‘Well,’ the woman said eventually. ‘You’ve come to the right place, but you’ve come too soon.’ She stepped back, opening a space between her and Lucy.

Lucy let her shirt drop. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘The scarring’s too new. How long ago did you do it?’

‘Six weeks or so,’ Lucy ventured.

The woman clicked her tongue. ‘Six weeks isn’t enough. It’ll move as it heals. Come back in a month.’

Lucy’s feeling of purpose frazzled. ‘I can’t,’ she said, panicked. ‘I just, I need them now. I need you to start now. Please. Isn’t there a way we can just get it started?’

The woman huffed. ‘Come through here,’ she said.

Lucy followed her through a door into a small, neat, well-lit room with crisp white walls. In one corner, there was a copse of plants in terracotta pots. The sanitised intimacy of the space and the bed in the middle of the room reminded Lucy of a massage or beauty therapist’s parlour.

‘Take your shirt off,’ the woman said.

Lucy contemplated making a daggy, faux-coy comment, like, Aren’t you going to at least buy me a drink first? but thought better of it and pulled her shirt off wordlessly.

The woman peered at Lucy’s chest again. ‘Well, I guess we can start in this patch here,’ she said, lightly touching a slice of Lucy’s unbroken skin, just near her armpit, ‘and kind of work our way in. That is, if you want it to go out this far. But if we start now, I’d be beginning before I fully have a chance to map it out and once you’re inked, you’re inked.’

Please. Lucy wasn’t sure if the word came out, or if she just mouthed it, but evidently the woman sensed her desperation.

‘I s’pose we can start with one, just to get you going. Then I can take some pictures of you, and have a think, and draw up a design that integrates what we do today along with your scars, for you to have a look at next time you’re in. Which,’ the woman added, enunciating with an authoritative deliberateness, ‘will be in a month at least, once you’re more healed.’

‘Please,’ Lucy said, hearing the word this time, both its sound and the evident neediness that underpinned it. ‘Let’s do that.’

‘Righto,’ the woman said. ‘But I’ll only do it on one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That you don’t crack the shits if the octopus distorts as you heal.’

‘This is just the first,’ Lucy tells Jem, who’s sagging, sagging in the shoulders, the lips and the eyes as the last of her bras scatters through the air about them in flecks of ash and wisps of black smoke. ‘We’re going to do a mural of them, once my chest is more healed. We’ll weave the scars into the design.’

‘A mural?’ Jem echoes, like he’s nothing but the hollow of a cave she’s shouted into: dead stone, capable only of reverberating empty sounds back at her. ‘Wow,’ he says again.