BooksBarbecue
Back The Octopus and I Save as PDF
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

‘You’ll get a whopping fine and it’ll go on your record. But, Harry,’ he says, now grinning again, ‘for old time’s sake, and ’cos I’m in such a good mood, if you want, I’ll only write one of you up.’

This is just like Mitch, Harry thinks bitterly. He won’t relinquish his power, but he’s more than happy to play the big man in town, try to win their gratitude by doing them a bullshit favour.

‘Then write me up,’ Flo says.

‘What, Flo? No!’ Lucy protests, but Flo cuts her off.

‘Don’t be stupid, Lucy, it’ll go down bad with your job if you get a record for poaching, and Harry: I’m your mother. It was me that did it anyway—not you two.’ As she says this, she points a finger—this one loaded with fierce maternal clout—first at Lucy, then at Harry, and gives them both a look so severe Harry knows there’s no point arguing with her.

‘Righto,’ Mitch says. ‘Step over here a moment, Flo, and I’ll get your details.’

‘Oh my god, I feel awful,’ Lucy says to Harry as Flo and Mitch talk. ‘I mean, I talked her into this!’

‘We did,’ Harry murmurs. ‘But Mum’s right: it makes more sense for it to go on her record than yours. And she’d skin me alive if I tried to take the blame for it.’

‘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.