The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Did I say like a hooker? Meant on my hookah,’ Scott smirked, ‘and half drowning in the meantime, and in among it I caught a glimpse of the rest of the octopus. He bloody engulfed me abs in his swarm of arms and retreated back to his lair with the lot of them! Jeez, the run-ins you have down there. I remember this other time—’ he paused to pull a breath, then pull at his beer.

  I took the chance to speak. You have to with Scott; his stories have the tendency to spill into others without ever finishing. ‘Well, I can’t find anything specific,’ I said. ‘But it does say: The common octopus likes nothing more than to find a den, litter some rocks and shells at its mouth and curl up inside, occasionally re-emerging to search for food. On average, an octopus spends seventy per cent of its time in its den and thirty per cent of its time out hunting. Oh hey, apparently they spend roughly three per cent of their day doing housework! That’s pretty cute.’ I wrinkled my nose as I continued to read. ‘Urgh. At the tip of the male octopus’s third arm from the right eye is the penis. I may have given you a jar of pickled penises, Scott.’

  ‘All good, Lucy. It’ll just make me more of a man,’ Scott said, rubbing at his belly.

  ‘God, Dad,’ May groaned. ‘Shut up. And anyway, you’re wrong—doesn’t sound like they’re migratory at all.’

  ‘Doesn’t say they’re not.’

  ‘Where are their vaginas?’ Jem asked curiously.

  ‘Um, let me find it,’ I said, still scanning the web page. ‘Here it is: under their mantle, apparently. Gosh, that sounds like the title of a seedy Mills and Boon, doesn’t it? Under the Mantle.’ I laughed. ‘Oh! Hang on,’ I continued, reading: ‘In her lifetime a female common octopus lays only one clutch of eggs, but that clutch is comprised of over a hundred thousand eggs. Once pregnant, the female finds shelter in a dim space, such as a sea cave, and yields the eggs; this process can take as long as five days. As the clusters of eggs are extruded, she hangs them in long strings from the ceiling or walls of her shelter. The eggs need constant fanning to keep them clean, and the female spends her time tending to the eggs with jets of water. Once this process has begun, she will stop eating, and once the eggs hatch she will die.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I think I knew that,’ May said. ‘And that’s one of the reasons octopuses are so interesting, isn’t it? They’re so intelligent, but there’s nothing inter-generational about it like there is with most mammals—like, the parents don’t pass the knowledge down to their offspring; they have to learn everything independently.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said vaguely, still thinking about Scott’s theory. ‘Maybe they head to the ocean side of the neck because there’re so many sea caves and more movement and nutrients in the water over there. The shoreline of Eaglehawk and Norfolk bays are mostly mudflats, aren’t they? Not really the ideal terrain for draping eggs about the place.’ Eaglehawk Bay is an estuary, which flows into the bigger Norfolk Bay, which in turn flows into Frederick Henry Bay, which in turn flows into Storm Bay, which in turn flows into the Southern Ocean.

  ‘I reckon that’s exactly it!’ Scott said, clamouring for vindication. ‘Especially with the pollution from the salmon farms in Norfolk Bay. Thousands of diseased fish trapped in those pens—I mean, jeez.’

  ‘What’s an octopus to do, hey?’ I grinned.

  ‘Exactly,’ Scott said.

  ‘Yeah, but that blows your Darwinian theory out of the water, doesn’t it?’ May pointed out. ‘The salmon farms have only been around for a decade or so.’

  ‘It’s all rather poignant, isn’t it?’ I sighed. ‘That mad dash across the neck for their babies, and then to simply die. It reminds me of the end of Charlotte’s Web. How did Charlotte describe her egg sac? Her magnum opus; her life’s work. And she never lived to see it hatch. That book cut me up as a kid.’

  ‘For me, it was Milo and Otis,’ said May. ‘Do you know how many little Milos and Otises they went through in the filming of that movie? It’s fucked.’

  I was saved from thinking about this bombshell in too much detail by Pam, Jem’s mother, emerging from the kitchen with the pavlova.

  ‘Kiwi fruit?’ Jem said, when he caught sight of the snowy white and soft green dessert. His disappointment was audible.

  ‘The weather’s made fruit tricky,’ Pam explained as she placed the plate on the table. ‘And I happen to think kiwi fruit is a lovely topping for pavlova.’

  By weather, Pam meant the weather events of the last month. A cyclone had rampaged astonishingly early, astonishingly south and astonishingly broadly (the phrase ‘an unprecedented December storm’ was bandied about by smooth news reporters, flustered politicians and unsurprised climate scientists) and the banana crops along the east coast were flattened by it, plunging the country into a relatively banana-less state. At the same time, a spell of downpours in the southern states surprised the local raspberry growers, ruining the summer’s harvest. This shortage, coupled with Pam’s morals, evidently made pavlova-appropriate fruit hard to come by: she refused to buy fruit that wasn’t organic, and fruit that was imported from overseas.

  ‘I know you’re not the biggest fan of kiwi fruit, Jem, but in the supermarket, they were selling raspberries from America. I just couldn’t do it. I mean, think of the carbon miles. Plus, it’s not even like it’s raspberry season over there. God knows what they’re doing to them to get them to ripen in the middle of winter and stay fresh enough to export to the other side of the world.’

  ‘What about strawberries, Mum?’ Jem asked. ‘Why couldn’t we have strawberries on the pav?’

  ‘“Why couldn’t we have strawberries on the pav?” You sound like a whingey child,’ May teased.

  He gave her the finger.

  She gave it right back.

  Their mother rolled her eyes. ‘There’s no strawberries for the pav because someone didn’t shut the garden gate properly and so the possums got to enjoy them instead of us.’

  Scott grimaced.

  ‘But you could have bought them,’ Jem said.

  He did sound like a whingey child.

  ‘I checked. They’d sold out of the Tasmanian strawberries, and the organic ones they had left were all imported from Queensland, and it just seemed ludicrous to buy them when any other day I could have bought locally.’

  ‘Locally, hey?’ Scott said, picking up the jar of octopus again. ‘Don’t get much more local than this.’

  Ten days of warm weather flickered by in what felt like a montage of Christmas leftovers, New Year’s celebrations, camping with Jem’s mate Zach and his partner, Carrie, in secret spots only accessible by boat, and feeling awkward about the way my incessantly perky breasts sat in my bikini top as I swam and mooched about the beach and campsite.

  It was a Saturday. We’d arrived home the afternoon before, and I was bemoaning my return to work on the coming Monday while Jem and I hung the washing out on the line—not a Hills Hoist, too Australiana-kitsch for us; our clothesline was strung up between two blue gums and moonlighted as a possum tightrope.

  My phone, which was wedged in my back pocket, rang. I pegged the undies I was holding to the line and wiggled it out. Displayed on the screen was an unknown number—a landline, with an area code local to the peninsula.

  ‘Hello?’ I answered.

  ‘Lucy?’ Flo’s voice asked.

  ‘Flo. How are you going?’

  ‘Good, good.’

  I smiled at her tone, which was brusque and business-like.

  ‘Busy tonight?’ she asked. ‘Octopuses?’

  ‘Um,’ I paused.

  ‘I’m only asking because I thought you was keen. Are you a bit squeamish about killing them or something?’

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ I was quick to insist, and I realised it was true. I wasn’t squeamish at all. ‘I am, I mean, I was keen.’

  ‘Great, we’ll see you tonight then.’

  ‘Flo wants you to go octopussing with her tonight?’ Jem surmised with a seedy smirk once I’d hung up. />
  I rolled my eyes. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But, I don’t know. After what your dad said, do you think it’s wrong?’

  Jem shrugged. ‘They’re just going to die anyway,’ he said. ‘And it’s not like they really matter in the scheme of things.’

  This perplexed me. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, it’s not like they’re a threatened species or anything. They reckon that Maori octopuses are going to be one of the species that will thrive with global warming. And it’s not like they have familial bonds. Like you were saying at Christmas: they die before their eggs hatch, and they live predominantly solitary lives. There’ll be no one and nothing to miss them and the ecosystem won’t suffer for it.’

  I felt uneasy. He was right, and yet I wasn’t convinced that this meant they didn’t matter. But I guess what mattered ever so slightly more to me in that moment wasn’t anything Jem had to say and wasn’t actually the octopuses at all. They were an incidental, if increasingly troubling component of it all, sure; but, at the time, that was still all they were. What mattered more to me was the romantic memory of that night: the two women, the shifting light, living not just off the land but in the land; immersion.

  And so, later on, I kitted myself up in a woollen jumper and, in lieu of waders, my wetsuit, which I kept folded down at the waist. I knotted the neoprene arms behind me like an apron, threw Jem a ‘Catch you later’ and traipsed out the door, leaving him lounging alone in front of the telly. I paused to slip my Crocs on and then plodded along the edge of the road, heading north to Eaglehawk Bay as the near-full orb of the gibbous moon brushed its way past the south-east horizon and up into the sky.

  I timed it perfectly, joining Flo and Poppy at the water’s edge on the navy-blue side of dusk, just as the stars winked on.

  They grinned when they saw me, eyes and teeth gleaming in the pearlescent light.

  ‘Onya, Lucy,’ Flo said, and I grinned back.

  The octopus had reached out, testing and then wrapping a curious arm around my gaff and I’d wrenched it up out of the weed, just like Poppy had shown me. Then, with a little difficulty, I’d bundled it into the net and waded it to shore. It was bigger than I’d expected. Made me realise why Flo and Poppy worked together. It took all my weight to hold it down and still. But hold it down and still I did, and then it happened, or I thought it happened. I could have sworn its eyes locked with mine, and not in a coincidental or passive way. It looked me in the eye intentionally.

  It did.

  I think it did.

  But what was its intent? What did it want? To live, obviously. But was there a thought beyond the instinct to live? Did it, for instance, think of me? It was such a peculiar sensation, to be watched like that, by it—her. It confused the dynamic between us. The octopus became a social player in the evening and not merely an object, a thing to be hunted, a potential hunk of meat. I should have seen it coming.

  You poor thing, I remember thinking. You’re an aspiring mother. You’re trying to do the right thing by your body, by your eggs, and it’s all going wrong. You might not believe it, but I know how you feel. Don’t look at me like that: it’s not me that’s fucked it all up for you. The neck is closed. You can’t be helped. You’re just going to die anyway, so don’t blame me.

  ‘Cut below the eyes, then take the beak out or else it’ll still crawl around,’ Flo instructed. I’d been about to do as she said, but then the octopus caught my eye again. Or I think she did. I hadn’t realised octopuses have eyelids until that moment and, for some reason, I found it disconcerting. She went still and just lay there, pinned to the sand by my hand, hooded eyes gazing up at me, insistent, silent, aware. Defiant, not defeated. Challenging me not to do the thing we were both expecting me to do.

  ‘Carn, Lucy,’ Flo urged, squatting on her haunches by my side, and the moment passed. The octopus’s eyes were dull and fish-like again. I remember thinking to myself: How does that Nirvana song go? Something about it being all right to eat fish because they don’t have feelings? But an octopus is not a fish; it’s nothing like a fish.

  It started writhing again and squelched out a jet of ink, hitting me square in the chest.

  ‘Ooph, gotcha a good one.’ Flo chuckled.

  I ignored her, and peered down at the octopus, which was still writhing under my weight. Sounds stupid, but I wondered if the octopus was making some kind of desperate attempt to remind me of my own body by inking me right in the spot my body thwarted any maternal aspirations. Ink like milk gone wrong.

  But no, the ink was just an animal reflex and, really, who knows what thoughts were pulsing in that gelatinous head, in the soft fruit of that brain? Unlikely, though, that they would have had anything to do with my gnawing angsts about my own body, that it would hope to use them against me. Vain of me to think so, really.

  But that gaze: surely I didn’t imagine it. There was something there. They’re all brain; they’re meant to be as intelligent as dogs. Dogs hold your gaze. Could I behead a live dog? A pregnant dog?

  I cut off its head.

  The knife was so sharp.

  It glided.

  ‘Orright,’ Flo said. ‘Good thing to do now is run your hand down the body like this’—she wrung her hand down the legs like they were an udder and she was milking them—‘else they’ll taste like shit.’ I took over, rubbing at its syrupy pelt. The translucent ectoplasm slipped away, bit by bit, with each stroke. And then the legs, which had momentarily calmed, began to shudder and twitch. One spasmed so violently it wrapped around my wrist and suckered on. It was as though my massage had reanimated it.

  ‘You’re orright—it’s dead,’ Flo said.

  ‘Nerves,’ I agreed. ‘Did you know that three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons—you know, like what we’ve got in our brains—are in its arms, and that even after the arm is severed from the body, it will often carry on as if nothing has happened for a couple of hours? To the extent that the arm can even hunt on its own? I read about them.’

  ‘Well there you go,’ she muttered.

  ‘The suckers are incredibly dexterous and the octopus has full control over every single one. They don’t suck on out of reflex. It’s intentional,’ I continued, looking down at the limb clinging to my arm. ‘So what do you reckon’s going on here?’ I looked up, from my arm to Flo, for a response, but she’d slipped away while I was talking and was already back in the water and out of earshot.

  I dumped the octopus’s severed body in the bucket, on top of the others.

  At the water’s edge, I attempted to wash the ink from my top, splashing water on my chest and rubbing at my breasts. I felt like a seedy actor in some kind of weird animal-death-fetish porno. Those bloody breasts. They just painted everything … off. I hated them.

  Oh my fucking god I hated them.

  And now my hands were covered in ink too. I bathed them, scrubbing with sand. The snotty strings clung to me, like characters from some primal language: an inky record of the octopus’s violent death.

  ‘Out damn spot.’ I giggled quietly to myself.

  Then: Pull yourself together, I scolded. It was going to die, anyway. It was an octopus. And what I was doing, it was a subsistence thing. Natural selection. Survival of the fittest.

  I couldn’t get the ink off.

  It did look at me, didn’t it?

  Once the bucket was full, we made our way up to the road to beat the legs tender. Just before we reached that little track that cuts through the band of bristling scrub and up, onto the road, a movement, discernible at the edge of my torchlight, caught my attention. I locked the light on it. It was another octopus, lurching and slithering, making its way to the road alongside us. All eight arms rolled sequentially underneath its head, chewing along the ground like caterpillar tracks on an army tank.

  It was so heavy in its movements, so laden. It was too pathetic.

  Had I imagined it? That interactive gaze? Or had I simply turned the octopus into an alert and aware creature so that
I could ask for atonement?

  A set of lights floated down the hill on the Forestier Peninsula.

  The car was such a long way off.

  The octopus moved with such intent, yet so laboriously, out onto the road.

  Usually, in these sorts of circumstances, people say: ‘I didn’t think.’ But I did think. I don’t remember what, precisely. I just know it wasn’t thoughtless on my part, which is why they’re making me see a psychologist now. Mostly, it was that I didn’t want to be the witness, skulking roadside in the dark, looking the other way, waiting for it to be over in a squelch of black ink, blue blood and brains. I wanted to help her. To be able to do something. For her. For myself. To just, finally, do something.

  It was dark. The car flicked its headlights from high to low beam. That must be why my depth perception was so out of whack. I thought I had enough time.

  I lunged forward and grabbed.

  My hand wrapped around a slimy arm.

  Was the octopus surprised? Are they capable of surprise?

  I remember being out in the tinny once with Jem. We were cruising about with a pod of dolphins, who were surfing our wake. Jem climbed up on the bow of the boat and reached down to where one was coasting along beside us and grabbed it by the dorsal fin, and I swear it started and looked over its shoulder at him, and with that, quick smart, the whole pod disappeared. There was something so human-like about the dolphin’s facial expression.

  It was the same thing that night: the octopus started as if it was surprised, turned to me and, somewhat dreamily, curled a tendril-like arm up and around my wrist. Her suckers folded to fit the contours of my skin and she latched on, holding me as much as I was holding her. Together we were caught in the headlights.