I first met the Occy Lady about the time I started hearing snippets of music on the wind. Three summers ago, sitting on my usual spot, high on the cliffs above the Tasman Sea, with a thermos of tea and binoculars, looking for the northern migration of humpback whales, the wind carried one lilting line from Australian Crawl’s ‘Restless’, I miss our early morning wrestle and stopped as a cormorant flew overhead and then as the Manly Ferry makes its way to Circular Quay.

When you mention my name to old girlfriends they pause. The more polite smile while the others roll their eyes and lean in to an anecdote about my bonkers behaviour: jumping off jetties into shallow water, dressing and acting like Caligula at a party, running out of restaurants without paying, the terrible puns, radical leftist politics, interpretive dances (the history of American Slavery is still famous) and the heavy drinking. The less mannered always mention the drinking. The car and motor cycle accidents, fighting people twice my size, the arrests, and failing to comport myself in a way one would expect from an individual with a first-class private school and university education.

Age has mellowed me. Not like a smooth merlot but a well-poured Guinness. In my 40s, I quit working for organisational psychic prisons and took up that most perilous of professions – a freelance journalist. To my surprise, considering the transformation of journalism into an adjunct of the entertainment industry, I did well. It wasn’t due to my people skills, which were appalling, but an innate sense of what makes news. But if I’m honest, as my hair turned pepper and salt, my nest was feathered by a small inheritance paid annually in British pounds from a distant Scottish relative. Like many of my ageing and neurotic peers, I’m surfing the great baby boomer wave towards death.

By my early 60s, I had matured into an eccentric, who raises the elbow Aussie Rules Football style, at the heads of spoilt fat brats riding Fat Boy e-bikes at 30 kph on footpaths, through Mum’s pushing prams and doddering old bastards. I took one out a while ago and the cops came banging at my door at 11.00pm. Bang! Police! Bang! Open Up! There were six of them over three metres tall with the usual accoutrement of death head insignia, guns, batons and body armour. I said if they’d come about the bookcases on Facebook Marketplace, they were too early. The usual palaver at the station: DNA test, photos of the tattoos – the Scottish Lion Rampant on the left arm, a Griffin holding a red star on the right, a dove carrying an Armalite rifle over the left breast followed by the charges, blah, blah. Not completely mellowed. There’s a wildness in the blood which obeys neither discipline or convention. In the next cell a drunk wearing only a grey blanket was singing Ian Dury’s, ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’, The juice of a carrot, the smile of a parrot, a little drop of claret, anything that rocks, over and over again.

On the lighter side I would, at dinner parties in my white, upper-middle class seaside village, quote chunks of Shakespeare, Auden and Larkin. I’m a natural after a few drinks at Euan McGregor’s ‘Choose Life’ speech from T2 Trainspotting. A curio amongst the older women whose husbands had croaked. For others, I was a wanker. I might not be everyone’s cup of chai as I support the IRA (finish the job) and the liberation of Palestine. In my callow youth – my uneaten salad days – my heroes were the Tupamaro – the Robin Hood urban guerillas in Uruguay. What I don’t like, as many of my neighbours do, is to fixate on property speculation while spending their 60s and 70s bitching about people on Facebook, demonstrating not only inveterate cowardice but proof that they will go into that good night shrieking and howling.

The Occy Lady was in her late 70s. It’s hard to say with certainty. I’m 64 but look younger as the kidney medications camouflage cellular decay. The Picture of Dorian Grey in bathers. The Occy Lady’s hair was the colour of burnished steel cut into a half-baked sylvan pixie bob with an evolving tragedy at the back. Her mint green one-piece bathing suit had a small plastic daisy woven where her breasts once would have met. A handsome woman but gravity and the sun had turned an hour-glass figure into a brown beer bottle bulging at the hips, with an east-west arse and ice cream cone legs. Yet her eyes were mesmerising. Aged hadn’t diminished those sapphires. Like free falling into a deep pacific island sink hole. It’s hard to be complementary about old age. She’d describe me as combination of donkey stubbornness and camel malice, with a large pre-cancerous red splotch of sun-damaged skin on the right side of my face from driving up the east coast in my youth, arm out the window, looking for ‘anything that rocks’.

I call her the ‘Occy Lady’ because as soon as she told me her name, I forgot it and lacked the courage to ask her again. Too many tides have passed. When we meet at the ocean pool, I smile and say ‘hullo’ and she says ‘Hullo Michael’, although my name is Callum. Apparently, I look like a Michael and others have said as much over the years.

It was a beautiful September day when the Occy Lady called me in to the ocean pool. I’d just been visited by a new aural hallucination. Now on the sidewalk, huh, huh, whoo sunny morning, un huh, lies a body just oozin’ life, eek, and someone’s sneakin’ ’round the corner, could that someone be Mack the Knife? The pool is 40 metres long and 30 metres wide. Its concrete walls were built in the Depression years by unemployed men to give them something to do instead of storming the government. The warm northern current had just reached the southern shores but the water was still freezing. With a wet suit top, snorkel and mask I tentatively entered the water and sang my Viking mantra picturing the icy waters off Lindisfarne, We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. Tiny purple, green and red fish darted amongst the rocks. A few orange fan tails and even baby kingfish – a delicacy served raw with soy sauce and wasabi.

She pointed at a clump of grey seaweed lying on the ocean pool floor, about the size of a small dinner plate. I floated above it and saw nothing until a tentacle slowly unfolded and reached out towards her finger. It took me a few seconds to discern this master of camouflage: the eyes, the mantle, the gills and then it took off at speed, jet-propelled, its tentacles waving behind.

“It’s called a Gloomy octopus but they’re far from gloomy. They’re curious and explore the world around them like children. They have consciousness,” she said as her hair hung over her mask like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family.

Feigned autistic indifference came naturally to me but this was interesting. What did it feel like to look like an alien navigator suspended in the cool twilight on the seabed, eight arms waving gently around me? Each of my tentacles with its own miniature brain, operating separately but in conjunction with my central brain. My suckers tasting everything they touch.

“They have blue blood as it has a high level of copper. Researcher reckon they not only have memory but can feel pain. They’re sentient.”

“Many years ago, I had lunch on the Greek island of Milos,” I said “and hanging in the sun were 20 octopuses pulled from the sea that morning. I chose the goat.”

“I wonder if goats think too,” she said with a smile and swam away.

According to Google, after a female octopus lays a clutch of eggs, she quits eating and wastes away. By the time the eggs hatch, she’s gone like Karen Carpenter. Some females in captivity try kill themselves by banging into the sides of the tank and eating the tips of their tentacles. I was hooked.

I had to re-employ behavioural therapy at our first meeting when she said she was a retired school teacher. Bile rose in my mouth. I’d lived with a teacher during the Jurassic Period; a hideous PC-infected drone who taught her young iPhone-addicted history students that the English Civil War was the progenitor of the #MeToo movement, Napoleon was gay and Emily Pankhurst was a tranny. I fled to west Belfast for some peace and quiet and she became a politician for the Greens.

I live alone one street back from the beach in a small two-bedroom apartment with a Japanese design aesthetic from the Edo period. Mats on the floor and bugger-all furniture. That was the interior decorator’s plan until I moved in with a queen-sized bed, six large bookcases (two empty) and three backlit glass cabinets full of shells from across the world. No futon? the designer asked. I spent my teens sleeping on the floor in other people’s houses. Fuck the futon. Guests say ‘what a marvellous shell collection’. They’re a marine graveyard. Sometimes it’s best to not get what you want.

I’d given up pair bonding with women some years ago. There were trust account babies who neither toiled nor spun, crystal huggers and ‘the Malaises’ – my collective noun for women who spread gossip like mustard gas over Passchendaele. A tedium the hens, their faces unclouded by deep thought. Many believed the journey to the centre of self was a dangerous and time-consuming expedition. In their bedroom mirror, a stranger’s face stared back or worse, a mask forged from the past fads of popular culture.

Was I so different? In my teens I used the Pinter pause to perfection before picking a male dancing partner to engage in ‘fisticuffs’ out the back of a pub. I buried myself in Dada and Surrealism, followed by Zen Buddhism, Marxism and endless nights gawping through the lens of my hand built refracting telescope, as the universe rushed towards and away from me. I too had wandered down lanes of thought far from the orthodox. In the morning, I did exercises from the Qi Gong and Tai Chi. I’d deep-dived into Jung and meditated on the Wiccan fire pentacle. To me, the ocean was a shrine to the ineffable, to the other. The truth was, in relationships, after swimming from the Titanic to the Marie Celeste, it became clear my powers of discretion in female companionship had abandoned me. The intelligence of apes, elephants, whales, dogs and octopuses had magnetic appeal. True, these were not great bed companions but better than waking up with Ms Givings.

The Occy Lady was a Quaker. When I think of the Quakers, I visualise people shaking in fear or a palsy. My mind flicks from image to image like the TV news. And now this…The Quakers – or the Religious Society of Friends – were pacificists, renowned for driving the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, prison reform and mental health care. Richard Nixon was a Quaker and he unsuccessfully tried to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age. The American invasion into Cambodia laid the path for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the extermination of two million people.

She loaned me a well-thumbed book on Martin Luther King and underlined a quote: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” I loaned her a book on Malcolm X and underlined my favourite passage, which flipped the Patrick Henry quote on its head, “Give me liberty or give me death” to “It will be liberty or it will be death.” Books sometimes divine one’s political philosophy but it’s a dodgy proposition as I also love Paddington Bear.

An invitation by the Occy Lady to the local flower show – a key event at the Annual Agricultural Show and Gymkhana – was something I’d normally turn down like a rectal exam. But as it was on a Sunday, which can be three months long, I made way to the Pavillion and Life Saving Club, paid the $5.00 entry fee, which included a raffle ticket. Ms Local Charity Queen was being crowned. A silk sash bash. The runners up pulled the icy cat-walk pout for the local newspaper photographer.

My nose was hit was hit by waves of perfumes as I browsed the rows of roses, Agapanthus, Gardenias, Hydrangeas (which bought back memories my of Grandmother’s garden and her ankle-nipping corgis). Below each exhibition a school child had drawn crayon pictures of the growers: all older women with smiley faces, dressed in hats and gardening gloves. A nice touch. The Orchids sat proudly and erotically to the left of the Dahlia’s, the petals opening up like women’s genitalia. The Occy Lady’s orchid was a Cattleya, with a purple and yellow cone protruding from a white flower. An exquisite shape, mathematical in its symmetry. I fought the temptation to touch it and kept my hands knotted behind my back as a large lesbian in overalls was giving me the evil eye. Below the Occy Lady’s orchids, a young girl had drawn her face with bright pink cheeks, blue eyes (she got that right) and grey and yellow whisps of hair, which looked either like Medusa’s snakes (under fed) or tentacles. Below the display was the name Margaret Eiger. Margaret. Remember that. A dog in the carpark was chasing its tail and people were laughing. As I walked up the street, her name flew away like a Bogon moth.

I wasn’t close to Patrick Magee but we’d sink a few Guinness in the Leagues Club. Paddy was in his early 60s and worked as a gas meter reader. The new digital meters will put him out of a job. He didn’t care. More time to sink pints and have a flutter on the nags. His grey hair was pulled back in a pony tail, the tips of his fingers yellow with nicotine. In his 30s, he lectured in literature at Trinity University but committed ethical suicide by sleeping with an Eileen, a Delores and a Saoirse. Patrick relished the magnetic attraction of young women who were only too keen to ‘go all the way’, (to quote Eric Carmen) but he failed to consider the power differential between lecturer and student. Like Odysseus tied to the mast, he should have resisted the siren’s call. He also didn’t consider the Pro-Vice Chancellor was a modern woman whose finger pressed heavily on the scale of prosecution. The fall was like Satan out of heaven and on to the dole lines. Like many Irishman, he set sail for Australia and a new life.

Patrick had a knack of guiding the conversation to his narrow and jaundiced lens of expertise – Australia. Not the ‘shrimp on the barby’ or the ‘dog on the tucker box’ Australia. But the regressive and xenophobic Australia. In the small alcove set aside for smokers, with a view of the local girls from the Greer and Steinem high school, wearing only coconut oil as they headed to the ocean pool, he’d broadside the Great Southern Land.

“Look, I’ll admit Ireland ain’t progressive. It’s uptight, regressive and buries new ideas under a sea of venom. Cromwell should have killed the lot of us and started again but don’t get me started,” he took a long draught of Guinness and kept talking as he rolled a cigarette with more paper than tobacco.

“Maybe as an immigrant I haven’t got the right to say it but I’ll say it anyway and you can love it or lump it. Australia is 1950s South Africa. They’ve buried the blacks under symbolism, our soldiers are fighting wars that have got nothing to do with us and the divide between the rich and the poor is like Russia before Lenin took over. Unless you come from a rich family, young people can forget owning a house. They’re fucked.”

Patrick’s rants had an epic quality. It was disconcerting to find oneself nodding along with a man who looked like hobo but had a doctorate in the poetry of WB Yeats.

“I tell you Cal, Australians are the most reactionary cunts on the planet. They don’t give a shite about anything but themselves. Mateship is long dead. D-E-A-D. The cult of Me, Me, Me has got them by the balls. If Thatcher succeeded anywhere, it’s here. As for that imperialist game, cricket, it’s dying. Aussie Rules has become unintelligible as they’ve changed the fucking rules. I’m telling you, your politicians are coprophiliacs with their Punch & July bickering and shit-eating grins. De Valera wouldn’t take a curried dump on the lot of ‘em.”

I thought so little about politics, that even if I could get a word in, I couldn’t add much. Society had atomised. Political parties were glove puppets for corporate giants and lobby groups. Political movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter, rose up like sky rockets on social media, only to explode at the moment of apogee and disappear until the next outrage. Nothing changed.

Patrick could go on like this for an hour. If he got on to migrants – who he hated – I tuned in to my semi-autistic state and wondered why female octopuses kill themselves after laying their eggs? Surely in a Darwinian sense, they should survive to protect their offspring.

For three years I made my way to the ocean pool almost every day – except in winter when the water temperature fell below 16C – to see the occies. I saw them grow, prise open oysters and mussels, find mates, sporn and die. The Occy Lady was there before me and we’d make small talk about the occies and the arrival of new fish, some as big as one’s arm. The occies fled in high summer as brats did bombs and suey’s into the water and a thin film of suntan lotion covered the pool. The Portuguese Man of War jellyfish would sail into the pool on hightide. I took perverse pleasure as the kids fled the water screaming with stingers wrapped across their chest or legs. One less biped pissing into the pool.

An unsolicited email hit my spam folder and lay unread for two days. How did the Occy Lady she get my email? I don’t like people snooping online.

Dear Michael,

I thought you might be interested in this. It’s in Nature magazine. Did you know octopuses dream and they dream in colour? They have two stages of sleep: “quiet sleep” and “active sleep”. In the latter, their arms twitch, their breathing quickens, and their skin ripples with vibrant, shifting colours. Researcher reckon they fall into REM sleep.

During quiet sleep, researchers saw neural activity that resembled mammalian “sleep spindles” – they’re still a mystery even in humans but many scientists believe they help cement memories. Fascinating is it not? Yours M.E

Last week according to Facebook and Darren the publican, the Occy Killers were seen walking around the rock pool late one afternoon. Three men in their 40s. Facebook posts reckoned they were Greeks or Syrians or Lebanese or Aborigines. They had form. Their routine was to scout the pool for octopuses and a week later, they’d roll up in a rusted old yellow Holden Statesmen early on a Saturday morning with wet suits, nets and spear guns.

The Occy Lady held an emergency meeting in the Freemasons Hall with the politically right-on greenies and progressives. They’d confront the assassins and through sheer weight of numbers and yelling, “Go Home! Leave the occies alone!” would drive them out of town. I had reservations. The greatest deterrents are unalloyed fear and violence.

After berating a librarian for raising the price of printing from the computers by 20 cents a page, I parked my bony arse on a bench in the main street and enjoyed a sausage roll with sauce. My kidneys were playing up and I needed a breather. Across the road the Occy Lady was handing out flyers, exhorting the locals to stop the murder of the innocent cephalopods. Locals stopped to chat. There was consternation and head nodding and to a man and woman, they were in accord. ‘No pasaran’ and all that.

One of the curious aspects about kidney disease is that pain relief is useless. I took half a Valium and got five hours nod. I awoke at 3.00am for my usual toilet ritual and read a book on the Chinese Cultural revolution. Then snoozed for 30 minutes and was planning a boiled egg on a tray, like Salome in a bygone day, when a gentle knock on the door awoke me. It was barely 6.30am and the sun was peeping through the kitchen windows. I had planned to spend the morning in bed. When I opened the door, the Occy Lady did an ironic curtsey as I stood before her in my Hugh Hefner red silk jimmy jam jams.

“I have good news and bad news,” she said.

I let her into the apartment.

“How did you know where I live?”

“You’re a local. Everyone knows where everyone lives”

I let it pass as my eyes were hanging out of my head.

“The good news is my orchid won third prize at the show. I’m very pleased. It was the first time I’d grown them”

“Congratulations. And the bad news?”

“There’s no way to sugar coat it. None of the locals are coming. I got ten calls last night from people who were going away for the weekend, numerous sick children and pets and one woman who had to take her husband to hospital with a suspected heart attack. There were more messages of Facebook begging off”

“But surely … I mean, the flyers, the Facebook campaign – not least because there’s a mating pair of octopuses and people know that. It was in the local paper”

She looked wounded.

“There’s only me. Will you come?”

She was wearing a white terry-towelling robe over her mint green bathing suit and Birkenstocks, which had seen better days. Under her left arm she carried a small, well-thumbed bible.

“I bought the bible … well, I don’t know why but it seemed a comfort”

“Onward Christian soldiers and all that? I suppose if push came to shove, you could always sling the Bible at them, like David and Goliath”

Like an image from Poe, her face, as if momentarily caught in a flash of lightening, was torn by red hot anger and then quickly fell back into the benign, friendly old woman she was.

“Yes, something like that”

If I didn’t come, she’d march down to the ocean pool and confront the men by herself. A woman in her 70s with steel grey hair and ice cream cone legs carrying the St James Bible. There was no plan, no strategy and while the men probably wouldn’t attack on old lady, a belligerent older male was another matter. I ate a spoon full of honey for the glucose, quickly showered and put my bathers on. I looked in the mirror. I’d lost weight in all the wrong places. I pulled my shoulders back and produced a silent but deadly fart. Hardly Henry V at Agincourt.

“There’s more to you than meets the eye,” she said, when I emerged from the bathroom.

“Not really. Let’s go”

The shops were still closed as we set off down the hill. Lurex clad body fascist cyclists rode past and a young woman with an extraordinarily pert bum jogged around us. The Presbyterian church was doing bell ringing practice. The peels rang across the still morning, across the light sea fog and a couple of squawking shit hawks. I struggled to remember the first line of Wilfred Owen’s poem, the one about doomed youth. Something about bells ringing for those who die as cattle… demented choirs of wailing shells…It seemed improbable that no one would turn up. I’d told Patrick Magee who loved biff, especially when I said they looked like foreigners. He told Felicity McFly, who worked behind the bar. Flick or ‘Maggot’ (as people called her behind her back), had a sex change operation in the 1990s from a man to a woman with mixed success. Flick looked like her surgeon was Victor Frankenstein. All that was missing was the neck bolt. The fact she’d been in the Merchant Navy and then driven trucks across the Nullarbor, made her more of a man than most men. After the operation, she worked as a university administrator, where she’d learnt cunning and guile, which made her – as Darrell said sotto voce leaning across the bar- ‘a nasty piece of work’. Darrell kept her on as she doubled as security on the front door on band nights. McFly was a shoo-in for something physical.

It was an unusually warm morning and the Winter solstice was on us. Smoke mingled with the fog as the Community Fire Service burned off the forest undergrowth. The Occy Lady took my arm as we ambled along. Was I lagging or out of camaraderie? With the cross of Jesus, going on before. To the stranger’s eye, we looked like an old couple going for a morning walk, the woman helping her hobbling husband. As we passed the weatherboard houses, flat and apartments, eyes peeked between the venetian blinds and shades. Curtains moved behind closed windows.

“I called the police in case there’s any nastiness,” she said.

The police were more interested in revenue raising by booking hoons on the highway doing 170 kmph in a 100 zone. Last year young revellers in an Airbnb burnt the place down and the cops showed up just as the fire brigade hosed the embers. The locals had mixed emotions: happy the ‘party palace’ was razed but if there was a serious crime, something gun or knife-based, you were on your own.

I didn’t think octopuses could cook a chook or solve differential equations but they should be left alone. The ocean’s tides turned in me. My moods rose and fell from flat calm to storm. I didn’t agree with John Donne’s ‘No Man is an Island’. I was island and not a ‘part of the main’. I felt kin with the sea creatures. I didn’t lack socialisation. I had been socialised too well; bombarded by the carrion cry of my fellow men and women, with their insistent wants and needs. As we walked past Mrs Bellvedere’s magnolia’s – which apparently had won second place in the Annual Agricultural Show and Gymkhana – it was time to let the chips fall where they may.

“I suggest I do the talking,” she said “Most men still have a skerrick of reason left in them”

“I like that word ‘skerrick’. I’m going to use it more”

“You can use it with your Irish friend in the Leagues Club”

“Patrick? Oh, to have an army of alcoholic Irish men with us now”

“We are enough”

We walked past Whispering Jack’s fish and chip shop, turned the corner and saw the old yellow Holden parked on the flat by the toilet block. Three men were donning wet suits by the side of the pool.

Cortisol surged through my blood. Speedy and unpleasant. While verbal persuasion may pacify the men who wanted octopus cooked with lemon and garlic for dinner, it was as unlikely as picking three Melbourne Cup winners in a row. Like an old battle ship, I needed to camouflage my intentions, stow the cannons and raise the white flag, until I got within an old fashioned 18 inches. Play the doddering old fool who step-by-step apologises for the disrespect shown by the old orchid grower, who hadn’t taken her medication that morning and had wandered out of the house. I needed to target the largest thug and it had to be over in five seconds or I was dead. Fear trembled my left hand and stones ground in my gut. A flock of pelicans flew in a V-formation overhead. Noble creatures. The men turned towards us. Flippers and facemasks lay at their feet. They were in their late 30s. Two were Caucasians. The largest had a tattoo on his neck. A girl’s name. Caro? Caroline. He was about my height. A little over 5’9. Clean shaven. My dancing partner. The one struggling to get his leg into his wet suit was tall with red hair. The third was short and stocky with a passing resemblance to Deigo Maradona. Maybe Spanish but more likely Greek. One to watch.

The Occy Lady walked forward, past two loaded spearguns and a dab net. I stood behind her, looking like a fool.

“Gentlemen, I understand you mean to kill the octopuses in this beautiful ocean pool. You do know they are a protected along the coast”

“Who says?” said Neck Tattoo.

“The Commonwealth Government. This is a breeding area”

Neck Tattoo and Red Hair laughed and continued to put their wetsuits on.

“Lady and I mean this politely,” said Neck Tattoo, “Please fuck off and take that old bastard with you. We have work to do”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you,” she said. “These creatures are unique and we are their guardians. You’ll just have to pack up your gear and go back to where you came from.”

That was not going to go down well. The Occy Lady had inadvertently flagged there were octopuses in the pool and given them a directive.

Neck Tattoo smiled at his mates and took a step towards her.

“Look you fucking old bag, you’ve got exactly ten seconds to piss off back to your knitting club before I kick the shit out of you”

A small cloud passed over the sun as I slowly made my way towards Neck Tattoo, dragging my left leg. I’d perfected the supplicant position doing my Richard 111 interpretive dance in front of the bedroom mirror. My shoulders fell forward in a stoop and I held out my left hand in friendship until I was standing before him.

“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six….”

I edged another couple of inches forward. He smelt of Old Spice and stale beer. Not a bad looking chap. Brown eyes with a small scar above the left eyebrow. His fists were flexing open and closed, pumping himself up. He spat in my face.

“Five, four, three …”

I raised my hands as if in prayer and threw a left jab at his nose, with plenty of shoulder in it. Like clockwork, both of his hands flew up to his nose as tears filled his eyes. I stepped quickly forward and drove my right knee into his balls and he bent over like a man looking for something on the ground. I moved to his right and slammed my right leg as hard as I could on the outside of his knee, snapping the cruciate ligament. He fell to the ground by the pool ladder, screaming strangled obscenities. Red Hair took a step back. A spear carrier in a school play. An attendant without lines. A strange thought passed through my mind. ‘I wonder if he has private health insurance?’ Deigo Maradona hit me with a large 18-inch adjustable spanner, just above my left ear. A glancing blow from on high which hurt even more as it passed behind my left ear, ripping the sinew. I blacked out and awoke on hands and knees with blood dripping on to the concrete. My eyes were a camera seeking focus. Maradona half dressed in his black wet suit stood above me with the spanner, ready to deliver the coup de grace.

It sounded like a large rubber band being released from enormous tension. A dull crack, a thwack, which echoed across the pool. I didn’t see the spear hit Maradona’s left leg but I heard the scream. It passed through his thigh, like a kebab skewer. He spun like a Dervish and fell into the pool, his face contorted in shock and pain.

As I rolled on to my side, the Occy Lady picked up the second spear gun and aimed it at Red Hair.

“Throw him that lifebuoy.”

In the far distance police sirens whirled. She told me later as she helped me to my feet, a large humpback whale had leapt out of the water only 300 metres away, as if taking a look.

xxxxxxx

The judge sentenced me to a community service order for hitting the fat kid off his e-bike and punching Neck Tattoo. I spent three weeks sorting second-hand books at the St Vincent De Paul charity shop. Considering my years and health, he said in a stern guttural voice, as if sentencing the Guildford Four, I should put my vigilante days behind me.

I sat with the Margaret during her trial. She wore a smart black pants suit, grey shirt and pearls. She was quiet and kept her hands knitted on her lap. She ignored the locals – mainly women – who’d come to support her. The judge found not guilty of deadly assault and her actions, although unorthodox, had saved my life. The locals in the court room rose to their feet and roared approval, as if the she had kicked the winning goal at the AFL Grand Final.

I never found out why her supporters didn’t rock up. None of my business. Patrick had pulled a two-day bender, dropped two Valium and slept for 36 hours. A young, blind Japanese tourist had wandered into the arms of Maggot as she was closing the bar for the night. He asked for directions to the nearest backpackers hostel and ended up at her place. They drank saki and ate hot chips soaked in soy sauce while playing ‘eye spy with my little eye’. I couldn’t blame them. Alcohol and sex had been my binary stars for many years, leading to forgotten ecstasy and regret.

Margaret stopped going to the ocean pool. In the space of a week the media had turned her from a hero to a psychopathic old woman. It claimed she was a danger to society and the best place for her was in supervised home care. Society can’t have loony old codgers roaming around trying to kill other people. Online media carried an old photo of her emerging from the ocean pool, in Cousin Itt mode, with her hair over her face. The headline read: ‘Do you want your kids to be around this?

While buying Patrick a Guinness and a packet of salt and vinegar chips, Darrell said Margaret had put her house on the market and was moving away. Somewhere further south. Patrick rabbited on about the influx of day tripping Chinese tourists, who spent bugger-all money in the town. I downed my Guinness and went back for another with a whisky chaser. It was 1.30 on a Wednesday afternoon. I sank those and kept sinking them until four hours later, I was barking at the toilet bowl. I must have passed out because when I awoke, there was a double Russian and a packet of unsalted cashews waiting for me on the cistern.

I asked around for Margaret at the Lions Club and the CWA but she had resigned from both. Whereabouts unknown. I sent two emails but both were unanswered. A month passed and after returning from the doctors to get the stitches out, an email hit in my inbox with a ‘ping’.

Dear Callum,

As you might know, I have sold my house and moved some 300 kilometres down the coast. Far enough to deter visitors. It was time for a change. New vistas and all that. I have discovered only 500 metres off shore, a most unusual phenomenon – an octopus breeding colony. The locals call it Octopolis. I’m going to get my scuba diving licence!

While you’re not exactly my cup of tea, I want to thank you for your help with those three nasty pasties. That took courage, a quality which is in short supply these days. I leave you the most important task of all – looking after the occies. You don’t need to do much. I can tell they like you. Send me some pictures from time to time.

Kind regards,

Margaret Eiger

I got an email from her at Christmas and that was the last time I heard from Margaret. She was writing a book about octopuses and said she almost lived in the local library. Something of a ‘hermit’ which I understood.

The pelicans still sit by the boat ramp waiting for the fishermen to gut their fish and throw them the heads and tails. The council passed a motion to put a ‘no fishing’ sign up at the pool but as year has passed and there’s still no sign.

The doctors want me to have dialysis but it’s too much bother. Almost every day, if my legs are willing, I make my way to the ocean pool, even in winter. People have got to know me and I smile and nod. I’m called the Occy Man. I’ve become a magnet for dogs and kids. I keep some cooked bacon in a sandwich bag for the dogs and answer questions about the occies. For the more curious, I’ve got hands outs on how occies evolved.

I dangle my legs over the side and stare into the water. Sometimes an octopus will swim by and reach out a tentacle.