I nodded. It seemed like a peculiar thing to say, but at the very least he was honest.
We went back inside. I’ll get you a drink, he said. I pushed through the crowd to Clemmie and she took me in her arms.
Lights. The swell of the sound. Limbs soft and performing precisely the right gestures. We clung to each other, hugging and holding hands. I love you, she said into my ear. I’m going to miss you so much. She put her arm around my shoulders and stroked my hair with her hands. I kissed her cheek.
I had all but forgotten the man. But then I felt a hand on my waist, and he was back. I thought you’d gone, he said. I shook my head. I noticed that there was space in the bar now, people were leaving. It was two in the morning.
The man from the desert kissed me. I kissed him back for a few minutes. But my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t like him touching me anymore.
That’s OK, I said. You know, I think I’ll go home.
The man said, Don’t. He sat down in a booth opposite the bar and pulled me onto his lap. He was bigger than me, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He seemed too drunk to get really upset. No, I said. I’m going to go home. Having made myself clear, I stood up and walked away from him towards the exit.
Clemmie was kissing a blond man in the middle of the dance floor. He’s German! she shouted at me as I passed her. She waved. On Broadway I walked a few steps towards the pedestrian lights. I wanted to get a cab. I wanted to go home. And then an arm was whipping me around, an angry face. Where are you going?
He had run after me.
I’m going home, I said.
Let me come.
No. He held tightly to my arm. Let me go, I said.
Come home with me, he said.
No.
Why? Jesus, this is the worst thing that’s happened to me all week. Come on, just come somewhere with me.
I don’t think it’s a good idea, I said. He pushed me backwards and pressed my body against the vomit-colored tiled walls of the Abercrombie Hotel. He put his hand up my dress and groped. That hurts, I said.
Somebody walking by shouted, Get a room.
He kissed me and I kissed him back, as a sort of consolation.
Don’t, I said, I don’t want to. This is stupid. You don’t even know my name.
I do.
I’m going to go home. He loosened his grip and I broke away. I hailed the nearest cab. I shut the door but the cabdriver paused a moment to calibrate his route and the door flew open. The man was sitting beside me.
Get out, I said.
He didn’t reply.
Get out. You’re not coming home with me.
I was afraid that if I got out he would follow me. I considered what might be best. It occurred to me that if I got out quickly by my house, at the lights, before he realized, I would be safe. He didn’t even know what suburb I lived in, let alone which house. I just wanted to go home.
The driver took off and I leaned across to speak to him. When I get out, please don’t let this man follow me. I don’t want him to come with me.
Neither the driver nor the man beside me acknowledged what I had said. In the back seat he pressed his hands between my thighs and I let him, as we got closer to Cleveland Street, where I would run.
When the traffic lights turned green I flung open the door. I didn’t bother to close it. I ran up Elizabeth Street, past the bins and the shrubs and the patchy vegetation on the ledge, up the steps to my house. I clutched my keys in my hand, pressing one between each of my fingers. At the door I fumbled. The big old-fashioned silver key for the security door slid out of my hand and dropped to the floor. I bent down to retrieve it and heard running steps. I hadn’t been fast enough. He was running up the steps towards me, he was at the door. Get out, I said.
Just let me come inside, he said. He gripped my arms and tried to kiss me again. I had made a horrible mistake. Somewhere along the line, I had made the wrong decision. He was bigger than me, and stronger.
I began to yell. Get out, I don’t want you here.
Shut up, he said. Calm down. It’ll be all right, just open the door.
Can’t you take no for a fucking answer?
Then he grabbed me by the hair, held my head close to his. Be quiet, he hissed, veins and tendons bulging in his throat.
He pulled me by my hair into the dark of the shrubs on the ledge. All the vegetation in which he could hide me. The mango, the mulberry, the fig trees, the soil so polluted and wet and soft that when he pushed me down and my hand reached out to catch my fall I felt as though I were penetrating the flesh of the earth. The winds were up, the leaves lashed above me. A storm was coming. He yanked at my hair. I could feel it strain against my scalp, feel the strands breaking. You’re a prick tease, a fucking whore, he said.
Then I screamed.
Titian, the woman in the grass had said all those weeks ago. The future is coming and it doesn’t look good.
Then we were flooded with light.
In the doorway stood Paul, in his boxer shorts, half-asleep. What the fuck is going on? he yelled. Don’t touch her. Get away from her.
The man from the desert let me go. He stumbled backwards. Sorry, man, I didn’t know, he said to Paul. She didn’t say she had a boyfriend.
And he was gone, running down the steps.
I flew past Paul and into the hallway.
Paul called after him, Fuck right off, mate. Keep running.
He slammed the front door shut and locked it.
I burst into tears and fell back against the wall.
Jesus Christ. What the fuck was that? Are you OK?
I sobbed. I covered my face with my hands. Why did you do that? I said.
What?
I don’t need protecting. I was fine. I was dealing with it myself.
He looked down at me. He shrugged and walked away, down the corridor and into his room. Yeah, sure. You’re dealing with everything yourself.
I’m sorry, I called after him. I’m sorry. I stood up straight and watched him close the door. I stood in the dark corridor. Thunder struck in the distance. I stood there, among the cobwebs and creaking and mold. And then walked in the dark to the end of the house, to the bathroom.
The bathtub was filthy. Orange mold still growing along the edges, unabated. I wiped it down, turned the water on, undressed, got in.
Outside, the storm approached. The window rattled and a gust of wind shuddered through the bathroom. The shower curtain inhaled inwards, pressing wet and clammy against flesh.
The weather came in.
Wind and trees and leaves entered the bathroom. Thunder and dry lightning struck, but as yet there was no rain. I was safe in the water.
I put my head under.
My hair floated around my head, great chunks of it broken, and the scratches on my arms stung and the dirt and blood wept into the water along with the dead leaves, the mud, the wind rattling and trembling in the bathroom, and outside a branch crashed, a siren rose in the distance, but I was safe.
In the water I was safe.
The future is coming and it doesn’t look good.
OK. Let me tell you about the future.
Best-case scenario, the two-degree spike in temperature causes the oceans to rise five meters.
Look.
Watch what happens:
First, the water pushes up into Sydney Harbour, along the sunken streams, and into the suburbs. Flooding submerges low-lying beaches. Bondi is gone. So is Cronulla. The Parramatta and Cooks rivers spill their banks. The airport descends beneath the waters of Botany Bay.
Rising seas flood the sewers and warp the pipes beneath the ground. Sandstone slopes crumble like cake into the lukewarm tea of the Pacific. Before long, the salt water leaking into the soil starts to sluice away at the pavement above. All the Body Shops and Oportos and JB Hi-Fis renting space in the basements beneath the Queen Victoria Building and Martin Place begin to flood. After a while, the supporting beams buckle. Hyde Park caves in and becomes a lake.<
br />
Water city. Island continent.
This ruined Eden.
As the seawater gets into the soil, the wooden structural beams of all the old terraces in the inner city begin to rot. As the wood decomposes, the trusses collapse. The walls lean to one side. Eventually the roofs fall in.
The seeds of pampas grass and crofton weed lift in the wind and take root along the new-look waterways. Birds do the rest of the work. Soon, shoots of sticky weed and fountain grass have taken root in the cracks in the bitumen. The cracks get wider as the weeds grow taller. The roots of the paperbark trees and Moreton Bay figs, untended by the City of Sydney Council, grow out of control and split open the pavement. Pink and purple weeds flourish. Morning glory scrambles up the walls.
Down along the Cooks River and Botany Bay where the shipping yards and industrial parks have at last gone quiet, corroding petroleum tanks and neglected power plants leach lead, mercury, cadmium, and zinc into the soil and the water. The nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights is safe enough from the rising oceans, but it’s in the direct line of the fires.
Because the extremely hot days dry out everything faster now. The city may be soaked in the rising seas, but fire season starts earlier.
Turn your attention to the empty oven of the great red center. In that place where our forefathers once stood feeling so breathless and melancholy and oppressed by all that vastness, the hot air builds up. Low-pressure systems moving along the cookie-crumb coast of the Great Australian Bight suck the furnace southeast, down and out across the mallee scrub and the grass plains and towards the blue mist, the ocean, the main attraction of the city coasts. A few weeks of that, and the heat has dried up everything. The soil is dry, the air is hot.
The accumulated leaf litter makes the center of the city just as susceptible to fire now as the rural fringe. Eucalyptus leaves pile up in quick-burning tinder all across the ground. Their oil disperses in the air. A blueness cloaks the city.
Then dry lightning strikes and the land flames up.
Once alight, the bark on the eucalyptus breaks free. Carried by the wind, the burning embers fly through the air, extending the fire front. The sky fills with smoke and then it goes black. Carbon monoxide from burning plastic makes the air toxic to breathe. Oxygen is sucked from the air. This causes a roaring sound. The trees turn black, crack, and explode.
The fire encroaches upon the city. Flames race down Parramatta Road and Broadway and the Western Distributor and make their way towards the Harbour.
If it’s bad enough, the fire can produce its own weather system. The pyrocumulus is very like the cloud that follows the detonation of a nuclear bomb. It can reach the edge of space, throwing pollutants into the upper atmosphere. That smoke plume spreads out across the Pacific, towards Asia and the Americas, wreaking havoc on Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Santiago.
The fire burns out, eventually. In the winter, the more frequent storms pummel the skyscrapers that haven’t burned. The charred remains of metal topple over in the high winds, knocking each other over one by one. Sulphur-crested cockatoos, lorikeets, and kookaburras make their nests in the broken windows of buildings. Lizards and possums nest in the drywall. Vinyl and aluminum sidings peel off and lie bleached of color in the sun. Within a few years, vegetation sprouts in the ashy ground. New growth rushes in. Lantana climbs the sandstone, roots splinter the cliffs, and the wilderness takes hold.
The following afternoon, I packed up my room. I piled all my things onto the bed and bookshelves, and in the glare of the midday sun I walked down to the old hardware store on Redfern Street and bought sugar soap, a new sponge, and a pole to reach high places.
At home, I poured the sugar soap into a bucket and washed down the walls. Every scrub of the sponge against the plaster broke apart old dust, cobwebs, pollution from the street. All of it trickled away. I washed until the walls were clean and almost completely white. I moved the furniture and did not bother moving it back. The removal team coming the next day would see to all of that. When the walls were clean I put the clothes into large plastic laundry bags, and began to stack the books into boxes.
I pulled the bed away from the fireplace and began to clean it out. The empty white space was covered in dirt. I listened to a shifting and scratching, up there in the bricks. And then with a sudden movement I ripped the cardboard from its place. A stream of disintegrated newspaper clippings and feathers and dirt heaped themselves onto the plaster. I tore up the cardboard and flipped it into one of the garbage bags sitting by the door. I looked at the fireplace and knew that I was done. No more.
I sat the cleaning spray down on a box of books and closed the door and descended the staircase of the house I was leaving.
I went outside to sit on the stairs leading down to the street. Night fell. A man set out wooden chairs in front of the art gallery. A Mercedes driver yelled at a mechanic across the street. I went walking. I waded through the people on Cleveland Street smoking outside bars. The traffic was thick and moving rapidly. A group of girls laughing together didn’t see me, and knocked against my ribs with their elbows. The cars screeched by. White and red.
A dog barked at me with wet yellow teeth, and through the doorway of a pub I saw three sad-drunk men sitting at the bar. Each alone, chin down, clutching at a warming pint. Pop songs soundtracked their sitting. “I got a love that keeps me waiting,” “Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young,” “You’d better run, better run,” On Redfern Street I passed a woman with her head hanging. Her underpants were strung around her ankles and she was squatting against the wall of the Centrelink office. She rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, her eyes fixed on nothing in particular. Her knees splayed out, her arse close to the ground. I watched her. It struck me in this light that she was filled with some kind of pheromonal strength, the same strength that a wild animal might possess. All flesh and blood and breath.
A long, thick stream of piss hissed out of her body and trickled along the ground. At last, when she was done she wiped herself with her hand.
I might have felt disgusted, or even afraid. But I didn’t. Instead, it felt more like relief. She stood up, hiked up her underpants, and continued on along the street. I watched the woman walk away, and understood. We are meat, and flesh, and we are liable to scar. I was an animal, just like her.
The night got quiet.
I kept walking.
But there was a dread singing through the wires strung between the telegraph poles, in the breeze off the water and floating in electromagnetic waves beaming across the sky, a dread directed by forces I could neither see nor touch but which seemed as palpable as government, as humidity. The dread moved in the inconsolable vowels issued by passing cars and the twisting bodies of bats moving across the sky. I stood at the corner of Regent Street and closed my eyes, trying to play games with the dread. I stepped out onto the asphalt. My body understood that it was dangerous to close my eyes and walk blindly across the street, but a second person existed inside the body, one that walked up to the danger and licked it, touched it, embraced it. When I opened my eyes the world was just the same, nothing had changed, no car or lightning or knife man had come for me. The city was still a small and insignificant place on a stretch of shore in the far-right corner of the map, a city nobody remembered, or cared to pay attention to, a place that I was leaving. A cat outside a chicken shop. Trains rumbling below the street. Emergency. Phones ringing.
In the second-last week of November, when the jacaranda blossoms were beginning to rot on the pavement, I caught a bus to Coogee and walked across the hill and down to Gordon’s Bay. There had been storms and torrential rain the night before, and trees had fallen through roofs in Kogarah. The storms had made everything strange. Cockroaches crept along the footpaths, moths besieged the streetlights in the evenings, the cicadas screeched. The heat rose up in radiant waves from the bitumen, and everything was wet. Nobody was sleeping well. At night the storms rattled the paperbark trees against the mulb
erry and banana and palm, and in the dark rooms, in the curtained light, it seemed like the din and noise were beckoning you outside into the downpour. Just to witness the spectacle. The morning was sticky, but the sky was flawless, and the water in Gordon’s Bay was clear. It was my last week in Sydney, and it was my birthday.
The morning was still early. I walked along the boat racks to get to the rocks where a body could stretch out flat on a towel. The storms had washed a scum of trash and mounds of seaweed onto the small stretch of sand. It was tangled together with chip packets and bottles of beer, milky condoms and bloodied Band-Aids. Nobody swam there. You had to walk farther out onto the rocks and dive off to swim. I stepped slowly over the waterlogged planks of wood, barefoot. I was watching my feet. Then I saw them.
On the rocks, in the boat racks, in the seaweed, bobbing at the edges of the sand. Everywhere. The dead bodies of birds. Their gray wings jutted out. They were large, but windswept and battered-looking. The birds hadn’t yet begun to smell.
Farther along the rocks the bodies dispersed. There weren’t any in the middle of the bay, in the swimming parts. In fact, the bay looked preternaturally clear. Obscenely blue and lovely. I laid my towel on a rock and rubbed sunscreen into my shoulders.
In front of me, down at the lower rocks where people dived into the water, I watched a girl in a paisley-print bikini inch herself into the sea. A moment later she had climbed up the rocks away from the water’s edge. She looked flustered, and repulsed. She had almost swum right into one.
The Inland Sea Page 19
