The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

If I didn’t go, she wonders, would Suzette hunt me down? Just how much can they force someone to attend therapy? And who are they, anyway?

  She’s bustling about the bedroom in her undies, pulling clothes out of the closest and discarding them on the bed, trying to figure out what to wear. It’s cool outside, the sky a pale blue: one of the first true days of autumn, a day that smells like fresh water and wood smoke. Normally she’d be excited about the chance to dress up in a more wintery outfit, not because she loves winter fashion, but because those first days of the new season mark a change and a chance to wear something new—or more, revisit something old—rather than put on one of the same outfits she’s been wearing for the past months. But nothing feels right: not the stylishly over-sized, pale blue cashmere jumper; not the flowy, high-waisted, floral skirt that flutters against her calves as she walks, which she’d imagined pairing with the cropped, burnt orange, lightweight merino that picks up the colour of the flower’s stamens perfectly.

  It’s Suzette’s fault, she thinks, bitterly. After their conversation last time, how is she meant to not feel self-conscious dressing for her appointments?

  If Jem were here he’d laugh at her—laugh with her about it. But he’s not here. He’s on the west coast diving, making the most of the cool, calm weather to nestle up into normally hard-to-reach abalone-rich clefts. He’ll come back full of highs and lows, full of stories about the surfs he grabbed in secret spots, and about the plastic, which storms on the back of the roaring forties and smothers the shore of the south-west in man-made colours, which are incongruous even against the bright orange lichen that fuzzes the rocks, and certainly against the backdrop of the scrubby brown–green bushlands, which roll up into mountains of white quartzite and gunmetal dolerite streaked with deep, emerald furrows of ancient rainforest.

  ‘It’s such a remote shoreline, and it’s being strangled by plastic tossed over the sides of ships on the other side of the world,’ Jem told her once, shaking his head in genuine grief for the innocent coast marred. ‘It’s like it’s a tip for the ocean.’ He was quiet for a moment, then murmured: ‘What seal guts must look like.’

  Seal guts, dolphin guts, bird necks. There’s too much in this world to fret about: what to wear, environmental degradation, the warming planet, not to mention her octopus. As she bustles, she catches its eye in the mirror. She stops, turns, and approaches it, so that she can gaze at it front-on.

  She knows she’s been spending a lot of time in front of the mirror staring like this. But she doesn’t think she’s being narcissistic, because there’re two of them, morphing together as her skin heals.

  Me and the octopus, she thinks, gazing at its reflection. The octopus and I. Me and the octopus. The octopus and I.

  She loves it. But she’s been noticing, this last week or so, how its arms are becoming more and more rigid in their movements. They don’t flow like they once did, and the thought makes her feel strangely nostalgic.

  She’s late. Nearly terribly so. She tears herself away from the octopus’s gaze, shimmies into the merino and skirt after all, tugs on her boots and dashes out to the car.

  ‘We’re on,’ Kat declares, prodding Lucy’s skin and Lucy’s heart sinks a little.

  ‘You’re sure?’ she asks. ‘I’m not still moving?’

  ‘Well, a little I s’pose,’ Kat says, still fingering Lucy’s chest. ‘I mean we’re all moving as we age, aren’t we? But I reckon this is healed enough to get started.’ She looks into Lucy’s face and seems to notice something there.

  What’s there? Lucy wonders. She wouldn’t have a clue how she feels. Does Kat know?

  ‘Assuming you still want to,’ Kat offers. ‘There’s no judgement from me if you don’t.’

  Lucy opens her face into a bright smile. ‘Of course I want to,’ she says. ‘This is fantastic news.’

  ‘Righto,’ Kat says. She rummages through a pile of papers and pulls out the design. There will be so many octopuses to writhe motionlessly alongside that first one, which Lucy knows will always be her favourite. There will be whole bodies here, the curl of a limb there, and eyes—hooded eyes, everywhere.

  ‘Let’s start with the outlines,’ Kat says. ‘If you don’t need to rush home, we can get a fair chunk of them done today, except in this patch.’ Kat strokes a finger across a particularly scarred section of skin. ‘We might have to wait a while yet for this bit to be ready enough. But that’s all good—we can keep an eye on it as we go.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Lucy says, faux chipper. What’s wrong with her? If it had been a different time in her life she would have thought she was pre-menstrual.

  Kat raises her eyebrows. ‘You sure?’ she asks again.

  ‘Yes,’ Lucy says, calmly. This time her voice is plausibly earnest. She lies herself on the table. ‘Do your worst.’

  ‘I’ll bloody do my best, like I always do.’

  We’re finally starting properly, Lucy thinks. We’re finally starting properly. She should be over the moon, or so she tells herself as she winces at the pricking and scratching of the needle as Kat gets to work. But all she can think is that this readiness is coming at a cost. The cost is that her skin has healed—or healed enough—which means it’s stopped moving. Which means her first octopus has also stopped moving. She knew it was coming, of course. But it’s one thing to know it’s coming and another to be told that this is how it is now. And so now she knows the truth. She knows it’s over. Her octopus has stilled and become an image, and with every representation Kat adds to her chest, Lucy becomes alone.

  ‘Mourning is a normal process, in these sorts of circumstances,’ Suzette had said, earlier.

  Of course, Lucy hadn’t quite revealed the full extent of the circumstances—she didn’t even know the full extent of the circumstances when she sat in Suzette’s office. All she had was a sneaking suspicion that her octopus was growing still. But she didn’t say any of what she was feeling to Suzette; she didn’t want Suzette to think she was crazy or anything. Who’d have thought she could be so deceptive?

  ‘Have you given the knitting any more thought?’ Suzette asked.

  ‘Maybe a little,’ Lucy admitted. It was a half-truth. Another thrown bone.

  But as Kat stitches the outline of the tattoo onto her body, and it doesn’t feel as right as she had hoped, Lucy gives the knitted knockers serious thought. It’s not that she thinks wearing them will do anything—they’re the daggiest idea in the world. It’s that she suspects maybe Suzette is right, maybe Lucy needs a project. Maybe Lucy needs company. Maybe she’s lonely now that her octopus has frozen. Maybe that’s what she’s feeling right now. And maybe that runs to the heart of the problem.

  Flo stands in the middle of the empty room. Impatience buzzes through her veins and fizzes in her toes. She wiggles them against the sheepskin of her ugg boots and places her hand on the head of the armchair and rubs at it, round and round. It’s like she’s ruffling the chair’s hair, giving it a bird’s nest. The upholstery is so worn it feels silky and quite lovely to touch. It’s Gray’s chair. Was. Is. Because that’s how she still thinks of it: Gray’s chair. Gray’s grey chair.

  A HiLux drifts down the highwayed hill, over on the other side of the neck. It’s a dual-cab, though, and too new to be her Harry.

  It’s the arvo of the fifteenth of March, which is why Flo is waiting, hand-worrying Gray’s old chair, peering out the window like Neighbourhood Watch. She wishes she’d asked him what colour the HiLux is and precisely what time in the arvo he’s intending. She’s been lurking in front of the window for five minutes and has already spotted two plausible utes on the highway—one white, the other red—not knowing if they’re him. Neither were him. Who’d have thought there were so many HiLuxes out there?

  Why does she feel so nervous?

  Jesus, woman, bugger off! You’re giving me the willies, fidgeting like that, Gray says—would’ve said—peering up at her from his chair. One of the smokes that will eventually kill him hangs off his l
ower lip. He swats at her with his newspaper like she’s a fly. A cuppa tea’s what you need, he continues. He doesn’t make it for her because, obviously, that’s impossible. But he would’ve. If she’d let him, that is.

  She turns, wanders through to the kitchen, lights the gas-top beneath the kettle and begins rummaging in the fridge, nudging the eggs and butter out of the way so that she can retrieve the tray of lamingtons she made last night. She doesn’t hear the footsteps on the porch—the hum of the kettle is too loud—so she starts like a cat when the front door opens and she knocks a lamington to the floor, sending a snowstorm of desiccated coconut swirling in its wake. But it isn’t Harry who helloes her name. It’s Lucy.

  ‘Flo-o?’ she calls.

  ‘In the kitchen,’ Flo calls back, frowning. Lucy knows Harry’s coming today. Flo had told her. Hadn’t she?

  ‘G’day, Flo,’ Lucy says, as she skips into the room. Despite her irritation, Flo can’t help but smile at the way Lucy moves. She skims across the ground like a stone across water. Since the accident, Lucy seems younger and happier; she’s pixie-like without those breasts: her limbs more slender, her movement more agile, her face more angular, her skin clearer, her eyes sharper. Is it possible that her teeth look whiter? Doesn’t make much sense but there you go.

  The smile Lucy gives Flo is a little slow and not quite full.

  ‘You right?’ Flo asks. She turns the gas off just as the kettle begins to whistle and pours the hot water into the teapot.

  Lucy slides into a chair, rests an elbow on the table and props her chin in the V-shape of her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Ye-es,’ she all but sighs. ‘But I have a favour to ask you, and I feel a bit awkward about it.’

  ‘Well I can’t help you if I don’t know what it is,’ Flo says a little waspishly, hoping to hurry Lucy to the point so she’ll leave. She places three cups on the table, along with the plate of lamingtons.

  As she’d hoped, Lucy notices, and asks: ‘Who’s the third cup for?’

  ‘Harry. I told you he was coming today, remember?’

  Lucy’s face drops in a way that confirms that Flo had told her, and she jumps to her feet. ‘Oh shit, I clean forgot it was today! And he’s about to arrive? I’m so sorry, Flo, I’ll bugger off right away.’

  Despite the fact that Lucy’s reaction is precisely what Flo desired, she waves her aside. There’s something in her that already feels more settled, grounded by the domestic rhythm of tea making, by the presence of Lucy. Perhaps Gray’s right: distraction’s all she needed.

  ‘Don’t be silly. He’s not here yet. Might still be hours away. Have a quick cuppa and tell me what’s on your mind.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Course I am. Now, what’s this favour?’

  Lucy looks at her hands, then out the window, then at Flo. ‘You any good at knitting?’

  ‘Knitting, ay?’ Flo’s surprised. ‘Did a fair whack when the boys were babies. Bits and pieces now and then. I did this cardi.’ She stands up and holds her arms out so that Lucy can admire her handiwork and basks a touch in Lucy’s nod of admiration.

  ‘All I can do is knit and purl,’ Lucy says. ‘I’ve only ever done scarves. But I’m wanting to do something a bit more intricate. Any chance you could lend me a hand?’

  ‘Reckon I could. Depends on how intricate, though.’

  ‘I’ve got a pattern here.’ Lucy fumbles in her handbag. She pulls out a piece of paper that has been folded into four. Its seams are worn and the corners dog-eared, as though she’s been unfolding it and re-folding it and passing it in and out of her handbag again and again. She hands it to Flo.

  Flo scans the pattern, and raises her eyebrows at Lucy. ‘Knitted knockers?’ she asks, a smirk twitching her upper lip.

  ‘Oh I know!’ Lucy groans. She covers her face with her hands, slides her fingers apart so she can catch Flo’s eye, and begins to speak in a wailing rush. It’s like she’s trying to mask the awkward intimacy of her words by jostling them from her mouth, making it hard to keep up with everything she’s saying, but Flo catches the gist of it: they’re making Lucy see a psychologist because she nearly killed herself trying to save an octopus and now her psychologist reckons she should knit herself a pair of knockers as a way of coming to terms with everything. ‘The thing is, the pattern’s a bit complex so I need to learn to knit properly …’ Lucy finishes, and Flo can hear the ellipsis hang in the air like a question mark.

  Flo’s quiet for a moment. She doesn’t quite know how to deal with this barrage of information. This type of conversation is new territory for them: up until this point, Lucy hasn’t really spoken to Flo about her body, about her breasts or lack thereof, except in passing. Until now, their friendship has been confined to more practical things: those octopuses, and they also did a batch of apricot jam together, not long after Lucy was discharged and just after Poppy had left, and also some tomato chutney a few weeks back. Lucy is blushing furiously, and Flo realises that she’s blushing too. It’s as though she feels Lucy’s shame as if it were her own. This shared blush makes Flo realise how similar they are.

  Took your time realising, you dingbat, she imagines Gray scoffing from the living room. Would’ve thought you’d have noticed it when she showed up that night and asked to help with the octopuses. Didn’t you realise that she did it in exactly the same way you did, years earlier?

  Exactly the way Flo had done, years earlier, just after Gray had died, leaving her to drift about the isthmus untethered. Whatcha doing? Catching octopuses to pickle? Can I give you a hand? And just like that she and Poppy had become friends.

  ‘Of course I can help you,’ Flo says, eyeing the pattern. ‘These look pretty straightforward, really.’ And then she snorts. It’s an ugly, choked snort; but so obviously a snort of laughter. She doesn’t mean to, and she feels terrible for laughing at Lucy, who’s just bared herself to Flo, and is sitting there, so vulnerable. But, it’s just, Flo can’t get past the fact she’s staring at a diagram of breasts. A pattern, yes, but a diagram of breasts, with nipples and everything. It’s just, well, a bit funny, and—god, she’s being so immature.

  ‘Sorry, Lucy, I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just—’

  ‘I know,’ Lucy interrupts. An embarrassed smile crumples her face. ‘It’s so bloody odd, isn’t it? I couldn’t believe it when the psychologist suggested it. Apparently, they’re massive in the U.S.’

  ‘Massive in the U.S., hey?’ Flo chuckles.

  Lucy laughs too. ‘Yeah, well, you know what those flashy American women are like.’

  And now they’re both laughing; blushing still, but laughing, and not at Lucy and what she’s been through and what she’s still so evidently going through, but at those American floozies with their knitted bazookas.

  ‘So what?’ Flo asks, peering at the pattern again. ‘You put them in your bra?’

  ‘Yep,’ Lucy says. ‘So you, like, pick a pattern to match a cup size, and then … yeah, wear them in your bra whenever you feel like it. It’s better than stuffing your bra with socks, I guess.’ Lucy lets out another pained laugh. ‘Oh my god, Flo, it’s just so weird, isn’t it? I don’t know if I’ll ever wear them and Jem and I burnt all my bras a few weeks back, so I’ll have to buy a new one if I even want to.’ She huffs an exasperated little sigh out of one side of her mouth. ‘But at least it’s not like they’re kinky.’ She laughs again. ‘And now that I say that, I don’t know if it makes them less weird or not, but there you are.’

  ‘There you are indeed,’ Flo agrees. ‘Do you have any wool yet?’

  ‘I don’t have anything. I thought if you could help me, I’d go up to Hobart this weekend and get some wool and needles and stuff.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry about the needles—I’ve got plenty. And if you don’t mind them looking a bit ramshackle, I’ve got a few scraps of wool about the place we could use. Just leftovers, you know.’

  ‘That’d be amazing!’ Lucy says.

  ‘Oh well, it’s not
like I’m using it for anything.’ Flo shrugs, and then, realising what Lucy just told her, asks: ‘Did you just say that you and Jem burnt your bras?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’ Lucy shakes her head again, as if exasperated by herself. ‘Is that a car?’

  Flo had heard it too: the burr of a diesel engine, the crunch of tyres on gravel. ‘Well that was good timing, ay?’ She gets to her feet. To her surprise, she feels calm and collected; all her earlier jitteriness has melted away.

  ‘I reckon,’ Lucy agrees. She’s still blushing, but the tension is gone from her face. ‘I really can’t thank you enough,’ she says as they walk through the archway and into the living room, which leads to the front door.

  ‘Don’t thank me for anything I haven’t done yet,’ Flo says. Gruff much? she imagines Gray scoffing from his chair, so she reaches out, clasps Lucy’s hand in hers and gives it a squeeze. ‘But it’ll be my pleasure to help. I’ll call you later to sort out a time.’

  Before Lucy can reply, the door swings open and there’s Harry.

  Harry’s slightly confused to find his mother and another woman standing just inside the house. They’re right in the doorway, which makes him wonder if they’ve been waiting for him, but at the same time, he can’t help but feel he’s intruded on something private. It isn’t just the way his mother seems to be clutching the other woman’s hand, it’s the way they’ve angled their bodies towards one another with such familiarity, the way they’re both a little flushed. Bizarrely, he finds himself wondering if they’re lovers.

  The woman looks at him. She’s slight, plainly dressed, with dark blonde hair bundled up on her head, and as she takes him in she grins widely, showing him both rows of her neat, white teeth. They’re real little pearls. She must have had braces when she was younger—that, or she got bloody lucky with the tooth fairy. She looks from him to his mother and then back to him, both sizing him up and waiting for an introduction. There’s something about her that’s familiar.