The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  But I did not mention the call, or the fact that it was all I could think about as he told me about his impending move to the Northern Territory. I had learned by then that it was best to keep such connections to myself. Instead I listened while he told me about growing up on these beaches, the spiritual retreat down the coast he had just returned from, the drive back through bushland all ashen and white from the fires that had burned through a month earlier.

  I could remember how bushland looked when it was ashen like that. The fires of ’94 had burned out the land around the house where I once lived with my parents. Those weeks were the first in living memory when fires had entered the city itself. When Sydney was threatened by total isolation, all the roads closed, cut off on all sides by the flames, when ash rained down and the sun turned red and we lived under orange skies. Even now I could remember driving through Ku-ring-gai National Park, three weeks after the fires had burned out, nothing in sight but blackened branches raised up, as though they were trying to clutch at something just out of reach. My mother had explained that the fire didn’t kill the bushland, that nothing was dead, although dead was how it looked.

  Because the country had evolved to burn. The seedpods of the banksia and the bottlebrush could open only in the intense heat of the fires, could spread their seeds only in scorched earth. The bush needed to self-immolate once in a while, and a catastrophic wildfire was par for the course, was in fact necessary. I remember looking out through the windows at the burned trees and thinking I had never seen anything so impenetrable and beyond my ability to understand. And I thought, not that I could die out there in that landscape if I was cast out into it, but that disappearing would be so easy. That the disappearing would be the temptation.

  Mark smiled. Yeah, I used to go up to Ku-ring-gai a lot as a kid too.

  I nodded. I sipped my drink. I didn’t think that had been my point.

  Below, the water surged against the rocks. I noted that this place was absolutely not a wilderness, as he had promised. It was a stretch of bushland along a cliff face in the middle of the city. Planes flew into Kingsford Smith overhead. Container ships progressed along the horizon. From the cliffs I could see south along to the Coogee headland and, turning my head, the mouth of Gordon’s Bay. I thought of the sea snake from the beginning of the summer, but I did not mention that either.

  We drank the beers, and watched the water. When he kissed me, he laid me down on the rug so that my head lay right at the edge of the cliff face. He undressed me without my being quite conscious of it, so that in the end I was lying on the rock naked but for my bra.

  Is it safe here? I asked.

  Yeah, of course. It’s fine. I’ll protect you.

  What if there are snakes?

  There aren’t, don’t worry.

  His breath roared in my ear, the rasp of belly hair against my skin. The longer he moved inside me, the more I felt my body being pushed to the edge of the cliff, the louder the waves crashed on the rocks below. I pressed the small of my back flat to the ground, I gripped one hand against the sandstone, the wind took a lock of hair and it went over the edge, but I did not.

  Later, when the sky turned dark, we had sex again in the parking lot at Clovelly Beach, in the back seat, sitting up and facing the rippling sea through the windshield. Mark was worried afterwards, because it was his parents’ car and the upholstery smelled like semen. We lingered in the parking lot for fifteen minutes with all the doors wide open, to air it out in the breeze.

  If I was afraid of snakes on the cliff, I put it down to the reptile exhibit.

  Not long after our house was burgled when I was four, my mother strapped me into the front seat of the car and drove us across the city, down Anzac Parade, to the termination of the loop at La Perouse. It was a Sunday afternoon, and this drive was meant to be “a treat.”

  We parked by the edge of the headland, got out, and walked towards a rust-colored corrugated-iron fence with a rainbow serpent painted on its side. People were already beginning to congregate around the fence. A yellow hand-painted sign stuck up by the railing read “Cann Brothers Reptile Exhibit.” The light was dipping west over the snakepit.

  In 1909, the snake men set up at a pit at the termination of the tram loop at La Perouse, where the Pacific eases into Botany Bay. In the pit, the family’s collection of lizards and snakes crawled and reared and sometimes lunged open-mouthed at the men’s leathery skin. The snake show had happened every Sunday, every year, with different men.

  The Snake Man entered the pit and the crowd applauded. Old-timey music played over a crackling sound system. The old man wore a baseball cap and long pants. Children hung over the sides of the fence. Tourists clicked the buttons on the black cameras slung around their necks.

  The man had five large burlap sacks and a long stick with a hook in his hand. The burlap squirmed. One by one he loosened the openings of the sacks and the snakes dropped out. A little boy next to me smeared a rainbow Paddlepop into his gaping mouth. The snakes reared up on release and writhed across the pit. I was pressed against the fence, my mother behind me. The Snake Man took some of the lizards and a python, offering them up for us to touch. The Paddlepop boy and I held out our fingers to stroke the reptiles like we were petting a cat. The scales were cold, and hard, and I didn’t mind the lizards but I did not want to touch the snakes. My mother pushed me from behind, urged me to stroke its scales. But I wouldn’t, and he moved on, back to the squirming sacks.

  The Snake Man pointed to the painting of the rainbow serpent on the corrugated iron. He explained, for the benefit of the tourists, that the rainbow serpent had a special significance to Australia’s first people. The snake was the creator god, but, like other ancient gods, the serpent was sometimes angry, and vengeful, and acted without mercy. Sometimes, the snake could be an omen of danger. He would avenge the land and punish those who had trespassed upon it.

  Now, people can be scared of snakes, the Snake Man said, but more people die in this country by getting hit by lightning than from a snakebite. Because, see, what’s remarkable about Australian snakes is how few people they bite given how venomous they are.

  He picked up a long copper-colored snake, the size of a woman’s ankle. He held it so that its mouth gaped open. See, he said, pointing at its teeth. When they bite it’s nearly always self-defense. And they inject venom only about half the time.

  He pointed to the fangs from which the venom would come. The fangs that would fold flat down against the roof of the mouth until the sensor under the nose detected the presence of a hot body, until a footfall caused the earth beneath its belly to tremble. All these sensations might impinge upon the creature’s safety and cause its fangs to come out.

  Snakes are not cruel, the Snake Man insisted. They never attack their own kind. But such a thought was not helpful. Because what do you do once the venom enters the bloodstream? Apply ice, or don’t. Compress, or don’t. Clutch a rosary, employ sacred herbs, recite a prayer. While the venom spreads and the pain comes and the muscles begin to spasm and the tissue breaks down and there is nothing you can do to halt it. What then does it matter whether it was an act of cruelty or otherwise?

  Now, these ones here are dangerous, very, very deadly, the Snake Man noted as he emptied a brown snake onto the yellow grass. The snake made towards me at the edge of the corrugated-iron fence, its body rippling and rolling across the dead grass. Come here, you, the man said, and drew its body back with the hook on the long metal pole. The snake reared up as though it were about to strike. The Snake Man continued to commentate: This one’s pretty quiet. Now, a fierce snake wouldn’t be standing up like that. If he was fierce he’d be straight on my leg before I knew what was going on, and when they strike they strike with their mouths open.

  I stared at the open mouth of the snake. The horror was all so simple, even then. The eroticism of snakebite, the act of penetration, all those Freudian fears of the phallus, of being swallowed whole, the uncanniness of a creature that can
shed its skin when we so often long to be able to escape our own. We are scared to death not of actual snakes but the snakes that live in our minds.

  But understanding the fear doesn’t make it any less real. If the snake show at La Perouse was meant to convince me of the hollowness of our fears, it failed. From that afternoon I was afraid of snakes more than just about anything else. Snakes in the long grass by the highway. Snakes hidden in the woodpile. Snakes in the water, the worst kind, because the water was where I felt safe.

  When the show was over my mother led me across the grass to look out at the water and the old military fortifications on the edge of the headland. That man, she said, has been there since I was a little girl. And it was his father before him. Your nana brought me here to see the same show when I was small.

  What happened to the man’s dad?

  Died of snakebite, the idiot. They’re a pack of idiots, those men. Think they’re immune to all the venom because they’ve been bitten so many times. But it’ll be snakes that kill every single one of them.

  I stood there looking at the waves coming in across Botany Bay. The thorny bushes below pushed up against the shore. When they strike they strike with their mouths open. I asked my mother whether there were snakes down there, along the water’s edge. Maybe, she said, but they don’t want to hurt you. And then reached for my hair to smooth a curl, because my hair, she said, was my most important feature.

  My mother was always playing with my hair. Always trying to smooth it down. She was always coming at me with her hands to try to “fix” whatever she found unruly about it, in much the same way that she would observe the things I did that, she was quick to inform me, she would never do.

  The summer carried on. There were fires in Tasmania, and along the eastern seaboard the heat did not abate so much as level out at a temperature just below unbearable. By the end of February only $6 million had been raised for the Queensland flood appeal. Emergency costs alone were expected to exceed $25 million.

  By then, the three women with whom I had been hired with in that office on Market Street had all been fired. They couldn’t, in the end, spell the names of the tricky towns. Couldn’t reliably answer the phone within three seconds. The girl with the dark roots cried at her desk. But I stuck it out. I looked like I could hack it. I wrote things down in the notebook when I felt overwhelmed.

  For instance:

  St. Augustine believed a flood was warranted every once in a while. God would always save the good. Only the wicked would be hurt. By Augustine’s logic, in the story of the Flood, it was the people who were killed in the deluge, not God, who were responsible for the catastrophe. They fucked up, accumulated an unseemly number of sins, and so they were punished. Augustine called the thousand-year storms of climate disaster “natural evils.”

  After months at sea, Noah released a bird from the ark, which flew out across the floodwaters to see if they had abated. The bird did not return. And so they knew the worst had passed and the world could be rebuilt. This single act has led a great number of people, including my great-great-great-great-grandfather, to put their faith in the questionable symbolism of birds.

  ____________

  When I was at work, the hours seemed to spread outwards, shifts taking on the weight of weeks as I watched the overhead clock blink down the minutes remaining until I could leave. I watched the midday movie in silence and the six o’clock news on Channel Nine. When a call appeared on the screen, I pressed ENTER and listened—to a man whose friend had been pulled out of their car at the traffic lights and was being beaten on the side of the road. To a girl who was so drunk that she didn’t know how to get home. To a woman, in a town so distant that there was no phone reception, explain that she had happened upon a little boy on the highway in the middle of the desert, whose father had left him out there to die, and driven away in the high-noon heat. In the notebook beside me I wrote down “heat.” I wrote down “desert.” I wrote down “crying.”

  In this manner the days arranged themselves into something like routine. I worked four days a week, sometimes three. I had money enough to pay my rent. If it sometimes felt like the emergencies of those on the phones were leaking through the borders of my own personal emergencies, I had at least developed reliable habits. I took to wearing flowers in my hair. I swam when I could. I kept the windows open at night so that the bedroom sometimes seemed a mere extension of the mulberry, fig, and mango trees that grew on the ledge between the houses and the street.

  When I returned home the most I could usually do was lie in bed, reading. I had taken to keeping bottles of wine atop one of the bookcases, as well as a glass, and there were few nights when I did not fall asleep with a purple stain on my lips. If I had time in the mornings I wrote, although I did that in bed as well, for I had not thought to buy a desk. I had some writing assignments coming through, and in one month I managed to write four long pieces for a website. The editor of the literary magazine had emailed asking if I was interested in some unpaid editorial work on top of the interviews I had agreed to conduct. I accepted. The website paid me one hundred dollars per submission, sometimes double, and even with the unpaid writing work at the literary magazine I was beginning to slowly save up money, enough money for a plane ticket.

  Lachlan lived in a terrace house in Erskineville with two other men. The paint peeled away from the plaster walls, mold grew in their bathroom as it did in mine, and Women’s Weekly cookbooks from the 1960s were piled on top of the kitchen cabinets, although nobody was sure where they’d come from. The rent was cheap because the toilet was still at the back of the garden. Walking down the path I tried not to brush against the oleander overgrowing the backyard. When I sat down to pee in the middle of the night I could see the stars through the gap between the roof and the corrugated-iron door. Spiders lived in there.

  I walked back along the path and took a seat on a milk crate in the back passage where Lachlan and his housemate Sean were smoking.

  Sean had moved in over the summer, in the months when Lachlan and I had stopped speaking. I had known Sean in my first year at the university, but we had fallen out of touch. Back then, he and I had got into the habit of meeting every Tuesday afternoon at a café on Glebe Point Road to read each other’s writing. Sean had discovered the novels of Anaïs Nin. Erotica, he remarked once, is very interesting. At the end of semester he gave me a story to read in which a man walks into an empty church and has sex with a corpse. The woman, whom he had never possessed in life, was laid out on the altar, having died some gentle, nonspecific death. However she had died, it hadn’t ruined her body. It wasn’t suicide from a bridge, which would have liquefied her limbs, or a long drowning, which would have bloated her immaculate flesh. She was just a pretty girl, laid out in an empty church, and the narrator was there to fuck her. We didn’t see much of each other after that. Whenever I went to see Lachlan at his house and saw Sean now, sitting in the living room, I felt a physical repulsion. I could not talk to him without picturing the imaginary dead girl in the church of his head.

  Lachlan knew I didn’t like him. Couldn’t stand to listen to Sean sermonize, at that moment, on Fanon. “Every citizen of a nation is responsible for the actions committed in the name of that nation,” he quoted at me, and I didn’t disagree, I just didn’t want to be told what I already knew to be self-evident. I stood up and walked into the living room to look for a bottle of wine.

  Cate was in there, sitting on the sofa. Oh, I’ve been meaning to talk to you, she said. Come sit with me. I haven’t seen you in so long, I’ve missed you.

  This struck me as insincere, given that we had never been friends, only friendly.

  That week in Sappho Books on Glebe Point Road I had seen a flyer for an experimental poetry reading, with her name included in the lineup. But Cate was the sort of person who had no addictions—she did not so much as drink coffee—and this seemed to me to imply a level of fortitude and self-reliance that was unreasonable in a poet. Her fingernails were ver
y clean.

  I had seen Cate’s bedroom once, the year before when we were in Honours seminars together and she had organized a dinner party. Then, I had noted that she had cherry-print shoes in her wardrobe and prints of Degas’s ballerinas on her wall and prizes awarded by Pymble Ladies’ College still pinned to the corkboard above her desk. She never drank too much or stayed out too late or did anything to disgrace herself. I could not take her seriously as an experimental poet. She was a girl from a world of rhododendrons and cul-de-sacs and golf club memberships. Everything about her manner and her comportment in Lachlan’s unclean living room in Erskineville indicated that she was inhibiting more conservative impulses.

  That night in Erskineville, when she asked me to sit beside her, I thought she was being cruel to me. I thought she was speaking with all the false sincerity of the North Shore private school girl she had once been, a false sincerity with which I was all too familiar because I had been a private school girl of the Inner West. I assumed Cate knew everything that had happened six months earlier, and that she pitied me. Now I understand that, in relations between her and me, Cate was never the cruel one.

  I sat beside her and balanced a mug of red wine on my knee. The men sat together in the back passage, smoking, and I wanted to be out there with them, instead of inside, on the sofas, with no cigarettes.

  A naked bulb hung from the ceiling. It swayed in the breeze with the windows opened, and it made the shadows swing with it. Somebody had thrown something brown or yellow against the wall. The color had dripped and hardened, drying in rivulets towards the floorboards. There was a crack in the wall below the staircase across the room. Years ago, somebody must have tried to seal it up with Spakfilla. Now it was crumbling, pockmarking the plaster, a whiter wound in the wall itself. The staircase led up to Lachlan’s bedroom. Cate’s things were up there. It was for her that he had ended things with me, for her he had wanted to be a good man. Good. With her clean fingernails and empty hands, I understood that she was precisely the sort of girl men might want to be good for.