He had kissed me. Not only that, I had kissed him back. Such things did not happen in my life, did not happen on land, and therefore must belong to some elemental slipping of the rules when one took to the sea. Very well, things were different out here. But having made an error, I didn’t have to repeat it. That is, I could if I wanted to, or—

Damn it, he was looking again—that half-smile—and I feared the turmoil was written on my face. I smiled tightly back and looked out to sea.

When I looked again he was probing on the board with the scalpel, picking at a tiny bundle of pale flesh that could easily have been mistaken for fatty off-cuts of pork. Gelatinous, curled, in shades of pearl through to pink, a nest of fine tubes and little sacs and, at one end of the strange structure, the tiny black parrot’s beak.

Occasionally he would stop and spray the specimen with a mist of what I presumed to be seawater from a perfume bottle. He started explaining to me again, blithely, as though unaffected. He had isolated the digestive tract of the octopus, he told me, and what I saw on the board was the part that lends most fascination. It was the venom duct, he said, along with the glands that produced the poison. ‘All cephalopods are venomous. And we know nothing of the properties of that venom.’

I could not think why anybody would want to keep and dissect the venom gland of an octopus, but he seemed almost childishly happy with his work.

‘And I believe I now understand the shape of the shell,’ he said. ‘It is a logarithmic spiral, spira mirabilis, expanding at a constant ratio while remaining essentially unchanged.’ Those lost eyes, enraptured. ‘Cyclones, ammonites, galaxies. Constantly emerging into the world even as they replicate, a process known as self-similarity.’

There were disjunctions here I could not fathom, between admiring the incremental growth and the beauty of a creature; observing it in life, and then killing it and eating it, and finally studying its entrails. I wished now I had not met the strange and beautiful creature before he fed it to me.

~

In the evening my father was drunk again, though I hadn’t seen him with a bottle in his hand.

Something was amiss, something was afoot. My long knowledge of his ways told me that he had a hoard somewhere, and I resolved to find it. I waited. I watched him in his phases: buoyant, funny and conversational, then morose. Moving about the deck—even dancing, in the full confidence that he now understood the layout of the boat—before slumping onto his backside and mumbling to himself. He was a drunkard, and a drunkard lives all the rampant madness of our dreams undisguised.