The city at night

The two tall girls walked along the busy Sydney street: the fair one, Leonie, with superb natural grace, looking neither to right nor left; the dark-haired girl, Janie, self-consciously in her first pair of high-heeled shoes. She turned now and then, when speaking, to look at Leonie, but Leonie's head never turned. The straightness of her gaze, the elegance of her bearing, seemed almost unnatural to Janie.

Janie was sixteen and a half, and had been at work in an office for exactly one day. This evening, saying 'miracle of miracles', instead of going straight home to tell her mother of the intricacies of the switchboard and tea-making, she was going out with beautiful Leonie, sophisticated and seventeen-and-a-quarter and well-made-up Leonie. It was Janie's coming out into Sydney nightlife; it was her growing up.

This is the first time I've walked through the main streets at night, she thought.

"I never knew the city had so many lights," she said to Leonie, who smiled.