The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  He told me once about his childhood. From the age of five to twelve Lachlan went to a school where there was chapel twice weekly and prayer before class. Stained-glass windows lined each side of the chapel, and each one depicted a saint. Beyond the school fence, and through the colored glass that obscured the surroundings, grew a grove of paperbark trees. It had seemed self-evident to him, for the longest time, that this was where paper came from. That adults simply stripped the paper off the tree and walked away with it. He could never try it out because the trees were on the out-of-bounds side of the fence, and by the time he got a scholarship to the more elite school an hour’s train ride away he had already forsaken the belief that what he needed might grow on trees, and he had lost his belief in the sanctifying power of the stained-glass windows and their saints.

  I remembered the paperbark tree that had been on the edge of the playground in my primary school, half a city away from his. I would sometimes spend the length of the recess break alone, stripping the tree of its bark and shuffling the pieces together in neat piles, wondering why I could never get them as thin and rectangular as the sheets they handed out in the classroom. I assumed that it was my deficiency. I wasn’t doing it right. I hadn’t learned to tear the bark off in the correct way.

  That’s cute, he said when I told him.

  We had both believed in paper coming from paperbark trees, and at the time this felt important, and perhaps I mention it now because it still does. It is not often that such sad, strange children find one another as adults.

  In the first week of Honours classes, I had walked home with Maeve, and she had mocked Lachlan. The way he smoked, the way he spoke, the things he spoke about. She thought he was affected. Because Lachlan was from a place in Sydney where the men became construction workers and the women became hairdressers, but he sounded for all the world like he’d been plucked straight out of Oxbridge. How he learned to speak that way in Engadine was a mystery never solved.

  Maeve was right about his speech. But where she saw affectation I found comfort. He had a deep, smooth timbre to his voice. Like a mid-century newscaster, some formative father. It was Home. When he spoke to me, I found that his voice could unify every disparate formless thing, everything that caused me anxiety, everything I didn’t understand. As he spoke the rivers swelled, the water tanks refilled, the pollutants and the sea snakes were cleansed from the storm surge, the Maldives rose above the waterline, the melting glaciers were restored to their rightful form. It seemed, as he spoke, that with him I was safe.

  Getting windy, he said that first afternoon on the steps of the Old Teachers’ College.

  Yes, I said, it feels like it, looking at the trees, as though I had just noticed that the leaves were moving.

  Yeah. It’s strange weather.

  I nodded. And then we stood up and walked back to the Woolley Building to our next seminar. We sat separately, at either end of the room.

  ____________

  We found ways to be around each other. I’m here, come by if you’re close. I told him about the songs I liked. He bought bottles of wine for the two of us to share. He texted me photographs of interesting passages from the copies of books he kept by his bed.

  “Perhaps because a rare commodity, water played a leading part in my developing sexuality. I was always throwing off clothes to bathe, either at the artesian bore during a pause from mustering, the water ejaculating warm and sulphurous out of the earth, or in the river flowing between the trunks of flesh-colored gums, to a screeching flick-knife commentary of yellow-crested cockatoos.”

  It’s from Flaws in the Glass, Lachlan wrote below the photograph. Because you said you like swimming.

  The first time I kissed him we were in the side passage of his house in Erskineville. He pushed me away. The next day he said it was because I had been too drunk. And in truth, I never remembered first kissing him.

  This was a time in my life when it was difficult to stop drinking once I’d started. I understood that the drinking made me vulnerable, perhaps even pathetic, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop because part of me believed that if I went on and on, past the point where my legs lost their coordination, when the syllables of words crumbled in my mouth, and my thoughts escaped the prison of coherence, then I would come out on the other side of the blackout into a new world. Maybe not better than the one I’d left, but new, and just for me.

  ____________

  When we finally went to bed together I undressed, turned the light out by his door, got under the bedclothes, and lay beside him.

  Do you always come to bed with your tights on? he asked.

  I shook my head. I did not usually sleep with my tights on. I just didn’t want to seem brazen.

  He coaxed the tights down my hips and examined my face. His fingers traced out the curves and ridges, as though there were a difficult cartography to my features that he was trying to learn by hand.

  I had never been looked at with such focus. It was the same focus he had on his face when he read, and what person doesn’t want to be read? And I was still open like a wound, back then, still formless, or forming, but young enough to believe in all the romance of the poetry I loved, the kind of belief that puts you on a river and makes you follow it down.

  One night cutting through the Eveleigh railway yards towards his house he stopped me and made me turn to look at him. A violet light from the city skyline cast a glow through the shapes of the retired train carriages. I tripped over broken cement and dead-end tracks.

  He held my face in his hands. Hey, he said. I think you’re somebody who hasn’t been loved nearly as much as they ought to have been.

  Don’t, I said. That’s not. Don’t. But I did not mean for him to stop kissing me, and he knew, because he did not stop.

  Are you OK? he asked.

  Yes, I said, and he looked very serious. Why?

  Are you pregnant?

  It was a strange place for such a conversation. The Eveleigh railway yards was a part of the city you could easily imagine yourself being taken, held down, raped, murdered, a scream-absorbing place where nobody would find a trace of you until the unbearable break of day.

  He ended it as we walked up Cleveland Street to City Road on a Friday afternoon. It had been two days since the procedure. The disorientation of the anesthetic had faded away, and most of the pain, but the bleeding had started in the shower that morning. Viscous dark red clots that slid down the inside of my thighs and dispersed in the pooling water.

  I waited. We were almost at the intersection.

  Then he opened his mouth. He began to speak. And it didn’t matter what he was saying so much as the sound of his voice, and the way it struck something warm and deep that dismantled me. His hand broad on my back. The things he had said in the Eveleigh railway yards.

  I’m going to start seeing somebody, Lachlan said. Somebody else.

  Oh. Right, I breathed. We had only been doing whatever it was that we were doing for two months, maybe less when I counted it all up. We’d never talked about what it was. We continued to walk up the hill. His hands were pushed deep into his pockets.

  Just don’t let it be somebody I know, I said.

  He was quiet for a moment. He smoked a cigarette and he did not touch me.

  I just think this woman is really worth trying for. You know, I usually fuck things up. But I’m going to try. I want to be a good man, with her. Good. And who knows, I might fuck it up again. But I really need to try with her.

  OK, I said.

  ____________

  I think now that I had waited for years to be disassembled like I was in that moment. I thought being hurt would give my life an interesting kind of texture, the way good surfers are always marked by the scrapes and scars of battles fought with the waves. I believed it would give me something to write about.

  Now, five months later, in the back of a bar in Redfern I opened my mouth to speak but he shook his head, looking up towards the opening door and the first glimpses o
f a pleated dress and a completely dry and guileless pretty face. Cate, the neatly dressed poet from our Australian literature Honours seminar he had wanted, in the end, more than me.

  Or no. He would object. I misquote him.

  This is what he actually said: I want both of you in completely different ways.

  Although it seems now that the things he said mattered less than the way I received them. There is so much that I cannot fully remember, but I can hear him speak even now. For the rest of my life I will be able to recall his voice, the sheer density and tenor of the sound and all the ways in which it affected me. As a child it always seemed to me that part of the pleasure of reading a book was the freedom the reader had to imagine a person or a place in any way they chose. But I am selfish. I do not want you to imagine freely. I want you to be able to hear his voice as I did then—his voice, and nobody else’s. Except my talent for description fails me now. Because all I can convey is an indefinite shape of a man saying, Hey you, as I stood up to go, and making it sound like there was only one “you” in the world, and he did not want to see her leave.

  One afternoon before a six p.m. to two a.m. shift, as I walked up Elizabeth Street towards work, my phone vibrated against my elbow in my bag.

  Maybe this is a dumb thing to say, but I’m glad we’re speaking lately. I was worried maybe we weren’t, generally.

  I let the text linger on the lock screen while I considered its meaning. Yes, me too, I eventually replied.

  In the call center, the silent television broadcast a special half-hour news segment devoted to the heatwave gripping the city. The news crews were assembled at Bondi Beach. Cameras panned across glistening bodies, the waves, a woman fanning herself with a magazine. Bloody hot, mouthed a surfer when asked for his thoughts. Ambulance crews raced towards Circular Quay and Parramatta to tend to the elderly, the pregnant, and the very young. In the western suburbs dogs and babies were discovered comatose after five minutes left inside locked cars. A Bubble O’Bill melted into the hand that held it. Children raised under drought conditions ran squealing through sidewalk sprinklers, the use of which was forbidden by state law. At Taronga Zoo, the lions were given milk-flavored ice blocks. Carrot-flavored ice was fed to the zebras. In Penrith, for the first time in living memory, the cricket was canceled due to the heat.

  On the phones there were calls for firefighters. Fires had spread across the south coast, from Bega to Cooma, to Tarcutta and Dean’s Gap. More than 135 were burning across the state, forty of which were uncontained. A woman calling from Lane Cove told me she wanted to confirm with the fire service that she had chosen to go instead of stay. I lived through the fires of ’94, she told me. It’s like a war zone. Smoke everywhere. I’m not going through that again.

  Every part of me wanted to tell her that I, too, could remember the fires of ’94. Remembered the smoke and the heat and the roads blocked off and no way home. But I was not allowed. I connected her to the fire brigade for Lane Cove, New South Wales.

  Instead, in the notebook I kept beside me, I wrote down “Fires, ’94, like a war zone.”

  In those first weeks at Triple Zero I had realized that if you sat at a station out of view of the managers, you could hide a phone in the headset box we all kept in our lockers when we were not at work. Everyone did. Most people used their phones to text or play games. Mostly, I used my phone to read. The reading, I thought, would keep me tethered to writing, to academia, to the life of the mind I thought was more important than being in the call center. I read political analysis and book reviews and long articles about climate disaster. I equipped myself with facts and stories, which I thought functioned just as well as conversation might. I wrote the facts down in a notebook, for safekeeping. The notebook was not against the rules, and so could be out in the open beside the computer monitor, whereas the phone had to be hidden at all times.

  I read and wrote down, in those weeks, that a wasting plague was afflicting the starfish of the Western Pacific coast. The illness started in the waters off Washington State, but had spread from Alaska all the way down to San Diego. The starfish first developed a white discoloration, and then began to grow soft, until they turned to goo. The starfish were disintegrating for no reason anybody could seem to explain.

  I wrote, too, that the Roman god Vulcan was the god of fire and volcanoes. It was understood that volcanic eruptions were a sign of Vulcan’s anger each time he learned that Venus, his wife, had been found fucking someone else.

  I wrote down this passage from an essay by David Wojnarowicz: “I am fearful or something more than fear: it’s something in the landscape surrounding the cities and smaller towns between here and the coast, something out there that feels so empty and it is not made of earth or muscle or fur; it’s like a pocket of death but with no form other than the light one might cast upon its trail of fragments.”

  I thought this was interesting.

  Facts and passages like these seemed pertinent to my general condition. I had tried to bring up the facts in conversation, but Maeve had taken me to task. I explained that I was just trying to join in. I didn’t want to seem quiet or unfriendly.

  People like to talk about television and lunch and their relationships, she told me. If you’re stuck, talk about the weather.

  But I do talk about the weather, I responded.

  Not your kind of weather, said Maeve. Normal weather.

  Now I had taken to using the notebook every time I came upon a new fact, or a thought, or to record a portion of an emergency call.

  The notebook became a place for certain types of information, unattributed fragments I wrote in from other texts, interspersed with my own thoughts and diary entries, as though by leaning into the fragmentation of my workday experience I might somehow conquer the sense of disarray and poor attention I felt daily on the phones.

  And so I wrote down “Brewarrina” when the man called and shouted “Brewarrina.” In his mouth the four syllables were compressed into something that sounded like Brwr-Na, but it made sense when I wrote it down. I asked him to clarify which state Brewarrina was in. There was only one. We both knew it. But I had to ask anyway.

  Brwr-Na you stupid bitch can’t you fuckin’ spell hurry up I’m bleedin’ to death.

  Another important fact I learned that year: when the body begins to panic, the system floods with hormones. The panic enters the muscles, your nerves, and your tissue proteins. It starts in the brain. The hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system, which sends a cascade of adrenaline into your blood. Sight sharpens. Your heartbeat accelerates. Your breathing quickens. Your stomach ceases to digest. The airways in your lungs spread wide open. The blood races through your veins. Your emotions run riot. You might begin shaking. Glucose floods your internal grid like electricity during a power surge. Every cell of your being is set alight.

  The panic response is so efficient that it has already taken full effect before the visual and intellectual centers of your brain have fully understood what is happening. It’s why people jump out of the path of an oncoming car, turn and run from the encroaching fire, duck away from the drunken husband wielding the kitchen knife, before they even think about what they’re doing.

  The man from Brwr-Na stuttered on the phone as the ambulance connected through, his breathing staggered, his voice hoarse and moaning. Fuck, fuck, fuck, why aren’t they answering?

  I said, The ambulance will answer as soon as they can, and by the time I’d tried three different lines they still hadn’t answered and he’d gone quiet, very quiet. As he whimpered, I’m fucking dying, I was looking up at the television, where a smiling man was frying another egg on yet another stretch of suburban bitumen, and when the ambulance answered the line was dead.

  When it was over I stood up, logged out, and walked down the corridor to the bathroom. I shut myself in the stall and sat down on the closed lid. I focused on the white laminate of the door and the advertisements stickered to the paint, a banana wearing a condom, a rape hot
line, graffiti.

  I recalled that in high school drama classes we would sometimes play games of “focus,” in which the winner was the girl who could lie on the floor and stare at one place on the ceiling without giving in to the distractions of the other girls pulling faces and whispering dirty jokes above her. I always won. I acquired a reputation as “focused,” but it occurred to me that afternoon in the bathrooms that what I felt on the floor staring at the ceiling was more like dissociation than focus. The faces and whispers were there, but I wasn’t entirely certain that I was. The focus game was really just a kind of exercise in cleaving my mind from my body and floating away, with none of the “mindfulness” or “control” that the drama teacher pinned to my accomplishment when I was eventually invited to pull myself up from my prone position on the floor.

  But I was good at it. And so I sat there, in the bathrooms outside the offices of Triple Zero on the first floor of a skyscraper on Elizabeth Street, focusing.

  During my half-hour break, late that evening, a middle-aged man, a sculptor, read me Keats in the staff room. He approached me, laughing before he’d even said what he wanted to say. He explained that I could punch him in the mouth if I preferred, but he wanted to read me some lines of Keats. They’re pertinent to you, he said. He had the book open in his hands.

  “She was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue,” he began. “She seemed at once some penanced lady elf, some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self . . . her head was serpent but, ah, bitter-sweet! She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete.”

  As he was reciting, Maeve passed behind me as she made her way to the kettle. I felt her hand squeeze my shoulder.

  Later, I found the poem, took a photograph of the stanza, and sent it to Lachlan. I had by then reacquired a thirst for him. I think the thirst was what came to me initially, followed by affection. The first feeling I had for him was still bound up in those early conversations in the Woolley Building when everything was possible and he was a voice more than a man.