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Back The Octopus and I
Chapters (19)
  1. COVER PAGE
  2. PRAISE
  3. TITLE PAGE
  4. COPYRIGHT PAGE
  5. DEDICATION
  6. CONTENTS
  7. ONE
  8. CROSSING ISTHMUS
  9. THE OCTOPUS INCIDENT
  10. TWO
  11. A SEAL’S TAKE
  12. THE MULTI-COLOURED KNITTED KNOCKERS
  13. NO BIRD IS ONLY AN I
  14. THREE
  15. I AM SHE
  16. SPUN AIR
  17. THE OCTOPUS AND I
  18. NOTES AND REFERENCES
  19. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘I’ll pay the fine,’ Lucy says, looking up at him, looking right into his eyes.

This time, he holds her gaze. She looks sad and pathetic, shivering in the yellow glow cast by the streetlight. He wants nothing more than to reach out, grab hold of her, press her body to his and rub at her back—to comfort her, to warm her up a bit, offer her whatever he can. But he doesn’t do that because as he looks back into her eyes, it seems to him that the intimacy he thought he’d seen in her earlier gazes has faded. Something has broken. Something feels, in some intangible yet definitive way, over.

NO BIRD IS ONLY AN I

NO BIRD IS ONLY AN I

He would slip the message down his chick’s gullet, just like his parents slipped a message down his when he was a chick: on a slick of regurgitated krill and fish.

They told him to follow his beak and relinquish himself, and then they disappeared into the orb of the sky, which glowed pale through the mouth of the burrow, to be as flock, as they must, leaving him to digest their message with their food. He absorbed it until he grew so hungry he understood that he couldn’t stay there, cocooned in his burrow, alone as an I.

Your beak will tug you into flock.

No bird is only an I. We are bigger than that.

We span the world, we span the world.

As a chick, he followed his beak up out of his burrow and saw for the first time the sky and sea thrown wide. He waddled about the headland, beating at the air with his wings until, one day, it bore him and the sky took him.

He tumbled through the air, shooting up on plumes of heat rising, and dropping on shafts of cool air sinking. Spotting the rough water of a bait ball breaching, he tucked his wings to his body, plummeted after his beak and burst into the ocean, which was dense, so dense and slick and cool, buffeting and reverberating against his oily wings. Bubbles flurried in his wake, krill and small fish pounded down his gullet in great gulps.

When he popped back up through the filmy surface, he discovered it was true: his beak had tugged him into flock. All around him were other fledglings, digesting and preening as they floated in a raft, which rippled on the ocean swell. They chittered as they rose and fell with the waves, marvelling at the motion which was so different from their still, warm, dark burrows, and gazed up at the sky and out across the expanse of the ocean, wondering at how big the world is and how much space there is to soar through.

Their beaks drew them up, up and along.