The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  She snatched up the curls on the floor, and I had thought she was angry at me, I fully expected her to be angry, but the shock of the thing was when I realized that she wasn’t shaking from fury. Down on her knees, my mother had begun to cry.

  I’m sorry, I said to her, down there on the carpet. It was an accident.

  But it had not been an accident. I looked at my mother as she scooped up the hair from the carpet. Before she had gone out I had sat on the bed while she changed, asking her questions, watching her struggle into underwear, the lovely flesh mapped with the straps and seams.

  She was soft.

  You should not harm a thing as soft as she was.

  A week later I was taken to a professional hairdresser and given a new, shorter haircut to neaten out the mess I had made. But my mother was distant, something had changed in her demeanor, and even though I was a child I sensed that she had absorbed what I had done and taken it personally.

  A week after I cut my hair, she gave me a book, Safety First. She explained that it was very dangerous for me to use scissors. I should never have picked them up. I could have caused myself an injury. As though my use of scissors was the real problem. She led me through the pages of the ex-library book, pages that explained all the things I could use to protect myself in bright, 1980s illustrations. “Everyone needs to be safe,” the book began. “When you are safe, it means you are not in danger of being harmed.” Safety pads and helmets, beware of open flames, stop signs and traffic lights, stranger danger, lock the doors, listen to an adult and follow the rules. See, said my mother, this way nobody gets hurt.

  It barely mattered. Safety first, or who got hurt, or why I had played with the scissors in the first place. It didn’t matter. The scotch had made me drunk. Wavering and weepy. I fetched the bottle from the living room and took it back to the bedroom and set it down on the floor. I took up the photograph of my half-naked mother again. I took up the photo of my former self in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. The tears began to leak out of my eyes. I let them come.

  Sometimes I drank just to have the sheer pleasure of weeping without apology, the luxurious, snotty weeping of childhood that can only be indulged, once you’re grown up, in the most solemn states of privacy. I lay back on my mother’s bed and wept briefly for the voices on the phones. And then a deeper, more expansive weeping for all my former selves in all the photographs splayed across the paisley bedspread. The baby with the father whose nature and temperament she couldn’t comprehend. Then, for the child who wanted more than anything to touch whatever creature would allow her touching. Then, the teenage girl who believed in the romance of all the poems she read, a girl too shy to ever talk about them with another flesh-and-blood person who could have helped make her happy. And then finally, with perverse pleasure, for the woman of the year before. For the events that had ushered in this splendid conflagration of emergency.

  Six months earlier.

  It began the way it always does. I pulled my underwear down and there was no blood.

  But there were cramps, and that was what caused me confusion. The cramps gave me conviction in the logical outcome. During a break before a meeting with my thesis advisor I walked to the other side of campus where I bought extra-strength ibuprofen from the university chemist, and for four nights in a row I took the pills before I went to sleep. Because I had cramps, and I was certain that the bleeding was imminent, and that the pain would come in the middle of the night. I was being “responsible,” and taking steps to manage the pain. But in the mornings nothing had changed. The cramps were still there but the blood didn’t come.

  I looked up the symptoms of pregnancy on my laptop on a Tuesday morning. I felt queasy. That was a sign. So was the pain. Cramps indicate that the uterus is contracting to accommodate a fetus. Many of the early symptoms of pregnancy were also symptoms of period pain. I took painkillers and waited.

  But the blood didn’t come.

  When you buy a pregnancy test the box comes with a set of two, just to make sure, and so it happened that in the bottom of my bedside table, I had a spare. I had been through this before. And it had been nothing. Just a hormonal reaction to stress. What could be more reasonable? I sat on my bed focusing on the absence beneath the fireplace until I felt quite dissociated from my body. Only then did I take the box downstairs to the bathroom.

  I peed on the stick and laid it flat and results-down on the bathroom tiles as instructed. The intractable orange mold was climbing the edges of the bathtub. The sound of the buses accelerating leaked through the open window, a dog barking, the theme music to Buffy the Vampire Slayer playing in somebody’s living room. I flipped over the test. To the two pink lines. I noticed that the breeze through the open window was quite cold. No, I told the two pink lines of the test in my lap. No.

  And then I called the office of the university medical services.

  On the morning of the appointment I woke to the blue wash of dawn in a bed not my own. Lachlan was asleep, snoring softly with his back to me. I watched his flesh rise. And fall. The books on the shelves. Outside I could hear the early din of birds waking up in the paperbark tree. The voices of construction workers arriving at the house under renovation next door and slamming the doors of a van. I looked at his back, and I thought about what it might be like to skip the appointment, and stay with him, naked, all day. It was so tempting. We could stay with each other forever in that bed, and we would be safe.

  I put a hand to my stomach then. The skin and softness of it. And the dark knot inside me with which I had been communing all week. This fulcrum that decided whole futures. This thing that had narrowed and sharpened every moment since I’d learned of it. This thing that was mine. And he was sleeping through it.

  I watched his back rise and fall.

  I peeled away the blankets and stepped into the freezing cold of his bedroom, as quiet as I could be. I didn’t want him to see me leave. I was afraid that if he woke up he would say goodbye, and roll over to check his phone. I was afraid that he wouldn’t offer to come with me. I wanted my mother.

  I watched my blue reflection in the mirror of his wardrobe door as I dressed. The framed photograph of Patrick White glowered down from the wall. I wrote Lachlan a note on a piece of paper and left it beside him, in bed, in the space where my body had been. I shut the door and descended the stairs. My head hurt, and I was thirsty. But I wasn’t meant to eat or drink anything beforehand.

  I walked to the station under a canopy of magpies screeching at me from the trees. I took the train home to change. The carriages were quiet and unpeopled. Rush hour hadn’t yet begun. At home, I showered him off me. I was thirsty.

  The clinic to which the doctor at the university health service had referred me was unmarked and halfway up Devonshire Street, not far from Central Station. An entryway screened by ferns and opaque windows shielded the door of the clinic from view of the street. It was painted a pale green, and I wondered whether they had painted it that way because they believed that pale green was a soothing color. I had walked past the building a hundred times and never noticed it before.

  The receptionist was British, and that seemed reassuring. I handed her my Medicare card and my credit card through the gap beneath the bulletproof glass. She told me to have a seat in the waiting room. The chairs along the walls were lined with thick purple upholstery, more office decor than medical. A television mounted on the wall close to the ceiling played an episode of 30 Rock. On the other side of the room two men sat waiting alone. There was only one other woman, a scrawny girl in a purple velour tracksuit accompanied by a heavyset Filipino man with acne-pitted cheeks. I looked at their faces but I couldn’t detect any emotions. For a moment I could believe the waiting room was the kind of place with no particular purpose. It was simply a space to sit alone on purple chairs, watching 30 Rock.

  I sat focusing on the television ahead of me but focus was not a state I could achieve. I thought about the book my mother had given me when I was a child. Safet
y First. Beware of open flames, do not approach the floodwaters, don’t struggle in the event that somebody tries to prevent your drowning. It was a book full of all the ways to protect yourself. But I supposed I had neglected most of the warnings, because I was not very good, on reflection, at keeping myself safe.

  The receptionist behind the bulletproof glass had told me I would not be able to get home on my own after the procedure, and I had told her I would manage. I typed out a message. I’m scared, it said. I clutched my phone in my fist, just waiting for it to illuminate itself with his name. But he did not reply.

  The receptionist called my last name. I was led through two heavy doors and down a corridor to a room where I was instructed to sit across the desk from the doctor. The walls were the same pale green as the exterior of the building. I could not look the doctor in the eye, and she seemed comfortable with that. She was plump. Her curly hair was turning white. She read from a piece of paper clamped to a manila folder.

  Eight weeks, I told her. The father knows, I told her. I’m twenty-two, I can’t do it. She filled out the paperwork, ticking the boxes and signing off at the bottom of the page.

  She asked me if I was sure, and I said yes, because I was. There was nothing else to say.

  A nurse led me into the belly of the building. She left me in a room to take my tights off and gave me a medical gown to cover the rest of me. It was cold in the small green room. No windows. I would not need to take my sweater off, the nurse had said. I pulled my tights down and laid them on a chair. The skin of my legs was pale, resistless. I observed thumb-shaped bruises on my thighs. I held myself very tense and very still, sitting on the chair, in the silence.

  The nurse returned. She took my blood pressure and weighed me and listened to my breathing. Then I sat on the chair in the small room where she’d left me. I watched my bare legs swinging. They did not touch the ground. I had no underpants on but I clutched the spare pair in my hand. They had told me to bring a spare pair. It occurred to me that I had never worn a medical gown before, and I wondered what it would feel like, this thing that I was about to do. I wondered if it would hurt.

  My heartbeat made green shapes on the monitor. Rising and falling. A beeping. The clamp on my finger. Three figures moving above me. Somebody placed my feet in metal stirrups. Legs spread. The swell of anesthetic before the black.

  Count backwards from five, honey.

  Five, four, th—

  I was gone.

  And was snatched through time into pain. Alone and wordless and clutching at the orange juice offered by a nurse, and searching for some sort of comfort in the fluorescent lighting and antiseptic of the room in which I’d woken. They lifted me into a seated position and told me to keep my blood sugar up. I set my eyes on my lap, but I didn’t see myself or my body, only the pale green atrocity of the hospital gown.

  I became aware of a sound that I discovered was being issued from me.

  A howl.

  Full of a grief I could not describe or examine, could not put words to, or name, I cried. Behind the curtain. Alone. For the first time. For my. For the thing I had lost.

  FLOOD

  The pressure got low. In the north of the continent the clouds gathered, spun, and began to take form. The rain came down and swept over the tropics, tearing up everything in its path. Lounge furniture in trees, downed power lines, crocodiles on the median strip. Borroloola first, then Kowanyama, a pirouette over the Gulf of Carpentaria, and then a monsoonal flow that sent it tearing down along the Pacific coast towards the cities. The storm rumbled through the north—dark, wild shapes that came in and out of focus on the horizon like a lover met once in a dream. To be on the safe side, the Queensland Premier ordered the preemptive release of water from the Wivenhoe Dam.

  But it didn’t matter much when the waters got wild. The rivers peaked. The levees breached. Water spilled over the banks of the Burnett and the Logan and the Mary, all the suicidal region’s veins now opened. Bundaberg evacuated, Kogan and Tara cut off. Landslides on the Burnett Highway. A state of emergency stretching all the way down to Brisbane and heading south. Helicopters flew over the roofs, and gum trees peeked out from the roiling, snake-infested waters. They plucked the lucky few from the rooftops. By the time the floods reached Brisbane the Premier warned the state that the city’s water treatment plant would need to be shut down. He advised his citizens to conserve their liquids. It was rumored that some parts of the city would run out of drinking water within three days. As the flood swept south across the state line and into New South Wales all the records were broken. A thousand-year flood, again, when there had been a thousand-year flood only three years earlier. How high could the waters possibly rise? How heavy the rain?

  Some hideous auspice, this, or proof of God’s displeasure, or else just simply bad luck. The Prime Minister conceded that it was indeed “a tough period.”

  And so the waters crept. The ocean bled into the land. Salt water seeped into the crops. Rivers not rivers. Homes not homes.

  Two bodies recovered from the waters near Burnett Heads were found bloated and rotting and were described as difficult to identify. A three-year-old boy was hit by a falling tree at Gordon Park and died. Elsewhere, a man drowned when he was swept away by floodwaters in the Oxley Creek. The Oxley Creek, named in honor of my ancestor, who stoked the fever of belief in like-minded men, the belief that out there in the continent there was water, and that the water would save us all.

  I had by then stopped seeing many people outside the hours of work. Maeve and Clemmie were my closest friends, but I kept them at arm’s length. That summer, every source of comfort felt potentially threatening. When I picked up my phone and typed out messages to Lachlan it was with all the desperation of reaching out for a drug you thought you’d once renounced.

  But I was not lonely for company. I spent time with plenty of strangers.

  I had discovered, during the summer, that sex came quite easily. There was a friend of Maeve’s boyfriend who still lived at home and snuck me in past his sleeping parents’ bedroom door. There was a man whose name might have been Jonathan who I met at Kelly’s at three in the morning. There was a man with a slicked-back pompadour who lived in Enmore. I slept with him every week for a month, and then when I got bored I slept with his best friend. There was a guy from Maroubra grinding his teeth on MDMA. There was a man who followed me through the beer court and down the long bathroom corridor at the Marly. There was a filmmaker from Melbourne who texted when he was in town. There was somebody I met at a party in Leichhardt whose name is lost to me forever. He broke into a car and went down on me in the back seat.

  It was possible, I had come to realize, to be touched every night of the week by a different man if I wanted to be. As long as I didn’t say much and I looked OK, there was always somebody that would have me. And I wanted to be had. By many. It didn’t matter who. Take your shirt off, babe, and Good girl, and Let me see you touch it, and Close your eyes. They all merged together, and I didn’t close my eyes, didn’t want to, even when it stung.

  When I thought of the men I saw them assembled as statues in a long gallery. I was fucking my way towards something serious in that silent, marbled place. I was accumulating bodies.

  Most often, these were the sorts of men who, if I had been interested in avoiding men it was clear it was best to avoid, I would not have gone near. They had a kind of eroded beauty to them. Rough. Older. Hair growing on their shoulders and chests and backs. Acid had eaten into the bronze of their features. They had scars, raised veins, and faded tattoos. But none of that mattered, and I wasn’t afraid to approach them.

  I wanted to be undone. I wasn’t interested in protecting myself. Besides, none of them affected me for longer than it took for the hangovers to fade. And so it didn’t matter what I did with them during the nights I went to find them, and it didn’t matter what I let them do to me.

  In February, one of these men, Mark, pressed me up against the wrought-iron railings out
side a party in Centennial Park held for an obese white rapper from New York who was then touring the country. I had been invited to the party because Maeve’s boyfriend thought they needed more women. Across the road from the house, against the viridescent darkness of the park, Mark had kneaded my breasts while the railings dug into my spine. This is unreal, he said, again and again until unreal ceased to have any meaning. As though he had not touched breasts in some time.

  Mark had brown hair flecked with gray. He was a full decade older than I was, and about to move to the Northern Territory to work as a social worker on an indigenous settlement. The night in Centennial Park would be his last weekend in the city, and so I agreed to see him in Coogee the following evening.

  I met him beneath the pines along the waterfront. The air rushed up from the beach, and out on the water the surfers bobbed gently on the waves, clocking the breakers. Seaweed was tangled along the sand.

  He told me he had an idea of where to take me. I used to come out here when I was a teenager and smoke, he said. It’s like a small piece of wilderness in the middle of the city.

  We headed north along the coastal path, around the cliffs. He led me towards a fence hung with a sign that advised you to beware of uneven terrain. We jumped it, and walked along a sandy trail through wild grass and bush until we came clear out onto a sandstone bluff overhanging the rim of the Pacific. We climbed down to a lower terrace so that the cliffs formed a shelter around us. Below, the sea surged against the rocks. He laid down a picnic blanket and I took off my shoes. He brought out bottles of beer from his bag as I leaned forward to watch the water surge below.

  Earlier that morning a woman hiding behind a closed bedroom door in the Northern Territory had called. She whispered, My husband, he has a knife, he’s trying to hurt me. I’m hiding beneath the bed please come quickly. And her voice broke as I asked her where she was. Darwin. Fannie Bay, she whispered, Northern Territory. Shit, I can hear him coming down the hallway please hurry. The police answered, she began to scream, I read out the job number over her cries and hung up as the phone made the clattering sounds it does when it falls out of a hand.