‘I am awake, right?’ I whimpered, surrendering to the pleasure.

But was I? It was just all so magical – sailing through the opalescent ocean, phosphorescence flashing in the bow waves, the Milky Way sprawling above us, moonlight shimmering on the waves . . . It was a midsummer’s night dream. Perhaps I was drugged, like Titania? He did have access to the pharmacy, after all. Was the doc spiking my drinks? Was that the explanation for how I’d been hijacked by my libido?

But our attraction wasn’t just physical. We talked about everything, delighting in shared favourite music, authors, films, poets and box sets, as well as alike politics and world views. Both ‘recovering Catholics’, we swapped memories from our church-dodging, free-range childhoods, me running wild by the sea, Brody running wild in the bush. Our conversation thrummed and trilled around us – it was a symphony of chat. I just had so much I wanted to say to him, and vice versa.

He made me laugh, too, with his medical anecdotes, like one about some kids who had broken into a house and snorted a white powder they found, then fell ill because what they had thought was cocaine turned out to be the cremated remains of the house owner’s father and his two Great Danes.

And then there was the couple rescued from floods outside Brisbane after surfing down a swollen river on an inflatable sex doll. They thought it’d be fun, until the doll snagged on a tree and they were marooned there overnight, clinging to its deflating plastic appendage. Brody treated them for cuts and bruises and hypothermia, while also explaining why blow-up dolls are not an approved flotation device.

Even better, his death-by-cunnilingus tale. Brody had saved a woman who had tried to kill her husband by putting poison in her vagina and then asking him to perform oral sex on her. The intended victim said he became suspicious when he noticed an unfamiliar odour emanating from his wife’s coochie. The woman, clearly a criminal mastermind, didn’t know that vaginas are porous. Realising that his wife was probably absorbing a majority of the poison intended for him, the husband very kindly brought her to the hospital.

‘And they say chivalry is dead!’ I laughed.

I reciprocated with tales of my less-than-illustrious journalistic career, with its many comedic mishaps, concluding candidly – ‘Trouble is, I thought that by now I’d be getting helicoptered in to book festivals, dashing on stage to give the keynote address while still maintaining salon-perfect hair. I thought I’d have an access-all-areas pass, a bodyguard, a restraining order against a stalker fan, a scandalous libel lawsuit and everything!’ I joshed. ‘But what have I actually achieved? Zilch. An unfinished novel in a bottom drawer.’