The quest begins. There are guitars and a violin and a hearty singalong and jokes. There’s a beer break and the lights come up and Steve the sailor MC turns his back to the audience and drops his pants. There’s a flash of startled white flesh and the shadow of his hairy balls between his legs. There are groans and screams and yells to get him off. Someone throws an empty beer can at him. The lights are dimmed. There are more jokes and then Max steps from behind the shower curtain. He’s kitted out in full Antarctic gear with an icepick in his hands. He’s a British wildlife documentary host. He’s investigating the strange species known as Antarctican Australis.

‘These people have undergone a multitude of tests. They’ve had blood tests, ECGs, psychiatry tests, they’ve had their bank account names and numbers recorded as well as their shoe, hand and head size and their inside leg measurement. These people are the selected elite—you just wouldn’t know it by looking at them.’

And it goes on. At the end of the skit I hold my scorecard up high. Fourteen out of ten. There’s loud approval and a fresh round of drinking and jokes and another song. The night grows ragged.

The last act. Gino and the stickmag boys. A borrowed black bra is dangled across the bar’s television. On it, with the volume down, is a soft core porn flick. In front of it there are self-conscious tradies who can’t quite remember their lines. The skit crawls, the audience begins to rustle, talk bubbles up. Then there’s a punch of laughter when from behind the shower curtains steps, magnificently, The Journalist. The crowd’s wilting focus is snapped to attention. Laughter comes and comes. It dumps me like a wave.

It’s Jim. In his hand is a carrot spearing an orange. It’s his microphone. He wears my signature black reporter’s clothes. He has on sunglasses and red lipstick that’s smeared and leering behind a blond scrap of a new beard. His hair is in bits of high pigtails. My polo neck’s straining across an enormous chest with fifties cone breasts.

The laughter goes on and on. My hand flutters across my chest. I feel prickly and wrong in the dress. I want to get out. I laugh.

Jim flounces in front of the crowd and adjusts his breasts and asks naive and nagging questions to the faces at the front. Onya Stiffy, someone yells. He pushes his microphone at them. He adjusts his breasts and runs his finger up his thigh and opens his mouth and runs his tongue around his lips. He speaks to the expeditioners in a girly voice that veers high into a tone that is, at times, exactly like mine.

‘You’re dead, Jim, you’re dead.’