Even though she can’t seem to tell the whole story, it doesn’t mean the whole story isn’t there, burbling away inside her. It doesn’t mean she’s not saving it for someone, one day. She has many imagined audiences. Sometimes it’s herself, other times it’s Jem. Sometimes she imagines she’ll write it down and it will scatter out into the world on leaves of paper, caught up in the spring winds. Other times she imagines she’s talking to a room full of faceless women who sharpen into someone she went to high school with, or the woman who served her at the supermarket, and she imagines them really thinking about it, after she asks them: ‘What would you do?’

She knows it’s daggy to title it, but when she thinks of the whole story she thinks of it as ‘The Octopus Incident’, dressed up in titular quotation marks like that.

She’d begin ‘The Octopus Incident’ with something like this: ‘To say that the cancer caused the octopus incident would be an overstatement. But, equally, to say the two events weren’t connected would be to deny the series of factors that caused me to experience the world as I experienced it that night. You see, everything was very specific to that moment. I was in a peculiar headspace. The cancer, the breasts, the infertility, Jem, fuck—the world! Everything had gotten to me. I just wanted something to be authentic; I was sick of all the bullshit. And I just wanted to help her—to help the octopus. I guess I just wanted to be able to do something.’

And then, with that preamble out of the way, she’d tell the story; she’d tell the whole story. And depending on the day, her mood, her imagined audience, and how pissed off or in love with Jem she was at that given moment, this would be it, or something like this: