He told me he had an idea of where to take me. I used to come out here when I was a teenager and smoke, he said. It’s like a small piece of wilderness in the middle of the city.
We headed north along the coastal path, around the cliffs. He led me towards a fence hung with a sign that advised you to beware of uneven terrain. We jumped it, and walked along a sandy trail through wild grass and bush until we came clear out onto a sandstone bluff overhanging the rim of the Pacific. We climbed down to a lower terrace so that the cliffs formed a shelter around us. Below, the sea surged against the rocks. He laid down a picnic blanket and I took off my shoes. He brought out bottles of beer from his bag as I leaned forward to watch the water surge below.
Earlier that morning a woman hiding behind a closed bedroom door in the Northern Territory had called. She whispered, My husband, he has a knife, he’s trying to hurt me. I’m hiding beneath the bed please come quickly. And her voice broke as I asked her where she was. Darwin. Fannie Bay, she whispered, Northern Territory. Shit, I can hear him coming down the hallway please hurry. The police answered, she began to scream, I read out the job number over her cries and hung up as the phone made the clattering sounds it does when it falls out of a hand.
But I did not mention the call, or the fact that it was all I could think about as he told me about his impending move to the Northern Territory. I had learned by then that it was best to keep such connections to myself. Instead I listened while he told me about growing up on these beaches, the spiritual retreat down the coast he had just returned from, the drive back through bushland all ashen and white from the fires that had burned through a month earlier.
I could remember how bushland looked when it was ashen like that. The fires of ’94 had burned out the land around the house where I once lived with my parents. Those weeks were the first in living memory when fires had entered the city itself. When Sydney was threatened by total isolation, all the roads closed, cut off on all sides by the flames, when ash rained down and the sun turned red and we lived under orange skies. Even now I could remember driving through Ku-ring-gai National Park, three weeks after the fires had burned out, nothing in sight but blackened branches raised up, as though they were trying to clutch at something just out of reach. My mother had explained that the fire didn’t kill the bushland, that nothing was dead, although dead was how it looked.
Because the country had evolved to burn. The seedpods of the banksia and the bottlebrush could open only in the intense heat of the fires, could spread their seeds only in scorched earth. The bush needed to self-immolate once in a while, and a catastrophic wildfire was par for the course, was in fact necessary. I remember looking out through the windows at the burned trees and thinking I had never seen anything so impenetrable and beyond my ability to understand. And I thought, not that I could die out there in that landscape if I was cast out into it, but that disappearing would be so easy. That the disappearing would be the temptation.
Mark smiled. Yeah, I used to go up to Ku-ring-gai a lot as a kid too.
I nodded. I sipped my drink. I didn’t think that had been my point.
Below, the water surged against the rocks. I noted that this place was absolutely not a wilderness, as he had promised. It was a stretch of bushland along a cliff face in the middle of the city. Planes flew into Kingsford Smith overhead. Container ships progressed along the horizon. From the cliffs I could see south along to the Coogee headland and, turning my head, the mouth of Gordon’s Bay. I thought of the sea snake from the beginning of the summer, but I did not mention that either.
We drank the beers, and watched the water. When he kissed me, he laid me down on the rug so that my head lay right at the edge of the cliff face. He undressed me without my being quite conscious of it, so that in the end I was lying on the rock naked but for my bra.
Is it safe here? I asked.
Yeah, of course. It’s fine. I’ll protect you.
What if there are snakes?
There aren’t, don’t worry.
His breath roared in my ear, the rasp of belly hair against my skin. The longer he moved inside me, the more I felt my body being pushed to the edge of the cliff, the louder the waves crashed on the rocks below. I pressed the small of my back flat to the ground, I gripped one hand against the sandstone, the wind took a lock of hair and it went over the edge, but I did not.
Later, when the sky turned dark, we had sex again in the parking lot at Clovelly Beach, in the back seat, sitting up and facing the rippling sea through the windshield. Mark was worried afterwards, because it was his parents’ car and the upholstery smelled like semen. We lingered in the parking lot for fifteen minutes with all the doors wide open, to air it out in the breeze.
If I was afraid of snakes on the cliff, I put it down to the reptile exhibit.
Not long after our house was burgled when I was four, my mother strapped me into the front seat of the car and drove us across the city, down Anzac Parade, to the termination of the loop at La Perouse. It was a Sunday afternoon, and this drive was meant to be “a treat.”
We parked by the edge of the headland, got out, and walked towards a rust-colored corrugated-iron fence with a rainbow serpent painted on its side. People were already beginning to congregate around the fence. A yellow hand-painted sign stuck up by the railing read “Cann Brothers Reptile Exhibit.” The light was dipping west over the snakepit.
In 1909, the snake men set up at a pit at the termination of the tram loop at La Perouse, where the Pacific eases into Botany Bay. In the pit, the family’s collection of lizards and snakes crawled and reared and sometimes lunged open-mouthed at the men’s leathery skin. The snake show had happened every Sunday, every year, with different men.
The Snake Man entered the pit and the crowd applauded. Old-timey music played over a crackling sound system. The old man wore a baseball cap and long pants. Children hung over the sides of the fence. Tourists clicked the buttons on the black cameras slung around their necks.
The man had five large burlap sacks and a long stick with a hook in his hand. The burlap squirmed. One by one he loosened the openings of the sacks and the snakes dropped out. A little boy next to me smeared a rainbow Paddlepop into his gaping mouth. The snakes reared up on release and writhed across the pit. I was pressed against the fence, my mother behind me. The Snake Man took some of the lizards and a python, offering them up for us to touch. The Paddlepop boy and I held out our fingers to stroke the reptiles like we were petting a cat. The scales were cold, and hard, and I didn’t mind the lizards but I did not want to touch the snakes. My mother pushed me from behind, urged me to stroke its scales. But I wouldn’t, and he moved on, back to the squirming sacks.
The Snake Man pointed to the painting of the rainbow serpent on the corrugated iron. He explained, for the benefit of the tourists, that the rainbow serpent had a special significance to Australia’s first people. The snake was the creator god, but, like other ancient gods, the serpent was sometimes angry, and vengeful, and acted without mercy. Sometimes, the snake could be an omen of danger. He would avenge the land and punish those who had trespassed upon it.
Now, people can be scared of snakes, the Snake Man said, but more people die in this country by getting hit by lightning than from a snakebite. Because, see, what’s remarkable about Australian snakes is how few people they bite given how venomous they are.