The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  The issue of parole had become a great topic of conversation in opinion pieces and the television news. The question being, would the man have been granted parole if the women he had raped years earlier had not been prostitutes? Is the rape of one woman qualitatively different from the rape of another?

  Earlier that day when the sentence had come down, that question had been discussed again on the news broadcast silently above the tripartite desks and the phones. The dumbest fucks here had joined in. They had thoughts. They pointed out that there are different kinds of chicks. Different rules. It’s just different, hey?

  Because some women are asking for it, and a prostitute, they observed, is positively inviting it.

  The news rebroadcast the footage taken from the bridal shop, the last known images of the woman before she died. We watched it again, all together, while we answered the phones. The men in the call center noted that the woman on Sydney Road turned. She’d looked back. And she followed him just the same.

  Once I got to the front of the bar I was squeezed between two tall men and ordered. It was only turning towards the corridor that I saw Sean, Lachlan’s housemate, standing on the edge of the pack.

  Hey, I said.

  Hey. He didn’t look at me, but ahead at the television screens over the bar.

  Who are you here with?

  Just some people from my doctoral program, he said. He gestured towards a group of men wearing glasses.

  I don’t know them, I said. I don’t really know what I’m doing here.

  Right, he said. I scratched at the label on the bottle of beer until it began to peel off, to disintegrate. I was waiting for him to say something else. I wasn’t sure how much he knew. I didn’t know if he had noticed my sounds in the upstairs bedroom of his house. I was never quiet, except when I was leaving.

  He looked at me then, with an expression of exasperation, because I was not going away. I don’t know what you expect me to say to you, he said. I mean, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? He shook his head. I just have nothing to say to you.

  Outside in the courtyard people were huddled in coats and scarves under the outdoor heaters, dropping ash in the soil beneath the frangipani trees. Taking a seat at the long tables, I took swigs of lukewarm cider and huddled beside Maeve. Her friends argued around us. They were the kind of people who didn’t expect me to speak much. Maeve peered at me. Should you be drinking quite so fast?

  Why do you say that?

  What about your liver? You said the doctor told you not to drink.

  I don’t know. I’m not drinking that much.

  You look like shit. And what’s this? She held up my arm and examined the thumb-shaped bruises wrapped around my wrist.

  I pulled down the sleeve of my sweater.

  Maeve let go. She got distracted as she argued with somebody across the table about the efficacy of the union movement. At the other end of the table her boyfriend bickered with another man. Why do all the women in Japanese porn look like they’re being hurt? They look like they’re being forced.

  No, man, you’re wrong. You’re wrong. They like it. It’s just that that’s what men like over there. They want their women to act like they don’t want it.

  Maeve took a strand of my hair and smoothed it into place as she talked. I was afraid of her leaving. Her breath was warm on my neck, her fingers easing through my hair. I depended on all of her small intrusions of affection. In Vietnam it would be hot, and I would be lonely in Sydney without her.

  You know that Pavement song? I asked her.

  Which one?

  “Darlin’ don’t you go and cut your hair.”

  She laughed. Yeah?

  That’s why I don’t cut my hair, I said.

  You’re ridiculous, she said. Also, you’re drunk.

  When the Courthouse closed at midnight crowds of people exited the beer garden and progressed down Eliza Street towards the seedier pubs on King Street whose licences let them stay open well into the morning. Maeve’s boyfriend and a group of his friends disappeared into the dark of Camperdown Memorial Park, saying they’d be back in a second.

  What are they taking? I asked.

  I absolutely do not give a shit, she said.

  I did not believe that Maeve and her boyfriend would be coming back from Vietnam in love. The fighting was constant. She couldn’t stand the drug-taking, or most of his friends. And he wasn’t prepared to move out of his parents’ place to come and live in the parts of the city we lived in, neighborhoods that he thought were dirty, and full of hipsters and too many immigrants. I didn’t see how the two of them could emerge from four months at such close quarters and still find something redeemable about each other.

  We stood on the corner of Lennox Street on the edge of the park. The Moreton Bay figs rustled and the sound of the crowds slowly receded. It was cold enough for our breath to form clouds. I lit a cigarette while we waited for the men to return from the cover of the trees.

  I hate when you smoke, she said.

  Hey, do you remember last year when we found those masks here?

  Masks?

  We were walking to a party somewhere near here in Newtown, and you found those three plaster of Paris masks of a man’s face? Outside the door to the Courthouse. And just took them, because they were on the street?

  Yeah, she said, why?

  Do you remember we took them to the party, and they were so weird, these big white plaster of Paris faces? And then Cate showed up, a half hour later, and she walked in and saw them and told everyone they were reproductions of the death mask taken of Ned Kelly after he’d been hanged? And we made fun of her when she left, because she sounded so fucking smug and convinced. Because somebody looked it up and Ned Kelly died when he was twenty-five. And these masks were all plainly of a man in his fifties, he was completely bald?

  Yeah? I mean, I remember you making fun of her.

  Cate was right, though.

  About what?

  They were replicas of Ned Kelly’s death mask, those things we found on the street. She was right.

  So? And she looked hopefully into the dark of the trees to where the men might be.

  I dunno, I said. I’ve just been thinking about it.

  He said, as he lay down, that there was a sick ball of stress in his stomach that he had been carrying around all week. He said the only time he’d felt like things were all right was right now, there with me. This is the best I’ve felt all week.

  I touched his hair.

  Did Sean say anything to you?

  I mean, Sean says a lot of things to me.

  About me, though.

  No. Should he have?

  Don’t worry. No.

  His house was empty, the doors to the balcony wide open, letting the light in through the silhouette of a forest, a stage prop he had acquired from someone, by means unknown to me.

  You won’t stay, you know, he said.

  Stay?

  Away. In America. You’ll come back. The prodigal son always returns. Daughter, I suppose.

  I don’t know about that, I said.

  The truth was that even then I had no intention of ever coming home. I wanted a warm, sunny climate far away from this one, a place that had nothing to do with me, and where there would be no history or memory tethering me to the land. I wanted him to ask me to stay. But in the list of wants that I could draw up and submit to a higher power, the desire to leave was far greater. The truth was that I wanted him to ask me to stay, so that I could have the pleasure of saying no.

  I’ll miss you, he said.

  Which caused me to kiss him. Then we were grasping at each other. We took the clothes from our nakedness.

  Don’t scratch, don’t scratch, he whispered.

  One hand pinning down my hair, he moved on top of me. The other hand holding my breast. All his weight bearing down on my body. Streetlight poured into his room. We were sheened in sweat. Each other’s.

  I scratched him anyway.

&
nbsp; I didn’t care how he would explain it. Red fingernail tracks down the plain of his back. Places where I had drawn blood. I didn’t care. This was my back, I thought. Not hers, or any other woman’s. I claimed it for myself.

  I’m close, he said.

  Come inside me.

  Really?

  Yes. Come inside me.

  And he did.

  That was stupid, I said afterwards. We shouldn’t have done that.

  In the morning we walked together towards the shopping strip on Erskineville Road. Be gallant, and come to the pharmacy with me?

  Of course.

  The pharmacist asked me to fill in a form. We sat in chairs by the end of the aisle, or, rather, Lachlan sat, and I knelt on the floor, using the chair as a writing surface. I hate having to take the morning-after pill, I said. It makes me insane. I expected him to say, Well, you asked me to. Because I had. But he did not. He reached out and stroked my hair.

  I completed the form and handed it to the pharmacist. By the counter Lachlan fiddled with the aromatherapy oils and neatly stacked tubs of shea butter. What is this for? he asked.

  To make you soft.

  The pharmacist handed me the box and smiled. Take it with some food, he said. I know, I replied. This was the third time I had bought the pill in the last twelve months, since the procedure. It was always unpleasant, always embarrassing, but it felt necessary. The previous pharmacists had offered advice on safe sexual practices, had often spoken in condescending or concerned tones. But there was none of that when I bought the morning-after pill with Lachlan. This time I had shown up with a man wearing a tie.

  Thanks, guys, called the pharmacist, as we walked towards the door. He waved a friendly hand.

  We sat down at a table in a café next door with a vase of small purple flowers between us. I said I couldn’t eat. You should eat, Lachlan said. That’s what the guy said. I nodded as he looked at the menu. He seemed happy, expansive, as I grew more and more anxious. What the fuck is za’atar? he asked.

  I shrugged. Spices, and fingered the box in my lap. Thank you for coming with me to do that.

  He smiled. It’s fine. I’ll write about it one day.

  I suppose it didn’t occur to him that both of us could write about it.

  He ordered a toasted cheese sandwich. I ordered a muffin. I opened the rigid magenta box under the table, after the food came. I could only stomach one bite before I swallowed it down. One tiny white pill in an orange blister pack.

  There. It’s done.

  It’s all right, you know. This isn’t a disaster. We’re sitting here having lunch together, and it’s fine. This isn’t like before.

  I picked at the muffin. It was dry, maybe stale. I didn’t want it. Why didn’t you do anything, last year?

  What do you mean?

  You never texted me back. When I went to the clinic. I told you I was afraid.

  Why are you asking about this now? He pushed his hand through his hair.

  What is it?

  You never really wanted me, you know. You wanted an idea you had of me in your head. Some story.

  No, I said. That’s not true. That’s not what happened.

  But he was right, of course. What I enjoyed most about my affair with him, from first to last, was the comfort of the narrative arc. Because affairs never last, and that knowledge was, in its own way, reassuring. I wanted the comfort of his voice, the safety of the bell jar, but I also wanted the inevitable conclusion, I desired it like men desire water in the desert.

  In the early evening, when we were sure that his housemates were gone for the day, I left. I made my way down the creaking staircase, and shut the dark red door quietly.

  I stood for a moment on the narrow pavement, looking up at the green iron lace on his balcony and the stage forest and the shirts he’d pinned to the clothesline beneath the awning. I had to stifle an impulse to slam the gate. Because once I left, I felt untethered. As though I were suddenly adrift.

  I had left bobby pins all through his bedroom.

  ____________

  The street was strangely empty of people as I walked home. Green lights turned to red over the empty intersection. It was strange that Elizabeth Street should be so empty, I thought, when there were so many people in the city. And yet sometimes I was sure I could hear footsteps behind me. When I turned, there was no figure, but I was afraid to turn around the whole way. There was always the chance I had missed whoever it was in my peripheral vision.

  The space spread out as the brothels began and the street got darker. I had always been wary of that section of Elizabeth Street, the stretch between the Strawberry Hills Hotel and the late-night Lebanese restaurants on Cleveland Street. I wasn’t afraid of the men who frequented the brothels. I was afraid of the angry man on the street who had been ejected from them. Of being the first woman he saw, of being the sudden secondhand object of his anger. And I wondered what would be left behind of me when I was gone. A handbag, a phone, bobby pins? The fear is that you’ll leave no trace. Or that the trace you leave won’t be adequately apprehended, like salt plains and the smell of seaweed in the desert. It’s important to leave clues, I thought as I walked. So that somebody can find you when you’re gone.

  Cracks, fissures, tremors. The crockery was rattling in the cupboards. The glasses had smashed. Just past one in the morning, when the center was quiet and I had an hour left to finish my shift. Police in Ernabella. Can you spell that, please?

  The waves of pressure began deep below the surface, spread outwards and upwards, expanding, compressing and advancing like a snake.

  The building is shaking!

  Emergency police, fire, or ambulance?

  The building is shaking!

  What state and town is the emergency in?

  South Australia.

  And then just dogs barking, yelling, something falling from a shelf with a thud.

  Footpaths cracked. The bed inched across the room. The door swung off its hinges.

  Emergency police, fire, or ambulance?

  Who do you call for an earthquake?

  Later, seismologists would note that this, the third big earthquake in the northern part of South Australia in twenty-seven years, made the remote town most unusual. “Ernabella’s seismic activity makes it one of the few areas in Australia to have experienced multiple large earthquakes in our recorded history,” said the scientists. They promised to “monitor” the region.

  I played with my hair and connected the calls. I didn’t think we got earthquakes in Australia, I said to Pat. Is this normal?

  Well, it’s happening.

  Guess so.

  Emergency police, fire, or ambulance?

  You know, I said, after a ten-minute silence, there was an ancient Roman theory about earthquakes. Pliny the Elder said that earthquakes were an expression of the earth’s displeasure about her violation by men. He thought that the land was like a woman’s body. It wasn’t even really a metaphor for him. The earth was a woman, according to Pliny. He thought that digging around in her, mining for gold or silver, made her angry. He said mining would lead humanity to ruin. Earthquakes were a warning that we had fucked up.

  Pat sighed. Right. And who is Pliny, when he’s at home?

  Ancient Roman. Died in Pompeii. He saw Vesuvius erupting and went to investigate. Took a boat towards the volcano and ended up dying there, from the poisonous fumes of the volcano.

  He went towards an erupting volcano rather than running away?

  Yeah.

  Well, that’s bloody stupid.

  I met Clemmie in Annandale late on a Friday afternoon, in the playground of the primary school. I still found it strange that she was a teacher now. That either of us was old enough, let alone responsible enough, to stand in front of a classroom and instruct children in language and maths and ethics. I still felt like I was essentially a child.

  Clemmie said we had to walk the long way to the bus stop. She did not want to pass by the café on the corner. Mo
st of the teachers bought coffee there in the mornings, but the week before when she had been drinking at the Vic she had run into the barista from the café, kissed him, and ultimately fucked him in the back seat of her car. She couldn’t remember his name. She didn’t want to run into him and have to admit it.

  Later, at the pub, after only one drink and half a plate of fish and chips, I found that I had to excuse myself to weep in the bathrooms. I wept with some confusion. A part of me was able to stand back and inquire what I was so upset about. But I couldn’t come up with a reason. I had no idea why I was weeping.

  When I returned to the table I found Clemmie had invited three Irishmen to sit with us. She asked me, quietly, why I looked like I had been crying. I told her it was the morning-after pill, and the cascade of hormones, which wreaked havoc with my equilibrium. She nodded. But it worked, right?

  Yeah, it worked.

  Good, she said, and returned her attention to the Irishmen.

  The next afternoon we would confer, and realize that while we had both slept with one of the Irishmen, we each thought ours had been named James. One of us was mistaken, but neither of us had taken their phone numbers, so we would never know.

  I answered the phone. Emergency police, fire, or ambulance.

  Shit, uh. Police! Um. Yeah. Police? ’Cause there’s a snake in the bedroom, see. Shit. And I have a baby. And I shut the door. But.

  Connecting to the police. What state and town is the emergency in?

  Rockhampton! Queensland.

  Connecting to the police in Rockhampton, Queensland.

  Quickly. ’Cause, right, I’m standing on a chair but they can climb, I think. Aw shit. Fuck. Is it black or brown ones that’s worse?

  They are both bad news, I thought, but could not say.

  When the call was over I waited for Maeve at the phone beside mine on the tripartite desk to finish transferring through her calls. I sat watching the television, a news segment about a dodgy plumber, probably foreign.