The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  Through the open window that let out into the outside passage where the men were smoking I heard Sean hold forth. Lachlan looked up. Our eyes met down the length of the passage. He was sitting on the red milk crate, smoking in silence. He looked at me sometimes, down the passageway. And then I could see it. His face. Saying it and then unsaying it. Wanting the thing that he saw when he looked at me.

  On the table where I rested my wine sat a splayed copy of The Tree of Man, dog-eared, plastered with Post-it notes. The Tree of Man, originally titled A Life Sentence on Earth, was written with “no plot, except the only one of living and dying.” It was my favorite of White’s books. The novel’s female character is possessed of all the jealousy and restlessness of her author. She seduces and is seduced. “It is quite possible to be consumed by love for one individual,” wrote White, “and to be led to a fatal wallowing in something else at some point in one’s life. A kind of desecration of the noble ideal one can’t attain to.” Lachlan was not, so far as I know, writing his dissertation on love or wallowing or dashed ideals. I cannot recall precisely now, but I think he was writing on modernism and style and rhetorical subjectivity.

  Cate had made herself hot chocolate. She clutched it between her hands. The mug, which was hers, looked cleaner than any other crockery I’d seen before in the house. Her face turned solemn as she sat. She put her hand on my arm. How have you been? You’ve not been around for months. I was beginning to worry. Have you been having a bad time of it?

  I shrugged, and looked down at her hand on my arm.

  I’m glad you’re here, she said.

  As we sat there together in the living room of Lachlan’s house in Erskineville, I remembered, quite suddenly, traveling on a late-night bus from London to Paris through the Channel Tunnel when I was eighteen. The roads were slick with rain, shining in the headlights as the bus drove southwards. A girl sat in the seat in front of me. I couldn’t see her face, only that she had not taken off her coat and that she was probably not a lot older than I was. She had taken a phone call as we pulled out of Victoria, speaking in quiet, clear French to the person on the other line. After that she sat quite still as we sped along the M20. She had no book, and no headphones. And then, as we got closer to Dover, I realized that she was crying. The crying progressed quite rapidly into sobbing, her shoulders shaking and beginning to spasm against the window. Her hair hung down so that her face was hidden. The bus was nearly empty and she was smothering the sounds. I was the only person who might have noticed her. And I did nothing. Had no clue if I should. I watched her sob until her heavy breathing turned into exhaustion, and finally she fell asleep. She slept all the way through the Channel Tunnel and into the ugly concrete outskirts of Paris. And I was paralyzed. I did not know what had happened or how I could possibly hope to alleviate the grief that I could see very clearly, but did not begin to understand.

  You can always come to me and talk, she said. About anything.

  Cate squeezed my arm. I thanked her.

  She looked, then, down the passageway towards where he was sitting. I saw her face fall into lines of gentleness. It was love, I suppose, but I didn’t think then that love was anything to take seriously. At that point in my life, I don’t think that I had considered that anybody but myself had the capacity to feel things with any real integrity. The idea that Cate might have had her own inner life with all its vividness and self-doubt and vulnerability simply did not occur to me. And if it ever occurred to me that she might love him, I took far more seriously my own moments of jealousy and fury, more seriously the thirst that I felt for him, which I might have called love if I was forced to.

  She was so easy to deceive. It would become, in time, so easy that I could imagine that she was a ready conspirator in all the infidelities committed against her. She ended every text message she sent to me with xx.

  Was it really possible she never knew? Did not know what had happened before, and did not know what was to come?

  I stood up, left the living room, and walked past the bookcases and into the kitchen. I turned on the tap and emptied out the mug of wine into the sink. Through the grimy mosquito wire of the kitchen window I could see him in the passage, sitting on the milk crate and smoking my cigarettes. The others talked, but he did not. He was looking at me in the way you hope a man might one day look at you.

  The next morning I spoke on the phone to a writer I’d been asked to interview for the literary magazine. I sat the digital recorder next to my phone on the eiderdown and I tried to summon all the focus and brightness of my academic self before dialing. But I needn’t have worried. The writer took me seriously. He answered all my questions, even seemed to think my remarks were sometimes clever. At the end of the interview, when all my questions had been answered, the writer asked me if I had ever had anything published in the magazine I was representing.

  No, I faltered. But I write. Or, I try to write. I finished my degree in November. I’m trying to write more seriously, is what I mean to say.

  Well, he said, I think as soon as you unlearn everything they taught you at university, you’ll be ready. I’m serious. As soon as you leave all that crap behind, you’ll be fine. Don’t go any further. Don’t do a Master’s or a PhD or whatever.

  Oh, I said, I was thinking about applying for a PhD next year.

  I don’t know about that. I mean, it depends on what you want to be. Between you and me, there’s a problem with their language, academics. You become too narrow in your language if you go down that path, you know?

  Oh, um. I don’t know. I studied English? I guess that’s what I’d do the doctorate in.

  Oh, Christ! You need to go and hang out with some serious bogans for a while. If you did English at Sydney Uni, you need to go live on a housing estate for two months. Get some access to authentic voices.

  Well, my part-time job is taking Triple Zero calls, I said, as though this might amount to the same thing.

  Oh, there’s a story! There’s a story. He paused, to consider the story. Yeah. Take a call, someone dies, and you stop on the way home at McDonald’s drive-through. That’s the real stuff of life.

  I liked this idea of the writer’s; that I was in some way undercover in the real world, reporting from the front lines of my own experience. That I wasn’t really an Emergency Services Answer Point Representative so much as I was temporarily playing the role of one. And wasn’t that the point of the notebook? Wasn’t that the idea with all the stories I read, the information I recorded? To pin it all down in syllables and syntax so that I could employ the experience for later use. But I was hesitant to consider my job with quite the degree of distance he was able to apply to it. Because when did temporary become permanent? The idea that I was gaining experience implied that I was different from everyone else who worked there. That I thought I was better than the job, above it. I spent all the time I could with the notebook beside me when I took calls, but the reality of my everyday life was the tripartite desk and the ringing of the phone, and at the end of it all, that was what it would say on my tax returns. I was no different from anyone else who worked there, and my experience was the same as theirs. I was just the one writing it down.

  The staff room of the call center had walls made entirely of glass. The city wavered in its panes, pigeon-streaked and empty. From the Telcom-gray couches I could see the buses taking off down below on Elizabeth Street. It had just gone seven, and I was taking my break. I sat watching the streetlights switch on and slowly take possession of the city. The ABC News intro music began to play. In the staff room, the television had sound.

  Earlier that day cardinals had attended Mass in Rome before moving into the Sistine Chapel, where they would commence voting for a new pope. Kim Jong-un had threatened to wipe out a neighboring South Korean island in “a sea of fire.” The New South Wales government had announced that it planned to lift the ban on fishing in all but one of the state’s marine parks. And a committal trial had been held at the Magistrates’ Court in
Melbourne earlier that day. Evidence had been presented that had never before been shown to the public. A blue hoodie. A handbag found dumped in an alleyway. A SIM card found in possession of the man on trial. The man had pled not guilty to the charge of murder, but guilty to one count of rape.

  When the woman went missing in Melbourne six months earlier, the story was everywhere. It was in all the papers, third or fourth in the seven o’clock news headlines, and then bumped up in the late edition to first. She smiled out from the photograph all the news organizations had seized upon. She was Irish, a beautiful, small-boned woman with a pink smile, a creamy face. Black hair.

  ____________

  I had first heard about the woman the day after she disappeared. Her face beamed out from the screen of my phone. The Herald explained that she hadn’t been seen since she left a bar on Sydney Road in Brunswick in the early hours of Saturday morning. I refreshed my phone every hour for more news of her. Eventually, it was all I could do. I didn’t read. I didn’t write. I didn’t talk to anybody else.

  Three days after she disappeared the police released CCTV footage taken from inside a bridal store on Sydney Road in Brunswick where the woman’s last known movements had been captured. The first moments of the film were unremarkable, but then a figure in black tights and coat walked by the front window and you just knew it had to be her. Cars glided along the high edge of the frame. And then a man. There was a space between them. He was asking her something. He was, quite clearly, a stranger to her. Her heels were very high, and she walked in that way you’re forced to when your feet are aching and all you want is to get home and feel something soft against your skin. At the end of the clip she turns and looks back. She looks back. But she follows him just the same.

  It was around then that Clemmie began walking home with her keys wedged between her fingers. It’ll fuck somebody up, she had told me. You just needed to aim correctly. Stab flesh. Hit bone.

  At around ten p.m. on Friday, nearly a week after she had disappeared, a man led the police to the place where he had buried her. It was the hottest night of the month. The temperature had risen to 34°C in the middle of the day and it wouldn’t go down. On the news they explained what had happened. She had been snatched off the street. Raped and murdered in an alleyway off Sydney Road. The man who’d done it had driven to the outskirts of Melbourne and buried her by the side of the road. He had done this sort of thing before, but this was the first time anybody had wound up dead. Brawny and ginger-haired, with faded tattoos, he had cried all through his police interrogation. He was furious with himself. He was ashamed at being a “big sissy man.” He said that he had done it because she had flipped him off. “That made me angry,” he said. “Because I was actually trying to do a nice thing.” He was a man who described himself as a Buddhist, who dug ditches for a living, and in his social media profile quoted the words of an aikido master: “Power of mind is infinite, while brawn is limited.” He was a man who had told another woman—a woman he had raped but not killed—“See, look who’s got the power” as he held her down.

  The police exhumed her body at dawn. There were pictures on the websites of the Telegraph, The Australian, The Age. Early morning. Soft orange grass in the breaking light. Men with guns and shovels.

  I watched and rewatched the footage of the woman in Brunswick taken outside the bridal shop. I always wondered why she looked back. Maybe she had wondered for a moment. Maybe it had felt like there was a world of possibility open to her on that street. Maybe, for the length of the fifteen-minute walk she had intended to take, she had longed for the darkness and the freedom of the shadows. Shadows where she thought she might pass unseen.

  Arguably I had paid too much attention to the case. I could not unremember many of the facts. I knew that after killing the woman in Brunswick the man had sat down in the alleyway beside her and cried. I knew that before he had strangled her he had thrown her over the hood of a car and raped her where she stood. I knew that when he had been arrested last September he had, towards the end of the ten-hour interview, told the police: “They should have the death penalty for people like me. How many chances does a person need? They should never have let me out.”

  Once her body had been found, the intensity leached out of the television stories and the newspaper reports and the social media posts. She had been found. People marched down Sydney Road. They left bouquets of flowers and notes of condolence. An arrest had been made. A prosecution was being prepared. Now that she had been found, she had been transformed into a case, and people understood the narrative through-line of a case. But the onset of the case and the footage of the courtroom on television that evening did not cause me to think about her any less. The handbag. The footage from the bridal shop. A strand of hair struck by the sun for a moment on a back road outside the city limits, caught on a blade of grass. I thought about the woman in Brunswick all the time. Something about what had happened to her felt personal. From the staff room of Triple Zero I leaned forward as ABC News focused on the man’s face. As though if I could get close enough, I might be able to understand why he had done it. I was interested in the kind of man who hunts a girl, throws her down, weeps, leaves her body and walks away, returning to the world as ordinary a man as he had always been.

  Come over, he said, and so I did.

  Smoking a cigarette, I stood waiting for him out the front, and when he opened the door he folded me up in his arms, Hey you, so that I set my eyes, stubbed out the cigarette, and strode ahead of him inside, so as not to let him know how nice it felt to be folded up.

  We settled out in the back passage with a view of the garden. He told me about the play he was writing.

  Are you happy with it?

  No. I don’t know. I’m afraid of failing.

  You’re too young to have failed properly.

  Not that kind of failure. Not, like, failing to build a cathedral. Failure like doing the wrong thing. Wronging other people. Lying, cruelty, avarice. Those kinds of things. Small failures. Moral imperfections.

  I don’t think you’ll fail anyone by writing a play.

  Maybe.

  In the end, I don’t think Lachlan ever made much of his playwriting, although I hear that he is now a fairly well-respected academic. He publishes his poems sometimes. I never read them. But there have been no further plays. I do not know if that counts as failure, although the way he personally defined failure was always strange to me. He was so worried about trying to be good, because, I suspect, he knew that he wasn’t capable of ever really being so. None of us are.

  The blotting darkness in the courtyard absorbed the green of the oleander. The ground was scattered with leaves that were gradually decaying against the walls of the back passage. A herb garden wilted by the fence.

  You know, he said. The truth is, and it sounds arrogant. When I read The Tree of Man I thought, I can do this. I already write like Patrick White. And I can do better than him.

  He emphasized his point with the orange tip of the cigarette he was smoking. I must have laughed at him. But what I remember most clearly now is that he brushed a finger against the bare skin of my arm as he spoke. As though to disguise a command with an entreaty. So I was not listening to him speak about The Tree of Man, or if I was I was only half listening, because in the dark of the garden under the banana tree I was remembering what it felt like to want to peel off the last layer of myself and surrender to him. To whatever he was asking for. I recognized that there was something trite and insipid about these feelings. Something wrong-headed, nonsensical, after all that had happened. But his voice still sounded like Home and swollen rivers and frozen glaciers to me. Nothing erased the fact that I felt, very sharply and so clearly that I lost track of what he was saying, that I wanted to do anything I could to stay with him.

  You know it never would have worked, between you and me, he said. Last year. I’d have hurt you terribly.

  I know. It hurt enough, what happened.

  I’m sorry.
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br />   I ran my fingers through my hair and shook my head. What I remembered was the morning of the abortion. That I had wanted to stay, but I had left him there sleeping. I remembered that the bedroom ceiling had been high and lonely and my skin had turned to gooseflesh when I walked out of his bedroom and into the street. How he had not responded when I said that I was afraid.

  Recently, when he was drunk, Lachlan had brought up that morning, nine months earlier. Not the abortion, but that he had woken up and reached out for me and I was not there. He had expected to touch a warm body, but there was no body to be found. Just a note. He implied that my absence in his bed had wounded him. And this had both touched and angered me, so that I didn’t know which emotion was the correct one to express, and so said nothing.

  While he opened another bottle of bad red wine in the kitchen I walked into the space between kitchen and living room, filled entirely with bookcases. I could see in the corner of my vision that he was standing in the door frame, looking at me. I knelt down to examine the bottom shelves, and when I stood up straight he was behind me. He handed me a glass of red wine. This is the only wineglass we have, he said. He inched closer to me. I pointed to a thin, clean copy of a Knut Hamsun novel. This is nice, I said. You’ve read it?