‘Sorry. My shower’s so small, I just soap the walls and spin around. The cabin’s so tiny I have to draw up a roster with myself to determine which days I can breathe. It ain’t so glamorous below decks, I can assure you. And I’m one of the luckier ones. As a doctor I get my own berth.’

We stood facing each other awkwardly once more.

‘Look, forget the coffee. Do you want to go on deck and get a cocktail?’ I asked. ‘Or . . .?’

Brody ran his fingertips gently down my arm. ‘I think “or” would kinda hit the spot.’

‘The G spot, I hope. After all, you are a doctor, right?’

The doctor cleared his throat and would have said something witty, I’m sure, except my tongue was down there already. Then Brody’s hands were on my hips. Not the way Harry grabbed me, like a drunken octopus, but with purpose and passion. And then it was as if someone had pulled the pin from a hand grenade. We tore at each other’s clothes and scrambled onto the bed. I hadn’t felt this kind of urgency since I’d been at the front of the queue for the Boxing Day sales. I yanked off his T-shirt and jeans while he ripped off my knickers. I tugged at his boxers and then he took off his prosthetic leg – okay, not your average bit of foreplay, but at this stage I couldn’t have cared if he revealed a pair of cloven hooves.

I could no longer speak, but what I lacked in lucidity I made up for in enthusiastic moaning and gasping. I felt like an astronaut who’d crash-landed on an unexplored planet. It was a sensation I vaguely remembered: bubbly, aerated, light, sparkly – sequined, even. What was it? Desire. Ah, yes, that’s what it was. Hot, red, raw, half-crazed lust. There was no time to worry about stray chin hairs or belly stretch marks, because he’d pulled me on top of him and I was shimmering. I felt my spine arch and heard a long, low, slow moan, which, I realised with a shock, was emanating from my own lips.

As the reverberations shuddered through me, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d experienced anything like this. It felt like rediscovering a long-lost talent from my youth; like executing a perfect pool backflip, shinnying up a tree or cartwheeling endlessly across a green field.

The range of sound effects available to me as a human seemed inadequate, and I wished I were a bell so I could ring and chime and peal out my pleasure.

I awoke, mid-afternoon, to find myself entwined with the doctor, our bodies warm and luxuriant beneath the sheets. I poked my head out of the blanket.