Fuck them.

‘Fuck them,’ Jem fumes as he bursts in the back door. ‘Fuck. Them.’

‘Jem, can you not shout?’ Lucy moans, her hand gently pawing her head. ‘My skull is waging war on my brain.’

Jem spies the empty packet of barbecue-flavoured chips. A telltale sign. ‘Are you hungover?’

Lucy groans pathetically.

‘What did you and Flo do last night?’ She’d got in late, stinking like a brewery, and was still in bed when he slipped out this morning.

‘We were knitting, and then we did shots.’

That stirs a laugh from him. ‘You and old Flo did shots?’

‘I swear I wasn’t that drunk. But brown spirits at the end of the night always kill me.’ Lucy groans again. ‘Who are you fucking?’ she asks, peering up at him blearily.

‘Cunts.’ Jem sighs. The fury is ebbing out of him. He doesn’t want to talk about it. ‘What were you knitting?’

‘Breasts.’

Jem raises his eyebrows. ‘Breasts? Like the psychologist suggested? But you thought it was a crackpot idea.’

‘I don’t know.’ Lucy sighs. ‘It’s just, you know. I don’t know.’ She groans again and closes her eyes. ‘My poor head. I don’t want to talk about it now. I want a bath.’

Jem smiles. ‘I’ll run one for you.’

Ten minutes later, he sits by the bath, stroking Lucy’s hair, and watching her octopuses—some only outlines, some fully fleshed—ripple beneath the water. Her eyes are closed. She is becoming a cadential tangle of suckered limbs, a ceaselessly curling and pulsing maze. He considers telling her about the octopus he saw today, or about the octopus he and Seamus fed with fish hearts. But he doesn’t. Why? Because he doesn’t want to encourage her fascination? Is he really that petty? No, he’s not. He just wants her to himself for the moment. The octopuses can have her later.

‘I’m heading west tomorrow,’ he tells her. ‘Maybe for the week.’ She doesn’t reply, but when he stops stroking her hair, she mumbles: ‘No. Don’t stop. Stay.’

So he does, and instead of watching the octopuses through the film of bathwater he watches her eyeballs flutter against her closed lids.

Lucy sits idly at her computer. She’s supposed to be writing a press release, but instead she’s thinking about mutton-birding with the Seabornes.

Mutton-birding with the Seabornes. Why does it sound so romantic?

She knows Jem would be horrified if he knew what she was plotting. That’s why she didn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell him. She won’t tell him.

‘You do realise they fly all the way from the Bering Sea to have their chicks here, don’t you?’ she imagines him saying—she’s even researched mutton-birds, in part because she’s curious and in part so that she can give voice to Jem when she rehearses this conversation in her head, so that she can pick the holes in what she imagines he’ll say, so that she’s armed for the fight.