The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  Is it her mind, though? Or is it her body? Its physical awareness—that deeper, but then also somehow shallower, level of consciousness that hijacks the hairs on your arms, the sweat glands in your armpits and groin—that kicks into action even when your mind is elsewhere. Because her mind is elsewhere. It’s with the octopuses, who have, it seems to Lucy, been waiting millennia for this moment. Who are one step ahead of everyone. Jem’s dad, Scott, had said that it was Darwinian. That it was some ancient impulse. But perhaps it’s divining intelligence. Octopus intuition. Perhaps they can read the light cast by the stars as it trickles, winking through the water, and know that the tides will rise then rise some more—have been waiting aeons for humans to clog the atmosphere and sink the neck. Turn it back into a narrows.

  ‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ Jem murmurs into Lucy’s ear, drawing her out of her reverie. Apparently, the meeting’s over. Harry brushes against her arm as he stands. Lucy isn’t sure if it’s the contact that’s coloured him red like that or if it’s because the hall is so stuffy with recycled air. On his other side is Flo. She’s chatting to a woman Lucy recognises but doesn’t know the name of.

  ‘Yeah?’ Lucy asks.

  ‘I mean, they basically said that the tide and swell were a perfect storm, but it was nothing, and they have no plan for the future except to wait and see. It’s just like after all those fires in Victoria last summer, when the PM said that we still don’t know if it was global warming because there’s inconclusive proof or some shit, so we shouldn’t make hasty decisions about energy production, which will affect the economy. Instead, the council’ll make everyone cut the trees down on their properties to “minimise risk”, as if that’s not one of the things that’s contributing to the problem in the first place. Pack of morons, the lot of them.’

  As he’s speaking, everyone begins filing outside. The school chairs are being kicked out of their rows and the room becomes a sea of plastic debris.

  In front of her, Harry’s like a wall, blocking her view of the exit and the icy currents she knows are curling in through the open door because she can taste fresh water on the air—it had rained, earlier. It’s been a record-breaking week, apparently. And it’s already a record-breaking August, even though they’re only halfway through.

  Behind her, Jem’s still talking: ‘Or what about the bullshit in South Oz? With that storm and the massive power outage, and then they’re all like: the power outage is the fault of unreliable renewable energy. But no one mentioned that the storm was the fault of the coal industry they’re clamouring to reinstate.’

  ‘I think the Greens might have mentioned something to that effect,’ Lucy says.

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Jem sighs. ‘It doesn’t do much good, does it?’ He rests his hand on the back of her neck and, briefly, it’s seven and a half years ago and she’s exhaling sharply into the muggy summer air at his touch—at his hand wrapping around the nape of her neck for the first time, completely out of the blue. A gesture that seems to anticipate a life of intimacy, a gesture that claims. Sparks of nervousness shoot through her like adrenalin—as adrenalin? in adrenalin? on adrenalin? she’s not sure of the chemistry, the syntax—and yet there’s also something in the weight of his hand that grounds her, that settles her somehow and she thinks: I could live down here just fine. And then she thinks about how sweaty her neck is and frets that he’s finding it gross and doesn’t know how to retreat politely from the contact.

  In the school hall, she shrugs him off.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s too hot in here; I’m all sweaty.’

  And then they’re outside and it’s too cold. She snuggles into her scarf and rams her hands in her pockets.

  ‘Catch you round,’ Harry mumbles in a puff of steam and shuffles to his car before she or Jem can answer.

  ‘Cuppa soon,’ Flo calls to Lucy as she trots after him.

  In the car, Jem says to Lucy, ‘You’re very quiet. What did you think of it all?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘to be honest with you, I was thinking about those octopuses. I was thinking about how global warming could reopen their waterway.’

  ‘You and those bloody octopuses.’ He rolls his eyes in faux exasperation, like he’s trying to make it a joke between them. But he doesn’t pull it off. Not quite.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’ She sighs.

  He’s quiet for a moment, just driving. Lucy huddles towards the dash, puts her hands over the vents and tucks her feet up under the foot heater.

  ‘It’s just—you could have died, Luce,’ he says quietly. ‘Again. You could have died again. For an octopus. You were just lying there, on the side of the road. You looked broken. I was sure you were broken, and for what?’

  His words wrap around her guts like steel rope. The pain—to think of the pain and worry she put him through. She doesn’t think of it, or at least, not enough. Not as much as he deserves.

  ‘And then you don’t say anything to me,’ he continues. ‘You don’t consult me. You just get them tattooed all over your body, like this reminder that you’d choose them over me.’

  ‘That’s not what it’s about.’ Her voice sounds strangled. It’s as if her throat has solidified into a glass bottleneck, and the words hurt as they squeeze out through it.

  ‘Well, it’s how it seems.’

  ‘Jem. It’s not about you at all.’ As she says it this time, she feels a wisp of anger emerge from the guilt. Because it’s not about him. ‘It’s about me. It’s about the fact that I couldn’t keep those breasts and I hated those scars. It’s because the octopuses mean something to me: something about feminine sacrifice and endurance, about the futility of it all, about how our bodies fail or are made to fail and yet we keep trying in whatever way we can.’ She trails off, frustrated. She feels like she hasn’t properly explained it, that she can’t find the words to describe what the octopuses mean to her. It’s something in her gut, her chest, her throat. ‘They’re not about giving up, Jem.’

  ‘It’s not about me at all, hey?’ He chuckles sadly, bitterly. She gets the feeling he didn’t hear anything else she said. ‘Well maybe that’s the problem. What are we, Lucy, if this isn’t about me at all? If I don’t even cross your mind? What are we doing? Sometimes, I feel like I don’t know you anymore. And what now? You’re going to become a champion of the coal industry? Speed up global warming so your octopuses can swim free?’

  She stares at him, gobsmacked. Except not gobsmacked because it’s so like him—to lead her right to the heart of the matter with such clarity, to allow her a glimpse of insight so precise it cuts, only to turn the conversation back to environmental politics. To make it not about them, but also somehow all about them at the same time.

  And just like her, to let him.

  ‘God, Jem. What’s your problem?’ she says. ‘I was just saying how not all the changes the planet is going through will necessarily be bad for all species equally, which isn’t exactly an outrageous thing to say and doesn’t mean I’m all like: yeah, yeah, bring it on.’

  ‘Sure, some species will survive. But it won’t be natural, what thrives and what doesn’t.’

  ‘What is natural?’ She sighs.

  ‘Certainly not this.’

  She has no idea what, exactly, he means by ‘this’.

  ‘It’s not like you’re doing anything about it anyway,’ she mutters. Then wonders at herself: which it? What’s to do?

  The rain pisses down in a way that really makes Jem understand the saying, because it isn’t so much falling in droplets but in a series of steady flows, like there’s a bunch of blokes up in the clouds all having a slash together. It’s been pissing down like this for days now. It’s not like the rain would’ve necessarily contributed to the king tide last week, but it augmented all the flooding and made it feel like the place was under siege by water: longlines of it dropping from the clouds to the rising bays and swaying this way and that on the gusting wind.

  The wind has di
ed off now, but the swell’s still trundling in. Solid slabs of it are pushing in from the south in triangular peaks that hit the tessellated reef and throw out so round you could drive a truck through them. Well, maybe they’re not quite that big, but they’re pitching double overhead at least—maybe triple on the peak of the sets—and they’re spitting fucking hard in jets of spray that burst from the barrel and cut horizontal through the streams of rain.

  Jem’s paddling back out, heading for the green water between two peaks, when he sees it all happen. He sees some blow-in from Hobart or somewhere paddle into a bomb, but it feathers, then breaks a bit further out and so doesn’t barrel to begin with, it just crumbles into a big wall. The bloke takes off and drops to the bottom of the wave and does this big lazy bottom turn, sweeping around until his board is facing vertical. Jem’s always thought you know it’s bloody big when you’ve got time to surf up the face of the wave, and this bloke does, smooth as poo. But when he hits the top of the wave his movement becomes out of sync: as he kicks his back foot, pivoting the nose of his board and jamming the tail into the curling lip, he swivels his torso too late, and so rather than charging down the line, he comes unstuck. He falls what would have to be a good three to four metres from the top of the wave to the bottom. The wave, by now, is hitting the bed of rocks properly and really starting to suck water up off the reef. At first, Jem thinks it’s just a lump or furrow in the reef causing the irregular water, like a rapid, but he sees—in the brief glimpse he gets of it, just before the wave engulfs it—a dead cow, bloated and rolling. The bloke falls square on it with a whump then everything disappears in an explosion of white water.

  Jem shakes his head, thinking he must be tripping balls, and keeps paddling out.

  Then he hears the bloke bellow.

  He looks in to shore and sees one of the most fucked-up sights he’s quite possibly ever seen: the bloke has been washed into the shallows inside a cow. When he hit it, he must’ve burst its skin and been washing-machined into the shore in the cage of its bones, covered in a slough of rotting meat and gizzards, like he’s riding some kind of white-water rapid ride at a theme park, but with a horror-movie twist.

  Jem thinks about paddling in, but there’re already a half-dozen other blokes helping the guy out of the cow. They half carry him up the rocks, and up the path, and a bit later, Jem thinks he hears the wail of an ambulance siren in the air. The cow must’ve done a bit of damage then.

  He tries not to think of the last time he heard sirens here at the neck—tries not to think of Lucy at all—as he slides through churning tubes of dense, olive-coloured water and braces himself against their blowhole spray.

  It really is an all-time surf. He should be ecstatic. He should be riding an adrenalin-fuelled high. He shouldn’t be thinking about Lucy saying, ‘It’s not like you’re doing anything about it anyway.’ He shouldn’t be thinking about bodies in the water, about drowned sharks and shot seals that bob about like dead cows, bloated and rolling. He’s not doing anything, but what is there to do? What is there to do but surf, and dive ethically, and surf, and get barrelled, barrelled, barrelled?

  Of course, the neck’s notorious for sharks—those monster makos get caught by fuckwits off the coast here, and every now and then a great white is spotted—so the dead cow clears the water like nothing other than shark bait can, which is funny because really, the fleeing humans are the most dangerous creatures in the water. And it’s great, because it means Jem gets to surf in a patch by himself. He doesn’t have to talk to anyone, doesn’t have to put up with townies or weekend warriors. Just paddles, takes off, drops, tucks in, is spat out, races, hacks, slashes, flicks off, paddles, duck-dives, paddles, duck-dives, paddles, drifts, gazes out to sea.

  But soon the cold gnaws its way into the marrow of his bones and stiffens the elasticity from his muscles, so he struggles to get to his feet and quick enough gets mauled by the foaming teeth of one wave, then another. And the vibe has grown strange. He’s not quite sure when he got there, but he’s on edge. The rain is so thick he can barely see anything through it, and the surface of the water is dimpled from the droplets and shrouded by a mist of splash-back spray, and he’s trying to look in both directions at once: out to the horizon scanning for sets and in towards the shore keeping an eye out for the cow, which has disappeared and has possibly been teased back out into the surf by the rippy shore break.

  It was probably dead already then was washed and rolled by all the rain off the cliff and into the sea where it drifted until it was pushed into the northern corner of the bay by this heaving southerly swell.

  It’d be a feast for the octopuses, he thinks. He imagines them clawing their way across the isthmus to where the corpse is drifting, imagines their suckered arms, curling nuggets of salted flesh from the body, their beaks mashing the meat into a pulpy mess.

  This place is literally rotting, he thinks. The world is coming apart under the gnawing fingers of the ocean and the cloud-swollen sky.

  He’s so cold and over it all, but he doesn’t want to go in just yet. Doesn’t want to return home to the warmth of Lucy’s octopus embrace.

  But that’s not fair of him. That’s not fair at all.

  Before long, spring begins to bustle all around Lucy in a palette so much softer than the flat, low light of winter, so much softer than the brilliance of the high, unrelenting arc of summer. In Tasmania, spring is waning acacia blossom, is bush speckled with wildflowers, is insects and snakes wakening. Spring is faces upturned like flowers to the buttery sun, and unexpected and unfair sunburn—unexpected and unfair, because spring is also unyielding, ice-spun wind. Ice-spun, then ice-melt-spun and then, finally, just spun wind as the days grow longer and warmer.

  It’s late September and Lucy tries to read outside so that the sunlight can lap against her winter-white skin and perhaps stain it a touch tan, but the gusting breeze whips her pages into a flurry and is cool enough that she needs a jumper. She wanders back inside.

  Jem looks up from the computer as she walks through the door.

  ‘There’s a swell on the way,’ he tells her. ‘Zach’s coming down and he might crash for the night, too.’ Zach often crashes in their spare room rather than driving home—back up Hobart-way—after days in the water and evenings on the beers.

  Jem swivels the screen towards her so she can see the synoptic chart, see the curling low pressure system which is winding air into a dense knot of energy out in the Tasman Sea. It will drive circlets of swell out from its centre and fan them towards the coast. ‘It’ll be solid,’ he says, unchecked excitement shining in his eyes. His face is already crinkled bronze and hair already flecked gold from the time he’s spent on the water this season.

  She grins at him. His excitement is so infectious; it’s what drew her to him when they first met. The man with a crown of birds. Unhindered, free, abandoned.

  There’s something in his expression that makes her think of the first time she saw him surf. She’d headed to the beach for a post-work swim. It was a couple of days after they’d gone out in the boat, that first time, and she had an inkling that he was the surfer floating with his hunched back towards the shore, gazing out to the horizon, waiting.

  She’d dropped her towel up near the dunes, walked towards the shore and buried her feet in the soft, aerated sand of the tideline. The waves lapped against her sunken ankles, cool enough to make her not really want to get in. But the afternoon sun was hot on her bare shoulders and she knew that once she was in, her body would tremble and tingle with pleasure, and her day spent huddled in front of the computer would wash away.

  Swimming in cold water is an exercise in mindfulness, she’s always thought. As the water ruffles against you, you can’t help but become aware of your every pore, your every follicle, as your skin gasps in shock and pricks out, waving fine hairs defensively against the touch of the cold.

  It’s good, once you’re in. That’s what everyone always says in Tassie, and that was what Lucy told herself
then. She began wading out, busting through the foamy lines, until it became deep enough for her to dive under. The first wave she dove beneath was gritty and sand-churned, and she frog-kicked below its turbulence with her eyes and lips firmly closed. The shock of the cold shuddered through her body. The second wave was cleaner, having exploded right in front of her into a heavy spray of bright white and crystal-clear droplets, which caught up the sunlight and tossed it about in shimmering rainbows. She plunged beneath it and buried her fingers in the sand, anchoring herself against the churning water. She brought her feet beneath her, pushed off the sand, and burst back through the surface, gasping into the sunlight. Her skin was on fire with the cold. The third wave reared up, just beyond her, and this time, when she dove, she opened her eyes, rolled onto her back and watched the way the turbulence of the breaking wave gathered in a series of foaming balls that passed above her like fizzing, liquefied clouds.

  When she resurfaced this time, she saw that it was Jem. He was floating, with his board clamped firmly between his thighs, a few metres away. He must have heard her surface because he turned to her, surprised.

  ‘Hello.’ He laughed. ‘Where’d you come from?’

  ‘Hi,’ she said, breathy with cold. Her legs were kicking like an eggbeater, churning beneath the unbroken green expanse. She felt incredibly awkward. All of a sudden swimming out to him seemed like a bold move, by and large because it seemed like a move, that she would swim here, with him, rather than further along the otherwise deserted beach. But then, some of the first words he had said to her were: This might be a bit forward of me. A half apology, half invitation. Maybe that’s how you get things done around here.

  The shock of the cold had morphed from an outright burn to a searing tingle. Her nipples were almost unbearably hard beneath the surface. ‘Just thought I’d say g’day,’ she panted at him. ‘Won’t last long,’ she added, probably unnecessarily. This was Tasmania. No one lasted long without a wetsuit.