I looked up to the cliffs and the high, battered bush. The birds were everywhere. Each year they migrated south from the sea between Japan and Alaska, down to Tasmania to breed. But there were no longer enough fish in the Bering Sea for them to eat in the northern summer. The birds became exhausted. They lost their sense of direction in the storms, and in the night they had wrecked themselves on the rocks.
I leaned forward again to look at the bird. It had drifted towards the sand and the seaweed. The girl in the bikini lurched past me to where she had left her towel. We sat there, apart, each of us looking around at the massacre.
I lay on the rocks as the sun grew warmer, staring at the sea. The water was so clear in the deepest part of the bay that I could see all the way down to the sand. There was no death there. No sea snakes that I could see. When the heat got too much I stood up and picked my way down to the place where the girl had earlier stood to dive. The corpses of the birds had drifted. The bodies had washed up on the sand, where nobody lingered for long. But the scum of waste was still there. Weeds and straws and Band-Aids and bottles. Sydney’s great epilogue to the squall.
I slipped on the rock beneath the surface of the water and scratched myself as I slid in. I held my breath and dived beneath the waste at the edges, swimming out into the middle of the bay. I floated.
With the water in my ears all I could hear was the thud of my heart. Bobbing there between air and water, I felt that there were no barriers between the water and me. The light pierced my eyelids. The seagulls swooped low near the rocks, feeding off the bodies of the fish, and the birds, and thrashing up the bay.
The thud of my heart. Bird cries.
There were cuts on my legs from when I’d slipped on the rocks, but the salt water didn’t sting. I swam out farther, away from the shore, letting the tide take me out to the threshold of the bay and the beginning of the open water. The birds called. The light dipped. No one held me back.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Greatest thanks to my agent, Anna Stein, and to Lucy Luck, whose encouragement, notes, and wisdom have been invaluable. Thank you to Laura Macaulay and Alicia Kroell for believing in this book, and to everybody at Pushkin Press and Catapult. Thanks to the thoughtful copyediting of Robina Pelham Jones and John McGhee. I am ever grateful to Anne Meadows, whose notes and advice helped me give this book its final form and shape.
The Inland Sea owes much to the guidance and encouragement of my teachers in Columbia University’s writing program, in particular Ben Metcalf, Leslie Jamison, Heidi Julavits, Rivka Galchen, and Sam Lipsyte. Thanks to Alex Abramovich for being a sounding board and a port of calm in the storm. I am especially grateful for the precious gift of space, which allowed me to finally finish this book.
I am indebted to all of those who read and offered their thoughts at various stages of the novel’s composition, including Landon Mitchell, Laurel Squadron, Nicola Goldberg, Heather Radke, Tyler Parker, Lizzy Steiner, Daniel Pearce, Miles Coleman, Daniel Lefferts, Dana Hammer, and, most especially, Cam Scott. To my most cherished reader and greatest source of faith, Madelaine Lucas, I can never thank you enough.
This book is indebted to too many books and writers to list in full, but the following deserve special acknowledgment: The Bush by Don Watson, The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, Sydney by Delia Falconer, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland by Ross Gibson, Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales by John Oxley, The Water Dreamers by Michael Cathcart, Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis, The Death of Nature by Carolyn Merchant, and The Big Ones by Lucy Jones.
Thank you to Amina Cain, Lexi Freiman, Kristen Radtke, Josephine Rowe, Jessi Stevens, and Jeannie Vanasco.
This book is dedicated to my mother, whose support of my writing has been vital, and finally, and most important, to Hayden Bennett, without whom I would not have written this book.
MADELEINE WATTS grew up in Sydney, Australia, and currently lives in New York. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and her fiction has been published in The White Review and The Lifted Brow. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It, was awarded the Griffith Review Novella Prize. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Hub. The Inland Sea is her first novel.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2020 by Madeleine Watts
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by One, an imprint of Pushkin Press
First published in the United States in 2021 by Catapult
All rights reserved
Extract from The Vivisector by Patrick White. Published by Vintage.
Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 2011.
Extract from “Agamemnon by Aiskhylos” from An Oresteia, translated by Anne Carson.
Copyright © 2009 by Anne Carson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Extract from Preoccupations in Australian Poetry © The Estate of Judith Wright, reproduced with the permission of The Estate of Judith Wright.
ISBN: 978-1-64622-017-5
Cover design by Jaya Miceli
Book design by Tetragon, London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936788
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