I found myself standing on a viewing platform sitting on a ridge line of vine-covered tropical forest. The information board told me that the elevation of the lookout was 378m. The indented arrows pointed towards a cruising playground of offshore islands that lay far in the distance with cloud-covered summits, surrounded by dark shadows of coral.

The bay below glittered in the low-flung sun. Sailing boats were scatted across the water, white butterflies feeding on a sea of sparkling indigo. The two pincers of a little harbour enclosed hundreds of pleasure craft prettily spaced along the marina walkways. A blue swimming lagoon lay embedded in the scalloped coastline like a baby seal, fringed by grassy parklands dotted with visitors. Condominiums crowded the foreshores. The rest of the resort town spread out like the tossed skirts of a burlesque dancer, hemmed in by the rainforest-covered slopes leading up to the ridge line where I stood.

I yearned for the warm breeze on my skin. How I wished I could smell the rich scents of the Queensland tropics! Time passes quickly here, ten minutes to an hour. I realised I’d have to start down now before it got dark.

A full moon was rising over the black-powdered ocean by the time I exited the forest and strolled past the spot-lit mansions clustered above the town. People were hanging over balconies or dancing while music played. I felt a tug of loneliness.

“Hey stranger!”

I looked up. A woman in a black top was waving to me from a nearby railing. In my hurry to respond to her gesture, I accidentally twisted my body the wrong way and had to recover before waving back.

“Newbie are you?” she called out.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Come on up!”

I landed near her, right at the edge of the paved courtyard. There was a pool and a band and elegantly dressed people drinking cocktails and flirting with each other.

Her name was Omg. Her lips were red and full, her eyes sparkling.

“How did you get to this locale?” she asked.

“I wanted to meet people, so I looked up where to party.”

“It’s a cute little place,” she acknowledged, “It grows on you. They’ve done a great job of the mountains and ocean.”

She looked up into my eyes, her breasts swelling, hips gently gyrating.

“Do you come here often?” I cringed with embarrassment as soon as I saw my words sitting out there in immutable letters. This communication/gesture/emotion thing was hard. Way hard. I felt like a foreigner catapulted into an unknown land.

“Yeah, every night for the past few weeks.”

A drinks waiter pirouetted in front of us. She had a perfect figure, porcelain-white skin and black hair braids tipped with golden adornments like Cleopatra. Omg took two glasses of fizzing champagne from the proffered tray and handed one to me.

“I’m curious, what sort of things do you do here?” I asked, trying not to drop the glass as I drank.

“You can do anything here – swimming, snorkelling, scuba diving, jet ski riding, sky diving, eating out or partying on the beach. And then there’s Zim, that’s the new adult area towards Shute.”

“What happens in Zim?”

“Everything you can imagine and some things you don’t want to. Naked dance parties, naked acrobatics, outdoor sex, BDSM and heaps of other out-there stuff for those that want to escape the usual norms of society.”

“Woops,” I said. My glass had fallen from my unfeeling hand and shattered on the floor. A servant quickly appeared and hoovered up the broken glass.

“Have you ever visited Zim?” I asked.

“Yes, once or twice. But alone. I haven’t met anyone I’ve wanted to go with. Not until now.” She cast her arm around my neck and kissed me.

Being kissed was nice but weird, like seeing myself in a movie, not feeling the pressure of her lips. I tried to hug her back but one of my arms slipped the wrong way and she was sent careening into a nearby gargoyle statue.

“Damn, I’m sorry!”

“That’s okay,” she said laughing, “This is a safe zone, you can’t hurt me here!”

She kissed me again. This time I managed to hold her close. A man in a charcoal suit, looking like a worse-for-wear Leonard Cohen after weeks on acid, gave us a supercilious camel eye as he slip-slided between us and the statue.

“But why me?” I asked. “I’m just a newbie. Haven’t even managed to buy myself a set of decent clothes yet.”

“That’s just what I like about you,” she said laughing. “Everyone here is so up themselves. They just go through the motions. Whereas you – you’re in the now. You’re curious.”

She sipped from her glass.

 “You live in the moment. I saw that from the moment I first saw you walking down the street, from the way you looked around the whole time. I know I can take you places and you’ll smile and enjoy.”

“You can take me anywhere, do anything with me,” I yelled over a crescendo of electronic drumming, “You’re gorgeous.”

“Ah, you’re sweet. Hey, I’m over this stuck-up crowd. Let’s go to Zim and dance naked!”

“What, are you sure?” I said, tearing my Velcro-stuck gaze away from where her nipples sat pressed up against the skin-tight top like .22 bullets.

“Yeah, it’s not far, let’s fly there.”

“Hell yeah, like dervishes under the moon!” I cried, my mind swish-frothing at the call of the wild that bubbled up my spine and into my brain like an effervescent fountain of Moët and caused my aeros phallus to rise to alarming proportions.

She was slow-spinning in the air, a semazen in meditative karma. I blundered distractedly around her, trying to disguise my erotic response like a snake charmer trying to put a lid on his bulging cobra basket.

“Hah hah, you have the goods all right but you’ll have to get better at flying it around,” she said mockingly before zooming down the upper slopes of the early beach town.

I doused my bucking thoughts and focussed on keeping up. The neat chessboard of tastefully lit white- and black-marbled mansions began morphing into a pinball parlour of noisy neon-lit hovtels, as though in a second life, when a piece of clothing fluttered down past me like a shadowy bat. I looked up just as the last of Omg’s underwear was peeling off.

“We’re in Zim now, we don’t need clothes,” she said caressing her naked loins and shuddery breasts as she twirled like a psychedelic lure being trolled through the skies by that curly headed boy astride on the full moon, his catch net full of blazing stars.