by Erin Hortle
He knows it’s not his place anymore, but he can’t miss the opportunity to find his friend and tell her about the strange school of fish. He doesn’t stop to nap or feed even when he bursts headfirst and laughing into a school of herring and sends them scattering.
He slows his pace as he enters the female territories, cruising in long lines and doubling back on himself, searching the waters as he swims to where their favourite cluster of rocks rise up and breach the ocean.
Other females spot him and swim over.
Why are you here? they ask by spiralling around him, and then before he can answer they snap, Go away, you shouldn’t be here anymore, by slapping their tails in his face as they swim away.
He doesn’t care; he just wants a moment with her. He just wants to say hello and tell her what he has been doing since he saw her last.
It’s night when he finds her. The familiar braids of seaweed are swaying and curling slowly up from the rocks, then sucking back towards them, as waves rise and fall. He pokes his head up out of the water and instantly recognises her snoozing on the shore. He grins at the familiar mound of her body, which is lit up softly in star and moonlight.
He barks once, quietly, and she starts awake. Her head lifts, and he watches her peering at the dark water, searching for him.
She slips into the water and disappears into the darkness. Then all of a sudden she is there, gliding and sliding against his body, curling about him, nuzzling her head into his shoulder and belly and so saying, I’ve missed you and You’ve grown.
He pointedly rubs his face in the slight swell of her pregnant belly, to say: So have you.
Why are you here? she asks him, by cocking her head to one side.
He grunts, laughing to her softly, to tell her he didn’t mean to be.
She tilts her head to the other side to ask him what he means.
He slips and slides and slithers about her, grunting and barking, and so tells her what happened to him.
She barks in surprise, laughing, and rubs up against him eagerly to ask if he’s okay and to tell him she would love to see this school of herded fish.
But you still have time! He realises it’s true as he honks it.
She cocks her head again, to ask him what he means.
He barks excitedly and brushes her pregnant belly with his flipper to remind her that she doesn’t have a pup yet, that she could come with him, now.
She rubs against him slowly and sadly to tell him that she can’t. Then, she swims in a circle around him to tell him that her place is here; she can’t just leave.
But why not? He swims in a circle around her. You won’t pup until harem season. Why not explore with me, like old times? He nuzzles his head into her shoulder and licks her whiskers. With me, for one last time?
She grunts and rubs her belly on his. I am with pup. I can’t just leave. She brushes her flipper against where his cock hides, to remind him that, unlike him, she is female and can’t go to a haul-out.
He knows she is right, but still, he can tell she is tempted. He swims in lazy circles around her, rubbing his body against hers, savouring the brush of her fur on his, and telling her that he misses her and that, should she change her mind, he’ll be waiting and watching for her until harem season begins.
She circles him slowly and sadly to tell him he should leave and that he should not get his hopes up. But before she disappears, she also rubs up against him one last time and brushes her flipper cheekily across his face. Maybe.
He coasts back down south on the current, which, this season, is teeming with tuna. They are too fast for him but he chases them anyway because he enjoys the feel of their bubbly wake fizzing about his face. He floats, dozing on the surface, with his flippers held up in the air, and when he wakes, he watches the albatrosses, shearwaters, petrels and jaegers lift and fall on the licks of warm and cool air, which brush against his cheeks as they peel off the surface of the water. The birds move individually but together like fish in the sky. He dives down low and swims through the different layers of the whales’ echoing songs. He comes up for air then dives beneath the surface and drifts on a lower current, gazing up at the flickering beams of sunlight that curl and sway on eddies, and listening to the hum of a boat engine in the distance.
She will come. He is sure of it.
As he surfaces for air, he tries to launch himself but he barely manages to get any of his body to breach. He is growing bigger and heavier every day.
Maybe it will only take me one season to become beta, he thinks. Maybe I will grow so big I will become alpha without having to fight!
Then he thinks about the alpha ramming him from the rocks, and he thinks about how terrified he was, and how submissive he felt, and he wonders if he’ll ever care about mounting a harem enough to fight alphas like that, no matter how big he grows. He thinks about his cock emerging from his fur like an eel from a cave when he smelled that his friend was beta-ready. He would quite like to mount her. But then he thinks about watching the would-be-alpha die with his throat ripped out, and he thinks about the beta-half-pup who brushed up against him teasingly as they watched the betas hump each other, and he thinks again: maybe being a beta would not be so bad.
He dives back down and drifts on the lower current, mulling it all over.
When I am beta, he thinks, I can swim and feed with my friend every harem season. I don’t have to be alpha to see her, he realises; in fact, it will be easier to see her if he is not a trapped alpha, unless, of course, he is her harem’s alpha. But he loves herding fish; he loves gorging himself. Would being her harem’s alpha really be worth it? He’s not so sure.
As he floats drowsily, watching the swaying and trickling beams of sunlight, he sees the silhouette of a tuna above him. He watches it for a while, perplexed. It’s the strangest thing: it’s as though it’s trying to race in one direction, but something is pulling it in another—in the direction of the boat, which has also drifted into his view. The tuna struggles lamely, and he thinks, idly, of all the tuna he has chased along the current this last little while. This could be his chance to finally catch one.
He spirals slowly, thinking, then decides.
He rushes at the tuna, charging as fast as he can as it slips up beside the boat. As he reaches it, it breaches the water, so he launches himself up into the air at it, breaching his head and shoulders up high enough to reach the dangling fish. He sinks his teeth into its rich, fatty flank.
For a brief moment, his eyes meet the eyes of a human-half-pup who is standing in the boat. The human-half-pup’s expression of surprise is so distinct, so seal-like, if it weren’t for the fish in his mouth he would have barked a laugh.
Syrupy blood trickles down his throat.
THE MULTI-COLOURED KNITTED KNOCKERS
Jem was doing the dishes when his phone rang. He wiped his hands dry on a tea towel and picked it up. It was Lucy’s number displayed on the screen, but when he answered, it was Flo’s voice that surged out of the speaker.
‘Come to the neck! She’s been hit by a car! We’ve got the ambo on the way.’
He froze up. He just stood there, by the kitchen sink. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t do anything; he just stood there. His hearing went all muted like he had earmuffs on, and from somewhere far away he could hear Flo’s parroty tones: ‘Jem? Jem? Jem?’
Then he snapped back to it, said, ‘I’m coming,’ and ran out of the house with no shoes on.
He was in the car, sole to the pedal, pedal to the metal, and was by Lucy’s side before he had a chance to think, before he had a chance to prepare himself for it.
Not that you can ever prepare yourself for it. He had heaps of time to prepare himself with the cancer and he was still a stunned mullet when she went in for that surgery, he was still dazed through the nightmare of chemo. It was so disorientating; the whole gruelling thing was. It was the strangest mix of utterly boring and utterly terrifying, and it had gone on for what felt like forever, but in such an abs
tracted and timeless way, where it had felt like their life had turned into nothing but potential tomorrows—like there was no today that mattered except the today to be endured because there must be a tomorrow. There must be, Jem had kept thinking. There must be a tomorrow.
But that night wasn’t about the anticipation of a tomorrow at all; it was about the shocking, shocking moment in which he saw Lucy, lying there in the January night, on the side of the road, unconscious, with blood coagulating in the gravel beneath her.
‘The paramedics said not to move her,’ Flo told him, so he just stroked her back and kissed her cheek—the one that was upturned—and prised the octopus arm from her fist.
Not my Luce, not my Luce, he thought. Not my Luce not my Luce not my Luce.
He couldn’t believe it was happening again. The circumstances were different, but the fear seizing his chest was instantly recognisable.
He didn’t have space in his head to think of anything to say in reply, anything to say to Flo or Greek Poppy who were hovering anxiously, or to the bloke who hit her, who was muttering, ‘I’m so sorry I’m so sorry’ over and over, while his wife bawled. Jem didn’t tell them to fuck off, or tell him that he believed him, that of course he was sorry and of course it was an accident because what sort of a fucked-up cunt runs down a woman and an octopus on purpose? He didn’t tell him because he couldn’t tell him, and he couldn’t tell him because his lips and chin were wobbling and his tongue felt too big for his mouth and a film of metallic saliva clung to his suddenly aching throat. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t do anything but think: Not my Luce not my Luce not my Luce.
Next thing he knew he was in the back of the ambulance, still barefoot, and Lucy was stirring. She was in so much pain it broke his heart; it broke his heart again, because how much can one body, one woman—no matter how tough she is—take? The paramedics gave her one of those pain-relief whistles to blow on and then she was out of it and the moment passed into the blur of lit-up night and high-beam-bleached eucalypts, framed by the ambulance windscreen. And during that long drive up to Hobart, and that long night in the emergency ward, the anticipation of tomorrow, and all the potential it carried with it—all the many potentials—emerged.
Lucy finds herself back in hospital. She finds herself, at least momentarily. She emerges from a dense, dense sleep, and there she is.
She isn’t surprised by her location. For a while she’d been in and out of consciousness and drifting in drug-induced half states, so she’d already registered that she was in the hospital on some level. But then she slept. And now she’s there: lucid, awake, present.
Jem, on the other hand, is not awake. He’s sprawled in the chair by her bed, dozing with his head hanging at an angle she’s pretty sure he’ll wake to regret. He looks like a wreck. She is a wreck. Straitjacketed by hospital sheets. Propped up by pillows. Gauzed and bandaged and breastless.
The hospital bustles on the other side of the door, but her room is relatively peaceful—sanitised and humming in that hospital way, but peaceful. It’s all so familiar, yet also not.
Last time, she’d felt trapped. Feverishly trapped. During those long hours in the oncology ward she’d had so much time to sit and think while poison siphoned into her veins via the chemo bowser, parked beside her at the beginning of every visit. As the fluids soaked through the corridors of her body, her awareness of the mechanics of her veins, her vessels and her cells, heightened. It was awful. She’d never felt so alive, so strange, so rotten. It was like she’d morphed into a creature with scars instead of breasts, a hairless body; delicate, translucent skin and bloody gums. She’s small, anyway—runty, she always called herself before the cancer, in a faux self-deprecating kind of way—but she became truly runty as the chemo ate what little flesh she had from her bones. Runty to the point she became something else as her vertebrae began to protrude, cog-like, from her back, and her shoulder blades came to look like the wings of a flightless bird.
She didn’t know if the waves of frenzied irritation she experienced while sitting in that chemo chair were all in her head, but at times she had to clamp her teeth shut and press her fingernails—so fragile, so laddered, so red-raw—into the cushioned arms of the chair and consciously stop herself from ripping the needles from her veins. It felt so wrong. It was like every sensation she experienced in that ward took on a hysteria that fed the awareness that she was trapped by her sickness, by medicine, by her body, by her childless future, by the very concrete of the hospital building. And all the while, deftly manicured women in ads for nappies, for baby food, for cleaning products, smiled secret smiles at her from the muted television set that was mounted on the hospital wall.
She was trapped, last time.
This time, she has been freed. She can feel it in her chest and on her chest, which aches and stings in the most cathartic way imaginable. She’s bruised, battered and freed. She’s a creature, with scars instead of breasts, but she has her hair—her hair, not that downy poodle regrowth—she has her skin, which is a hardy pelt again, and she has her tough, leathery gums. She’s Lucy.
And the octopus is—what happened to it? she wonders. But she can only bring herself to wonder idly. She’s warm. The room hums. She curls her toes. Sleeping seems like a nice thing to do.
Fragments of the past day—days?—skitter about her disassembling consciousness:
Jem’s face, blotchy. He’s been crying. ‘I don’t know what happened to the octopus, Luce, but you’re going to be okay.’ Going to be okay. ‘We’ve had to remove the ruptured implants,’ someone says. The same person—another person?—says: ‘Skin is very damaged.’ ‘Another reconstruction could be an option.’ ‘Best plastic surgeon in Tasmania.’ ‘Works wonders.’ Wonders wonders wonders. ‘Other symptoms: concussion, whiplash, and grazing.’ ‘Fortunately, nothing is broken.’ ‘Options.’ ‘Rest now.’ ‘Think about it later.’ Later. Later. Later. ‘Take all the time you need.’
She doesn’t need time.
Her consciousness wanes into an impression of autumn twilight and suspends her there, lazing in what she’s sure would be an amber glow if she could open her eyes enough to see it. She’s so warm. The world hums. Sleeping seems like a nice thing to do. But she doesn’t quite sleep. She dozes in another half state, aware, but not quite awake. Watching through her fluttering lashes.
Jem wakes as his mother opens the door with a gentle knock. She gives him a coffee and a kiss on the forehead, whispers something, then leaves again. He stretches his neck, rolling his head on its axis. Sips at his coffee and plays on his phone. Poppy pokes her head in the door, sees Lucy is all but sleeping, waves at Jem, and retreats.
Poppy’s made the trip to Hobart for me? Lucy wonders, and with her surprise, her consciousness clarifies.
‘I’m not getting another boob job,’ she says, to see how the idea will hang in the air. Phlegm stifles her words. She clears her throat, and tries again, more firmly this time, like she’s trying to convince herself: ‘I’m not going to have breasts.’
The way Jem looks at her. What’s on his face? Relief, concern, love. So much love. Something else?
She meets his gaze. ‘I know you loved them,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t. I hated them.’
He moves quickly, from his chair to her bed, and then he’s holding a plastic cup of water to her mouth, but he hasn’t quite tipped it enough for her to drink. She lengthens her lips into a pout, and then he tips it too much. Water leaks from the corners of her puckered mouth and trickles down her neck, on the outside and the in, washing the phlegm away. He puts the cup back on the table, mops her up with his sleeve, then snuggles his body against hers, but gently, so as not to hurt her.
Pressing his lips against her temple, he says, ‘Whatever, Luce,’ humming the words into her skin. ‘Whatever’s right for you. I’ll be here.’ He pauses, then pulls back so he can look at her face. ‘But are you sure?’ he asks. ‘I mean, it’s a clean slate again, isn’t it? You could try something different this t
ime. Smaller, or whatever. I’ll support you no matter what, but are you sure you want to go the rest of your life without them at all?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lucy sighs. Then, ‘No, actually, I do know. I’m not really sure of anything at all except for the fact that I hated them so much, Jem. I just hated them and I don’t think I can stomach them again.’
‘Fair enough,’ Jem says, smiling, it seems to her, a little sadly. ‘I mean, they’re only adornments, aren’t they?’
‘They are,’ Lucy says. ‘And if they made me feel more me or better about my body or whatever then I’d do it again, because they’d have a purpose. But if they just alienate me from myself, then what’s their point?’ She sounds so lucid, so reasonable. Is she? Jem doesn’t say anything. He presses his lips to her temple again and strokes her hair.
‘I’ll be able to run without a bra,’ Lucy muses, more to herself than him. ‘I’ll be like a child, or a man.’
‘No, Luce,’ Jem murmurs. She can feel his lips curl up into a smile. ‘You’ll be like a woman without breasts.’
Lucy smiles too.
She feels elated.
She’s so warm, snuggled against him like that. The room hums. His heart beats. Sleeping seems like a nice thing to do. She curls her toes.
‘You don’t have to make a decision now, anyway. You’ve got plenty of time to think about it,’ Jem says, somewhere far away.
Flo gazes out of her lounge room window and traces her eyes along the highway that spans the neck and cleaves the bush on the opposite hill like a part forcibly combed into boofy hair. In her mind, she follows the highway as it cuts through tracts of bush and shadows the curve of mudflat bays, as it glides through pasture studded with copses of eucalypt, edges through bland country towns, coils around roundabouts, bridges stretches of water and drifts towards the estuary of the Derwent River, which is white-capped by the summer sea breeze; towards the arch of the Tasman Bridge and the hunched skyline of Mount Wellington, towards the city that wedges itself between the rise of the mountain and the briny lap of the river; towards the hospital in the centre of that city; towards Lucy and Poppy.
