I knew all about it – from the victim’s angle. I’d been prose-violated countless times. Mangled and mutilated more often than I cared to think about, long before I turned up in Townsville. I had even been mastectomized once, been made to look on without an anaesthetic while the word breast was removed from wherever it had put in an appearance, on the grounds, I could only suppose – since my surgeon was female and Australian – that I was disqualified from using it by being male and English. But nothing had prepared me for the scale of meddling that awaited me when I went to collect my page proofs from the Post Office in Townsville – every comma changed into a semicolon; every semicolon promoted to a period, every period reduced to a comma. Not a line that didn’t bear the scar of some incision; not a pause for breath that wasn’t shortened or lengthened; not an interval or respite that I recognized as my own. So much for a leisurely weekend’s proofreading on a hotel balcony overlooking the bay. I asked for a second table to be brought to our room, ordered a couple of dozen pencils, and requested that nobody disturb us for a fortnight.

In fact it didn’t take us quite that long. Measuring time on the conventional scale, we restored the script to something like its original condition in ten days. But anyone who had seen us at the end of that period would have said we were older by a year.

We did get to look around Townsville a bit during these ten days, and given how little we were pleasure-bent it’s possible that we even quite liked it. It had a waterfront, a beach, a river, a hilly hinterland, a few good nineteenth-century public buildings, a small but lovely botanic garden overlooking the sea, and some spectacular fig trees. A high, rugged outcrop of rock – Castle Hill – didn’t tower over the town as spectacularly as I kept thinking it was about to, but it was picturesque enough and from some angles, especially looking up at it with your back to the beach, offered the sort of prospect that makes a man think of owning a horse and saying, ‘See you later,’ to his family.