The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  A woman gave it to me a few years ago, he said. She said I would find it instructive. But I never read it.

  I turned to him and smiled and found that his mouth was kissing close to my throat.

  My housemates and I combined our books, he said. Together we have all of literary theory. I began to laugh and he flushed a little, realizing how pompous he sounded. Well, there aren’t many books at all here, are there? I said.

  He rested a hand, very lightly, on the small of my back. Are you staying? Lachlan asked.

  I don’t know. I have to work at eight tomorrow morning. Hand me that bottle.

  He handed me the bottle. Come on. Don’t be absurd. Call in sick. Stay here. It’s late.

  OK?

  He nodded. Go. Call. I’ll pour you a drink.

  I picked up my phone and passed the overstuffed armchair where he was sitting now, balancing a glass on his knee. I’ll stay with you?

  He looked up at me and nodded.

  I walked into the kitchen, called the managerial office in Melbourne, and told them that my father was very ill and I would not be at work in the morning. It occurred to me, of course, as I made the phone call, that what I was about to do was ill-advised. We are meant to have learned not to stick our hand in the fire once it has burned us—this is a fundamental lesson of childhood. But the burn seemed worth it, or the fire seemed interesting, or both. Perhaps I was the kind of person, like a banksia tree, that needed an occasional catastrophe in order to break open my outer shell, spread my seeds, and grow. At the bottom of a bottle of wine, the analogy seemed sound. I tried to conjure some idea of Cate, of how hurt she would be by the betrayal. But I didn’t care. These were ideas, concepts, which flitted through my mind but made no impact on what I had already decided I would do. That is the problem with desire: it adheres to no timeline, operates within no narrative arc, and we rarely want the things we are meant to want.

  I told them my father was sick, I said as I climbed the staircase to Lachlan’s bedroom. I don’t know why I told them that.

  I thought you didn’t speak to your father?

  No. Not really. But I might if he was about to die.

  I put my bag down by his desk, slid my shoes off, and sat on his bed with my legs spread out. The breeze stirred the narrow leaves of the paperbark tree outside in the street. He sat down at his desk chair, took a swig from the bottle, and passed it over to me. He exhaled, his breath catching. The flame from his lighter cast shadows on his face as he lit another cigarette. He stretched his legs out so that they almost touched mine.

  And watched me.

  The house had become very quiet. Only the sound of the rustling leaves and his breathing. I pushed my hand through my hair.

  Don’t do that, he said.

  He wasn’t looking at me so much as he was looking at the bookcase by the bed.

  Don’t do what?

  You know well what.

  He rubbed his hand against his chin, and the gap between his bottom front teeth was hidden from my sight.

  My hair is in your bed, I said. I could see the strands in the lamplight.

  He put his head in his hands. What’s wrong? I asked.

  Nothing’s wrong.

  OK.

  Jesus Christ. He stood up. Come on, he said, let’s go to bed.

  He turned off the light and in the dark I pulled off my skirt and shimmied beneath the duvet. He slid in beside me, wearing only his underwear.

  He propped himself on his elbow and looked down at me in the darkness, in which the forms of our bodies were resolving as our eyes adjusted to the night.

  What are you looking at? I whispered.

  Your hair.

  I could not tell what he was feeling, but whatever it was, his expression indicated that it was felt as extremely serious.

  I can’t tell, I said. Whether you’re looking at the wall behind me, or my hair.

  He smiled. You can pretty safely assume I’m looking at you and not the wall.

  His hand was in my hair. He had a handful of it. There’s so much of it. These are locks that I’m holding. Locks of hair. He did not let go, he continued to hold my hair in his hand.

  Just look at you, he said.

  A fumbling that seemed to rise and overflow. A comfort of hands and hair in the bedclothes. He spoke. I can’t remember now what he said, only the sound. He spoke in that voice which seemed to promise that he could refreeze the ice pack and replenish the floodplains. And I wanted whatever I thought the promise was, wanted the form of him, wanted, just wanted, in staggering abundance.

  Why do you always come to bed in tights? he said, reaching and pushing them down my hips.

  Only with you, I said.

  Do you sleep in tights when you’re alone?

  Of course not.

  Take them off, then.

  Lachlan.

  And the tights were off.

  Are you OK?

  His hands ran up my arms, my waist, my breasts. I love you, he said. I love you but I can’t.

  Don’t say that. That’s not the truth.

  He said it again. And we did it anyway.

  ____________

  Are you leaving? he asked in the morning when I inched out of the bed.

  I don’t know, I said. You probably have work to do.

  Later, sure. But, we could eat? Unless you don’t like to eat with people who you’ve just.

  I covered my eyes with my hand. He grinned. Come on, get dressed, he said.

  We walked up to Erskineville Road. At the coffee shop on the corner we ordered and I sat on a stool, trying to keep my legs out of the way of other people, looking at the folded front page of the South Sydney Herald. He sat beside me, and through my hair I could see him staring. What is it?

  Do you have any brothers and sisters?

  I began to laugh, and stood up to collect my latte from the counter. Hang on, he said. I have something coming with bacon in it. Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?

  I’m happy with coffee.

  The sun on the street outside struck blue and bright through the sparsely leaved plane trees. I sneezed, once, then twice, then three times. He watched me, an amused expression on his face that was unaccompanied by laughter. Are you done?

  The sun makes me sneeze, I explained. When it’s at an angle. Usually I have sunglasses, but not. Not now. I didn’t think I’d need them last night when I.

  We were walking together uphill, by the animal hospital and the ambling young mothers and the rippling pepper trees. He brushed his hand along my forearm.

  I have to get a couple of things, if you don’t have to rush off anywhere?

  No. I mean, I can come.

  You really sneeze in the sun?

  Yes.

  I’ve never heard of that.

  Well, I do.

  In the condiments aisle at the back of the supermarket we stood side by side staring at the different kinds of chili sauce available. I turned to find him already looking at me. You all right? His face bent close to mine. And then all at once.

  No no, he said after a moment. No kissing in the condiments aisle.

  At peak hour, when the call volume was at its highest, the television was switched to A Current Affair. All over the eastern seaboard people were leaving work, crashing their cars, and beginning to drink. I had only just begun my shift. It was the first chilly night of autumn, but there was no sign of it inside, beneath the central air-conditioning vents. I was sitting on a tripartite desk with two men I rarely spoke to. They talked about football, mostly, and which sandwich they were going to buy from Subway during their break. They were the pair that Pat, on my first day, had labeled the dumbest fucks here. On the other side of the office beside the windows, I heard the same woman explaining that the city’s water was polluted, and that’s why she drank only bottled water. The water from the dam at Warragamba is full of cocaine and greyhound blood, she said.

  Chicks are crazy, muttered one of the dumb fucks.


  In the early years of the new Australian colony, one of the priests stranded down there at the edge of the island continent decided to carry out a survey of Sydney’s women. Naturally, he included only European women, because according to him they were the only ones that counted. The priest drew up the “Female Register” and submitted it back home to the British government. In the Female Register the priest found there were just two types of Australian women. The priest counted 395 wives and 1,035 whores.

  When I answered the phone the man on the line was yelling already. You hung the fuck up on me what the fuck do you think you’re doing?

  I explained that it had not been me he had just spoken to, and asked which service he required. He asked whether I was both stupid and a bitch. He suggested that the emergency services were incompetent. He had called for the ambulance before, he said, but now he wanted the police.

  Fuck you pricks, he said, when I asked him what state and town his emergency was in. Macquarie Fields, he said when I repeated the question. I connected him through to the police. The line rang and rang. “Fuck you pricks,” I wrote in the notebook.

  The police will answer as soon as they can, I said.

  What the fuck, he screamed. What the fuck.

  The phone traffic was high. After nine unanswered rings, I said, I’m trying another line.

  Every three repetitions of the dial tone I repeated, as directed, the police are still connecting, please stay on the line. The presenter’s hair on the silent television above looked like hard-boiled caramel. She nodded encouragingly at her co-host.

  The man’s angry yells became groans. What the fuck is taking so long? he asked. I assured him that the police would answer. The digital clock suspended from the ceiling flicked to 18:35 and Maeve logged off, waving goodbye to me as she exited the room. I waved back as I changed lines.

  His breathing became hoarse. I can’t fucking breathe, he whimpered. I can’t fucking breathe. I asked if he would prefer to reconnect to an ambulance. But he didn’t reply.

  “I can’t fucking breathe,” I wrote in the notebook.

  The police answered the phone then. But the man now didn’t, or couldn’t, respond. There was labored breathing on the line, then the clattering of a phone falling out of a hand.

  The caller asked for the police, I said, but he said he can’t breathe and he hasn’t responded since.

  Did he say where he was? asked the police dispatcher.

  Macquarie Fields.

  No street address?

  No.

  Thanks, operator, I’ll deal with it. Hello? Can you hear me?

  I couldn’t hear the man’s breathing anymore when I hung up the phone.

  While out in the middle of nowhere on his search for the inland sea, Oxley one morning instructed the accompanying botanist to dig some holes in a clearing. The men planted quince and peach and apricot seeds in the barren soil. They didn’t expect that the trees would grow. After all, they had read their copies of Bacon and Locke. They were rational men. The quince and peach and apricot seeds were a gesture of hope. A hope rather than an expectation that the European trees would mark the passage of European men, “should these desolate plains be ever again visited by civilized man, of which, however, I think there is very little probability.”

  On the silent television a new segment began. A heavily fake-tanned woman was shown looking out a window, and then it cut to a scene of her gazing across the rows of cars in a Woolworth’s parking lot. When she was interviewed under studio lighting her makeup appeared so thick it seemed to be smeared onto her face with a trowel. A Current Affair had been running a story for a week about this woman, who was alleging sexual assault by three Sydney football players. Or I thought that was what she was alleging. The television being silent, I was not sure of the specifics.

  The men at the nearby phones were talking about the woman on the screen. They seemed to know all the details of the story. They were concerned about how her allegations would impact upon the general morale of the team. The team stood for everything they wanted the country and themselves to be—strong, secure, and mindless. I mean, she’s probably lying, said the one with the thinning Thai hair transplant.

  Australia’s “first novelist,” Marcus Clarke, wrote once about those men like Oxley who had landed on the eastern shore and pushed off alone into the wilderness. He had imagined this figure of the ideal man, knowing that “he was lord of that wilderness, that in it he could live unmolested and secure, that he could find there a home and subsistence, with no aid but that of his own hands and his own brains.” Men like Clarke believed that the effort of taming the natural world chiseled out “the whole man” from the poor marble of his birthright. Like women, the bush came wild or tamed, and they knew which one they preferred.

  Why do you think she’s lying? asked the thin one.

  Well, look at her, said the man with the hair transplant. They both looked up at the screen, at the woman with her eyeliner and leather boots silently explaining what had happened to her.

  She’s a fuckin’ bitch. And she looks like that? She’s asking for it.

  The thin one sounded tentative. You really think stuff like that?

  Yeah. ’Course.

  “She’s asking for it,” I wrote in the notebook.

  ____________

  After the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the city of Pompeii, Christians at the time argued that it could be explained by the sacking of Jerusalem by Rome several years earlier. The sacking of Jerusalem had angered God. The destruction of a city filled top to bottom with Romans was, to Christian minds, divine punishment. It was nothing to get upset about, because only sinners had died. The pure were pure by virtue of their being alive. It was a fantastically reassuring system of logic. God was good and catastrophe made sense. If you had been hurt, you must have been asking for it.

  A conversation with Maeve:

  Hey, are you working tomorrow? I know we said we’d get dumplings but New Shanghai is not going to happen this week. Maybe in the future when you’re feeling nostalgic for Ashfield we can go, but I’ve got too much on this week.

  No problem. And no, I’m not working until Sunday now. I switched some shifts around. I’m in bed. I need some time to try and calm down. I was so stressed out at work last night I was shaking and misdirecting calls.

  Why so stressed?

  I’m not sure. General malaise? Maybe everything. I’m trying to breathe.

  Good idea. Also, try to use work as an opportunity to not think about things. I did it during uni. It was a lifesaver.

  Yeah. You know the guy who gets the hair transplants? I saw him on his phone this morning, online shopping for knives. And not butter knives. Properly scary ones.

  Wooden steps led down from the veranda and into my mother’s garden. Along the side of the house the fernery grew dense and thick. The paving was all broken, the cracks striped with dirt and weeds. I trailed my hand along the bricks of the house as I walked. Moss grew so thick there, where the hose coiled out of the wall, that when I pressed down it felt sometimes like I was penetrating flesh. There was a scent of crushed insects and soil and decomposing blossoms. It felt very close, down in the thick of the garden with the din of crickets just starting as the light leaked out of the day. My mother stood halfway down the side of the house, directing the hose towards the tibouchina tree, her bare feet wet with the mud she was making.

  This is pretty, I said, fingering the grevillea peeping out of the shadow of the tall grasses. She turned and smiled. I’d hug you but I’d get you wet, she said.

  That’s all right.

  It was comforting to simply be around her. I reached out and smoothed her hair into place, as she did with mine.

  I’ll go check on dinner.

  I left her alone down there with the hose. She was smiling.

  My mother liked to call her garden a jungle. She wanted it green and dense and impenetrable. This was curious to me, because she had expressed no interest in gardeni
ng when she was younger, or even when we lived in the house on the edge of the national park with my father. But that changed after the fires of ’94, which had scorched the grass and trees of the garden without passing the property lines. She hadn’t cared about that garden. She had done nothing about the scorched grass. But after we moved into the house in Ashfield, my mother began working on her jungle with a terrifying affection. It had three big gum trees already well established, but not much else to speak of. In that first year alone, she planted bougainvillea vines, the tibouchina tree, bromeliads, Monstera deliciosa, birds of paradise, and jasmine. After the burglary she had higher fences built along the side of the house that bordered the street. I was not allowed to leave the house and play outside under any circumstances, nor to play in the park across the street, and certainly not to walk unsupervised to the more exciting park three blocks down. Instead, my mother built me a swing in the back garden. She grew plants along the border of the fence. She did battle with the gum tree roots that rose up and unsettled the plumbing and the paving stones. And by these methods, she learned to love the thing she had brought under her control.

  But after a year or so the gum tree roots would grow back. They would unsettle the pipes and disturb the foundations of the house. The gum trees posed such a problem that she decided, in the end, to have them cut down. I recall my mother standing on the veranda on the afternoon that the men came with their chain saws to cut down the trees. She smiled. As though she knew that, to keep herself feeling safe, the garden had to be defended. And now there were no gum trees in the garden, just plants and vines and ferns, and a fig tree which she could easily control.

  When my mother finished hosing she wiped off her feet and came inside, moving back and forth between cupboard and countertop, assembling a dressing for a salad. On the veranda I set the table and set out a plate of foil-wrapped fish. Slices of lemon stuck to its scales. My mother thrust salad servers into my hands.

  We stayed out on the veranda together for several hours, talking and drinking wine while the leftover fish leaked its juices into the foil. My mother asked about my shift at the call center earlier that day. I told her it was fine. She asked how I was coping with the work. She asked whether I thought it was helping with the writing. I tried to reassure her that it was, although writing had become increasingly difficult. But I didn’t want to worry her, because my mother was already concerned about how I was coping with the calls. She didn’t need to know the ways in which they affected everything else.