The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  It’s not the kind of job where you can sit around and reflect, I told her. It’s not my place to take the calls personally. They aren’t anything to do with me, I just put them through and make sure they get to the right place.

  A look of doubt came across my mother’s face. It was all there in her expression. The knowledge that a person can become lost in their life, how you might swim in the waters and reach for the lifebuoys but never be rescued, might drown out there in the dark ocean of your choices.

  Before we moved to the house in Ashfield, my mother and I had lived with my father in a house that hugged the edges of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. We lived there together until the fires of ’94. And then we left.

  My mother and I had rarely discussed our leaving. The night she had woken me in the dark while he thumped on the door. The night she told me I had to be quiet, opened my bedroom window, and climbed down to the driveway outside, holding me in her arms. While he thumped and threatened to break the door down. You can’t take her, he screamed. I won’t let you take her. I’ll kill you before I let you take her. I think she must have assumed I had been so young that year that I couldn’t remember what had happened. But I did.

  All my first memories were formed in that house on the edge of the national park, in those days or maybe months when the fires were burning and my father’s anger seemed to mount with the heat and the blood-red sun and the orange glow of the skies.

  I recall one night perhaps two weeks before we left, listening from bed as the screaming carried on outside the boundaries of my closed bedroom door. I could not sleep amid so much screaming and the smell of smoke that issued through the mosquito netting. So that night I left bed and I walked downstairs.

  I approached the sound of my father’s voice, and through the crack between the rolling door and the door frame I could see him looming over my mother. I knew without a doubt that he was about to hit her. She was on the sofa, sobbing, her legs tight together as though she was trying to make her body smaller, and he was red and sweaty with the screaming he was doing. His arm was raised. He was bigger than her, and stronger. I rolled aside the door between the rooms and marched into the living room. I recall that I was clinging to a doll, barefoot, in my pajamas. I stood between my parents and put my hands between them and said, Stop. I thought at the time that this was a terribly brave thing to do, and while I knew that the situation was serious, I did not appreciate how dangerous things had become.

  But I understood something from the way my mother picked me up, the sound she made as she watched the little girl with curly hair stand between the two adults and put out her hands as though she could halt what was happening.

  A howl.

  She gathered me up in her arms and took me from the room, and I remember as she cried into my hair that I told her I was just trying to help. That night she slept with me in my small pink bed.

  She was afraid of being alone with him. She slept with me not because she felt the need to protect me, but because I was warm and alive and some kind of comfort.

  Even when we moved to the house in Ashfield she was building tall fences and looking out windows. She couldn’t sleep deeply. She was waiting for him to appear at the door, to jump the fence, to smash through the glass of the back door. She had never ceased to be afraid of him.

  From her chair on the veranda my mother twisted around and pointed the remote control for the stereo through the open back door. She turned the music up. The turning up of the music signaled that she was on the verge of becoming excessively and sentimentally drunk. We had, I assessed, drunk three bottles of wine between the two of us. She scrolled through to a song by INXS. A cockroach scuttled along the deck below her feet.

  The INXS song played and she began to tell me the same anecdote she had told me so many times before: When I was six months pregnant with you I was driving to a party, and INXS was playing on the radio. I felt you begin to kick. But you were kicking in time to the music. You were dancing to INXS, right there in my stomach.

  I know, Mum. I’ve heard.

  I had told her I was thinking of going away, although I had not yet decided where I might go. I knew the idea that I might leave would make her sad. In fact she had said so.

  I’m going to be all alone.

  She held her glass of wine in both hands. Her teeth had turned purple. Have you spoken to your father about moving away?

  We haven’t spoken since Christmas. But no, though I don’t imagine he’d object. It won’t really affect him. Besides, it probably won’t be for long.

  No, I suppose not. But. You’re not afraid? Of being somewhere completely by yourself? What if something happened to you? I worry, you know. You’re self-destructive, and you’re stubborn. I know you’re clever, but you’re reckless. You do things that at your age I would never have done.

  This was what my mother had never understood. The things she never would have done—moving out of the city, dropping out of the university system and into paid-by-the-hour work, reckless sex and drinking—they were not things I did because I didn’t know any better. I just didn’t think there was any point in trying to shelter myself. If working on the phones had taught me anything, it was that emergency could not be avoided. Emergency would come for you no matter what you did.

  Why did you ask about my father, I said. Have you spoken to him lately?

  No, she said. A great sadness came over her, and a kind of weight settled across her shoulders.

  What’s wrong? I asked.

  Nothing, she said. I’m drunk. Only that thinking about him, your father, it makes me so sad sometimes. I’m not sure I’ve ever loved anyone like I loved your father. I love my husband now, I do, but it’s different. Sometimes I think that your father was the love of my life.

  Really? After everything? Everything that he did.

  The everything settled between us, solidly outlined, but unmentionable. The affairs, the amphetamines, the violence. The early-morning escape in the dark.

  Yes, she said simply. And began to cry.

  I have thought about that conversation with my mother often in the years since.

  Throughout my childhood, I had longed for my mother to be able to present me with a self-contained narrative about what had happened during that period of the fires in ’94. I wanted her to explain with all the fervor of my child-self who still believed she could put up fences and grow the garden and make us safe. But of course, she could not.

  Certain promises are made to us as children. Only in adulthood does it begin to dawn on us that many of those promises cannot be kept. The promise that the fairy godmother will rescue the protagonist, that the handsome prince will wake us with a kiss, that the wicked will be punished for the bad things they have done.

  There are lower-level promises as well. For instance: that there exists a human-scale equivalent of “stationarity,” which will keep the waters from ever rising too high and keep the fires from burning any more than is necessary. That rain will fall and the crops will grow and the tide will ebb and flow along an unchanging shore. That summer will come at the same time every year.

  I was just young enough, that year, to still feel the sting of the betrayal that the promise could not be kept. I was becoming aware of the fact that the fires were vicious and the waters would not abate. That the thousand-year storms were just going to keep rolling in.

  My mother could not give me a self-contained narrative, particularly not when she was weeping, particularly not when she was drunk. In a narrative there would be a clear ending. The scene would fade to black, the curtain would come down, the paragraph would break.

  But our lives contain no line breaks. Our experiences are so frequently unbearable to us because real life is just sheer bloody continuity. The excruciating thing is not to have witnessed the person you love commit, upon your person or another’s, an unforgivable act. The excruciating thing is that time carries on and you love them anyway.

  In the morning stripes of light slant
ed through the gap between the French door and floorboards in his bedroom. The birds screeched in every tree on the street. I curled into the crook of his arm, half sleeping. Hair pinned beneath his arms. A stretch and twitch of stiff bones as my skin drew close to the heat of him.

  Morning, he whispered into my ear.

  Hi, I said.

  You sleep all right?

  Yes.

  He played with my nipple. I watched it harden, rise and swell. His hand on my waist. That’s an interesting thing you’re doing with your hips.

  We turned to face each other, and with my leg around his he stroked my face and pushed his thumb between my lips. I went under the sheets. I used my mouth, but he pulled me back up.

  What’s wrong? I asked.

  I don’t want to come.

  We paused a moment. I looked at his face. The wanting.

  Yes you do.

  He nodded, or maybe I want to believe, now, that he nodded. I went back down, he put his hands in my hair, he came, and I swallowed him.

  When I crawled up from under the sheet I found that the orgasm had worked some kind of change. He began to think again. I lay beside him, but I was all of a sudden aware of my nakedness. I covered myself. His mind seemed to work over a complex problem while he stared at the ceiling.

  He got up out of bed and walked towards the veranda and opened the door to the outside world. A rush of eucalyptus, smog, and light invaded the bedroom. The birds screeched.

  Want some coffee?

  I looked out at him through my hair. OK. I nodded. I sat up and began to peel back the covers.

  No, don’t worry. I’ll go out to get it. I’ll be back in a bit, he said. Don’t leave the room.

  He squeezed my foot and did not kiss me goodbye.

  When he was gone I stepped out of the sheets and pulled my sweater on. I walked around the room, trying not to make the floorboards creak. I saw myself in his mirror. It was very big, propped by the wall next to the desk, so that he must have been able to see himself as he worked. My hair resembled nothing so much as a bird’s nest. Fresh bruises dotted my legs, not from anything he had done, probably just from knocking against a chair leg. My skin seemed to bruise, these days, at the slightest pressure. In the mirror I examined my reflection and tried to comb out the knots with my fingers. I watched broken strands of hair fall to the carpet. The framed photograph of Patrick White glowered down at me from the wall, as though to suggest that he was not pleased to see me again.

  I turned to the floor and found my underwear twisted up in my tights. I untangled the fabric and pulled them on. My bra was somewhere by the bookcase. Piles of books rose beside the shelves. Dirty laundry spilled out of the open wardrobe door. His belt on the floor. A wooden beat-up bust of Christ sat by the bedside table with a chipped nose, hands in prayer. It was a starving Byzantine Christ. I fingered the broken edges of its face.

  I did not think he would like me to look at his desk, but he was not there to stop me. A leather jacket hung over the back of the chair. Beneath the desk, a tangle of wires and unworn running shoes, old boots, a plastic spoon. There were sticky spaces on the surface where sugary drinks had been left to sweat too long. A laptop with a broken charger was password protected. Two notebooks lay open. The pages were full of notes to self: “The problem with the essay can often become its subject.” “I can’t write as well as I’d like.” A volume of Gore Vidal open to an essay on Italo Calvino, Russian fairy tales, Demons by Dostoyevsky, dog-eared, a copy of Elizabeth Costello splayed, pages down, on top of other books. The spines were bent and creased. I ran my finger down the volume of fairy tales, as though by touching it I might be able to uncrease what had already been broken. Beside the Dostoyevsky a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Somebody had written on the first page, and I lifted the cover to read the inscription, written in thick black pen. Cate, Katoomba, February 2011. I turned and moved away from the desk and the books, back to the bed where my hair was tangled in the bedsheets. There was nothing in that room with my name on it. Nothing to which I could stake a claim.

  I lay in his bed for another half hour before he came back, with coffee. He handed it to me and stood by the bed, looking down. I reached out my hand and held on to his thigh. I looked up. His gaze would have been severe were it not so soothing. I pulled his leg towards me. He sank down to my level.

  A bell jar of calm and order lowered down over the two of us in the bed. Inside the jar there was purpose, reason, a nature that adhered to the predictable order of things. We were safe.

  Everything is going to be OK, he said, and while we were there in his bed there was no part of me that doubted him.

  Pat liked to conclude arguments with the same phrase—You’ve made your bed, now lie in it. She liked to argue about politics and the law, and she was often the winner of the argument, although I do not believe that in the time we worked together I ever saw her change someone’s mind. People’s minds don’t bear changing.

  There was a map of Australia in the call center, pinned to a pylon in the middle of the room. I suppose somebody once must have thought it would be helpful for us to visualize the continent while we were on the phones. The map listed the cities, and even big towns. But knowledge of cities and big towns was never much use. Because what the map didn’t account for was that the most important places were the small ones we had never heard of before. Middle of nowhere. The great big empty. Back of Bourke. The Never-Never. Whatever the fuck you wanted to call it.

  The small, tricky towns produced stress. The stress of hearing somebody scream for the police on a bad line, not knowing what they were saying, and asking as they screamed if they might be able to spell it. Wherever they were out there, wherever they were having their emergencies. People died this way, I told Lachlan, and Clemmie, but never my mother. In those precious seconds when I didn’t know and asked the caller to spell the name of the town and they screamed and sometimes ceased responding. Somebody must have died while I asked if they could spell it.

  One night on the television a segment detailed the risk to coastal properties along the Northern Beaches. Homeowners were having problems with their insurance companies. Their premiums were too high, because their houses faced right onto the beach. The insurance companies countered that the houses were at increased risk of inundation due to rising sea levels. The homeowners seemed to respond with something along the lines of “get fucked.” Hard to tell. No sound on the televisions. The journalist cut to a map of the continent. It showed the country as it is now, and then the way it would look once the ocean got high. And indeed, the properties would be long gone, sunk below the surface, algae growing on the baseboards, sharks butting up against the windowpanes. What do they expect? said Pat, nodding up at the screen. It’s not like the insurance companies can stop rising sea levels. We’ve made our beds, now we’re all going to have to lie in them.

  I discovered sometime around then an uncommon map of Australia. The map was published to great interest in the 1820s, when the interior of the continent was largely uncharted.

  The map had been commissioned by a man named Maslen, a retired employee of the British East India Company. He had never visited Australia. But he believed in Oxley’s vision of the inland sea, because, like me, he had read the journals, and had a keen belief in the promise of Empire making its way. The landscape might have been back to front and the seasons all different, but the inland sea allowed everyone to believe that the prisonscape they had established in the Antipodes might really be a kind of pristine Eden, which God had set down on the earth as a gift to the British Empire.

  Maslen’s map shows a string of wide river systems penetrating the continent from the northwest, descending downwards to a wide-open sea in the middle of the country. All rivers flow to meet it. The northern part of the map is marked Australindia. The southern part of the continent, Anglicania. The inland sea, Delta Australia.

  Maslen commissioned the map because he was as sure of the logic of the inland sea
as though it had already been navigated. He wrote to the colonial authorities in Sydney, enclosing a copy of the map, and proposed that the government should fund another inland expedition with his guidance. He suggested equipping men with camels and elephants and guns. These soldiers would cross from one side of Australia to the other, establishing small townships along the way, until the entire continent and her interior ocean was known and navigated in its entirety.

  It made sense that there would be an inland sea. It adhered to fundamental theories of balance. Men like Oxley and Maslen assumed that the land was proportional. When it was at last understood that there was no Eden, no inland sea, that westward the course of Empire would never make its way, and that the island continent did not align with any prevailing theory of reason, then it was felt, if not made a point of law, that the land was just as wild as the kind of woman who’s asking for it.

  My mother had met Lachlan once, the day we graduated. She took a photograph of the two of us, standing together beneath the jacaranda in the university quad. The attrition of light as it pushed against sandstone, not violent, but persistently gold. The native, neo-Gothic monsters that bore down above us as we shifted awkwardly beside each other. In the photograph we are smiling. Close, but not touching. Has it occurred to you, she asked me later, that he resembles your father?