The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

  I took one of the desks in the middle of the room. Outside in the park, elderly Chinese women had umbrellas up to protect them against the sun. European tourists sunbathed on towels laid out on the grass. On the television a sofa full of fake-tanned women discussed their thoughts on Miley Cyrus. Calls came through. Crashes on the M4, heatstroke inland, overnight break-ins just discovered, the sound of gunfire at the end of a cul-de-sac. Outside in the street the high winds caused the City of Sydney flags to whip around on their poles.

  Somewhere in the country, the burning began.

  The first panicked calls began around half past ten. Calls from Marrangaroo, Bilpin, Zig Zag. In nearly every case, the beginning of the fires looked the same. A smoldering turned into flames. Flames raced across dry grass. Husks of trees caught light, shuddered, and lifted. Leaves like sandpaper. High winds pushed the flame forward, the enemy of property and annihilator of possession. The fire came over the mountain. It embraced whole trees and homes and hillsides. The calls came thick and fast. Smoke, the voices said. Flames at the end of the street. Red glow on the horizon. Spot fires. Spot fires. Spot fires. There goes the shed.

  Yeah, looks like the school is on fire, not sure if youse already know.

  Hi, yeah, I’m home studying for my HSC and my mum’s gone out but the fire brigade just came ’round and told me to evacuate but there’s a fire already burning three houses down so like I don’t know if I’m still meant to leave?

  Look now. I’ve called four times and why aren’t you here my garden is on fire.

  Fire. Fire. Oh heavens. Fire.

  Well, I’m in Parramatta, but is it possible to get the fire brigade to go out to my house and check on it, in Lawson? My texts aren’t getting through to my wife.

  An ambulance, dear, my husband has asthma.

  What the fuck is taking so long don’t you jokers know there’s a fucking bushfire?

  Awwww shit.

  Over the voices on the phones I could hear the roar of flames, the crack of falling branches, the hiss of cinders in the air. The bark burned off the trees and flew like bullets. It sounded sometimes like I was receiving calls from a battlefield. Houses that had been safe when people left for work were gone two hours later. Through the tall glass windows of the office I could see that smoke had clouded the city. Everything in Sydney was red.

  On the television above the desks I watched the breaking news on Channel Nine. News crews had flocked to the scene. The old railway at the top of the Blue Mountains went up in flames. The Premier held a press conference. Helicopters hovered overhead. The fire had breached containment lines, said a spokesman for the Rural Fire Service; it was burning out of control. Everyone sheened in sweat and smoke. Wet patches under the arms of their business shirts. And I sat there in the office, watching the television as I listened. The calls kept coming. They kept coming.

  Connecting fire, Lithgow.

  Connecting fire, Gwandalan.

  Connecting fire, Springwood.

  Connecting fire, Winmalee.

  Connecting fire, Catherine Hill Bay.

  Connecting fire, Yanderra.

  Connecting fire, Bargo.

  Connecting fire, Lake Munmorah.

  Please wait, the fire brigade will answer.

  I’ll try another line, please stay on the phone.

  Please wait, the fire brigade will answer.

  I understand. The fire brigade will answer. I’m trying another line.

  At five I logged out and fled the building. But being outside didn’t make me feel better. The city smelled like smoke. The heavy air altered all perception of clarity. I walked along Elizabeth Street towards home. The 7-Eleven seemed to loom into the street and the brothels creaked and the music issuing from the open door of the kebab shop was more like a wailing. There were no birds. And I could feel the sun before I saw it emerge from behind the smoke. Peculiarly illuminated against the blue of the sky, blood red. There were sirens, from all directions, everywhere in the city.

  On television a few nights later, I would watch a United Nations official say that, while the direct link between the fire and climate change had not yet been established, what was clear was that heatwaves—which were increasing in both frequency and intensity—would contribute to the overall catastrophic fire risk. She chided the Prime Minister, who had stood in front of a press room and announced, “These fires are certainly not a function of climate change, they are a function of life in Australia.”

  In my bedroom I opened the window and the smell of smoke filtered into the room. I propped the window open with a piece of wood and climbed out so that I was sitting on the window frame with my legs hanging down over the awning. The walls of the house scorched my skin.

  I sat watching the street below. The heat of the bricks radiated against my skin. After a little while, a window of sky appeared between the tendrils of smoke and smog. It was relentlessly distant, and blue. As the night dipped in, great clouds of flame burned along the horizon in the west. We could all see it was out of control. Nobody needed the RFS to confirm it. There was a horrible brittleness to the leaf litter, and crickets, and the sirens.

  I looked directly at the paperbark tree across the street outside the mechanic’s. It would take so little to catch light. For all of it to go up in flames. And would that be so very bad?

  I could smell the smoke in my hair.

  In a state of sustained emergency, a chicken will play dead. In 1646, the scholar Athanasius Kircher observed that a frightened chicken would become utterly paralyzed, “as if, despairing of escape through the fruitlessness of her motions, she gave herself up to the will of her conqueror.” A toad turned upside down will likewise appear for all the world as if she has been paralyzed. A goat will seize up and often keel over completely. A possum will begin to leak a foul green fluid.

  But humans cast into a prolonged state of emergency will tend towards more subtle physiological changes. Blood volume will increase, potassium will be shed in the body’s excretions, the immune system will stand down its battalions, and the brain will unwind. The mind doesn’t distort reality necessarily, but its memory will suffer. Because the more a stressful memory is recalled, the less accurate, and the more prone one’s brain may be to puncture holes in the narrative that we have convinced ourselves might freeze the melting snowcaps of our memories.

  So is it enough to say that I don’t remember, now, how it ended? Not precisely. There are holes. My recall has suffered. I remember not the beginning of the end, nor the hours afterwards, but certainly the moment of crisis. Is it enough to say that it was on Elizabeth Street, in the dark? Enough that it was three beers and a bottle of red wine and then Jameson, quantity unknown. I have flashes that emerge bright and appalling from the blackness, but not the ending itself.

  I remember the toilet that didn’t flush in the pub. The stumble from the cab and onto the curb as I opened the door onto Elizabeth Street. I remember playing Nick Cave songs in my bedroom, and the feeling of Lachlan’s hand holding my face when he sat on the bed, in the curve my body made. I remember being in the hallway outside the bedroom, and asking him to stay when he told me he would not.

  I remember that I told him that it hurt.

  I remember lighting a cigarette. The streetlights. The squeal of the bats. The way the heat of the night engulfed the street. And that I shivered regardless. And I remember that I hated that body. My body. I hated it for shivering. I hated that my mind was not divisible from its form. I hated that both mind and body had caused me pain. And that somebody could want the form of the body but not the quivering thing inside. I remember the grief of that thought, the sheer, pathetic weight of it as it struck me. It’s something everyone knows, of course, in the sober, rational light of day. But it hit me, in that wine-smeared present tense, as something heartbreakingly sad.

  I remember him standing there beside me, smoking his own cigarette. I remember trying to communicate the weight of that feeling, in words that seemed entirely insuffic
ient.

  I remember that he said something, although I do not know what it was. But I can remember the way that he said it. Because for the first time in a year and a half, it didn’t feel reassuring. There was no Home in his voice, no swollen rivers, no refilled water tanks. There were sea snakes in the storm surge and glaciers melting. It was the voice of a man from the Sutherland Shire, who spoke like he had gone to Oxbridge, who kept a framed portrait of Patrick White above his bed, and who had promised me nothing.

  I remember wanting him to comfort me.

  I remember holding my hand above my head and slapping it loudly against his face when he would not.

  I remember the bloodboil of fury. The cries as I hit his back. His arms. His face. A knee in the stomach. Tear at the hair. As I smacked and clawed at him. Teeth. Spit. Wailing. I remember that I wanted to bring him to his knees. He pushed me away. He turned.

  And then blackness.

  I walked home from work in full sunlight. The tourists sunbathed on towels in Hyde Park. The jacarandas were in bloom. I stepped through the patches of mushed purple on the sidewalk, and barely saw Cate waiting to cross the road outside Central Station.

  Hey, she said. Reaching out to me.

  Wow, hey. Hi. What are you doing here?

  I’m having coffee with somebody on Crown Street. What are you up to? When are you leaving?

  Soon. I just booked an appointment at the consulate for my visa. Should have it next week. My flight is booked. I’m moving out at the end of the month. Which, also, if you know anybody who would want to live in my house, let me know.

  That’s exciting. That’s. Yeah. How have you been? How’s Lachlan?

  How’s Lachlan?

  You. Oh, you don’t know? We broke up. Two weeks ago.

  Oh. No, I didn’t know that. I haven’t seen him.

  You haven’t?

  No.

  Why?

  I don’t know, I said. I shifted my bag from one shoulder to the other. When did that happen? Breaking up. You guys aren’t speaking, I take it.

  No. Barely. I mean, I saw him for a second last week. I went over there to pick up some stuff. And he was so cold. You know? He just stood at the door holding it open while I collected my things. And there was a girl there. In the kitchen. I’d never seen her before. And then I walked back down the hallway, and I was looking at him, trying to get something from him, you know, just something. Some acknowledgment. But he just held the door open, and he wouldn’t look at me, and he didn’t even say goodbye when I left.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  What about?

  Don’t worry, it’s fine. I’m sorry about all of that. He, um. Well, you know what he’s like. He was never very good at being good, in the end, I suppose. He’s not good with other women.

  Women? I thought it was just one. Just her?

  Oh. Yeah. No. Um. I really don’t know, Cate. No, I don’t know.

  And she was weeping. He gave me chlamydia, you know.

  Oh. No, I didn’t. I didn’t know about that.

  I should go, she said.

  I hugged her. And walked on towards home in a blaze of sunlight.

  The thing was, she never did find the red hair in his bed, she never saw the bobby pins.

  Clemmie had moved into the Marrickville house six months earlier. Everyone save salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses entered via the back door, accessed along a cement path down the side of the house and the back garden. The garden was where I found her. Wearing the nightie she had slept in and a pair of gumboots, she was standing in the soil of the vegetable patch, trying to protect the tomato plants from the sun and the insects by wrapping them in gray netting. She wiped her hand across her brow and left dirt smeared across her skin. Hey. Fuck, it’s too hot for this, she called out. The heat radiated up from the river at the bottom of the garden, into the cement courtyard with the plastic chairs and into the old bricks of the too-big house.

  Clemmie emerged from the garden and walked towards me. Too hot to hug, I said, and she nodded with relief. She took her boots off and left them by the door. It didn’t bother her that she hadn’t seen or heard from me in nearly a month. Inside, we opened cold cider from the fridge and lay across the brown velvet sofas in the living room, sharing the stream of the standing fan by the windows. To pass the time we watched movies about disaffected teenagers in the Midwest from the ’80s. Isn’t it weird that it’s going to be winter where you’re going? she asked.

  Not really, I said. I don’t think they have winter there.

  Oh, yeah. Two weeks left, though.

  Twelve days.

  The stream of the fan blew the hot air at our bodies.

  When the sun set we peeled ourselves away from the wet velvet and into Clemmie’s car. She applied blue eyeliner in the rearview mirror and drove barefoot, with her platform sandals kicked to the side of the accelerator pedal. We drove to Paddington, with the windows down. In a park that had been built on the old site of a women’s hospital we found a collection of Clemmie’s friends, a mix of art students, drug addicts, climate activists, tall men with shaved heads and tattoos. A blond man with big calves pulled an Irish girl into his lap, and the rest of us sat in a circle on the grass. Cockroaches crawled up the walls of the white terraces. A girl jumped up and ran around the park like an airplane. There was no breeze, only air that drew thick and close around my body.

  We walked back into the city. Bottles were passed among strange hands. The lights on Oxford Street streamed by. Clemmie and I let the others go ahead of us and told them we would catch up. In the dark of a alleyway by broken wood fences Clemmie took two pills out of a ziplock bag containing ten. She gave one to me and handed me the warm mixture of vodka and lemonade she had been carrying around in her bag.

  We walked to a tequila bar. It was dark inside, and packed with bodies. Girls standing by the walls rolled their hips to the music, solemn, balancing margaritas with stiff wrists. But we left before midnight, when the liquor licenses expired. The queue for the Soda Factory was long, and the door fee at Oxford Arts Factory was twenty-five dollars. The group splintered. The others caught a cab to Marrickville. Clemmie and I went to the Abercrombie.

  Rhythm, barely music. Bass that I felt in my collarbone. People moved against one another, just to touch. Sweat dripped down skin. It mingled with the beer spilled from jostling hands. The management had put industrial-strength fans in the corners but they didn’t do much more than circulate the air. But the Abercrombie was familiar, and the beer was cheap.

  I felt my dress wet against the skin of my back. Somebody twisted my hair in their hand and lifted it in a knot to bare my neck. I felt lips kiss me, and the cool air. Clemmie beside me, handing me a drink. I held her to me and ran my hand through her hair. She was prettier than me, or differently pretty. I loved her strange shoes and her openness. We moved into the surging mass. I danced. Clemmie reached out to circle my waist and played with the neckline of my dress. My love for her expanded as the pill progressed through my system. I couldn’t see my feet. There were plastic cups and puddles of beery sweat on the floor. I moved with the music.

  I could see a man progress into the edges of my vision. He was all in black, with hair the color of sand, and a shadow of blond beard. He leaned over and shouted something into my ear, about dancing, either that he wasn’t good at it, or I was. Really, it could have been anything. He asked me what my name was, and where I’d been. The music was too loud. I cupped my hand and yelled my name into his ear. He put his hand on my waist and drew me backwards into his body, pushed his crotch into my back, and slid his hands over my outline. I made eye contact with Clemmie and shrugged as if to say sorry. The circle of people closed ranks, jutting me out of it now somebody had claimed me.

  The man with the sandy hair leaned down and spoke into my ear. I could feel his stubble prickle on my skin. When I fuck you, he said, I probably won’t last very long. But I can do other things. With my fingers and my tongue.

  What ma
kes you think you’re going to fuck me?

  Well, I’d like to. He slid his hands up to my breasts and held them. The hands campaigned southwards, to the hem of my dress, pulling it upwards as though testing just how far I could be unclothed. He turned me around to face him. I tried to kiss him. But he didn’t want to. Save it till later, he said. We’re never going to see each other again after tonight. Everything can wait. It was nice being clutched at, as though my body served a function to someone other than myself.

  He said he was going for a cigarette. I could come if I wanted. We walked through the pub to the door and turned right outside, to sit on a gray concrete ledge built into the new development. The letters glowed bigger than my body. Cars streamed down Broadway. Above us the buildings soared out of their scaffolding. The flower-covered skyscraper was right above us. A breeze sent shadows of ferns flowing across the pavement. It was as though the city had stopped being able to hold back the wilderness, and Sydney had returned to some formative jungle. There were flowers growing from the thirteenth story.

  I hate that building, I said, not looking at the man.

  In the streetlights I could see he was golden from the sun. He was older than he had looked in the pub. When I asked, he said he was thirty-two. He was rolling sloppy cigarettes and licking at the edges of the papers. I asked him if he could remember my name. He shook his head. He didn’t ask me to tell him again.

  What do you do? I asked.

  He said he worked in the mines out near Kalgoorlie. Three weeks on, three weeks off. Isn’t that difficult? I asked.

  He raised his voice. Nope, he said. I’m rich. I come back to the city and get fucked up then go back and work. It’s fuckin’ great.

  I did not know what they mined out near Kalgoorlie. I didn’t really know what was of value in the ground, what resources were booming, what was making him rich. There was a rush for something, I knew that much. Or maybe the boom had peaked and we had already entered a national decline? I didn’t know. Didn’t care. Fuck the nation. I knew only that Pliny had said you should not violate the body of the earth by mining her for what she kept safe beneath the surface, for she would lash out, eventually, in fury. The man beside me on the concrete ledge had emerged from the desert’s red emptiness, and from what I could tell the boom and the cash hadn’t done him any good. He stamped out the last of his cigarette. I don’t want you to ask any more questions, he said.