The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  I want to show you my most treasured dead sea of the interior.

  Look down now from this imagined space in the sky above the land.

  Observe the vast sweep of history and time, and direct your gaze to the millions past, the ancient times, the before-memory of this place.

  See the way the desert ripples and wriggles across the landscape? The way the sand seems to swell and ebb with the sun? The way the brown seems flecked with light? Can you see the steady movement of the tide? This is no mirage or desert fever dream. This is the Eromanga Sea.

  The continent looks different, when seen this far back. More like an archipelago with a stripe of water separating east from west. There is no coral in the Eromanga Sea. Instead, the water is home to abundant fish and crabs, cockleshells and turtles. There are reptilian dolphins and crocodilian shapes crawling through the shallows, armored fish, all forms of scaled, saw-toothed, and cold-blooded biting things. This is sea monster country. But beautiful. Aquatic plants grow by the waterlines. Birds soar overhead.

  Crank the dial and you can speed through the years by the million. Watch the sky fill with debris, blocking out the sun, watch the proto-crocodiles and scaly dolphins die for lack of light. Watch the years peel forward. Watch the ocean recede. As the water dries up the iron-rich soil erodes. An underground freshwater reservoir forms. It’s as though the ocean sinks down, below the surface. The Great Artesian Basin covers the same area as the long-lost sea like some subaqueous shadow. The Eromanga Sea leaves behind a dry red desert replete with opal, and hundreds of ghost streams and poorly watered rivers that flow not east out to the Pacific, but west, petering out into the salt plains where once there was ocean. It still smells like seaweed out there. Sometimes there are swans.

  But skip forward from the present moment, just a little. Watch the apocalyptic climate maps jump from computer screens and take their predicted form. The sea need only rise a few meters for the Great Artesian Basin to unbury itself. For the rock and sand and red gibber plains to become submerged once more beneath the sea. Fish will return. They will swim around the drowned branches of the mulga and the mallee and the saltbush shrubs.

  Because Oxley wasn’t wrong, exactly.

  He was just 110 million years too late, and a few hundred years too soon.

  WILDFIRE

  The year I was eleven, I received a book in an orientation package for the high school I would attend in the coming year. The book was a large, hardbound volume printed to mark the centennial of the Ladies’ College, now School for Girls, and given out to every new student upon her enrolment. The book described the school’s founding, the evolution of the grounds, and pertinent pieces of history. Buried towards the end of the book, a small column of text detailed an incident that had occurred in the 1950s. The school grounds had once held a wing to house boarders, an old part of the campus now used for official ceremonies, interviews with the press, and annual vaccinations. In April 1958, the book explained, a twenty-nine-year-old man had broken into the boarders’ dormitory and abducted a fourteen-year-old girl. He had taken her to a nearby park, raped her, and then stabbed her to death. Because she had screamed, and he had been afraid that she would report him to the police.

  When I started high school, I realized that I was the only girl who had read the book over the summer. In those first weeks, I looked for traces of her everywhere. But I found that, outside the book, there was no memorial for the girl who had been killed in 1958. The boarders’ quarters had been closed after a fire in the 1970s, but the structure was still there. I would look up to the tower sometimes, and imagine it back then, how quiet and frightening it must have felt to be snatched by a stranger in the middle of the night. Every day at lunchtime Clemmie and I would assemble outside the building where the girl had been abducted, to sit cross-legged on the old tiles where we dirtied our dresses. During all those years of segmented mandarin halves and forged permission slips we never mentioned her. I’m not sure that Clemmie knew anything about the girl from 1958. But I thought of her often. I knew that, just as my home could be violated by burglars, I could not be kept safe from the world, not even at a School for Girls, formerly a Ladies’ College. Not for all the long socks and blazers, or the neat hair, or keeping silent with strangers. You could simply disappear, and the only trace you might leave behind would be a mention in an old book. There wouldn’t even be a memorial plaque. Just light, just grass, a bobby pin, a memory, a handbag, and a SIM card. If you were lucky.

  I turned from Pat to answer the phone. There were sounds in the background, waves and the sea breeze and people calling out. The voice started panicking right away. Ambos. Oh, fuck ambos, maybe the police? Fuck, I dunno. My mate’s being bitten by a shark, he’s still in the fuckin’ water.

  What state and town is the emergency in?

  Coffs!

  Coffs Harbour in which state?

  Campbell’s Beach.

  Campbell’s Beach in which state?

  Fuck the shark still fucking has him fuck fuck quickly we’re on the beach. It’s fuckin’. Fuck. Elouera Street? It’s Elouera Street. Mate! It’s gonna be OK!

  Connecting to the police for Coffs Harbour, New South Wales. Please inform the police that you’ll also need an ambulance.

  The police answered, I read out the job number and hung up. I went back to speaking with Pat. We were discussing the alleged sexual proclivities of the youngest, virginal daughter of the Prime Minister. Sharks already, huh?

  Yeah. Seems early for sharks. Although I guess the summer’s already started. It’s only October but it feels like January.

  True.

  Emergency police, fire, or ambulance? What state and town is the emergency in? Connecting fire for Mount Macedon, Victoria. See, there’s already spot fires starting up in paddocks.

  Later that evening, on the Channel Nine news, a beach in Coffs Harbour flashed up on the screen above the phones. A nineteen-year-old body boarder had been killed by a shark at Campbell’s Beach in Coffs Harbour just before 2 p.m. The footage showed the emergency services trekking through thick bush to get down to the unpatrolled beach from the street above. That was all the information I could absorb from the silent television. They filmed the paramedics lifting his body through the bush on a stretcher. They had placed a white sheet around his form. They weren’t hurrying to get up the hill. The emergency was over.

  The obstetrics ward of Prince Alfred Hospital was parceled away in a building off Missenden Road gated by palm trees rustling in the wind. I followed the arrows along corridors of clean linoleum and glass walls. The doors were built wide to accommodate gurneys, and the waiting room I eventually found myself in smelled like hand sanitizer and decay. I checked in with reception, sat with the other women, and waited to be called. High windows built at the far end of the waiting room opened out to gum trees and the football pitch of one of the university’s residential colleges.

  The waiting room in the obstetrics ward was entirely different from last year’s waiting room. No purple chairs, no 30 Rock on the television overhead. There was no television to speak of. Sitting against the wall on a squeaky vinyl chair, a teenage girl held her round belly. A boy sat beside her, holding her hand, swaddled in baggy jeans and a Penrith Panthers cap. I judged that he was not old enough yet to grow facial hair. Across the aisle a sensible-looking woman in her thirties sat knitting the arm of a tiny cardigan while the man beside her swiped his thumb across the screen of his phone. I put my hand on my empty stomach and pressed down. I held a book open on my knees without reading its pages. Was it not odd, I wondered, that they put us all together in here?

  I had almost forgotten about the procedure to implant the IUD until the hospital called to confirm the week before. After the doctor’s visit, after the morning at the pharmacy and the single pill in the blister pack, I had made phone calls and received a referral to the hospital.

  ____________

  I had come in once before, three weeks earlier, for a consultation. During
the consultation, I had met with the doctor who would conduct the insertion. She told me about research trips she had made to Mozambique, the public health initiatives she was involved in, the challenges facing women and girls in developing economies. She was tall, and clearly spoken, and I trusted and liked everything about her.

  The gynecologist had reassured me that she had done the procedure hundreds of times over the last twenty years, and she was convinced I was making the right choice. It was the most responsible thing I could do for myself, she noted, and I confirmed that I wanted to be responsible.

  That morning, three weeks earlier, she asked me to take off my underwear and lie down on the examining table. She pressed down on my belly, checked between my legs, and pronounced me completely healthy.

  This morning, sitting in the waiting room, I was sniffling. I had had a bad cold for three days and had been lying in bed watching the sun stream through the windows. I hadn’t eaten anything, although I had been told I should.

  The corkboards above the vinyl chairs in the waiting room were emblazoned with messages. Warnings about soft cheese and alcohol and shellfish, health notices listing the early symptoms of preeclampsia, and missives from the Australian Breastfeeding Association. Nobody has the right to tell you that you cannot feed your child. A list of ten reasons to breastfeed your baby. Warnings about smoking printed in indignant type. Remember that what you put into your body, you put into your baby’s. The message board seemed to suggest that the universe was full of danger, and women were too thinly screened from its evils, too porous to the world.

  A nurse came to fetch me. I followed her sensible slacks and Elizabeth Taylor helmet of hair down a fluorescent corridor. I was left by the door to the office and told to wait. I had already taken the painkillers. The doctor had told me it would hurt. Not as bad as labor pains, a little more than period pain, she had said. I sat by the door under the humming light and pressed my nails tightly into the palms of my hands until I could see the little half moons etched in red. I took another painkiller, just to be on the safe side.

  When the nurse called me into the room the doctor was still looking over her notes because she had forgotten who I was. Her manner was pleasant, but she was running behind schedule and did not look me in the eye. She asked me if I had collected the copper IUD from the chemist, and I handed her the long white cardboard box I’d been keeping for weeks in my bag. Whatever was in there, I couldn’t believe that it would fit inside my body. I didn’t have any clear idea of what was inside me, let alone its shape, its size, or what it could accommodate.

  Behind a screen I rolled down my tights and underwear and placed them on a chair. I pushed my dress up around my waist and inched along the surgical table, adjusting the loose, starchy sheet that shifted as I moved.

  The doctor pulled back the curtain then and began to work. She asked me to lie down, and it wasn’t as cold as I thought it would be. She placed my feet in stirrups. She pressed on my pelvis, and all across my belly, just to check. I stared at the ceiling. This is going to hurt a little, the doctor said. I felt something clamping me open, maybe a finger. It didn’t hurt.

  And then it did. A deep pain that went up my spine and landed in my throat, a pain that threatened to jolt me out of my body through my mouth. Galloping spasms. I whimpered. The nurse and the doctor spoke quietly around my hips, they were switching implements, but the fingers kept moving inside me and the pain kept gushing up my back and the whimpers kept coming. The nurse asked if I was all right. I said I was fine. My fingers clutched at the edges of the surgical table and screwed the loose sheet into tissuey balls. Something wasn’t right.

  The doctor pulled her hand out of me.

  It isn’t working. Your uterus is too narrow. I’m worried that if I push it in harder I could puncture the uterine wall. I’m sorry, I’m not comfortable proceeding any further.

  She began cleaning up the instruments. I could see the copper thing in her hand, the long, sharp end of it coated in blood. I had not realized that there would be blood.

  Do you want me to try again? she asked.

  I shook my head. The doctor’s face had taken on an expression of extreme frustration. I could not see where she put the thing, now that it was of no use.

  This is only the fifth time in a twenty-year career fitting hundreds of these that I haven’t been able to do it, she said.

  I felt sorry for screwing up her track record, as though in a vital sense I had failed her. She told me to lie still for a minute as she disappeared behind the screen.

  Sometimes fiddling around with the cervix can trigger fainting, she called.

  I lay still, looking at the ceiling tiles. The spasms of pain had begun to subside. When I sat up I looked down between my legs. There was blood on the sheets. Very bright. In the blue surgical bucket below, on the ground, where my hips had been, there was more of the stuff. Thin, a rich red, the same color as my lipstick. More blood than I’d ever seen come out of my body. It was trickling down the plastic sides, making dripping sounds like the last of the rain falling from the eaves. I watched my shadow move on the surface of my blood in the bucket.

  When I emerged, fully clothed again, I sat across from the doctor as she explained that what had just happened was a statistical anomaly. Very rare. But there was a new model from America, it was due to be introduced here in maybe six months’ time. We could try again then. If I were still in the country. If that was what I wanted. But the point was, we just couldn’t go ahead with any of the options currently available to me.

  Do you feel all right? she asked.

  Yes. I nodded. I’m fine.

  She examined my face. You’re going to faint, aren’t you?

  Oh no, I said. Then I fainted.

  When I came to, I was in a different room in a white hospital bed. The nurse was there, folding a towel.

  Oh good, you’re awake, she said. She was worried about you. You know, I would have tried again. Those things are very expensive. And you’ve already paid for it. I would try again.

  She paused for a moment, as though remembering the protocol she was meant to be following.

  But that’s just me, she said, folding roughly. Your decision.

  I lay on the bed, observing the ceiling. It seemed to glow and pulse as though it expected me to understand its meaning. But I wasn’t capable of understanding anything. My mind appeared to have detached itself and sailed away from my body.

  I remembered, then, that I had told nobody about the appointment, and as a consequence, nobody knew where I was.

  When the nurse returned she handed me juice and forced me to sit up. What’s your job? she asked. I sipped the sugary liquid through the child-size straw. The room pitched and my hearing dimmed. As though the volume had been turned down on the world. I lay still.

  I’m. Um. I’m a writer.

  Good, she said, piling the towels one on top of another in her arms. You can write about this.

  From the door on the opposite side of the room she turned and said, You stay here till you feel better, that’s what the doctor says. We have lots of patients. Not many beds. But you stay here. Other patients will wait, I guess.

  She opened the door and closed it loudly.

  When I sat up, my body left my head behind on the pillow. My shoes were on the floor, my bag on a chair. I waited a moment while the texture of the walls and the ceiling glowed and pulsed. I put my shoes on.

  I opened the door and walked very carefully down the corridor, past the noticeboards and reception desk in the waiting room, and out into the glass walls of the hospital at large. I looked for an exit sign. I could feel blood thick and wet slicked between my thighs. I would need to throw away the tights that I was wearing. Nobody seemed to notice me leave. I walked slowly by the shuddery palm trees of the hospital’s entrance, down Missenden Road towards the chicken shop and the motorcycle café on Parramatta Road. I stopped on the corner and looked at the bus stop. It occurred to me that I might well faint if I ca
ught one. And then, I suppose, wind up back in the hospital. And who would I call? My mother? I didn’t want to talk to my mother about this. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I was humiliated. I had tried to do the most responsible thing I could think of. I had tried to look after myself. And my body had physically rejected all my gestures at attempting to vouchsafe its protection.

  It was the middle of the day. The sunlight cast a tepid blue across the six lanes of traffic and the roar of the cars.

  I hailed a taxi.

  The cabdriver wanted to chat. He was Greek, he told me, and he played in a mandolin band on Thursday nights in Drummoyne if I was ever interested in hearing some old-fashioned Greek mandolin music.

  You’re coming from the university?

  Yes, I said, for simplicity’s sake, and because it was easier to lie to strangers. I don’t feel well, so I’m going home.

  He nodded and was silent a minute. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of sounds, by the air-conditioning and acceleration of trucks and the voices of the Radio National news bulletin.

  What about your boyfriend, is he at the university too?

  Yes, I said. The cabdriver smiled at me in the rearview mirror as he drove me past the auto body shops and university research centers towards home.

  Well, he said, he must be a lucky man. Pretty girl like you, I know any Greek man—I’m Greek, did I tell you that?—any man who had his head about him, he would be after you in a minute. If it was me, I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.

  Quietly, looking out the window at the curve of the road and the kebab shops and the brothels, I began to cry.

  It was the middle of the night when the pain began. Cramps rolled through my abdomen. A rising tide of pain. Nothing would halt them. I curled myself around pillows. I got up and went to check the medicine drawer, but there were no painkillers in the house, only Band-Aids and disinfectant and expired antinausea pills.