The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  ‘Ay,’ Lucy agrees absently. She doesn’t know them from a bar of soap.

  ‘Ay,’ Mitch says. ‘I swear, Blue hasn’t been right in the head since he watched his old man get shot in the massacre.’ His hand drifts towards the gun strapped to his belt and he gives it a little pat.

  ‘Oh,’ Lucy says, taken aback.

  Then he asks: ‘What you doing out here, anyway?’ He shines the torch on her again. It’s so obtrusive, blinding her so he can see her better. ‘You been swimming?’

  ‘Something like that,’ she agrees.

  ‘You must be bloody freezing. Take me coat.’

  ‘Nah, really. I’m fine.’

  ‘Carn. I insist.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘Didn’t mind taking ole Harry’s jumper that time, though, did ya?’

  What’s his problem? ‘I’m nearly home,’ she says. ‘I’ll be right. Catch you later.’

  She makes to keep walking down the road, but he thrusts out an arm, she doesn’t think to grab her, but certainly to block her path.

  ‘Come on, I’m just teasing you,’ he says. ‘Here, wear my jacket and I’ll walk you.’

  ‘Really. It’s okay.’

  ‘No, no. I insist. Civic duty and all that.’ He takes his jacket off and holds it out to her. There’s something weirdly authoritarian about the way he’s brandishing his police uniform at her: she can’t quite figure out how to refuse.

  The whole time they’re walking he jabbers on about his twins. ‘My little men’, he keeps calling them. She doesn’t pay attention; she just makes listening noises whenever he stops for a breath. She’s too distracted by the smell of his jacket: the tinge of old, vinegary BO and the newer, fluffier scents of washing powder and men’s deodorant. As if someone’s tried to scrub it clean but couldn’t quite because the stain had sunk too deep. But, despite herself, she welcomes its warmth. Uncontrollable shivers are rippling down her spine, and her teeth are rattling like dice in her mouth.

  There are no lights on in the house, but she can hear music and voices. They must be around the back again. She wonders how much their high will have worn off, or if they’ve been topping themselves up throughout the night. She really doesn’t know much about meth. She pads up the steps, onto the veranda and opens the front door.

  ‘Oh well, catch you later then,’ she says to Mitch, shimmying out of his jacket.

  ‘Sounds like Jem’s still up,’ he says. ‘Might pop in and say g’day.’

  Lucy knows that she needs to tell him not to, but she can’t think of a thing to say to deter him. Mitch climbs the steps and walks in through the door, like she’s holding it open just for him, and swaggers along the dark hallway. In the kitchen, the shadows flicker about on the light from the fire, which is framed by the window above the sink.

  ‘I think they’re out there,’ she mumbles and ducks past him, so that she can get to the door first. She opens it in time to see Jem lean over the table and snort a fresh line.

  ‘Look who’s here: Mitch Saunders walked me home and thought he’d pop in to say hello,’ she says loudly, loitering in the doorway and trapping Mitch in the house. If only she were taller.

  ‘What?’ Jem’s head snaps up. He’s roiling from the fresh hit, trying to make his eyes focus on her. Zach’s quicker. He snatches whatever’s left and shoves it in his pocket and then brushes his hand across the table. Jem scrubs at his nose.

  Lucy finally moves, letting Mitch out of the house.

  ‘Mitch, how are ya?’ Jem shouts. ‘Want a frothy or are you here on business?’

  ‘Ah, fuck it,’ Mitch says. ‘Now’s as good a time to knock off as ever.’ He saunters over and sits by the fire.

  Jem grabs a beer from somewhere and thrusts it at him. ‘What’s going on?’ he barks. ‘Something happen?’ This last question is directed at Lucy, who has edged close to the fire.

  She stands, with her back to it, facing out into the darkness, side-on to the others who are all sitting between the fire and the house. ‘Nope,’ she says, still gazing into the darkness. Her voice sounds too clipped, too bright. She can feel Mitch’s eyes on her.

  ‘Nah, mate,’ he says to Jem. ‘Mrs Buchannan’s engine dropped out of her car. I was just tidying it all up when Lucy wandered past me dripping wet. Figured I’d give her my jacket and walk her home.’

  ‘Huh. Fairo,’ Jem says, and Lucy thinks: Really? what about that scenario is fair enough?

  ‘Yep. Always good to touch base with felons,’ Mitch adds, and gives her a playful wink.

  ‘What?’ Jem asks, looking from Mitch to Lucy, to Mitch again.

  ‘Lucy didn’t tell you?’ Mitch asks smugly.

  ‘Tell me what?’ Jem says, looking from Lucy to Mitch then back to Lucy.

  Lucy throws Mitch a dirty glance. ‘It was ages ago,’ she says to Jem. ‘Harry, Flo and I … well, we’d been, ah … mutton-birding.’

  ‘What the fuck, Lucy!’

  ‘Yep, caught ’em red-handed,’ Mitch says. ‘You should have seen Lucy, covered in bird vomit, shivering away in Harry’s jumper, reeking to high heaven. Bloody hilarious.’ He laughs, like they’re all as entertained as he is, all having a hoot of a time reminiscing. ‘But obviously, illegal,’ he adds, suddenly stern.

  Zach sways to his feet. ‘Anyone want another brewskie?’ he asks, even though, bar Lucy, they all have fresh beers. When no one says anything, he sits back down.

  Jem’s eyes have fixed on Lucy; outrage and betrayal are scribbled all over his face. Lucy knows it has nothing to do with her wearing Harry’s jumper, has nothing to do with Harry at all. (Harry’s breath on her neck, his hands sweeping up and down her spine: goosebumps rise in answering lust.) Jem’s knee is jiggling and he’s manically running his tongue over his teeth. He looks deranged. He is deranged: he’s high as all fuck, angry and humiliated, because white people mutton-birding—this is the sort of thing that riles him up at the best of times, and for his partner to do it?

  Here it comes.

  ‘Fucking hell, Lucy. Mutton-birding? How could you do that? They fly all the way from the Bering Sea to have their chicks here. Half of them starve on the way because we’ve fucked the planet up so much there’s not enough food. Fucking krill oil’s getting swilled like there’s no tomorrow by dumb hippy-wannabes who’re after natural remedies to fix their gluten guts or some shit, like their digestive woes are more important than those little legends who are actually starving, you know? Actually. Fucking. Starving. God, they’re legends.’ His face sags in genuine grief—his voice is cracking with it. He becomes wistful. ‘You see them out there, and they’re so nimble in the air and underwater, like they’re flying through the ocean. And they raft up like they’re all little buddies. All just little buddies, hanging out,’ he trails off.

  ‘I don’t know if that’s what people take krill oil for,’ Zach interjects. ‘I think it’s for your heart. Or maybe arthritis …’

  ‘Fucking hell, Zach!’ Jem spits, flaring up again. ‘It doesn’t matter what they take it for. It’s not theirs to take. What the fuck is wrong with everyone? What the fuck’s wrong with you?’ he rounds on Lucy again. ‘Fucking mutton-birding,’ he mutters. ‘And why were you wearing that cunt’s clothes?’

  She lets out a sigh. ‘Harry’s not a cunt,’ she says calmly. ‘And like Mitch said, I got bird vomit over my clothes and he lent me his jumper so I wouldn’t be cold. We can talk about this tomorrow. I’m going to bed. Don’t wake me.’

  She can feel Mitch’s eyes on her as she storms inside.

  Bloody Blue Buchannan, she thinks. If it weren’t for him she never would have bumped into Mitch. Bloody bush mechanics, ay?

  ‘Wait a minute. Why are you all wet?’ Jem shouts after her.

  For the record, she does feel bad about the baby birds.

  Lucy chuckles when she sees the article in her newsfeed about the scientists who sequenced an octopus genome. ‘The late British zoologist Martin Wells said the octopus is an alien. In this se
nse, our paper describes the first sequenced genome from an alien,’ one of the proud scientists declares. Lucy chuckles because isn’t it like that? You swim with an octopus one evening and the next day your newsfeed is touting stories about octopuses.

  Jem would be alarmed. He reckons technology has ears and has tested his phone more than once by talking to it about mountain biking (a pursuit he has no interest in) to see if his newsfeed fills with mountain bike advertisements. The first time she caught him, phone on the table, crooning, ‘mountain biking, mountain biking, mountain biking,’ at it, over and over. She’d stirred him, told him to get creative. So he sang, ‘When my baby, when my baby smiles at me I go-o mountain-biking, oh me or my oh, I go mountain mountain mountain mountain biking, with my baby, Lucy-i-oh!’ The results were confused. He was slightly vindicated by advertisements for tickets to see The Boy from Oz at the Derwent Entertainment Centre up in Hobart, but as for mountain bike ads? Nothing.

  As she reads she chuckles again, this time at the vanity of the scientists. ‘You don’t really know an organism until you’ve sequenced its genome,’ they declare.

  I’ve never sequenced anything’s genomes, she thinks. Does that mean I know nothing?

  She wonders if these scientists really know octopuses—know what it’s like to simply be alongside them, if only for a moment. With them, on their terms. Not that she feels like she knows them. But she knows she doesn’t know them in a way that is quietly hers.

  At the bottom of the article, another octopus-themed story is suggested. She clicks on it.

  ‘When you pet a cat,’ it reads, ‘the cat purrs. When you pet an octopus, the octopus pets you back. It loops a limb around your hand and explores you.’ Yes, she thinks. It does. It’s not a one-way interaction at all. Not that an interaction with a cat is one-way, but octopuses are so busy in the way they respond to your touch. As she continues to read, she realises just how busy. ‘Not only can octopuses touch and taste with their skin, new evidence suggests that cephalopods can also see with their skin, or do something very close to what we regard as seeing on a physiological level.’

  As it wrapped its arms around her, did it see her tattoos? Did it recognise itself on her skin? (Could it taste the ink, secreted in her skin?)

  She keeps reading, and discovers that scientists have proven that octopuses can learn vicariously, and that they can retain useful information—in other words they can remember things. Another article informs her that octopuses often show favouritism when it comes to researchers, consistently smooching up to one human while avoiding or squirting water at another; some prefer to be around female humans while others prefer male humans—apparently, they can taste oestrogen and testosterone.

  They can taste oestrogen. Which means that her octopus—the one from last night—likely knew she was female. She knows that it’s female too, or at least she thinks she knows. It’s not like she was tasting it or anything. She’s just going off something Scott told her near to a year ago and, suddenly, her human capacity to register, perceive and recognise seems so inferior, so blunted. But no, it did seem female, somehow. She thinks of the arm, snaking between her legs, thinks uneasily about the location of an octopus’s penis. But no, it is female. She’s sure. Perhaps her body recognised it, on some kind of animal level outside of thought, words, reason?

  It could taste her oestrogen. What else could it taste? Her infidelity? Could it taste Harry? Is that why it went there, because it was odd—the wrong flavour—and it wanted to investigate? She feels exposed, like she’s been read by someone with X-ray vision, but more than that because it didn’t just see her, it touched her and tasted her too. She also feels, strangely, like she’s gained an intimate—told her secret to a friend. Her body whispered it. Leaked it into the salty black.

  Then she sees the image.

  Her heart leaps to her throat and she slams the laptop shut. Blinks once, twice. Looks over her shoulder, to make sure Jem and Zach are still in bed, calms her breath and opens the computer again.

  It’s a Japanese woodblock print captioned: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. A woman lies on her back, legs spread, while an octopus performs cunnilingus on her. Her head is thrown back, her eyes closed, and she grips the octopus’s arm, as if to draw it closer (and Lucy’s fingers are twined in Harry’s hair as she presses her clitoris against his tongue and bares her throat at the ceiling, moaning). A smaller octopus is playing with the woman’s nipple. Lucy imagines the touch of suckers on a nipple and wonders how different they would feel to a mouth. Both are hard and soft, dexterous, slippery. The fisherman’s wife is covered in snaking limbs just like Lucy is covered in ink and as she gazes at it—at her and them—guilt sloshes through her like hot water, then cold water, as she sweats then shivers.

  She shouldn’t have done it.

  She closes her laptop again, gets up, walks outside and sits on the bench seat by the pile of ashes. The sun cuts, but the billow of a new easterly breeze is cool. A yellow-throated honeyeater hangs upside-down from the callistemon Lucy planted when she first moved into the place—to frame the barbecue area and attract birds.

  ‘It’s not a Tassie native,’ Jem had said.

  ‘No, but it’s an Australian native and Tassie birds will love it,’ she’d reasoned. ‘Plus, they go gangbusters in sand.’

  She remembers the first time she saw a bird—it was a little wattlebird—land in it: the way the spindly sapling waved and bowed under its weight. She’d called to Jem, and the two of them stood at the kitchen window, beaming as the bird suckled on the red bottlebrushes.

  Her eyes fill with tears at the thought of what she’s risking and why she’s risking it.

  It wasn’t the octopus’s face between her legs, it was Harry’s. The bristle of his stubble scraping against the inside of her thighs.

  Harry, so different to Jem, who is impulsive at every turn: quick in opinion, in joy, in anger, in grief. Jem’s recklessness shines his charisma so bright one can’t not be captivated; but equally, it shines his hypocrisy so obvious one can’t not be, at times, dismayed that this gold-flecked man isn’t all he promises to be. Except he is—he’s exactly who he is: passionate and pigheaded and erratic.

  Jem’s right. She is a hypocrite like him. The only difference between them is the fact that she spent years steeped like a teabag in a postmodernist and poststructuralist education until her strength of conviction was soaked from her; because she learnt that nothing means anything anyway. (Except that’s a lie because it does, doesn’t it? And that’s the problem.) Whereas for Jem, everything means everything all the time and so the inconsistencies of it all are laid bare then obscured, then laid bare then obscured by the lapping tides of reason, as if reason’s a thing of substance.

  Harry, on the other hand. She doesn’t think she’s heard him venture enough of an opinion to be a hypocrite. Instead he’s all considered motion, always moving steadily with a deliberateness that both animates and contains him in a way that would be, in busy, erratic Jem, unimaginable.

  She shouldn’t have done it.

  Oh but Harry. Gosh, Harry.

  He just gets it, doesn’t he? Kat had said. And she’s right; somehow he does.

  Lucy’s ashamed by the lust that shudders through her.

  It’s just. There’s something about him. He’s a younger, quieter, masculine Flo. A masculine Flo, with his broad shoulders and sinewy muscles; his rough stubble and deep rumbling, mumbling voice that echoes in his chest. And his hands. His long, strong fingers tracing up and down her spine, gripping her buttocks, spreading her thighs, slipping inside her.

  But still, Lucy wonders if half the reason she’s drawn to him is because of his mother, who so enchanted her that night as she waded, yarning gibberish with Greek Poppy in torch beam and moonlight, like a woman yanked from another time.

  Last night she’d felt safe, adored. So thoroughly adored.

  And then the octopus.

  No, nothing means anything anyway, except the octo
pus that suddenly, shockingly, made sense in a way she can’t quite articulate and isn’t that just it—isn’t that just the crux of it? Because what’s in an articulation, in a word? What’s in a breast? What’s in an octopus, a tattoo? Why mark yourself? What’s in a word, anyway? Surely nothing but air? Air in words, air in no words. She can feel the words’ absence clogging her throat like they’ve solidified into a knot of inexpressible meaning, into a micro-weather system expanding, pressure so tightly spun it hurts, makes her throat ache and throb in time with the pulse of her heart.

  The octopus’s arm between her legs. The shock, the violation which is perhaps only a violation if it knew what it was doing—knew the taboo it was breaking.

  Bestiality.

  But no, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife didn’t speak to her of that, but of something else.

  What did the octopus taste? Touch? See? Know? What does the octopus remember—what does it think of her, even now?

  The tentacle tweaking the nipple, the octopus’s face buried in the woman’s vulva, which bristles with pubic hair. Harry’s face, in and among her hair. She can’t stop thinking about the octopus’s beak, about the beak she discarded, like it was rubbish, when she cut the octopus’s head off that other night, about the boy at high school who told her that as women age their clitorises grow—protrude and turn into beaks if they get stimulated too much over the course of the woman’s life.

  ‘Sticky beak,’ he guffawed.

  The thought worried her so much she didn’t masturbate for months.

  Jake begged and begged to come, but Shayne told him no.

  He told him it was because they were going at the crack of, so he’d be too tired at school the next day.

  Really it’s because he just wants a day to himself.

  He’s a good father. He loves his son. Jake’s a great kid. But the relentlessness with which Jake looks up to him is exhausting. His eyes seem to beg Shayne, constantly, for approval. It makes Shayne feel like he can’t just be himself; that he has to be some sort of role model all the time. Like the whole seal thing, when they took Jake tuna fishing back in February: it’s grey—Shayne knows it’s grey—but he could feel Jake wanting him to say it was all right. And it was all right, but not so all right that you want to say it out loud, or that you want to teach it to your son. You just want to be doing what you have to do and not be thinking about it. But when your kid’s around you have to think about it. That’s what parenting is all about, which isn’t something you take into account when you’re a horny twenty-something and you come before you should, then think: What the heck? Why not keep it? You love her, after all. But you don’t realise that it means from then on you can’t be your own person anymore, or at least, not wholly your own because you’re part dad, no matter what else happens. You can split with the missus, and sure, you can abandon the kids. But you’re still their dad, one way or another.