The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  ‘I’m about to head in, too,’ Jem said. ‘I’ve got a few beers in the fridge at home. Feel like dropping by for a frothy? They always taste better on salty lips, I reckon.’

  And she had thought her move was bold.

  A wave drifted towards them and Jem began to paddle for it.

  ‘Drink?’ he said again, as he paddled past her.

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  As he stroked firmly and evenly towards the shore, he looked over his shoulder, checking to make sure his tempo was right and that he was manoeuvring himself onto the peak, and briefly, he caught her eye. He might have given her a wink; she wasn’t sure. As the wave jacked up, he slipped down in front of it, etching a furrow of wake in the blue fold of its back. As the peak tapered off, the nose of his board appeared once, twice, three times, tipping above the wall of the wave and then disappearing; in its place, the fins of his board rose and slashed, cutting gouge marks in the back of the wave and shooting rooster tails of spray up into the air.

  The next wave loomed, and Lucy swam for it. It sucked up, drawing water off the sandbar. She hovered for a moment on its precipice, then launched over the edge, taking the drop with her arms outstretched. As she hit the bottom of the wave she pulled her arms in towards her body, grabbed hold of her bikini bottoms to stop them getting yanked from her hips, and dolphin-kicked, half riding and half chasing the wave that bubbled about her cheeks and tugged her breasts from her bikini top. As the wave faded about her she kept floating, prone, so that she could tuck her breasts back into her bathers and unpick her wedgie.

  Jem was standing in the shallows, watching her, grinning and dripping in the afternoon light. He was always grinning, in those early days. He’d stripped the top half of his wetsuit to reveal a mat of blond hair fuzzing his thickset surfer’s chest, and he held his board loosely beneath one arm.

  Something about it felt pre-coital when she eventually stood, perhaps because, throughout the whole interaction, she had been clothed in water. Now, as she rose and it slid from her body, it felt as though she was unveiling herself for him, even though she had made sure her breasts were concealed safely in her bikini top. Concealed but not concealed; her nipples stood painfully erect. She felt his eyes on her—his eyes, shining green against the backdrop of yellow sun and sand and white churning foam, lit up in post-surf exhilaration, or in pre- … pre-who-knewwhat, at that point.

  Her skin thrummed against the air and her heart against her rib cage, and soon, she was on the butcher’s block in his kitchen and one of her nipples was between his lips as her hands kneaded the muscles of his shoulders and back.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Jem asks, lips twitching into an intimate little smile. She can tell that the weather forecast is momentarily forgotten; the intensity glinting in his eyes is now just for her.

  ‘You’re just looking so … beautiful,’ she tells him, biting at her lip a little as she holds his gaze. ‘So Jem. My Jem.’

  And he tugs her, laughing, into his lap.

  Her shirt stays on, but that’s okay.

  To perch up on the cliff, among the she-oaks and mud, in a crook sheltered from the gusty south-westerly wind. To watch him surf the reef that juts out from the northern headland of Pirates Bay. To watch his energy meld with the energy of the ocean. To watch him stroke out in front of a rounded lump of water, to watch as that lump turns sheer when it hits the reef—turns sheer and towers the height of their house at least, its face marbled black with drawn-up ribbons of bull-kelp. To see him, all of a sudden upright, slip behind the fold of opaque green and turbulent, deafening white. To see him burst back into view in a rush of spray, to wonder that he can keep his feet in and among all that raw force. To hear him yelp—actually, involuntarily yelp—in pure, palpable joy. To watch him do it, all over again, and again, and again. Svelte in his wetsuit. Each time, ecstasy, like new.

  Lucy smiles as she watches him, a little envious and a little optimistic. Finally, again, a little optimistic. About them.

  In her mind, the crown of birds becomes a halo of droplets—briny finery, glittering in the sun. She’s almost tempted to put on her wetsuit, swim out and float in the deep so that she can see the expression on his face each time he’s spat from the teardrop barrel.

  She’s catching up on some work when Jem and Zach get home. Jem barges in the back door, sandy, dripping and grinning shamelessly. He gives her a peck on the cheek and says: ‘Barbie.’

  ‘Righto.’

  ‘We’ve got snags in the fridge, don’t we?’

  ‘Dunno, check.’

  ‘G’day, Luce,’ Zach says, following Jem in with a carton of tinnies. ‘Thirsty?’ he offers.

  ‘Give me five,’ she says. ‘I’ve just got to finish this off.’

  ‘Got snags!’ Jem announces. Then to Zach: ‘Give us the beers. I’ll stick ’em in the fridge.’

  ‘I watched you guys for a while this arvo,’ Lucy says. ‘Looked pretty amazing.’

  ‘It was perfect.’ Jem glows. ‘Perfect direction swell. Then it just died out completely.’

  ‘Fucken heavy while it lasted though, ay?’ Zach mutters. ‘Feel like someone’s taken sandpaper to the back of me throat.’

  They mooch outside with a six-pack, some newspaper and a lighter.

  Lucy follows them out, after slightly more than five. The six-pack has half disappeared so she hands out the last couple of beers, scoops up the plastic binding and ducks back inside. She fossicks in the drawer for the scissors and severs each plastic loop. She’d been traumatised as a child by the image of a dead penguin with the plastic from a six-pack of beer looped around its neck. She can’t remember if she saw the bird in real life, or if it was an image shown to her in primary school when they were doing litter education. ‘Litterbug, litterbug, shame on you,’ the teacher made them chant over and over, in a vain attempt to transform the class of nine-year-olds into a squad of vigilantes. (‘Shame on you, shame on you, you did a poo,’ some of the more immature boys in her class took to chanting, much to the ire of the teacher.)

  She watches through the kitchen window as Jem throws a log onto the fire. As it lands, embers kick up, spraying and swirling on the momentary micro-weather system the flames and tumbling wood create.

  ‘You oiled the ramp?’ Zach’s saying, as she wanders back into earshot, new six-pack in hand.

  ‘Can’t believe I haven’t told you about it before,’ Jem replies.

  ‘Did it do anything?’

  ‘I was down there at sparrows, hiding in the bushes to watch and saw a car slip out a bit but he was fine. Fucking muddies, ay?’

  ‘Should call them oilies,’ Zach quips.

  ‘Well, it was oily in the morning,’ Jem says, with a grin. He lounges back in his chair, body relaxed like pummelled meat.

  He’s so happy, she thinks. When was the last time I saw him this happy, this content? This … easy?

  It’s the post-surf Jem she knows and loves. He’s the Jem she’s used to—nothing like the stranger he was the last time he arrived home after a monster swell, all surfed-out, and declared in such a flat, toneless voice, ‘Haven’t seen it break like that in years.’

  That was the time back in winter, with the cow, when he’d come home halfway-hyperthermic and glum; it was like the cold had frozen him into a funk and she couldn’t seem to do anything to warm him up out of it. He wouldn’t even rug up and come with her for a walk, up to the northern corner of Pirates Bay, to inspect the cow’s carcass which had washed back in and been stranded by the ebbing tide. Lucy had left him sulking in the bath and gone anyway, but in retrospect she wished she hadn’t. It was one of the foulest things she’d ever seen or smelt. It was nearly as foul as the mood Jem stayed in for days.

  But this Jem is nothing like that Jem. This Jem is radiant in the fire’s dancing light, in surf-afterglow, and Lucy can’t stop beaming at him.

  But later on, after dinner, Zach pulls a little bag of white powder out from god-knows-where and it all
turns to shit.

  ‘Whaddaya reckon?’

  Jem grins. ‘Wouldn’t say no.’

  ‘Lucy?’ Zach offers.

  ‘Nah, I’m all good—probably gonna have to work tomorrow.’

  ‘Really?’ Jem asks, frowning. ‘But you worked today.’

  ‘I know.’ Lucy sighs. ‘But I spent the morning faffing around and a deadline’s a deadline. It’s all right. I’ll get time in lieu.’

  ‘We should go camping when you get the chance to take it,’ Jem says. ‘Just the two of us for a bit. In the boat maybe, if the weather’s good. We could even take the work boat and head round to Port Davey or something.’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be nice,’ Lucy says, more than a little optimistic now. About them. She marvels that this swell might have fixed them—this low pressure system, this tight-spun coil of healing air.

  It’s still now. The wind petered out with the swell. A chorus of insects whirrs above the rhythmic white noise of the dwindling swell, each bug chirruping into the star-speckled night.

  Jem and Zach both snort a line, then snort another, through a rolled up five-dollar note, which they borrow from Lucy’s wallet because neither have any cash on them.

  ‘We should do it again,’ Jem blurts out. The change in him is instant, palpable: he’s snapped taut, twanging like a banjo string. ‘Properly, this time.’

  Lucy has no idea what he’s talking about but Zach gets it straight away, as though through some kind of high-induced osmosis.

  ‘Do you have enough oil?’ he asks.

  Oh, Lucy thinks.

  ‘We could check up the pub. They used to leave their old oil out the back. Big vats of it, gritty with chip and batter crumbs. Fish food, ay? It’s not like they use it for anything.’

  ‘Biodiesel?’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  Their words are staccato, like rain on a tin roof, and they’re both jiggling their knees. Two balls of instant, reckless energy.

  ‘Yeah. Right. Let’s,’ Zach says. ‘I’m getting another beer. Anyone else want one?’

  ‘Cheers,’ Jem says.

  ‘Nah, I’m all good,’ Lucy says uneasily. She feels like she’s speaking in slow motion compared to them.

  Once Zach’s inside, she says to Jem: ‘I don’t think you should.’

  ‘What? Have another beer?’ he barks.

  ‘No, oil the boat ramp.’

  ‘Lighten up, Luce,’ he says. He grabs a log and jerks it onto the fire. Embers swirl slowly through the air like bioluminescence in a rip.

  ‘You could do proper damage,’ she says. ‘And anyway—you use the boat ramp too!’

  ‘That’d be right,’ Jem spits, shocking her with sudden leaping anger. ‘You’d be all for the tuna club.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Raise the ocean for the octopuses.’

  ‘That doesn’t even make sense.’

  ‘They’re all burning fuel, fanging round in their glitzy Bar Crushers, aren’t they? You’re loving it.’

  ‘I … I … What the fuck, Jem? How’s the weather out in left field?’ She should have left it at that. Should have got up and walked away. But she couldn’t help herself. She can never bloody well help herself with him. ‘And anyway, check out your work boat—it puts Bar Crushers to shame. You’re a fucking ab diver; get off your high horse!’

  ‘You get off yours,’ he barks.

  ‘Oh, very mature.’

  ‘I mean it, Lucy. You think you’re better than me. You think you’re not a hypocrite. But you are—you’re just the same.’

  There’s something in his tone. She feels like he really hates her.

  There’s no point reasoning with him. He’s high. It’s because he’s high, she tells herself.

  She passes Zach as she walks inside.

  ‘Zach, what did you take?’

  ‘Meth.’ He grins manically.

  ‘Hi,’ Lucy says when Harry opens the door.

  ‘Hi,’ Harry says.

  ‘Hi,’ she says again. ‘Is Flo here?’

  Of course she’s here for his mother.

  ‘Nah, she’s up in town for the night. It was my nephew’s birthday today and they had a bit of a do, and she’s got stuff on tomorrow or something so she stayed up there for a day or two. I just got back.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lucy says. ‘Right. I’ll leave you to it.’ But she doesn’t flit down the steps the way she usually does, quick like a fairy wren; she loiters on the doorstep.

  ‘Come in for a beer, if you like?’ he offers.

  ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘Nah. Not at all.’

  You’re never too much trouble. The words spring so ready to his tongue he has to bite them back.

  A dead rat pops out of the mouth of the oil drum and floats like a cork in the mother-of-pearl slick, which is fast dispersing on the gentle lick of leftover swell, and Jem’s brain chews words like gum; they’re stringy, sticky, going nowhere, stuck somewhere in his face, up and down, up and down, up and down. He thinks:

  The swell laps and laps and laps and laps at the barnacles that border the ramp and they’re like a fuzzy mossy fringe to the smooth tyre tracks that aren’t really tracks but are a slimy tongue that rolls into the water where the dead rat bobs and bobs and bobs and—

  ‘Would you look at that!’ Zach crows. It seems to Jem that Zach is looking at the rat like it’s some kind of trophy they won playing footy or some shit in high school, except he never played footy because all he wanted to do was:

  Surf surf surf get shacked ay bra yiiiew barrels.

  The dead rat was spat out of the barrel.

  The bugger must’ve been drawn in by the smell of fried food and climbed up on top of the drum to investigate, then slipped in through the hole while it nosed about. It must’ve drowned with the stink of chips filling its nostrils until it was spat out by them, when they tipped the barrel and now it’s just there, floating and bobbing and rolling and bobbing. The words are like gum or like the rat: floating and bobbing and rolling and bobbing and floating and bobbing and rolling and bobbing and reminding Jem of that dead cow. The cow. The cow. The cow. The cow the cow the cow the cow and did the old lady who swallowed a fly and swallowed a spider to catch the fly that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her and swallowed a cow to catch the goat, and what kind of a fucking cow catches a goat? But did she swallow a rat? That’s what he wants to know.

  The rat floats in lazy circles as Jem and Zach empty the drum, sloshing the oil down the ramp and into the water where it blends mother-of-pearl like the shells of the abalone that Jem shucks from rocks day after day after day.

  ‘Looks pretty seedy, ay?’ Zach says.

  ‘Aw yeah,’ Jem says. ‘But it’s veggie oil and it’ll disperse quick enough.’

  The oil’s curling in loose tendrils on the surface, cupping the rat which just bobs and twirls. Bobs and twirls, bobs and twirls. The words are like chewing gum going up and down and up and down, strung out between his teeth except they’re in his mind, and looping around his tongue: bobs and bobs and twirls and bobs and twirls and bobs and twirls and bobs bobs bobs bobs bob bob bobobobobobob and have you ever noticed if you say it over and over the o sound disappears and the bs burble and start to sound like the burble of an outboard motor: bobobobobobbbbbbbbbbrbrbrbrbrb. It makes Jem think about being out in the tinny whackin’ the flats and pottering about and those other fuckheads fucking targeting game fish like their dicks depend on it and the way dead seals bob after they’ve been shot plump bulges floating in thick clouds of blood blooming he was asking for it, going for me tuna like that makes Jem feel like it’s worth it piece-of-shit recreational tuna fishermen fucking cowboys with their unlicensed guns so sloshed it’s surprising they don’t shoot themselves do everyone a bloody favour. You see them rolling drunk at the boat ramp half passed out while the fish go off in the sun trophy caught, job done, would you check out the size of my wang? Come on, son, come fishing with me; let’s make a man out of you. Don
’t mind me, I’m just gonna guzzle Cascade Blues then go home and beat up my missus. Fish? What fish? That’s not a fish, mate, that’s my manhood. Ah fuck it, we’ll use it for burley, get ourselves some mako. Mako, fellas! Gonna get ourselves some mako! and the tuna arriving earlier and earlier every year until now there’s not even a season anymore, there’s just tuna, tuna, tuna, and there were some caught off the coast here through the week. Big ones, too. The fellas, the Bar Crusher bros, they’ll all be gapping to get down to the peninsula tomorrow now the swell’s dying. She’ll be bumper-to-bumper first light which’ll make Luce happy raise the seas, let the octopuses swim free, or whatever. Fucking whatever.

  But Lucy’s face, Jem thinks. Lucy’s face. But no! Stop it! Don’t think about her face when he said that stuff to her. Don’t think about the way she looked at him—and what’s happening to them? None of it makes sense: he doesn’t make sense and she doesn’t make sense, and her and those fucking octopuses don’t make sense. He tries and he tries, but he can’t wrap his head around it and they’ve somehow become messed up with everything else. They’re all over her; she’s covered herself with them and he wants to cover her with him, and why did she do that? Why did she do that to herself?

  His Luce. He misses his Luce. And he misses being her Jem. There’re glimpses of it, moments of it, but it’s not like it was and he can’t figure out how to make it better and tonight he’s just fucked it up even more and he loves her. He loves her. She knows he loves her. Doesn’t she? Doesn’t she?

  No—

  Don’t answer that.

  Don’t think about that. Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it. Don’t let it sober you or tug you onto some downer.

  Think about this night instead. This night.

  You love this night. (And you hate this night but) you love this night, you fucking love this night, and there’s Zach grinning at you like a doofus golden retriever and what do they even retrieve? Have you ever thought about that before? Think about it now, instead of thinking about Luce.