Flo and Harry roar with laughter as Lucy shrieks, looking down at herself in horror.

‘Argh!’ She tries to brush it from her clothes, but really, all she’s doing is rubbing the orange gunk further into the fabric.

‘If I was you,’ Flo chuckles, ‘I’d give ’em a rinse out before we leave.’

‘Definitely,’ Harry agrees. ‘’Cos you’re not getting in my ute stinking like that.’

Flo hoots with laughter and looks from Harry—whose lips are twitching, who seems so relaxed, who seems to be somehow truly home, here and now—to Lucy, dripping in bird vomit and looking so disgruntled and yet somehow exultant. Flo wishes she could bottle the expression on Lucy’s face. Bottle the whole moment, for that matter.

‘I’ll catch you up,’ Lucy says.

She waits by the silver-slick little rockpool for Flo and Harry to move off before she starts stripping. She pulls her jumper off and her singlet comes with it, exposing her chest to the evening. She lets it; it’s not like she’s got anything to hide.

As she leans forward, the little fish in the pool scatter for cover, diving beneath rocky overhangs and burying themselves in weed. She laughs, thinking they’re hiding from her octopuses, which are still only one third or so coloured in, but with their beaked maws and curling arms are evidently menacing enough, and feels an overwhelming sense of joy at her body. The contentedness shocks her for its completeness, and reminds her—in a way that makes her feel both hopeful and nostalgic—of how much she’s been missing it: that sense of just being in your body, and of your body just being in the world. Of being un-thought, unqualified, just as is.

And as easy as that, she falls in love with her tattoo again. Not just the one octopus, but the complete mural. It’s not still, dead art. It’s on her living body, which, like Kat said, is always moving. It’s her, living vibrantly in the world. She doesn’t need the knitted knockers, still only half finished at Flo’s. They were never going to be right. But her octopuses, the mutton-birding, the living of her life: this is it. This is right. This is the thing that’s been missing, the thing she was trying to describe to Suzette.

Breasts as tools, my arse, she thinks.

Or maybe not.

The knitted knockers proved to be a tool after all, a vehicle to get her somewhere: they transported her to here, to now. They were kicked under the table as they should be, once she, Flo and Harry decided to go mutton-birding, and in doing so they achieved their ends. And their ends? When she was lying on the ground, armpit deep in a burrow, she wasn’t thinking about the fact that she was lying flat on the ground. She wasn’t even thinking. She was utterly occupied by the moment, which she knows will never be repeated, because she does feel a bit guilty about killing them now—those poor, downy chicks, blinking in the dusky light. She won’t do it again. But in the moment, despite the fact that there had been a small part of her that had wondered if she’d baulk, she didn’t feel bad enough to not kill them.