Smithy meets the girl at the pub one Friday night, when his workmates have all gone home and he’s the only one left at the bar, watching the foam slide down the inside of his glass. She comes to stand beside him and he feels her eyes on him. Her blackness is shocking, out of place in this white man’s pub; a different kind of blackness from that of the Aborigines who occasionally slouch along the bar. Skin like polished night, against which the hot pink of her top looks bright as candy, her breasts provocatively emphasised. When he makes eye contact, she offers him a hesitant but warm smile.