Our upstairs neighbour had agreed to take care of Leroy while my husband and I were away. As my husband had arranged automatons to both feed and water, little real caretaking was required. Rather, I explained sheepishly, Leroy was a soft-minded child who required regular attention and reassurance of his general goodness as a person, or his mental health would suffer, and he would stalk up and down the apartment, crying at intervals, and our return would be received with displeasure.

We demonstrated how, if one were to tap the foot of the bedframe expectantly, Leroy would make a low trilling sound before obediently jumping up and promenading back and forth, tail twitching with anticipation. Then, my husband explained, one could brush his dark luxuriant fur, first the top, followed by the underside, while proffering admiring compliments. If our neighbour found any of this ridiculous, they hid it politely. The three of us — my husband, neighbour and myself, stood and watched silently as Leroy swished back and forth in front of us for several minutes — before I realised, panic descending, that I was running late for my flight and had just missed the bag drop.

Charging towards the gate with a thumping heart, I had an unstable feeling of being poised on the threshold of something, roiling with potential for things to go in any number of directions, like an agitated glass of water, its contents ready to slosh around violently. It was the same feeling of potential that hovers over the paper before the pencil makes contact; even if everything goes right, you bear the responsibility of bringing something into the world, some statement or line that didn’t previously exist, and ought you to have borne such a thing?

[…]

These festivals have a blinding effect on me; the constant movement between venues, between the darkness of the backstage zone and into the spotlight and back again, smiling and socialising, receiving and giving breathless compliments, leaves me feeling dazed.

With almost an hour free between engagements, I struck out in the direction of the art gallery, a few streets away. As I moved under the shadows of tall sandstone buildings, I noticed a stranger was following me. He lurched in an unpredictable, zigzagging trajectory, a pinball chaotically bouncing off street trees, water fountains and rubbish bins. About twenty or thirty metres separated his body from mine, and while there was nothing at all connecting us, I felt his gaze — red, swivelling — on my body as I walked as quickly as possible.

As I turned down North Terrace the street was quiet. I consciously positioned myself so there were a few people between us. I looked up and down the street, hazy with heat. The steps of the Parliament building were baking in the sun. There was nowhere to take shelter. The space between myself and my pursuer was diminishing.

When I reached the corner of King William and North Terrace, there was nobody between us. The stranger was approaching. Sweat was dripping down my back. My back was aching, I leaned back and used my arm to support my lumbar, the elbow crocked at a right angle.

The stranger was next to me. Now he leered at me. Now he was in my face.

When you stand like that, it means you want me to look at you. His voice was nasal, searching. I wondered if people from Adelaide tended to speak at a higher pitch than people from my hometown. When you stand like that — he placed his hand on his hip and pitched his voice even higher, a crude imitation of a woman’s posture —  it means “ooh, look at me, look at me.”

I was silent for a moment, but I wanted to appease him. I changed my stance to try and appear more neutral. I remembered a therapist once explaining this to me. When threatened, people respond in four main ways: fight, flight, fawn and freeze. Perhaps my reaction to unwanted attention was always to fawn or freeze, as I knew I would be physically unable to fight or escape quickly enough.

Does it? I responded lamely, unable to think of a better answer.

Yeh, you want attention. He leered at me again, his eyes were unfocused but he made a kind of kissing shape with his lips.

It struck me, with a bolt of shame, that this stranger was right —  that the spotlight of attention was something that attracted me, was something that also repelled me, that I did need in some sense — or else why had I come to the writers’ festival? Why did I make things, and then get up on stage to talk about the things I had made, and the thoughts I had about them? Was this vanity — was I not exactly like the caricature of a woman who sought attention with tremendous need, that this sex pest had just acted out to belittle me?

You should come with me, I’ll show you how to live, really live! I love Chinese food and I love Asian women! There was a bizarre light behind his dim eyes, as if he were imagining some kind of fluorescent utopia in which I represented an unlimited bain marie of beef in black bean sauce and special combination fried rice. He lurched towards me.

I unfroze slowly and took several steps backwards, away from him. When I was a few metres away I turned and promptly power walked as fast as I could away from him, braced to feel his hand on me, braced to have to fight this stranger, and I felt around in my bag for my keys, arranging them in between my fingers. Once I was halfway towards the festival centre and could see the entry, I started to run, not looking back.

As a child and then a young adult, I had experienced many such interactions; to be followed and harassed in the street was nothing new to me. But I had thought that, close to forty, no longer lithe and cute, and etched with frown lines and jowls, I was finally now free from being made an object.  What I wanted was such a minor request, so little to ask: to be safe and have control of my movements, to imagine without limits, what might be possible in my life.

I felt only fear as I trotted back to the festival, but I could feel the small sharp angry stone that would grow inside me. I turned the stone over and over, studying it from every angle. Why was I like this  — unable to express my wrath in the moment or rebuke those who would assault my dignity — then simmering in a state of silent rage for the rest of my life, until the next outrage came to take its place?

[…]

The automated doors of the theatre foyer dilated soundlessly, drawing me into their air-conditioned embrace.

The last event of the festival was about to start; the fuzzy red velvet of the seats enveloped my body like a womb. As I observed the theatre from the vantage point of the balcony an image came to me of these writers as a strange species of bird which was usually solitary, but would flock together seasonally in different nodes of a network which spanned the globe. Some would never lay more than one egg, and show that progeny off forever, giving the same spiel at every stop. Others would have to periodically nest for long periods, choosing remote or out-of-the-way hiding places, quietly meditating over a long gestation and incubation, beak bowed, eyes closed, while wind and rain battered their fragile bodies.

Some were travelling elsewhere to appear at more festivals, residencies, teaching engagements, talks; others were returning to the nests from whence they came. I optimistically imagined the sumptuous interiors of Architectural Digest — built-in libraries with movable ladders, plush armchairs, glossy, well-fed pet cats ensconced on brocade ottomans for the few successful, monied authors — and share houses, small apartments and clutter for the rest of us.

In the hubbub of the closing party I slipped away, back to my quiet hotel room. I didn’t turn on the light. I brushed my teeth in the dark. As my head touched the pillow I fell into tormented dreams.

[…]

I awoke at half past three, an hour before I had set the alarm. The room was still dark. I felt something move inside me like a tide, and my heart skipped a beat.

As I boarded the plane I said a quick prayer to Bodhisattva Jizō (地蔵), protector of travellers, women who are pregnant or in childbirth, children and the dead. I imagined his round, compassionate face, his closed yet all-seeing eyes. I was always moved by the tributes left to Jizō — stuffed animals, tiny clothes, snatched fragments of the fabric of childhood — from women who had had abortions and miscarriages, or were mourning children.

I gathered my long skirt in one hand and rearranged it around my legs as I sat down, before quietly clicking the seatbelt into place.

The sun rose as the plane ascended into the same slowly brightening sky. Jizō, protect us as I move through the clouds. Hold me in your ancient stone hands.

[…]

As I exited the airport I was enveloped into the island’s humid embrace. My husband had sent a driver to pick me up, and I was swiftly delivered into a clean, new-smelling SUV.

You got kids? the driver inquired, smiling into the rearview mirror.

No, I responded slowly, not yet.

But you’ll want to do it soon, won’t you? You and your husband?

I don’t know. I’m not sure if I want to.

What do you mean? — he was incredulous —  Why wouldn’t you want to have a family?           

Your life … it doesn’t begin until you have a child!

I was startled. I had a medieval feeling about childbirth, that it was mystical, unimaginable and would probably end in my death. I had always thought of a child as representing a kind of end to my life; at the very least, it would signal the end of my youth and independence and shatter my career prospects, which were slim to begin with. The only thing about me which I considered to be of any value, my impulse to make things, might not survive such an eruption. I would be irrevocably changed. I tried to convey these feelings and stumbled.

Haha, the driver chuckled. Of course you don’t know what life looks like after you are a parent. It’s impossible to know, so what’s to fear?

To have a child was to continue a loop, to form another link in the chain after myself, my parents and my grandparents, and was in some way my acquiescence to this infinite chain. I hadn’t been successful at much in life, but to be a bad parent would be a failure and shame beyond what I thought I could bear. Suppose I had a child and then learned I wasn’t up to the task? How could I be ready for a lifelong commitment?

I have a friend of about my age who has struggled to commit to anything, any career or home or relationship. As a consequence her life is less tethered than mine, which could be diagrammed by my commitments to my husband and my job which I hated but was too scared to quit; and indeed sometimes I envied my friend her freedom and longed to wake up to a blank slate, in which I was free each morning to decide what to do with myself and my life. I once expressed this envy, and she responded with such bitterness and anger that I feared I had killed our friendship, and it would be my fault for misunderstanding so comprehensively —  that what I saw as her rejection of opportunities and relationships, her pursuit of freedom, she felt as an unending succession of painful failures and struggle to know what she wanted to be or do with her life; and in fact what I saw as her freedom was felt by her to be a cage in which she was a captive wild animal.

I suppose that was exactly my fear, I tried to explain, the unknown, the open water. What if I wasn’t a good parent, what if I repeated the very same mistakes my parents had?

He scoffed. Mistakes? They can’t have mistaken too badly, can they? You’re here, aren’t you?

This was such an unexpected response to what I considered my legitimate concerns that I was momentarily struck dumb.

[…]

When I arrived at the house, my husband and friend seemed pleased to see me, but impatient with hunger. We walked to a restaurant where we ordered huge round thali trays like silver islands populated with small metal bowls of curries and condiments. Our friend related their findings from the last week in the area, including the best beer to drink and what they had been eating for breakfast.

The local news was that a volcano called Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki had erupted on nearby Flores Island. Several people had died, killed by lava, volcanic ash and boiling rocks propelled through the air. Also, the remaining ash clouds in the sky meant air travel had been temporarily paused, and our flight home might be postponed to the week after.

I was quiet after dinner, head full of the volcano spewing its hot dark plumes and molten rock into the sky. The ground, which I always thought of as solid and inert, was in fact churning, heaving with movement, pregnant with the earth’s potential. I lay in bed thinking about the tension of the tectonic plates beneath us, grinding against each over, powered by ancient motivations.

The more one thought of it, the crazier it seemed to drive a car, build the foundations of a house, have a child, or plan for anything at all. At the same time, I felt some strange sisterhood with the volcano. Perhaps she was justified in her eruptions. Perhaps she grew tired by the way we humans trampled the ground, immiserated the animals and depleted her forests. I turned over and nestled into my husband, drawing his hand over my belly.

[…]

We walked to the beach at dusk. It was seething with people with Western accents and thrumming with reggaeton versions of pop music, a music festival without centre. A circle of young people sat around singing awkwardly to an acoustic version of The Cranberries’ Zombie. The air was remarkably still, as if the beach were a backdrop for the theatre of thousands of tourists exchanging their currency for this vacation experience.

The sky was overcast. The sea was pewter-hued, sepulchral, and the horizon was represented by a meeting of two very subtly shifting, almost imperceptibly different shades of grey.

We stood in the water up to our ankles watching the sun set. There were signs erected, at regular intervals in the water which stated NO SWIMMING in a number of languages. There were people and their children and infants swimming all around us.

My friend started to share a memory with me of how he had kayaked in the Rottnest Channel Swim, an annual swim between Cottesloe Beach in Perth, and Wadjemup, a stretch encompassing about twenty kilometres of sometimes tumultuous sea. Swimmers often relay and are accompanied by kayaks and boats, for safety and navigation. There’s a crazed moment when the swimmers all leave the beach and the boats have fifteen minutes to find their swimmer — if they don’t find them during that time, they are disqualified. This brief, frantic period of pandemonium, of seeking one’s co-adventurer, is merely the beginning of a long parallel peregrination often lasting eight or nine hours.

My friend described his friend’s family who swam the race, the friend and her sister, their father and uncle had decided to swim it as a relay. But gradually, as they got out into the open water, the older swimmers grew tired, and it was the young women, the friend and her sister, who started to swim longer and longer legs of the relay, giving their father and uncle greater periods of rest.

We watched the tide come in, and the staff of the beach clubs began packing up the banana lounges and umbrellas as they were one-by-one threatened by the rising water level. Tourists grumbled as they brushed the sand off their pale and sunburned bodies, as if the cycles of the sea were an affront to them personally.

That reminds me of an annual ritual I had witnessed in Greece — I said — the celebration of the Epiphany, which commemorates Christ’s baptism in the River Jordan. The priest throws a small timber cross into the sea, and the brave, willing youths of the village all dive in and swim out to grab the crucifix, a religious race to be the first to touch the symbol of Christ.

I thought of myself as a solitary swimmer who had long treaded water, swimming around in circles, uncertain of my direction or purpose in the water. But now I felt some novel and violent movement inside me, compelling me to find my co-adventurer, to swim out, to reach out to touch their hand, provide and receive guidance and navigation, and hope that when we emerged out of the waters at the end of the race, that we recognise each other immediately; of the same flesh, borne out of the same water, exhausted but ready to go on, and on.