‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. And said and said. ‘It’s one of the only known cancers to behave as a contagious disease. Due to the extremely close genetic kinship within the entire devil population the infection is able to spread rapidly, mostly during mating when they bite at one another’s faces. Basically, because their genetic codes are so similar, the immune system of one devil doesn’t immediately recognise the tumour cells of another devil as not-self, and so effectively doesn’t put up a fight.’

An Australian bloke, whose too-clean polo shirt skimmed remarkably pronounced nipples (a Queenslander, I assumed, to not only be wearing a polo shirt but also to be cold in weather like this), surprised me by musing: ‘So it’s their fault; they’re killing each other, poor little buggers.’

I hadn’t heard it framed like that before: as fault. And then I’d felt the need to attribute blame in response, felt the need to make sense of the dividing cells in that tidy one-plus-one-equals-two kind of a way, by telling him: ‘Well, actually, if it’s the fault of anyone, it’d be the early European settlers who wrongly assumed the devils were killing their livestock and so hunted them to near extinction. That’s one of the main reasons the gene pool is so small and the cancer can travel so easily from devil to devil.’

We always try to find fault and then organise our reactions accordingly, don’t we? And that’s what I was doing to myself.

It’s my fault, I couldn’t stop thinking somewhere deep inside, even as I tried not to, even as I chided myself, shamed myself. It’s my fault, this attention my breasts are receiving; my fault because the problem wasn’t so much that everyone knew they were fake. Of course, everyone knew—small town and all that. Really, it’s just like how everyone knows Benny Thomas has a massive crop of dakka hidden somewhere in the bush between Taranna and Koonya and that he’s your best bet if ever you’re after some; and how everyone knows to stay on the good side of Kitty Plunkett because she’s not only as mad as a cut snake but also a vindictive council snitch. No. The problem was that my breasts were noticeably different; they were, quite literally, out there, and I’m pretty sure this was the reason that people felt free to commune with them.

To be honest with you, the larger breasts were a knee-jerk decision. Or at least, I think they were. I hope they were. Jem made this sort of joke, way back at the beginning, after the doctor had explained that I would have a double mastectomy.

‘Well,’ he’d said, trying to smile, ‘let’s look on the bright side—you can get an even better pair when all this is over.’

Maybe I took on his sentiment and subconsciously planned it.

I don’t know, and I guess I’ll never know. You can never really know your subconscious, can you?

But let me ask you this: What would you do?