Chapter 7 The Octopus
There are things I know now that I did not know before I came to Kaliroi.
The specific silence of an island at half four in the morning.
The way bougainvillea looks in a heat haze, which is to say: furious and glorious.
The fact that oregano smells different dried than fresh and different again when it hits hot oil, and that each of these scents is a distinct experience and not interchangeable, and this is apparently obvious and everyone on this island knew it already.
And: octopus can move after it is dead.
I know this now. I know it in the very thorough, embodied way that you know things that have been demonstrated to you against your will.
(I also know, as a footnote, that this is a normal and documented biological phenomenon and that anyone with a basic understanding of marine biology would not have found it alarming.
I am choosing not to engage with this footnote.
Some knowledge is best acquired before the relevant event.
I did not have it before. I have it now. This is the situation.)
* * *
It was a Thursday, third week of June, and the morning delivery from the dock had included the weekly fresh seafood order, which Elena had left a note about because she was visiting her sister on the northern part of the island and wouldn't be back until noon.
The note said, in Elena's handwriting (small, decisive, slightly alarming in its precision): Fresh octopus in dock fridge.
Needs moving to kitchen cold room by ten. Theria knows.
Theria, when I asked, was doing morning prep and had her headphones in and could not, it emerged, come with me because she was managing the bread timing and it was a precise operation and could not be interrupted.
She did, however, tell me where the dock fridge was and which container the octopus would be in and that it was "not heavy, probably three kilos, maybe four, is fine. "
"Is there anything I should know about—" I began.
"Is fine," Theria said, and put her headphones back in.
I went to the dock fridge.
* * *
The octopus was, as specified, in a large lidded container and labelled ΣΟΥΠΙΕΣ/ΧΤΑΠΟΔΙ — Στα?ρο? in marker.
I lifted it. It was fine. The walk to the kitchen was maybe three minutes.
I had done more complicated things in the last fortnight and I was not going to be defeated by a deceased cephalopod.
I was halfway back to the taverna when I became aware that something inside the container was moving.
Not moving in the way something moves when you're carrying a container with liquid in it. Moving in the way something with surface area makes contact with the side of a container. A slow, dragging contact.
I stopped.
I looked at the container.
The container sat in my hands and was still.
I walked another ten metres.
The contact came again. Long and slow, like fingers trailing across the inside of the lid. Multiple fingers.
I put the container down on the ground.
I took a step back.
The container sat in the morning sun and was completely still.
Here is the thing about being a person with a certain professional background in sustainability consultancy — you develop an instinct for situations where a cautious and systematic approach is warranted, situations where you should gather more information before acting, and situations where the correct move is to open the container and establish facts.
I opened the container.
* * *
The first thing that happened was the cat appeared.
I did not know where the cat had come from.
I had been on the island for nearly two weeks and I had seen the cat exactly once, on my second day, from a distance, eating something near the dock, and I had assumed it was a resident of the dock area who had no particular relationship with the taverna.
This assumption was, I now understood, incorrect.
The cat had a comprehensive relationship with the taverna, specifically with its seafood deliveries, and had been waiting in what I can only describe as a prepared position.
The second thing that happened was the octopus.
The octopus was dead. I am confident about this.
What I was not prepared for was the fact that the octopus, despite being dead, had residual nerve activity in its suckers that produced, upon contact with air and the morning sun and possibly the presence of a cat, a slow and deliberate extension of one arm.
I will describe my response as a contained scream. It was British. It was interior. It emerged at a volume that I am confident did not disturb the nesting birds.
I want to be very clear that I did not throw the container.
I did not drop the container. I stepped back in a controlled and deliberate fashion, maintained possession of the bucket at all times, and breathed through it.
This is what seven years of professional experience teaches you: something going wrong is data; the correct response to data is not panic, it is assessment.
I assessed. The octopus was still. The assessment was: continue.
The cat had other ideas.
I stepped back.
The cat stepped forward.
I said, "Don't—"
The cat did not have opinions about what I thought it should do.
* * *
The cat and the octopus had a brief interaction which ended in the cat retreating to a nearby wall to assess the situation from a position of dignity.
I, meanwhile, had decided that what the octopus needed was containment, and that the logical containment mechanism was the bucket that was sitting near the taverna's back step, used for washing down the outdoor terrace.
The bucket was large. This was correct. I placed it over the open container with a decision-making speed that I will, charitably, describe as efficient.
Then I realised I could not get the octopus from the container into the cold room without removing the bucket.
I removed the bucket.
I attempted to move the octopus. The octopus was approximately three kilos of dead but uncooperative cephalopod, and I will not go into more detail than this except to say that getting it into the bucket by a method that involved a degree of personal contact I had not anticipated.
Here is what I had going for me: seven years of complex multi-stakeholder systems management, a certain Yorkshire stubbornness that my mother described as a feature and my former colleagues had sometimes described as other things, and the absolute certainty that I was not going to go back to the kitchen and say I couldn't manage the octopus.
Here is what I did not have going for me: any prior experience with dead octopus. It turns out that dead octopus, in the close-contact management sense, is not well-represented in sustainability consulting training programmes. I am noting this as a gap.
The transfer took fourteen minutes. I know this because I checked my phone afterward and it was fourteen minutes after I'd opened the container.
I had also, by the time Lex arrived, managed to get the octopus into the cold room and wash my hands twice and was standing very calmly at the kitchen door holding the empty container, examining a fixed point on the harbour wall with the concentration of someone who was absolutely fine and not thinking about anything in particular.
I was, by this point, damp.
Not soaking. Not dramatically so. The specific dampness of a person who has negotiated the transfer of a fresh octopus between containers under unideal conditions.
The cat returned.
* * *
"The cat," said a voice from the kitchen doorway.
I turned around.
Lex was standing at the kitchen entrance with the expression of a man who has taken in a scene in its entirety in approximately one second and has made several decisions about what he is going to say.
"I know about the cat," I said.
He looked at the cat. He looked at the bucket. He looked at me.
"The cat," he said again, which I was beginning to realise was not a question but a statement of priority.
He crossed to the cat, picked it up — the cat submitted to this with the bearing of something that has been carried before and considers it beneath its dignity but will tolerate it — and deposited it on the other side of the gate that separated the outdoor terrace from the dock-side path. He latched the gate. He came back.
He looked at the bucket.
He crouched down next to it and showed me, briefly and without narrating any of it, that what I'd interpreted as the octopus moving was the arm relaxing post-mortem — a neuromuscular thing, completely normal, not distress, not life, just biology being slightly inconvenient about its own processes.
He demonstrated how to manage the transfer to the cold room in a way that did not result in either party (human, cephalopod) being significantly more damp than necessary.
He stood up. He wiped his hands on his apron cloth.
He left.
From just outside the gate, a sound. Brief. Nasal. The slight controlled exhale of a large man who was either mildly exasperated or — and I was not going to commit to this interpretation — trying not to do something more obvious.
I stood in the morning sun with the bucket and the gate latched and the cat regarding me over the top of it with the expression of an animal that had observed a great deal and had opinions about all of it.
"Tell no one," I told the cat.
The cat blinked. This seemed, somehow, like a conditional agreement.
* * *
Lex, for his part, had not mentioned the octopus again.
He had come out from the kitchen door, assessed the scene in the way he assessed things — fast and complete — retrieved the cat, demonstrated the cephalopod physics, and left.
Not a word about what I'd been doing with the bucket.
Not a word about the fourteen-minute gap between my going to the dock and my returning with an empty container and slightly damp forearms.
I found this — and I examined this response, because it was interesting — a significant relief.
A person who mentioned the octopus would have been harder to work for.
A person who let it exist as a fact, neither embarrassing nor remarkable, was a person I could look in the eye at the pass-through that afternoon.
I had looked him in the eye at the pass-through that afternoon, twice, without incident.
I told Priya everything that evening on a voice note, which was a mistake because Priya is a journalist and does not hear anything without putting it in order.
The cat is called The Aegean Overlord, she texted back, forty minutes later.
The cat doesn't have a name, I replied.
It does now. You need to tell Lex.
I was not going to tell Lex. I was going to quietly use the name in private and never say it aloud to anyone on the island and take it to my grave.
I resolved this firmly over dinner — Derek had made something with tomatoes and dill, neither of us had mentioned the octopus because it turned out Derek had seen some of the middle part from an upstairs window and was being kind about it.
"I've seen it happen to better people," he said, which was the kindest possible thing he could have said and also confirmed that he'd seen quite a lot of it.
I told him about the exhale outside the gate. I wasn't sure why I told him. I'd been not sure why I was telling Derek things all week.
"The exhale," Derek said, carefully.
"Outside the gate. After he — sorted things out."
"Was it exasperated or amused?" Derek said.
"I couldn't tell. It was very brief."
He nodded slowly, with the particular thoughtfulness of a man who has known Lex Stavros for several years and is making a calibration. "Yes," he said. That was all he said. Just yes. As if the exhale had confirmed a hypothesis he was running.
I went to bed.
* * *
After service the next evening, Nikos was in the courtyard with the small table they used for the end-of-day accounting.
Lex came out and sat with him. I was getting my bag from inside and I passed through the back of the taverna, the part that faced the courtyard, and I could hear them through the window.
Nikos said something. Lex said something back.
Nikos laughed — that large warm laugh, the one that came from deep in his chest — and Lex's voice when he replied had a different timbre to it.
Not warmer, exactly. Easier. The word I was looking for, I thought, was loosened. As if something had loosened.
His shoulders, when I looked — trying not to look, not actually looking, simply in possession of peripheral vision — were different. The set of them. The same but lower. Easier.
I nearly said "oh" out loud. I didn't.
I got my bag. I said goodnight to Elena. I walked back to The Blue Door in the evening light and told myself that what I had been doing was simply cataloguing observable information, which was a thing I did, because I was a person who paid attention to systems.
The Aegean Overlord was sitting on the wall outside The Blue Door, which I chose to interpret as a coincidence and not as anything the universe was trying to communicate.
"I'm not calling you that out loud," I told the cat.
The cat surveyed me with total serenity.
"Yet," I said. "I'm not calling you that yet."