I walked home along Elizabeth Street at two in the morning with my keys wedged in between my fingers. Green trails of slime dripped down the sandstone walls of Central Station. There was nobody else out on the streets. I followed the lampposts along the hot, dark stretch of Elizabeth Street, up the concrete staircase, to the front door and the second wooden staircase that led up to my bedroom. I locked the door and got into bed.
But I slept badly. The lights from the traffic and the Mascot-bound bus rotated across the walls in phosphorescent blue stripes. Two drunks screamed along the street. Ambulances and fire engines careened out of Cleveland Street all through the night, beelining a course into the south. I knew that each and every one of the ambulances and fire engines had been dispatched from phone calls put through by somebody I worked with, and knew that in a few hours I would be back there, in that office, summoning sirens. Before dawn the birds began to call. The house creaked. The room began to heat up. The sheets clung to my legs. The light crept across the floorboards in weak but insistent increments. I watched it move.
My friend Clemmie stood in her kitchen chopping watermelon, dropping the slices into a plastic container as I explained that this was a Good Idea. This job thing, this plan I had devised. More and more I was living in the dark, aquatic place in my mind where such plans were defined only vaguely, by sentiments such as “leave” or “retreat” or, simply, “no.”
Clemmie had known me longer and better than just about anybody. She and I had met the first day of high school. She found me pressed against a door frame picking at the starchy pleats in my new school skirt before our first class. She was already comfortable in the blue waistless thing, and she told me she liked my hair. She was a tall, glowing thing that I envied as soon as I saw her. Even then, at twelve, there seemed something luxuriously wild about her. She smelled of Herbal Essences and yogurt-covered muesli bars and liked to expose the blond down on her shins, which she did not shave off until her second year of university.
That job sort of makes sense, Clemmie said. If you can hack it. I couldn’t last at something like that. Just listening to all those people. People screaming and dying. I don’t know how you aren’t crying by the end of every shift. How long are you going to do it, do you think?
I don’t know. Not long. The money is good. I’ve been able to save some already.
She looked at me skeptically and wiped the wet knife against her shorts. Beads of sweat rolled down the backs of her knees. So you’re making yourself miserable for an indefinite period, for the sake of some cash? And for what?
I mean, I’m not miserable. I’m fine. I have time to write. But yeah, I’ll have cash. If I’m careful. It seems like a good idea to get out of Sydney for a while. That’s probably what I’ll do.
That seems like a good idea. Like, if you’re not happy here. Seems like all those friends you had from your course last year have fallen away. And the rest. The bad things. Well, you know what happened. You’d go to London, then?
Maybe London. Or America.
America? Clemmie turned and dropped the knife into the sink, along with the chopping board, pink and wet and fleshy as though she had just been butchering meat. Drops of watermelon juice dotted her toes, and she bent down to wipe them with her hand. She thought for a second while she sucked the juice from the heel of her palm, then shook her head. London makes sense. But I can’t see you in America.
“In the beginning all the world was America,” said John Locke, long ago. A man who never set foot in the place, but believed in fresh starts. Only later, once my plans had come to pass, could I see that younger version of myself grasping for fresh starts like they were lifebuoys, and judging that America was the only one worth grasping for.
Five o’clock came. The southerly breeze began to insinuate itself through the wall of heat surrounding the city. The air glowing amber and thick with bushfire, we took the container of watermelon and a bottle of vodka and inched bare legs onto the hot leather surface of the seats of her car. We drove the back way through St. Peters with the windows down. At Coogee we parked five blocks from the beach. We ran barefoot on burning asphalt down the steep hill past blocks of flats and scrubby bush, running through stalled traffic, long hair streaming over our shoulders, along the sandy path by the barbecue pits and pines and the rippling grass and descending, at last, to the fine golden sand beyond which there was only water. The surface of the sand scorched the soles of my feet. We flung down towels and Clemmie stayed put while I ran. I jumped down the sandbank, running through the glistening bodies on their towels and into the waves.
I jolted to a stop. Taken aback. The rolling waves were, it occurred to me, the only boundary I could be certain of.
And even that boundary could be breached.
I swam out until I could no longer feel the ground beneath my feet. In the water, dipping and coming up again, I was swept for a moment into a sudden panic. I felt nothing below me and nothing to the sides. I was not afraid of the rip tide, of being pulled out. Yet I believed, in that instant, that there were snakes in the water, all around me. And the fear, given recent events, seemed entirely rational.
It had been like this since we were teenagers. Clemmie and I went to Coogee, to Maroubra, to Bronte, but never Bondi, and once we arrived the setup was always the same. While Clemmie tanned, I would swim out beyond the waves. She would watch me from the sand. Occasionally she would yell at me from her towel when I’d gone out too far. I would hear her voice—swim back!—pressing her untied bikini top to her small, flat breasts.
Looking back towards the shore now I could see her gesture for me to come closer. Swim back. The turning tide of early evening made her anxious. All that heat and beauty, like the beach was opening the velvet curtain and inviting you to gaze upon the tawdry lushness from which you might never want to turn away.
She had reason to be afraid that I would swim out too far, because I had done so before. When we were fourteen years old we had walked out into the waves at Bronte Beach. Both of us had grown up swimming the city beaches. We knew that Bronte had rough surf, that the rips could be fierce, and that the flags always narrowly delineated the safe part of the beach. We knew how to handle ourselves in the water. Knew that you don’t fight against a rip if you’re caught in one. You have to surrender to the direction of the tide, swimming across it until you’re free of the pull. But that afternoon when we were fourteen we had not paid attention to the tides. Clemmie followed me out, deep into the water. But then she began to panic. We’re being pulled out to sea, she said. No we’re not, I replied. But we can’t touch the bottom anymore, she said. We were standing five minutes ago. She turned and began to swim back. Her strokes led her nowhere. No, I told her. Don’t do that. You swim across the rip, remember, not against it. I acknowledged that we were caught in a rip, but I continued to tread water. I did not see any reason yet to be afraid. Clemmie flailed her arms. She called out. And then a lifeguard appeared on a jet ski, telling us to jump on. Oh no, I said, we’re fine. You’re caught in a rip, he shouted. Hop on, you’re going to get pulled out. Clemmie hopped on, but I refused. I did not want to be rescued. Especially not by him. I believed that the water would treat me kindly.
Clemmie knew even then that it would not. She pulled me onto the jet ski and the lifeguard took us back to the shore. You always swim out too far, she said.