Shortly after Buckland delivered the first Australian paper to the well-read rock enthusiasts of London, the Geological Society came to be presided over by Charles Lyell, a mentor to the younger Darwin. Lyell instilled in the society one of the greatest tenets of Victorian science—the principle of “uniformitarianism.” This was a principle in which it was supposed that the earth changed at precisely the same rate and in the same ways as it had done in the past. The earth was Orderly and Consistent and could be mastered by Men.
But this orderly view of natural history put Lyell in philosophical conflict with the views of French geologists, who had recently proposed the concept of “catastrophism.” Catastrophists saw the earth as formed by occasional violent cataclysms—floods, fires, earthquakes, heat. Lyell rejected all theories of catastrophism. Geological catastrophism was not far, in his mind, from the insult of the Jacobins across the Channel. Revolutionary hogwash. The theory struck him as pre-rationalist, and essentially un-English.
While Lyell was waging an ideological war in the form of rocks, his protégé Charles Darwin had set sail around the world on the Beagle. In the 1830s, the Beagle reached the northwest coast of Australia, one of the most catastrophic places on the globe—fire-prone, flood-prone, hot. The Beagle progressed fifty miles up the Victoria River, a river cherished today as one of the country’s last remaining “wild” rivers, according to the Department of Environment and Energy. After a few miles of red rocks and water and avian shrieks, the principal surveyor on Darwin’s ship sent word back to England. Darwin and his men believed that this river of the north was the vein that might bleed into a central inland sea somewhere out there in the middle of the island continent.
They all believed. Believed in the warm, wet center opening its legs out there in the heart of the dead, dry country. They could almost taste it, almost see it, the promise just beyond the horizon, sloganeering their hopes like a black swan at dusk.
Word of Darwin’s theory reached Charles Sturt, who was then living in the city of Adelaide. From his home, Sturt had taken to watching the flight paths of waterbirds. He saw the birds fly west from Sydney, and he saw them fly north from Adelaide. He had developed a theory. He took a pen to a map of the known continent, and he joined together the lines of migration of the waterbirds, and found a point of convergence, a degree or so north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
When Oxley had returned from his journey down the Lachlan River and announced, “I feel confident we were in the immediate vicinity of an inland sea,” Sturt was the first to drink my great-great-great-great-grandfather’s Kool-Aid. Darwin jigsaw-puzzled with Sturt’s lines of migration, with Oxley’s journey west, with all those hunches and hopes that the land could be apprehended and subjugated to the will of men.
And so Sturt proposed an expedition into the interior. Twenty-seven years after Oxley’s journey, Sturt, filled with conviction, led an expedition into the desert along with a twenty-five-foot whaleboat and two ex-sailors to man it. The wastes got barren and the rivers petered out into salt plains, but Sturt was ever hopeful. Space was made for conquering. The desert had to be other than empty. The river must flow backwards for a reason.
And so his men died. Thirst overwhelmed them. They developed scurvy. Their bodies’ connective tissue disintegrated. Old wounds reopened. But Sturt smiled out of a face reddened by dust. He held faith with the questionable symbolism of birds. He believed he heard swans.
In the winter I was placed on morning shifts. Each day I woke up at four to be ready to take calls at five. The dawn was still a distant dream as I walked through the tall glass doors, swiped through at the security gates, and took the lift up.
Mornings were slow, and I had found that I had come to like them. The staff were older in the mornings. They were the kind of women who’d make vanilla slice if there was a birthday, who brought in plates of cheese cubes and cabanossi, and referred to me as “love” because they couldn’t remember my name. The women’s voices filled the thin morning light with chatter of arthritis, the council, and their wayward children. That morning the preoccupying outrage was the next-door neighbor’s gum tree hanging too far over a shared fence.
It’s a bloody accident waiting to happen.
Oh, yairs.
My word.
Emergency police, fire, or ambulance.
The night before, in my bedroom, I had watched the rain fall against the glass in thick translucent veils. Buses heaved in the street below. I had missed a deadline for an essay I had pitched, but when I sat up in bed intending to write, I found I was unable. I instead lay there and listened to the fireplace. My body felt like it had all the consistency of water. I had been to a doctor on Glebe Point Road, and she had run reams of tests on me. I was anemic. The tests showed that I had an abnormal liver enzyme count. I had been told to stop drinking and to rebuild my iron levels. I also had chlamydia, and was prescribed antibiotics.
Do you know how you might have got it?
No.
Have you had unprotected sex lately?
With every single person I’ve ever slept with.
Don’t do that, the doctor said. Anyway, the antibiotics should clear it right up.
The doctor advised that I consider my options, and offered to write a prescription for birth control, but I had demurred.
No hormones, I said. I am afraid they’ll make me depressed.
At that, the doctor had shaken her head.
A flurry of calls came in the mornings as people began to wake up on the east coast. There were car accidents, angry motorists, and loved ones who had taken ill during the night. Then a lull set in, between nine thirty and eleven, when calls were infrequent. The television personalities began to move with a sedated languor, their smiles widened, and the segments on Tupperware, juicers, and control-top underpants began. That’s about the time that the old women would begin to call.
The calls tended to arrive in concert with postmen, midday marketers, and door-to-door prophets. The old women would place calls to the emergency services, not knowing precisely what they wanted, but knowing they wanted something. Their voices simpered and quivered as they must have done in times of vulnerability since little-girlhood. The old women invariably believed that the voice they heard when I spoke was one of a police officer. They only grew more confused when I tried to explain that I was not. All the old women told a version of the same story. There’s somebody knocking at the door, and, oh dear, I’m a woman all alone in the house and I’m terribly frightened. I’m all alone. Won’t somebody please come and help me. Somebody’s at the door and I’m frightened.
I put the calls through to the police.
All the while I connected them through, I wanted to tell them to open the fucking door. To talk to the postman, the Jehovah’s Witness, the phone company. I wanted to tell them that they didn’t need protection, and surely facing the man at the door, whether he was selling phones or brandishing a butcher’s knife, was better than this helplessness and terror and the unwavering belief in these other knifeless men at the end of the phone who might care for them.
But in the moments between calls I would reason with myself. It is natural to be afraid of the man at the door, I wrote in the notebook. That’s how humans evolved, after all. When a twig rustled in the leaves, it was the anxious ones who survived because they ran away regardless of whether the rustle had been caused by the breeze or a bear. You got on better if you ran away. And so we went on, evolved, creating stories to explain away the inexplicable. We said Vulcan was angry and that was why the volcano rumbled. We said that the swan was a portent of nearby water. We said that God punished the sinners and saved the virtuous. To acknowledge that terrible things happen and people are killed and tragedy befalls the good for no reason at all would defy all our expectations of narrative. So why not call the police on the Jehovah’s Witness at the door, if it worked to stave off the terror that one day the man with the knife really might arrive, might not even knock on the door, and in the
end it would signify nothing?
I sat looking through the office windows over the park. I watched the rain snap the City of Sydney flags, and the patent-leather leaves of the park rustle in the wind. On the television the ads were all for kitchenware and weight-loss supplements. I listened to the hum of the air conditioner and counted down the minutes on the overhead clock until my second break. Phones ringing.
Emergency police, fire, or ambulance.
Um. OK, so, I’m not sure. Um. Maybe you could help me?
Do you require the police, the fire, or the ambulance?
Um, well. So. The thing is. I got a new dog. And the old dog was really excited to have a friend. A new friend. And um. Yeah. The dogs had sex with each other. But not. Yeah. One of them is pretty little. So. They’re, um, stuck inside one another. So I don’t know who can help me with that?
What state and town is the emergency in?
Dundas Valley. New South Wales.
Connecting to the police for Dundas Valley, New South Wales.
In the notebook I kept beside me I wrote down “pretty little.”
The pool in Prince Alfred Park was newly renovated, and because it had run millions of dollars over budget and been finished years late, the council was allowing free entry to local residents up until November. In the late afternoon, the benches surrounding the pool were half-full. It was winter, sure, but unseasonably warm. The deck chairs underneath the old trees attracted the kinds of women so beautiful that each one, separately, might cause you to lose your reason. Bronzed men performed push-ups in the grass by the fences.
I had taken to coming to the swimming pool every day, even when the weather was cold. I would lie on the benches with a sweater thrown over my swimsuit, reading or writing, but always in view of the water. I found the water infinitely soothing, and in those months it became the only thing that could calm me down.
I had always wanted a swimming pool as a child, but I was raised in drought conditions. Every year of my childhood the drought got worse, every year more crops failed, the reservoirs fell, and television news was full of images of cattle ribs bleached white on the plains. When the state government instituted water restrictions, I learned to take short showers, my mother watered the garden only after dark, and we did away with sprinklers and the hosing of driveways. But each weekend we drove to the ocean and I swam and the waves took me, rolled me under, and I emerged back onto the surface with a mouthful of salt.
It was infinitely clear to me even then that I lived in a country afflicted by a paradox. We were a people surrounded by water, living on one of the most arid continents in the world, a place rapidly running out of potable water, with no hope of any inland sea to hang our hopes on anymore. The rain could not be coaxed from the sky, the dams could not be raised, empty ghost rivers like the Lachlan would never run steady again. And so I longed for rooms of steam, for baths, for the cool blue miracle of a swimming pool in which the water could be contained as though it were safe in the cup of your hand. When I came to the swimming pool now, I gazed at the water more than I read the book I brought with me. Looking at the swimming pool I could forget the emergencies, my confused plans, and all the men in leather jackets or thongs or tattered dressing gowns who laid their hands on my body whether I wanted them to or not.
The changing rooms of Prince Alfred Park Pool had been built by the children’s play area. Their shrieking echoed off the wet concrete floor of the locker room in which I was standing naked. In front of the mirror in the changing room I examined my body for marks.
I made an inventory.
There were, first, the bite marks on my neck. There were scratches that stretched down my back. Bruises in browns and pinks and purples. The bruises were patterned along my arms and legs as though on purpose. Sometimes I could remember their provenance. The corner of a desk had left its imprint on my hip. A stumble on the stairs had marked my calf with a long dark stripe. On my thigh there were five circular bruises, corresponding precisely to the largish fingers of a man’s hand. The rest of the bruises were as indecipherable to me as a lover’s thoughts.
A middle-aged woman eyed me from the other side of the changing room, then turned her eyes to the ground, fastening her sweat-stained bra behind her back. I did not know how to read her face. Did she think I had been beaten? Was she sorry for me?
The bruises were from sex, and also a product of my recklessness. I was careless with my body when I was drinking and blacked out. I had blacked out in my bedroom the night before, and again, a week earlier, trying to feel comfortable, to chill out or anyway hang loose with people from the call center at a bar on Castlereagh Street. I couldn’t remember what I had done, but in the morning my flesh bore the marks of the night.
The middle-aged woman slipped on her blouse and her black dress trousers and left, without saying anything or giving me another glance.
Once the woman was gone I could examine myself more closely. Staring at myself in the mirror, it occurred to me that my body might look a lot different by now. A kind of ghost life ran parallel with my own. One year. It had been a year. The knowledge came to me unwillingly, I hadn’t wanted to remember it. But there it was. A year to the day. My body would have been much changed by now, marked by things I had not wanted to experience.
I never doubted that I had made the right choice, and it was not that I regretted not having the child, or a body that by now would have borne the traces of stretching, the accommodating, the darkening of nipples, the linea negra blooming down my abdomen. That wasn’t the source of sadness.
It was sheer pity for myself.
Even then I could assess the events of the previous year and observe that it was all rather a lot to bear. Perhaps for a woman stronger than myself, everything might have progressed smoothly. But I was not strong. Taken together, the recent events of my life were of the kind that, in the past, might have made a weak woman hysterical. They might have made her take to her bed, might have caused her to adopt the teachings of a spiritual leader, or have her committed to a regime of constitutional walks and water cures. I could see, in the mirror, and quite clearheadedly, that I had entered the dark waters all those months ago, and there I was still, clutching at lifebuoys, only occasionally able to emerge to the surface and take in the vast formlessness of the sea around me. I had the bruises to prove it, if nothing else.
I knelt down to retrieve my underwear from my bag. I had a dress folded in the bottom, and a nice pair of shoes. The dress covered up the bruises on my arms. I was meeting my mother and I did not want her to see.
I walked from Prince Alfred Park, up through an alleyway and towards the theater on Belvoir Street, where my mother waited on the corner, holding her handbag in front of her legs like a shield.
Your hair is still wet, she observed.
It’ll dry, I said. I did the best I could.
The chimes that signaled the beginning of the play began to sound from the speakers in the corners of the theater. People filed towards the doors. I followed my mother inside.
The play was an adaptation of a Swedish playwright’s most famous work. It had been updated for a contemporary audience, but the broad lines of the story had been maintained for history’s sake. The play concerned two people, one rich, one not, who nevertheless felt powerless over their destinies, and who believed that in sleeping with each other they might no longer feel that way.
When my mother and I left the theater she saw the male lead smoking by the stage door. She approached him. You were wonderful, she said.
Cheers, he said, and looked at me over her shoulder.
Come on, Mum, let’s go.
Are you embarrassed? she asked as we walked towards Cleveland Street.
No, I said. But he just finished performing, he probably wants to be left alone.
It’s always nice to hear praise when you’ve done a good job, she said. Besides, I like him, that man, whatshisname? I liked him in that show a few years ago on Foxtel, the one with the little gir
l who died. He seems lovely.
Maybe. I just see that actor around, is all. He’s at the Courthouse a lot. Someone told me he got into a fistfight at the BP in Erskineville a few months ago. He beat up the guy pretty badly. Made a woman cry.
My mother shook her head.
The night was warmer than it should have been. A dry breeze rattled through the jasmine. Going to be a short winter, remarked my mother.
I guess so.
Here, your hair is drying funny, and she used her hand at the back of my head to scrunch a handful.
I pulled away. Don’t.
She looked at me, her head tilted to one side.
What is it?
You grow more and more like him, you know.
My father?
Mmm.
Don’t say that. That’s a horrible thing to say.
Around the eyes.
I pulled away from her. That I might be like my father was more than I could countenance. If I were like him then I, too, might have the capacity to weep on the stairs, crash the Mercedes, smash the windows, go off the rails more brilliantly and violently than I ever had before.
I changed the subject. Are you walking me home? Your car is that way, if I recall.
Don’t complain. I’m your mother.
You realize I walk down this street in the middle of the night half the week, coming home from work.
I’ll put some money in your account. Get a taxi.
It’s a twenty-five-minute walk. That would be a waste of money.
It would ease my mind to know you’re safe.
I didn’t respond. She put her arm through mine. We crossed at the lights on Cleveland Street and approached the ledge above which all the houses were built. Just then a scuffling sound started up from behind a green recycling bin left on the nature strip, and we stopped in our tracks as an animal emerged from behind the plastic. The eyes of the animal glinted in the streetlight. It looked right at us. A sick misunderstanding had occurred. It’s just a possum, said my mother. It’s fine.
The Inland Sea Page 12