by Erin Hortle
‘The Octopus and I is a bracing and exhilarating read. The storytelling is energetic yet beautifully judged, and the characters are wonderfully alive in their warmth and brittleness, their sorrow and their joy. The energy of the novel is exuberant; the insights are wise. I was engaged from the beginning and so deeply moved by the end. A terrific book.’
Christos Tsiolkas, author of Damascus
‘The world of The Octopus and I is like no other. It’s real—familiar Australian coastal landscape, and people I felt I knew intimately, so precisely are they depicted—but it’s also fantastical and daring. Erin Hortle’s under-sea narrators are as vivid as her human cast—and that is where the poignancy lies. Humans become creatures, and creatures are more humane than humans. Standing between the worlds of water and earth is Lucy, a character drawn with tender insight, unsentimental compassion and a fierce will toward life. Hortle’s writing is lyrical yet blunt; daring yet gentle; wild yet domestic. It’s said that humans are sixty percent water. This book tells us that we forget that fact, and our creatureliness, at our peril. It may be where redemption lies. The Octopus and I is strange. It’s singular. It’s exquisite. It’s haunting. It will grip you and hold you tight.’
Ailsa Piper, author of The Attachments
‘All at once exquisitely poetic, fiercely intelligent, deeply Australian and laugh-out-loud funny. The Octopus and I makes you think about what it means to be a woman … or an octopus.’
Danielle Wood, author of The Alphabet of Light and Dark and Star-Crossed (as Minnie Darke)
First published in 2020
Copyright © Erin Hortle 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
ISBN 978 1 76087 564 0
eISBN 978 1 76087 393 6
Cover design and illustration by Alissa Dinallo
Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia
For Ido
CONTENTS
ONE
CROSSING ISTHMUS
THE OCTOPUS INCIDENT
TWO
A SEAL’S TAKE
THE MULTI-COLOURED KNITTED KNOCKERS
NO BIRD IS ONLY AN I
THREE
I AM SHE
SPUN AIR
THE OCTOPUS AND I
NOTES AND REFERENCES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ONE
CROSSING ISTHMUS
My body is brimming is pulsing is purring is ready. The world moves so slowly as tide washes with inhale in exhale. It was enough before but now my body is full and I notice too much and I touch I see I taste the fish filth clotting my skin. I notice it is not clean enough for my eggs and my den so snug with its doormat of crab husks not enough for my eggs. The world sighs slowly but I need it to sway swiftly I need currents to swirl and whorl and rush.
I feel the roar pulsing and purring and promising and rumbling. I leave my den my body brimming as I ripple and spiral and snatch a scuttling crab and crush it in my beak then jet off jet on.
I feel the surface sink and I feel I see moonlight with my skin and it is caught up in the eddies that bubble and swirl about my arms that curl and unfurl and the moonlight envelops me caressing my arms as they caress the kelpy floor the kelpy shore. I snatch a scuttling crab and crush it in my beak and ripple and dance and jet and twirl across the bed of swaying weed towards the thunder and rumble that beckons and calls.
The surface dips down as I dip up and I snatch another scuttling crab and crush it in my beak as the surface slides from my body and drips and trickles and mellow moonlight settles on me as the air yawns and murmurs about me. I become heavy become flat become fixed become pinned to the sand and I cannot spiral and jet I can only slither. But the ocean hammers the shore beyond the land it clamours and calls and beckons.
The sand clogs my suckers and stifles my slime and slivers of grass prick and slice as I drag myself pull myself roll myself and my arms beneath me cannot spiral and dance and chase and they cannot snatch as crabs scuttle. I need them all and I need to focus and this is not right because I am too heavy but I am ready and I feel the rumble and boom and crash beyond the land and it is close so I press on.
What is it?
I see I feel too much cold light as a beam so bright too bright blinds my skin and I cannot see the land before me but I can touch can taste and I pull myself forward blind I haste towards the crash and rumble and beckoning liquid boil.
The light tracks on tracks off tracks over me and I see shapes dark and eerie in the moonlight and they are moving beside me alongside me.
The roar rumbles through the ground and I feel it pulse against me pulse in me.
The sand turns hard and rough and is like limpets on the rocks to touch but it tastes different and wrong of tar and oil and—
What is it?
Something grabs at me and clasps one of my arms and gently pulls at me.
I touch her see her taste that she is she like me and I curl my arm around her wrist and she is warm unlike me. I taste she is curious is scared is sad is frantic her skin tells me even though it is dumb skin it tells me. I stroke her and her skin welcomes my touch and I feel her pores open letting me in and I ripple against her shining the dust from her skin the dust of her skin and I taste her see her touch her and she is worried is frantic and—What is it?
I see I feel too much cold light and we are hit I see I taste I touch metal and oil and we are in the air and I am not heavy not flat not fixed not pinned to the ground and for a moment my arms can spiral and dance on the air and I taste a flash of shock and the fear on her skin and I do not let go of her and I am with her.
The ground meets us and I try not to let go of her and I hold onto her seeing her tasting her touching her and my arm does not let go of her but is pulled from me is pain is gone. I roll and slide on a wave of air crashing and bubbling across the ground and I am caught up in a current and I roll on and cannot make myself stop and I am bashing across the ground and grazing bleeding hurting stinging.
I am still.
I see her stir and then she is still and I see the shapes of others like her about her.
I press on. I drag myself across the hard rough ground that tastes of tar and oil and onto the sand and the pain clots my skin and is sharp is searing where my arm no longer is. The ocean rumbles and calls and thunders and beckons beyond the land I feel it I feel it I press on and the sand is beneath my suckers and the pain sears and bites and the ocean bellows and billows so close and I press on.
The waves rush with inhale in exhale as the surface rises and falls against me and the water boils and foams with air then I am immersed and it is right.
I let my body wash in and out and out and in and out and out as currents and waves swirl and churn about me and my arms spiral and curl and coil as the water bubbles against me and I am light am drifting am ushered out to where the water is full and languid and the currents billow in long ocean arcs. I touch I taste I see the water so clean and clear and full and ready and perfect
for my eggs and the water curls about me and caresses my pain and my body is full is ready.
THE OCTOPUS INCIDENT
‘What are you knitting?’ Harry asks. He’s just plonked himself down in one of the old, grey tweed armchairs. It, like the matching chair Lucy is sitting on, is reminiscent of the lounge suite Lucy’s grandparents used to have, with its screw-in wooden feet and its wooden hand-rests, which emerge from the softly mottled upholstery like a sheep’s snout protrudes from the shorn fleece of its brow. Harry’s mother, Flo, sits on the leather three-seater couch, and she and Lucy both hold knitting needles, poised at the ready. On their laps are nests of mismatched wool. The colour scheme of Flo’s is oceanic greens and blues, while Lucy’s ranges from fiery reds to buttercup yellows.
‘None of your business,’ Flo says, at the exact same time Lucy says: ‘Breasts.’ As she says it, an awkward smile tickles her lips, even though it’s not that funny.
Except it is.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
It’s like the word acts as an invitation. Harry’s gaze shifts to Lucy’s chest and lingers there. A frown flits across his face as he takes in her flatness; it’s like he’s only just noticed it.
And how does she feel under the touch of his eyes?
She feels knobbly with scars, a little bit tipsy from the beers, and bizarrely, she also feels a little bit slinky, a little bit … you know. All in all, she thinks she feels okay—really okay, actually—which is a small miracle in and of itself. It makes her love Harry, if only for the duration of the moment, which ends as his gaze shifts to the beer clutched in his tall-man’s fist. The tan of his face deepens as it blends with a red hue.
What a vibrant, rich blush he has, Lucy notes idly.
Eventually, he says, ‘Sorry if this is a weird question, but did you used to have them?’
Flo lets out a nervous whinny of laughter. Lucy can see why; everything about this evening feels charged and funny—in a ha-ha and weird way. Harry’s words are the cherry on top. Maybe the cherry that will break the camel’s back. For his sake, she bites her own chuckle down. She pretty much invited the question. She doesn’t want to make him feel shit for asking it.
‘Yes,’ she tells him. Because she did used to have breasts.
Harry nods, slowly. ‘Can I ask what happened?’ He darts a glance at her then looks back to the beer in his hands.
‘Do you want the long story or the short story?’ Lucy asks.
‘Give us the short story,’ he says.
So she gives it to him.
When she finishes speaking, he finally looks her in the eye. She looks right back at him. He raises his eyebrows, lifts his beer to his lips and drains the dregs from the stubbie, holding her gaze all the while. Then, he puts the empty on the coffee table and says: ‘I’m going to stick that crayfish in the pot, grab myself another beer and, if it’s not too much trouble, I think I’d like to hear the long story.’
‘It’s not too much trouble,’ Lucy tells him. ‘It’s good for me, I think, to talk about it.’
He gets up and disappears into the kitchen. In his absence, Flo and Lucy talk quietly. After a few moments, Harry walks back into the living room with three stubbies, frosted with condensation, threaded through the fingers of one hand. He passes one to Lucy and one to Flo, then sits back down in the old chair. He props his feet on the coffee table and looks at Lucy expectantly.
‘Right,’ she says. She takes a swig of beer, and then she tells them the long story.
She tells them the long story, but she doesn’t tell them the whole story. There are some things she can’t tell Harry; there are just some things you can’t tell a man with a lovely blush you’ve only met a couple of times.
And Flo. She was such a big presence in the story; it would be weird—too intense, too intimate—to properly narrate her back to herself. Lucy can’t do it unfiltered.
And yet she wants to do it unfiltered. She wants to talk. She wants to make sense of herself to herself, and to everyone else for that matter. She doesn’t want to simply be a woman without breasts; she wants to be, well, her. She wants to be Lucy: someone who is specific and has a specific body for specific reasons.
Even though she can’t seem to tell the whole story, it doesn’t mean the whole story isn’t there, burbling away inside her. It doesn’t mean she’s not saving it for someone, one day. She has many imagined audiences. Sometimes it’s herself, other times it’s Jem. Sometimes she imagines she’ll write it down and it will scatter out into the world on leaves of paper, caught up in the spring winds. Other times she imagines she’s talking to a room full of faceless women who sharpen into someone she went to high school with, or the woman who served her at the supermarket, and she imagines them really thinking about it, after she asks them: ‘What would you do?’
She knows it’s daggy to title it, but when she thinks of the whole story she thinks of it as ‘The Octopus Incident’, dressed up in titular quotation marks like that.
She’d begin ‘The Octopus Incident’ with something like this: ‘To say that the cancer caused the octopus incident would be an overstatement. But, equally, to say the two events weren’t connected would be to deny the series of factors that caused me to experience the world as I experienced it that night. You see, everything was very specific to that moment. I was in a peculiar headspace. The cancer, the breasts, the infertility, Jem, fuck—the world! Everything had gotten to me. I just wanted something to be authentic; I was sick of all the bullshit. And I just wanted to help her—to help the octopus. I guess I just wanted to be able to do something.’
And then, with that preamble out of the way, she’d tell the story; she’d tell the whole story. And depending on the day, her mood, her imagined audience, and how pissed off or in love with Jem she was at that given moment, this would be it, or something like this:
I bumped into Terry Jones outside the shop on my way home from work. I didn’t want to be there. The December sun was poised high in the sky, still only midway through that long summer arc that pushes lingering afternoons well into what should be night and pulls dew-soaked dawns from the south-east horizon. I’d been sweating under it all day at the devil park, where I work (it’s a kind of zoo-cum-conservation and research site, devoted to breeding and sustaining a healthy population of the endangered Tasmanian devils), and I felt filthy and irritable in a way that reminded me how I’d felt as a child after eating a toffee apple in the sun at the show: sweat, sugar and saliva to the elbows, tears on the drive home. I don’t normally work outside, but they were short-staffed and had asked me to spend the day talking with tourists—doing the hourly spiel and mopping up the questions afterwards. It happens, every now and then, especially in summer when people are on holidays—people being the double-whammy of my colleagues and the tourists. I don’t mind it too much; it means I get to spend more time with the animals and less time with my computer. Wouldn’t want to do it every day, though. And anyway, it’s not like I don’t take holidays, although when I do there’s no immediate impact: the wheels of conservation showbiz continue to churn whether the comms and marketing woman is on-site or not.
That morning I’d watched as rippling horseshoes of groundswell fanned into Pirates Bay and jacked up in punchy peaks on the inside sandbar at the neck. All I wanted was to get home and go for a bodysurf, to let the salt and sand scour the day from my skin. But we were out of milk and my partner, Jem, was diving all day, which meant he couldn’t pick any up, what with him being underwater and all. So I had to detour to the shop at Port Arthur on my way home.
We live at Eaglehawk Neck, the shacky nearly-suburb that clusters the shorelines of the dual bays of Eaglehawk and Pirates. The bays—the former a mudflat-fringed lagoon of calm unless it’s blowing westerly (and then it’s a hall of wind, rooved by sky, walled by the hills of the Forestier and Tasman peninsulas, and carpeted by white horses), and the latter, a curve of blonde sand which merges into turquoise shallows that deepen into the rolling and ro
iling green of the Tasman Sea—are parted by a thin stretch of dune and a highway: the land-bridge that connects the Tasman Peninsula to mainland Tasmania; the isthmus; or, as Tasmanians call it, ‘the neck’.
In the years I’ve been living here, there have been two unsuccessful attempts to get a shop-type-establishment up and running at Eaglehawk Neck. The first was a couple of rough and ready empty-nester sea-changers from the northern suburbs of Hobart. She was an ex-canteen lady, who wore her hair in a cropped blonde perm and her torso in a magenta polar fleece, and he was a balding ex-plumber with a glass eye who wanted, and I quote, ‘a shit-free change in career’. Rumour had it that he lost his corporeal eye when, as a curious teenager, he opened a golf ball with a handsaw in his father’s shed. They ran the shop as if it were a school canteen, complete with pink kiss biscuits crusted with hundreds and thousands, pizza pockets and chicken burgers. They lasted one summer.
The second couple, who also lasted one summer and who were also sea-changers, were Melbourne-born hipsters in their early thirties. Their vision was, and again, I quote, of a ‘shabby chic Byron Bay-esque coastal cafe slash corner store with a lounge room vibe’. While the coffee and food were exceptional, it was a bit on the fancy side for most of the locals who were perplexed by individual items on the menu, such as kimchi, rillette and radicchio—‘You mean it’s not a fancy radish?’—and by many of the meals as a whole.
One morning, sitting by the window sipping my post-swim cold-pressed coffee, I overheard Linda Fish mutter to Shirley Fitzpatrick, ‘It’s one thing to poach a crab in butter, but it’s another to pickle an egg. And serve them together on a crumpet with watercress? Waste of a perfectly good crab if you ask me.’
To which Shirley replied, ‘Waste of a perfectly good crumpet, too. Nothing wrong with butter and honey in my book.’