Thirty years as a journalist and this is what he’d come to, writing up a dead fish. Ewan looked around Yellowcraigs and grudgingly acknowledged it was beautiful. Nice for walking the dog or playing with your family. If you had a family who weren’t on the other side of the planet forever.
A few bystanders were looking at the washed-up thing on the wet sand. Vikki the marine biologist had told him she’d never seen anything like it. Wasn’t the whole point of being an expert that you had answers? Four years of university to stand on a beach and declare you have no idea about the octopus that’s just washed up. And she wouldn’t even speculate how it had died, which made his article for the Standard even more boring.
It was gross, for sure. He looked at the cephalopod, a word he’d just learned from Vikki, who was now giving the same non-answers to a woman from BBC Scotland. Ewan stepped closer to the thing, coated in sand on one side. He had his notebook out, thinking of a way to describe it that might paint a picture. Not that it mattered, they would run a photo of it. Words were irrelevant these days. Every social-media post was accompanied by a picture, video or GIF. Imagine reading a piece of writing longer than 280 characters? Being a reporter felt obsolete, but what else could he do?
He watched Vikki chatting to the beautiful BBC presenter. He used to be on television when he was younger and gave a shit. Politics was his beat and he enjoyed the cut and thrust of it, but as he got older and started refusing to work crazy hours for virtually no pay, work dried up.
So here he was, thinking of ways to describe a dead octopus. It wasn’t cordoned off yet, the council hadn’t decided whose responsibility it was. When a whale beached a few years ago in Aberlady Bay it took days for anyone to take charge. People thought the authorities had rules in place for stuff like this, but in his long experience, no fucker had a clue. No one wanted the ball ache of getting rid of a stinking dead animal. Ewan remembered famous footage of a whale being blown up on a beach in America in the 1970s. The case of dynamite sent whale flesh and blubber for miles, raining down on onlookers, smashing nearby cars.
The octopus was pale green and blue, blank eyes on the bottom of its … head? Body? He crouched down and was about to prod it with his pen, then remembered he chewed the end of that pen. A wave reached the creature’s body, making it rock a little. Ewan thought he saw something else, a movement that wasn’t because of the force of the wave. Probably imagined it. A cloud passed overhead and the change in light did something to the octopus’s skin, a shiver or ripple of thickness. The more he stared at it, the less he was sure he would be able to describe it properly.
His phone buzzed. It would be Patterson hassling him for copy, even though deadline was hours away. He was so hands-on as an editor he might as well type the thing himself.
Ewan straightened up, felt a twinge in his back. He’d been getting that since he turned fifty. He pulled his phone out. He’d entered Patterson in his contacts as ‘Cuntybaws’, puerile but it made him smile.
‘McKinnon.’ Patterson was a hard-bitten cliché and he loved it. Barking was preferable to speaking, and he dispensed pearls of wisdom rather than having conversations. ‘Have you finished with the killer squid?’
‘Cephalopod,’ Ewan said, just to annoy him.
‘Fuck your pod.’ Which didn’t make sense. ‘Are you done or not?’
Ewan stared at the thing, looking for another shimmer on its skin. It had a translucent quality, shifting from solid to ghostly as clouds passed overhead.
‘I’m just about to type up my notes.’
‘Throw them in the bin, I’ve got something else.’
Ewan sighed. Spiked before he’d even written it. ‘Yeah?’
‘Get yourself to the hospital. A bunch of people have had strokes.’
Ewan frowned. ‘What do you mean, “a bunch”?’
He sensed annoyance down the phone and smiled.
‘That’s what I want you to find out, dickhead.’