Suzette raised her eyebrows. ‘Okay, Lucy,’ she said. ‘That’s totally fair enough. I’m happy with the work you’ve been doing’—really? Lucy thought—‘and will sign off on cancelling your last two appointments. But if you ever want to pick up where we left off don’t hesitate to book back in.’

And so that was that. Lucy skipped her way down the front steps of Suzette’s office, thinking good bloody riddance.

But she was being harsh. Really, Suzette had helped her. Suzette had said to her of the knitted knockers, ‘It can’t hurt to give it a go.’ And it hadn’t hurt. The evening with Flo and Harry really hadn’t hurt. It had been bloody special, actually: it had done something for her. But it wasn’t the knockers that had done something for her. Telling her story—shaping her story and finishing her story, even if it wasn’t quite the full story—had done something for her. Flo had done something for her, and then Harry had done something for her. But, most of all, the idea of mutton-birding had done something for her. She’d suggested it on a drunken whim, but as soon as the idea was in the air it felt so right. It felt like what she needed to do.

Why? she wonders, peering at the screen of her computer as if the blinking cursor might have answers. Why does mutton-birding with the Seabornes sound so romantic? And, more to the point, why does it feel permissible to kill a baby bird, but not a pregnant octopus?

Why? she asks herself again, to cover for the fact that she has a sneaking suspicion that she knows the answer, but would rather loll about pondering the question than confront the somewhat narcissistic truth: that the octopuses, with their grossly female and alien bodies, somehow resonate with her and her sense of self in a way that the concept of a baby bird, or even a bird family unit, simply doesn’t. She’s pro-choice of course and she would always choose the life of a woman over the life of a foetus. But just because she won’t take the lives of the female octopuses again doesn’t mean the romanticism of the idea of it has faded away entirely. That night. Flo and Poppy. The shifting light. Living not just off the land but in the land. Immersion. Hands thrust into earthy burrows. Fat sizzling over fire. Mutton-birding has a longer, more entrenched human history than octopus fishing, no matter what the ancient Greeks might say. Oldest living culture is the oldest living culture after all. Those baby birds have been plucked from burrows for millennia, and what’s tradition if not that? What’s it to be human, in this place, if not that?

What is it to be human in this place?

Jem really doesn’t have to know. He doesn’t need another item added to his list of all the ways she’s disappointed him. The breasts and octopuses are enough. The mutton-birds don’t need to hurt anyone.