‘Um,’ Lucy says. ‘I actually don’t think I can. I’m not really much of a knitter, you see.’

If Suzette lacks a touch of subtlety here and there, then Kat has none at all. But then, she never pretended to. That’s her whole thing: bees and flowers and bigness, right in your face.

‘I wouldn’t slice my tits off for nothing,’ she says, ‘but if they were gone I don’t know what I’d do.’ Lucy is topless again, and Kat is tracing a cool finger along her healing scars. ‘I don’t like the idea of getting them reconstructed, but I’m a big woman, and a big woman with no boobs is a different story to a skinny bitch like you with no boobs, you know? You look good: wiry, sexy, tough. A big girl with no top half, though, I dunno. She’d be all tummy and arse and thigh.’

‘Yeah, I mean, I don’t know,’ Lucy says, shrugging awkwardly. ‘I don’t think there’s a right way. You’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do, I guess. The hardest thing for me has been figuring out what to do.’

‘Fucking A.’ Kat nods. She steps back from Lucy, inspection over.

‘So, what’s the verdict?’ Lucy asks. ‘How are we looking?’

‘Well,’ Kat says, slowly. ‘I reckon you’ll be ready to start on it properly in a month, maybe a fortnight if pressed. But today, I know I said we wouldn’t do any ink, but what would you say to colouring this bad boy in? Just for shits and giggles.’

Jem tries not to let himself get crushed by the weight of humanity when he sees the tourists queued up at the fish and chips van at the wharf. He watches them out of the corner of his eye as he unloads the abalone. Their distended tummies. Their porky fingers, dripping with grease as they prod scallop after scallop into the hole between their flabby lips.

‘Don’t think globally.’ That’s what Lucy would say to him. And he knows he’s doing it. He’s seeing these people, who just want a lunch of local seafood on this sunny autumn day; but he’s also seeing them multiply and multiply into a horde, and he’s seeing the trail of plastic bags, bones and spat-out gristle they leave in their wake.

The thing is, sometimes he just can’t help but think globally, because the world is increasingly globalised. Even the small things are, like their pavlova at Christmas, which got caught up in the changing weather.

Raspberries from America; strawberries from Queensland, Jem thinks, as he hauls the last crate of abalone over the side of the boat. His mother could have bought them, could have paid for them with money from shellfish like these, which will be flown to Sydney and, at least three-quarters of them, on to Asia. Carbon mile that.

‘The thing is,’ Jem’s dad has said on many occasions, ‘if we don’t do it, then some big corporation will, and do you think they’ll care about preserving the coastline and the fishery like we do?’