How Lucy had soared with the octopus flung out in front of her the night before last. Its legs rippled slowly, like it was floating through the air. Even as Flo watched in dumbstruck horror, it had seemed to her one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen: Lucy and the octopus suspended, hand in hand, contained by the beams of the car’s headlights. Was it really only two nights ago? The texture of the scene was such that Flo had felt like she was remembering it, even as it was all unfolding. She and Poppy had just stood there, side by side, silently watching them, and it felt like the moment—which in reality must’ve only lasted seconds—slowed and throbbed in a way that was somehow detached from the normal stream of time.

And then they hit the ground with a crash that made Flo clench her teeth and fanny, and everything became a flicker of people’s faces: the traumatised driver, who kept saying, over and over, ‘I didn’t mean to’, the paramedics, and Jem. Then they all left, and Flo and Poppy were still just standing there, surrounded by limp octopus bodies they’d collected. Of course, they still had to beat them. It’d be a shame to let all that meat go to waste.

Jem had phoned the next day, just as she and Poppy had finished pickling. He told Flo that Lucy was cut up pretty badly but that she’d be all right. She was sleeping like the dead, he said.

‘But she’s not dead,’ he added hastily, as if worried his words might do something.

‘She’s gonna be all right,’ Flo told Poppy.

A crepe paper smile burst onto Poppy’s face and sent a cloud of powder into the air. She threw her arms around Flo’s neck, and they danced around the kitchen, hugging like schoolgirls for a bit. They couldn’t have forgiven themselves if Lucy had died or been permanently injured. Not that it was their fault, but still, if it weren’t for them Lucy would have never been there. Poppy planted exaggerated kisses on Flo’s cheeks over and over, and then trotted off with a basket full of jars of octopus and that gorgeous, relieved smile still crumpling her cheeks and glossing her eyes.

When she got home, there was an ambulance out the front of her house.

Flo’s gazing across the neck to the crouched, brown–green hills of the Forestier Peninsula and the beginning of the rest of Tasmania, phone in hand. Poppy’s just hung up. Con’s waking up from his anaesthetic, and Poppy is needed.