‘That’s not what it’s about.’ Her voice sounds strangled. It’s as if her throat has solidified into a glass bottleneck, and the words hurt as they squeeze out through it.

‘Well, it’s how it seems.’

‘Jem. It’s not about you at all.’ As she says it this time, she feels a wisp of anger emerge from the guilt. Because it’s not about him. ‘It’s about me. It’s about the fact that I couldn’t keep those breasts and I hated those scars. It’s because the octopuses mean something to me: something about feminine sacrifice and endurance, about the futility of it all, about how our bodies fail or are made to fail and yet we keep trying in whatever way we can.’ She trails off, frustrated. She feels like she hasn’t properly explained it, that she can’t find the words to describe what the octopuses mean to her. It’s something in her gut, her chest, her throat. ‘They’re not about giving up, Jem.’

‘It’s not about me at all, hey?’ He chuckles sadly, bitterly. She gets the feeling he didn’t hear anything else she said. ‘Well maybe that’s the problem. What are we, Lucy, if this isn’t about me at all? If I don’t even cross your mind? What are we doing? Sometimes, I feel like I don’t know you anymore. And what now? You’re going to become a champion of the coal industry? Speed up global warming so your octopuses can swim free?’

She stares at him, gobsmacked. Except not gobsmacked because it’s so like him—to lead her right to the heart of the matter with such clarity, to allow her a glimpse of insight so precise it cuts, only to turn the conversation back to environmental politics. To make it not about them, but also somehow all about them at the same time.

And just like her, to let him.

‘God, Jem. What’s your problem?’ she says. ‘I was just saying how not all the changes the planet is going through will necessarily be bad for all species equally, which isn’t exactly an outrageous thing to say and doesn’t mean I’m all like: yeah, yeah, bring it on.’

‘Sure, some species will survive. But it won’t be natural, what thrives and what doesn’t.’

‘What is natural?’ She sighs.

‘Certainly not this.’

She has no idea what, exactly, he means by ‘this’.

‘It’s not like you’re doing anything about it anyway,’ she mutters. Then wonders at herself: which it? What’s to do?

The rain pisses down in a way that really makes Jem understand the saying, because it isn’t so much falling in droplets but in a series of steady flows, like there’s a bunch of blokes up in the clouds all having a slash together. It’s been pissing down like this for days now. It’s not like the rain would’ve necessarily contributed to the king tide last week, but it augmented all the flooding and made it feel like the place was under siege by water: longlines of it dropping from the clouds to the rising bays and swaying this way and that on the gusting wind.