It’s a Japanese woodblock print captioned: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. A woman lies on her back, legs spread, while an octopus performs cunnilingus on her. Her head is thrown back, her eyes closed, and she grips the octopus’s arm, as if to draw it closer (and Lucy’s fingers are twined in Harry’s hair as she presses her clitoris against his tongue and bares her throat at the ceiling, moaning). A smaller octopus is playing with the woman’s nipple. Lucy imagines the touch of suckers on a nipple and wonders how different they would feel to a mouth. Both are hard and soft, dexterous, slippery. The fisherman’s wife is covered in snaking limbs just like Lucy is covered in ink and as she gazes at it—at her and them—guilt sloshes through her like hot water, then cold water, as she sweats then shivers.

She shouldn’t have done it.

She closes her laptop again, gets up, walks outside and sits on the bench seat by the pile of ashes. The sun cuts, but the billow of a new easterly breeze is cool. A yellow-throated honeyeater hangs upside-down from the callistemon Lucy planted when she first moved into the place—to frame the barbecue area and attract birds.

‘It’s not a Tassie native,’ Jem had said.

‘No, but it’s an Australian native and Tassie birds will love it,’ she’d reasoned. ‘Plus, they go gangbusters in sand.’

She remembers the first time she saw a bird—it was a little wattlebird—land in it: the way the spindly sapling waved and bowed under its weight. She’d called to Jem, and the two of them stood at the kitchen window, beaming as the bird suckled on the red bottlebrushes.

Her eyes fill with tears at the thought of what she’s risking and why she’s risking it.

It wasn’t the octopus’s face between her legs, it was Harry’s. The bristle of his stubble scraping against the inside of her thighs.

Harry, so different to Jem, who is impulsive at every turn: quick in opinion, in joy, in anger, in grief. Jem’s recklessness shines his charisma so bright one can’t not be captivated; but equally, it shines his hypocrisy so obvious one can’t not be, at times, dismayed that this gold-flecked man isn’t all he promises to be. Except he is—he’s exactly who he is: passionate and pigheaded and erratic.

Jem’s right. She is a hypocrite like him. The only difference between them is the fact that she spent years steeped like a teabag in a postmodernist and poststructuralist education until her strength of conviction was soaked from her; because she learnt that nothing means anything anyway. (Except that’s a lie because it does, doesn’t it? And that’s the problem.) Whereas for Jem, everything means everything all the time and so the inconsistencies of it all are laid bare then obscured, then laid bare then obscured by the lapping tides of reason, as if reason’s a thing of substance.