‘Hmmm,’ I said vaguely, still thinking about Scott’s theory. ‘Maybe they head to the ocean side of the neck because there’re so many sea caves and more movement and nutrients in the water over there. The shoreline of Eaglehawk and Norfolk bays are mostly mudflats, aren’t they? Not really the ideal terrain for draping eggs about the place.’ Eaglehawk Bay is an estuary, which flows into the bigger Norfolk Bay, which in turn flows into Frederick Henry Bay, which in turn flows into Storm Bay, which in turn flows into the Southern Ocean.

‘I reckon that’s exactly it!’ Scott said, clamouring for vindication. ‘Especially with the pollution from the salmon farms in Norfolk Bay. Thousands of diseased fish trapped in those pens—I mean, jeez.’

‘What’s an octopus to do, hey?’ I grinned.

‘Exactly,’ Scott said.

‘Yeah, but that blows your Darwinian theory out of the water, doesn’t it?’ May pointed out. ‘The salmon farms have only been around for a decade or so.’

‘It’s all rather poignant, isn’t it?’ I sighed. ‘That mad dash across the neck for their babies, and then to simply die. It reminds me of the end of Charlotte’s Web. How did Charlotte describe her egg sac? Her magnum opus; her life’s work. And she never lived to see it hatch. That book cut me up as a kid.’

‘For me, it was Milo and Otis,’ said May. ‘Do you know how many little Milos and Otises they went through in the filming of that movie? It’s fucked.’

I was saved from thinking about this bombshell in too much detail by Pam, Jem’s mother, emerging from the kitchen with the pavlova.

‘Kiwi fruit?’ Jem said, when he caught sight of the snowy white and soft green dessert. His disappointment was audible.

‘The weather’s made fruit tricky,’ Pam explained as she placed the plate on the table. ‘And I happen to think kiwi fruit is a lovely topping for pavlova.’

By weather, Pam meant the weather events of the last month. A cyclone had rampaged astonishingly early, astonishingly south and astonishingly broadly (the phrase ‘an unprecedented December storm’ was bandied about by smooth news reporters, flustered politicians and unsurprised climate scientists) and the banana crops along the east coast were flattened by it, plunging the country into a relatively banana-less state. At the same time, a spell of downpours in the southern states surprised the local raspberry growers, ruining the summer’s harvest. This shortage, coupled with Pam’s morals, evidently made pavlova-appropriate fruit hard to come by: she refused to buy fruit that wasn’t organic, and fruit that was imported from overseas.

‘I know you’re not the biggest fan of kiwi fruit, Jem, but in the supermarket, they were selling raspberries from America. I just couldn’t do it. I mean, think of the carbon miles. Plus, it’s not even like it’s raspberry season over there. God knows what they’re doing to them to get them to ripen in the middle of winter and stay fresh enough to export to the other side of the world.’