It’s like she’s piggybacking it.

She is piggybacking it. It’s riding her, she realises.

So she walks across the road.

She marvels at how strange the octopus’s weight is: heavy, bodily, but it has no warmth. She tries to feel its breath (do they breathe? how do they breathe?) or the beat of its hearts, but she can’t.

She starts when she sees the dog, three feet high, knotted with muscle and snarling. But of course it’s not a real dog; it’s a statue. A tribute to the chain of pooches that rendered the peninsula an island, back in the convict days. The octopus doesn’t respond to it. She wonders if it registers it, how it registers it, what it recognises. Just another inanimate thing, probably. It’s not like it would know what a dog is anyway.

The boobiallas are rough against her arms and thighs, their coarseness exaggerated, perhaps, by their juxtaposition with the slick weight at her back. They’re brushing against the octopus, too, and she wonders if it hurts: if things are rougher on its skin when there’s no water to lubricate, to dilute gravity. She wonders how the boobiallas taste to the octopus’s skin, what they look like. If it registers them as vegetation like, yet unlike, seaweed.

She thinks about being a child, at the beach, ‘harvesting’ sea lettuce for a ‘salad’. Picking it, putting it in a bucket of saltwater to keep it fresh. Her surprise and delight when she noticed the small fish darting about in the buttercup glow of her bucket, and realised she must have picked it up without noticing. Her pride as she showed her parents.

‘Look what I caught. Can I keep it as a pet?’

‘It’ll just die, petal. You don’t want that, do you?’

The ocean is haphazard with broken lines of turbulent white, kicked up by this relentless easterly pattern, not as big as the other day when she watched Jem surf, but getting close.

‘Needs a good offshore to tidy it up,’ Jem would say. It’ll have it soon. A new low pressure system is on the way; she’ll be howling westerly by the morning, which is why Jem’s back, one step ahead of the weather.

The octopus, which has been surprisingly still, starts shifting its weight like it knows the ride is over and it’s time to leave her. She is overcome with pre-emptive nostalgia as she reaches the water, lowers her body into it, and feels the octopus’s weight slip away with a lingering, coiling caress.

Gone.

Lucy can’t believe how profound the sense of loss gripping her chest is.

She bites down on a sob and throws herself into the swell. Her blind arms search for the slimy body, for one last touch because she knows it’s going to die. But the sand-churned currents jostle her back and she can’t find it. She swims out, frog-kicking and spluttering as waves hit her in the face, ducking under, her hands in front of her, searching around, fossicking through the water.