‘The Tasmanian landscape—it’s made for this type of living. It’s not made for imported agriculture. That just fucks everything. Do you think Aboriginal women would have caught octopuses? There? At the neck?’

‘Dunno.’ Jem shrugged, then added uselessly: ‘They got abs and mutton-birds.’

I already knew that. Everyone knows that.

‘And then today,’ I pressed on, ‘learning to preserve food like that—and not just jams and condiments, but real food—to make the most of the going when it’s good and setting yourself up for times when it’s not. It’s a survival thing, isn’t it.’

‘Totally,’ Jem agreed absently.

‘But it’s more than that, I think,’ I continued. ‘There’s something romantic about it all. Particularly the inter-generational element; it’s like this knowledge or skill set is being passed down to me.’

‘Secret women’s business?’ Jem smirked, finally looking up.

‘Shut up.’ I meant for it to come out good-naturedly, but the words had sounded brittle, so I tried to catch his eye and give him a smile to let him know I was all right and he was all right. But he’d already turned back to the screen. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me. For some reason his lack of response made me hum with irritation and I found myself thinking, with more spite than’s comfortable, that what I’d enjoyed most about my time with Flo and Poppy was that I’d forgotten all about the lumps of silicone sitting beneath my skin; I’d lost myself and my body in the experience of processing the octopuses with Flo and Poppy in a way that I could no longer lose myself and my body in Jem, and it was the happiest I’d felt in a long while.

‘Is this octopus from the neck?’ Scott, Jem’s father, asked when I handed him the gift two days later, on Christmas, right after lunch but before dessert, as is Jem’s family tradition.

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘You know what they reckon about those octopuses?’ He held the jar up to the light. The sucker-covered chunks floated in the vinegar mix, which glowed amber in the sunlight. It looked like a prop from a vintage horror film: perfect for a mad scientist’s office. ‘They reckon the peninsula used to be an island and the octopuses that live in the bay used to swim through the small channel—now closed over by the neck—to the open ocean to breed. It’s evolutionary, you know, natural selection. The ones that went through the neck when it was open were more likely to make it than the ones that went around the bottom of the peninsula, past all the seal colonies around Tasman Island. That’s why you see more octopuses in the bay when the surf is big: it’s the call of the ocean. Lures them in.’

‘Marram grass was introduced as a dune-binder,’ Jem nodded. ‘We’ve probably fucked it for them, fixing the neck in place like that. The highway’s the cherry on top. It’s just like the Gold Coast. Dunes are meant to wander.’