For his thirty-second birthday, an ex-boyfriend had bought Jake a retro suitcase record player. The sound was tinny, the tonearm lightweight plastic, and the needle often skipped or scratched the vinyl. But it gave Jake a valuable weekend ritual: trawling the local Oxfam and British Heart Foundation shops for old 33s and 45s. Sometimes, he turned up a ‘90s house classic lurking between the James Last and Demis Roussos. Today, however, there was nothing new on the shelves, and he was just about to leave empty-handed when he spied an old art print in a box of thrown-together junk near the door—a beautifully rendered octopus in a stained-wood frame. 

At first he thought the print was monochromatic. On closer inspection, it had three distinct tones of blue, giving the octopus’s head (or mantle, if that was the right word) a bulging depth, and its suckered tentacles an undulating realism. The paper itself was four taped-together pages from a mildew-spotted dictionary, with definitions from AMB to AST in antiquated font. 

When he got it home, Jake hung it on the living room wall between the vintage Sondheim poster and the surrealist collage of a flower-headed man in linen shirt and string vest. 

Then he thought about his mother. 

He was perhaps three years old, and they were sitting on the edge of his bed. She was wearing a Blondie T-shirt and smelled of the flowery purple soap in the wall-mounted dish next to the bath. The room was cosily lit, ready for bedtime, and they were reading together from an A-Z alphabet book. The book was made of cloth, and Jake loved its touch between his fingers. Pinching smooth, he called it. B was for bear. G was for goat or giraffe, perhaps. But O was definitely for octopus. Jake carefully traced the shape of an extended tentacle with his index finger as his mother spoke to him in soothing tones. 

“An octopus has three hearts, you know.” He hung on her every word. “And I have three hearts too, because one isn’t enough to give you all my love.” 

At eight years old, and to make sure his mum didn’t die in her sleep, leaving Jake with only his father, he would brush his teeth each night for fifty seconds left to right, then fifty seconds right to left, timing this precisely on his digital Casio watch. After that, he would jump up, touch the top of the bathroom cabinet five times, and then, back in his room, find the flower pattern in the wallpaper that looked like a baby dinosaur. If he followed these steps in exactly this order she would still be alive when he woke the next day. 

Almost thirty years later, Jake’s phone buzzed as he emptied a sachet of meat chunks into the cat bowl. It was his father. Again. That was three times this week. He put the phone face down and moved to the bin with the gloopy cat food pouch. He stopped as he passed by the print. Its colours were so rich. As if its inky limbs were writhing. One of the tentacles was curved into a figure-of-eight, settling close to one of the dictionary words. 

It wasn’t a word he knew, but he liked how the open vowels of approach rubbed against the syllables of conjunction. On the Merseyrail to work on Monday, he found himself muttering, “O is for Octopus. Approaching a conjunction,” so that a middle-aged man with a bulbous nose and sweat-stained shirt looked at him funny and shifted to another seat. One station after another whizzed past the train window, and Jake muttered a different, older mantra: “A is for Alien. How did we make him?” but quieter this time; the bulbous-nosed man looked up only briefly before returning to his newspaper. 

#

“Polyradiculoneuritis,” said the veterinary surgeon.

It was later that evening, and Jake was with the cat at the after-hours clinic. The cat’s limbs weren’t working properly. It had started a week or so ago with a peculiar, unstable gait. But when Jake returned home this evening, she was struggling to move at all.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means,” said Jake. 

“It’s neurological. Demyelination of the nerve sheath. Electrical signals from the brain don’t reach her muscles, so her movement is restricted.” 

“Like she’s trapped behind glass,” Jake suggested. 

The vet ignored this. “I’m going to leave you with Alistair, who will talk you through the medication.” 

With the cat lying flat on the vet’s table, Jake felt momentarily guilty for noticing Alistair was a very handsome dark-haired man with deep-set eyes and sinewy arms. 

“Have you given pills to a cat before?” he asked. It sounded like a kinky chat-up line.

Appulse, thought Jake. The phone buzzed in his jeans. His dad again, he guessed. And so, he left it in his pocket. 

#

Jake first became conscious that his mother and father each saw him differently when he was about five years old. 

“Son, could I talk to you?” said his father. The voice was stern, not cruel. Even at that age, however, Jake could sense something heavy and important was coming. He scratched at an itch behind his knee, where a midge had bitten him earlier, and nodded solemnly to show he was listening. 

“The game you were playing in the garden?” his father continued. 

“It wasn’t a game, silly. I was acting out The Wizard of Oz.” 

“Yes.” There was an undertone of frustration in his father’s voice. “But the neighbours …” The sentence trailed away, unfinished, leaving Jake confused. And now his mother was calling them for dinner. 

“It was only The Wizard of Oz, daddy!”

Years later, in his apartment, Jake looked at the word Apprehension on the octopus page and scratched absentmindedly at the back of his knee where the midge had long ago bitten. It was difficult to read the definition, because the creature’s bulging eyes and beak were densely coloured and covered some of the words. And was it him or did the mantle seem somehow different today? At a different angle, perhaps? But no. How could that be? Jake held a jar of pasta sauce in his left hand and turned the lid anticlockwise with his right. In one dextrous movement, he popped it open. This was unusual. He tipped dried pasta into an empty pan, half listening to it clatter against the metal. He was again remembering something from years before—something from just after the Wizard of Oz incident: way past his bedtime, ear pressed vacuum-like against the glass of the living room door.

“He’s just so different, Catherine. Alien, almost. I’m not sure how I made him.” 

“We made him,” came his mother's voice. She sounded tired. She often sounded tired these days. “And yes, he’s different, Adam. But that’s okay. Because different means kind. And sensitive. And …” 

Jake looked at the swirling patterns of the hallway carpet and imagined he was see-through, melting into its brown and orange patches. It would be like I was never here, he thought. He peeled his ear from the glass and scuttled soundlessly to bed. He scoured the wallpaper for the baby dinosaur. 

Pasta water bubbled over the rim of the pan and sizzled on the hob, and Jake was shaken back into the present. The cat was on the sofa. He met her sad, confused gaze. He looked at the octopus print. And swore he saw its great eyes blink. 

#

It was three nights after the vet visit, and Jake was in a nightclub called Benthic on Fenwick Street. Handsome Alistair had slipped into his DMs after showing him the best way to administer prednisolone to a cat. And Jake had thought, why not? 

It was a disco cocktail bar, apparently. Jake did not suppose this an expression likely to be found in later pages of his octopus dictionary, but, on the off chance it should be, he guessed it would be defined as a semi-squalid subterranean hole with garish green ceilings, zebra-striped floors, and a wall-mounted tiger’s head (which was also a lantern). 

Nurse Alistair had been talking to an older, silver-haired gentleman at the bar for the time it took the DJ to play two nu-disco aberrations, and Jake was on a red velour banquette with the remains of a forty-minute-old Negroni. He felt strangely aware of his toes and the way his shoes seemed suckered to the vinyl zebra stripes.  

A drunk young woman appeared. She was crying.

“Is everything okay?” Jake asked.

#

“Is everything okay, daddy?” asked Jake. 

He knew everything was not okay. At home time, his teacher Miss Poulton had dismissed the class, then beckoned Jake’s mother over for a quiet word. 

“I just wanted to let you know,” she began, “that Jake was picked last during football again today.”

Jake’s mother looked at Miss Poulton with a dreadful stare but said nothing. 

Miss Poulton pressed on. “He had a wonderful morning—wrote a lovely poem in English—and his marine life collage is almost as good as Carolyn’s—but, well, to put it bluntly, we don’t want everyone thinking you’re frightened of the ball, now do we?” She had directed this last part at Jake, who had turned his feet inward and was looking at the playground tarmac.  

“I’m sorry. Can I get this straight?” said his mother. “You’re saying he’s creative, which, rather than a compliment, seems to be subtext for something else. And that—very importantly—he could do with getting better at football?” 

A small crowd had gathered—young mothers with their children. Jake recognised some of the football boys. 

“I’m just saying,” replied Miss Poulton in a tense whisper, “that senior school can be tough, and when he gets there, we don’t want Jake to find it harder than necessary.” 

Two of the football boys were sniggering. But Jake was looking only at his mother: her face pale as marble; her body still as a specimen under glass.

“We both know very well what you’re saying, and it has precisely nothing to do with football,” she said with quiet ferocity. “Just leave us alone, and don’t make insinuations about my son ever again.” 

“Is everything okay, daddy?” asked Jake. 

“Your mother is tired, that’s all.” His eyes didn’t meet Jake’s. “Now, off to bed and we can talk more about it tomorrow.” 

In the night, Jake woke with a start. He had forgotten to find the flower dinosaur in the wallpaper. How could he have been so stupid? He switched on the bedside lamp and searched until he found it, then went back to sleep. 

When he woke the next morning, his mother was gone. 

#

In Benthic, the crying woman had sobered up sharpish. 

“Is everything okay?” she asked Jake. 

He wondered why she was suddenly asking him. Then he felt the tears on his face and the snot in his mouth and understood.  

“Not really.” He paused for a beat. “I think I killed my mother.” 

The woman’s eyes widened.

“Sorry,” said Jake. “They said it was her heart. Congenital. But they don’t know what really happened. And what didn’t …” 

Jake’s heart pounded everywhere. Chest. Belly. Throat.

One.

Two.

Three.  

The air was too hot. It pressed down on his head in thick layers. 

Everything was dark. The floor was viscous sludge. 

I’m going to puke, he thought.

Jake looked for his arms. His hands. His fingers. He could see them in outline, but they looked and felt so different. Sinuous. Translucent. He jerked to his feet and gripped the sticky floor, curling his toes inside his shoes to get a purchase. When he tried to move, his left foot was stubbornly anchored. He pushed the right foot forward, twisting and searching unnaturally.  

Alistair and the older man were attached at the face. They had a bluish hue. 

Now, the muscles in Jake’s chest contracted violently, and a black, inky shape appeared beside him. 

The black, inky shape was him. 

The next thing he knew, he was curled in a ball on the pavement outside Benthic. Clutching his phone in a pool of his own vomit. 

#

Three weeks after his mother’s death, Jake returned to school. The other children avoided him or whispered as he walked by, and Miss Poulton spoke to him quietly with a forced, unnatural kindness. Jake’s eyes felt itchy and the skin on his arms and face prickled.

In science, Miss Poulton taught the class about a rare octopus which marine scientists had recently discovered in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Over the course of many weeks, said Miss Poulton, deep-sea divers had watched with fascination as this mother octopus guarded her clutch of eggs with gentle ferocity. Way down on the ocean floor, she watched in complete stillness as shrimp and crabs passed by, never once reaching out a tentacled arm to grab food for herself, lest any movement attract some hidden, sharp-jawed predator. Under the mother’s watchful eye, her eggs burgeoned and pulsed with the promise of life while she stayed, frozen like a statue, weakening and withering until almost nothing was left of her. Weeks and months passed. Eventually, the enormity of the task took its toll. Her hearts beat their last, just as the eggs hatched and her brood swam away. Jake closed his eyes and pictured the faded mother octopus slowly melting into the ocean floor until she was practically invisible. You might never even know she’d been there, he thought. 

“He’s bleeding!” screamed Cassie Andrews from the next seat. “Jake’s nose is gushing blood!”  

#

The phone buzzed. Jake read the message in preview, so his father couldn’t know he’d seen it. 

Please answer my calls, son. It’s a hard time of year. For both of us. 

After his mother’s death, the distance between them had grown. His dad didn’t know about the toothbrush or the baby dinosaur, so he had no idea Jake was the one who had done it; that she had withered away because of him. Regardless, Jake had not been the son his father wanted. 

Alien, almost. I’m not sure how I made him.  

And so much time had passed, Jake thought. Nothing could bridge that gap now.  

He looked at the cat. She was improving. She had some voluntary movement and wobbled less when she walked. She could make it to the litter tray without Jake’s help. Alistair had called round yesterday to demonstrate some simple pet physiotherapy. It was kind of him. The prognosis was good. His cat was finally returning to her body. 

Jake wished he could say the same of himself. Five days after Benthic, and things were still off-kilter. Electric shivers tingled in his limbs. Blue haloes bubbled at the borders of his vision. Right now, he felt strangely fixed to the sofa—his left buttock melded to the cushion, his right foot searching the floor. It was like he was in something else’s skin. He looked at the print on the wall. 

The mantle shimmered. 

The great eye blinked. 

The frame began to rattle. 

Jake’s chest tightened. A hairline fracture was forming in the glass. Something was seeping out: the words from the page. 

Appulse

Apprehension

Ambiguous. 

They floated in the air above his head. He reached out and touched Appulse; it shivered and broke into fragments. 

And now the octopus was testing the crack with its beak. Pouring itself, liquid-like, through the glass. 

It was free.

And in one great muscular movement, the octopus burst towards him in a cloud of inky mist. 

Jake gasped for breath at the sight of the sea beast hovering: mantle pulsing, tentacles undulating. They were face-to-face. The octopus blinked. A velvety eyelid covered the great black slit of its pupil. It reopened. And the pupil was now a great black pearl. 

It reached out a tentacled arm and pulled him in. Electrical signals pulsed, like muscle fibres twitching into life. The octopus looked at him. And he looked at the octopus. 

In the reflection of its eye, he saw a woman: a young woman in a Blondie T-shirt. A lavender soap dish. An alphabet cloth book. From inside the great black pearl, his mother smiled at him. 

Her skin was thin. Translucent. Inside her chest, he saw the faintest outline of her heart. He saw its valves and chambers. He saw them strain and flutter. 

It was never about toothbrushes and dinosaurs.

He looked into her eyes. Heard her voice through the glass against his ear. Watched her fight for him on the playground: protecting him from sharp-jawed predators.

He smiled back at her. 

But now the octopus was changing: its skin turned loose and pale, its pupil dim and clouded. Its blue hues were draining away, like ink in water. And now, he could hardly see it at all. 

The room was still and empty.

You might never even know they had been there. His mother-octopus. The octopus-mother. 

The print was face down on the floor: frame cracked, glass shattered. And the phone was ringing. Exhausted, he picked it up. 

“Hi, Dad,” said Jake. He paused. 

And then they spoke.