The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  Darlin’ don’t you go and cut your hair,” the radio played, again and again, between news updates during the week of the fires in ’94, the month that my mother took me and left.

  My mother and I listened to the radio, driving home from the city through the national park to the house we all lived in together, though for only a few weeks more. There was a blood-red sun hanging over the road that day. Ash clotted the air. We came to a traffic jam while the smoke plumed in the distance and the wind swept through the bush. “But I don’t care, I care, I really don’t care,” spoke the radio. Firemen in their fluorescent suits walked along the sides of the road through the perilously yellow grass.

  A rattling of gum nuts punctured the song as the wind picked up and they flew at the roof of the car.

  One of the firemen in his bright yellow jacket approached my mother’s window and she rolled down the glass. He informed her that the fire had jumped containment lines and was burning out of control. They were closing the roads. Ash clung to the sweat of his brow, and I remember that it didn’t seem to bother him. My mother wished the fireman good luck, and we turned back, with the rest of the traffic. We drove to my grandparents’ house. I recalled the song from the radio when I stood on their driveway, looking out towards the north and west. The fire burned on the edges of the city and the red sun sank into the ash and cloud. I could smell the smoke in my just-cut hair.

  That evening I sat on the gold filigree carpet of my grandparents’ living room with the air conditioner on full blast, watching the oversaturated television set they had bought in the late ’60s. On ABC News I saw the fires burn in the bushland behind the house where my father was. The manicured grass of all the gardens on the street was crisp, and blackening. I had looked for my father in the footage of the firefighters and the flames. I had naturally supposed that the fire had something to do with him.

  My grandfather had sat behind me on the sofa while the ABC broadcast the inferno, a cold bottle of Crown Lager resting on the tiny table he reserved for that purpose. The incompetence of the fire service, for fuck’s sake, he had yelled. No back burning, they don’t know how to do the job, and now look where it’s got the pack of bastards.

  I did not ask him whether my father would be safe. He turned the television off. My grandfather went to the spare room, where my grandparents kept the films they had taped from television onto carefully labeled and alphabetized VHS tapes. My grandfather chose Brief Encounter, and that night we watched it together instead of the bushfires.

  In the end my father hadn’t even been at the house. He was safe from the fire. He was staying elsewhere, with a woman, in Bondi, I think, and shortly after the fires we would sell that house. My mother took me out of the suburbs and back to the city, while my father moved to Melbourne.

  I still dream about that fire, sometimes. I still smell the smoke in my hair. In these dreams I find myself looking down the same stretch of closed-off road in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park where my mother and I had been stopped by the Rural Fire Service. In the dream, the flames tower around me. I never feel the heat in the dream, only a sense of animal terror, that my father is somewhere beyond the flames, that he cannot get to me, does not know where I am, and no one will be coming to save me from the fire.

  One evening, at one in the morning, I returned home from the call center and I was too tired to read. I poured wine into a glass, set my laptop on the bed, and found a full-length version of Brief Encounter on YouTube, which was watchable enough, although grainy. I had not watched the film since the VHS copy at my grandparents’ house, which I watched often after my grandfather first showed it to me during the fires, on rainy evenings when I was sent to stay with them. I remember the film on the tape being split up by ads for bananas and toothpaste in the shoulder-padded, yellow-green lighting of the 1980s. My grandparents taped many films onto VHS tapes, but it never occurred to them that they could pause the recording during the ads.

  I liked the film because it was so cautious, so small. Every scene occurred in a railway station, a drawing room, a cinema, a tearoom, as though all of England were nothing more than cramped spaces where middle-class lovers could gaze at each other in anguish. It was the sort of film it seemed strange to love now, because it was concerned with such small things, because it was so melodramatic, because it was so English. And they said the kinds of ridiculous things the English used to really believe, and perhaps still do. “You know,” intoned Celia Johnson, “I believe we should all behave differently if we lived in a warm, sunny climate all the time. We shouldn’t be so withdrawn, and shy, and difficult.” Which was nonsense, I realized now. Misery thrives on sunshine.

  Who were these people, I wondered, whiling away the Second World War with their shopping and missed trains and affairs?

  But there was something so soothing about the film’s smallness. Its predictability. The affair would always end, the train would always leave, but Celia Johnson never would find it within herself to throw herself onto the tracks.

  The comfort of the film was mixed up with the ads that haunted my memory of first watching it, ads that I found myself anticipating as scenes faded out every fifteen minutes. The memory of the advertisements created lacunae in the film, and in my head the Australia of the 1980s—closer, but just as foreign—muddled itself with England of the 1940s, a soup of homesickness for times I’d never known. As if a time were a place you could return to. As if all those rituals my family had brought from England two hundred years ago, all those habits and rituals we fell into at Christmas, on birthdays, in times of crisis, could make sense of anything. And after all, the feeling had nothing to do with England as it was now—in London, years earlier, I had expected to find something to love, but all I found were gray days, and bad coffee, and a man who crossed the atrium at Shoreditch High Street station with no other purpose but to stamp his foot down on a child’s untended balloon. Nothing was as promised.

  From the standing desk in the corner, Maeve told me and whoever cared to listen that she had been reading accounts from people online who had eaten another person. Not cannibals as such. Just people who had found themselves in situations where they had, by necessity, eaten somebody. They said we taste like pork, but gamier, she said. There was one man, actually, from England, who’d had his hip replaced. So he took the old hip home, carved off the meat and cooked it in a sauce. Served it with pasta and a glass of wine. Emergency police, fire, or ambulance?

  All our conversations happened like this, broken up and punctuated by the sudden calm tones we were forced to adopt every time we recited the script.

  How could he do that? asked Pat. I couldn’t even take my wisdom teeth with me when I had them out. Once they remove something doctors won’t give it back to you. It’s considered medical waste.

  Well, that’s what he said. Maybe the laws are less restrictive in England.

  Nothing is less restrictive in England, I said.

  When I was eighteen, I had gone to England. I had thought perhaps that London was the place for me. But when I got there I found that it felt more like a mausoleum than a place I could envision my future. One evening I had gone to see a show in Shoreditch, alone. I spent the evening bumping against strangers who looked at me coldly, drinking too-sweet cider, sinking into the music, which was boring anyway. After the show, I had walked up and down, through Shoreditch and the East End, as though I were looking for the friends I hadn’t met yet. But the friends failed to materialize in Shoreditch, or anywhere in England.

  Another conversation with Maeve that morning:

  Do you understand how incredibly fucking stupid it is to be sleeping with him again? Emergency police, fire, or ambulance? Connecting police for Newcastle, New South Wales.

  I know.

  I mean, I don’t know what you want me to say exactly. Because I think it’s something that you sound like you’re enjoying despite all the protestations and admissions of guilt. I think it’s something that once you leave Sydney and get some
distance from the whole thing you will be disgusted with yourself for. This is not something that a good person would do. And I think that all we can ever strive to be is a good person. I don’t understand why you’re doing it. I don’t understand why Lachlan is doing it. There is nothing good that can come from it. You are both using each other. And this secrecy is just another component of the game. Cate will find out. You know she will. This is cruelty. I don’t know whether you just want me to say it, but you know it’s all true.

  Emergency police, fire, or ambulance? Emergency police, fire, or ambulance? No response.

  The frustrating thing from Maeve’s perspective was that interventions by one’s friends on behalf of morality, or goodness, or our well-being, matter so very little. I know now as I knew then that it was incredibly fucking stupid to be sleeping with him again. And I know now that our friends have little sympathy when we stick our hand in the fire again, when they’ve nursed us through the burns the first time around. Because why?

  It is never easy to say, because I want it, and have that be enough.

  I could have explained that I knew it wouldn’t last, indeed, I didn’t expect it to. I didn’t expect that it would end well, or that we wouldn’t hurt each other. It was simply that I didn’t care. I wanted, in the three-second pop-ups and hot takes of attention I received, the sound of his voice and the infinitely reassuring way in which it warmed and rippled through me, because in those moments it felt like the fragments were at last hung on a story line, and that was what I wanted.

  “You know, I believe we should all behave differently if we lived in a warm, sunny climate all the time. We shouldn’t be so withdrawn, and shy, and difficult.”

  Celia Johnson was wrong. I knew it even when I was a child. Because I was from a place that was both relentlessly sunny and difficult. A place where the weather got so warm it sometimes killed us.

  There it is. Take it. So said William Mulholland to the assembled crowds in the San Fernando Valley the day he brought water to Los Angeles. It was a declaration full of longing and recklessness, made by a man who had followed through on his promise to bring rain to a dried-out place, and who would spend his old age in mourning for the hundreds drowned in his single-minded mission to flood the desert. But wasn’t his hubris infinitely reasonable? I understood the need to control water. I understood putting your faith in its ebb and flow and the devastation you might feel when it didn’t work out as you’d hoped.

  ____________

  Los Angeles, too, was a warm, sunny place.

  I booked my plane ticket this morning, I said to Maeve between calls.

  Really? Where to?

  America.

  That’s what you decided? Where in America?

  California.

  I was so sure you’d go to Europe. Why California?

  Because it has nothing to do with me and I have nothing to do with it.

  When are you leaving?

  In November, three days after my birthday.

  OK. But really, America? California? Are you sure? That doesn’t seem like you.

  During my break that morning, two men standing on the corner of Castlereagh Street wore Guy Fawkes masks and gray hoodies and offered to explain to me how I could save my life by rising up against the Church of Scientology. The headquarters sat across the road. They pointed to the large square windows from beneath the eaves where they sheltered from the wind. The masked men explained that the E-meters and the auditing and the Clears were brainwashing the vulnerable. It was a moneymaking scheme, where true believers scrubbed floors and surrendered their will because they believed in the promise of salvation.

  They’re all in league, one said.

  Are you chill? asked the other.

  Sure, I said.

  I told them that I needed to go inside because my break was up. Have a lovely day, one called after me. He looked so cold, in his mask, while the wind whipped the winter up along Elizabeth Street from the Harbour.

  An hour later, as I walked through the glass doors and headed into the park for my longer lunch break, I saw that the men had abandoned their posts. They were standing in line for sandwiches in the Subway beside the headquarters. They still wore their masks.

  I left the office late at night. The walk along Elizabeth Street was wet, but I didn’t mind. The rain had poured down all day and now drizzled, as though it, too, were tired and needed to rest before the inundation continued. Lights glowed gold and red in the indigo sky like a promise just before it’s broken. In the distance, behind the skyline, were the suburbs with their salmon bricks and paint blisters on woodwork and Colourbond fences kept in place by grids of buffalo grass. And beyond even that, the plains and the desert. I could feel it. A casual sort of violence seemed to vibrate beneath the highways, the warehouses, the gasworks, and the high-rises.

  I had not been home more than half an hour when I began to hear it. Outside on the street a loud sound. A crack.

  And then another.

  With every crack the darkness of the bedroom was flooded with light. Blue and bright and sickly. I stood at the window and looked out at the mechanic’s and the paperbark tree and Elizabeth Street slicked wet by the rain. The sky’s heart torn wide open. Blue light splintered the room. I could see, out there above the fig and the mulberry trees, the flash of light, and then the smoke.

  The power line was on fire. The flame wasn’t getting far with the rain, but I could see it directly in front of me through the window, the smoking electricity wires shaking in the wind. I tried the lights in my room, and the power was dead. I noted that the smoking power line was connected directly to the black wires that terminated on the bricks by the bedroom windows.

  My housemate Paul was still at work, and Joe was with his girlfriend. I was the only one home. I pulled a cardigan over the lace petticoat I slept in and walked downstairs in the dark with my phone in my hand. I opened the front door and the iron security gate. The power line was still on fire. The flame licked the darkness. I dialed 000.

  I will do this properly, I thought. I knew the protocol. I wondered if I would recognize the voice that answered the phone. And would I say something? I had never been on this side of the line before. But I wasn’t sure whose voice it was when the emergency services answered. I need the fire brigade for Redfern, New South Wales, I said. And was connected. I was the very model of a calm caller. The rain slanted in below the awning. My toes were wet, pale, and then suddenly blue in the flash of electricity. The phone rang twice before they answered. I explained the problem to the fire brigade. They asked for my address, and told me to wait for them. They would be there soon. Happens sometimes when there’s heavy rain, said the man on the phone. The water gets in and the lines short-circuit.

  I stood under the awning, leaning against the arm of the couch that we never used, which sat beside the front door. The smoke and electricity were oddly pretty in the rain when seen through the canopy of slick, wet leaves in the dark.

  Whaddya think of that, said a voice. From beneath the grapevines of the house next door the old Greek man emerged in his dressing gown. His wife, I supposed, was inside. I so rarely saw him, unless he was watering the tomato plants.

  I called the fire brigade, they’re coming, I said.

  Well, I called the police about fifteen minutes ago. They haven’t showed up yet.

  I did not ask him why he had called the police. It seemed a patently ridiculous thing to do. When there’s smoke, wouldn’t you think of fire?

  Well, they should be here soon, I said. I looked down at my phone.

  He continued to stand there in the dark. The power line cracked and the rain came down. I could feel the old man looking at me. Now that he was there it was hard to be aware of anything else. He was big. His bigness was the first and second thing you noticed about him. The third, his hair, the way the stubble grew gray and thatch-like across his chin and neck, out of his nose and ears, into his chest and down into the V of his dressing gown because he was n
ot wearing any clothes beneath it. He watched me. I pulled the cardigan over my breasts, crossed my legs more tightly. He had wide hands and in the flashes of electricity his face shone. Ruddy, years of drink visible on the surface, the broken veins spread across his cheeks.

  I’ll just sit down here and wait with you, said the man. He took three steps from beneath his grapevine and came to sit beside me, where I leaned on the arm of the couch. The gray chest hair overspilled the V of his tattered dressing gown, gaping wider. I felt his arm brush against my thigh. The electricity cracked blue again and the flame burning along the power line began to spread. I no longer felt like the model of a calm caller. I was all of a sudden caved in. Tremendously alert, but vacant. Frantically empty. I didn’t move, not at all.

  I could hear the sirens approaching.

  Your hair is very pretty, said the man. What’s your name?

  TREMOR

  The first paper on “Australian Matters” presented to the Geological Society of London was given in 1820 by the Reverend William Buckland. The paper included some observations on a series of rocks collected by John Oxley during his 1817 journey along the Lachlan River, and sent on to London upon Oxley’s return to Sydney. It was unclear where, precisely, Oxley had obtained the samples, only that the land in question lay west of the Blue Mountains. Buckland, in his paper, found a “strong analogy between the coal formation of the Hunter’s River and River Hawkesbury in New South Wales and that of England, which well deserves to be accurately investigated.” This would prove to be a confusing analogy. New South Wales is not England, and Hunter coal is not English coal, but it would not stop anyone from reaching a hand into the navel of the earth and squeezing at any promising flesh they could find.

  It might have made things easier on the men of the Geological Society if New South Wales were identical to England and its coal just as extractable. But they were soft men in shabby trousers more comfortable scrabbling on the beaches of the Dover coast for fossils, hoping like hell to stumble upon the jawbone of a dinosaur. The Antipodes were interesting only so far as they provoked moments of curious conversation in the Freemasons’ Tavern at Covent Garden of an evening.