The Inland Sea Read online

  For Hayden,

  and my mother

  Actually girls don’t change, I think, from generation to generation. They’re like moths blundering about in search of their fate. You know how moths hit you in the face—soft velvety things—and are sometimes killed . . . Nor do I think girls grow up into anything very different from what they were. They’re still blundering about after they’ve promised to honour and obey. Oh, I don’t mean they’re dishonest—not all of them—but they’re still quivering and preparing to discover something they haven’t experienced yet.

  —PATRICK WHITE, The Vivisector

  Australia has from the beginning of its short history meant something more to its new inhabitants than mere environment and mere land to be occupied, ploughed and brought into subjection. It has been the outer equivalent of an inner reality.

  —JUDITH WRIGHT, Preoccupations in Australian Poetry

  Kassandra: “Who cares? The future is coming.”

  —AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon (trans. Anne Carson)

  CONTENTS

  Heat

  Flood

  Tremor

  Wildfire

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I couldn’t sleep at night. The heat rose in the evenings, the old bricks of the house absorbed it, and after dark my bedroom felt as thick and quivering as an oven. Open windows didn’t help. On the seven o’clock news there was always somebody making a show of frying an egg on the asphalt of an outer-suburbs driveway. Watch this! they would shout to the camera. Yolks slipped out onto the bitumen and sat trembling there beneath the burning Australian sun. The people on the news were always grinning, nearly naked but for a singlet or a pair of shorts, sweating into their sunglasses. Nobody ever ate the egg.

  By the time the fireworks had blown up over the Harbour and the city was wasted and the New Year begun, I had handed in my final papers and my academic life was behind me. The open wilderness of adulthood stretched ahead like so much wasteland. During the sleepless days of that last hot summer I had no money and nothing to do, but the bus that left from Cleveland Street could get me to the beach in half an hour. The air along the coast in those months was full of seaweed and car exhaust and the fires that were burning on the edge of the city. Rounding the cliffs, I could walk through the parklands and along the ocean path to the secluded rocks and boat racks of Gordon’s Bay. I passed weeks there, stretched out on a towel, reading novels and jumping into the deep water when the heat became unbearable. In the end, they would say that this January was the hottest month on record, in the hottest year on record, although they’ve said that about every year since. But this was the last January I sweltered through before I left the city entirely. I don’t know anything about those other summers.

  The heatwave broke with a storm. The squall bore down from the Pacific, sweeping southerly winds across the city and snatching frangipani flowers from their branches. The convulsion of the storm struck in a way that seemed only natural, following as it did the tense weeks that seemed to justify the punch to the back of the head, the child left locked in the back seat of the car, the missing girl.

  The morning after the storm arrived, I lay on the rocks beside the bay, and at last I was able to sleep. When I woke up I was overheated, my body covered in sweat. I picked a way down the rocks and surveyed the brown storm surge mucking up the edges of the water. I took a leap. The day was still, the rocks deserted, the splash could be heard all over the bay. I dived deep under the storm surge and closed my eyes and began to swim out. When I’d gone far enough into the depths, I turned and looked back to where I’d been. From above, the palms and bougainvillea erupted in great green and pink swarms from the cliff face like some madman’s garden of Babylon. Seagulls circled overhead. I floated in the clear water in the middle of the bay and thought that I wouldn’t be so afraid to be lost at sea. The smooth blue expanse couldn’t hurt me, not the one I imagined stretching out for miles and miles, all the way east to Valparaiso, north to California, the tips of Alaska and Russia and Japan, eternities away from here. The sun beat down. I treaded water and spread out my arms. And I observed just then, as though waking not out of, but into, a nightmare, a long yellow-and-black thing swimming in the water.

  The sun glinted on its scales, and it took me a moment to see it for what it actually was. I had never once seen one in the wild. When I was a child my mother had told me how deadly they could be. She had seen them, coiled on the seabed in the north of the country, and washed up on the beaches of the remote Pacific islands she had visited with my father when they were happy together. That sea snakes rarely struck didn’t make them any less threatening. If they bit you, the neurotoxic venom would begin to work through your limbs before you could make it to shore. Blurred vision, numb throat, a prickle in the soles of the feet, and then a burst of pain in every cell of your body, like a fire sweeping through the nervous system and destroying everything in its path. I looked at the water, flat and silent, all around me. I had swum out too far. The bay was empty. I knew that it was the most vulnerable parts of the body one needed to guard. They bit you in the thin, fleshy spaces between your fingers and your toes. I drew my hands into fists. I kicked with my toes clenched. I swam towards the rocks, moving through the water as though I were punching it.

  The snake had been carried into shore overnight, swept along from warmer depths by the storm.

  The snake was weak, but weak things lash out.

  Its body rose and fell with the lap of the tide, and it moved with its mouth open.

  HEAT

  I had moved to Redfern twelve months earlier, at the beginning of my Honours year at the university. When I first moved in my mother helped me drive my things across the city from Ashfield, where I’d grown up, and carry my boxes up the fifteen steps to the door. As she left that first day she looked around at the old terraces and the old Greek lady next door watching her husband watering the tomato plants, and the group of men loitering on the corner by the housing commission apartment blocks. She squeezed my arm and walked down the staircase to her car. Be careful, she said. Please. We had never lived apart before, and she believed the place was dangerous. She was concerned about the mold that grew beneath the baseboards and she was skeptical about the efficacy of the cast-iron security door and she was afraid, more than anything, of the neighborhood and its people.

  Redfern still had the reputation of being a sordid area of Sydney, even if it was not as dangerous as it had once seemed. The suburb was filled with decaying Victorian terraces and housing commission towers where graffiti caked the open doorways. Overdoses still trembled in the parking lot behind Surry Hills Shopping Village when I passed by with Coles bags full of carrots and hummus and rice. Bed sheets covered windows. Iron lace rusted into the pavement. Verandas were converted into kitchens without the council much caring. But things were changing. The junkies weren’t gone, and neither were the indigenous communities in The Block. Students and artists in search of cheap rent lived there, as ever they had. But by the time I moved in there were cocktail bars and cafés and seven-dollar loaves of bread. On the edges of the neighborhood floorboards were being polished and courtyards were being landscaped. Old factories had been demolished. High-rises were rising. A television newsreader living on the eastern fringe suggested that his side of the neighborhood be renamed South Dowling to spare it from the stigma associated with the rest of Redfern.

  The house where I lived was on Elizabeth Street, far from the South Dowling side. All the terraces on my side of the street were built so that they were elevated above the foot traffic, as though the original architects had been afraid of the squalor they suspected of festering at street level. As though the cockroaches couldn’t fly through windows open that h
igh. Each house was reached by a staircase of fifteen steps, spread at intervals along a sloping incline patched with vegetation and cement. The cockroaches still got in.

  The Elizabeth Street house was old. There were forever cobwebs in the corners of the living room and an orange mold that bloomed in the bathtub. The green paint on the baseboards had begun to peel away to reveal something black. The washing machine had a sticker at the base that read “Made in West Germany,” and of the three of us who lived in the house none of us had been alive before the Berlin Wall fell. I lived upstairs in the front room and I was higher than every tree and building around me.

  The men I lived with had gone to high school with my friend Maeve, and I never knew them particularly well, not in all the time I lived there. So it was in the bedroom that I spent most of my time. I tacked postcards of Carol Jerrems and Bill Henson photographs to the walls and hung a pink paper lantern over the bare light bulb. My bed was covered by a yellow eiderdown and jutted out into the center of the room. When I moved in, I supposed I’d be staying.

  ____________

  There was a square hole cut into the wall behind my bed that had once been a fireplace. Somebody, long before I got there, had taped up the flue with a piece of cardboard. When the weather turned windy, black dust would sometimes breach the barrier and turn up in the hollow white space behind my pillows. The pillows, too, would fall into the fireplace hollow during rough sleep, or rough sex. The fireplace bothered me. Sometimes I could hear the sound of something that wasn’t the wind or shifting cardboard, something that might have been an animal, but anyway sounded alive.

  On my first night in the house I tried to remove the piece of cardboard in the chimney. Somebody had stuck it to the plaster with pieces of masking tape. When I prodded at it the cardboard flipped out and along with it a mound of dirt and soot. Once the soot had settled I peered into the flue. Its edges were lined with newspapers, yellow at the edges before they blackened and became indistinguishable. I reached out and picked away at them. I could make out one of the pages, just barely. A marriage announcement for a man and a woman, the wedding held at St. Barnabas’s Church on Broadway, in the winter of 1932. A jolt of air sent forth another tumble of dirt, and the marriage announcement disintegrated in my fingers. I reached for the cardboard. I taped the chimney back up, and left the newspaper in fragments on the floor.

  Now, a year later, the money I had saved was rapidly disappearing. I wrote sometimes, for magazines and literary journals and the street press, but it was never enough to keep me in rent. My student allowance had dried up with the end of semester and the official termination of my student status. I was paying full fare on the train.

  In a word, I was drifting.

  I had spent four years of university preparing to spend the rest of my life in the sandstone sanctum of academia. For years before I enrolled, I had passed by the golden buildings on the hill in Camperdown and imagined it to be a kind of utopia where men and women spent days on end walking the flagstones and making sense of all that was senseless. I thought it was where I belonged, and I had no plans that extended much beyond the reaches of its architecture. All year, my thesis supervisor had spent our weekly meetings laying the groundwork for my doctorate proposal. She said more women were needed to stop the discipline turning stale. Young women with good minds. Like me. But by the time November arrived I had applied for nothing, had written no proposals, had already missed deadlines. I sat in her office on that final afternoon surrounded by stacks of ungraded essays she had organized into neat rows across the rose-print carpet. A poster of Nick Cave glowered down from the corkboard above her desk. I looked out through her window to the already fruiting trees in the courtyard of the Woolley Building, and everything looked brighter, and more vivid, as though it might contain significance. Because I had never thought that I might miss it before. My supervisor hummed, and conceded, when I pointed out how neurotically inarticulate and exhausted I had become, that it might be best to wait a year.

  I walked out of my supervisor’s office and down the long hallway to the wide-open exit. I sat down on the brick wall and lit a cigarette, although it was not a designated smoking area, and considered how senseless the last year I had spent in the Woolley Building seemed suddenly to be. The university was very tranquil at this time of day, and there was nobody to see me. My legs were crossed too tightly, and I imagine if someone had passed by and noticed I would have looked as though I were disappearing into the bushes growing up against the wall. I did not appear, from the outside, to have entered any sort of wilderness. But half a year ago I had sat on this same brick wall outside the Woolley Building waiting for a man, with a sense of anticipation and purpose that, by this afternoon, I had lost entirely. Its essential train of logic had been exposed as absurd, along with all the patterns of reason that I had believed I could rely on. I did not know what the future would look like anymore. I smoked the cigarette and the sun beat down and then I walked to Glebe, to buy the first novel I would read on those rocks in the summer at Gordon’s Bay.

  By January the money was gone and I needed a job. The heat was relentless. We were told that the intense weather signaled the end of “stationarity.” The thousand-year storms no longer happened every thousand years. They seemed to occur yearly now, maybe more, along with the heat, the fire, and the floods. I went to bed at night with all the windows open. Bats conspired outside in the trees.

  Directly across the street from my bedroom there was a car mechanic’s called Sydney Prestige. They announced their “excellence in European auto service” across the awning, but they were a constant source of angry arguments from irate BMW drivers claiming negligence and fraud. A paperbark tree grew out the front. Its roots broke open the pavement and tripped over the kids and the drunks who passed by. When the summer began, I tried to take charge of the windows. I dismantled the plastic blinds, bought curtain rods, and hung long strips of white fabric over the glass. I had thought that the white light they collected in the afternoon sun would quieten the room. But all through December the white fabric got soaked by afternoon storms and turned brown in the exhaust from the buses that stopped on the street below. After a while the curtains were filthy, and I stopped closing them when I undressed in the mornings. The men working across the street at the mechanic’s would look at me when I passed naked in front of the open windows, but nobody ever called out or said anything.

  When I was a child a high fence had shielded my bedroom window, but my mother would insist that I close the blinds when I took my clothes off. People might see, she would say, looking into the thick shrubs that lined the fence. The seeing—it was evident to my mother—was a danger. But I never felt endangered when I undressed in front of the open windows in Redfern, and in the year before I left Sydney it stopped occurring to me that perhaps I ought to.

  It was Maeve who told me that there were openings at the call center. I thought perhaps the job would be stressful, but I reasoned that it would only ever be temporary. And besides, the fact that Maeve already worked there all but guaranteed that they would hire me.

  I was interviewed in a beige room on the seventh floor of a building in Darling Harbour, in the office of the country’s largest labor hire company. Four women were hired that day, and I was the only one who had finished high school. I figured out later that the hiring policy was based on the likelihood that the applicants would stick around, and the four of us didn’t look like we were doing anything else. As we left the group-interview stage and emerged from the elevator into the rush-hour foot traffic on Market Street, a girl with bleached hair and three inches of black roots told me she had failed the spelling test, but was pleased that they’d told her she’d receive a call in a couple of days. She made a sound that I think was meant to be laughter. I told her I had studied literature, and she asked me if that meant books.

  The actual office was located on the other side of the city. It spanned the second floor of a skyscraper on the corner of Bathurst and Eliz
abeth Streets, overlooking Hyde Park. Technically, the office was on the same street that I lived on, and I could walk to work, but my stretch of Elizabeth Street was all kebab shops and bars and brothels, as though in the half hour it took to walk down Elizabeth Street to my house the city was gradually loosening its belt and taking off its clothes.

  The proximity of the office to Hyde Park made it easy for me to imagine that I might enjoy the job, and in the morning it was soothing to see busy, professional people making their way through crowds that streamed steadily along beneath the Moreton Bay figs that lined the street. But the managers drew the blinds at dusk and, besides, most of the time you were not sitting near the window, and the window was not much of a reprieve from the trilateral smog-colored workstations and the fluorescent lighting and the constant ringing of phones.

  After a morning of training that encompassed company policy and instructions on how to navigate the procedures and regulations of the nation’s largest telecommunications company, a woman with corkscrew curls and broken teeth named Pat showed me how to use the desktop computers where we received the calls. I was handed a headset and placed at a workstation. I started answering the phone.

  People were meant to dial 000 but every single person who called was in a panic, and some people who had been confused by watching too much American television would slip up and dial 911 instead. It didn’t matter. The calls came through anyway. Every emergency phone call in the country came through to centers in either Sydney or Melbourne. In these centers spoke the first voice a person would hear in a crisis. After establishing whether someone was in need of the police, the ambulance, or the fire brigade, it was my job to determine a person’s state and town and connect the calls through to the dispatch centers.