The Octopus and I

by Erin Hortle

  Within minutes, they struck again. As they dragged their new prey to the shore, I floated towards them. A moth, drawn in by the torchlight.

  ‘That you, Lucy?’

  I started a little at the way Flo’s voice ripped through the air. ‘Well g’day,’ she said. ‘How ya doing, girl?’ She had a knife clutched in her fist and was kneeling on the sand beside Poppy, who had draped her body over the squirming octopus like a human cage.

  ‘Not bad, thanks. How’re you going?’

  ‘All right. Whatcha doing out here?’

  Before I could answer, she turned to Poppy and the octopus. Poppy shuffled herself back, giving Flo the room she needed to behead the octopus with a sawing slice. Then they both turned to face me, ready for my answer, like what they’d just done was nothing out of the ordinary.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I said. ‘Just mooching. Octopus, ay?’ I was uncomfortably aware of the way my consonants were drawling and my vowels were becoming harsh as I parroted Flo’s tone back at her. Funny isn’t it, how that happens?

  I watched as Flo worked the beak out from between the octopus’s legs and flung it away. And you know what? To my surprise, I found the blunt, down-to-earth competence that underpinned her movements enchanted me all the more.

  This is real, I found myself thinking. This is life, stripped back. No bullshit. There’s nothing transcendent about this scene; this is a scene of immersion. Thigh deep in the salt and elbow deep in the ink and slime.

  ‘Yep. Octopus,’ she agreed. ‘Gonna pickle ’em up tomorrow, eh, Pop?’

  ‘Ναι,’ Greek Poppy nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Gonna get another one? Need a hand?’ I found myself asking, somewhat impulsively.

  ‘Nah, not tonight. Be honest with you, we’ve got too many already.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Flo must’ve sensed my disappointment, because she said kindly: ‘Tell you what, though, come round to my place tomorrow at, say, ten? Eh, Pop?’

  ‘Yes, ten.’

  ‘We’ll teach you to pickle ’em. Like I said, we got a bit carried away tonight, and they make a good Chrissy present. But you have to tell people they won’t be good to eat for a week or so. Let the vinegar settle and all that.’

  ‘Righto. Cheers. Ten. Sounds good!’

  Jem was slightly frantic when I rematerialised.

  ‘Where’ve you been? You’ve been gone ages!’

  ‘I ran into Flo Seaborne and Greek Poppy, octopussing,’ I told him. ‘Is that how you say it? Octopussing? Octopus fishing doesn’t seem right—they’re not fish.’

  He shushed me and pulled me into a bear hug. ‘You know I love you, and that’s what matters, don’t you?’

  ‘They’re going to show me how to pickle them tomorrow,’ I told him, then added: ‘I love you, too.’

  ‘And just so you know,’ Jem murmured, ‘I think “octopussing” is slang for an eight-woman orgy. That wasn’t what Greek Poppy and Flo were up to, was it?’

  I laughed out a snort that was half a scoff, then reached up, looped my arms around his neck and lifted my chin so that he could kiss me on the mouth.

  The next day I headed over to Flo’s house at ten. I drove, although I probably should have walked; I just wasn’t sure how much octopus I’d be carting home with me and, while walkable, it’s a bit of a trek from her place to ours. We live on the Pirates Bay side of Eaglehawk Neck, down towards the jetty, but tucked up in the bush, and looking east towards sunrise and ocean, while Flo and Poppy both live on the north face of the Tasman Peninsula, looking across Eaglehawk Bay to the bush of the Forestier Peninsula. On the southern side of the isthmus, you either look north or east; you either live perched on the north-facing slope and nestled into the black peppermints and she-oaks, or on the eastern plane of the hills in one of the cliff-hanging McMansions or in the shacky bush suburb, tucked up against the national park.

  It’s a funny, incoherent place, Eaglehawk Neck. There’s no planning or unity to the suburb. The houses are a mismatch of eras and materials, as properties were subdivided and new dwellings sprang up: old fibro shacks with decaying utes abandoned in their yards; log cabins framed by banksias with wide verandas; brick houses with trimmings so neat and tidy they scream suburban pride, some of which were rendered up in the late nineties or early noughties in an attempt to turn them trendy again; kit Colorbond monstrosities straight from the shop; and jaunty shipping container mini-houses that suggest off-grid living, even though they’re plugged into the mains.

  Our place is one of the old weatherboard shacks, circa 1940s, insulated and modernised into a warm and comfy home. We’re at the back of the bush suburb on a couple of acres, and the way the height of the trees and the fall of the land works, you wouldn’t even know we have neighbours—not that we really do; they’re all shackies anyway, only down in the school holidays.

  Of course, there is that other suburb of Eaglehawk: Doo Town, the cluster of black, sump-oiled, Tas oak shacks, all of which are branded with doo-themed names that range from the hospitable ‘Doo Drop In’, to the more jazzy ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, to the contented ‘Thistle Doo Me’. Doo Town is located right near the boat ramp, and is such a microcosm it has its own postcode, distinct from the rest of Eaglehawk, so it’s not really a suburb of Eaglehawk at all, but its own little territory.

  ‘They’re a rare breed down there,’ Jem’s been known to say. ‘Rough as guts and kitsch as kittens.’

  But I digress; to get to Flo’s I drove north, not south, so there wasn’t a doo in sight, although when Flo answered the door, she did say to me, ‘Lucy, do come in.’

  That was a joke. She didn’t really. She’d scoff if anyone spoke so formally. Stick up the arse, that one.

  ‘Lucy, how are ya?’ was what I was really greeted with when she opened the front door. I was standing on her porch, admiring the magnificently flowering leucadendron in her garden. It was one of those orange spiky ones which look a lot like waratahs but aren’t native, but that native birds have a field day in nonetheless. She was wearing blue jeans that looked freshly ironed and her hair was plaited down her back.

  ‘Yeah, I’m all right. How’re you?’

  ‘Good, good,’ she said. ‘Come on in. We’re just making a cuppa.’

  She led me into a carpeted lounge room, which was furnished with a free-standing wood heater, a shelf of framed photos, a squashy-looking brown leather three-seater couch, which had a cream, pink and navy crocheted throw draped along its headrest, and two old tweed armchairs that looked just like the chairs my grandparents used to own. On the walls were two timber-framed maps of the Tasman Peninsula—one that looked as though it was from colonial times, and the other, mid-twentieth century—and the husk of an enormous crayfish, mounted on a piece of Huon pine. She headed through the archway into the kitchen, but I diverged from her path so I could take a closer look at the trophy.

  ‘Is this cray real?’ I called.

  ‘Yep,’ came the reply from the kitchen. ‘Biggest one Gray ever caught.’

  ‘Potting or diving?’ I asked.

  ‘Potting. Gray weren’t much of a diver, but he was a potter through and through. Bloody loved it.’

  I moved from inspecting the cray to the shelf of photos. I figured that the man standing in front of the skeleton of this same house, hammer in hand, must’ve been Flo’s husband, Gray. Handsome bugger, tall and lean, and a potter through and through to boot. The squinty-eyed and gummy-mouthed babies were grandchildren, I assumed; the photos looked too new for them to feasibly be children. Those two couples smiling triumphantly from their wedding photos—two of them must be Flo’s children. And there, behind them, was a photo of four knobbly-kneed, grinning boys ordered from tallest to shortest, each holding a speckled flathead up for the camera. All her children for sure: the family resemblance was striking. The fish were similarly ordered longest to shortest and I smiled, wondering if they had caught them in that order or if it was staged for the geometric aesthetic of the photo and if so, by wh
om. Flo struck me as too organic to orchestrate such tidy patterning, but perhaps Gray was a man of order.

  ‘Four boys?’ I said to Flo as I entered the kitchen.

  ‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Bloody lot of work in mothering that throng, I tell you.’ She was fussing about, lighting the gas-top under the kettle and spooning tea-leaves from the dog-eared cardboard box into the teapot. Greek Poppy was perched at the table, hair fixed in a bun, powdered up like a marshmallow.

  ‘How d’you like your tea?’ Flo asked me.

  ‘Black.’

  She nodded her head approvingly and said: ‘Same as both of us. Good to keep these things simple, I reckon,’ and I felt like I was one of them.

  She’s a natterer, Flo is. While we sat there, sipping our tea, she told me how they never really thought much of octopus until Poppy and Con showed up on the peninsula, fresh from the Hydro (and before that, fresh from the boat), near thirty years ago.

  ‘Course, we thought they were crazy,’ she said, ‘and it didn’t help that they barely had a word of English between them when they first got here—not that they’ve got much now; she barely understands a word of what I say, eh, Pop?’

  ‘What?’ Poppy smiled conspiringly, and Flo chuckled.

  ‘Well, I don’t understand much of what she says neither,’ Flo said, ‘but I tell you what, I understand more than I did when they first got here.’

  She told me how Poppy and Con were selling jars of pickled octopus and other ‘wog stuff’ at the show one year and she said to Gray, ‘Let’s give some of that stuff a crack.’ ‘We did, and we loved it,’ she told me now. ‘So I muscled in on their operation one night. I was just wandering around in the dark, bit like you were last night, and saw them at it. Hur hur hur’—she chuckled again and gave Poppy a wink—‘not at it at it, at the octopus, I mean! I went up to them and pretty much had to mime that I wanted them to show me how, and the rest’s history.’

  She told me about how Con had all ‘them problems’ with his hips and knees—from too many years roofing—and so couldn’t come anymore, and that she and Poppy struggle a little too; that it takes two of them to do what they used to be able to do on their own. Then she said: ‘You’ll come next time, give us old birds a hand, won’t ya?’

  And I couldn’t keep the grin from my face. ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘It’s the beating of them that gets me these days. You gotta throw your weight into it and I lose balance,’ Flo said.

  ‘Beating?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep. Gotta tenderise them after you catch them. Else they’re like old boots. We beat them up on the road. Good hard surface. Once, some tourists stopped and had a go at us. Animal cruelty, they said! Course, they didn’t realise that we’d already cut their heads off, and when I told them so they were even more shocked. Mouths going like goldfish.’

  We chatted as we boiled the octopuses in a big pot with wine, onions and herbs, sipping fresh cups of tea all the while.

  ‘This was Gray’s old cray boiler, this was,’ Flo said.

  When Poppy removed the lid to check the progress, it let out a belch of briny steam.

  In another large pot, Poppy brought a vinegar, sugar and spice mix to the boil.

  ‘My jam pot,’ Flo told me, nodding her head at it. ‘I’ll have to give it a good and proper scrub out after this, else my apricot jam’ll be chutney!’

  It smelt so harsh it chafed the back of my throat.

  ‘It’ll settle, it will,’ Flo said as I coughed. ‘Just give it a week at least.’

  After a bit, Poppy drained the octopuses. The foamy scum, brought forth by the boiling process, gathered in a crescent around the plughole, too light to be carried with the rest of the fluid down the drain. Then the three of us sliced the octopuses into chunks and packed the chunks into jars, which had been waiting, sterilised in the oven. Poppy poured the vinegar mix over the top and we sealed the jars.

  We were onto our next pot of tea when the lids popped reassuringly.

  ‘You know, there was something terribly wholesome about it all. It was just so authentic,’ I told Jem as I looped a length of twine around the neck of a jar, just below the lid. I pulled the folds of the bow gently until they sat neat and even, then trimmed the tails so that they were the same length. ‘It was like, watching them last night—they were hunter-gatherers, living off the land. So decisive, so confident, so …’ I couldn’t quite figure out how to convey to him the impression they’d given off without sounding naff. ‘In the ecosystem?’ I tried. ‘You know, properly in nature?’

  Jem nodded, barely glancing up from the synoptic chart displayed on the screen in front of him.

  ‘The Tasmanian landscape—it’s made for this type of living. It’s not made for imported agriculture. That just fucks everything. Do you think Aboriginal women would have caught octopuses? There? At the neck?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Jem shrugged, then added uselessly: ‘They got abs and mutton-birds.’

  I already knew that. Everyone knows that.

  ‘And then today,’ I pressed on, ‘learning to preserve food like that—and not just jams and condiments, but real food—to make the most of the going when it’s good and setting yourself up for times when it’s not. It’s a survival thing, isn’t it.’

  ‘Totally,’ Jem agreed absently.

  ‘But it’s more than that, I think,’ I continued. ‘There’s something romantic about it all. Particularly the inter-generational element; it’s like this knowledge or skill set is being passed down to me.’

  ‘Secret women’s business?’ Jem smirked, finally looking up.

  ‘Shut up.’ I meant for it to come out good-naturedly, but the words had sounded brittle, so I tried to catch his eye and give him a smile to let him know I was all right and he was all right. But he’d already turned back to the screen. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me. For some reason his lack of response made me hum with irritation and I found myself thinking, with more spite than’s comfortable, that what I’d enjoyed most about my time with Flo and Poppy was that I’d forgotten all about the lumps of silicone sitting beneath my skin; I’d lost myself and my body in the experience of processing the octopuses with Flo and Poppy in a way that I could no longer lose myself and my body in Jem, and it was the happiest I’d felt in a long while.

  ‘Is this octopus from the neck?’ Scott, Jem’s father, asked when I handed him the gift two days later, on Christmas, right after lunch but before dessert, as is Jem’s family tradition.

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  ‘You know what they reckon about those octopuses?’ He held the jar up to the light. The sucker-covered chunks floated in the vinegar mix, which glowed amber in the sunlight. It looked like a prop from a vintage horror film: perfect for a mad scientist’s office. ‘They reckon the peninsula used to be an island and the octopuses that live in the bay used to swim through the small channel—now closed over by the neck—to the open ocean to breed. It’s evolutionary, you know, natural selection. The ones that went through the neck when it was open were more likely to make it than the ones that went around the bottom of the peninsula, past all the seal colonies around Tasman Island. That’s why you see more octopuses in the bay when the surf is big: it’s the call of the ocean. Lures them in.’

  ‘Marram grass was introduced as a dune-binder,’ Jem nodded. ‘We’ve probably fucked it for them, fixing the neck in place like that. The highway’s the cherry on top. It’s just like the Gold Coast. Dunes are meant to wander.’

  ‘Hang on,’ May interjected, eyeing her brother and father sceptically. ‘That sounds like a load of bull. I’m pretty sure octopuses aren’t migratory.’

  ‘Well, some of them are so desperate to get to the ocean they try to walk across land, but they don’t make it. And—’ May started to say something, but Scott raised his voice, cutting her off.

  ‘They’ve examined them,’ he said. ‘All the specimens so far have been females carrying eggs.’

  I was shocked by how much Scott’s words affec
ted me; by the way they instantly stained my memories of that evening watching Flo and Poppy, then the morning helping them with … what? The ink of maternal desperation? I shook my head—I mean, how melodramatic can you get?—and shushed myself. That’s just life, isn’t it? And it’s like Flo always says: you can’t look at these things like that.

  Meanwhile, May said: ‘They’ve examined them? Who’s they?’

  Scott took a slug of his beer, eyed his daughter, puffed himself up, and said: ‘Well …’

  ‘Well what?’ May smirked.

  ‘Well, people,’ Scott said, digging at the wax in his ear with his pinkie. ‘You know. Scientists and all that.’

  May snorted. ‘Ohhhh, “scientists”?’ she scoffed, making quotation marks with her fingers. ‘Really? What scientists?’

  Knowing Scott wasn’t one to back down, and knowing May’s a chip off the old block even though she does her best to deny it, I took out my phone. ‘Here—I’ll google it,’ I offered, hoping to curb the brewing argument.

  There was a moment or two of silence as I sifted through web pages.

  ‘You know, I reckon out of everything down there, octopuses are the creepiest, and the cheekiest,’ Scott mused. ‘I remember this one time, diving off Maria Island. I’d been feeling pretty spooked as it was, because there’d been a few sightings of a big shark in the area. You know what it’s like. You catch a glimpse of something in your peripherals then wham! The adrenalin hits, but it’s just kelp swaying, and all you can hear is the boom boom boom of your heart. I was at this place we used to call the supermarket. There was this series of shelves stacked one on top of another and the crays would sit in them, lined up like groceries at the shop, waiting to be plucked. Bulls with tails as big as footballs. We loved going there because it was such easy picking on the cray-front—always grabbed a couple for dinner, not that you could do that now. Anyway, I’d found this overhang right at the bottom that was dripping with abs. I was chipping them off the roof and letting them fall to the sand, when out of the darkness something grabbed my wrist. Well, it scared the shit out of me, and, I joke you not—I sucked my mouthpiece bloody halfway down my windpipe! I came out of the cave feet first and gagging like a hooker—’