The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  ‘It’s not natural. It’s a by-product of human impact. So even if it’s beautiful, it shouldn’t be celebrated,’ I imagined Jem lecturing. It was the sort of thing he would say with groundless, yet unapologetic, authority.

  And this—this—was what made his reaction to those breasts so infuriating, you know? They weren’t natural. They weren’t real. They weren’t me. And there he was, lying flat on his back, zealously worshipping a pre-packaged fantasy of faux femininity—a by-product of human impact, or ingenuity I suppose. I don’t know. He’s such a hypocrite sometimes. It felt like everything about my cancer, everything that had happened to my body enabled him to take the soft option, had made his life—his politics, his sexuality—easier. It’s riddled with bullshit. He’s riddled with bullshit. But then, he’s also so … Jem.

  He’s the man with the crown of birds.

  The day Jem and I first met was one of those rare summer days when no sea breeze roars in from the north-east. It was late afternoon and I’d gone for a walk along the beach at Eaglehawk Neck. This was before I’d moved there from Taranna. The clouds were like a sheet of gauze across the sky, the bay, mother-of-pearl. I’d reached the wharf and wandered out to the end of the jetty, splattered black and white with ink and shit, to see if the people perched on upturned buckets or deckchairs with fishing lines extended were having any luck.

  ‘Nah, but once the sun goes down there’ll be squid,’ I was told.

  As I dawdled back along the jetty, I watched Jem reverse his tinny into the water, get out of his car and start to wiggle the boat from the trailer.

  ‘Hey, can you give me a hand?’ he asked. It was a moment before I realised he was talking to me.

  ‘Sure,’ I replied.

  ‘If I push the boat towards you, can you grab that rope there?’ He pointed to the rope tied to the bow of the boat.

  ‘No worries,’ I said. He walked the boat down the trailer and swivelled the bow in my direction. He was still holding it steady when it was close enough for me to lean out and grab the rope.

  ‘Great! Can you loop it around that pylon?’

  I did as he asked.

  ‘Cheers for that.’ He grinned.

  Later, he told me that he didn’t need any help at all. He just wanted an excuse to talk to me. ‘You looked so pretty, and so lost,’ he’d said.

  As he jogged from where he’d parked his car back to the boat, I was walking from the jetty.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, coming to a stop as he was about to pass me. ‘This might be a bit forward of me, but do you want to come out for a bit? There were a heap of dolphins just around the headland earlier. Might still be about. I’ve got a spare lifey.’

  I was going to say no, but something in his demeanour stopped me. He stood, arms dangling lax, bare-footed, surefooted, toes splayed easily in the jetty grime. The casualness of his stance seemed to say: Hey, I’m just offering but I couldn’t give a rat’s either way, it’s up to you, and I found this lack of urgency reassuring, non-threatening. His unkempt jaw reminded me of a lichen-covered boulder. Lazy stubble, not fashionable stubble, I suspected, given the state of his clothing: eighties-era Stubbies too short to be trendy at the time, a tatty T-shirt that boasted Port Macquarie, a homespun jumper knotted sloppily around his waist. Not the same jumper that I was wearing the evening of the argument, but the same vintage—output of a grandmother, industrious on her deathbed two years earlier. Premature wrinkles worked to emphasise the almond shape of his eyes, which were green and gold and shining mischievously, I immediately imagined, although perhaps it was just refracted sunlight. Regardless, I began to feel mischievous, reckless too, and quickly found myself thinking: What the heck? Why not? How else are you going to make any friends down here?

  ‘How do you know there were dolphins out here?’ I asked as we sliced our way around the jagged headland and out into the Tasman Sea.

  ‘I was doing a bit of work out here earlier,’ he told me. ‘For Dad. He had to go up to town this evening so we got back in early and I was mooching about, doing nothing, and I thought: It’s so beautiful. I mean, this weather! When does this ever happen? This still and hot?’

  ‘It’s pretty un-Tassie-like, hey?’ I murmured in agreement, and then was racked with anxiety, hoping he wouldn’t catch me out as a mainlander. I really had no idea if it was un-Tassie-like; I’d only been down here a few months, and even though I’d never had weather like this yet, it wasn’t to say it didn’t happen.

  ‘Blood oath,’ he said, to my relief. ‘And see those clouds? We might even get a proper summer storm and everything.’

  I looked to the west, to where he was pointing, and saw how the silvery sheet collided into white billows mushrooming with black underbellies. There was so much latent energy in that sky.

  ‘What sort of work were you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Ab diving. I do a bit for the old man here and there.’

  ‘Does your dad own a licence?’ I asked, impressed. I’d heard abalone licences described as golden tickets: the sort of thing every Tasmanian—no matter what their profession—wished they’d invested in back in the eighties when they were cheap as chips, before the industry became heavily regulated and licence numbers were capped in a bureaucratic move that made the existing tickets all the more lucrative.

  ‘Yep,’ Jem said. ‘It’s one of those classic Tassie stories, you know. My parents were real Blue Mountains greenies, and they’d come down for the Franklin blockade. Next thing they knew, Mum was pregnant with my older sister, and Dad, not sure what else to do, pulled some weird deal at the pub, where he traded their old caravan, which they’d been living in—like really scumming it—for an ab licence because he needed to be able to scrape together a living, because of the baby, you know? And then, before they knew it, they were living on the east coast of Tassie and he was diving his arse off, and they had a house, and then me,’ Jem trailed off.

  I noticed even then that there was something a bit defensive in the way he told the story. Like he was trying to make sure I didn’t think of him as a kid of some fat-cat investor who plundered the coast for cash. They fell into it because they had to, and despite their vocation and the random luck of their wealth, they’ve never forgotten their hippy roots; that’s the story Jem and his family tell of themselves.

  The boat we were sitting in was an aluminium tinny, probably only fifteen feet long.

  ‘You don’t work out of this boat, do you?’ I asked him. It didn’t seem big enough.

  ‘This one? Nah,’ Jem said, laughing. ‘This is just mine, for pottering about.’

  We didn’t find any dolphins, but we did find birds: hundreds and hundreds of terns and mutton-birds, wheeling and veering, swarming above a bait ball like bees. The sky was clotted with them. There were albatrosses too, carving through the flock at surprisingly low speeds, rising and falling on scarcely discernible pockets of breeze, barely giving way to the gannets that dropped from thirty metres above to pierce the deep-water turquoise, which was boiling with fish.

  ‘This is fucking amazing. There’d be tuna out here for sure!’ Jem’s eyes were gleaming and it was like the energy in the sky burst forth to mirror him. While we watched the birds do their thing, the sun tore through the gauzy sheet of cloud, just as the billows Jem had pointed out earlier moved in. They verged the sun and the edging blackness turned its light a piercing gold and the sea the colour of orange juice. For a moment, the layers of colour stacked in a complete arc over us: orange, black, gold, grey and orange again.

  ‘How’s this light?’ Jem gushed. ‘Sometimes, when you spend every day out here, it’s like it all just turns into humdrum background, but then the sun hits it slightly differently and your whole perception gets blown out of the water, and you just think: Is there anywhere more beautiful? Anywhere you’d rather be?’

  It was utterly spectacular—still to this day one of the most spectacular skies I’ve seen. There was nowhere I would have rather been in that moment, but before I could
tell him, his attention shifted from the sky back to the bait ball.

  ‘Fuck! There’d be tuna down there for sure! Can’t believe I didn’t bring rods.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ I asked, somewhat bemused by his ranting. I couldn’t decide what to watch: the sky, the birds, the play of light on the water, or this strangely charismatic man in front of me. He won out.

  ‘Because I’m an egg,’ he said, laughing at me or him or the situation, I wasn’t sure. And I couldn’t stop looking. Something in me was drawn to his energy, to the liveliness of his smile. I say liveliness intentionally; his smile radiated life.

  ‘It was bloody stupid of me. I was just going for a fang, but it wouldn’t have hurt to chuck the rod in,’ he rambled on. ‘It’s probably too early in the season for them to be about, but fuck, you never know, do you? If only I’d been a boy scout as a kid. I’d always be prepared. But who gives a rat’s really; it’s enough to just be out here, isn’t it? Like, to just be here. It’s so beautiful. I honestly don’t think there’s a better place in the world. I don’t know why anyone would ever go anywhere else.’

  It was rare, I remember thinking at the time, to hear a man speak so passionately and unashamedly about beauty. As I watched him, ranting and gesturing, the image of him carved out a space inside me where, I suspect, no matter what happens between Jem and I, it will shine forever: Jem, wild in the golden light, wild with tuna-lust, a cloud of birds around his head.

  Perhaps it’s because this image of him is so flint-sharp that I was shocked when, later, I heard him talk scathingly about recreational tuna fishermen, and even more shocked to find out that one night he and some of his mates, before a major tuna-fishing competition, had oiled the boat ramp.

  ‘They’re rank, cashed-up bogans. Fucking Bar Crusher central. It’s so unwholesome. So unsustainable,’ Jem always says.

  When I point out that he loves catching tuna too, he responds: ‘It’s different. I only catch them to eat. It’s not about the photo op. It’s not about the competition: whose dick’s bigger.’

  At the time I’d been so infatuated by his impulsive environmentalism—the raw energy of it seemed so real compared to the pretentious intellectualism of the urban greens I’d hung out with at uni—that I didn’t dwell on his hypocrisy. But now all I can think is: Surely people with Bar Crushers for boats, surely bogans, be they cashed up or otherwise, eat the tuna they catch too.

  What’s so wrong with Bar Crushers anyway? They’re mass-produced, but then so is nearly everything else.

  Jem can be funny like that. He gets these strange sets against things and then there’s no convincing him otherwise. Like microwaves. I’m pretty sure that the myth that microwaves give you cancer has been thoroughly debunked. I’m pretty sure the fact that we had a microwave when I was a child didn’t contribute to me getting cancer. Nor did the fact that I take paracetamol when I get headaches—I asked the doctor.

  I reached the northern headland and instead of following the rocks around to the Tessellated Pavement, I sat for a moment to watch the waves. The white water faded into deep turbulence as it hit the gutter and then reformed in thick dumpers on the inside sandbar. The surface of the gutter, framed by the dual banks of white water, looked silky, seemingly still, safe. During the day, if you look closely, you see pockets of sand-laden water churning busily beneath the surface. That night, it was flashes of bioluminescent light that marked the movement beneath. Little explosions of blue and green spun chaotically on the currents. The gutter is where the fish are. The sea is alive; it’s easy to forget.

  It was three days until Christmas, I realised as I sat, which made it the night of the summer solstice. The bioluminescence took on a pagan mystique. Or maybe it was the ocean’s display of Christmas lights.

  Eventually, stiffened by cold, I clambered to my feet and retraced my steps. Each time I pressed a foot into the sand of the tideline the pressure caused a spatter of bioluminescence to light up; the glimmers momentarily ghosted my feet, like shadows of light, before fading back into darkness.

  I was infatuated by my experience of this phenomenon as a child when my family spent that wonderful, if not rather poignant (at least for me), Easter down the Great Ocean Road. I was at the stage of childhood where the magic of make-believe was fading; those holidays were my last hoorah, really, and I felt it—somehow knew it at the time.

  An auntie once told me that if you’re walking along a path and the branches of the trees on either side form an arch over your head, you might step through that archway into fairyland. I would always close my eyes and take a breath before stepping through such leafy doorways, and for a few years there, once I was through, I could make everything sparkle that bit more with my mind’s eye, and I could see chittering movements on the edge of my vision. I read a book once that referred to them as ‘The Little Folk’, and that’s how I always thought of them as they scurried about the undergrowth, only perceptible if you weren’t looking at them directly. But on that Ocean Road trip, the magic was becoming more and more forced. It didn’t just happen; I was having to make it happen, and I knew that I was making it happen, which was leading me to the unpleasant conclusion that what was going on was me, and not them at all. So, you can imagine my relief when I experienced the bioluminescence.

  ‘It’s fairy dust,’ I insisted to my mother. ‘Look! It’s proof!’ Frantically, I ran and danced backwards, often tripping but never caring. All I wanted was to watch each glittering footprint fade. I wanted to see more, more, more, to prolong it, to prolong all of it, all of what it meant, all of what it allowed me to be, if only for that little bit longer.

  I turned and ran backwards, swept along on a wave of nostalgia as I watched my footprints fade. Too soon, though, I reached the track fringed by the bristling silhouettes of marram grass—the track that would lead me home to Jem. I picked my way along it with a little difficulty; the shoulder-high scrub blocked the moonlight so I couldn’t see my feet, and I stumbled on the low steps and the exposed roots of the boobiallas and banksias. At one point, a blackberry bramble reached out and snagged my jumper—funny I remember that so clearly. I wasn’t quite ready to go home, to leave the night air, to see Jem. So, when I arrived at the road I wandered a little way along it, heading north to where the dark hills of the Forestier Peninsula huddle forward, as if closing in on the neck, rather than south and home. On the Eaglehawk Bay side of the neck, I spied flickering torchlight. Somewhat absently, I wandered towards it.

  When I got close, I realised I’d happened upon Flo and Greek Poppy.

  I don’t know why everyone calls her Greek Poppy. She’s the only Poppy on the peninsula, so it’s not like they’re differentiating her from another Poppy, and nobody calls Con, Greek Con. But still, this place can be so insular and set in its ways, and intermixed with this is the way odd and, at times, non-PC things catch on. Perhaps it was just a way of explaining why she talked funny and did strange things, like cook with olive oil and pickle octopuses, which as I later learnt was viewed as a radical thing to do when she and Con first arrived. It’s kind of like how there’s a guy who lives down here who obviously has some kind of disability, and everyone calls him Loony George, or just Loon for short. They don’t do this in a mean-spirited way; they call him Loon in a fond and matey way, and he basks in their affection. It seems backward and kind of discriminatory to me, but he’s so widely loved for who he is, and he’s included in the community and seems happy enough with his nickname. And like Jem said to me, who am I to judge?

  But I digress.

  I could hear Flo and Greek Poppy murmuring to each other; their words drifted to me nonsensically from across the water. They were wading, near to waist-deep, and the rippling water caught the light from their head torches and refracted it back in a kaleidoscope of planes and angles.

  Greek Poppy began splashing violently and called to Flo. I couldn’t quite make out what had happened, what was happening; the darkness obscured all but that which was lit up in the
bands of light, which were now fanning to and fro with the busy movement of the women’s heads. Together, they began to move to the shore. At one point, Flo looked down at what they were holding between them long enough for me to identify the suckered whorl of a limb. Octopus. Bundled up in Flo’s net and held at bay by Greek Poppy’s gaff.

  I stayed where I was, hidden from the moonlight and so from view, and watched as Greek Poppy held the struggling octopus down and Flo swiftly cut its head from its legs. Flo fiddled around for a bit, then dumped the still-writhing mess of legs into a bucket and the two of them waded back out into the bay, leaving the motionless lump of head on the sand.

  Just before she’d cut the octopus, Flo’s knife had momentarily caught the light of the moon. That timeless glimmer of pearly light on steel was enough for me—maudlin and pensive as I was that evening—to endow the scene with a cultural solemnity far beyond what it deserved. The coincidence of the solstice only compounded the impression of mystique that was stirring within me.

  This has played out before, I thought. How many women have gathered here, like this? I could almost see them, hear them, echoing and multiplying through the halls of time; the cries in Greek and English could just as easily be cries in Paredarerme. I wondered if it was because they were women that this scene intimated such mystery and secrecy? They were the priestesses, carrying out the Eleusinian Mysteries before the ceremonies were corrupted by rape; they were the witches, gathered around the cauldron, before being interrupted by Macbeth and his posse; they were Palawa women, swimming through icy, shark-ridden waters to hunt seals, before the European sealers forcibly co-opted them into colonial industry. I know it sounds stupid, but all I wanted in that moment was to gain access: to acquire a claim to that local inheritance; to immerse myself in that raw, feminine culture; to both transcend my body and collapse into history.