‘Is this cray real?’ I called.

‘Yep,’ came the reply from the kitchen. ‘Biggest one Gray ever caught.’

‘Potting or diving?’ I asked.

‘Potting. Gray weren’t much of a diver, but he was a potter through and through. Bloody loved it.’

I moved from inspecting the cray to the shelf of photos. I figured that the man standing in front of the skeleton of this same house, hammer in hand, must’ve been Flo’s husband, Gray. Handsome bugger, tall and lean, and a potter through and through to boot. The squinty-eyed and gummy-mouthed babies were grandchildren, I assumed; the photos looked too new for them to feasibly be children. Those two couples smiling triumphantly from their wedding photos—two of them must be Flo’s children. And there, behind them, was a photo of four knobbly-kneed, grinning boys ordered from tallest to shortest, each holding a speckled flathead up for the camera. All her children for sure: the family resemblance was striking. The fish were similarly ordered longest to shortest and I smiled, wondering if they had caught them in that order or if it was staged for the geometric aesthetic of the photo and if so, by whom. Flo struck me as too organic to orchestrate such tidy patterning, but perhaps Gray was a man of order.

‘Four boys?’ I said to Flo as I entered the kitchen.

‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Bloody lot of work in mothering that throng, I tell you.’ She was fussing about, lighting the gas-top under the kettle and spooning tea-leaves from the dog-eared cardboard box into the teapot. Greek Poppy was perched at the table, hair fixed in a bun, powdered up like a marshmallow.

‘How d’you like your tea?’ Flo asked me.

‘Black.’

She nodded her head approvingly and said: ‘Same as both of us. Good to keep these things simple, I reckon,’ and I felt like I was one of them.

She’s a natterer, Flo is. While we sat there, sipping our tea, she told me how they never really thought much of octopus until Poppy and Con showed up on the peninsula, fresh from the Hydro (and before that, fresh from the boat), near thirty years ago.

‘Course, we thought they were crazy,’ she said, ‘and it didn’t help that they barely had a word of English between them when they first got here—not that they’ve got much now; she barely understands a word of what I say, eh, Pop?’

‘What?’ Poppy smiled conspiringly, and Flo chuckled.

‘Well, I don’t understand much of what she says neither,’ Flo said, ‘but I tell you what, I understand more than I did when they first got here.’

She told me how Poppy and Con were selling jars of pickled octopus and other ‘wog stuff’ at the show one year and she said to Gray, ‘Let’s give some of that stuff a crack.’ ‘We did, and we loved it,’ she told me now. ‘So I muscled in on their operation one night. I was just wandering around in the dark, bit like you were last night, and saw them at it. Hur hur hur’—she chuckled again and gave Poppy a wink—‘not at it at it, at the octopus, I mean! I went up to them and pretty much had to mime that I wanted them to show me how, and the rest’s history.’