by Erin Hortle
This is it, then.
She isn’t ready to say goodbye. She stands. A chaos of droplets sprays from her body. The still-blowing easterly curves their fall and rakes against her wet skin.
She watches the octopus’s progress with fascination as she trails along behind it. It’s a slog: its head lolls heavily, as if the press of gravity is too much. She scans the scrub for the path and is surprised to discover that the octopus is heading directly for it. How did the octopus find it? At night, she can barely find it.
And then she notices the lights. Déjà vu pools in her belly like sick. The octopus has reached the edge of the road.
Not again.
She lunges and scoops the octopus into her arms before it can drag itself out onto the bitumen. It’s surprisingly heavy—all gelatinous muscle. She struggles to pin it to her chest as it moves in all directions at once, but she only needs to hold it for a moment more.
They’re hit by light and the whoosh of dislodged air as a car speeds past and then everything is black as her eyes work to readjust to the night.
I must be mad, she thinks, smiling as she imagines what the people in the car would have thought about the naked woman half wrestling, half cradling an octopus on the side of the road. Was that … ? Did you see that?
She slackens her grip and the octopus stops fighting against her, and begins … climbing her. It’s such a strange sensation: its suckers gripping her as it struggles its way up. Its head is on her left shoulder; they’d be cheek to cheek if it had cheeks. (Does it have cheeks?) Two arms drape around the back of her neck like a scarf and rest on her other shoulder. Several arms snake down her back; two suck onto her chest, just above her heart. It all feels orchestrated—like each arm has been placed deliberately. They have. It shifts its weight and the head flops to her back, the mantle spreads and the suckers all lock on. It’s like a backpack. She puts her arms behind her back to support it and the grip loosens a touch.
It’s like she’s piggybacking it.
She is piggybacking it. It’s riding her, she realises.
So she walks across the road.
She marvels at how strange the octopus’s weight is: heavy, bodily, but it has no warmth. She tries to feel its breath (do they breathe? how do they breathe?) or the beat of its hearts, but she can’t.
She starts when she sees the dog, three feet high, knotted with muscle and snarling. But of course it’s not a real dog; it’s a statue. A tribute to the chain of pooches that rendered the peninsula an island, back in the convict days. The octopus doesn’t respond to it. She wonders if it registers it, how it registers it, what it recognises. Just another inanimate thing, probably. It’s not like it would know what a dog is anyway.
The boobiallas are rough against her arms and thighs, their coarseness exaggerated, perhaps, by their juxtaposition with the slick weight at her back. They’re brushing against the octopus, too, and she wonders if it hurts: if things are rougher on its skin when there’s no water to lubricate, to dilute gravity. She wonders how the boobiallas taste to the octopus’s skin, what they look like. If it registers them as vegetation like, yet unlike, seaweed.
She thinks about being a child, at the beach, ‘harvesting’ sea lettuce for a ‘salad’. Picking it, putting it in a bucket of saltwater to keep it fresh. Her surprise and delight when she noticed the small fish darting about in the buttercup glow of her bucket, and realised she must have picked it up without noticing. Her pride as she showed her parents.
‘Look what I caught. Can I keep it as a pet?’
‘It’ll just die, petal. You don’t want that, do you?’
The ocean is haphazard with broken lines of turbulent white, kicked up by this relentless easterly pattern, not as big as the other day when she watched Jem surf, but getting close.
‘Needs a good offshore to tidy it up,’ Jem would say. It’ll have it soon. A new low pressure system is on the way; she’ll be howling westerly by the morning, which is why Jem’s back, one step ahead of the weather.
The octopus, which has been surprisingly still, starts shifting its weight like it knows the ride is over and it’s time to leave her. She is overcome with pre-emptive nostalgia as she reaches the water, lowers her body into it, and feels the octopus’s weight slip away with a lingering, coiling caress.
Gone.
Lucy can’t believe how profound the sense of loss gripping her chest is.
She bites down on a sob and throws herself into the swell. Her blind arms search for the slimy body, for one last touch because she knows it’s going to die. But the sand-churned currents jostle her back and she can’t find it. She swims out, frog-kicking and spluttering as waves hit her in the face, ducking under, her hands in front of her, searching around, fossicking through the water.
She doesn’t see the black slab of a set wave rear up because her eyes are smarting with salt and tears. It breaks in a heavy slap, crunching her and throwing her under with empty lungs. She forces her body to go limp as it churns her about. When she hits the sand she anchors herself with her fingers until the turbulence passes, brings her feet beneath her and pushes off, punching through the surface. As her lips open to the clouds, another wave forces itself down her throat, and she’s rolling in a flurry of bubbles, choking and burning with the lack of air and too much saltwater in her belly. Then it all slows and she’s staggering to her hands and knees in the gentle lick of the shallows, vomiting her guts up from the salt or the grief or both. She’s alive and the octopus is swimming out, full of eggs and then it will die. She’s alive and it’s gone. Something in her chest, on her chest, releases. She’s alive and it’s gone to give its life for its eggs. And she’s alive; she’s alive; she’s alive.
Flo opens the door and gasps.
Lucy is all spiralling suckered limbs and hooded eyes and chains of round bruises and sand and vomit and snot and pubic hair and grief.
‘I couldn’t find my clothes,’ she mumbles, then crumples into tears.
Flo reaches out, takes her by the arm and guides her into the bathroom. She sits Lucy in the bath and turns on the shower then leaves her with warm water cascading over her as she sobs, to put the kettle on.
Back in the bathroom, she kneels on the floor next to the bath and doesn’t mind that spray from the shower is misting all over her while she washes Lucy’s hair. She breathes in the soapy lavender scent.
‘What are those marks?’ she asks, quietly. ‘They’re like … hickeys?’
‘Probably from the octopus’s suckers,’ Lucy says miserably.
‘Right,’ Flo murmurs. ‘Fairo.’ She turns the shower off, passes Lucy some towels, then nips back out of the bathroom to turn the kettle off and find Lucy something to wear: some trackie dacks and a T-shirt. Nothing fancy—just comfy.
When Lucy appears in the lounge room, she says, ‘I’m sorry, for what I said before, about the octopuses.’ Her voice is husky from crying.
‘Ah, you’re right,’ Flo says. ‘It was never my thing. And I’m getting too old for it anyway.’
‘The mutton-birds, though, they’re your thing. It’s so unfair.’
‘They were my thing. It’s from a bygone time. I’m a relic.’
Lucy surprises them both by walking across the room, and wrapping her arms around the older woman and giving her a kiss on the cheek.
‘You’re a gem, is what you are.’ Her words are hot on Flo’s cheek and stink of vomit.
Flo grunts and waves her away. ‘Sit, drink this,’ she instructs, passing Lucy a cup of tea. Lucy sits on the couch, cross-legged.
‘Speaking of gems,’ she says. ‘I think I’ve left him. Jem, that is.’
Flo nods. ‘Had a feeling it might’ve been coming.’
‘Yeah, he’s,’ Lucy pauses, frowns. ‘I don’t think we’re right for each other. I don’t know if we ever were; it just seemed like we were because I wanted us to be, because I wanted that life with him. I think I wanted and loved it more than I wanted and loved him, you know? I feel awful
because he was there for me when I was sick but then afterwards everything changed and we just didn’t work anymore. And he’s, he’s …’ Lucy sniffles, and takes a deep breath. ‘He’s done something. I … I—’ Sobs shudder her body and stop her vocal cords. She can’t get the words out.
‘Later,’ Flo says. ‘We can talk about it later.’
They sit in silence as Lucy’s breathing calms.
Eventually Flo ventures: ‘Need somewhere to stay?’
‘I guess,’ Lucy croaks miserably.
‘I’ll make Harry’s room up for you.’
‘Harry—Harry’s gone?’
‘Yeah,’ Flo says. ‘Not far, though. He’s moved three doors down, into Paul and Claire Brinkman’s place. They’ve been trying to rent it out for donkey’s and then, the other night, he said to me, he said: I gave Paul a call and I’m moving into his old place tomorrow morning. And he’s taken over Gray’s old boat too—given the boys who’ve been leasing it a fortnight’s notice and told them they can stay on as deckies, if they want. So it’s just me now,’ Flo says. ‘Just me and you for as long as you want to stay.’
‘Thanks, Flo,’ Lucy says. Then she starts telling Flo about this thing she saw on the telly, on one of those paddock-to-plate cooking shows, about these people who brine then smoke mussels before pickling them in vinegar and oil.
‘Want to give it a crack?’ Lucy asks.
THE OCTOPUS AND I
What worried the little female seal most was how swollen her belly was. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to launch herself high enough to get up and into the school of herded fish. And while she worried, her belly grew and grew until she realised it was now or never. He was right. Soon she would have a pup and then she couldn’t leave, even if she wanted to.
Her worries in that regard weren’t unfounded, but what should have worried her more was actually finding her friend. The ocean is so big. There are seamounts and islands and all the different fish and whales and dolphins and birds floating and diving. There are crabs and crayfish and octopuses and squid and great forests of swaying weed. There are glittering hazes of bioluminescence and clouds of krill so fine they get lodged in your orifices if you swim through them (when she was a half-pup she had one whispering in her ear for a week, until it died and fell out). There are boats and there are sharks, big and small. There are packs of orcas that roam and comb, hunting. And in between all these things there is so much water unbroken and rolling. So much water. There are currents and other currents, crisscrossed with gyres and undercurrents and eddies, muddled by tides and swells.
The ocean is so big and he is only a small seal. Despite her swelling belly, she is smaller yet.
She swam, rushing south on the first tendrils of the current, which were curling down from the warmer waters to the north. She chased fish and birds and drifted on her back, with her flippers outstretched and the tight bulge of her pup held up to the sun or stars, only when she needed to sleep.
The ocean is so big, but on the current she reached the haul-out—a cluster of rocky islands, which, at this point in the season sat just south-west of the current’s creeping range—within days. She knew it was the haul-out. She could smell and hear the horde of male seals lounging and wrestling and gorging and shitting—preparing themselves for the fast-approaching harem season.
She stopped and drifted, spiralling slowly for a bit, thinking. Her pup shifted in her belly and made her piss. It marked the water around her female, which left her worried. She had no idea what to do.
They are harems for a reason. It would be dangerous, this close to harem season, for a lone female like her to go to the haul-out. So how was she supposed to find her friend?
Why didn’t she swim south with him when she had the chance? Why did she hesitate? And why was she stupid enough to come now?
He had made it sound so easy. I’ll be waiting for you, he’d told her. If you come, I’ll find you, he had said.
And she’d believed him; she’d never asked him: How?
He had explained to her—by barking softly and swimming in circles around her, first one way, then the other—that the haul-out islands breach the water just off the southern coast; and he had told her that she didn’t have to go to the haul-out, that she could just follow the coast to the west, and then follow her ears and nose to find the herded school.
She spiralled slowly down into the green-black then back up towards the surface, which was silvery and opaque, muddied by the light bleeding through the thick, low clouds. She spiralled down then back up again, waiting for her churning pup to settle. Eventually it did, and she swam towards the rearing stone sea cliffs, thinking maybe that was where he would be waiting for her, and thinking, in any case, it would be good to put some distance between herself and the haul-out. In neutral waters she would be a curious anomaly, and hopefully nothing more.
She lolled for a while, enjoying the fizzing turbulence of the swell hitting the shallow ledges beneath the cliffs. A curious beta-half-pup joined her.
He asked her why she was there by cocking his head to one side and brushing his flipper against her swollen belly.
She explained to him that she had come to find her friend.
The beta-half-pup told her that he knew the seal she was looking for. He told her that he had not seen her friend in a long time, not since an alpha threw him from the rocks, back before winter.
She was disappointed. She had seen her friend more recently than this.
So he didn’t return?
No, the beta-half-pup told her by barking. Then, he rubbed his body around hers, to comfort her and tell her there were plenty of other haul-outs that her friend may have gone to.
They herded a school of darting herring together and gorged themselves, then he returned to the haul-out and she continued west, following the directions her friend had given her.
Maybe he is waiting for me closer to the school, she thought as she swam.
After a while, she heard them, just like her friend described. She heard them sliding and fluttering against one another, herded so tightly there was no water between them. There were only bodies rubbing on bodies rubbing on bodies.
As she swam closer, the water became murky and so sweet with rotting fish she didn’t know if she wanted to gobble it up or vomit—maybe because of the smell and taste, or maybe because the pup in her belly had begun moving restlessly, stirred up by the filthy water burrowing into her fur or by her agitation or by something else entirely.
Who knows what bothers it; who knows what it wants. Certainly not her. Her pup is a mystery growing inside her. Growing increasingly restless. She wonders what it will be like, when it emerges. She wonders if she will like it. Some betas love their pups so much they suckle them for years, right up until they are becoming beta themselves. Some betas loathe their pups and leave them to wither into leather, picked over by birds, on the rocks.
She swam slowly, moving her body as little as possible so as not to further agitate her quivering belly.
Gradually, they emerged out of the murk (or she emerged towards them): thousands of fat, slick bodies churning busily, bound by a webbed barrier. She pressed her face against the barrier and chewed for a while on the meshing, waiting for her pup to still, watching the fish stream past her face, unable to bite at them.
He was right; this was the most alluring thing she had ever seen. Ever smelt. Ever tasted on the water.
When her pup finally stilled, she swam as deep as she could into the murk. But she had no faith in herself, no faith in her pregnant little body.
She’s still not sure if she tried as hard as she might have. She wishes she knew. Not knowing means she will regret it forever, because she only had that one chance.
She rushed at the surface and launched herself, gasping, up into the air, kicking her tail as hard as she could (she hopes). But it was no use. She barely managed to breach her shoulders. And then her pup started wriggling and thrashing so ferociously it was all she co
uld do to float. She drifted, racked by cramps, away from the herded school and towards the horizon, on the outgoing tide.
She is too small. It is too big, this thing inside her. It takes over her body and she has no choice but to let it.
When it finally calmed she decided to return to the female waters. She was getting too close to pupping to be this far south, to be this far from her harem. And it was getting too big and too busy in her belly.
Because she couldn’t launch herself into the tightly herded school, she did not get to ride in a roaring box and so she had to swim back north, hugging the coast so as to avoid the current, which was flowing in the opposite direction to where she needed to go.
She swam, gorged herself, swam, napped, gorged herself, swam. She floated supine whenever the pup thrashed inside her, holding her belly to the sun or stars and moon as she drifted.
She reached a deep horseshoe bay and she chased a school of trevally into a grove of weed. The weed swayed up from an overhang; beneath it, she spotted the suckered coil of an octopus limb. Floating upside-down, she sculled at the water with her flippers, sweeping the weed out of the way so she could better see it. But she could see nothing. The octopus had squirted a miasma of ink into her face, telling her to leave. Imploring, demanding that the little seal leave her to her eggs.
The ink cleared away in stringy, black wisps, and there the octopus was: folded into a maze of limbs that didn’t start or finish, that simply curled and flowed in a mess of pulsing suckers. The octopus was staring back at the seal, her eyes never leaving the seal’s as she stubbornly jetted water at the thousands of eggs she had strung about the cave. They clung, like strings of bright white, baubly seaweed, to the rocks and each time she fanned water at them, they rippled.
Strangely, the octopus smelled a bit of human. The little seal wondered what the octopus might have done to collect that scent in its slime.
