by Erin Hortle
‘But are you going to do anything about it?’ he persists. ‘Lucy, it’s … it’s manslaughter.’
‘I know. But … I mean, it was just a prank, you know? It was just a prank,’ she repeats the words, like she’s trying to convince herself. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. It’s all so fucked. How did it all get so fucked? What do you think I should do?’ She presses her face into his chest again as she waits for his reply.
Harry pauses for a moment, and realises he doesn’t know. Not because he doesn’t know, but because he does know and it seems too easy: dob Jem in, end up with Lucy, live happily ever after.
But he’s too close to it. He’s too tangled up in it. It’s not his place. Or if it is, it’s not the place he wants to be; it’s not the person he wants to be. It’s wrong. Even though he knows what’s right, he knows it’s wrong. He can’t benefit from a man’s death like that. And he can’t fuck Jem’s missus then get him arrested, all in the space of twenty-four hours.
‘I don’t know if these things should just go unpunished,’ he mumbles. ‘But. I dunno. It’s up to you, Luce. It’s not my place. None of this is my place.’
Lucy makes an indistinct sound, which muffles into his sternum. Then she looks up at him and asks, voice all small: ‘Do you think Mitch will tell Jem?’
This? Harry thinks, uneasily. This is what’s worrying her most?
‘I don’t know,’ Harry says slowly. ‘Maybe.’ And as he asks, ‘Are you going to tell Jem?’, he squirms inwardly because he realises he’s no different from her. Because, for him, this is the real question, and the other question—Are you going to dob Jem in?—matters to him most because he so badly wants her to remove Jem from her life, to shuck Jem from her skin the way Jem shucks abalone after abalone from boulders and clefts, day in, day out. Harry cares about justice, sure. But above all, he wants her. God, he wants her. He never knew shit could feel like this.
‘I don’t know,’ she mumbles.
He takes a deep breath. ‘Listen, Luce,’ he says as his hands go to her face, fingers nudging her chin so she has to look up at him. Her tear-puffed eyes are little red slits. ‘I’m not gonna make you do anything. But I want you to know, I’m staying here. On the peninsula.’
Her mouth turns to an o. ‘I didn’t realise you might be leaving,’ she says.
‘I didn’t know which way I was going. But I do now. I’m staying here for good and I’m going to start fishing with me old man’s licence and maybe get me own place. And I’m not gonna tell you what to do, and I know I don’t have much to offer you, but I just wanted you to know that I’m going to be here. If you decide you want me.’
He knows his eyes are begging her to answer him—to say, Harry I want you.
Instead she just smiles sadly and pecks him on the cheek and says honestly, ‘I don’t know what I want, Harry.’
Even though he feels like he could explode inside because all he wants is for her to pick him, for her to say, You might not have much to offer me but all you have is all I need; for her to wrap her legs around his waist and let him sit her on the butcher’s block and sink into her again, right here, right now, because he’d be damned if he isn’t bloody well barring up—even though he yearns like nothing else for these things, all he says is, ‘No worries.’
‘Best leave things like this for now, ay? Until I sort all this shit out,’ Lucy says sadly.
At the door, she looks up at him, stricken. ‘Oh my god, a man’s dead,’ she says in that small voice.
‘Yeah,’ Harry says, helplessly. Because it’s all he can say. And it’s all he can do to hold himself together until he’s down the front steps and shattering and shattering as he climbs into his ute. Hard little tears force their way out of his ducts as he drives a lap of the peninsula, through the towering bluegum forests; past the scraggly old pear and apple orchards; past the old prison; past the bays so bleak in this weather they look like they’re full of dirty dishwater; and through the deadbeat little towns. He drives, because he can’t go home and face his mother like this and what sort of a bloke is living with his mother at his age anyway?
Flo dashes through the drizzle from her car to the veranda of Lucy’s house. She knocks on the door, opens it, and calls ‘Hello!’ all at once.
‘In the kitchen, Flo,’ Lucy calls back.
Flo trots down the hallway, into the kitchen which merges into a dining room. She loves this room. Something about it seems to Flo so Lucy: trendy and rough and sophisticated in all the right ways.
‘Tea? Wine?’ Lucy offers.
‘What are you having?’ Flo asks.
‘Wine,’ Lucy says. ‘Definitely wine.’
Flo peers at her. She looks unhappy and exhausted, and gaunt with dark rings under her eyes.
‘Tough day?’ Flo asks.
‘Tough few days.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘Nah.’ Lucy shakes her head. ‘It’s just, I have to sort some stuff out with Jem and he’s not getting back from the coast until tomorrow.’
‘Ah,’ Flo says, nodding. ‘And this sort of weather, ay? Makes everything seem glummer than it is.’
‘Something like that.’ Lucy shrugs, then tugs her face into a smile. She grabs a bottle from the fridge, places it on the butcher’s block and turns to get two glasses from the cupboard.
‘Hear about that bloke, drowning at the boat ramp?’ Flo asks. ‘The poor brother, hey?’
Lucy doesn’t turn to Flo as she speaks. She stands, facing the cupboard, with a wineglass in each hand. ‘If it’s okay with you, Flo, I don’t really want to talk about it,’ she says. Each word sounds stilted and deliberate.
‘No worries,’ Flo says awkwardly. ‘Was just making conversation.’
Lucy turns around. She’s still smiling that forced smile. ‘All good,’ she says, faux bright, as she opens the bottle of wine. ‘How’ve you been, anyway?’ she asks, as she sloshes the straw-gold liquid into the glasses.
‘Pretty good, had a few days up in town with the grandkids, caught up with Poppy. She said to say hello.’
Lucy smiles again and passes Flo her glass.
‘Which is sort of why I called,’ Flo continues, taking a sip. It’s bloody delicious. Probably cost an arm and a leg.
‘Yeah?’ Lucy invites.
‘Yeah. I was thinking, what with the time of year, when the weather clears up a bit, want to get some octopuses? I was thinking we could catch ’em and then maybe head up to Poppy’s new place and pickle ’em up there with her. Reckon she’d really appreciate it.’
Flo wasn’t expecting Lucy to look so horrified. Her forced cheeriness has shattered like glass.
‘You don’t have to,’ Flo says. ‘I was only asking. I know you had that, that thing with them, but I thought maybe you were over it?’
‘Flo, I don’t think I can,’ Lucy says.
‘Fairo,’ Flo mumbles. ‘Just thought it might be nice to do something together again; that’s all.’
‘Yeah, it would be,’ Lucy says earnestly. ‘But not that, not them.’
‘Hmmph. Oh well. Guess I’ll just have to wangle Harry into coming with me.’
‘No.’ The word bursts from Lucy’s mouth.
‘What?’
‘I mean, please, Flo, don’t. Don’t kill them. Please.’
‘Why?’
‘I just. I don’t know. They’re special to me. Just don’t.’
‘Well, they’re special to Poppy, too. Pickling them’s her thing—her heritage. Doesn’t have to change just ’cos she moved.’
‘Her heritage, not yours,’ Lucy snaps.
Flo looks at Lucy in surprise. ‘That’s what I was saying,’ she grumbles indignantly.
‘I know. Sorry,’ Lucy says and, truly, she looks stricken. But it seems it’s not for Flo’s feelings that she’s upset; it’s for the octopuses. ‘Please, Flo, don’t kill them,’ she pretty much begs. ‘You know they’re females, trying to find somewhere to extract their eggs. And they’re smart—so smar
t. Smarter than dogs. You wouldn’t kill a pregnant dog, would you?’
‘You can’t look at these things like that,’ Flo says, matter-of-fact.
‘Why can’t you?’ Lucy asks.
‘Well, because if you did, you wouldn’t ever do anything, would you?’
Lucy has become the tightness in her throat, the tension in her chest, the crumple of her brow that pulls at her scalp and makes her head ache and ache. It’s as though someone has taken a knife and slit her down the middle, then folded her out like she’s a chicken being butterflied, so that the anguish contracting inside her is now spread across her surface. She is nothing but a numb plane of hurt and guilt and confusion and octopus limbs curling and unfurling. And eyes. Her chest is covered in eyes. She’s on the brink of tears.
She sits in the kitchen, waiting. She’s been waiting restlessly since yesterday—since Flo left, disgruntled, saying she couldn’t promise anything but she’d think about it, which, Lucy supposes, is all she can hope for. But she feels uneasy about what that conversation might have done. She’d begged Flo to be what she isn’t, to be other than herself; and she’d refused to participate, to work alongside the older woman who was just trying to do a good turn by Poppy. She’d seen it in Flo’s face: Flo knew Lucy was judging her. Trying to change her.
But the thing is, Lucy wants to go. She wants to go octopussing with Flo. She yearns to. She yearns to be in the water, to be doing something rather than stewing incessantly like she has been these last few days—to be doing something with Flo and chatting all the while, or not, because either way is just fine when you’re busy in camaraderie. She wants to rush over to Flo’s place and barge through the door and say, I’ll do it, Flo, and You’re perfect the way you are.
But she can’t. Won’t. She would, if she thought doing so would fix her, would knit her back into herself. But she knows it won’t. It would only tear her further apart because of the octopuses in the bay and because of Harry. Harry. Fuck, Harry—she can’t face him again until she’s sorted it out with Jem, who’s due back from the west coast any minute now and might or might not know he’s killed a man, or at the very least created the circumstances for a man’s death.
So she sits, waiting. Staring at the screen of her laptop, pretending to work. Feeling like she could cry or vomit or cry or vomit.
Manslaughter, Harry had said. She doesn’t know, yet, if that’s how she sees it. Abstractly, she knows it’s true. She knows that what Jem did is the definition of manslaughter. And she knows that, by concealing certain facts, she’s complicit to the point that she has become an accessory. No longer her own person, but Jem’s accessory.
The door bangs and she starts like a cat, slopping her tea over a pile of documents. She grabs a tea towel and tries, half-heartedly, to mop the tannin mess up as she listens to his approach: his footsteps on the floorboards growing louder.
And here he is, standing listlessly in the doorway.
He knows. Judging by the look on his face when he appears in the doorway, she knows he knows. And judging by the way he’s looking at her, he knows she knows, too. He looks old. Undone. His lips, his cheeks, his eyes all droop with grief and guilt, like the weight of the emotions has worried the elasticity from his face. She’s never seen him like this before.
Will he cry? she wonders, absently.
‘Jem,’ she says.
‘Zach called me,’ he says without preamble. ‘He’s stressing balls. He told me that … that …’
‘I know,’ Lucy murmurs.
‘I didn’t mean for it to happen,’ he says.
‘What did you mean to happen?’ she asks quietly.
‘Look. I don’t know. You saw me, I was high. We were high. It wasn’t just me. It was a prank. It wasn’t … it wasn’t my fault—our fault. Zach’s stressing,’ he says again. ‘But it wasn’t our fault.’
It’s what she’s been waiting for. It’s what she’s been needing. At his words, it all snaps into focus. Yes. She did see him—them. Yes. They were high. But, ‘What do you mean it wasn’t your fault? Of course it was your fault.’ As she says it, she knows it’s true, and she finds herself growing angry in the face of his avoidance of reality. Angry, but not surprised. ‘It was your fault,’ she repeats.
‘Okay, right.’ Jem exhales loudly with the admission—but is it an admission, or is he rallying himself?—then continues: ‘But you know Mitch found a gun in the boat. They would have shot seals, Luce.’
‘What are you trying to say? That that makes it okay?’
‘I don’t know, all right? I. Don’t. Know.’
‘Jeez, Jem. He had a family. I read about them in the paper. A daughter and a son.’ Those poor fatherless kids. She’d tried
not to, but she couldn’t help but imagine them. They were old enough to know their dad was dead, but, Lucy imagined, still young enough to expect answers, to expect logic.
‘I know he has a son,’ Jem says quietly. ‘You want to know how I know? You remember those people I told you about around the Regatta Day long weekend? After we’d found those half-dead seals? You remember how I told you that when I had a chat with them they squirmed like worms? They’d already filleted the fish the kid caught so no one would see? You remember that? Well, that’s the bloke who, who …’ his voice chokes, and he pauses to garble in a deep breath, before continuing. ‘You know them, Lucy. They’re fucking rednecks from Doo Town. You would’ve seen them around. And Mitch found a gun in their boat and it was them that time. I know it was them.’
‘You know what, Jem? You said to me at the time that it couldn’t have been them who left those seals—that the seals must have been shot a couple of days earlier, at least.’
‘But I know they did something! I know they’re the type; they’re the problem.’
‘They’re the problem? Fucking hell, Jem! That makes it sound like you did it on purpose. Like you’re on some kind of crusade to exterminate “their kind”. It’s fucked, Jem. It’s fucked.’
‘Lucy.’ He drags in a big, shuddering breath. ‘You know I didn’t do it on purpose. You know I didn’t mean for that to happen.’
‘Do I, though?’
Anguish tugs his lips in a direction she’s never seen them go before. ‘You do,’ he insists quietly.
She sighs. He’s right. She knows he didn’t mean for anyone to die. But it still doesn’t make it okay.
He must see a thread of something like acquiescence weave its way into her facial expression, because he presses on: ‘I feel terrible, Luce. And I’m not saying they deserve it, and I’m not saying I’m not sorry, I’m just saying … I’m just saying, it’s not black and white.’ He’s panting slightly. ‘I feel terrible,’ he whispers. ‘Please, Lucy.’ But it seems to her that his eyes don’t quite match his voice. The look he’s giving her isn’t quite pleading; it’s more expectant than that. He’s so obviously waiting for her to agree with him, for her to tell him it’s somehow okay. His Luce, his partner in crime.
‘Isn’t it black and white, though, Jem?’ she says quietly. ‘Isn’t it black and white this time? You once told me there’s got to be a cut-off point somewhere.’
She sees disappointment and then anger flare in his eyes. ‘Says the woman who happily wrings the necks of baby mutton-birds,’ he mutters.
She’s not even angry, not even outraged as she says: ‘No. You don’t get to say that. You don’t get to equate me with you.’ Right there, right then, she knows it’s over. Dead horse flogged. And she feels defeated, deflated.
‘Lucy, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I’m—’
But she’s already gone.
Lucy starts stripping before she gets to the damp little beach. Makes a scarecrow of the banksia that catches her shirt. Soaks up a puddle with her undies. The dab of a moon lights the clouds colourless silver; the bay is their refracted duplicate.
Dead horse flogged, she thinks as she strides out into the water. But is it somehow equivalent?
Is it?
&nbs
p; Of course it isn’t.
But why isn’t it?
Don’t think about it.
Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it.
Instead, she dives into the black and relishes the way the cold whumps the air from her lungs. She rolls over, floats on her back. The moonlit surface is a pliant, icy membrane rippling about her, masking the dark beneath. Drifting, waiting. She holds herself as still as she can. She can’t tell if she’s hearing or feeling the boom and tremor of the swell that does, and doesn’t, remind her of Harry’s heartbeat and voice, vibrating through his chest and into her cheek, palm, fingertips as she lay there, listening to him talk about a past girlfriend, whose too-sincere love of David Bowie ended the relationship.
‘She took to calling me Major Tom in the bedroom.’
‘Ironically?’
‘Nope.’ A twitching smile.
Lucy laughed and then all of a sudden she was crying again and Harry asked her why.
A gasp escapes her lips as an arm curls around her ankle, wends its way up her leg, trails back along her calf, the sole of her foot, the tip of the toe that’s pointing towards the isthmus. It’s as if the octopus is trying to tell her where it’s headed. It slips away from her. Floating on her back, she sculls her hands, ushering herself after it.
She doesn’t know if it’s the same octopus or not; she realises they’re all the same octopus to her—even the one she killed, even the one she tried to save that night. She tells herself that it’s because she’s always with them at night, that if she could see them, she’d be able to differentiate between them, but she knows she’s kidding herself.
Maybe this one is the one from the other night and it’s not just recognising her, it’s showing her it recognises her so that she, in turn, can recognise it.
It’s beside her again, butting against her like a cat. She thinks about Aslan’s walk to the stone table—the sisters burying their fingers in his fur. Her mother’s voice, as she reads.
Her bottom scrapes along the sand and she stops, wallows in the shallows and watches as the octopus emerges, dragging itself past the tideline.