The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  The first time Jem went tuna fishing, back when he was a boy, he had been appalled by the prospect of wielding a gaff. The tuna was churning up great swathes of turbulence and whenever it smacked against the surface, it kicked up rooster-tails of spray. It was thrashing against the hold of the hook in its lip—the hook, which was the trap hidden in the lure, which was connected to the line, which was traced up through the guides of Jem’s fishing rod, and coiled around his reel. They needed to get it into the boat. Or rather, Jem needed to get it in the boat. This was his kill, his responsibility; he was old enough now. Jem’s dad had taken the rod from him and instructed him to take up the gaff and land the fish himself.

  ‘But gaff it while it’s alive?’ he’d asked his father, eyeing the hook of the gaff dubiously. ‘Won’t it hurt it?’

  ‘The quicker we can get this done, the quicker we can put the fish out of its misery,’ Jem’s father had said.

  So, Jem had got it done.

  There was so much blood.

  Later, his father had taken the time to explain: ‘If you’re going to take a life, Jem, then you need to do it quickly. Fast is humane. Remember that: fast is humane. Never leave an animal to suffer, even if it’s just a fish.’

  ‘But what about abalone?’ Jem had asked.

  ‘They’re not complex enough organisms to suffer,’ Jem’s dad had replied.

  ‘Is that true?’ Lucy asked, years later.

  ‘I think so,’ Jem said. ‘And I mean, there’s got to be a cut-off point somewhere, doesn’t there?’

  ‘So, it might as well be at the point where you make your living?’ she teased.

  ‘Yeah, well, what can you do?’ He smiled. ‘I was born into it.’

  ‘It’s that thing about the faces, isn’t it?’ Lucy mused. ‘We’re more likely to feel empathetic towards critters with faces, and while those poor abalone have those fat black lips, they’re faceless.’

  And maybe that thing about faces, maybe that was when the rules came into effect: we’re more likely to feel empathetic towards critters with faces and we should let that empathy guide us. Except some of us have no empathy at all; some of us are untouched by the rules. Some of us shoot seals and leave them to die. Some of us are shameless. Utterly, utterly shameless.

  Like these men, here, these men standing in front of him on the jetty.

  He knows they’re shameless: the brothers, Rob, Shayne and Pete. He knows their names, although he can’t remember which is which. Eaglehawk Neck is a small place, and their family has had a shack down here for generations. The brothers are a good handful of years older than Jem and were rougher and lewder in ways that fascinated and appalled him when he was a kid, watching them at the jetty, squidding near them but not with them—never with them. He would watch the way they’d leave fish to drown in air, catching more than they’d need and kicking the bodies, which had turned leathery in the sun, back into the water as they mooched away.

  What they did was bad; he knew this, even as a kid. Bad in a sinister way. It was worse than the mere fact that they had pointlessly taken lives; it was that there was something in them that had allowed them to do it so carelessly.

  And what was perhaps more shocking to Jem than the fact that they did it, was the fact that they didn’t get in trouble. There seemed to be no consequences for their behaviour. That was how he learnt that the world is a fucked place.

  He learnt all sorts of other things from those boys as well. He learnt that if you acted like you owned a place, maybe you did. He learnt this when, one raucous evening, once they were a little older, they got blind drunk and so foul-mouthed they drove all the other people who were enjoying having a fish and a sundowner scurrying from the jetty and they didn’t seem to care two hoots. It was like they thought they owned the place and could do whatever they wanted, and everyone just let them, him included (but what was he going to do? he was only a kid). And he learnt things about girls from them—about girls and boys. He’d never even thought about the fact that you needed a plan of attack if you were ‘going in for the finger’. Are you better off going down the front of her undies, or up and in the side? The eldest of the brothers and his mates debated this one evening. They never did reach a consensus. The eldest had just gotten his P-plates and he and his mates were down at the shack, no younger brothers, no adults: just the boys. Jem heard what they shouted at May and her mates that same night. The Invitation. They were just having a laugh. Boys will be boys, Jem learnt, and he knows the type of men those coarse, careless, boofhead boys would have grown into.

  Just having a laugh. Always laughing, never caring.

  And now they’re adults, with kids, like this boy here, who’s peering up at Jem with what looks like a combination of awe and distrust.

  Jem can imagine how the fishing trip today would have started: the father saying to the son, ‘Let’s make a man out of you’, and the boy lighting up. And now he is a man; he caught his first tuna; soon his balls will drop and he’ll workshop strategies for fingering girls.

  The fish is already filleted and on ice, which could mean anything or nothing at all. If Jem didn’t know their type, he would think it meant nothing at all.

  He tests the water a little and asks them if they heard gunshot and tells them about the seals, watching them for any sign of guilt. The kid’s eyes widen, and flicker between his father and his uncles, who are all gruff bravado in a telling way.

  ‘Nope, didn’t hear anything,’ one of them says.

  ‘You didn’t, did ya?’ Jem eyes them sceptically.

  But now he thinks about it, those seals were probably shot a bit ago, given their withered state. Unlikely that these blokes would have done it. And yet there’s a whiff of something fishy about them. The boy doesn’t have the poker face of his dad and uncles. There’s sure guilt in the set of his eyes and mouth. And they are the type. Jem knows that. He sighs heavily as he wanders back to his boat.

  ‘Finally,’ Jem says. ‘I was about to send out a search party!’

  He’d heard Lucy’s car in the driveway and rushed to the door to greet her. He can’t shake off that feeling of dismay and frustration that has settled in him since he’d left the wharf, and he wants to wrap himself in Lucy’s presence. Not physically: not with sex—sex isn’t distracting at the moment with Lucy’s body how it is while she figures things out. But there are other ways Lucy distracts him: the way she talks to him and gets him to talk to her. That’s what he needs now. He needs her to listen to him, needs her to tell him that the blokes are ‘arseholes caught up in a web of toxic masculinity’. That’s the sort of thing she often says, and it seems genuine coming from her in a way it never would coming from him.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lucy says. ‘I got a little caught up with … I’ll show you in a second. Help me with the groceries?’

  They carry the bags up the steps, in the front door, along the hall and into the open-plan kitchen and living space: the room Lucy turned into a home. The L-shaped kitchen benches and the butcher’s block were there before her, but the stool at the butcher’s block and the blackheart sassafras dining table (which also always seems to double as Lucy’s desk, covered in papers and her laptop), the bookshelves and the pot plants: they were things Lucy brought to the space.

  Jem loves this room. He loves the way it makes him feel warm and at ease. He loves the fact that the first time Lucy came to the house, she sat on top of that butcher’s block drinking beer from the stubbie, and while he kissed the salt from her neck, she told him, ‘You know, you really should get a stool,’ like she already had the right to have a say about the place.

  While they put the groceries away, he tells her about the seals and the blokes and the kid.

  ‘I see what you’re saying,’ she says. ‘But Jem, it’s not like you can know that they would have done it, or did do it, or …’ she trails off, frowning. ‘Actually, what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m just saying that they’re the type that would, you know? And that the boy’s
so young. I just hate to think what he’s being brought up to see as normal.’

  ‘So it’s the inter-generational stuff that’s upsetting you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sighs. ‘I guess. It’s that, and it’s also the way that even if it wasn’t them, someone left those seals to die that slow death and there’s nothing to be done about it. There’s no consequences, you know. People just do shit like this and get away with it.’

  ‘It is against the law, though, isn’t it?’ Lucy asks. ‘Like, there are actual consequences for animal cruelty.’

  ‘They’re bullshit consequences, though, aren’t they?’ Jem says. ‘Like the guy that bludgeoned all those penguins to death and he only got a fine and a handful of days community service. It means nothing. And you’ve got to actually get caught in the first place. The ocean’s a big place. It’s not like the cops would be able to patrol it properly, even if they cared enough to put the manpower into it.’

  ‘Come here,’ Lucy says. She grabs his hand and draws him towards the stool. She sits him on it, then straddles his lap, loops her arms around his neck and looks up into his eyes, ready to listen some more.

  ‘Sometimes I just can’t see how things will get better,’ Jem murmurs. ‘Cunts raise new generations of cunts.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Lucy says sadly. ‘It’s the circle of life.’ And then she grins. ‘But think about how many centuries of the patriarchy humans have lived in, and how much has changed in the last fifty years, you know? Stuff can change and stuff is changing, and we’ve got to hope it’s for the better.’

  ‘Are you saying it’s the patriarchy’s fault that those seals were left for dead?’ Jem says, arching an eyebrow happily. This is it. This is what he wanted.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ Lucy smiles. ‘That sort of entitled and toxic masculinity you’re so worried about is a symptom of the patriarchy, after all.’

  ‘Damn straight, sister,’ Jem says, grinning. ‘Now excuse me while I go and burn my bra.’

  Lucy’s smile becomes mischievous. ‘Do you want to?’ she asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Burn my bras? You know, in tribute to the seals?’

  Jem laughs, but a little hesitantly. Maybe this isn’t what he wanted; maybe he doesn’t want this at all. He gets the feeling this will mean something more than a tribute to the seals. But, ‘Why not?’ he says, because what else can he say?

  Lucy plants a kiss square on his lips, then slips off his lap. ‘Go get the fire started,’ she says. ‘I’ll get the lingerie and booze. We’ll make it a wake like no other.’

  ‘So this is it then?’ Jem asks. His heart is sinking in a way he knows it’s not allowed to as Lucy throws the last of the bras onto the fire. For a moment, it sits there like new: pale blue satin with lacy straps, framed by a shimmering bed of orange and red. And then the straps dissolve into black smoke, and the blue is tarnished a filthy grey, which becomes a soiled navy, and then fingers of red and orange crumple it into dust.

  ‘This is it,’ Lucy says. She holds her beer up to his. ‘No more breasts.’

  ‘No more breasts,’ Jem echoes, tapping his stubbie to hers. He’d kind of been holding out hope that she might change her mind and decide differently. But it’s her body, her decision. He knows that.

  They watch while flakes of bra whip up into the air as smoke and toxic ash.

  He can’t dwell on it; he shouldn’t dwell on it; they’ll move on if he doesn’t dwell on it. They’ll move on together. It’s going to be okay. The world is going to be okay.

  ‘And you think the world can be better?’ he says, not even trying to mask his pleading tone.

  ‘I know the world can be better,’ Lucy says. ‘And I love you.’ He throws his arm around her shoulder and pulls her against him. Pressing his lips to the top of her head, he murmurs, ‘I love you too, Luce.’

  She pulls back and looks up at him. ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s the reason I was so late,’ she says. Then she pulls her top up, revealing her scars and there, next to them, the outline of an octopus, etched into her skin. Its head is nestled against her armpit and its arms reach towards her ruined flesh.

  Jem opens his mouth and then closes it again. He has no idea what to say. His heart has no right to be doing what it’s doing. It’s her body. He opens his mouth again. The words that emerge are: ‘A tattoo. Wow.’

  Given the look on Lucy’s face, he suspects his voice sounds as empty to her ears as it felt in his mouth.

  Earlier that day, Lucy was up in Hobart, staring through a window at one of the most impressive people she had ever seen in her life. That person was staring right back at her. It was both highly awkward and thrilling—thrilling, because of the very fact such a woman existed, and thrilling, because Lucy suddenly realised what to do.

  ‘Let’s leave the octopus to one side for a moment, and talk about you, Lucy,’ her psychologist, Suzette, had said not an hour earlier. Suzette was likely aged somewhere in her late forties. She had soft cheeks that bunched up into pillows when she smiled, and blonde foils through her greying hair. Her brown eyes were framed by a fine web of lines, and were currently fixed on Lucy in a gaze that met the perfect balance between cool professionalism and caring concern. Lucy wondered how long it had taken Suzette to master that kind of expression, and how many staunch people had cracked open when met with it over the years in this very office.

  ‘You said that you feel like a stranger in your own body,’ Suzette said. ‘Can you elaborate on that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lucy had said, stalling so that she could collect her thoughts. She could hear the hum of traffic on Davey Street, and imagined all those people, sitting side by side, contained in their cars, waiting vacantly for the lights to turn green. ‘I guess my body became unfamiliar when I had those new breasts. It was like I—the me that’s self-aware: ‘I think therefore I am’ and all that—had been peeled away from my body, which had become something else entirely. It was like I was watching myself from the outside rather than existing inside myself, if that makes sense? And perhaps it was because I didn’t feel like I belonged in it anymore, and perhaps it’s because I felt like it had become this kind of grotesque feminine caricature, but I became so aware of Jem’s eyes on me, and of other people’s eyes on me. I felt like they were looking at me as this female body—as this hunk of processed meat—and not as me anymore, and that just exacerbated the way I felt about it.’

  ‘And now?’ Suzette had asked. ‘How do you feel now?’

  ‘How do I feel now?’ Lucy had echoed. ‘Now I hate the scars. I just hate them. I know they’re going to fade with time, but still, they will be the feature on my chest, you know? I don’t even have nipples anymore. I’m not even like a pre-pubescent child. It’s just going to be … scars, or the ghosts of scars, and I hate that. I won’t get prosthetic breasts again, and I do feel good about that decision. But still, I hate that my chest is never going to be something I love or even remotely like about myself anymore.’

  It had felt so good to say it. To really say it, and not just in a half-sleep, half-drugged state. It’s the sort of thing she’d been wanting to talk about—to talk to anyone about, but especially to Jem about, but she hadn’t been able to because of the way he’d say: ‘You don’t have to make a decision now’, or, ‘You still have options’. He’d say that, as if she hadn’t already made a decision and as if she hadn’t already been limiting those options with every day that passed in which her chest healed flat, and with every visit she made to the various doctors and plastic surgeons who were doing their best to reduce the scarring on this: her flat chest, here to stay. Even though he said he’d support her, no matter what, she could tell he missed having a partner with breasts. And while she understood this—she did; he was a heterosexual man, after all—she didn’t want to give him space to air his thoughts on the matter. She didn’t have any room inside her for his opinions; she was occupied, brimming with
her own. And earlier today, in Suzette’s office, she had relished the chance to let them out.

  It was their first appointment. Apparently she had to have five more—six all up—although she could have as many as she liked and/or required. Suzette had taken care to make sure she understood this, in her cool, methodical voice.

  ‘The six-consultation plan is arbitrary, Lucy,’ she’d said, leaning forward in her chair. ‘This process will take as long as it needs to.’

  ‘Does that mean it might take less time?’ Lucy had asked.

  Suzette smiled at that, and leant back again, straightening her striped blouse. ‘Let’s just see how we go.’

  They didn’t cover much ground in that first appointment; mostly Lucy was just cleared, again, as a suicide risk.

  ‘It really was an accident. You really were trying to save an octopus,’ Suzette determined with a straight face. ‘But I still think it would do you good to keep meeting with me, Lucy. You’ve suffered some real traumas, and I want to work with you on how you think about your body.’

  So Lucy would be back in a fortnight—she was handed an appointment card, with 11 am, 27th February scribbled on it to remind her—and, now she thought about it, this seemed like a good thing. She wanted to talk in a safe and baggage-free space. She wanted to talk. She really wanted to talk.

  It was after she’d left Suzette’s office—when she was walking along one of Hobart’s streets, on the way to her favourite cafe for a coffee and a decadently buttery almond croissant—that she noticed the tattoo parlour. Or, more specifically, she noticed the woman in the tattoo parlour.

  The woman was big and magnificently curvy. She had straight, black hair trimmed to shoulder length with a fringe cropped to sit high on her forehead, and she was wearing a sleeveless floral dress that almost absurdly matched the tattoos that covered her arms and neck. A spray of bees flew out from her crevasse of a cleavage to feast on the flowers of her chest and neck. She was an obscene explosion of colour; she was a walking, overgrown, feral flower garden, or more specifically, a sitting garden, because she was perched on a stool in what Lucy assumed was the reception area of the parlour, and she was looking out the window, right at Lucy.