The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  But the feeling gradually increased, because he was something that both aroused thirst and satisfied it, and someone, too, who seemed thirsty for me. I wanted, more and more, to be alone together, satisfying the thirst, forgetting about what had happened, and what was surely to come. It was not reasonable, but the things we want rarely are.

  I walked home along Elizabeth Street at two in the morning with my keys wedged in between my fingers. Green trails of slime dripped down the sandstone walls of Central Station. There was nobody else out on the streets. I followed the lampposts along the hot, dark stretch of Elizabeth Street, up the concrete staircase, to the front door and the second wooden staircase that led up to my bedroom. I locked the door and got into bed.

  But I slept badly. The lights from the traffic and the Mascot-bound bus rotated across the walls in phosphorescent blue stripes. Two drunks screamed along the street. Ambulances and fire engines careened out of Cleveland Street all through the night, beelining a course into the south. I knew that each and every one of the ambulances and fire engines had been dispatched from phone calls put through by somebody I worked with, and knew that in a few hours I would be back there, in that office, summoning sirens. Before dawn the birds began to call. The house creaked. The room began to heat up. The sheets clung to my legs. The light crept across the floorboards in weak but insistent increments. I watched it move.

  My friend Clemmie stood in her kitchen chopping watermelon, dropping the slices into a plastic container as I explained that this was a Good Idea. This job thing, this plan I had devised. More and more I was living in the dark, aquatic place in my mind where such plans were defined only vaguely, by sentiments such as “leave” or “retreat” or, simply, “no.”

  Clemmie had known me longer and better than just about anybody. She and I had met the first day of high school. She found me pressed against a door frame picking at the starchy pleats in my new school skirt before our first class. She was already comfortable in the blue waistless thing, and she told me she liked my hair. She was a tall, glowing thing that I envied as soon as I saw her. Even then, at twelve, there seemed something luxuriously wild about her. She smelled of Herbal Essences and yogurt-covered muesli bars and liked to expose the blond down on her shins, which she did not shave off until her second year of university.

  That job sort of makes sense, Clemmie said. If you can hack it. I couldn’t last at something like that. Just listening to all those people. People screaming and dying. I don’t know how you aren’t crying by the end of every shift. How long are you going to do it, do you think?

  I don’t know. Not long. The money is good. I’ve been able to save some already.

  She looked at me skeptically and wiped the wet knife against her shorts. Beads of sweat rolled down the backs of her knees. So you’re making yourself miserable for an indefinite period, for the sake of some cash? And for what?

  I mean, I’m not miserable. I’m fine. I have time to write. But yeah, I’ll have cash. If I’m careful. It seems like a good idea to get out of Sydney for a while. That’s probably what I’ll do.

  That seems like a good idea. Like, if you’re not happy here. Seems like all those friends you had from your course last year have fallen away. And the rest. The bad things. Well, you know what happened. You’d go to London, then?

  Maybe London. Or America.

  America? Clemmie turned and dropped the knife into the sink, along with the chopping board, pink and wet and fleshy as though she had just been butchering meat. Drops of watermelon juice dotted her toes, and she bent down to wipe them with her hand. She thought for a second while she sucked the juice from the heel of her palm, then shook her head. London makes sense. But I can’t see you in America.

  “In the beginning all the world was America,” said John Locke, long ago. A man who never set foot in the place, but believed in fresh starts. Only later, once my plans had come to pass, could I see that younger version of myself grasping for fresh starts like they were lifebuoys, and judging that America was the only one worth grasping for.

  Five o’clock came. The southerly breeze began to insinuate itself through the wall of heat surrounding the city. The air glowing amber and thick with bushfire, we took the container of watermelon and a bottle of vodka and inched bare legs onto the hot leather surface of the seats of her car. We drove the back way through St. Peters with the windows down. At Coogee we parked five blocks from the beach. We ran barefoot on burning asphalt down the steep hill past blocks of flats and scrubby bush, running through stalled traffic, long hair streaming over our shoulders, along the sandy path by the barbecue pits and pines and the rippling grass and descending, at last, to the fine golden sand beyond which there was only water. The surface of the sand scorched the soles of my feet. We flung down towels and Clemmie stayed put while I ran. I jumped down the sandbank, running through the glistening bodies on their towels and into the waves.

  I jolted to a stop. Taken aback. The rolling waves were, it occurred to me, the only boundary I could be certain of.

  And even that boundary could be breached.

  I swam out until I could no longer feel the ground beneath my feet. In the water, dipping and coming up again, I was swept for a moment into a sudden panic. I felt nothing below me and nothing to the sides. I was not afraid of the rip tide, of being pulled out. Yet I believed, in that instant, that there were snakes in the water, all around me. And the fear, given recent events, seemed entirely rational.

  It had been like this since we were teenagers. Clemmie and I went to Coogee, to Maroubra, to Bronte, but never Bondi, and once we arrived the setup was always the same. While Clemmie tanned, I would swim out beyond the waves. She would watch me from the sand. Occasionally she would yell at me from her towel when I’d gone out too far. I would hear her voice—swim back!—pressing her untied bikini top to her small, flat breasts.

  Looking back towards the shore now I could see her gesture for me to come closer. Swim back. The turning tide of early evening made her anxious. All that heat and beauty, like the beach was opening the velvet curtain and inviting you to gaze upon the tawdry lushness from which you might never want to turn away.

  She had reason to be afraid that I would swim out too far, because I had done so before. When we were fourteen years old we had walked out into the waves at Bronte Beach. Both of us had grown up swimming the city beaches. We knew that Bronte had rough surf, that the rips could be fierce, and that the flags always narrowly delineated the safe part of the beach. We knew how to handle ourselves in the water. Knew that you don’t fight against a rip if you’re caught in one. You have to surrender to the direction of the tide, swimming across it until you’re free of the pull. But that afternoon when we were fourteen we had not paid attention to the tides. Clemmie followed me out, deep into the water. But then she began to panic. We’re being pulled out to sea, she said. No we’re not, I replied. But we can’t touch the bottom anymore, she said. We were standing five minutes ago. She turned and began to swim back. Her strokes led her nowhere. No, I told her. Don’t do that. You swim across the rip, remember, not against it. I acknowledged that we were caught in a rip, but I continued to tread water. I did not see any reason yet to be afraid. Clemmie flailed her arms. She called out. And then a lifeguard appeared on a jet ski, telling us to jump on. Oh no, I said, we’re fine. You’re caught in a rip, he shouted. Hop on, you’re going to get pulled out. Clemmie hopped on, but I refused. I did not want to be rescued. Especially not by him. I believed that the water would treat me kindly.

  Clemmie knew even then that it would not. She pulled me onto the jet ski and the lifeguard took us back to the shore. You always swim out too far, she said.

  She didn’t doubt that I knew my limits. She simply knew that I was more interested in crossing them than I ever was in staying safe.

  Clemmie was forever making dramatic declarations and going back on them. Owning a pet was akin to slavery, she announced over gelato when we were fifteen. A month later she owned a
guinea pig named Skywalker, which she kept in a cage in the back garden. Piercings were an abuse of the body, she proclaimed on the platform of Strathfield Station, until she pierced her ears at twenty. Oral sex was disgusting because she did not like it, and on that I never heard her launch a counterclaim. When we were teenagers, I thought that she would wind up being the corrupt one, center stage, while I looked on from my bookish place in the audience. She could flirt, she brought summer into a room on the tail of her big man’s shirt, and I always thought she knew how to be in the world in a way that I didn’t. But it turned out that, once I got around to it, I never thought oral sex was disgusting.

  The year she first cast her assessment on oral sex, Clemmie had stopped sitting cross-legged on the ground with me on the city-bound platform of Strathfield Station after school. Instead she stood, leaning against a pole. My mother said that girls who sit on the ground have low self-esteem.

  That’s absurd, I told her, I’m not fucking standing.

  For two weeks we waited for the train home, me sitting, Clemmie leaning against her pole, until eventually, and without acknowledgment, she wound up back on the ground with me, picking at the icing on stale strawberry doughnuts with her legs crossed. It occurred to me even then that I was, by dint of sheer stubbornness, forcing her down to my level.

  ____________

  As the sun dipped we wrapped ourselves in towels and bought hot chips from the kiosk. We walked north along the headland towards Bondi, past the sandstone bluffs and Gordon’s Bay and the parking lot at Clovelly, up at last to Waverley Cemetery.

  The warm breeze rustled the palm trees by the memorial to Irish sons killed in English wars. We walked towards the boardwalk that rounded the cliffs and down towards the beach. A couple of tourists walked by, holding hands, squinting expectantly behind their sunglasses at the glimmer of Bondi ahead. There were signs set up every few meters along the path, warning of unstable ground. The edges of the cemetery were crumbling. It sat upon a dyke filled with building waste, between two walls of rock. Below, the base of the cliff was being inundated with waves. It didn’t drain properly. The land was breaking up piece by piece. In fifty years’ time, once erosion and the rising waters had taken their toll, the cliffs would no longer exist. And who knew what would become of the bodies?

  At the farthest outcrop of rock there was a lookout. I picked a flower from the bushes by the fence. Clemmie wandered ahead, looking north. I leaned against the fence and turned, looking back towards the blood-red pulse of the light as it sank. From the edge of the ocean, it was easy to see how seductive the west must have looked for those nineteenth-century men trapped at the edge of all this vastness, believing in the water that was Out There.

  Back then, the British had believed an inland sea lay at the heart of Australia. They had stood right where I was standing on the edge of the continent and noted that some of the rivers didn’t terminate down there in the churning ocean below the cliffs. Some rivers flowed west. Turned their backs on the Pacific and slouched suggestively inland.

  In 1817 the colony’s surveyor general, John Oxley, was sent out to explore and chart the Lachlan River. Dammed almost out of existence today, the Lachlan was a source of much excitement in the early years of the nineteenth century. It was one of those westward flowing rivers. Termination point unknown.

  Oxley set out to trace the river’s course, to see whether it led into the inland sea. The sea would make way for cities, farms, great feats of engineering, all the bounty of the empire. The inland sea was the landscape’s logical promise for this scrap of land in the far-right corner of His Majesty’s maps. If there was no water in the interior, then what future could they possibly have in this country? Because the thing was, if you didn’t believe in an inland sea and all that ripe promise of the landscape, you might then have to face what you’d done—set up home on this drought-ridden ancientness that you’d stolen and didn’t understand. A land all dead grass and fire and pestilence. A ruined Eden you had convinced yourself, in some fever dream, to stake a future on.

  I had known about the inland sea my whole life, but during this final year in Sydney I began to think about it all the time. Because John Oxley was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. A descendant from my father’s side, I had been told Oxley was somebody to be proud of. But I came to realize the story I had been told might not in fact be accurate. I began to think often of that feckless imperialist trudging through the landscape for all those weeks in 1817, slowly being overwhelmed by a sense of alarm that there was simply fuck-all Out There. No Providence, no Eden, no neat or rational conclusion to the narrative.

  Except that wasn’t what he reported when he got back to the coast. Oxley, our flesh and blood, was a consummate liar. A swindler and a fuckup, whichever way you look at it.

  Oxley failed to trace the course of the river, but he noted that the Lachlan did not stop flowing west. “I feel confident,” he reported to the governor upon his return to the coast, “we were in the immediate vicinity of an inland sea.”

  Why? Because he had smelled something like seaweed out there.

  He had seen a swan fly across the horizon as he’d looked out across the flat salt plains that looked so seductively like the bottom of some long-ago seabed.

  He hadn’t seen the water.

  But he believed in its promise.

  I did not speak often to my father, but years ago, during a rare bout of affection, my father had sent me a copy of Oxley’s journals. He included a letter with the book, explaining that he thought it important for me to appreciate our ancestral stake in History, and Empire. My father would, if challenged, earnestly forswear any allegiance to the atrocities committed by the Empire, but deep in his heart my father was proud of Oxley, had more admiration for him than for his own parents or children, for any prime minister or rock and roll guitarist. My father inflated the importance of Oxley’s legacy so that it might overshadow any other aspect of our personal or national history.

  I read the journals.

  Here was what was in them: walking, heat, monotony. Men and desert and horses. A lot of talking about water.

  “Nothing can be more melancholy and irksome than travelling over wilds, which nature seems to have condemned to perpetual loneliness and desolation,” Oxley wrote. “We seemed indeed the sole living creatures in those vast deserts.”

  From the fence on the edge of Waverley Cemetery it was difficult to believe any place so beautiful could give way to the loneliness and desolation of the interior. Up ahead Clemmie held her phone down by her hips out of the glare of the sun, and the first flush of sunburn began to warm my shoulders. I turned my back on the west and looked down along the coast. There was something strange about the water heading south towards La Perouse. There were thin streams of algal bloom like slick oil or sewage spread out down the coastline. It was hard to be sure that it wasn’t some dead or deadly thing coming into shore.

  The word auspice refers at its root to the Roman belief that one could apprehend the future by tracking a bird in flight. The word describes a belief in the meaning of patterns, and encourages the human mind to read significance in, say, couches that have been pushed across front doors, in sea snakes in the water, in the progression of an algal bloom, in rivers flowing west, in the distant shape on the desert horizon that might be a swan.

  If I had begun to consider leaving the city, it was here, in this muddle of auspices and water and lovers formed in the shape of failed rivers, that I now locate the source. Long afterwards it is easy to see the ways in which you thought you knew the story. You follow along the banks of the river and observe its course. But then the future falls apart at the seams. When the river trickles out into salt plains it’s more than you can bear.

  So, why, you begin to ask, should I not abandon this place? There is nothing left for me here. Just snakes in the water. Just sirens. Just phones ringing.

  That night a marginally famous actor was at the Courthouse. There had been a few years whe
n you could expect to see him drinking every night in Newtown. The actor had put on weight and didn’t look much like the man who had been on TV a few years earlier. Whenever I saw him he was drinking, and eyeing young women. I still thought he was handsome, and wanted to be one of the women he looked at, but even when he was tipsy and smiling in a corner of the beer garden there was something bitter about him that made it seem inadvisable to approach.

  I pointed out the actor when Clemmie came back from the bar with a jug of beer. Her hair had dried from the beach into stiff waves. That guy again? she asked. I guess he hasn’t been around as much lately, has he. She swept a finger across the spilled beer and brought it to her mouth.

  Across the table from Clemmie sat two people I’d only met in passing once before. A woman with shiny hair, and her boyfriend, an underfed, nervy man whose name I had forgotten.

  Maybe he got better, said the shiny-haired girl.

  Nah, I don’t think so, said the boyfriend. Friend of mine told me that the other week he was walking home after a night out. Passes by the BP in Erskineville. The one by the railway line. And that bloke was laying into some poor guy with a bunch of tattoos while his girlfriend stood to the side, just crying for him to stop.

  The actor had punched the man with tattoos in the face five times, the boyfriend said. The man’s jaw had cracked. His nose had smashed. Blood trickled into his eyes. And the actor, when he was done, had started half-apologizing, pacing, wringing his fist as though it hurt him. Then he stormed away from the BP while the tattooed man bled into the asphalt.

  Guess he didn’t get better, then, I said.

  Nup.

  At midnight the Courthouse closed. We bought longnecks and bottles of bad white wine from the bar. Clemmie hid them in her bag before we caught the bus outside Newtown Station. She was too drunk to drive us to wherever we were going now.