The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  When she got the breasts, she was so nervous about them, so he tried to make her feel good about her decision, and he tried to let her know exactly how beautiful, how sexy she was. Because when she was sick and bald she’d told him about how she no longer felt like a woman, no longer felt human.

  ‘I just feel like a … thing,’ she’d told him. ‘A whole other sexless species or something.’

  So once she was better, he tried to help her feel like a woman again, and whether she had those breasts or not wouldn’t have made a difference. But yeah, that she had them was great as far as he was concerned, he’s not going to deny that.

  But now, the octopuses. It’s infuriating, incomprehensible. She was face-down in the gravel, with a disembodied octopus arm in her fist, for fuck’s sake. He’d discarded it for her: prised it from her grasp and tossed it into the scrub. But now the octopuses have surged back with a vengeance. They swarm out at him from her chest, guarding her, walling her off. There’re new ones, added to the throng, every couple of weeks. She’s smothered in them. He can’t get past them, can’t get to her, and they make him feel … replaced, somehow. He can’t compete with them—with her. It’s like she rejected his best efforts to make her feel like a woman, and instead is deliberately trying to make herself into a thing all over again. Not a cancer-thing; a new thing.

  An octopus-clad thing.

  He doesn’t understand it; it’s like she deliberately won’t let him understand. They used to share everything, but now? Now he can’t tell what she’s thinking, what she’s feeling, and he misses her. Boobs or no boobs, he misses the person she used to be and he misses the person he was around her, he misses the people they were, back before she met the octopuses.

  He knows it’s not the octopuses’ fault, and he knows it’s not this octopus’s fault: this one, glaring at him with her slitted pupils, as she tends to her swaying lengths of eggs.

  He doesn’t really want to fight her, and of course he won’t pop her precious foetuses. He might be lurking and mouth-breathing through his hookah like a creep, but he’s not a monster. And he would never have left that lure lodged in the octopus that lived in the rockpool if it really was hooked, no matter how much Seamus tempted him.

  But the thing is, if it’s not the octopuses’ fault, then whose fault is it?

  Jem sometimes wonders if his life would be better if he never spent time at this wharf—this wharf tucked up in the crook of the southern headland of this place. This place he lives, this place he breathes, this place he knows in the air and under the water. This place he loves so much. He does love it, and yet Jem wonders, now, as he motors towards the wharf and spots the dead shark lashed to the side of the boat, if his life would be better if he never spent time here at all.

  Fuck them.

  Fuck them.

  Fuck them for catching a shark that size—which everyone knows is going to taste like shit—and not releasing it. Fuck them for playing that animal against their engine until it became so spent, it lost; it’s not a fair fight and just because they’ve forked out the cash for the equipment doesn’t mean they’re legends. Fuck them for towing the exhausted shark backwards, forcing water the wrong way down its gills, drowning it. Fuck them for tying the corpse to the side of their boat like they’re some kind of Caesar parading in some kind of triumph, showing off a spoil of war, which has bloody stumps where its dorsal fin and tail should have been, marking a trail of bloody glory all the way back to the wharf. Who cares that it’s too big for them to kill swiftly and too big for them to wrestle into the boat? Who cares that because it’s too big they had to strap it down like that and they had to forcibly drown it like that. Because they didn’t have to do it; they could have just let it go when the game was over.

  They could have let it go.

  Fuck them. Fuck them for their smug grins, for their sweaty bum cracks and their aching arms, and fuck them for the record they probably didn’t break but sacrificed this life just to double check. Fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck them.

  Fuck the flagrant pride buzzing about the man who has just approached Jem, while he’s tying his boat up at the jetty. Fuck his jowly red face, sprayed with grey stubble. Fuck his chapped lips. Fuck his beer breath.

  ‘G’day, mate. She’s a beauty, isn’t she?’ He wiggles his brows and flares his bloodshot eyes in a smile that tugs his lips off his teeth. His calloused palms scrape together as he rubs his hands. (Fuck his calloused palms.) ‘We’re going to weigh it to see if it breaks any records, then carve it up. There’ll be a fair old bit to go around. You want any, mate?’

  Oh, Jem fucking wants some.

  ‘It’s gonna taste like shit and you know it,’ he spits. ‘You’re an arsehole for keeping it.’

  ‘Easy, mate,’ the bloke says, showing Jem the full glory of his callouses as he backs away.

  ‘I’m not your mate,’ Jem calls after him.

  He wishes the bloke had arced up, right in his face, so he could have hit him. Biffed him. Given his smug jowls a good old wobble. Jem should have called him a cunt; that might have done it—gotten a rise out of him. But the world’s becoming desensitised to that word. Should have called him something else then, should have called him something. Should have just hit him anyway. Should have done something. Should have done something.

  Jem fumes and fumes as he unloads the abs and packs up the boat and witnesses the whole palaver. This is his workplace, this is his home. This is what he has to put up with while he’s going about his business. This is what unfolds:

  They put the boat on the trailer with the body still lashed to the side. They tow it up the ramp and onto the flat. Bloody water sluices from the body and gathers in murky puddles. Col Fitzgerald, an ex-commercial fisho and the president of the local recreational fishing club, is there to oversee the weighing. They must have called him from the boat. He shouts a hello-how-you-going-cobs?-ripper-day-on-the-water to Jem, but all Jem gives him back is a glare. Col says something to the blokes and they all look at him, chuckling a bit. Jem can imagine the gist of it and doesn’t give a rat’s. They unbind the body, and it lands with a thwump on the scales that they wheeled from the little clubhouse and parked next to the boat. One of them heaves the severed tail and fin from the boat, to the body, resting them on top of it so they’re weighing the full value. It’s declared a disappointment: only two hundred and ninety-nine kilos; sixteen shy of the record. Oh well, they say, and then they crack another round of beers and take it in turns posing with the corpse. They wrench the jaw open and pretend it’s biting their foot, their hand, their head. They laugh; it’s all a great joke. They’re just having a laugh, the boys are. And then they start dismembering it.

  Fuck them.

  ‘Fuck them,’ Jem fumes as he bursts in the back door. ‘Fuck. Them.’

  ‘Jem, can you not shout?’ Lucy moans, her hand gently pawing her head. ‘My skull is waging war on my brain.’

  Jem spies the empty packet of barbecue-flavoured chips. A telltale sign. ‘Are you hungover?’

  Lucy groans pathetically.

  ‘What did you and Flo do last night?’ She’d got in late, stinking like a brewery, and was still in bed when he slipped out this morning.

  ‘We were knitting, and then we did shots.’

  That stirs a laugh from him. ‘You and old Flo did shots?’

  ‘I swear I wasn’t that drunk. But brown spirits at the end of the night always kill me.’ Lucy groans again. ‘Who are you fucking?’ she asks, peering up at him blearily.

  ‘Cunts.’ Jem sighs. The fury is ebbing out of him. He doesn’t want to talk about it. ‘What were you knitting?’

  ‘Breasts.’

  Jem raises his eyebrows. ‘Breasts? Like the psychologist suggested? But you thought it was a crackpot idea.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Lucy sighs. ‘It’s just, you know. I don’t know.’ She groans again and closes her eyes. ‘My poor head. I don’t want to talk about it now. I want a bath.’

  Jem smiles. �
��I’ll run one for you.’

  Ten minutes later, he sits by the bath, stroking Lucy’s hair, and watching her octopuses—some only outlines, some fully fleshed—ripple beneath the water. Her eyes are closed. She is becoming a cadential tangle of suckered limbs, a ceaselessly curling and pulsing maze. He considers telling her about the octopus he saw today, or about the octopus he and Seamus fed with fish hearts. But he doesn’t. Why? Because he doesn’t want to encourage her fascination? Is he really that petty? No, he’s not. He just wants her to himself for the moment. The octopuses can have her later.

  ‘I’m heading west tomorrow,’ he tells her. ‘Maybe for the week.’ She doesn’t reply, but when he stops stroking her hair, she mumbles: ‘No. Don’t stop. Stay.’

  So he does, and instead of watching the octopuses through the film of bathwater he watches her eyeballs flutter against her closed lids.

  Lucy sits idly at her computer. She’s supposed to be writing a press release, but instead she’s thinking about mutton-birding with the Seabornes.

  Mutton-birding with the Seabornes. Why does it sound so romantic?

  She knows Jem would be horrified if he knew what she was plotting. That’s why she didn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell him. She won’t tell him.

  ‘You do realise they fly all the way from the Bering Sea to have their chicks here, don’t you?’ she imagines him saying—she’s even researched mutton-birds, in part because she’s curious and in part so that she can give voice to Jem when she rehearses this conversation in her head, so that she can pick the holes in what she imagines he’ll say, so that she’s armed for the fight.

  ‘They pair up for life, and they return to the same burrow, on the same little, insignificant patch of Tasmanian coast to have their chick, every year. They only have one chick per season, and if they struggle to conceive, or the chick dies, the risk of divorce between birds increases dramatically. Do you realise that’s what you’re playing with?’ her conjured Jem lectures from his lame high horse, and she seethes at the blank page. The cursor blinks back.

  How dare he? He, who has begun to avoid her, who can’t help but look pained whenever he catches a glimpse of her ever-growing tapestry of octopuses. He, whose dismay makes her feel like shit.

  ‘How’s your fella liking the tattoo?’ Kat had asked yesterday, on the twenty-seventh of March and Lucy’s fortnightly trip to Hobart, as decreed by Suzette’s little card.

  ‘Um,’ Lucy had paused.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Kat had said, knowingly. ‘It’s like that, is it?’

  ‘No, no,’ Lucy had protested. ‘It’s not “like that”. It’s just a big change for him to get used to is all.’ She was lying—not about the fact that it was a big change, about the fact that it wasn’t like that with Jem. It was like that. It was exactly like that.

  ‘It is a big change,’ Kat agreed. ‘How are you feeling about it?’

  ‘Good,’ Lucy said, too brightly.

  Kat raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I mean, I think I feel good,’ Lucy amended. ‘Sometimes it’s hard to get a grasp on things. But I don’t regret it at all and it’s beautiful—you’re doing beautiful work.’

  Kat smiled, pleased.

  Lucy didn’t tell Kat that while the tattoo did feel somehow right, it had felt more right when that first octopus was stretching and flowing with her skin, and she didn’t tell Kat about the knitted knockers. Kat kept telling her that she was a ‘fucking legend’, and Lucy didn’t want to undo that impression with her woolly appendages, which were so ridiculous. So ridiculous. What had she been thinking by even starting them, even contemplating them?

  ‘I’m not sure. I reckon they’ll feel too … unnatural,’ she’d said to Suzette, earlier that morning. She didn’t mention the fact that she’d already started them—that they were already underway. She didn’t want to see the glint of triumph in Suzette’s eyes.

  Christ. What was it about this woman that turned Lucy into such a, well, if not direct liar, then someone who’s so deliberately deceptive?

  ‘Unnatural? What is natural?’ Suzette had prompted.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Lucy said. ‘Natural and unnatural are subjective: it depends on how you rationalise them.’

  ‘Dependent on how you rationalise them,’ Suzette echoed, nodding her head in a condescending way that made Lucy feel like she was a schoolkid, getting the right answer on a test.

  What was it about Suzette? Maybe it was her manner, which had seemed so promising at first.

  ‘Yes. Very interesting,’ Suzette continued. ‘Now, have a think for a moment; and take your time with this one. How might you rationalise prosthetic breasts as “natural”?’

  ‘Uuuumm.’ Lucy paused, thinking. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, I just don’t know. Except for the idea that it’s “natural” for women to want breasts or bigger breasts or whatever. But I’ve already been down that path, and as far as I can see it’s not so much “natural” as culturally inscribed. It’s all about the objectification of women and the male gaze. Or rather, about women subjecting themselves to the male gaze, you know? Participating in their own subjugation.’

  Suzette nodded slowly. Lucy could tell that, this time, she hadn’t provided the answer Suzette was angling for. Sure enough, ‘That’s a really important point that I want us to return to in a moment,’ Suzette said. ‘But first, I want you to try again. Really think about it.’

  Lucy really thought about it. The gridlock outside revved and inched.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lucy said eventually, shrugging.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Suzette said gently. ‘But, can you try rationalising them like this: humans have been using tools for millennia to make life easier for themselves, ergo tools are natural for humans?’ ‘Are you saying breasts are tools?’

  ‘Not necessarily. But I’m asking: can you rationalise them like that?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I can,’ Lucy said, with a defeated sigh.

  ‘Good,’ Suzette said, nodding.

  Ugh. The pointlessness of it all was so infuriating. Therapy shouldn’t be a hoop-jumping exercise. The funny thing was, this was the sort of conversation she’d find engrossing in any other context. But in this room, forcibly, with this woman, and framed about her body—it was driving her up the bloody wall. And the prospect of two more visits, two more hours of being pushed and prodded into thinking in ways about her body that felt not just unnecessary to her, but banal and gratuitous, grated on Lucy enough that she said: ‘I think I’m okay.’

  ‘Oh,’ Suzette said. ‘What do you mean by that, Lucy?’

  ‘I just mean I don’t think I need this anymore,’ Lucy said. ‘You told me after the first visit that I wasn’t a suicide risk, and that the reason you wanted to keep seeing me was because you wanted to work with me on the way I think about my body, but to be honest with you, I don’t really want to talk about my body—to think about my body anymore. I mean, I do think about it, but I’d actually rather think about it less. I’d rather just be living in it, if that makes sense? Normalising it, or whatever. These sessions are hindering me being able to do that.’

  This was the truth, perhaps the truest thing she’d said to Suzette all morning. She’d spoken about it all in such detail the other night, narrating herself to Flo and Harry in a state of deep and self-indulgent catharsis, and then she’d shotted whiskey and plotted the mutton-birding escapade in the afterglow of that release. She was done talking now. She was ready for action.

  Suzette raised her eyebrows. ‘Okay, Lucy,’ she said. ‘That’s totally fair enough. I’m happy with the work you’ve been doing’—really? Lucy thought—‘and will sign off on cancelling your last two appointments. But if you ever want to pick up where we left off don’t hesitate to book back in.’

  And so that was that. Lucy skipped her way down the front steps of Suzette’s office, thinking good bloody riddance.

  But she was being harsh. Really, Suzette had helped her. Suzette had said to her of the knitted knockers,
‘It can’t hurt to give it a go.’ And it hadn’t hurt. The evening with Flo and Harry really hadn’t hurt. It had been bloody special, actually: it had done something for her. But it wasn’t the knockers that had done something for her. Telling her story—shaping her story and finishing her story, even if it wasn’t quite the full story—had done something for her. Flo had done something for her, and then Harry had done something for her. But, most of all, the idea of mutton-birding had done something for her. She’d suggested it on a drunken whim, but as soon as the idea was in the air it felt so right. It felt like what she needed to do.

  Why? she wonders, peering at the screen of her computer as if the blinking cursor might have answers. Why does mutton-birding with the Seabornes sound so romantic? And, more to the point, why does it feel permissible to kill a baby bird, but not a pregnant octopus?

  Why? she asks herself again, to cover for the fact that she has a sneaking suspicion that she knows the answer, but would rather loll about pondering the question than confront the somewhat narcissistic truth: that the octopuses, with their grossly female and alien bodies, somehow resonate with her and her sense of self in a way that the concept of a baby bird, or even a bird family unit, simply doesn’t. She’s pro-choice of course and she would always choose the life of a woman over the life of a foetus. But just because she won’t take the lives of the female octopuses again doesn’t mean the romanticism of the idea of it has faded away entirely. That night. Flo and Poppy. The shifting light. Living not just off the land but in the land. Immersion. Hands thrust into earthy burrows. Fat sizzling over fire. Mutton-birding has a longer, more entrenched human history than octopus fishing, no matter what the ancient Greeks might say. Oldest living culture is the oldest living culture after all. Those baby birds have been plucked from burrows for millennia, and what’s tradition if not that? What’s it to be human, in this place, if not that?

  What is it to be human in this place?