Readings had been a consistent stop for me in my adult life, ever since I moved near Carlton when I was seventeen and had just started university. I can remember being utterly awed by the area around Lygon street (the gelati, the people with abominably interesting clothes, the tiny hole-in-the-wall theatre emanating shrieks and bafflement, the impossibility of getting served quickly at Tiamo's, the desperately cool men with shaggy beards holding joints; I was perhaps a bit sheltered when I first visited Carlton). I adored Readings, even though they would never give me a job (apparently waffling on about loving books is no substitute for actual skills). I had a number of moments of sheer elation when I discovered some new novelist who made my skin tingle, and some of the more significant turning points in my life must have taken place there. It might be disquieting to consider how many breakups or reconciliations have taken place between new fiction and new biography.

I think of standing in the rain outside the store, with my hair dripping water down my back, glumly contemplating the proliferation of share-house ads and seeking to decode the witty language into something more pragmatic (was open-minded a synonym for drug-addled? How neurotic was the person asking for a "clean and quiet" flatmate? Why was a single man seeking 'women only applicants'?) , or running into people with whom I'd had fleeting attachments, and never wanted to see again, in the travel section because, *damn* them, they all read books. Then there were the launches, the critical theory books on sale, the horrifyingly knowledgeable staff who worked in the music department, the bargain table. The story I've got in this anthology is about working in retail…