Beer dick, I surmised. Well, it was getting late and he’d no doubt been drinking all day. Or, wait, could it be . . . the bush? Maybe he’d never seen a woman with bush? No way . . . he’d told me in the lift that he’d grown up on a sheep station, so surely the bloke was used to a little light bushwalking? I had been hoping that he might actually be partial to a bit of bush tucker.

But Wayve was making a repulsed face, like a kid who’d been offered a plate of spinach. The condom hung limply from his cock the way washing hangs lifeless from the Hills hoist on a breezeless day. For him, this was clearly a Bush Tucker Trial. Suddenly, instead of starring in a black-and-white French film, I’d been unceremoniously recast in an episode of I’m a Nonentity . . . Get Me Out of Here!

‘Do you prefer your women waxed?’ I inquired. ‘A waxed pudenda may sound erotic, but when it’s growing back it looks like a shag pile that’s been terrorised – a super-itchy shag pile.’

Judging by the intense look of revulsion on his face, Wayve was thinking that waxing wouldn’t be enough to achieve deforestation on the scale this situation required. No, my mons was obviously going to require several months of strategic bombing with napalm.

I pulled him back up into an embrace, snuggled into his arms and inhaled his delicious scent – musky, tantalising, what was the word I was looking for? Oh, yes – young. Determined not to be rejected, I slid down his body this time, flicked the condom floorwards, as though I did this every day (dear god, I hadn’t even seen a weenie beanie since teenhood) and aroused him with my mouth. He got hard straight away but then I felt his body convulsing and pulled back in annoyance. I wasn’t going through all this just to give a toy boy a blow job, I thought, angrily. Men are just like holidays – they never last long enough. If I’m going to cheat on my husband, I want to do it properly. Or improperly, actually.

‘Getting off at Redfern? I don’t think so. I like to do the whole City Circle,’ I said, trying to employ some blokey, euphemistic vernacular. I rolled on another condom and then sat astride Wayve, tossing my hair theatrically as if I were in a shampoo commercial. (Isn’t that what women did?) But his flaccid penis just flopped around inside me, like a dead salmon in a tumble dryer.

‘Reckon I’m just feelin’ a bit guilty about me girlfriend,’ he explained.

‘Oh? Right,’ I said, dismounting once more.

It may not have been true, but we both clung to the excuse like two drowning people to a tiny piece of verbal flotsam.