Dog tells me the most common thing the doctor treats on the island is seal bites. There’s the punch of smell in the wind; it stinks of rotting kelp and salt and wet.

‘Gee it’s good to see the ship,’ Dog says. ‘It was so cold this season, the water froze in the pipes. We had to flush the toilets with buckets of sea water. We all got a bit on the nose, but we had a ripper of a year.’

His body’s softly going to fat. He can hardly touch my breasts. He stares, reaches out, draws back. Then he places a large, cold hand on my chest. The hand stays there for a long time. He’s grave and quiet.

The woman I was meant to be sharing the hut with has gone off to sleep with an old lover, Dog’s best mate on the island. Dog thought he’d better come up to the hut to keep me company for a while. He told me people were under the impression he’d gone to check the astronomy shed. I’ve been put high up on a clifftop for the night. The ham shack’s a building with two mattresses on the floor. Officially, it’s for amateur radio enthusiasts. Unofficially, it’s for people on the station who have to get away from other people on the station. I’m in bed with Dog because I’m intrigued to be with a man who hasn’t been with a woman for a very long time. And because I want to be touched. And because I have nothing to lose.

His foreplay is a rapid flick flick flick of my nipple which I’m more curious about than anything else. It’s utterly unarousing. His penis hurts, it grates, I’m not wet yet and he pushes it in and then out and then harder and harder, ramming it deep inside me as far as it will go as if he wants to puncture something and I imagine that this is close to what it’s like to be raped. My head bang bang bangs against the wall behind me. I cry out. He doesn’t understand I’m hurting. He has no idea. He thinks it’s arousal when all it is is sore. There’s no tenderness. I want him to come and be done with it. The condom splits with the force of it all. He doesn’t come. He flops onto his back. He says his mates will be starting to miss him and he’d better get going. He says see ya and smacks a kiss on my forehead and he’s gone.

It’s a night of scrawny sleep. The wind roars around me. In the cocoon of my thermal sleeping bag I can hear the sea that’s bashing into the cliff below and I can hear the barks and belches of the elephant seals. I wake early and tired. There’s a rawness between my legs. I remember, then, something I’d forgotten, one of the first things Dog told me when I invited him inside.