by Erin Hortle
How Lucy had soared with the octopus flung out in front of her the night before last. Its legs rippled slowly, like it was floating through the air. Even as Flo watched in dumbstruck horror, it had seemed to her one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen: Lucy and the octopus suspended, hand in hand, contained by the beams of the car’s headlights. Was it really only two nights ago? The texture of the scene was such that Flo had felt like she was remembering it, even as it was all unfolding. She and Poppy had just stood there, side by side, silently watching them, and it felt like the moment—which in reality must’ve only lasted seconds—slowed and throbbed in a way that was somehow detached from the normal stream of time.
And then they hit the ground with a crash that made Flo clench her teeth and fanny, and everything became a flicker of people’s faces: the traumatised driver, who kept saying, over and over, ‘I didn’t mean to’, the paramedics, and Jem. Then they all left, and Flo and Poppy were still just standing there, surrounded by limp octopus bodies they’d collected. Of course, they still had to beat them. It’d be a shame to let all that meat go to waste.
Jem had phoned the next day, just as she and Poppy had finished pickling. He told Flo that Lucy was cut up pretty badly but that she’d be all right. She was sleeping like the dead, he said.
‘But she’s not dead,’ he added hastily, as if worried his words might do something.
‘She’s gonna be all right,’ Flo told Poppy.
A crepe paper smile burst onto Poppy’s face and sent a cloud of powder into the air. She threw her arms around Flo’s neck, and they danced around the kitchen, hugging like schoolgirls for a bit. They couldn’t have forgiven themselves if Lucy had died or been permanently injured. Not that it was their fault, but still, if it weren’t for them Lucy would have never been there. Poppy planted exaggerated kisses on Flo’s cheeks over and over, and then trotted off with a basket full of jars of octopus and that gorgeous, relieved smile still crumpling her cheeks and glossing her eyes.
When she got home, there was an ambulance out the front of her house.
Flo’s gazing across the neck to the crouched, brown–green hills of the Forestier Peninsula and the beginning of the rest of Tasmania, phone in hand. Poppy’s just hung up. Con’s waking up from his anaesthetic, and Poppy is needed.
It was the same paramedics as the night before—the ones who had come for Lucy—Poppy told Flo just now. She said the whole time they were driving up to Hobart—them in the ambulance, her following in the car—she couldn’t help but worry they hadn’t had any sleep.
‘Drowsy drivers die,’ she’d said, reciting the warning emblazoned on those roadside signs that flashed past her, intermittently, the whole way up to town.
Oh yeah, and speeding shatters lives, Flo thinks to herself, sighing. That’s another one of those signs; that’s the writing that goes with the X-ray image of broken bones. Turns out clearing out the gutters shatters lives too.
What had happened was, Con had fallen off the roof while he was clearing the gutters and he was lucky to only break both of his legs. But because of his age and the nature of the breaks, he’s going to be in plaster for a while, and then rehab for a while longer. While he was in surgery, Poppy dropped by Lucy’s room to see how she was, but she was asleep. She’d try again later, Poppy told Flo. But in the meantime, she’s been talking to her kids about where to now for her and Con, and the plans are already in motion. (It’s quick, but Flo knows that those kids have been plotting something of this nature for their parents—something conventional and old person-y—for some time, and Con’s tumble has given them the perfect excuse.) The plan is: Poppy and Con are going to move into an orderly, one-storey house in a suburb near Hobart, where a layer of bitumen will keep the ground outside level, which will mean that Poppy can wheel Con about. They’ll be able to frequent the Greek Club and catch up with their long-neglected friends and community. They’ll be closer to their children and grandchildren, and everything will be easier. Or that’s what Poppy told Flo.
Flo turns from the view and puts her phone down on the coffee table.
But what about me? she had wanted to ask. But of course, she didn’t.
What would have happened if she had? Flo wonders.
The lonely reality is that it’s likely nothing would have happened if she’d said those words to Poppy—or likely not much at all; Poppy would have just blathered awkwardly into the phone, and her eyes and mouth would have crinkled into a grimace, and that would have been it. She still would have moved, because Con’s her husband, and Flo’s someone she can leave behind.
That makes it seem like Flo’s bitter. She’s not—she gets it. She’s just lonely, because despite the fact she’s only known Poppy is going, going, gone, for five minutes or so, she already misses her a surprising amount, and because missing Poppy is nowhere near as bad as missing Gray, who has been gone for too long and, really, that’s the crux of the problem. It’s not Poppy leaving, although it’s always hard to lose a friend; it’s that Gray left her long before he should have.
Gray.
Her Gray.
Gray Seaborne.
What a romantic name for a rummin of a man.
She loved him equal parts fiercely and banally, which is the best and most thorough way to love.
Flo sighs.
She misses him so much. People say that, don’t they? I miss him so much it hurts. And it does. At times the emptiness in the house presses down on her until the weight of it turns to a dull ache in her chest and a painful lump in her throat. As if nothing can weigh something. But it can. The weight of his hands not on her hurts.
She’s been told by numerous people that she should try to find someone else. That it’s time. That with the internet these days it’s easy. But how is a woman her age supposed to start again? It’s like this:
When she was in her early forties, she and Gray were sat in the bath together. He had his knees folded under his chin; she had one leg wedged between his narrow hip and the bath, and the other hanging over the side. Water was dripping from the tips of her toes onto the bathmat. They were chatting about something ordinary—she can’t remember what; likely, she was going up to the shops in Sorell, the town with the closest supermarket, the next day and was asking him if there was anything in particular he wanted to eat for dinner over the coming week—when she became suddenly aware of her nudity. It wasn’t that she became shy, it was that she became self-conscious. Although, strangely, it wasn’t Gray that she felt self-conscious in front of, it was herself. She found herself thinking: What would a younger version of me have thought of this—of me, comfortably, if not mundanely, splayed in front of a man with all of my girl bits opened right up? He could look right up my fanny if he wanted to. To a younger version of herself—to her fifteen-year-old self, say, whose morphing body felt like an awkward secret—the idea would have been so alien as to be unthinkable. And yet there she was. The shock of the past Flo, the young Flo, wouldn’t have been so much directed at the nudity, but at the present Flo’s attitude to it: how could her nipples not be hard? How could his gaze not have raised them? Her nipples, along with hot little goosebumps, a blush, a slick between her legs? How could she not be terrified by his proximity to her naked body and by her proximity to his … penis, bobbing there in the tepid water?
It’s like she’s become that fifteen-year-old version of herself all over again. The idea of sitting in the bath in such a humdrum way with someone else is shocking to the point it’s utterly incomprehensible. So when people say she should try to move on, what she wants to know is how? You can’t manufacture that sort of familiarity; you can’t just make it happen by willing it. And the idea of becoming aroused by someone else in the bath? While terrifying, to her fifteen-year-old self it would have seemed like the most thrilling prospect imaginable; but to Flo now, it’s just, well … No, she was done with love like that when Gray was done in by his love of smokes.
Flo sighs again. It’s not that she would
n’t quite like sex again. It’s just that. Well. You know.
And now Poppy’s gone too, ripped from her life all because of a clogged gutter, an old codger who should have known the job was beyond him, and conniving kids who couldn’t be arsed driving an hour or two to visit their folks, so jumped at the first opportunity to shift them up to town.
Flo decides to put herself to use. All this thinking about the bath has inspired her. She dons rubber gloves and fishes the bottle of bleach from the cupboard. The bath isn’t that dirty—it’s only her who uses it these days, after all—but she dribbles bleach onto the rim anyway, and watches it trickle to the base.
Before she can start scrubbing, the phone rings again. She dashes like a pathetically eager puppy to answer it, near crashing into the table in her haste to scoop it up.
‘Mum.’ The sound of her youngest son’s voice hits her ear. ‘How’re you going?’
She presses the receiver to the side of her head with her shoulder and walks back into the bathroom.
‘Harry. I’m all right,’ she tells him. ‘I’m fine. What’s news?’
‘News, hey?’ He laughs, a touch nervously, it sounds to Flo. ‘News is I’m sick of this shit and I’m coming home. I’ve booked my flight. I’ve got two more rotations in the mine left on my contract, and then I’m back for good.’
‘Back for good?’ Flo echoes. She slumps down on the bathroom floor and leans her back against the edge of the bath.
‘Yep,’ Harry says.
‘And you’ll be coming back … here?’
Harry chuckles. ‘If that’s all right?’
‘Course it’s all right,’ she says, frowning. She can’t decide if this is excellent news or terrible news. Is his tail between his legs? ‘Let me know what time your plane gets in and I’ll pick you up.’
‘Nah, don’t worry about it. I’ve got a mate who’s selling me an old HiLux for a song. It was his grandfather’s, but, you know—he carked it before the car did. Diesel. Only three hundred thousand on the clock.’
‘Only three hundred thousand?’ she squawks.
‘It’s an eighties series, like the one Dad used to have but single-cab. They go forever. Three hundred’s nothing. I’ll be down in the arvo, on the fifteenth.’
‘Arvo of the fifteenth,’ she says. ‘Righto.’
‘Catch you then, Mum.’
‘Righto, catch you then.’
She hangs up and tosses the phone to the bathroom floor, then turns to the bath and begins to scrub.
Harry’s coming, she thinks, as bleach sterilises her nostrils. He’s coming back on the fifteenth. But, whoops—she forgot to ask: the fifteenth of which month?
She tugs the now bleach-wet gloves from her hands so she can dial his number. She knows it off by heart, just like she knows all her boys’ numbers off by heart, and Poppy’s number, too.
She doesn’t bother with a greeting. They only just did that. Instead, when he answers, she opens with: ‘What month?’
‘Hey?’ he asks.
‘The fifteenth of what month?’
‘Oh, right, March. So I’ll be back in a bit over a couple of months. That okay?’
‘Course it is,’ she says. ‘I’ll have your room ready for you.’
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘And Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘Could you have some lamingtons ready too?’
‘Course,’ she says.
As she finishes off the bath, she smiles quietly to herself.
It’s the Regatta Day long weekend in February, and Jake’s family have all descended on the shack down at Doo Town. Jake’s great-grandfather had named the shack ‘Doo Catch a Fish’ back when he built the place in the late forties, but when Jake’s dad and his brothers were growing up they called it ‘Doo Whack ’Em’, which means the same thing but doesn’t sound so daggy and posh. The name stuck so much that his grandmother painted it in neat white letters on a plank of Tas oak and nailed it to the post, beneath the old, faded sign, which she also touched up with white paint while she was at it. ‘For history’s sake,’ she said. The Tuesday after the Regatta Day public holiday is a student-free day at school, and all the grownups have organised to have it off work as well so they can stay down for four whole days.
On the Monday morning of their stay, Jake’s grandmother announces she wants to make blackberry jam, and so Jake, his sister, Emma, and their cousins are each handed a plastic bucket and instructed not to return to the shack until they’ve filled the containers with blackberries.
‘Don’t eat them,’ their grandmother warns. ‘They’re for the jam, not your gobs.’
It’s what the kids are always made to do when they’re down at the shack at Doo Town this time of year. When he was little, he loved picking the berries, but now he finds it a chore. He’d rather be fishing with his dad and uncles, or even by himself, than hang out berry-picking with the girls. Especially now, with the way they treat him. Like he’s dog poo, just because he’s the only boy.
‘Just you wait, they’ll grow out of it,’ his mother had said, ruffling his hair like she still thought he was five. ‘It’s just a phase. People always say: boys will be boys. But you know, girls will be girls, too.’
They scurry up to where a thicket of blackberry bushes sprawls in a ditch between the road and paddock. Emma and their cousins move off in a knot, leaving Jake to pick alone. He doesn’t mind. If anything, he prefers it that way. He’s embarrassed by the fact that his colourblindness doesn’t allow him to fully distinguish the black from red; he has to pick by texture, methodically squeezing every single berry to make sure it’s ripe.
The others fill their buckets in no time. Once they’re done, they gather like clouds to survey his work; their swift little hands tear down the mound that had formed in the expanse of his bucket, searching for the unripe berries that have snuck past his blind eyes and through his clumsy fingers.
‘Red!’ Kate, the biggest cousin, shrieks as she plucks a presumably crimson berry from Jake’s haul. ‘Red!’ She licks her lips as she finds another, and then another.
He catches Emma’s eye. She just smiles at him, half smug, half apologetic. Payback for the fact that Jake got the last punch in when they were wrestling earlier.
‘You see like a dog. Dog! Dog! Here, Rover! Fetch, Rover!’ Kate throws the unripe berries back at the bush, laughing.
‘Piss off!’ He pushes past them and runs back down to the house, thongs snapping at his heels and stupid, stupid tears pricking the corners of his eyes. Stupid tears. It’s not like he’s sad or upset or anything.
He gets his revenge later that day. He’s sitting, legs dangling off the jetty, feet arched to stop his thongs from falling into the water, lazily spinning for squid. With a stab of excitement, he feels a squid grab his jig as, out of the corner of his eye, he sees the girls approach. As he eases it out of the water, they rush over—morning nastiness forgotten—to see what he’s caught. With a lumpy grudge still fresh in his throat, Jake flicks the squid in their direction. It flies through the air and ejaculates a shower of inky ribbons, which splatter across the cousins’ bare toes, only just missing Emma.
Jake grins in triumph as the cousins shriek in disgust, dancing away from the squid, which is now lying on a pancake of bird shit, flexing its tentacles.
Jake’s satisfaction, however, is short-lived. Kate—of course it’s Kate—breaks ranks and barrels towards him. Two well-placed palms wallop into his chest, cannoning him backwards off the jetty and into the water, fishing rod in tow. The fortunate squid, still clinging to the jig, arcs a firework of ink in its wake.
The freefall, the splash, the sudden submersion, all shock him. He doesn’t even have time to grab at any air before he’s under and sinking with the weight of his clothes. He lets go of his rod and claws his way to the surface. As he breaks through with a panicky gasp, he hears the sound of an outboard motor and his father and uncles’ hooting laughter—their boat must’ve rounded the scrubby headland just in tim
e for them to witness the scene. He ducks his head back under the ruffled green surface of the water, opens his eyes and watches the blurry shape of his fishing rod sink towards the sand. The boat cruises past; its muted reverberations team with the throb of cold in his ears. When the oxygen in his lungs turns stale he pulls back up, gasping again at the cloud-mottled sky.
Above him, on the jetty, Emma and the cousins have crowded around the boat and are laughing with their fathers.
He glares at them, takes a deep breath and dives back under. It takes two breaststrokes to reach the bottom. The sand fades into a murky horizon that sways with the slight swell. He scoops up his rod then pushes off the sand with his bare feet. His thongs have gone. He didn’t even notice when. Back on the surface, he looks around to see if they’re floating nearby. They’re not. He looks back under, to see if he can spot them, but the saltwater is rasping at his eyes. He’ll have to come back with his mask and snorkel later to find them, or do some thorough dobbing to see if he can get one of the grownups to make Kate come back with her mask and snorkel. Yeah, that’s what he’ll do. He rolls onto his back and frog-kicks to the rusty ladder. But the dads have all seen it, and they’re not even telling her off, he realises, so what good would dobbing even do? Bedraggled, shame tarnishing his cheeks, he climbs up onto the jetty, sodden clothes clinging to his bony frame. The empty squid jig, dangling from the still-extended line of his fishing rod, bumps up the rungs behind him. He squelches past the group on the jetty, ignoring his father’s calls to come and see the bluefin he’s caught.