an octopus...
 
 
an octopus
 
Below me, on the seabed, I spotted what looked like a giant testicle - which turned out to be - creeping through the rocks - an octopus. We hovered above it for twenty minutes or so, watching it breathe through an expanding ventricle on the side of its head. Its skin was horned and exactly rock-coloured, and when I dived down a single eye opened - honey-hued as a dog’s eye - and it watched me warily. When it crawled through the rocks it moved on a raft of bluish grey tentacles that unravelled and flickered beneath it. Each tentacle was thin, looping, and revolting. Perhaps a thousand of them, although the octopus is clearly mostly head. We also swam above a jellyfish. It was deep water there and the jellyfish was small - no larger than a child’s hand - and coloured like a creme caramel. It lingered below the level of my foot, going nowhere. Just pulsing, above the weed that covered the seabed like shredded newspaper. We saw starfish the colour of old blood, clams that clamped shut as I dived down to them, and shoals of fish that gathered around us, sad eyed and sociable, and when I reached out to touch them, single flicks of their tails to escape. Once, off the coast of the Florida Keys, I jumped over the side of a boat five miles off shore. Below me was a reef and, among its swaying fronds of coral and multicoloured fish, I looked down at a single barracuda, javelin shaped, shining like an ingot of newly poured lead. I watched the fish. The fish watched me.