But I wasn’t entirely happy with it. And later, alone with Dawn on the straw mattress, I voiced a query: ‘Isn’t a Banjo a little round thing that you put on your knee and play with?’

‘It sure is,’ said Dawn.

She had a name for everything. ‘That’s called a Boston Strangle,’ she explained as she tied her breasts around my neck. And what was she doing when she swung them just out of reach of my lips and then lashed me across the cheeks, first with the left and then with the right, was known as the Wodonga Whip.

I suspected that she made these titles up as she went along. ‘And what do you call that?’ I challenged her, after she had sat on my face for a full five minutes and left me squashed and purple, but by no means unhappy.

‘That?’ She didn’t hesitate. She was astonished that I needed to ask. ‘That was an Ayers Rock. But now I’m going to give you a Filipino Flick for being untrusting.’

I didn’t mind. You wouldn’t have heard me complaining, as they say. I loved Filipino Flicks.

In truth there was nothing that Dawn did to me that I could think up any stringent objections to, and my only complaint finally was that she failed to understand the solemnly ritualistic needs of the sexuality she herself inspired in me, and responded to them at all times with indefatigable boisterousness. There were moments, for example, especially after a prolonged St Kilda Smother, when I wanted nothing so much as to submit my whole being to her, to offer myself up in one supreme act of self-annihilation and love; if I could have undergone some molecular transformation and been compressed into the iron shot I had seen her practice with in the garden, tucking it under her chin and rolling it round and round until she had it just where she wanted it, it would have been my perfect consummation – she could have putt me as far and as often as she cared to. The trouble was that this desire of mine not just to cease upon the final expulsion of my seed but to become actually inanimate, her thing, did not find any echo or correspondence in her. She couldn’t treat it, therefore, with the appropriate seriousness. Even as I twitched and throbbed on her straw mattress, even before the last liquid promise of future life had left my body, leaving me mainly mineral with just a vestige of vegetable, she was reaching for her beach towel and telling me her favourite jokes about lonely sheep-shearers.

‘You can do anything you like with me,’ I kept trying to make her understand, as I lay back spent, tasting the blood that ran in a trickle from one or other of my nostrils and from the re-opened cuts below both my eyes. ‘I belong entirely to you. Destroy me.’