Home > The Inland Sea(6)

The Inland Sea(6)
Author: Madeleine Watts

It’s from Flaws in the Glass, Lachlan wrote below the photograph. Because you said you like swimming.


The first time I kissed him we were in the side passage of his house in Erskineville. He pushed me away. The next day he said it was because I had been too drunk. And in truth, I never remembered first kissing him.


This was a time in my life when it was difficult to stop drinking once I’d started. I understood that the drinking made me vulnerable, perhaps even pathetic, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop because part of me believed that if I went on and on, past the point where my legs lost their coordination, when the syllables of words crumbled in my mouth, and my thoughts escaped the prison of coherence, then I would come out on the other side of the blackout into a new world. Maybe not better than the one I’d left, but new, and just for me.

____________


When we finally went to bed together I undressed, turned the light out by his door, got under the bedclothes, and lay beside him.

Do you always come to bed with your tights on? he asked.

I shook my head. I did not usually sleep with my tights on. I just didn’t want to seem brazen.

He coaxed the tights down my hips and examined my face. His fingers traced out the curves and ridges, as though there were a difficult cartography to my features that he was trying to learn by hand.

I had never been looked at with such focus. It was the same focus he had on his face when he read, and what person doesn’t want to be read? And I was still open like a wound, back then, still formless, or forming, but young enough to believe in all the romance of the poetry I loved, the kind of belief that puts you on a river and makes you follow it down.


One night cutting through the Eveleigh railway yards towards his house he stopped me and made me turn to look at him. A violet light from the city skyline cast a glow through the shapes of the retired train carriages. I tripped over broken cement and dead-end tracks.

He held my face in his hands. Hey, he said. I think you’re somebody who hasn’t been loved nearly as much as they ought to have been.

Don’t, I said. That’s not. Don’t. But I did not mean for him to stop kissing me, and he knew, because he did not stop.

Are you OK? he asked.

Yes, I said, and he looked very serious. Why?

Are you pregnant?

It was a strange place for such a conversation. The Eveleigh railway yards was a part of the city you could easily imagine yourself being taken, held down, raped, murdered, a scream-absorbing place where nobody would find a trace of you until the unbearable break of day.


He ended it as we walked up Cleveland Street to City Road on a Friday afternoon. It had been two days since the procedure. The disorientation of the anesthetic had faded away, and most of the pain, but the bleeding had started in the shower that morning. Viscous dark red clots that slid down the inside of my thighs and dispersed in the pooling water.

I waited. We were almost at the intersection.

Then he opened his mouth. He began to speak. And it didn’t matter what he was saying so much as the sound of his voice, and the way it struck something warm and deep that dismantled me. His hand broad on my back. The things he had said in the Eveleigh railway yards.

I’m going to start seeing somebody, Lachlan said. Somebody else.

Oh. Right, I breathed. We had only been doing whatever it was that we were doing for two months, maybe less when I counted it all up. We’d never talked about what it was. We continued to walk up the hill. His hands were pushed deep into his pockets.

Just don’t let it be somebody I know, I said.

He was quiet for a moment. He smoked a cigarette and he did not touch me.

I just think this woman is really worth trying for. You know, I usually fuck things up. But I’m going to try. I want to be a good man, with her. Good. And who knows, I might fuck it up again. But I really need to try with her.

OK, I said.

____________


I think now that I had waited for years to be disassembled like I was in that moment. I thought being hurt would give my life an interesting kind of texture, the way good surfers are always marked by the scrapes and scars of battles fought with the waves. I believed it would give me something to write about.


Now, five months later, in the back of a bar in Redfern I opened my mouth to speak but he shook his head, looking up towards the opening door and the first glimpses of a pleated dress and a completely dry and guileless pretty face. Cate, the neatly dressed poet from our Australian literature Honours seminar he had wanted, in the end, more than me.

Or no. He would object. I misquote him.

This is what he actually said: I want both of you in completely different ways.

Although it seems now that the things he said mattered less than the way I received them. There is so much that I cannot fully remember, but I can hear him speak even now. For the rest of my life I will be able to recall his voice, the sheer density and tenor of the sound and all the ways in which it affected me. As a child it always seemed to me that part of the pleasure of reading a book was the freedom the reader had to imagine a person or a place in any way they chose. But I am selfish. I do not want you to imagine freely. I want you to be able to hear his voice as I did then—his voice, and nobody else’s. Except my talent for description fails me now. Because all I can convey is an indefinite shape of a man saying, Hey you, as I stood up to go, and making it sound like there was only one “you” in the world, and he did not want to see her leave.

 

 

One afternoon before a six p.m. to two a.m. shift, as I walked up Elizabeth Street towards work, my phone vibrated against my elbow in my bag.

Maybe this is a dumb thing to say, but I’m glad we’re speaking lately. I was worried maybe we weren’t, generally.

I let the text linger on the lock screen while I considered its meaning. Yes, me too, I eventually replied.


In the call center, the silent television broadcast a special half-hour news segment devoted to the heatwave gripping the city. The news crews were assembled at Bondi Beach. Cameras panned across glistening bodies, the waves, a woman fanning herself with a magazine. Bloody hot, mouthed a surfer when asked for his thoughts. Ambulance crews raced towards Circular Quay and Parramatta to tend to the elderly, the pregnant, and the very young. In the western suburbs dogs and babies were discovered comatose after five minutes left inside locked cars. A Bubble O’Bill melted into the hand that held it. Children raised under drought conditions ran squealing through sidewalk sprinklers, the use of which was forbidden by state law. At Taronga Zoo, the lions were given milk-flavored ice blocks. Carrot-flavored ice was fed to the zebras. In Penrith, for the first time in living memory, the cricket was canceled due to the heat.

On the phones there were calls for firefighters. Fires had spread across the south coast, from Bega to Cooma, to Tarcutta and Dean’s Gap. More than 135 were burning across the state, forty of which were uncontained. A woman calling from Lane Cove told me she wanted to confirm with the fire service that she had chosen to go instead of stay. I lived through the fires of ’94, she told me. It’s like a war zone. Smoke everywhere. I’m not going through that again.

Every part of me wanted to tell her that I, too, could remember the fires of ’94. Remembered the smoke and the heat and the roads blocked off and no way home. But I was not allowed. I connected her to the fire brigade for Lane Cove, New South Wales.

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