‘Nerves,’ I agreed. ‘Did you know that three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons—you know, like what we’ve got in our brains—are in its arms, and that even after the arm is severed from the body, it will often carry on as if nothing has happened for a couple of hours? To the extent that the arm can even hunt on its own? I read about them.’

‘Well there you go,’ she muttered.

‘The suckers are incredibly dexterous and the octopus has full control over every single one. They don’t suck on out of reflex. It’s intentional,’ I continued, looking down at the limb clinging to my arm. ‘So what do you reckon’s going on here?’ I looked up, from my arm to Flo, for a response, but she’d slipped away while I was talking and was already back in the water and out of earshot.

I dumped the octopus’s severed body in the bucket, on top of the others.

At the water’s edge, I attempted to wash the ink from my top, splashing water on my chest and rubbing at my breasts. I felt like a seedy actor in some kind of weird animal-death-fetish porno. Those bloody breasts. They just painted everything … off. I hated them.

Oh my fucking god I hated them.

And now my hands were covered in ink too. I bathed them, scrubbing with sand. The snotty strings clung to me, like characters from some primal language: an inky record of the octopus’s violent death.

‘Out damn spot.’ I giggled quietly to myself.

Then: Pull yourself together, I scolded. It was going to die, anyway. It was an octopus. And what I was doing, it was a subsistence thing. Natural selection. Survival of the fittest.

I couldn’t get the ink off.

It did look at me, didn’t it?

Once the bucket was full, we made our way up to the road to beat the legs tender. Just before we reached that little track that cuts through the band of bristling scrub and up, onto the road, a movement, discernible at the edge of my torchlight, caught my attention. I locked the light on it. It was another octopus, lurching and slithering, making its way to the road alongside us. All eight arms rolled sequentially underneath its head, chewing along the ground like caterpillar tracks on an army tank.

It was so heavy in its movements, so laden. It was too pathetic.

Had I imagined it? That interactive gaze? Or had I simply turned the octopus into an alert and aware creature so that I could ask for atonement?

A set of lights floated down the hill on the Forestier Peninsula.

The car was such a long way off.

The octopus moved with such intent, yet so laboriously, out onto the road.