The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  But it didn’t move or run away. Instead the possum stared at us and seemed to puff up its chest. The animal advanced.

  I dunno, it’s pretty big, I said.

  Shoo, shouted my mother, waving her arm at it. Go on.

  The possum advanced once more. It opened its mouth to bare its teeth. There was a noise, suddenly, something between a growl and a hiss, but anyway a noise that announced her intention to attack if we came any closer. My mother cried out. We turned and ran into the street, across the road.

  I’ve never seen anything like it, said my mother, standing outside the closed car yard of Sydney Prestige.

  It must have something by that recycling bin it really wants to protect.

  Possums are meant to be gentle. I’ve never seen anything like it. God, did you see her? She was so big. She was quivering with anger.

  We stood across the street, looking at the recycling bin, but we could not see the possum in the darkness, we could not tell if it was still guarding the street, and so we continued to wait while the fire engines careened around the corner and towards Waterloo, heading south.

  A fumbling at buttons.

  Wait, I said. Wait.

  What? The fingers pulling at fabric.

  I. I. Jesus. I got my period this morning.

  A rearing back. So?

  You don’t care?

  No, and he was biting at my lips again, inching my underwear down my hips.

  I excused myself. I ran downstairs, took off my tights, and pulled out the tampon, leaving it wrapped in bloody tissue on the edge of the kitchen sink.

  A moment of fear, should he look. But he didn’t flinch. Didn’t care. I expected there to be red all over the sheets. But there were no stains. It was as though everything were thinner, and diluted. A wetness.

  Can I come?

  Inside me?

  Yes.

  You can’t. Yes. Yes. Come inside me. It’ll be OK.

  When it was over he lay back in bed and checked his phone.

  I felt between my legs. A mess of pubic hair, his and mine. A butcher’s block, I thought it might be. A minor murder scene. But it was not. Just skin. Just wet.

  Then I noticed something, at the base of his cock. A globule of purpley-brown. Before I could take it from him, he reached down to his crotch. He took the clot of blood in his fingers, stretched and pulled the thing. It was animal, borderless, female. Soft and staining on his skin.

  He wiped it on the sheets.

  Then he kissed me, sat up, and lit a cigarette. He leaned over to set an alarm on his phone. What does she think you’re doing tonight? I asked.

  Working.

  You don’t feel bad about lying to her about any of this?

  I love her, he said.

  I turned away from him.

  He told me, then, that he had spent the last morning, after I had gone, kneeling over his bed searching for strands of my hair. He could see them clearly in the bright light of the morning. Shapes of my body still there in the sheets. Smell on his fingers and his belly. He searched the pillowcases, the duvet cover, the sheets, his clothes from the night before. He got on his knees and picked out the strands of hair one by one. When he had them all he walked out onto the balcony, opened his fist, and threw my hair out into the street below.

  Don’t comb your hair in the bed, he said.

  You pull it.

  Cate sat waiting at a table outside the café on Redfern Street. She stood and hugged me as I arrived, the soft squish of wool-covered breasts pressing together. When she pulled away I noticed that long strands of my hair had attached themselves to the shoulder of her sweater. She didn’t notice.

  I asked whether she minded if I smoked. I said I had eaten, but in fact I hadn’t eaten all day, hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. The idea of food was revolting to me. Chewed-up bread slid like mucus down my throat. As though while being so surreptitiously fucked it was necessary to reduce the functions of my body in all other respects.

  I did not ask her how she was. She had a thin, wide smile on her face. I could see she was nervous about seeing me, so nervous she was almost shaking. She twisted the rings around her fingers, pulling them off and sliding them on again, and I could see, when she did so, the red marks she had developed through what was clearly a new nervous habit.

  It is supposed that it took us until the mid fourteenth century to begin using the word fire as a metaphor for the force of our feelings.

  I asked Cate about her poetry. Was she still writing? This woman whose delicate prose was riddled, Lachlan had told me, with images of buttons and pearls.

  The poetry wasn’t working out particularly well, she said. She was working as a secretary to a friend of her father’s, a dentist in Roseville, and getting sick of the trek back and forth between the suburbs of her childhood and the city of her adulthood. She would try to write, she said, in her lunchbreak. But she was too loyal and trustworthy to work on her poetry during office hours.

  I write at work, I told her. That’s why it’s such a good job.

  Her phone vibrated beside her. She swiped her thumb across the screen and read whatever had been sent. He’s at uni, she said, in Fisher. I might go and meet him there in a minute. It’s not a long walk from here.

  No, it’s not.

  “Where’s the fire?” was standard American English by 1917. It was less common for English-speakers in the Commonwealth to inquire about fire when people were in an obvious hurry.

  He probably needs a break, she said. I’ll take him for lunch. But God, he’s been such a shit, lately. He probably doesn’t deserve me being so nice to him.

  Oh?

  Just moody, because of his writing. And I’ve told him, if you want to get up early in the morning to write, that’s fine, but can you at least go out onto the balcony so that I don’t get woken up by your typing? I had a pregnancy scare last week, and it didn’t help matters.

  I thought you were on the pill.

  I am. But, you know, things can go wrong. You’re not on it, are you?

  No.

  What do you do?

  Nothing. Get scared. I seem to be doing all right. I have my period right now.

  ____________

  By the mid 1860s, the expression “to play with fire” was in common usage. It was largely directed at badly behaved children who meddled, risked disaster, or treated a serious matter with carelessness.

  I asked her how the opening night of his play had gone. She smiled. Nobody had come, she said. He went out drinking at the end of it all. She went home.

  What’s it about? I asked. The play.

  It’s mostly about his father, Cate said. It’s very affecting. At the end I started crying. He never speaks about his anguish, but you could see it all. The loss. Are you going to see it?

  No, I said.

  The truth was that I was due to see it that night, when I knew she would not be there.

  Perhaps because I was as young and half-formed as I was that year, I didn’t really believe I had the capacity to affect Cate. It did not occur to me that I made her nervous; rather, I believed she was constitutionally anxious. Perhaps both were true. I was so bound up in the struggle to keep my head above water that it seemed inconceivable I might affect those around me in the way they affected me. Part of me felt guilty, part of me even liked Cate. But when I was with her I was jealous and, in the deepest part of myself, furious. For what I perceived as her happiness, her ease with the world. So I sat there drinking coffee, with all the calm of a behavioral scientist equipped with an electric buzzer, knowing full well I had the capacity to cause her extreme pain, but having no real belief that anybody had the capacity to feel pain but myself.

  You should meet him for lunch, I said. I’ll come with you.

  ____________

  In the late eighteenth century, an experimental chemist interested in gas anchored a small boat in a stream. He strung a pipe from the shore and set it up so that the end of the tube rose just above th
e waterline. He conducted the gas upwards through the tube, and lit a match. He observed to his friends that “he had now set the river on fire.” In the nineteenth century “to set the river on fire” became a common expression, used to refer to a remarkable and usually foolish achievement. By 1830 it was often used with the name of a river, and varied by locality. To set the Thames on fire, to set the Hudson on fire, to set the Lachlan on fire, and so on.

  Our bill arrived, and I laid down money for the coffee I’d drunk. She had barely touched the hot chocolate. I think it’s great that you and he are spending time together, she said, looking again at her phone. Twisting her rings. It’s good for you two to be working through your problems and getting close. It’s what I’ve been telling him for ages.

  I crossed and uncrossed my legs, stringing my hand through my hair. My fingers came away threaded with bright red strands. They burned in the light. Cate startled, and her train of thought halted. Oh no, she said. Are you shedding?

  No. What. Never mind. I always shed a lot of hair.

  But not like that. That’s way too much.

  I untangled the hair from my fingers and tried to throw it quickly down onto the pavement, but hair doesn’t take to being thrown easily, it sort of drifted there in the air, still clinging to skin and sweater sleeve.

  Are you terribly stressed? she asked. You know you can lose your hair from stress? That job you do must be stressful.

  Yes, I know. But I don’t think it is. It’s not that.

  It’s not normal to lose so much, she said again. She offered me advice: relaxation techniques, the benefits of not working so much, perhaps drinking less.

  As she talked I remembered how hard he had pulled my hair back, how he wound the strands through his fingers and tugged as if my hair were a rope to hold on to, and I looked at her hair, very brown and smooth and sleek, and I wondered, doesn’t he do the same thing to you?

  In the morning I found it. Dead, and lying in the gutter. Somebody had moved it so that it would be out of the way of the traffic. I stood above the mess of fur and bone, uncertain about how much attention I should visibly give to the dead possum. I crouched down. It was impossible to tell if it was the same animal I had seen with my mother that night after the play. But she was, I was sure of it. I was close enough to touch her.

  She was splayed stomach-upwards among gum tree leaves and cigarette butts. Something had pulled off her face. The nose hung loose and bloody by a strap of gray-furred skin. Ants swarmed in the red flesh. The possum still looked angry. Her mouth was fixed in a growl, although the teeth were smashed in and her jaw misshapen, hanging off her face. Broken, I supposed. I could see where the wheels must have crushed her, but it wasn’t just a car that had caused the damage. Something else had got to her. The possum’s pouch had been half torn off. I could make out the wet pink of teats below, and her fur was sticky with milk and congealing blood. I could see no sign of her baby. The cars accelerated along the street. I stood up and took a step backwards. The men in the mechanic’s were not watching, nor the people at the bus stop, no one was watching. Nobody would pay her any reverence.

  The idea came to me then. To grind down my boot on her skull and break her broken teeth further, to tear off the pouch completely and expose the whole of the raw flesh to the punishing sky.

  But I didn’t.

  I turned, and I left her there.

  ____________

  Before I was born, before they moved to the suburbs, my parents lived in a house in Enmore. My grandmother, when she came to inspect it, peered around at the lightless walls and the mold-catching cupboards. You couldn’t swing a cat in here, could you, she said. Both of them young, my parents worked at law firms and made good money, the kind of money that allowed them to buy a house at the age of twenty-five, and the kinds of excellent drugs that could drive a reasonable man to wildness.

  At nights when they lived in Enmore, my mother took the train from Circular Quay to Newtown Station and walked home. One night, during the summer, the little Greek ladies sat in the poured-cement front yards and old men watered tomato plants and kids squealed through open front doors. The heat was sticky. A group of men loitered at the top of the street. My mother saw them as she neared the corner. The house was in sight, my father’s first Mercedes parked out the front. This was before he went off the rails, of course, before he smashed our windows, crashed the Mercedes, wept on the stairs.

  That night, a man peeled off from the pack. He walked towards my mother. He didn’t say anything, but he smiled. When he reached her, his right hand extended forward. His hand lifted up the hem of her knee-length skirt, and the man grabbed my mother between her legs. She didn’t say a thing. The man smiled. He held on.

  After what seemed like a very long time, she pulled away and heard the laughter of the other men loitering at the top of the street. It’s just a joke, love, she heard one of them call out. She walked down the street towards her house, as though nothing had happened. The old ladies in the front yards didn’t meet her eye, and the old men watered the tomato plants as though she wasn’t there. She opened the front door and closed it, and my father was inside, with his shoes off, reading in a chair, a rum and Coke ice-cold beside him on the side table. She said nothing about what had happened. Because what could he have done? And isn’t it best to keep these things from the people we love? Once the damage is done, what can anybody do?

  Maeve and I stood side by side in the ladies’ room. She pinned her hair into place and nodded to me in the mirror. We headed for the door. We were at the Courthouse. In a fortnight, Maeve would be leaving the country. She would live in Vietnam for six months, maybe a year, if things worked out. Teach English, perhaps. Her boyfriend had planned it, and for him she had deferred her law degree.

  The noise of the pub rose up and broke around us as we nudged through the throng of bodies shouting their orders over the taps. Maeve left me, headed outside to the wooden tables on the veranda, and I stood in line beneath the healthy smiles of the Sydney Swans players erected on the walls, trying to control my breathing.

  I wanted badly to be drunk.

  On the television mounted in the corner of the bar, a news update flashed across the screen. Footage showed a man being escorted from a white van, up a staircase and through a courthouse door. Cut to the white van driving away from the courthouse at the end of the day. A woman in a black coat stood by the open gate, holding a sign up to the van’s tinted windows. It read: “May u rot in there.”

  Earlier that afternoon, I had listened to the radio playing in a café on Castlereagh Street during one of my breaks. A woman with a foreign accent was speaking to the radio host. She was Dutch, and she had been backpacking through Melbourne a few years earlier when she had encountered the man who killed the woman in Brunswick. Standing outside a pub one evening, she said, he had pulled up beside her and told her that somebody was following her. He said she’d be safe with him. She got into his car and he sped her away. The man had lied.

  Her voice was matter-of-fact. He was on me, the Dutch woman explained on the radio. I saw myself being killed. He could have done anything.

  The Dutch woman got away. He hit her and he raped her, but he didn’t cross the line of no return.

  The radio host had not asked the Dutch woman about the apparently chance series of events that had led to her being trapped in the man’s car in suburban Melbourne, nor her thoughts on why her mistake had not been fatal. I had wanted the host to ask the woman those questions, because I suspected that she would not be able to explain. How could she?

  The man had been convicted that afternoon in a Melbourne courtroom. The articles I read on my phone between emergency calls explained that the man had sat in the dock wearing a dark shirt, his hair tied back, surrounded at all times by four prison guards. When the verdict was read, the judge had started by saying that the rape and murder were “savage and degrading.”

  He had chastised the man for telling the police “a farrago of lies
” before admitting to what he had done that night in Brunswick last year. The articles described the man as “impassive” as he listened to the judge read the verdict.

  The judge said that the man in the dock could have easily controlled the woman if he had wanted to. He was bigger than her, and stronger. The woman had fought back. She had threatened to call the police. And whether it was because the man found pleasure in hurting the woman, or he was afraid of being caught, he had strangled her there in the alleyway off Sydney Road early on a Saturday morning, and she was killed where she stood. “This was particularly heinous,” the judge concluded, “as you hid the body and were on parole at the time.” The judge sentenced the man to life in prison with a thirty-five-year non-parole period.

  As I waited in line at the bar I kept my eyes fixed on the screen. The sound of the crowd was too overwhelming to hear what might have been said, but it didn’t matter. It occurred to me that I was surrounded entirely by disinhibiting strangers, and it occurred to me that an anemic with poor liver function who is in the midst of ordering her third drink of the evening would be in no position to fight anyone off if that’s what it came to.

  The line for the bar inched forward and beer wept into the carpet and I fingered the ten-dollar note in my hand.

  When the man killed the woman in a alleyway in Brunswick he had been on parole from prison. Years earlier, when I was still a child, the man had raped five different women in the southern suburbs of Melbourne, all prostitutes. When he attacked the five women in the southern suburbs he would park his car with the passenger door so close to a brick wall that the women could not escape.