Page 17 of The White Octopus Hotel
Suzy disappeared and Eve and her mum were left staring at each other across the silent room. Eve immediately wished that Suzy would come back. She was always good in social situations, always able to effortlessly fill those awkward silences.
“Do you want to sit down?” Eve asked her mum.
It was only after she’d said it that she realised there was nowhere to sit, meaning her mum had to perch awkwardly on the edge of the bed. She handed over the bag.
“Here. I got you a sketchbook.”
“Oh.” Eve was startled. She no longer had any interest in drawing and couldn’t imagine ever wanting to pick up a pencil again. “Thanks.”
“I got you some pencils too. It’s the charcoal ones you like, right?”
“Yeah.” Eve was surprised her mum knew this, but it was hard to care in that moment.
She wished her mum would leave. This was exhausting and making her feel worse. Her mum hardly ever touched her, so she was surprised when she reached out and very gently laid her fingers over Eve’s hand where it lay on the bed.
“Sometimes it can get very dark,” her mum said, gazing fixedly at a spot on the floor. “I know. Our minds set dreadful traps for us.”
At any other moment, Eve would have been both astounded and pleased to hear her mum speaking to her in such a way—opening up a little, letting her in. But now she couldn’t be bothered. With any of it. They might have been in the same room, but Eve was in one place and her mum was somewhere else and there was that wall again.
“I don’t think I will ever be happy,” she heard herself whispering.
In the seconds that followed, she wondered if she had actually spoken aloud. Eve and her mum didn’t have conversations like this. And it couldn’t be allowed, surely, to complain about the difficulties of being alive when Bella was very much dead? Eve knew if she’d said this to Suzy, her stepmum would immediately have insisted:Don’t be silly, of course you will be happy. Of course you will.
Eve’s mum withdrew her hand. “Maybe happiness is too much for some of us to hope for,” she said.
Eve flinched. She realised that, deep down, she’d been hoping her mum would say something different—that shecouldbe happy, that she deserved to be, that she wanted her to be.
“I’m not trying to be cruel,” her mum said, noticing her expression. “It’s just that…aiming for happiness can be a heavy burden to put on yourself. Even if you do manage to reach it, happiness doesn’t last. You might find things a bit easier if you accept thepossibility that there can be peaceful, contented moments in a life that’s quietly sad.”
Eve said nothing. Her mum’s words had a ring of truth, but she didn’t know if she could make the huge effort required to return to normal life if she could expect so little in return. What was the point?
“There are almost always some lifelines around us,” her mum went on. “You just have to grab on to the right one.”
Still, Eve remained silent. Eventually, her mum stood up. “I should go. Perhaps I’ll see you again soon?”
Eve shrugged. She didn’t especially want to see her mother again. She didn’t really want to see anyone.
“Mum?” Eve asked, just as her mum reached the door.
“Yes?”
“What was your lifeline?”
Her mother paused, with her hand on the doorknob, and Eve thought for a moment that she would evade the question, but instead she said simply, “It was my camera.”
Eve felt a dull, throbbing ache in the pit of her stomach. She would have so loved for the lifeline to have been her. Surely itshouldhave been her? Bella may have been gone, but her mum still had one daughter who was there, and alive, and needing her. She supposed if it had been someone else’s fault, then perhaps it might have been that way. But Eve was the one who hadn’t closed the gate.
The drawing pad and pencils lay untouched for months. Until, finally, one April morning, the sun was shining and the fresh air coming in through the window smelled so inviting that she went out into the garden. She was sitting at the patio table, enjoying the feeling of the sun on her face, when Suzy came outside and silently set down an iced tea. And her sketchpad and pencils.
And Eve found herself picking up a pencil, testing the weight of it, and then opening the pad and gazing down at that blank, white page. The clean newness of it was calming somehow and thensuddenly, she could see it. The octopus. Its essence was already there on the paper, begging her to bring it to life. So she did. The tentacles curled and sprawled across the page, and the pencil felt good and right in her hand, and the birds were singing, and things weren’t unbearable. They still weren’t good either, but they weren’t unbearable.
Eve looked down at her first octopus and smiled, pleased with how it had turned out. There was something still missing, though, some detail that wasn’t quite right…. She reached out and coloured in the tip of one of its tentacles.
“There,” she muttered. “There you are.”
And at that very moment, the octopus began to move—drifting up and down the page, exploring the blank corners with its curious tentacles. Eve stared at it, wondering whether she was supposed to scream or slam the sketchbook shut, but she did neither of those things. She didn’t feel scared, or horrified, or alarmed. She was even more pleased with her octopus than she had been before. She knew it was a possibility—in fact, a probability—that it wasn’t actually moving around the page at all. Perhaps she was imagining it. Perhaps it was a side effect of her medication.
But more octopuses followed—page after page of them. After a while, Eve started to take short trips out of the house to draw. She’d go to the park or a local café. And one day she was sat at a table by the window when a young man stopped beside her and said, “That’s cool. It looks like paper but it’s, what, some kind of tablet?”
