The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  ‘What do you even retrieve, Zach?’

  ‘Huh?’

  And there’re the stars and they’re fucking magical you know? Don’t think about Luce and those octopuses (those fucking octopuses), think about the stars. They’re up there twinkling and twinkling and they’re down there too, on the water, twinkling and twinkling and isn’t it just fucking divine?

  And there’s Zach. Look at him as he tests the ramp with his foot, look at him as it slips out and he nearly does the splits; you can almost hear his groin muscle ripping.

  Laugh at him.

  Go on: laugh at him!

  And don’t think about octopuses.

  Listen to him as he says, ‘Job done, ay?’ and see him grin at you.

  Look at how he grins at you.

  And say to him—go on, say to him: ‘Shit yeah,’ and grin back and see the stars there, on the water, shimmering and twinkling.

  And in among them the shadowy lump of the rat just bobs and twirls and bobs and twirls and you wish it would just fuck off.

  ‘I mean, I know there’s no point in trying to reason with someone who’s snorted themselves into a lather,’ Lucy says.

  They’re sitting in the lounge room, she on the couch, he in one of the old armchairs. Harry had put on a record from his old man’s collection just before she’d arrived: Johnny Cash singing to the inmates at Folsom Prison. When she decided to come in for a drink, he wished he hadn’t, because something about the music made the atmosphere feel contrived, like a date. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking because all she’s done is talk about what a prick Jem’s been and warned him not to launch his boat first thing. Which he really appreciated, because he had been planning to. Apparently some blokes caught some super early season tuna through the week. So early they could be late season, actually. Or maybe there’s no such thing as seasons anymore.

  ‘But still,’ she continues. ‘Meth? I mean, fucking meth?’

  ‘It does make some people go aggro,’ Harry says, matter-of-fact.

  ‘Have you done it?’ she asks, curiously.

  ‘Yeah. Only once. I didn’t really like it, to be honest with you. It made me real aggro and I got into a pretty nasty fight. Wasn’t good.’

  ‘Huh. And you can snort it?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘I smoked it, but I think people do. Maybe. I dunno. Maybe Jem and his mate don’t have the equipment or whatever to, you know, do it any other way?’

  ‘I must be living under a rock. I thought it was just one of those things you saw on telly. Like, Breaking Bad, or those current affairs shows that run stories on the way it’s ruining towns in regional Australia.’

  ‘This is regional Australia,’ Harry says.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says glumly. ‘I guess it is.’

  ‘Oh, come on. It’s not like he’s going to turn into an ice addict with fucked teeth after one night on the stuff,’ Harry says.

  Her burst of laughter splutters with snot. Harry peers at her and realises she’s crying. He hadn’t noticed it, under the thrum of the music and heckling crims. Should he put his arm around her? he wonders. Instead, he gets up, walks into the kitchen and grabs the box of tissues. Brings them back into the lounge, sits on the couch next to her and, instead of an arm, offers her the box.

  ‘Fucked teeth?’ she asks thickly, as she plucks a tissue from the plastic slit. She doesn’t honk into it but dabs at her eyes and nose like he imagines a proper lady would.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You know, like strung-out junkies. He’s just high tonight, then he’ll come down and say he’s sorry.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She shudders out a sigh. ‘Or maybe we’re just kidding ourselves. Maybe we’re just flogging a dead horse.’

  He might be kidding himself, but it feels like she’s melting across the couch towards him.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m crying,’ she confesses. ‘I guess I’m just tired. I’m sick of arguing with him. I thought it was over. That we’d made it through. It’s been so shit this last year and then these last couple of days—it really felt like it was getting better. But it’s not.’ She pauses, then says without looking at him: ‘Thanks. Thanks for talking with me. For being here.’

  All I want is to be here, Harry doesn’t say. The irretrievable intimacy of the words scares him. Instead, he reaches over, gathers up the curtain of her hair with a finger and gently loops it behind her ear so that he can see her face. His knuckles brush her earlobe as he pulls away. She’s gone very still. She’s not breathing and her shoulders have tensed—shrugged, ever so slightly, towards her neck.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles, because he doesn’t know what else to do: how to take it back, how to take it forward.

  She flicks her gaze to him. The skin has hardened around her eyes, creasing into little wrinkles and forcing her gaze out. He tries, but he can’t hold it. He never can with her. She blows out a long, whistling sigh that softens her shoulders and, if anything, intensifies the tension building in him. Then, she raises a hand and brushes her knuckles against his earlobe. So softly, she barely touches him.

  Now her knuckles trace his lips. He feels it all: the smattering of soft, wiry hairs, the ribbed skin clinging to bony joint. He wants to suck her finger, to roll his tongue over it, but he refrains. It would be too sudden, too wet in the face of these unreal, dry caresses that whisper of smooth driftwood. And he’s thirteen again. It’s Easter. There’s a bonfire, down at Mandy’s place (back when she was married to that prick Ronny), in the big backyard that rolls into boobialla then beach. A smouldering offshoot, for cooking. The dark shapes of the adults, moving about the flames. The sardine-roast-lamb smell of mutton-birds. Fat hissing and burning. His head spinning, from the beer he stole but didn’t steal because no one wants Terry’s raspy home brew anyway. Not even Terry, who’s busy pilfering everyone else’s grog. He brushes a finger of bone-white driftwood against his cheek, his lips, savouring the cool smoothness of the wood and imagines what it would be like to kiss a girl. His face must betray him—betray something weak in him, because one of his brothers barrels out of the twilight, thumps into him, shoves him to the ground. Harry bucks him off and they wrestle aimlessly at the edge of the firelight until they stop.

  Saliva pools in his mouth and he forces himself to swallow, gulping stickily. He frets the sound of it will ruin everything.

  He waits a beat, then traces the tips of his fingers from the corner of her eye along her smile lines. Then the swell of her cheekbone.

  She presses her face into his hand roughly, like she’s an echidna trying to burrow into the wide expanse of his palm. His whirring blood, the ants beneath his skin. The warmth of her cheek, sticky with tears—the dampness shatters the airiness of it all, and he grips her cheek and pulls her face to his. His lips crush into hers, his tongue, to hers, and she lets out a moan that spills into his mouth and nearly has him come, then and there.

  What’s wrong with him? He’s like a horny teenager. A bull at the gate.

  And this is Lucy—a girl like Lucy, kissing him back. Really kissing him back.

  She’s almost in his lap now, awkwardly half sitting across him. His hands go to her waist and he lifts her a touch so she can get her leg out, over. His head is thrown back; her mouth is at his ear, his neck, his collarbone. His hands are beneath her shirt, running up and down her spine.

  No bra, of course.

  He tugs at her shirt, pulls it up, tries to pull it off.

  ‘I,’ she stops. Looks at him, embarrassment—no, disappointment? panic?—in her eyes. ‘I …’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he murmurs. Then: ‘You’re beautiful.’ It’s true, but he regrets the words straight away; they feel token—not intimate enough. But she softens and leans down into him, opens her mouth on his. The tang of beer and snags. And her. His fingers fist in her hair. She grinds down on his lap. It’s almost too much. His hands are at her shirt, again. Tugging. She raises her arms.

  ‘I,’ she says again as she pulls back. Bares herself at him, watc
hes his face as he takes her in. Her ruined body. Not ruined—her body is art. Kat’s masterpiece. The whirls and coils and suckers and eyes: so many hooded eyes gaze back at him. Pupils that are dashes rather than dots, black against the electric blue, green, mottled orange irises.

  She’s blushing in … shame?

  ‘Breasts were always such a part of this sort of thing. I didn’t realise just how much. I … I don’t know if it feels right without them.’

  But everything feels right with you, he wants to say, but doesn’t. His eyes, though—surely she must see it in his eyes.

  He thumbs her lower lip. Pulls her face to his, again. This time, forehead to forehead. Then her face is pressed against the curve of his neck. He holds her to him, bundles her in his arms, lifts her, swivels, lays her on her back. Settles between her legs.

  A pang of anxiety: oh god, he won’t last.

  His mouth is at her neck, her collarbone, lower. His tongue traces the slight ridges of her scars, the curling octopus arms. Suckers press back into him, rippling against him, and his tongue dissolves into thousands of buds that open against the chaos of scarred skin and limbs.

  He becomes aware of her hands in his hair, and she half guides, half ghosts his head as his kisses run to her navel, the dough of her stomach, the juts of her hips. His hands are at the buttons of her jeans, his lips never leaving her skin as she lifts so he can pull them off.

  His face is in her hair. He nuzzles, probes his tongue through it, and she moans and opens her legs further, arches her back, urges him on.

  And this is Lucy beneath his mouth. A girl like Lucy.

  She whimpers, near thrashes. ‘No,’ she groans out.

  He stops his tongue, lips pressed to her, not moving. Raises his eyes to meet hers. Face still burrowed in her.

  ‘I want you …’

  He doesn’t draw his face away immediately, just kisses lightly as he awkwardly shimmies his jeans off. And then he’s above her and she’s pulling at his shirt and her hips are curving up towards him. One hand at her cheek, one hand guiding himself—but he stops. Fuck.

  ‘I don’t have a condom,’ he murmurs.

  She bites her lip. ‘Have you been … checked, for you know? STIs?’

  ‘Yeah, I have,’ Harry says, truthfully. ‘And you?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, not for ages but I’ve been, you know …’

  Harry’s grateful. Instead of saying what they’re both thinking (or what she must surely be thinking, and what he’s assuming), that since her last test she’s been monogamous with Jem, she presses parted lips to him.

  Still he pauses, poised. ‘And what about …’ He exhales into her mouth.

  Her hand snakes between her legs, his legs. She traces a finger along him. Smiles at his groan. Wraps a hand around him, leads him towards her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she murmurs sadly. ‘I’m infertile.’

  Lucy is crying again. She tries to hold her body still, but the tears leak across her cheek, wet her hair, pool in her ear and in the hollow beneath his collarbone. A finger wends across her cheek, checking. She nuzzles her face into him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks quietly, and she feels his voice rumble in his chest and wishes she could burrow deeper. His lips are at her hair.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Again. The hot air of the question on her scalp.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, feeling her own words condense on his skin. She rubs her nose in the moisture. ‘It was just so—you were just so … attentive.’

  Harry’s quiet for a moment, but she feels the muscles beneath her tense.

  ‘Why does that make you sad?’ His hands are at her cheeks, fingers nudging her face up so that she’s looking at him.

  His eyes are bright like hot coals.

  ‘I’m not sad,’ she explains. ‘I’m just, I don’t know. Confused. You weren’t what I was expecting. I thought you’d be all throw-down and then you … you just surprised me, that’s all.’

  ‘In a good way?’

  ‘In the best way.’

  He’s quiet again, and then he murmurs, thoughtfully: ‘Throw-down, hey? I get it.’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘You came here for a fuck.’

  ‘No, I came here for a cuppa with your mum,’ she says, and all of a sudden everything feels particularly weird. She worms up so she can kiss him on the mouth, and a new wave of adrenalin shot through with lust shudders through her.

  Because he’s new, she thinks. He smells so new.

  You can’t blame me for enjoying it. Variety is the spice of life, Jem had reasoned. But I’m still monogamous; I still have you.

  ‘It just happened, didn’t it?’ she says.

  ‘Not that.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m following your drift.’

  ‘You wanted me to fuck you and not to, not to …’ She can see that he can’t say make love to you. ‘You just wanted it to be all, whatever, and then it would be out of your system and now you’re crying because it was what it was and you’re stuck with … whatever this is.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m crying,’ Lucy says defensively, even though she knows it’s part of the reason tears are snailing down her cheeks. Because he’s right. Because she doesn’t know what to do now; she still doesn’t know how to be in this body—how to be loved in it. Because Harry had loved her, in it, in a way that was entirely unexpected and what is she supposed to do with that?

  What’s she supposed to do?

  He doesn’t say anything. He just strokes her hair gently with one of those enormous hands like he gets it. Which makes it even worse.

  ‘I just … That was so … You’re so … I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Leave him,’ he states, eyes like a possum’s, so matter-of-fact.

  ‘I,’ she says and stops, surprised by what he seems to be offering. She can’t have this conversation now. ‘I have to go.’

  She disentangles herself, pulls on her clothes, and leaves him still naked, reclined on the couch, modest hands cupping his crotch, and something—something too complex to name—smeared like paint across his face.

  She can feel the semen leaking from her as she trails along the side of the road, walking like a cowboy so it won’t dribble down the inside of her thighs.

  Almost could’ve done with a pad, she thinks bitterly. Then rolls her eyes at herself. For her masochism. Why? Why think that? As if, if she were still in a position where she needed pads, she’d have one in her pocket and think to use it now.

  She can smell herself, smell him, the mingling—so human against the clean night air. Champagne air, they call it. But it’s nothing like champagne. It’s silken. No fizz.

  She can’t go home like this.

  She crosses the road, picks her way through the marram grass, down to the bay, slick against the stillness of the night. Strips her clothes and wades into the water. The cold makes her gasp and pucker and tingle. This is champagne. The winter lag: the water temperature, always a month or so behind the warming air. She doesn’t care; it’s better this way. She dives under, bares her eyeballs at the salty black and refuses to let herself panic about what she can’t see. Swims: one stroke, two strokes. Comes up for air. Rolls onto her back and forces herself to stay there: to float for a bit, despite the way her breath is catching against the cold that swirls about her. Her skin burns. It feels so good.

  Her arms skim the surface. She stretches them out like she’s buoyed on a crucifix; brings them above her head in one slow sweep, like she’s making a water angel. Her hair, caught up in the soft curl of the wake, is a tattered cloud against her arms. She’s a child, in the bath, playing mermaids. She forces her breathing to deepen and slow as she floats and she’s at the yoga studio in Melbourne, lined up with the friends she doesn’t really know anymore, trying to empty her mind as she deepens her downward dog. She can’t help but get distracted by the stubble on her legs.

  Note to self: always shave your legs before yoga. Empty legs, empty mind.

/>   ‘Let your breath centre you.’

  Her breath shudders, in, and out, as the cold seeps through her pores. Her hair, so soft against her arms. And there, among it, something else, skimming her skin. Silky, slimy, a caress. She can feel it, twining in among her hair, gliding the length of her arm, pawing her, curling about her and there are the cups of its suckers scraping so softly against her. Testing her, tasting her. She does nothing but float. Tries to keep as still as she can. It emerges from the swaying nest of her hair, ripples along her underside, spreads its mantle fully across her back. Its arms flow out: one still in her hair, one coiling along her right arm, one along her left. Two wrap around her torso, snaking across the plane of her chest, squeezing her into an embrace. One arm winds down her lower back and traces between her buttocks and thighs. She starts, and it disappears.

  There’re flashing lights. Blue and red. A band of yellow, shifting. It’s a police car. Another car, pulled off the road. A waving torch. Mitch Saunders, busy.

  He catches her in his light before she reaches him. She stops dead, feels like a wallaby.

  ‘G’day,’ she says into the blinding yellow-white.

  ‘G’day, Lucy.’ Mitch’s voice emerges from the darkness. He moves the torch off her and she blinks stupidly until her eyes readjust.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asks. ‘Crash?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Mitch says. ‘It’s the weirdest thing, actually. Mrs Buchannan was driving home, and the bloody engine dropped square out of her car.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yep. Engine mounts’ve rusted through. Asked her last time she got it serviced and she said her son Blue does it for her. Bloke’s got scrambled eggs for brains for not noticing it was gonna go. Bush mechanics, I tell you.’ He shakes his head. ‘The thing’s completely fucked, and I said to her: You’d better sort out a tow truck in the morning to take it to the wreckers. Bets on she doesn’t and just leaves it to rust here. Bloody Buchannans, ay?’