The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  ‘To fuck with red tape,’ he toasts.

  ‘To fuck with red tape,’ Lucy and Flo chime, and all three of them drink.

  ‘To fuck with the Greens,’ Flo toasts.

  ‘Oh I don’t know about that.’ Lucy laughs. ‘I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Greens who brought in those regulations. How about: to fuck with The Man?’

  In what seems like no time at all, Lucy announces that she’s heading home.

  ‘Walk ’er ’ome, ’arry!’ his mother slurs.

  ‘It’s fine, Flo,’ Lucy insists.

  ‘It’s not fine. Walk ’er ’ome, ’arry!’

  He and Lucy exchange a glance.

  ‘I could use the fresh air anyway,’ he mumbles.

  ‘Only if you’re sure.’ She shrugs.

  So they leave his mother, gurgling away on the couch in front of the telly, with a cup of tea on the coffee table in front of her, and step out of the door into the autumn night.

  Lucy half trips at the bottom of the porch steps. Her arms flail out, and one slips around his waist. He’s so startled by the sudden intimacy that he doesn’t move, doesn’t put a steadying hand to her back, doesn’t do anything but hold his breath and blush into the darkness.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Lucy says, letting go of him. ‘Seems I’m nearly as lightweight as your mum!’

  He laughs, but it sounds awkward and strained. So he says, ‘Nah, you’re right.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ Lucy says. ‘I’m with your mum. Can’t remember the last time I did shots like that. You’re a bad influence, Harry.’ She grins up at him. ‘Reckon I’ll be feeling it in the morning.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ he murmurs, smiling back. His cheeks are sore; he feels like he hasn’t smiled this much in years.

  At the bottom of the driveway, just as they step out of the light cast by the house and into the darkness, she says, ‘Do you want to go via the beach? I wouldn’t mind walking this off a bit.’

  Harry mumbles his assent. He’s surprised at how pleased he is by this suggestion; it seems he’s not ready to end the night just yet either, not ready to stop smiling.

  ‘What do you do down here?’ he asks as his eyes adjust. In front of them lies the inky calm of the bay and to their right, the listing and tilting black of the Tasman Sea. There’s a glowing smudge on the eastern horizon. The moon must be about to rise. They head towards it.

  ‘What, for work?’ Lucy asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Comms and marketing. At the devil park.’

  ‘How’d you get into that?’

  ‘Well, I did an Arts degree—’

  ‘Like, painting and stuff?’ he interrupts.

  ‘Nah, like Cultural Studies and stuff. Like, English and History and Political Science and Gender Studies and things like that.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And then, I did honours in Cultural Studies and a Masters in Marketing and Environmental Management because, I don’t know, I was interested in green politics and wanted to do something a bit vocational. Then I saw the job advertised and I’d never even been to Tassie, but I thought: What the hell? It seemed like it’d be an adventure, you know? And I applied and got it and here I am.’

  ‘You’d never been to Tassie?’ he asks. ‘Where’d you grow up?’

  ‘Melbourne.’

  Harry nods. ‘Melbourne,’ he says, ‘then here.’

  ‘Yup,’ Lucy nods. ‘That’s basically me.’

  They turn into the car park and follow the sandy track that leads to the beach, threading between banksias, blackberries and marram grass. The wind gusting off the water is cold and damp on Harry’s face, but not icy with winter yet.

  ‘Do you get much of a chance to see your friends from Melbourne, living down here?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh, not really. They came down for the Falls Festival my first summer here and I’ve been back for weddings and stuff, but I’m a pretty slack friend. If people aren’t directly in my life they kind of fall off the radar, you know? I should make more of an effort, really. Hey, let’s sit for a bit,’ she adds abruptly.

  Harry isn’t paying attention to what he’s doing and he sits on a clump of damp seaweed, which he promptly pulls from under himself and throws away, hoping she didn’t notice. He’s distracted by her mention of Falls.

  Does she remember me? he wonders anxiously. Was that her way of telling me? Is she just being polite by not bringing it up explicitly? Should I bring it up? Rip the band-aid off, get it out there? Is she waiting for me to do that now?

  But it seems Lucy’s thoughts are elsewhere. She fidgets and says: ‘God, I feel like I’ve done nothing but talk about myself since you showed up this evening. You’re a good listener, you know? But you don’t say much.’

  Is she accusing him?

  ‘I guess I’ve never been much of a talker,’ he says apologetically. ‘I guess I’m a bit shy.’ He feels embarrassed all over again, but something in the evening has made him want to try, made him want to impress her a little, if he can. He searches around for something to say, something that he can tell her that will match the sorts of things she’s been telling him. He surprises himself when the words tumble out—when he asks what he knows will be a leading question: ‘How’s May going?’

  ‘You know May?’

  ‘Course,’ Harry says. ‘The peninsula.’ He pauses. ‘But I mean, not really. We were in the same year at primary school.’ They’d both attended the school down at Nubeena, the township on the west coast of the peninsula. ‘I put glue in her hair, so she punched me—like, properly walloped me—and I cried.’ He pauses a moment, then plunges on. ‘I don’t reckon it was because it hurt—I had three older brothers and was used to it, you know? I reckon it was the shock—that a girl would do that. I didn’t really know many girls ’cos we were all boys in my family, but I knew they weren’t supposed to punch or fart.’ He flashes her an awkward little grin which she can only half-see in the starlight. ‘Everyone teased me about it, so I hated her all through primary school. Then, when they were shipped off to Hobart for high school, I thought she was a snob.’

  Tasman District School is a kinder to year ten school. Everyone who grows up on the peninsula goes to the primary school; they’re all in it together. But when it gets to high school the wheat is sorted from the chaff; the rich kids make the trek up to Hobart while the rest run feral in the holding pen that pretends to be an education facility, but really is nothing more than a place to be endured, then spat out of. Or that was how Harry felt about it when he was there. But that could be more to do with him as a student than the school itself.

  ‘I saw May once when I was up in town,’ he continues. ‘In the mall, right near Subway. She was in her blazer and boater and she grinned at me like she knew me and wanted to chat but I ignored her because I didn’t know what to say, and I’ve felt a bit bad about it ever since.’

  The crash and rumble of swell fills the silence.

  God, he thinks. I’m so lame.

  ‘So you’ve never had much to do with that family?’ Lucy finally asks.

  ‘Not heaps. I mean, we all know each other, and we were all at primary school and stuff but they were always different from us. We used to play British Bulldogs at lunchtime. It was always the pubs versus the hippies—so like, if your parents hung out at the pub you were on one team, and if your parents were some kind of hippy you were on the other. Even though my parents weren’t massively into the pub, that was the team I was on because they definitely weren’t hippies, and Jem was always on the hippy team because even though his dad was an ab diver, everyone knew his parents were card-carrying members of the Greens. Then he and May went to that private school, and Jem surfed and I played footy,’ he finishes, as if that would explain the differences. As if that would explain the fact that Jem’s dad had an ab licence and so he and May suckled the silver spoon. As if that would explain how Jem had found a girl like Lucy while he had pissed his life away.

  ‘Pubs and hippies, hey?’
Lucy said. ‘You know, I’ve always thought that it’s a weirdly fine line between hippies and …’ She pauses, furrowing her brow, obviously trying to find the right word.

  ‘Rednecks?’ Harry supplies.

  She grins at him, and something in his groin flutters. ‘Yeah, rednecks, I guess,’ she says. ‘I’ve always thought that in Tassie they’re two sides of the same coin. Both of them have this ferocious, almost primal, love of Tassie’s bush. They just come at it in different ways.’ She laughs self-consciously. ‘Listen to me—you must think I’m a right mainlander, spouting off commentary on Tassie’s social dynamic to you like this. I’m like a mainlander version of a mansplainer. A mainlandersplainer or something. A mainsplainer.’

  ‘Nah, you’re all right,’ Harry says, smiling. ‘And I get what you mean. It’s like the difference between bushwalking and dirt-biking, or tree-hugging and wood-hooking. Except the greenies love wood-hooking anyway, so it’s even blurrier than that.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Lucy says, clapping her hands together, eyes sparkling against the navy of the night, and Harry’s a man on top of the world. North Pole can eat shit. It’s Woop Woop. Here’s the true top of things: here, this patch of beach beneath his bum. He can feel the magnetic field thrumming at his sphincter.

  ‘A mainlander, hey,’ he murmurs. ‘How long’ve you been here?’

  ‘Seven years or thereabouts,’ she says. He can just make out her grin in the dark. ‘So how long have I got, d’you reckon? How long ’til I’m proper Tassie?’

  ‘It’s not so much about time, it’s more about attitude.’ Harry smiles shyly. ‘You’re all right, I reckon,’ he tells her.

  She grins again, and the starlight shows him her pearls.

  ‘Seven years, hey,’ he says. ‘About as long as I was gone.’

  After a pause, Lucy asks, ‘Why won’t you tell your mum why you came home?’

  The thrum beneath him fades into something awkward. ‘There’s some stuff you just don’t want to tell your mum.’ His words come out all prim. Why can’t he get his tone right with her?

  ‘So it was a girl then,’ she muses.

  He laughs. ‘God, you sound just like her! Nah, it wasn’t, I mean, there were a few, don’t get me wrong. But it was more the rhythm of my life. You fly in, you work flat-chat for a fortnight and you’re living in this compound-type thing. To begin with it’s great, all these blokes around you, all amped ’cause we felt like the world was ours for the taking. We were earning a shit-tonne of cash and there was this real camaraderie, this optimism, you know? But it was ugly. No one loved what they were doing, they were all just in it for the money. It’s a wasteland out there. And then you fly back out and you’re in Perth and you feel loaded with cash so you go clubbing and do line after line of coke, which is great to begin with, but then every morning you wake up feeling like a shell. And I hated it. And I just wanted to go fishing or set the pots. Breathe Tassie air.’

  ‘Huh,’ Lucy says.

  The sound of the swell fills the silence; the regular rhythm of the breaking waves seems to mimic his heartbeat, which feels like it’s crashing against the back of his throat.

  ‘I really should be getting home,’ she announces.

  Harry’s glad it’s dark so she can’t see how he’s blushing. He feels like he’s said too much, like he’s revealed himself to be the dropkick he is. He gets to his feet but is too afraid to offer her a hand up, in part because he’s nervous to touch her, in part because he’s self-conscious of his sweaty palms. But then, maybe they’re two parts of the same whole.

  ‘Don’t worry about walking me,’ she tells him. ‘Jem’ll probably still be up and it might be weird.’

  As she walks away, Harry finds he doesn’t know what to make of anything.

  Jem parts the swirling, deep khaki curtain of weed, hoping to find a rockface crusted with abalone. Instead, he discovers an overhang, and deep beneath it, nestled up in a cave, an octopus. She is a cadential tangle of suckered limbs, a ceaselessly curling and pulsing maze, and all around her, ribbons of white eggs sway. They look like ropes of pearly beads, which have been strung up like decorations about the cave, and there are thousands of them, swishing and swooshing on currents as she fans them. He can feel the water churning and remembers what Lucy had said: the octopus will fan clean water at her eggs like this until they hatch and she dies, spent, like Charlotte.

  Jem imagines reaching out and bursting the eggs one after another between his thumb and forefinger; he imagines them popping like bubble wrap.

  She’s eyeing him like she knows what he’s thinking. She shifts, tightening herself into a knot. He’s not sure if she’s retreating from his lurking presence, or if she’s preparing to attack.

  Who would win? he wonders. Surely him. He’s bigger. But then, he’s in her habitat; she’d definitely be more nimble than him in the water. And you should never underestimate the power of maternal ferocity—all those mothers, lifting cars off their babies. Plus, octopuses have so many arms to keep tabs on, and Jem knows that they are ridiculously strong.

  When he was a kid on holidays on the west coast of Tassie, he and another boy, Seamus, whose family was renting a shack in the same little town as Jem’s, went fishing every day. They’d discovered a flat rock, which was stubbled with barnacles, and had a sheer face, and depending on the tide, it sat a metre or two above the surface of the water. The headland jutted right out into the ocean, which meant that it fingered the shifting currents and tides, so when they were fishing, the water they were casting into churned with energy and life. Even better, behind where they were fishing was a large, clear rockpool, which, they discovered, housed a small octopus. It was about the size of a nectarine when they first saw it.

  The first evening they put their recently killed catch of cocky salmon in the pool to keep them cool while they continued to fish; this was how they discovered that the pool was occupied. The octopus reached one spindly, tentative arm out from under a little ledge, curled it around the tail of one of their fish, and drew the body up into its lair. The fish didn’t quite fit, but Jem and Seamus’s fingers couldn’t get enough purchase on its slick body to tug it back out, so they left it to the thief. The following day, the fish was gone.

  Over the space of the next week, the boys continued to fish from that headland as the salmon continued to run. They didn’t make the mistake of putting whole fish in the rockpool again, but they did take to feeding the little octopus the salmon organs they’d otherwise throw to the birds, luring it out into the middle of the pool with offaly treats. It was particularly keen on the deep red hearts. With such an iron-rich diet, the octopus grew, doubling its size in the space of a week, while the boys watched on, congratulating each other proudly.

  On their last day, they had no luck on the fishing front, but wanted to farewell their octopus friend. So, Seamus dangled his fishing lure into the rockpool, trying to entice the octopus to play with them. The octopus rushed out from where it was huddle in its lair and gathered the lure up in its arms, then sat staunchly in the middle of the pool, holding the silver slice beneath its mantle.

  At first, Seamus tried to ease the lure from the octopus’s grasp, however, it appeared to be lodged in the octopus’s flesh. So, Seamus began to jerk and tug on his fishing rod, trying to pull the octopus from the rockpool so that they could unfurl it and disentangle the hooks. But to their surprise, he couldn’t lever the octopus—who, while bigger than it was last week, was still only the size of a grapefruit—from the pool.

  Jem had a go. Then, they tried together. But the octopus wouldn’t budge.

  ‘It’s heavy as lead,’ Jem said, parroting a favourite saying of his father’s, perplexed. He jerked the rod again, but nothing.

  ‘Perhaps we should cut the line and call it a day,’ Seamus ventured.

  Jem looked at the other boy aghast. ‘We can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’ Seamus shrugged. ‘We tried.’

  Jem couldn’t believe Seamus’s fl
agrant casualness, couldn’t believe that this other boy, who he had been playing with all week, and who had shown none of the signs, had that thing inside him; that thing that would let him walk away. But it wasn’t a thing, it was a lack of a thing: a lack of the rules.

  ‘What’s your problem, Jem?’ Seamus asked. ‘Come on.’

  Jem knew what Seamus was doing; he was inviting Jem to break the rules with him. And there was a tiny, tiny part of Jem that almost wanted to, just to see how it felt. But then, at that thought, irrepressible panic surged through him as he imagined what his father would have to say about this. ‘But what if we get caught?’ he stammered.

  ‘Caught?’ Seamus looked at Jem like he was whacked in the head. ‘What do you mean, caught?’

  ‘My dad,’ Jem said. ‘He won’t like this. He won’t like this one bit.’

  Seamus shrugged. ‘Then don’t tell him.’

  Jem frowned at the prospect of the deceit. This was, perhaps, the first time Jem properly comprehended the fact that there were no consequences for people who broke the rules, that it was something you could really, truly get away with. Because Seamus was right: they were leaving tomorrow, and his father would never find out what they’d done if Jem didn’t tell him. This realisation thrilled Jem, but it did nothing to comfort him. After all, he would know what they had done and that knowledge would always be there, inside him, nestled alongside the space where the rules used to live. Jem didn’t know if he could carry the potential for such parental disappointment, even if it remained latent forever.

  ‘Oh, never mind.’ Seamus pointed to the rockpool.

  While they’d been talking, the octopus had decided to let go of the lure and had mooched back into its den. It seemed the hooks weren’t stuck at all; the octopus had simply been testing the boys, playing tug-of-war with them. Evidently, it had won and become bored.

  The octopus had won that bout, and it seemed the octopuses were winning this one, too—this bizarre, impossibly fraught bout, which was being played out on Lucy’s chest, over … what?