by Erin Hortle
Lucy couldn’t stop looking back at her. She couldn’t help herself. She really couldn’t. But she had to do something to break the moment, so she smiled. The woman raised her eyebrows, and not in a good way.
Maybe this isn’t the best idea, Lucy thought to herself. But regardless, she backtracked to the door, and pushed her way in.
‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked, before Lucy was even through the door.
‘Um,’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t know.’
The woman gave her a rather hostile glare, a glare that said: What the fuck’s your problem?
Lucy felt conventional, and beige, and scrawny, and so, so out of place. ‘I was just walking by, and I saw you, and … your look is amazing,’ she babbled. ‘Did you get your tattoos done here?’ As she said it, she wondered if there was a cooler word that she should have used. Tats? Ink? Art?
‘Some,’ the woman said, giving Lucy a once-over and sneering a touch. ‘I did some of them myself, and the ones I couldn’t reach or do proper, me mate Shani did. This is my shop,’ she added.
‘Oh, this is your shop?’ Lucy echoed stupidly and perhaps … offensively? Like she was implying that she didn’t think the woman would be the sort of person to own a shop? That wasn’t what she meant at all, and she hoped it wasn’t how the woman took it. All the woman did was raise her eyebrows at Lucy, evidently waiting for her to get to the point. So, Lucy did.
‘I want one,’ she blurted. ‘I want a tattoo.’ She felt the blush spring to her cheeks.
‘Oh, you want a tattoo do you, little Betty?’ The woman sneered outright this time. ‘What do you want? A little love heart on your hip? Or how about a feather on your ankle? That’d be cute. Or, no wait, I’ve got it: you want a bird between your shoulder blades, don’t you? No! A dolphin in the small of your back; that’s it, isn’t it? It’d be, like, super nineties,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘Retro as, babe.’
Lucy really should have felt cowed by this woman’s hostility, and she was surprised that she didn’t. She was shocked, yes, but she wasn’t cowed. She could feel herself blushing, but she wasn’t blushing with shame. Rather, she was flushed with defiance and that sense of purpose, which had struck her as soon as she saw the woman and had surged back with a vengeance that fed upon everything Lucy was working through, everything she explained to Suzette this last hour: her scars, Jem, the octopuses, what those breasts had done to her, who she was—who she is.
‘I don’t want any of those things,’ Lucy said, calmly. Then she pulled her shirt up and bared her scarred chest at the contrary woman, smirking as shock slackened the sneer from the woman’s face. ‘I want a tapestry, like yours. I want octopuses. A mess of them. All over my chest.’
Without saying anything, the woman got up off her stool and walked over to Lucy. She leant forward and peered at Lucy’s chest for a moment or two, tracing her eyes over her scars. Lucy found herself gazing into the woman’s cleavage, trying to find the bees’ source, which must be nestled somewhere deep. The moment or two stretched on, and the closeness of it got to Lucy. She looked towards the ceiling and tried not to laugh. She could only imagine how the scene, neatly framed by the shop window, would appear to anyone walking along the street: Lucy’s bare back, her shirt bunched under her armpits, the woman peering intently at her exposed chest.
‘Well,’ the woman said eventually. ‘You’ve come to the right place, but you’ve come too soon.’ She stepped back, opening a space between her and Lucy.
Lucy let her shirt drop. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘The scarring’s too new. How long ago did you do it?’
‘Six weeks or so,’ Lucy ventured.
The woman clicked her tongue. ‘Six weeks isn’t enough. It’ll move as it heals. Come back in a month.’
Lucy’s feeling of purpose frazzled. ‘I can’t,’ she said, panicked. ‘I just, I need them now. I need you to start now. Please. Isn’t there a way we can just get it started?’
The woman huffed. ‘Come through here,’ she said.
Lucy followed her through a door into a small, neat, well-lit room with crisp white walls. In one corner, there was a copse of plants in terracotta pots. The sanitised intimacy of the space and the bed in the middle of the room reminded Lucy of a massage or beauty therapist’s parlour.
‘Take your shirt off,’ the woman said.
Lucy contemplated making a daggy, faux-coy comment, like, Aren’t you going to at least buy me a drink first? but thought better of it and pulled her shirt off wordlessly.
The woman peered at Lucy’s chest again. ‘Well, I guess we can start in this patch here,’ she said, lightly touching a slice of Lucy’s unbroken skin, just near her armpit, ‘and kind of work our way in. That is, if you want it to go out this far. But if we start now, I’d be beginning before I fully have a chance to map it out and once you’re inked, you’re inked.’
Please. Lucy wasn’t sure if the word came out, or if she just mouthed it, but evidently the woman sensed her desperation.
‘I s’pose we can start with one, just to get you going. Then I can take some pictures of you, and have a think, and draw up a design that integrates what we do today along with your scars, for you to have a look at next time you’re in. Which,’ the woman added, enunciating with an authoritative deliberateness, ‘will be in a month at least, once you’re more healed.’
‘Please,’ Lucy said, hearing the word this time, both its sound and the evident neediness that underpinned it. ‘Let’s do that.’
‘Righto,’ the woman said. ‘But I’ll only do it on one condition.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That you don’t crack the shits if the octopus distorts as you heal.’
‘This is just the first,’ Lucy tells Jem, who’s sagging, sagging in the shoulders, the lips and the eyes as the last of her bras scatters through the air about them in flecks of ash and wisps of black smoke. ‘We’re going to do a mural of them, once my chest is more healed. We’ll weave the scars into the design.’
‘A mural?’ Jem echoes, like he’s nothing but the hollow of a cave she’s shouted into: dead stone, capable only of reverberating empty sounds back at her. ‘Wow,’ he says again.
The twenty-seventh of February arrives in what feels like no time at all. Lucy had to take the day off work—had to organise to take a day, once a fortnight, for the duration of the six-psych-sessions plan. ‘For stuff to do with the accident,’ she told them, keeping it vague. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of seeing a psychologist, she just didn’t think everyone on the peninsula needed to know, which was how it would have turned out.
‘Why do you think you, or why do you think people in general, dress the way they dress?’ Suzette asks, once Lucy has settled into her chair.
Lucy looks down at her breezy floral shirt, her denim cutoffs, her Birkenstocks. She feels suddenly aware of her earrings and the fact that she ran a hair-straightener through her hair before she left home this morning. ‘I know, I know,’ she says. ‘We always construct our image in order to present ourselves to the world in particular and purposeful ways. But sometimes you dress yourself and you feel as though you look like you, or like the version of you you want to be on that day, and other times none of your clothes feel quite right.’
‘Just like the breasts didn’t always feel right?’ Suzette asks. ‘And how your flat chest doesn’t always feel right?’
‘Yes, but, this is different. There’s something about my chest that feels exposed. Have you ever been waxed then had a shower and noticed the way the water feels so strange on your bare skin? That’s a personal question. Sorry. But if you have, you’ll know it feels odd: familiar and yet not. It’s like a sensation you’re used to, but it’s too intense and it makes you feel—I don’t know—bare, or unprotected or something. More naked. Too naked. That’s how I felt with the breasts: too naked, like my body was hyper-visible. And now I feel too naked in a different way. It’s like I’ve been stripped, you know?’
&n
bsp; Lucy doesn’t mention the tattoo to Suzette. Nor does she mention the fact that she’s going to see Kat to talk through the entire tapestry once she’s finished up here. (Kat said she ‘couldn’t get more ink’ today, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get planning.) It makes her feel a little like she’s two-timing Suzette, but she feels it’s necessary because she suspects Suzette wouldn’t approve. She suspects that Suzette would think she’s being impulsive and reckless, which is not the impression she wants to give off in the current circumstances. Which means that Lucy also doesn’t mention that, with the tattoo, things have changed.
Kat was right. The octopus has been moving as Lucy’s scars tighten into puckered lines, which soften as they fade. Lucy’s been watching its progress these last couple of weeks, fascinated. It’s like it’s alive. But more than that, it’s like it’s experiencing her healing body with her. Living her body with her. And while it stretches its limbs with her skin, its shape hasn’t distorted. Instead, it’s moved as an octopus might and she loves it for this.
‘I can see how you’d feel like that,’ Suzette says, and it takes Lucy a moment to register how Suzette can see her feeling. Stripped. Right. Yes, despite the tattoo she still does feel stripped. How could she not, on some level?
‘Have you ever thought about temporary prostheses?’ Suzette asks. ‘For instance, knitted prostheses?’
‘What?’ Lucy laughs.
‘I’m being serious.’ Suzette smiles. ‘They’re very popular among breast cancer survivors in America.’
‘Knitted prostheses,’ Lucy mulls. ‘So, like, you stick them in your bra?’
‘That’s right. What do you think of that idea?’
‘What do I think? Well it’s … I don’t know. It’s a bit of a cop-out or something, isn’t it? Like … they’d be so pretend. There’d be something so inauthentic about them.’
‘Isn’t all image inauthentic, but sometimes we’re more aware of it than at other times? Isn’t that what you’ve been saying, in part, today?’
‘Was that what I was saying?’ Lucy asks. But why wouldn’t you throw a dog a bone if you have a secret octopus tattoo? ‘I mean, I guess I kind of was,’ she offers. ‘Like how with clothes you sometimes feel authentically you, and other times less so, even though they’re the same clothes and you’re the same person wearing them.’
‘This is interesting, what you’ve said here, Lucy. “Sometimes you feel authentically you and other times less so.” Do you think that it’s possible to be and feel authentic and inauthentic simultaneously?’
Despite her faultless demeanour, Lucy’s starting to wonder about Suzette; she seems to be a little lacking in subtlety. Yet maybe that’s a psychologist’s job—to prod you where they want you to go? ‘I dunno. I suppose so,’ she says.
‘I have a suggestion. Given the sort of hands-on person you are, it could be cathartic for you to knit your own prosthetic breasts.’
‘You want me to knit myself a pair of breasts?’ Lucy asks, raising her eyebrows.
‘Hear me out.’ Suzette smiles. ‘The process of making them could help you acknowledge and accept, in a more practical way, what you already know: that your old breasts are gone and that any replacement will be just that—a replacement. You don’t have to wear them if you don’t want to. I think what will be more important is the process of making them. But if you try wearing them every now and then, on days when everything else is too much, and if they make you feel a bit better, I want you to say to yourself: “It’s okay to take the easy option sometimes.” Give yourself permission, Lucy. You might find that they feel too inauthentic. Or you might find they feel authentic even in their inauthenticity, and, really, it just doesn’t matter. Because what I’m thinking, Lucy, is that by knitting and wearing them whenever you feel like it, you’ll be taking back some semblance of control. I want you to try to think of them as clothes, not as body parts. Do you think you can do that, Lucy?’
‘Um,’ Lucy says. ‘I actually don’t think I can. I’m not really much of a knitter, you see.’
If Suzette lacks a touch of subtlety here and there, then Kat has none at all. But then, she never pretended to. That’s her whole thing: bees and flowers and bigness, right in your face.
‘I wouldn’t slice my tits off for nothing,’ she says, ‘but if they were gone I don’t know what I’d do.’ Lucy is topless again, and Kat is tracing a cool finger along her healing scars. ‘I don’t like the idea of getting them reconstructed, but I’m a big woman, and a big woman with no boobs is a different story to a skinny bitch like you with no boobs, you know? You look good: wiry, sexy, tough. A big girl with no top half, though, I dunno. She’d be all tummy and arse and thigh.’
‘Yeah, I mean, I don’t know,’ Lucy says, shrugging awkwardly. ‘I don’t think there’s a right way. You’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do, I guess. The hardest thing for me has been figuring out what to do.’
‘Fucking A.’ Kat nods. She steps back from Lucy, inspection over.
‘So, what’s the verdict?’ Lucy asks. ‘How are we looking?’
‘Well,’ Kat says, slowly. ‘I reckon you’ll be ready to start on it properly in a month, maybe a fortnight if pressed. But today, I know I said we wouldn’t do any ink, but what would you say to colouring this bad boy in? Just for shits and giggles.’
Jem tries not to let himself get crushed by the weight of humanity when he sees the tourists queued up at the fish and chips van at the wharf. He watches them out of the corner of his eye as he unloads the abalone. Their distended tummies. Their porky fingers, dripping with grease as they prod scallop after scallop into the hole between their flabby lips.
‘Don’t think globally.’ That’s what Lucy would say to him. And he knows he’s doing it. He’s seeing these people, who just want a lunch of local seafood on this sunny autumn day; but he’s also seeing them multiply and multiply into a horde, and he’s seeing the trail of plastic bags, bones and spat-out gristle they leave in their wake.
The thing is, sometimes he just can’t help but think globally, because the world is increasingly globalised. Even the small things are, like their pavlova at Christmas, which got caught up in the changing weather.
Raspberries from America; strawberries from Queensland, Jem thinks, as he hauls the last crate of abalone over the side of the boat. His mother could have bought them, could have paid for them with money from shellfish like these, which will be flown to Sydney and, at least three-quarters of them, on to Asia. Carbon mile that.
‘The thing is,’ Jem’s dad has said on many occasions, ‘if we don’t do it, then some big corporation will, and do you think they’ll care about preserving the coastline and the fishery like we do?’
He’s right. The fishery is better off in their hands—in Jem’s hands. Today, down there, drifting among motes of filament-studded sunlight, parting swathes of curling bull-kelp with his neoprene-gloved hands, Jem had left an abalone for every one he’d taken. If it means his work takes longer than need be then who cares. Most days, Jem’s happy underwater, watching fish cruise through the murky blue and green expanses and dart and weave among the weed that swishes and waves on currents and swells. Plus, he isn’t accountable to anyone apart from his old man, who understands Jem’s approach, because it was he who taught it to Jem. If luck would have it that his family own a percentage of the quota allocated for the entire fishery, then the least they can do is make sure their percentage is devoted to sustainable fishing. If they gave up their quota, who knows whose hands it would fall into.
And, kiwi fruit aside, Jem admires his mother’s position, her strength of character in living by her convictions, her desire to look after her body and the world.
When Jem gets home, he finds Lucy standing topless in front of the mirror. She grins at him, then turns so she can view her profile and runs her hands down the plane of her stomach.
‘Do you think my flat chest will look weird if I get a bit of a paunch when I get older?’ Lucy asks. ‘F
lat chest and pot belly. It won’t be a good look, will it?’
‘Ah-h,’ Jem stammers. What the fuck’s he supposed to say to that? Will her chest look weird, with its scars and her planned octopuses, if she develops a paunch?
To his relief, she bursts out laughing. ‘You should see the look on your face!’ she says, leaving the mirror so she can wrap her arms around his neck. ‘I’m awful, aren’t I?’
He nestles his face into her hair, and sniffs her in. She still smells like Lucy. ‘You’ll be bloody gorgeous no matter what happens,’ he says.
‘Ha! Good answer.’ He can hear her smile.
He pulls back from her enough to kiss her on the forehead. ‘Now,’ he says, running his hands down her back until they come to a rest on her hips. Her woman’s hips. ‘Tell me about your day. How’d it go with the psychologist?’
‘Bit weird,’ Lucy says. ‘She wants me to knit fake boobs. But look.’ She pulls back from him so that he can see her chest again and his hands drop to his sides. ‘I got the first octopus coloured in.’
‘Oh wow,’ Jem says, cringing at the hollowness of his tone. He really needs to strike the word from his vocabulary.
The tattoo is raised and red and somehow seems to be swarming out at him. Is it just Jem, or is it angry? Raised and red and angry.
A fortnight passes. The thirteenth of March arrives. Lucy has that date written on a card stuffed somewhere in her handbag, summoning her up to Hobart.
