‘This is it,’ Lucy says. She holds her beer up to his. ‘No more breasts.’

‘No more breasts,’ Jem echoes, tapping his stubbie to hers. He’d kind of been holding out hope that she might change her mind and decide differently. But it’s her body, her decision. He knows that.

They watch while flakes of bra whip up into the air as smoke and toxic ash.

He can’t dwell on it; he shouldn’t dwell on it; they’ll move on if he doesn’t dwell on it. They’ll move on together. It’s going to be okay. The world is going to be okay.

‘And you think the world can be better?’ he says, not even trying to mask his pleading tone.

‘I know the world can be better,’ Lucy says. ‘And I love you.’ He throws his arm around her shoulder and pulls her against him. Pressing his lips to the top of her head, he murmurs, ‘I love you too, Luce.’

She pulls back and looks up at him. ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she says quietly.

‘Oh?’

‘It’s the reason I was so late,’ she says. Then she pulls her top up, revealing her scars and there, next to them, the outline of an octopus, etched into her skin. Its head is nestled against her armpit and its arms reach towards her ruined flesh.

Jem opens his mouth and then closes it again. He has no idea what to say. His heart has no right to be doing what it’s doing. It’s her body. He opens his mouth again. The words that emerge are: ‘A tattoo. Wow.’

Given the look on Lucy’s face, he suspects his voice sounds as empty to her ears as it felt in his mouth.

Earlier that day, Lucy was up in Hobart, staring through a window at one of the most impressive people she had ever seen in her life. That person was staring right back at her. It was both highly awkward and thrilling—thrilling, because of the very fact such a woman existed, and thrilling, because Lucy suddenly realised what to do.

‘Let’s leave the octopus to one side for a moment, and talk about you, Lucy,’ her psychologist, Suzette, had said not an hour earlier. Suzette was likely aged somewhere in her late forties. She had soft cheeks that bunched up into pillows when she smiled, and blonde foils through her greying hair. Her brown eyes were framed by a fine web of lines, and were currently fixed on Lucy in a gaze that met the perfect balance between cool professionalism and caring concern. Lucy wondered how long it had taken Suzette to master that kind of expression, and how many staunch people had cracked open when met with it over the years in this very office.

‘You said that you feel like a stranger in your own body,’ Suzette said. ‘Can you elaborate on that?’