This Moon – by Megan Coupland
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
It’s the tail end of 1873, November, and a clergyman is rugged up against a sluggish dusk. Along a Newfoundland coastline, Reverend Moses Harvey makes his way towards a fishing boat on the shore; he’s approaching the knot of fishermen who summoned him. The men, just in from the sea, are clustered around the carcass they’ve surfaced, a creature dredged inadvertently from the depths of Logy Bay, tangled in their herring nets. Harvey’s not there on church business. Instead, he’s made a name for himself locally as a collector of curiosities and the fishermen have offered him their haul: a giant squid, dead on arrival. The specimen is largely intact, which is a first. There have only been severed tentacles conjured from the waters before and so the air is charged; animated voices carry with the salt on the winds. Harvey agrees to pay the fishermen and they help him move the carcass to his house. And it’s here, in the living room of Harvey’s St Johns weatherboard, that the first known photograph of a giant squid is taken. It’s a makeshift studio: Harvey positions the squid over a shallow, rounded bathtub. The tentacles and arms are draped over a shower rail, flanking the creature’s mantle like lengths of linked sausages garlanding a butcher’s window. The undersides are exposed to the camera, each one nubby and forlorn, impossibly elongated. It’s an unsettling composition, the effect oddly reminiscent of an old man in a darkening park: pale and shambling, naked beneath a trench coat. Pitiful, laid bare, I want to offer cover, to call someone to guide the creature home.
***
And us: we’re 150 years into the future, cross-legged in Canberra, under a moon. It’s a magnificent moon, perfectly round and as plump as a lychee, its surface pitted as if hastily peeled. We’re side-by-side on the carpet, leaning against a floor cushion, our knees just touching. We’ve meandered through to the science centre’s core, beginning at the top and spiralling down floor-by-floor, lingering over the various exhibits orbiting the vast moon sculpture suspended at the building’s centre. There are windows on every floor, facing inwards, offering snapshots of the moon in its carefully lit silo. Pausing at several of the viewpoints, our faces reflected back at us in the glass, superimposed amongst the lunar craters; I hadn’t realised quite how much taller than me you are now. As we reached the ground floor, entering the central space housing the sculpture, I was thinking of a book I read to you when you were little, the one about a mole, emerging from his burrow one night to the sight of a majestic full moon. I had bought the book on a whim, just six weeks pregnant with George. It was the talisman I kept on my bedside table through that pregnancy: this is a book we'll read together. Please let this one come to be.
And then you loved the story as much as George did: the curious mole, wanting the moon for himself, his bungling attempts to bring it down from the night sky, and his friends’ patient advice that it’s not as close as it looks. So I lean over and whisper: but it’s not as close as it looks, nostalgically, predictably, cross-legged under the immense moon sculpture. If the reference means anything to you, you don’t say. Instead, craning your neck, tapping your glasses back up the bridge of your nose, what you do say is: this moon has got nothing on our squid. It takes me a moment, but then I realise you’re thinking of the model back in Adelaide: the giant squid in the museum on North Terrace, suspended in the lift shaft, the squid that’s four storeys high. Based on a carcass pulled from New Zealand waters, the exhibit was installed a few years before we moved to South Australia. As soon as you were old enough to walk the museum, freed from the constraints of the pram, it was always the first place you’d pull me. We’d stand on the various levels, your forehead pressed to glass, eyes transfixed and your hands framing either side of your small face.
Our squid. Such carefree, easy belonging; I want to bottle it. With George starting to make his post-school plans, I’ve been thinking more than ever about belonging, about displacement and place, of how we think about home. Wondering where your adult lives will take you has reminded me of being that age myself. I realised this summer I’ve lived outside my home country longer than I ever lived in it. And I go back so rarely, feeling more and more foreign every time I step from the plane at King Shaka, the Durban heat hovering in low waves over the tarmac. If I think about home, I picture Tim and you kids, of course; you’re always there. The setting is interchangeable though: shape-shifting scenes, flickering as if on a screen. There are times it’s Adelaide now, but mostly it could be anywhere. I have a recurring dream that feels unexpectedly like home: a series of rooms, rambling, timber and glass. In it, we’re always standing in water, just up to our ankles, a shallow lake across the floor. Shoals of tiny fish dart just below the surface, glittering at our feet; they scatter when we reach for them. It’s never clear where the house is located, what place, if any, lies beyond its walls.
***
I don’t know why I haven’t shown you the photo of the giant squid before, the one taken over Moses Harvey’s bathtub. I tell you about it under the moon. I call up a map of Newfoundland on my phone, and we zoom in and out over the island on the screen. There’s Logy Bay, and a few kilometres south west is the town of St Johns. It’s the easternmost edge of Canada; we zoom out again and Greenland appears in view, just across the Labrador Sea. At this scale, the entire landmass of Newfoundland is reduced to a dainty filigree drifting, seaweed-like, in the North Atlantic. Leaning over to point out its edges, gossamer against the dark ocean, I’m about to say how much the island resembles a leafy seadragon. But you say first: here be dragons; you’re scrolling across the water though, casting east, nudging Newfoundland off the map’s edge. You’re thinking of cartographical illustrations, renaissance sea monsters rather than leafy seadragons, the old guardians of the unexplored: snaking tentacles and spined tails, abyssal, snaggle-toothed maws breaking the ocean’s surface. There’s a game you like to play online, a water-based world populated with many-tentacled kraken. They spawn beneath players’ ships; I’ve watched them emerge on your screen, tentacle by tentacle through the waves, wrapping your hull and pulling you below into an inky, pixelated void.
From the time of Harvey’s image of the first carcass, it took 130 years for a giant squid to be photographed alive, in its deep sea habitat. A series of photos emerged in 2004; Japanese researcher Tsunemi Kubodera tracked a giant squid with a baited camera on a line that ran a kilometre deep underwater. The images, taken off Chichijima Island, give the impression of screenshots through a telescope; they’re reminiscent of a starred night sky rather than an oceanscape. The giant squid is suspended at the edge of the baited rope, hook-like in its bearing, barbed against an indigo backdrop. Specks of organic matter fill the remainder of the screen, glowing a grainy white in the camera’s flash. When I first saw the image I assumed the white pinpoints were an artefact of the underwater photography process; I learned though that the specks are marine snow: detritus that falls in flurries, drifting down from shallower waters, sustaining life in the depths. Kubodera captured the images of the squid just at the point where the ocean’s twilight zone transitions to midnight, in depths untouched by sunlight. Sitting as we are, indoors under a giant, glowing moon, it’s difficult to imagine a world without light. I think of the camera flashing in the ocean’s depths: bursts of illumination, drawing the giant squid from darkness.
“Sitting as we are, indoors under a giant, glowing moon, it’s difficult to imagine a world without light. I think of the camera flashing in the ocean’s depths: bursts of illumination, drawing the giant squid from darkness.”
I remember my disenchantment as a child, learning that moonlight was, in fact, merely reflected sunlight and not the moon’s light at all. I refused to believe it for a time, preferring to think that the moon emitted its own light, its silver glaze as distinct in my mind from the sun’s rays, quite literally as night is from day. Throughout my childhood, my grandparents lived just down the coast from us, in Amanzimtoti, in a towering, beachfront block of flats. We’d stay on weekends and school holidays, my sister, brother and I taking turns on a pull-out bed in an enclosed balcony overlooking the sea. Some nights, when the moon was full, it would seem from a particular angle that the moonlight plating the Indian Ocean ran directly into our balcony room: a shimmering path as wide as a highway. With the louvre windows tilted open, I’d fall asleep to the waves, thinking of the light skimming back and forth between the sun and the moon and the earth. In time, I came to appreciate the choreography of the exchange, drawn in by its light-moulding rhythms. Realising that the beauty was perhaps in the scattering, I’d imagine the lunar craters and the ocean depths, realms alive too in their darkness. I’d wake early, the morning air already humid, the sun warm on my pillow.
***
Often you’d stand in silent companionship with the four-storey squid, suspended in its North Terrace lift shaft. Some days though, you’d peer into the darkened chasm, alongside any other kids who were there, pointing and exclaiming over the scale and the various details of the exhibit. From time to time, if it was just the two of us, we’d wonder what it would be like to see a giant squid alive in its own environment; we’d imagine filling the lift shaft with saltwater, picturing the water level rising incrementally against the glass. We’d talk about racing up the stairs to the second floor, and then to the third, to watch from above, as the giant model would swell to life in our minds, languidly adjusting to the sensation of water, its vast eyes inscrutable. It was easy to see then how giant squid encounters, in centuries past, had brought to mind monastic beings: robed figures rising from the waters in sudden crimson folds, dignified and displaced, against the dark. Imagining the giant squid alive, we’d talk every now and then of setting it free, stage whispering to each other at the glass as we’d plan our foolhardy heists. The shape of your escape methods shifted over the years, morphing from large buckets and water-filled tarps, to talk of laser glass cutters in the dead of night, of get-away vans and distant sirens. There would be a boat waiting in the harbour, a single lantern signalling its whereabouts, ready to carry the smuggled cargo far enough out to sea. Me, I always imagined you setting off on your bike, rugged up against the dark, pedalling the giant squid to water, balanced, ET-like, in your basket over the wheel: tentacles and arms trailing the night sky, the creature’s flowing robes silhouetted against the moon. ▼
Image: silviu zidaru
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