The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  Bleeding.

  Blood seeped into my underwear. Enough to make me worry. Because why was I bleeding, and what could have gone wrong?

  I trembled. Had the cold worsened, perhaps? Had I contracted something worse? What punishment was this?

  My temperature rose. The streetlights shimmered and lifted. Fever took hold.

  Sirens careened out of Cleveland Street and headed south. They are coming for me, I thought. I knew, with absolute certainty, they were coming for me. The bats were conspiring in the trees, and the man in his bathrobe was opening its folds beneath the grapevine, and the fruit from the mulberry tree was infested with baby snakes, whose venom is more dangerous because they cannot control their impulses.

  Sirens.

  ____________

  I waited for the waters to rise and cover my salt plains, waited for the stretcher to bear me away, the policeman to hold me down, the fireman to douse my flames. Every siren was personal, because the border between world and self had been—it was now clear—washed away in the flood long ago. I was swimming in it. All things were wet.

  Every siren was for me.

  I slept.

  And when I slept, I dreamed of snakes.

  When I awoke in the morning there was a circle of dark blood beneath my hips, but I didn’t get up or change the linen. The fever was gone. I pulled the blankets around my shoulders and rolled over, feeling as though I had been beaten. As though I had been punished for I knew not what, but that I surely must have done something to deserve it.

  The next day I wrote on an empty page of the notebook a list of things I thought I needed: to quit my job, to go to the consulate and apply for my visa, to book appointments with the dentist, the dermatologist, a different gynecologist, and the hairdresser, to drink less, to take iron supplements, to use condoms, to get another STD test, two bottles of wine, Marlboro Reds, milk chocolate, a new dress, new books, sleep, a new pencil, need need need.

  Blood loss. It’s nothing too serious, the doctor noted. And your blood pressure isn’t quite as low as it was. You’re clear of the chlamydia. I’m still not happy about the bruising, but you’re otherwise healthy. And what will you do if you fall pregnant again? she asked as she screwed the cap on the vial of blood she had taken from me.

  I don’t know, I said. I don’t know.

  You’ll need to do something, she said. What kind of contraception are you using now?

  I’m not.

  Well, you know that’s not good enough.

  I did not reply.

  I can write you a prescription for the pill, since you’re going away shortly. I know you don’t want to take it but it might be the best option.

  I can’t try an IUD again?

  I wouldn’t recommend it, after what happened.

  I don’t want to go on the pill.

  I’m going to write you a prescription anyway. Just in case. She scribbled out words on the pad in front of her, the spiky indecipherable handwriting of a doctor who’d been doing this a long time. Practice some responsibility, she said, handing me the piece of paper.

  I nodded. I told her I would figure it out.

  Once I had a pain in my ear so great that I couldn’t sleep or hear. The earaches began shortly after my mother and I left the house on the edge of the national park, when I was four years old, and we were living with my grandparents. During these earaches, which continued intermittently for several years, I had the persistent sensation that my head might simply explode. Even in those moments when the pain seemed to abate, I knew it would come back. This was because I could hear a rising sound in my ears like a wave drawing back and pausing before it stands, crests, and crashes down upon the shore. I understood, then, that I could control nothing. Over time, the earaches stopped and I forgot.

  At a certain point during the end of the year I am telling you about, after the two pink lines, the heart monitor, the anesthetic, the pale green hospital gown, the pain, the bleeding, the fainting, the fever, the blood tests and blood pressure cuffs and blacking out, I remembered. My body could not be made to behave. It disdained all methods of prevention and protection. I could still hear the wave pausing before the crash.

  These months before I left Sydney helped convince me that the improbable was probable. The earthquake could hit even a country without earthquakes. The car could veer and hit me. The fire would flash down the promontory and burn my house down. There would be a man at the door. He would be a con man, a swindler, he had a knife in his pocket and in his mouth. Phones ringing. Sirens. Simple as that. The environment was merely the outer equivalent of my inner reality. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

  I had told him I couldn’t bear touching. I was still in pain from the failed IUD insertion, more than a week later. Still tender. And so we drove north. Parked in a lot by the road with only wilderness either side of us, administered by Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park.

  There’s a place to swim, through here, I said. You follow the path downhill about half an hour. And then there’s the Basin. Our school used to take us every year before the summer holidays began.

  All right, he said. If it makes you happy.

  We walked. I did not tell him about the week before, the failed procedure, the fever or the dreams. Instead I told him about William Mulholland, the bringing of water to the American West, about “there it is, take it” arrogance and greed.

  We set out along the path. The morning was hot. All I wanted was to swim. The path was narrow, and I walked ahead of Lachlan, chattering, complaining of the heat. Gum trees loomed above us. The undergrowth was dangerously dry. Ready to catch light.

  When he had not responded to my chatter for some time, I turned around and looked back. Lachlan was standing far back on the path. He had stopped walking long ago. He did not move. I began to walk back towards him but he held out his hand. Hold on, he called out.

  Something rustled.

  After a few moments, he proceeded down the path towards me.

  Why did you stop walking? I asked.

  Because there was a snake at the edge of the path.

  There was?

  Yes.

  When I was there?

  Yes.

  Why didn’t you tell me?

  Because I was afraid of it, he said.

  What if it bit me? I asked.

  Well, it didn’t, did it?

  We continued to walk. I slid my hand into his. And thought about what it must have looked like, through his eyes. Seeing the snake emerge onto the path, stopping, and watching the woman walking on into the distance. Letting her go. And waiting for the snake to depart.

  The first time I saw my father after we had left, he was slumped in the driver’s seat on a Saturday morning. A car accelerated up the slope of the driveway and I rushed from my place on the gold filigree carpet to the space between my grandmother’s curtains. Lace. Because, she told me, if God didn’t want us to spy on our neighbors he wouldn’t have invented sheer curtains. We stayed with my grandparents for three months after we left, before my mother eventually found the house in Ashfield.

  I looked out the window between the lace curtains. My father was stopped in an unfamiliar car beside the camellia bush. Just sitting there. A white streak of happiness flared through me. I shouted out, jumped from the curtains, and ran into the entryway. I got up on my toes to reach the doorknob, but the hand of my grandfather caught me by the tail of my dressing gown before I could even get the knob firmly in my grasp. His hands lifted me up, put me back in the living room, and rolled the sliding door across the entryway with such a roar of force, it almost muffled the shouting. What the fuck does that bastard think he’s doing, showing up at my house?

  I heard the front door open, loud voices on the veranda, the rise and fall of angry accusations, without being able to decipher any individual word with clarity.

  I watched the shapes of my family argue through the frosted glass. The television continued to broadcast Saturday morning music videos, the
sanitized ones that Rage was committed to playing when children might be watching: Ace of Base, Kylie Minogue, the Cranberries.

  The kettle whistled on the stove. After a little while the figures and their voices retreated inside from the veranda, and moved away from the frosted glass and into the kitchen. The tone of my grandfather’s voice still signified rage, but the ferocity of his objections sounded like it might be diminishing. I sat in place beside the electric heater I was not allowed to touch, swaddled in my dressing gown. The ancient television flickered.

  Fifteen minutes later the door slid open, rattling on its rollers. My father walked through it. My grandfather followed behind him, smaller, withered, defeated. He was allowing a visit, just this once. My mother took me to her old bedroom, where we shared her bed and she put me in a dress. She seemed to shrink from my father as she passed me over to him by the front door. It troubled me to see her so afraid. I swung my head back and forth between them but I couldn’t, then, understand why she looked at him like that.

  Not here, she said.

  My father was driving a different kind of car. He had a tattoo on his left biceps that was new as well. Only a month or two had passed since my mother had left him for the final time, but things had visibly changed. The upholstery in the new car smelled like damp and chlorine, and there were clothes and boxes piled on the back seat. A woman’s cardigan I’d never seen before. Cigarette butts stubbed out on the dashboard. The radio stations were programmed strangely. Triple J came out where Radio National was meant to be. “Darlin’ don’t you go and cut your hair,” sang the radio. I took the sentiment very seriously. I would be well into adulthood before I realized that “Cut Your Hair” was not a serious song.

  My father drove east, towards the beach, even though it was much too cold for swimming. We passed over unfamiliar hills, through eastern suburbs I had never seen before. He turned the radio down and spoke to me as he drove. I listened as the car traveled through shadows and late-autumn sunlight, past the red lights of Darlinghurst, the barbed gates of Centennial Park, the exposed concrete walls of Bondi Junction. I listened to my father’s voice—the dux of his year, Oxley’s lawful descendant, the golden son who was never wrong. I listened to that voice in the car as he attempted to explain his version of events. Explain why he had been absent, why he was going to move away, why I mustn’t listen to whatever it was my mother had told me he had done. Do you understand? he asked. And I nodded. He could have told me anything. I would have believed him. I believed everything he ever told me.

  He parked on a hill at North Bondi and walked across the street to a café that looked out to the sea. He bought me a chocolate milkshake and a cheese sandwich. I had thought I was hungry. The air was cold and salty and whipped against my face. I did not eat the sandwich, and when we left, the waitress asked me if there was something wrong with it. I shook my head, but I did not speak. Across the road from the café was a park with a whale-sized mosaic fish. It had a hole in its belly. I crawled inside and my father sat there on the bench by the swings, waiting as I lay curled up in the cold, dark belly. It was quiet and riskless in the fish.

  When he called me out there was sand on the knees of my tights and the elbows of my sweater. We took a winding path down to the beach. The sand was deserted, although the lifeguards had erected the red and yellow flags to show the safe part of the water. Surfers paddled outside the flags. The waves roared over the rocks.

  At the very end of the beach there was a concrete pool built into the sea wall, filled with the high tide’s salt water. I didn’t like ocean baths. Earlier that year I had seen a news story that scared me off them. In the baths at Palm Beach, at the very edge of Sydney, they had discovered a long, yellow-bellied sea snake curled up in the murky depths of the water. A storm had washed it in. My mother assured me that a sea snake was extremely poisonous, but their jaws didn’t open wide. They had to bite you in the spaces between your fingers, between your toes, to do you any harm. For years I swam with my hands in fists, thrashing through the water as though I were punching it.

  I walked beside the mural on the rock wall, tracing the curves of the blue and brown sea creatures. I cannot remember how we got from the path to the ocean pool, or where my father stood. Wouldn’t he have been watching me? All I could see ahead of me were the waves breaking on the rocks and the black straps of my shoes tracing out the edges of the pool as the wind whipped around me.

  The wind came. The water surged. I fell in.

  I went under.

  Wet wool, wet tights, shoes heavy with water—they all drew me down into the cold. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. There was salt in my nose. I beat at the water with my fists. I was floundering. Trying to fight it. But the water was bigger than me, and stronger.

  I began to be afraid.

  Then there were arms around me. My father caught hold of my body and took me to his chest. He hauled me out of the water and onto the concrete ledge where the creatures in the mural smiled down at me just as they had a few minutes before. We were both dripping. I looked back into the murky water, not understanding how I had come to be there. I held on to my father.

  It’s OK, darling, he said. It’s all right. Everything is all right now.

  That was when I began to cry.

  ____________

  Six months later the summer had arrived and my father had made good on his word. He had moved to Melbourne. He had another tattoo and he had taken the new car with him when he left. He had a new girlfriend, to whom the cardigan belonged. She was twenty-three, English, seven months pregnant, she had a nose ring.

  On the weekends of that summer, the first summer without my father, my mother woke me up early and drove us north to Palm Beach from our new house in Ashfield. On the sand I would hop from foot to foot as my mother tried to restrain me, rubbing sunscreen into my skin as I focused on the water. I wouldn’t go near the ocean baths anymore, for fear of sea snakes and drowning, but the sea, to my mind, was different. It was each time a kind of christening. I ran into the water and I wouldn’t leave. I was never scared of the cold, the bluebottles, the seaweed that gathered in clumps on the sand. The ocean took me in like I belonged to it.

  My mother would sit on the sand watching me, always protective, always telling me I swam out too far. She asked me please to keep between the flags. When I told her I wanted to live in the water, she dismissed the idea out of hand. She didn’t like that I seemed to prefer being alone. She didn’t like the thing she could see winking to life. Because she knew there was safety in numbers, that you have to swim between the flags, knew the kinds of dangers posed by girls who become women in a country where the land is not easily tamed. When the girl looks like she might not resemble someone else’s vision of Eden, she winds up looking like just another girl who’s asking for it. Because she wasn’t what you thought you’d been promised. My mother knew that women have to hold up their end of the promise if they want to keep themselves safe.

  ____________

  By then I was all she had. We were gone.

  When we left, we left in the middle of the night. Everything we had was packed into the back seat and the trunk. She wrapped me in a blanket and drove. She had twenty dollars in her purse. We stopped, once, at a 7-Eleven on the side of the highway, where she bought Dairy Milk bars and a Kit Kat that she handed to me through the window. She didn’t let me look at her face. When she drove, she kept her eyes fixed on the road. I sat in the passenger seat still swaddled in my dressing gown, and watched the darkness and the green road signs hurtle past the windows, announcing the kilometers remaining to suburbs farther south.

  My grandparents were waiting in the driveway when we arrived. Hard-faced, no smiles, no words. Just sounds. Sobbing. Rage. In the light streaming through the open door of her childhood home, I saw my mother’s face, only for an instant. The darkness blooming around her right eye. The finger-shaped bruises beginning to form around her neck. The blood that had dried in the scratches on her arms. Ev
erything that had been done to her was marked on her flesh. But there were no tears. Her eyes were dry.

  I was lifted by my grandmother’s shivering arms, taken down the corridor into the bedroom, and put to sleep on the eiderdown. But a few hours later I woke up in the creeping light of the spare room and didn’t know where I was. I panicked because I couldn’t see my mother. On unsteady legs I walked to the window and peered out through the sheer curtains.

  I saw her from the back, standing out there in the driveway, looking down the slope to the cul-de-sac she hadn’t known as home in sixteen years. She was barefoot, her hair piled on her head, holding a half-smoked cigarette by the hem of a big red sweater and looking at something out there in the dark. Currawongs were calling. She stood there for a long time, smoking, as though she were waiting for something. She was beautiful. When she turned and came back into the house I didn’t make a sound. She hadn’t washed the blood off. Everything was visible, still.

  I lay down on the strange bed. A cold, cyanotic light crept across the carpet. The wallpaper was gold.

  But that’s wrong, I thought. That doesn’t make sense. My mother doesn’t smoke.

  Spring heatwave, said The Guardian in the morning when I checked my phone. Hottest day on record expected. Dangerous fire conditions. The winds were up, and a dry heat was cresting.

  I left the house and walked to work. Even though it was early in the day, the heat was stunning. Bare shoulders. Smoldering pavement. A foreboding too-blue sky. At the traffic lights I watched the water I had spilled from my bottle of Mount Franklin seep back into the asphalt without a trace. Sweat rolled down my back. It was reassuringly cool in the air-conditioned atrium of the Telstra Building. I scanned into the call center and already I could hear it. The heavy traffic siren. The phones ringing.