The shell.

 Murder in the Wind. The Empty Trap. All These Condemned. 

These and others - many others - covered the days. John D. McDonald. Trash fiction. Good trash fiction. Very good trash fiction. Not even trash, actually. He wrote The Executioners, but I read that a few years ago. Brought back the horrible face of Robert de Niro. Nobody knows The Executioners, but everyone knows Cape Fear, the movie they made of it. I can't get that bite out of my mind.

John D. McDonald. Two hundred and sixty-two days of waiting. Not really waiting; just stopping. A moratorium of the kind my hippie sister never attended in 1970. A torment from nowhere, a Job imposition that Job never endured. Or maybe he did. I forget. Maybe I should read the Book of Job again.  A hell on earth, but he held up. Or did he?

Seven thousand pages, thirty-seven novels, fifteen non-fiction books, innumerable Spectators, Economists, Classic and Thoroughbred Sportscars, five hundred and twenty-four newspapers.

*

Three days ago. Two hundred metres offshore, water still only three or four feet deep. Me and the children, now teenagers except the youngest, waded. (Their mother a distant swimsuit reclining on the beach, reading, a curl of limb on a white towel.) In the water the sand and the pebbles and broken bits of shell on the bottom seemed to jump and roll, but it was just an optical trick caused by the ripples made by the passing yachts farther out. I picked up a larger shell, a spindle or conch or whatever they call them. Hand-sized, like one you would buy for your beach house coffee table or sideboard in a resort shop full of pale decor and faded driftwood and oversized off-white cushions. It might have something in it, one of them said. I don't think so, I said. I tipped out the seawater, looked again. Two eyes, like a toad, got bigger, came round out of the curved-in centre. Fat, ugly, tantalising. I showed them. Then brown flesh, mottled, filled the opening. Then a strange white ribbed thing curled out of the rim and around the shell, then another one. Then more. An octopus, waking, disturbed. The eyes five hundred million years old. Cambrian eyes. 

*

I put it back gently, like a bone china teacup, and watched the octopus shrinking back into its wayside accommodation, on the road to find out. 

Later, much later, I fried garlic and onions and poached them in wine and made that thing I posted a few weeks ago, that Italian dish with assorted seafood, but no octopuses ('octopi' is wrong; it is a Greek word, not Latin). I could have cooked my octopus and used its shell as a table decoration. What was I afraid of, eyes five hundred million years old? Cambrian eyes? Afraid of what they might see?