Triptych, An Erotic Adventure (11 page)

She knew the octopus that lived in this particular rock pool. She had spent many hours watching it and then, at a certain point in this particular study, she had slipped into the water with her snorkel and yellow rubber gloves and teased it out of its hiding place with an extended finger. Of course, studying the octopus, she had imagined its erotic potential. There was that painting by Hokusai,
Tako to Ama.
The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. She had framed a print and placed it over the bed in her first year of university. Every marine biology student should own this picture, she had thought at the time, and it made her laugh to imagine the serious young men with their neat haircuts, or the studious girls with thick glasses, hanging prints of this erotic woodcut on their walls.

Her mother rolled her eyes when she saw it, but her father held the painting high, studying the image as he had her old print of Rubens’
Leda and the Swan,
admiring it for technique and completely ignoring the subject matter. The almost-human mouth of the octopus, the erotic creep of the tentacle encircling one nipple, the smaller octopus dipping its beak into the woman’s mouth as her head fell back, and she found her ecstasy with sixteen tentacled fingers caressing her naked skin.

Leda had imagined herself taken in this way. She knew how the suckers of the octopus could hold her, the sticky cling of the tentacles crawling across her skin bringing a sensation of pure pleasure. Still, in the fevered hours of the morning
when she woke from dreams of giant creatures caressing her breasts among the slippery spines of anemones, Rachel’s words would be with her.
It is a matter of consent.

The fisherman’s wife was consenting, taken by two creatures, passive in her pleasure. Allowing herself to be open to the tentacles and beaks of her cephalopod lovers.

Leda bobbed up and down in the tidal pool. Waves crashed against the rocks, loud and close. She could see only the white tips of their relentless push yet, seconds later, feel the swell of water spilling forward, foam-flecked white, all the malice drained from them by the outcropping of rock that protected this chain of pools.

Her own hair was as dark as that of the fisherman’s wife, but it was thick and tightly curled. Only the salt-water damp could straighten it. Her hair fanned out around her in the water, tugged this way and that by the tidal swell. Naked, with her hair pulled loosely about her, she could imagine herself into the body of Hokusai’s model.

She tipped her head back, allowed her legs to float apart. Her lover was dead and she abandoned herself to the ocean, feeling the cold swell of water pushing up into the warmest places of her body.

The thing that had attracted her to marine studies was the alien nature of it all. The ocean, a beast constantly feeding, killing, eating, turning flesh to food and carving further into bone. The ocean frightened her and all its creatures seemed so unlike herself or anything she knew.

Perhaps fish had feelings; perhaps they wept as humans weep, their tears indistinguishable from the salt water. Still, she doubted it. She imagined them to be emotionless, the fish and crabs and molluscs. Even the evasive creature with its beckoning green light down in the deepest recesses of these rock pools.

Do creatures without emotion need to consent, then? It was a conundrum. While Paul still shared her bed she had no need to wonder. She dragged herself from oceanic dreams back into the sharp light of morning and turned to her furred lover, caressing him and receiving his kisses. She was still in a world where she could love and be loved. Only in dreams did she abandon herself to the alien landscape of the ocean floor.

Of course she knew about the mating habits of octopuses. Only a few years ago it was imagined that the octopus was essentially a loner, mating quickly before moving on. Then a recent Californian study showed that in the wild the male would carefully choose a partner and lurk outside her den, killing every new suitor that came to mate with the chosen one.

An evolutionary imperative, this is what her lecturers had explained to the class, but to Leda it sounded like romantic obsession. Octopuses seemed insatiable with their tendency to mate several times a day.

Leda was fascinated by the knowledge that the male octopus penetrates the female with its hectocotylus arm, a long flexible tentacle that he slips into her mantle cavity to
deposit a sac of sperm. Their movements are a ballet and, just like the dramatic climax of a dance, the male dies soon after mating. The female dies when the eggs have all hatched, a poignant end to the love story. They mate only in one season, a brief frenzy, and after this they have nothing left to live for.

Leda read the Berkeley studies and realised that there was work still to be done. The octopuses on her beach were a different species entirely. It was clear there would be more to learn here in Australia, on the other side of the world.

The octopus in this pond was a male. There was a female nearby, lurking
coyly
in a separate rock pool. At night the ocean brought a tidal bridge between the separate worlds and the male could slip unnoticed into his lover’s territory.

Now, at low tide, the male was isolated. She could see him tucked up into a crevasse. His tentacles curled tightly into the rocks. Still as a carving. It was a small thing to reach out with her finger. She usually wore gloves, but today she felt the suckered foot of the octopus curl out to touch her, the powerful grip of the little cups as the tentacle reached out to wind around her wrist.

If Leda moved too quickly the creature would retreat in an inky cloud. She shifted her hand gently, so as not to stress him, kicked her legs and inched closer to the rock ledge. She took a deep breath, eased herself down and opened her eyes under the water. The octopus was always more perfect in real life than in her memory: each of its legs exquisitely formed,
its suckers able to cling to anything.

She knew the creatures tended to wait and watch the researchers, conducting their own study, or so it appeared. Perhaps this octopus had formed an opinion about her. They seemed to know the difference between the research students at any rate, racing out to play with the exuberant Ian, watchful with the prickly Jocelyn. Leda knew they were not afraid of her. Curious, perhaps: they often snaked a tentacle out to touch her gloved finger. Now, this one, the male, wrapped a second suckered leg around her arm.

It was a medium-sized creature. Not a giant octopus of the kind used in horror movies or photographed on the decks of deep-sea trawlers, but big enough. This one could have wrapped its legs around her waist if it chose, but Leda did not feel intimidated by its size or strength. It would not release its ink unless it was threatened. It had no reason to drown her. She held her breath and let the spidery tentacle pull her closer, wondering anew at the balletic delicacy of all those elegant limbs. The Fisherman’s Wife would be feeling just such a strong but gentle tug, only in the woodblock print every inch of the woman’s skin was subjected to this sticky grip.

Leda needed to breathe. Slowly, she touched the end of a tentacle and lifted it off her arm, feeling the suction cups release her one by one, leaving little red marks on her flesh. She kicked for the surface, took a deep breath and smoothed her hair back from her face. The cold water tugged at her nipples, crept up rudely between her legs. This was what she
needed, the cold hand of the ocean draining the warmth from her body.

When she took another breath and pushed herself down towards the hidden crevasse, the creature slipped a lazy arm towards her, touching her under the ribs with one leg, snaking another out towards her shoulder. It was curiosity, of course. She was too large to eat, too alien to desire. She was a length of mammalian flesh, and the octopus explored her stomach with the kind of scientific detachment the students themselves had brought to his rock pool.

She thrust her chest out. Of course she wanted to know what it would feel like to have its legs caressing her breast. She imagined a suction cup placed on her nipple: it would feel as nice, the thought, as Rachel’s suckling mouth. But manoeuvre herself as she might, she could not make the creature touch her in that way.

He placed one leg underneath her breast, reached out with another to pull at a tendril of her hair. When she took another breath and hovered close to his crevasse, her legs spread wide and the icy water breathing its tidal pulse through her pubic hair, the octopus retreated entirely.

There would be no consensual giving or taking of pleasure. The octopus did not express its desire as a mammal would. There was too wide a gulf.

Leda slid her hand between her legs. She touched her nipple with cold fingers, opened herself to the wash of the tide between her freshly parted and still-warm lips. She felt
her desire spread through her body but was forced to push to the surface to take a breath.

Breaking through into the air above she blinked and gulped down a lungful of grief. Paul in the sunlight and the scent of brine.

When she took another breath and submerged herself completely, there was the sensual dance of the octopus limbs hovering close to her once more, the tantalising potential for an eight-armed entry in his suckered touch. Her desire surged again and she rubbed herself until she felt the need to breathe.

It was impossible. She would die of desire, perpetually suspended on the edge of release, excited by the underwater stillness, repulsed by the world of air and light. After one more descent, one more disappointing breath of memory as she resurfaced, Leda abandoned her attempt to climax.

The tide was turning. She pulled her naked body shivering from the water, spurred on by the swell of a wave pounding against the rocks, subsiding into her side of the cliff wall. She dressed awkwardly, dragging dry clothes onto wet limbs. She walked past the place where her desire was first consummated; up the narrow track that she and Rachel had run down each day with the dogs nipping at their ankles and leaping beside them.

In her bedroom she lay alone, cold now in the bed where the restless body of a German shepherd had kicked his dreaming feet into her back. She stared up at the two prints
above her bed. Leda in the embrace of the swan. The Fisherman’s Wife, caught in the moment of her ecstasy, mouth and cunt both filled completely, her body entangled in a lavish, loveless embrace. She gazed up at the image. She rubbed at herself until she was sore but could generate nothing more than a warm glow, a little nod to the rapture of the Fisherman’s Wife.

The idea came to her in a dream. The giant beast nestling its mantle between her wide-spread thighs, its great emotionless eyes staring up as if to examine the repercussions as it dipped its beak between her swollen labia. In the dream she saw another octopus swimming close by. She wanted to call it over but had no language. She wanted to take its hectocotylus arm into her mouth, swallow the packet of sperm it held, just as a female might take it into her mantle cavity.

She cooed to the creature. She blew kisses. Her entreaties were greeted only by that blank alien stare. Finally, she opened her mouth and there was something under her tongue. She manoeuvred her tongue around the slippery little object and produced a bait-fish, which she held firmly between her teeth.

The smaller octopus saw the silver glint and was upon her, wrapping its tentacles around her head, dipping its beak into her mouth to take the fish. She held tight and in a moment felt the snaking of a leg into her mouth, the sticky tentacles prising her jaws apart, easing her open as it would ease apart the shut-tight shell of a mollusc. The sensation was overwhelming.

Leda woke with a gasp. She must have been holding her breath. She found herself panting, and when she reached between her legs she could feel the last spasms of her climax quivering in the muscles there.

She sat up and looked straight into the great half-lidded eyes of Hokusai’s giant octopus. He seemed to be watching her, waiting for her to make her next move.

Leda slipped out of bed and dressed for class. She had a morning lecture but after that she would be free to go down to the rock pools to conduct her research unhindered. She was keeping a diary, looking at the movement of the octopuses from one pool to another, their feeding, their social behaviour. She hoped to be there to witness the frantic activity of a mating season.

She stood under the shower, washing the last of the dream from the slippery places inside her thighs. She could get fish from the shop beside uni. The science department could have provided her with bait but it was old, frozen and refrozen many times. The fish shop would provide her with a lure for her octopus fresh enough that she need have no concern for her health.

She felt a shivery kind of excitement. She turned off the hot and stood under the cold water till she had brought her body back under control.

The octopus was not in his hole. Leda felt a terrible disappointment. She had bought the fish and come down to shed
her clothes at the edge of the rock pool. All this with her hands shaking and her breath coming quick and shivery in her chest. She had brought a mask and snorkel, which she now pulled off her face to stare out at the other rock pools carved into the cliffs.

Not here, perhaps, but he would not be far away. Maybe he had moved to a different location, encouraged by a king tide to stray from his lair. She pulled herself up onto the rocks on the far side of the pool. The ground was sharp, great gouges of rock torn away in recent storms. She was careful not to cut her feet on the colonies of barnacles: another momentary nod to Paul. The care in his tongue, cleaning her cut feet. Lapping at her torn hymen, licking away the fresh blood.

Leda peered into the second pool. This one was usually empty. Now she saw a tiny school of fish the size of her fingertips flashing one way and another. She dangled her feet into the water and slid down, clutching tight to her bag of fish, slipped the mask on, dipped her face and blew out the water from the snorkel. The fish flashed past, brushing against her chest like the tickly fingers of a human hand. She felt her nipples snap to attention. All the elements of the ocean seducing her, the chill of the water, the scent of brine, the tickle of an anemone snapping closed as it brushed her hip.