‘Did I say like a hooker? Meant on my hookah,’ Scott smirked, ‘and half drowning in the meantime, and in among it I caught a glimpse of the rest of the octopus. He bloody engulfed me abs in his swarm of arms and retreated back to his lair with the lot of them! Jeez, the run-ins you have down there. I remember this other time—’ he paused to pull a breath, then pull at his beer.

I took the chance to speak. You have to with Scott; his stories have the tendency to spill into others without ever finishing. ‘Well, I can’t find anything specific,’ I said. ‘But it does say: The common octopus likes nothing more than to find a den, litter some rocks and shells at its mouth and curl up inside, occasionally re-emerging to search for food. On average, an octopus spends seventy per cent of its time in its den and thirty per cent of its time out hunting. Oh hey, apparently they spend roughly three per cent of their day doing housework! That’s pretty cute.’ I wrinkled my nose as I continued to read. ‘Urgh. At the tip of the male octopus’s third arm from the right eye is the penis. I may have given you a jar of pickled penises, Scott.’

‘All good, Lucy. It’ll just make me more of a man,’ Scott said, rubbing at his belly.

‘God, Dad,’ May groaned. ‘Shut up. And anyway, you’re wrong—doesn’t sound like they’re migratory at all.’

‘Doesn’t say they’re not.’

‘Where are their vaginas?’ Jem asked curiously.

‘Um, let me find it,’ I said, still scanning the web page. ‘Here it is: under their mantle, apparently. Gosh, that sounds like the title of a seedy Mills and Boon, doesn’t it? Under the Mantle.’ I laughed. ‘Oh! Hang on,’ I continued, reading: ‘In her lifetime a female common octopus lays only one clutch of eggs, but that clutch is comprised of over a hundred thousand eggs. Once pregnant, the female finds shelter in a dim space, such as a sea cave, and yields the eggs; this process can take as long as five days. As the clusters of eggs are extruded, she hangs them in long strings from the ceiling or walls of her shelter. The eggs need constant fanning to keep them clean, and the female spends her time tending to the eggs with jets of water. Once this process has begun, she will stop eating, and once the eggs hatch she will die.’

‘Oh yeah. I think I knew that,’ May said. ‘And that’s one of the reasons octopuses are so interesting, isn’t it? They’re so intelligent, but there’s nothing inter-generational about it like there is with most mammals—like, the parents don’t pass the knowledge down to their offspring; they have to learn everything independently.’