The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  General consensus was that such a cafe would have been better suited catering to townies in North Hobart, or even the clientele on Bruny Island—the severed landmass on the other side of Storm Bay, which traces the south-east coast of mainland Tasmania.

  ‘They’re a bit more la-di-dah over there on Bruny, what with their gourmet cheese and white wallabies and all that shit.’

  The problem, in both cases, was the lack of business. They could get by in summer when everyone was down at their shacks and in need of bread and milk and a feed of wedges or a flat white branded with a foamy love heart or leaf, and when tourists were tripping about in campervans and wanted to stop off for a snack en route to Port Arthur or Remarkable Cave. But then autumn would come, and the shackies would head back to their town houses, and the traffic would thin to barely more than a trickle of locals, surfers and recreational tuna fishermen. The population of Eaglehawk residents just isn’t big enough to sustain its very own shop, and the surf’s too cold and fickle for a dependence on the surfer trade to be a viable business model, and the tuna fishermen are rushing to the boat ramp in the morning, or rushing to the pub in the twilight, which is probably why the pub—tiny as it is—can sustain itself at Eaglehawk Neck while a shop can’t quite seem to, and which is why, if Jem and I need milk, we have to make the trip south to the township of Port Arthur, just as I did, that day.

  And so, grimy and grumbly, I drove the fifteen minutes out of my way, past that house where Martin Bryant killed his first victims and then was later held up by the police, and on to the little town of asbestos shacks that cluster by the crumbly old sandstone penal settlement.

  I couldn’t avoid Terry Jones. He materialised—all belly, tufty moustache and Yamaha cap—in the shop doorway, blocking my path. I took a step back to make way for him as he pushed through the yellowing plastic strips that hung from the doorframe to guard the shop from flies. Somewhere inside, the doorbell chimed.

  ‘G’day, Terry,’ I said and made to move past him.

  ‘Lucy, ’ow are ya?’ He ripped the words from the back of his throat in one nasally go and shifted his weight, lurching to block my path. His gaze slid from my face to my chest.

  ‘Owareya?’ he strained again as he craned towards me. He pushed his face so close I could make out the broken crosshatch of veins on his cheeks and was engulfed by his stale, boozy tang. I stopped breathing. The way he was leering over me—for a bizarre moment, I thought maybe he was going to try to kiss me, but then I realised that, actually, he was trying his utmost to peer down my top. I could almost hear him think: This is them, then.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I replied, using the last of my air. I took a step back, out from the cool strip of shadow cast by the shop eave and into the sun, grabbing the chance to slug a belly-breath, which, although clear of Terry’s reek, was laced with heady bitumen and fuel from the car park.

  ‘Ho ho,’ Terry chuckled, swaying in the shadows, and as he agreed, ‘Yes, you are,’ he lifted the neatly rolled newspaper that had, up until that moment, been hanging loosely in his hand, and—in, what was for Terry a surprisingly coordinated act—used the space I’d created between us to punctuate his words by lightly rapping my breasts with the newspaper, one after the other, like they were the keys of a xylophone.

  I recoiled. I folded my arms over my chest and tucked my hands into the hollows of my sweaty, spiky armpits. Silently, I cursed the unyielding bulges that pressed into my forearms.

  The still pointed newspaper wavered in the air, then flopped flaccidly to Terry’s side, and from the look on his face, it seemed that if I was astonished by his actions, he was even more so. ‘Oh, sorry ’bout that,’ he stammered, blushing and blinking, confused, like someone just woken from a nap in the sun. ‘Just meant to say that it’s good to see you looking so well and all. It’s a compliment, ya see?’

  ‘Aha. Well. Thanks?’ I ventured. ‘Anyway, I’m after milk.’ He was still in my way but didn’t pick up on the hint, so after an incredibly awkward pause during which we both shuffled about a bit, looking at our feet, I nodded my head towards the shop door.

  ‘Oh, sorry. Right you are, Lucy. Well, we’re all so pleased for ya anyway,’ he mumbled as he lumbered out of my way; then, as if grasping for some semblance of normality, added: ‘And say g’day to Jem for me, oh, and Merry Christmas, if I don’t see youse before then.’

  As I sped in and out of the tangled knots of bracken and eucalyptus and the smooth folds of pea-green pasture that flank the highway, all I could think was: This place is unreal sometimes; fucking unreal.

  It’s funny, isn’t it? The way small details from specific moments stick in your head. I remember so clearly the way beads of perspiration gathered on the plastic milk carton sitting on the seat beside me, wetting the upholstery as I drove. Also, the fact that I wound down the window to let the cool air buffet my cheeks and claw at my hair.

  I mean, it’s not like you can take Terry Jones as a case example. His brain tissue’s melted in a sea of beer, and Jim Beam and Coke fortified with whatever moonshine-cum-paint-stripper he has ticking over in that shed of his at the time. Often his ankles don’t quite match up with his shins and his hands flop from his wrists like fish. A soft drunk, not hard. So helpless he’s found a place in everyone’s heart, almost like a pet. How ya going, Terry? Let’s get ya home.

  I guess what I’m saying is, I’m sure he didn’t intend to make actual contact—he had simply meant to gesture at them but had misjudged either the length of his newspaper or the size of my breasts—and when the paper hit the silicone he was jerked back to reality and became, quite suddenly, aware of the inappropriateness of his behaviour.

  It was all so slow-motioned, though. That’s what didn’t make sense. How could something like that be an accident if it takes so much time to happen?

  The thing is, it wasn’t just Terry.

  ‘If people know you’ve had breast cancer, they will stare at your breasts. It just happens,’ the breast-care nurse had told me, way back when.

  She was right. And then some.

  I remember this one time, at the pub. Col Fitzgerald catcalled: ‘Well, check ’em out! Pamela Anderson eat your heart out!’ His stubble-trimmed lips slackened into a content, boozy grin as he ogled me. He obviously had a few under his belt. He wouldn’t have been so crass if he hadn’t—or at least, not to my face. I mean, he’s normally an all-right sort. In that small-town, uneducated, misogynist kind of a way.

  I was stunned; stopped in my tracks like a mullet. Jem wasn’t, though. He frowned, glanced around, took in the way Col’s call sent a ripple of grins through the bar. Then he pressed his face right up to Col’s and snarled a what-for in a voice low enough for only Col to hear. Everyone quietened, waiting to see what would happen next, but Col turned back to his pint and that was that.

  Women, though, they were curious about my breasts in a different way.

  ‘Do you still have to wear a bra?’ they’d ask, adopting the cosy voice of a confidante and resting a hand on my forearm or in the small of my back, their eyes gleaming bright and eager.

  ‘What do they feel like?’

  ‘Do they float?’ Linda Fish asked me that.

  I don’t know, perhaps I was overreacting. Really, these were just a few isolated moments. Most people didn’t say anything, although their eyes did wander. It was like they didn’t think I’d notice, wouldn’t feel it on my skin. Feel it with my skin, which would raise goosebumps and excrete sweat, as if in retaliation to their gazes.

  The brazenness, the new liberty with which people treated my body—I guess more than anything it made me realise just how awkward everyone had been around me while I was sick. It was all avoidance and eggshells before, when all I had were scars and a bald head. And clearer still was the fact that it wasn’t so much the word remission but the fake breasts that relaxed everyone in my presence. That flick of the eyes, from my face to my chest, and I could see—almost feel—their shoulders soften, their exhale. It w
as as if when my breasts entered the room, the elephant that was my cancer exited via the other door.

  I asked myself then, and still ask myself now: why didn’t I spit a fuck-off at them? Why didn’t I, at Terry? The pre-cancer, presilicone-boobed Lucy would’ve. And I would now: the flat Lucy would. Back then, though, why didn’t I? What was it in their advances that made me crumple, then freeze, every bloody time?

  It was the words, whispering inside my head: your fault your fault your fault. A refrain that turned me into a wilting flower, bowed by silicone growths. And I hated myself for it: I hated myself for crumpling, and I hated myself for feeling that it was all my fault, because I knew that all I was doing was shaming myself, and what’s the good in that? So I’d kick myself all over again—shame myself for my shame.

  Oh to be in my head.

  Another thing I remember from that drive home was a sigh bursting from my mouth as I drove past the devil park. I hadn’t realised I’d been holding my breath until it escaped from me.

  It was still open. Its car park was chock-a-block with rentals and camera-wielding tourists, eager to catch a glimpse of the sullen little marsupials—refugees from the wild population whose faces blister and burst with contagious, cancerous sores.

  ‘Oh, so the cancer’s contagious?’ a tourist had queried, earlier that day. Not just a tourist: many tourists. Every tourist.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. And said and said. ‘It’s one of the only known cancers to behave as a contagious disease. Due to the extremely close genetic kinship within the entire devil population the infection is able to spread rapidly, mostly during mating when they bite at one another’s faces. Basically, because their genetic codes are so similar, the immune system of one devil doesn’t immediately recognise the tumour cells of another devil as not-self, and so effectively doesn’t put up a fight.’

  An Australian bloke, whose too-clean polo shirt skimmed remarkably pronounced nipples (a Queenslander, I assumed, to not only be wearing a polo shirt but also to be cold in weather like this), surprised me by musing: ‘So it’s their fault; they’re killing each other, poor little buggers.’

  I hadn’t heard it framed like that before: as fault. And then I’d felt the need to attribute blame in response, felt the need to make sense of the dividing cells in that tidy one-plus-one-equals-two kind of a way, by telling him: ‘Well, actually, if it’s the fault of anyone, it’d be the early European settlers who wrongly assumed the devils were killing their livestock and so hunted them to near extinction. That’s one of the main reasons the gene pool is so small and the cancer can travel so easily from devil to devil.’

  We always try to find fault and then organise our reactions accordingly, don’t we? And that’s what I was doing to myself.

  It’s my fault, I couldn’t stop thinking somewhere deep inside, even as I tried not to, even as I chided myself, shamed myself. It’s my fault, this attention my breasts are receiving; my fault because the problem wasn’t so much that everyone knew they were fake. Of course, everyone knew—small town and all that. Really, it’s just like how everyone knows Benny Thomas has a massive crop of dakka hidden somewhere in the bush between Taranna and Koonya and that he’s your best bet if ever you’re after some; and how everyone knows to stay on the good side of Kitty Plunkett because she’s not only as mad as a cut snake but also a vindictive council snitch. No. The problem was that my breasts were noticeably different; they were, quite literally, out there, and I’m pretty sure this was the reason that people felt free to commune with them.

  To be honest with you, the larger breasts were a knee-jerk decision. Or at least, I think they were. I hope they were. Jem made this sort of joke, way back at the beginning, after the doctor had explained that I would have a double mastectomy.

  ‘Well,’ he’d said, trying to smile, ‘let’s look on the bright side—you can get an even better pair when all this is over.’

  Maybe I took on his sentiment and subconsciously planned it.

  I don’t know, and I guess I’ll never know. You can never really know your subconscious, can you?

  But let me ask you this: What would you do?

  Put yourself in my shoes.

  It’s not an option to keep your natural body. You have to remake it, one way or another. So, what would you do?

  This is what I did: I paused, briefly, then decided: ‘A little bigger’, when they simulated my previous size. I paused again, then decided: ‘Just a tad more. Just a tad more. Yep, that’s it. Actually, just a tad more.’

  ‘You’re sure this is it?’ There was no judgement in the surgeon’s query; he was simply checking the measurements.

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  I was too slight to have breasts built from my own body fat, and so had been advised that silicone implants were my best option. I’d gone in intending to get the same breasts, or as close to them as they could manage, but what I realised as I stood there—frozen like a living statue, lit up in fluorescent light, with gel implant sizers spacing my useless bra—was that my old breasts were gone and nothing would bring them back. And there was something in that moment, which realisation—and, if I’m being honest with you, in Jem’s stupid comment—that caused me to recall two childhood episodes which were stamped in my memory, episodes I might have forgotten if it weren’t for the fact, despite the years that had passed, a sense of humiliation clung to them so profoundly they still had the capacity to affect me deeply. They still do now, even with the breasts been and gone.

  The first was of a sleepover at my friend Chloe Milligan’s house. There were six girls there that night: me and Chloe, Jacinta and Bonnie, Maggie and Sarah. We’d rolled our sleeping bags out in front of the television in the rumpus room and proceeded to watch back-to-back Disney movies while cramming potato chips and lollies—snakes, raspberries, milk bottles, pineapples, jelly babies, false teeth, black cats and the like—into our greedy red mouths. As each movie finished, Chloe would jump up, prod the eject button on the VCR player with one of the fingers I’d decorated so painstakingly with sparkly nail polish earlier that evening, and select a new video from the seemingly endless pile. One by one, the others fell asleep. As Ursula squelched and plotted in her cavernous lair in The Little Mermaid, I noticed that the numbers 4:45 glowed green on the digital clock (which meant it was the latest I’d ever stayed up), and that I was the last awake. Triumphantly, I let my eyes close.

  When we woke a few hours later, Chloe announced that because the sun was shining we would have a swim in the pool before breakfast on the deck. This was what I’d been looking forward to most since receiving the handwritten invitation from Chloe the Monday before. I’d been on holidays with my family in Queensland earlier that year and had managed to convince my mother to buy me a bikini. My first ever. I thought it was beautiful. It was pale blue with a navy blue trim and had a stencilled, navy blue hibiscus flower on the left triangle and right buttock. I hadn’t told anyone I had the bikini and had been waiting impatiently for the weather to warm up so that I could make my debut. We hastily stripped off our pyjamas and pulled our bathers on. Chloe was the only other girl with a bikini, I noticed smugly. We filed outside and stood shivering by the pool in the cool spring morning. Overtired, over-sugared and more than a tad cranky, I was frustrated that the others hadn’t been making a fuss of my new bathers, so I took matters into my own hands. Slyly, I said to Sarah: ‘I like your bathers.’ Actually, Sarah’s were childish and pink and plain, except for the Adidas logo in the middle of her chest.

  As I’d hoped, this caused Sarah to cast an admiring eye over my bikini in return. But, rather than complimenting me, as I was anticipating, Sarah’s eyes bulged.

  ‘Lucy’s got boobies!’ she shouted gleefully to the others, pointing to my chest. ‘Look!’

  As the girls gathered around me, goggling, I looked down at my chest and saw that Sarah was right. The cold had made my nipples go hard and I saw that the flesh around them was visibly raised; my fledgling breasts, accentuate
d by the bikini triangles, were quite discernible through the lycra.

  Even though the change was slight, in that moment, it seemed to me that a gulf had opened between my friends and I. It wasn’t so much that they all seemed smaller and younger; it was that all of a sudden, I felt I was much bigger than them all, more bumbling, something like an oaf (although, in reality, I was shorter than Sarah and Bonnie, slimmer than Jacinta and Maggie and older only than Chloe). Inexplicable guilt welled up in my chest.

  The second recollection was of getting changed after PE in the dingy change room of my high school gym. It was some years later and, despite my early start, a significant portion of the girls in my year had overtaken me. It had been, perhaps, six months since I realised that my breasts had stopped growing. Each morning, I would put on my humble bra and notice the way in which it cupped my breasts snugly, but not too snugly, and would feel a pang of bitter disappointment. Meanwhile, I watched the way in which other girls wobbled in glee. They would loudly complain that their backs and necks hurt from holding them up, and I’d nod along like I knew what they were talking about.

  There was one particular girl whose breasts I envied above all others. Whenever Cassie Barnett took her shirt off in the change rooms and leant forward to get something from her bag, her breasts would swing down, bulging against her bra like swollen water-balloons. I couldn’t help but steal envious glances at her deep, creamy cleavage every chance I got. One day, Cassie caught me looking and loudly guffawed. ‘Enjoying the show? What are you? A lesbian?’

  I blushed deeply, and Chloe and Bonnie, who were nearby, shot me sharp, disapproving glances.

  I fretted that word would get out, but it didn’t, perhaps because—if I’m honest with you—I was small and popular and a bit of a bitch in a ‘cool girl’ way, while Cassie was robustly built and unpopular. More likely, what saved me was the general consensus that Cassie herself was a lesbian, because, of the school uniform options, she chose to wear the maroon polo shirt favoured by the boys rather than the button-up white blouse any self-respecting girl would wear, and even though she never wore her windcheater, she always had it tied around her waist.