It was their first appointment. Apparently she had to have five more—six all up—although she could have as many as she liked and/or required. Suzette had taken care to make sure she understood this, in her cool, methodical voice.

‘The six-consultation plan is arbitrary, Lucy,’ she’d said, leaning forward in her chair. ‘This process will take as long as it needs to.’

‘Does that mean it might take less time?’ Lucy had asked.

Suzette smiled at that, and leant back again, straightening her striped blouse. ‘Let’s just see how we go.’

They didn’t cover much ground in that first appointment; mostly Lucy was just cleared, again, as a suicide risk.

‘It really was an accident. You really were trying to save an octopus,’ Suzette determined with a straight face. ‘But I still think it would do you good to keep meeting with me, Lucy. You’ve suffered some real traumas, and I want to work with you on how you think about your body.’

So Lucy would be back in a fortnight—she was handed an appointment card, with 11 am, 27th February scribbled on it to remind her—and, now she thought about it, this seemed like a good thing. She wanted to talk in a safe and baggage-free space. She wanted to talk. She really wanted to talk.

It was after she’d left Suzette’s office—when she was walking along one of Hobart’s streets, on the way to her favourite cafe for a coffee and a decadently buttery almond croissant—that she noticed the tattoo parlour. Or, more specifically, she noticed the woman in the tattoo parlour.

The woman was big and magnificently curvy. She had straight, black hair trimmed to shoulder length with a fringe cropped to sit high on her forehead, and she was wearing a sleeveless floral dress that almost absurdly matched the tattoos that covered her arms and neck. A spray of bees flew out from her crevasse of a cleavage to feast on the flowers of her chest and neck. She was an obscene explosion of colour; she was a walking, overgrown, feral flower garden, or more specifically, a sitting garden, because she was perched on a stool in what Lucy assumed was the reception area of the parlour, and she was looking out the window, right at Lucy.

Lucy couldn’t stop looking back at her. She couldn’t help herself. She really couldn’t. But she had to do something to break the moment, so she smiled. The woman raised her eyebrows, and not in a good way.

Maybe this isn’t the best idea, Lucy thought to herself. But regardless, she backtracked to the door, and pushed her way in.

‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked, before Lucy was even through the door.

‘Um,’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t know.’

The woman gave her a rather hostile glare, a glare that said: What the fuck’s your problem?