VIVIEN JONES

Octopus

We lived in Sliema at 197 Prince of Wales Road in a two storey apartment reached from a ground floor staircase that curved high and tight upwards. There was a graceful banister that ended in a tight curl at the bottom and it was my ambition to slide down its entire length, but it was forbidden. What if I fell off ? What if my little brother copied me ? One day, I promised myself, when they are all out except for Tessa, the maid, I would do it. Sometimes I slid one bare leg over the polished wood and felt it glide under its own weight but I daren’t shift my body weight across the centre. I just knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to do it and the marble floor beneath was very hard. Graham had dropped a Dinky toy from upstairs once, not entirely accidentally. It was a breakdown truck and the crane section had bent so he bawled until Daddy straightened it out.  Not a mark on the floor though.  

This day, I was sliding down the stairs with the top half of my body providing the limiting friction, but my feet on the steps. I had done it several times so I had worked out just how much weight allowed the slight loss of control that made it exciting. A couple of times I had overdone it and spun round, nearly falling backwards down the steps but I had been agile enough to catch the banister with my hands before I went too far. My mother appeared at the top of the stairs.

‘Vivien, I’m going to the shop. Do you want to come ? ‘ she called down to me.

‘Can I stay with Tessa ?’ I called back.

I knew that Tessa would be here cleaning all morning, moving from room to room with her bare feet slapping on the stone floors. She had horrified my sister and thrilled me by standing on a huge cockroach on the upstairs landing. The sound it made was terrific, a kind of wet crackle. She had bent to pick up the remains, inspected it with a grin and mock tossed it towards my cringing sister, who screamed and ran away. Then she gestured to me that she would eat it, holding it high above her thrown-back head. Tessa never did these things in front of my mother and she behaved like an adoring hand-maiden to my little brother, but we two girls were just a nuisance around her feet and not worth exerting any manners for. We were just girl children, just about worth an extra shilling for minding.

‘All right, but you behave. I won’t be long.’

But she would relieve me of the demands of my little brother, who was sweet but a toddler not old enough to really play with. He didn’t say much. He mostly ate and ran his cars everywhere or played ‘Diddely-bum’, another stair game where you went down the stairs in a sitting position, saying ‘Diddely-bum’ in time with your landing on each step.  The motion and the words made him laugh but I wasn’t allowed to make him go fast enough to make it fun for me. My sister was too old for these games and she wasn’t expected to amuse Graham, which wasn’t fair. So it was always good when my mother took just them shopping, Frances to help and Graham because he was little. I could always escape Tessa.

I waved them up the road and hung about in the doorway until they were out of sight, then I called upstairs.

‘Just going out for a lolly.’

Tessa knew my mother had given me three-pence for an ice lolly from the Walls freezer in the kite shop next door, so she wouldn’t worry for a while. I slipped next door and pushed through the bead curtains into the gloom of Igor’s kite shop. The walls and ceiling were hung with paper kites of all colours and sizes, their tails looped over their shoulders but there was no window so the shop resembled a cave hung with shadows. Igor ( not his real name, of course, but what we children called him ; why I do not remember and we never said it out loud ) Igor was sitting splitting cane with a hooked knife that zipped through the wood spraying dust. He was cutting towards his lap, a practice I knew was dangerous. I could hear Daddy saying ‘Always cut away from you.’ But he can’t have told Igor who looked up in the middle of a stroke, not even watching what he was doing, when he heard the rattle of the beads.

‘What you want ? ’ he muttered.

I pointed at the Walls freezer, not minding his surliness because it was habitual. He spoke to everyone like that. My mother said she didn’t think he would sell many kites with that attitude, but the shop entertained a steady stream of customers because the Maltese people celebrated everything; birthdays, weddings, births and deaths by flying kites and then there were naval fathers who, home on leave, would often stop by to buy a new kite for the children they hadn’t seen for a while. He put his tools aside and came over to the freezer, lifting the thickly insulated lid and peering inside.

‘What you want ?’ he repeated.

I wasn’t going to be caught out by Igor’s irritable tricks. If I said one thing, he’d say ‘None left.’ and shut the lid.

‘What you got ?’ I copied his way of speaking unconsciously.

He grunted and reached into the depths of the freezer. He pulled out an unrecognisable object wrapped in newspaper and held it out to me. It was much bigger than any lolly I’d ever seen. I hung back.

‘My dinner. Octopus !’ he roared.

He laughed suddenly and dropped the frozen parcel back into the freezer.

He plunged his arm down again and this time pulled out an orange ice-lolly which he held out to me.

‘Three and a half pennies,’ he demanded.

‘But, I only have threepence.’ I said indignantly, adding, ‘It was threepence yesterday. Mummy only gave me threepence.’

He stood, shaking his head in mock regret, while the lolly in his hand lost its white frosting and started to turn the wrapper wet. I fidgeted, imagining it running down the stick and over his wrinkled hand to drip on the floor. At this point I wasn’t sure who owned it. Would he let it melt then make me pay for it ? He roared again, having caught me off-guard and I blushed whist he took my warm threepence and handed me the melting lolly, still chuckling. I swept out brushing the bead curtain energetically to show my annoyance. Once outside I headed down the road towards the creek, quickly licking the liquid surface of my lolly until I reached the ice core. Relaxing, I rested it on my lips until it hurt, after which it was soon gone. I kept the stick for later.

By then the creek was in view. I don’t know why we called the sea the creek, because it was the sea, the Mediterranean Sea, that lapped on the white rocks of Sliema beach. It wasn’t one of ‘our’ beaches by which I think the adults meant somewhere where only other Naval families went, but a local beach where Maltese children played and their grown-ups had noisy picnics with oil-drum fires and wine which made them sing and did other things like fishing and beach-combing. I wasn’t allowed to pick things up from the local beach although there were always hundreds of interesting things I would have liked to pick up. Mummy thought they might be dirty though since they’d been in the sea, I couldn’t see why. There were sometimes lumps of tar on the beach and if you got them on your skin it burnt, and on your clothes it meant wiping the stain with petrol ( though that didn’t work on white ankle socks, Mummy had said pointedly ) In the pools you had to watch out for sea urchins which could leave their fierce spines in your hand or foot, and there were little crabs everywhere that tore about like rugby players if you lifted the rock they were under.

This day there were several grown-ups, all men, shouting and laughing around a red oil drum fire. They wore rolled up trousers and white singlets that looked startling against their brown flesh and black hair.  One of them had a smoking skewer that he was waving about, perhaps to cool whatever was on it, before all of them huddled round him like a rugby scrum and bent to some task. I didn’t mean to be nosy but I was collecting white pebbles and I wandered close to them by accident, by which time I could see all round the stubble round their mouths, noses and chins their faces were glistening with eating straight from the skewer.    One of them held up a long finger of smoking studded flesh, shut his eyes and crunched it in his mouth until the juices were overflowing from his mouth. (Glad Mummy didn’t see that.)  I was aware of the heat radiating from the crackling oil drum, a hot salty, roasting smell that made my mouth water. I swallowed several times and went closer.

One of the men noticed me staring at them. He bent down to his feet and picked up a long white and grey speckled thing that looked like a very floppy fish. In one quick movement he speared it onto a long wire skewer and laid it across the top of the oil-drum where parts of it began to twist into wild spirals whilst the rest turned opaque and its liquids hissed into the oil-drum. The man watched it for less than a minute before wrapping his hand in a rag and lifting the skewer into the air. He walked towards me and the other men muttered a little, standing back, wary of some trouble-making infringement of beach protocol. But I was on their beach and the man with the skewer was king of the skewers. He showed me the roasted body and I could see it was the distorted remains of an octopus. I also noticed his hands were oiled with something black. Without a word he pulled off a spiral tentacle and offered it to me. The crackled surface was still smoking, the sweetest salt smell rose from it and I took his gift from his grimy hand and said ‘Thank you very much’ before putting in my mouth.

Then it was as if a spoonful of cream and salt and the sea and the sky and the sun had been distilled into one mouthful of food. My eyes shut and the taste shot through my body like an electric shock. My eyes opened wide. He was smiling at me.

‘More ?’ he asked. I nodded and he began to feed me strips of roasted octopus, first a tentacle then pieces of the sack torn delicately into a child’s mouthful with his gnarled fingers. Soon my mouth and chin were wet with eating too. The taste was so much finer without cutlery or plates or a tablecloth in between the cooking and the eating. I wondered if Mummy might………

When I’d had enough the man handed me his rag to wipe my face and, as one, they turned away from me and began talking in Maltese. I read the signal and turned away sure it must be time to go back to Tessa and wait for Mummy’s return from the shops.

I had only reached the beach’s edge when Mummy and Frances and Graham and Tessa were there. Tessa was wringing her hands and crossing herself, talking in rapid Maltese. Mummy looked furious, Frances her true sergeant at her side and Graham looking sleepy, lolling a little in his pushchair. I stopped a few paces off. Mummy had been known to issue slaps when pushed. I looked at her face trying to measure the balance of anger, worry and relief there ; they seemed to be alternating.

‘Just where do you think you’ve been ?’ Mummy demanded, wiring into the anger first. ‘Tessa has been worried out of her mind.’

‘Just here. I didn’t do anything wrong. I wasn’t far away.’ I protested.

‘Oh Vivien, you know you’re not allowed to come here. And what’s that on your collar ?’ she sounded exasperated.

She reached forward and pulled me towards her. I dipped my chin but I couldn’t see my collar.

‘Ice-lolly,’ I guessed, hoped.  I also hoped the men were far enough away to be indistinct.

She bent towards me, sniffed deeply and scanned the beach. I could feel it all drop into place in her mind as she took in the still smoking oil drum and the group of men and the smell on my clothes. I thought I might pre-empt what looked like severe trouble brewing.

‘OK. It’s not ice-lolly, it’s octopus.  A nice man over there gave me some to taste.’ I added brightly, ‘Have you ever tasted octopus, Mummy?’

She looked over at the men on the beach, taking in their language and loud laughter, their size, their strength, their otherness. I looked too and saw what she saw. Seven Maltese men and her little girl.

I saw her mouth tighten. Her hand on my arm tightened too. 

‘Home just now. We’ll see what Daddy has to say later.’

Though she spoke quietly she seemed to be trembling.

It was the worst thing. Not that Daddy would be anywhere near as angry as she was but she hardly ever saved up events for him to deal with, only when they were really bad. And I would have to wait for after dinner to have done with it, dreading it all afternoon.

‘It wasn’t their fault, Daddy, really. Please don’t report them. They only gave me some octopus.’

I was tearful, aware from Daddy’s long serious speech that he thought something very bad had happened, though I didn’t understand what it was because he hadn’t said exactly. It wasn’t the octopus but something about eating it like that, straight out of the sea without cutlery or a face cloth, with strangers, Maltese strangers. I wanted to please Daddy (and Mummy) so I promised not to do it again though whether it was eating octopus or eating with strangers, I wasn’t sure, but I would promise Daddy anything to make him smile again. In the end he said he wouldn’t report them, this time, and I rushed to assure him there certainly would never, never be another time. I would stay off the beach, play only in Prince of Wales Road, be kind to my brother, help Mummy and not squabble with Frances. He pulled me onto his lap and I sank my face into his great chest, feeling freshly forgiven and reborn into virtue.

But in bed that night, even after brushing my teeth, when I lay in the cool rooftop room, I could still sense a faint salty thrill and a suggestion of smoke on the edge of my tongue. Not something to share. I knew that much anyway.

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