‘Cut below the eyes, then take the beak out or else it’ll still crawl around,’ Flo instructed. I’d been about to do as she said, but then the octopus caught my eye again. Or I think she did. I hadn’t realised octopuses have eyelids until that moment and, for some reason, I found it disconcerting. She went still and just lay there, pinned to the sand by my hand, hooded eyes gazing up at me, insistent, silent, aware. Defiant, not defeated. Challenging me not to do the thing we were both expecting me to do.

‘Carn, Lucy,’ Flo urged, squatting on her haunches by my side, and the moment passed. The octopus’s eyes were dull and fish-like again. I remember thinking to myself: How does that Nirvana song go? Something about it being all right to eat fish because they don’t have feelings? But an octopus is not a fish; it’s nothing like a fish.

It started writhing again and squelched out a jet of ink, hitting me square in the chest.

‘Ooph, gotcha a good one.’ Flo chuckled.

I ignored her, and peered down at the octopus, which was still writhing under my weight. Sounds stupid, but I wondered if the octopus was making some kind of desperate attempt to remind me of my own body by inking me right in the spot my body thwarted any maternal aspirations. Ink like milk gone wrong.

But no, the ink was just an animal reflex and, really, who knows what thoughts were pulsing in that gelatinous head, in the soft fruit of that brain? Unlikely, though, that they would have had anything to do with my gnawing angsts about my own body, that it would hope to use them against me. Vain of me to think so, really.

But that gaze: surely I didn’t imagine it. There was something there. They’re all brain; they’re meant to be as intelligent as dogs. Dogs hold your gaze. Could I behead a live dog? A pregnant dog?

I cut off its head.

The knife was so sharp.

It glided.

‘Orright,’ Flo said. ‘Good thing to do now is run your hand down the body like this’—she wrung her hand down the legs like they were an udder and she was milking them—‘else they’ll taste like shit.’ I took over, rubbing at its syrupy pelt. The translucent ectoplasm slipped away, bit by bit, with each stroke. And then the legs, which had momentarily calmed, began to shudder and twitch. One spasmed so violently it wrapped around my wrist and suckered on. It was as though my massage had reanimated it.

‘You’re orright—it’s dead,’ Flo said.