The octopus is friendly

Marta looked out the bus window as it travelled along so slowly that the man running along the street seemed to be running backwards. Palm trees were drowning in late fall sunlight. Marta wondered to herself what the slowest speed the bus could go could be... recalling that Einstein used to ride the trams in Vienna, and it was there that he started pondering theories of the relativity of time.

“He must have been riding a tram as slow as this bus when he came up with the idea of what would happen if trams could move at the speed of light,” she said aloud and turned up the volume of the music in her headphones. “Maybe the driver will go nuts?” she went on. “There's a chance he might just put his foot down and race off, to hell with all speed limits and rules of the road...”.

Marta herself often breached these herself, or at least dreamed of doing so. She was only 13 years old, so there could not be any talk yet of breaking the law as a driver. Not that she wanted to have a driving license – that would only force her to drive her siblings all over the place.

She looked at her mom as she was talking on her cell phone, then turned her head to look back out the window.

“I'm never gonna have kids,” she mumbled to herself, then crossed her legs, which only made her feel silly. Marta bent her legs so her chin was resting on her knees, worrying a little that mother would chide her for putting her shoes on the bus seat, but her mom was too absorbed in her telephone conversation.

Marta swayed a little to the sound of her music, as if wanting to make the bus go faster in this fashion. Her mom cut the call. Marta glanced up and saw that she was evidently upset – then watched as she reached into her handbag and got a pocket mirror out. Mom hadn't looked her best for a long while now, being rather unkempt and overweight of late...

Marta's mom put the mirror away, closed the lid of her fake Dior handbag and looked out the window. The bus was now stuck in a traffic jam, a woman pushing a baby buggy along the sidewalk.

“I am 46 years old and when I see women pushing prams, I feel like climbing inside and letting them rock me a little...” Ingrid thought to herself. She'd first got pregnant when she was 19 years old, and didn't like her four kids much, though she loved them a lot, of course.

Ingrid is an unhappy woman and if there was anyone in the world who knew that for a fact, it's her daughter. Her absent minded daughter. Free of her mother's forbidding instructions. Fully aware no adult could order her around or say they knew things better than she. This daughter – the only one of them all – loved Ingrid truly, because she could see her mother was a tragic figure and set all of her hypersensitivity aside, wanting to help mom make ends meet.

Marta once asked Ingrid why she did not read books. Her mother said Marta was the one to blame. Marta nodded and tried to sit quietly, really she did, but then she said:

“People are as wise as they allow themselves to be.”

This was by accident, really, as she hadn't planned to say anything. Still, it earned her a slap to the face. This wasn't the first time she'd been beat for talking too much. From that moment on, she tried to control herself, but then at school people said that she was of an age when kids went through all sorts of problems and sometimes keeping everything under total control was just not possible.

She suspected that as a result of a nuclear bomb explosion (which had been covered up by the media) her mother was still of the same age as Marta – she had friends at school who were just like her mom... just as naive and as demanding to be the permanent center of attention. Marta meanwhile was besotted by her older sister and had this feeling that studying hard was the only thing which could free her from familial oppression and the strange love her mother felt for her offspring. Marta was doing well at school, and so allowed herself to skip classes from time to time. She wrote out notes excusing her from attending school, signing it with just the family surname. Certain she could take responsibility for her own self.

When she was not at school, she would sit on park benches, devouring books. Her dream was to one day be sentenced to five years jail time for income tax evasion and finally have time to read the classics. Her constant hunger for more and more literature was the main cause of fights in the family home. “Turn the lights off! Sleep!”

“Light is nothing other than an essence pressed out of darkness,” Marta wrote on her bedroom wall using a pencil – forced to spend an hour scrubbing it off again the very next day.

A week ago, she spent too much time in the bathroom, mother desperate to get in. Marta's period had started and she was trying to work out how to tell her mom. This was not her first-ever period – it was the fourth month in a row since she had become a woman. Her girl friends at school already knew, she had told them earlier, before it had actually started. Marta asked them about how they had managed to tell their own moms. They said it was best to do it spontaneously, just come out and say: “Mom, I got it!”.

And yet, Marta just could not bring herself to do it and each month failed in her bid for spontaneity.

Instead, she would close the bathroom door and fill the bath, then sit on the toilet. She did it often, pretending to be bathing, in order to have some time to herself. She would then look at the green colored boiler and touch the water to imitate the sounds of someone who was in the bath...

She was now thinking of the times when she was little and in the bathroom at the same time as her mom. When Marta would come up with rhyming verses and poems and mom would sit and write them down. This was a long time back, before the divorce. All long gone...

“I took a dump in your bedroom!”

Marta remembered putting on her pajamas and exiting to face her furious mother. Utterly stunned. She was about to ask something, but she knew no words made sense right now. They passed each other in the hallway. Ingrid went into the bathroom, while Marta followed the terrible smell and checked to see just how literal her mother had been in her declaration. In the middle of her room, in a blue wastepaper basket, she found her mother's feces.

She lifted the basket and tossed it right out the kitchen window into the courtyard, then turned on the tap in the kitchen sink and washed her hands. Mother was screaming from the bathroom:

“You're using up my water!”.

Marta went back to her room and lay in bed, thinking of that basket and how someone would eventually find it, oh, what a disgrace that would be. She then recalled her father talking about how mother had once tossed a cat out the window. Just because it had failed to find the cat litter box in time, or another time for spending too long scratching at the litter box. She couldn't remember all the details now. It had been her favorite cat, and it also made her mad when he scratched the box so. He would sometimes pee on the window sill in her room. All night, the cat would knock on the window pane to make her come over and clean it all up. And then afterwards, when she was crying, he would come to her and stroke her cheek with his paw until she fell asleep.

“We're here,” Ingrid said.

Marta's head jolted nervously as she tried to free herself of all those thoughts.

“We're not, we still have one stop to go,” she answered calmly.

Ingrid looked around her fellow passengers, looking for silent support.

Marta noticed this and turned away.

“Get up,” Ingrid howled, grabbing her daughter by the arm, then got up and once more sat down, seeing as it really wasn't their stop.

They were going to visit grandpa in hospital... Brain cancer, inoperable... making the trek to see him once a week. A man sitting up front turned about and gave Marta a look which made it clear he liked the look of things. She looked away. Maybe she misinterpreted his stare? She was wearing tights covered in a flowery pattern and had the impression he was staring at her legs. This made her blush. Ingrid noticed it too. It wasn't the first time a man had taken notice of her daughters, though this was the first time it had happened to Marta. She felt a strange stinging pain and almost howled:

“Sit up straight! Will you behave?”

Marta adjusted her seating position and turned her music back on. She once again remembered the time she hid from her mother in the bathroom... This was when Ingrid had been shouting for her to come out and bring her bicycle into the bedroom. The bike was brand new and she'd wanted it to be safe. Marta herself felt better when it was in the room with her and she could look at it any time she wanted.

“How many times have I told you – you're getting on my nerves! I can't be stressed, my doctor told you to go easy on me!”

Marta ran off to the bathroom – its door had a large window made of thick, orange colored glass. Mother kept banging on it, holding a metal coat hanger. Marta stood up in the bath and opened a small window, wanting to shout for help, but couldn't get the sound out, her voice too quiet, inaudible. The same way one's legs would freeze when facing a rapidly approaching car, her voice froze. Ingrid broke the pane of orange glass. Marta came out of the bath and curled up on the ground as Ingrid beat her with the coat hanger. She covered her head with her hands, but her ear was left exposed and cut – Marta could see her own blood running down the floor tiles.

She then leapt up and ran out the front door, a scream finally escaping her throat, then ran down the staircase, suddenly aware that she was still in her pajamas, wearing a single slipper.

The street was empty, so she walked up to the nearest security guard booth and called her dad. It was his father who was now lying in hospital.

The bus stopped at some traffic lights and Ingrid was now back talking on her cell phone. Marta felt a pang of hunger and remembered she had once again forgotten to eat breakfast, although she knew it was the most important meal of the day.

She then thought about the octopus she had noticed that same morning while out on the beach. She kept toying with the animal, moving around and then away, but the octopus kept following her.

“What a fascinating creature!” Marta wondered to herself as she walked round in circles while the octopus followed. “This octopus is a friendly sort,” she thought, remembering lessons where she learned that gibbons were the smartest apes, and wondered how intelligent octopi might be by comparison. She wasn't able to tell.

Mother turned away from Marta and moved her lips. The girl heard her making some sounds, but it was a different language. A tongue alien to her. She wanted to ask Ingrid to repeat what she had said, seeing as she couldn't understand a word. But she also said something in another language. What was more: it was not the same tongue! They looked at each other in disbelief.

Ingrid answered her cell phone, listening for a long while, nodding along. Marta waited for her to finally say something.

They were getting close to their destination, the hospital visible just around the corner.

“Grandpa's passed away,” Ingrid said.

Marta was relieved to find they were once again talking the same language.

“Really? Gone? Forever now?” she asked.