Shallows

  Queenie nodded thoughtfully. Music seemed to vibrate, incoherent, in the whole building. The sleeping bodies did not stir. ‘My grandfather did something like that, once. My grandmother was driving the tractor. She got caught on a slope, hit a stump that lifted a wheel. It rolled and she got crushed underneath. He was an old man even then. He suddenly knew something was wrong, came out of the sheds, saw the wheel of the tractor up in the air, and ran. When he got there he saw her legs sticking out, all bloody. He did his block. And in his rage he somehow lifted the tractor and dragged her out. It was no good, though. She was dead. But I’ll always love him for it.’ She saw it all as she spoke, as though she had been there, observing from the vantage point of the windmill. It had become her personal memory.

  ‘Yeah,’ Marks said, steepling the fingers of his hands together. ‘Well, likewise. If a whale is sick or being chased or anxious, it will do similar things, like try to get up out of the water and walk away like its ancestors must have done. They want to be what they used to be. I guess the old myth of the Immortal is what people must flick back to in those situations. You know, be Adam or Eve for five seconds, and then back to real life.’

  It struck Queenie as a bizarre thought, that her Poppa had the strengths and virtues of Adam for those seconds during which he freed his wife. That’s what heroism is, she thought, people saving each other’s lives, memories of Eden. For a second or two. But for whales? Did they have an Eden, or a Fall? She tried to remember the Sunday School stories, but nothing came to mind.

  ‘You got kids?’ she asked him.

  ‘Nope,’ he said, rolling his empty tumbler in his palms.

  ‘A wife?’

  ‘Used to have. Why?’

  ‘Dunno,’ she shrugged.

  ‘I guess Brent would call me pelagic.’

  ‘I suppose it makes me pelagic too,’ she said.

  Marks scratched his tanned chin, dubious. No, he thought, you’re anchored all over the place, girl; it’s written all over you.

  She found Georges Fleurier out on his balcony with a bottle of Chardonnay and a glass like a rosebud. His eyebrows lifted perceptibly when she joined him at the rail. Lights came on along the freeway and around the river. The air was still and cold. They were alone and the music from inside was muted by the glass doors and the heavy drapes.

  ‘Well,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ Fleurier said, glancing briefly at her.

  ‘Another party.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Queenie took his bottle and swallowed a mouthful of the wine which had a dry, metallic taste, and she looked out across the river to where the lights of the old mill had begun to burn. ‘So, what’ve you been doing these weeks? Nearly a month. You didn’t answer my messages.’

  ‘We were frozen. The unions have a ban on us. No one will transport our Zodiacs from Sydney. No one will supply to us here for fear of strikes. Nonsensical. They broke up our demonstration at Parliament House – did you see it? You should have been there. A fiasco.’

  ‘This whole thing’s a fiasco, if you ask me.’

  Fleurier poured himself more wine.

  ‘Four weeks,’ Queenie murmured. ‘A whole month. Nothing. That’s what I’d call a balls-up.’

  Fleurier sipped.

  ‘I mean some poor sod has donated money, more than one I s’pose – and what for? A first-class holiday and all-week parties. That’s expensive. And bloody wasteful.’

  ‘In terms of life, yes. They have been killing five whales a day, sometimes eight, off Paris Bay.’

  ‘I meant money,’ Queenie said.

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘Well,’ she waved her arm behind, ‘who did you justify all this to?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Oh, come on, now. Surely there’s a Foundation or something. This is big money.’

  Fleurier sighed. His impatience was audible. ‘I am the Foundation, Queenie, and it is peanuts money.’ He permitted himself a graceful smile as he rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Queenie let out a long, thoughtful breath.

  ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘where do you get enough to spend it like this?’

  ‘Hardly a polite question,’ he said.

  ‘Well?’

  He smiled, humourless. ‘I have many interests.’

  Queenie took another gulp of the wine; it warmed her stomach. There was a great doubt welling in her and it made her fearful.

  ‘What are you in this for?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, fame, fortune —’

  ‘Be serious.’

  ‘Well, only a deep sincerity about this cause would keep me stranded in this little town, I should think. Not one of the world’s most compelling cities. Not one of the world’s cities, for that matter. I have enough money to be elsewhere, you know. It is summer in the northern hemisphere.’

  ‘Well, why spend all the money at all? Why not stay in France?’

  ‘I haven’t been to France since I was sixteen. We are here to stop Paris Bay. The whales, remember?’

  ‘I was beginning to think I was the only one who did. What are the whales to someone like you?’

  Fleurier smiled; it was a savage smile. ‘You mean someone with money? The whales have become my life. They are the most amazing creatures alive. They have intelligence, wit, compassion. There is much that is mystical about the whale. One day, if we keep them alive long enough, we will discover it, and perhaps learn something about ourselves. They are almost magic, the friendly giants of our childhood dreams. Think of the things the whale has seen, the civilisations coming and going. They are observers, perhaps even recorders. They pre-date us. They are the biggest things in existence; there is nothing bigger than the whales. We take all our measurements of size from them. They harbour secrets. I want Man to know them one day.’

  Daylight was gone. The lights of the night marked the expanse of the city. Queenie was struck by the beauty of its glitter, its size and strangeness. The air was cold. She felt her skin prickling beneath her pullover. The alcohol left a smooth feeling in her head. Something far away told her lightly that she should be worried. She had listened to Fleurier with a forced scepticism, wanting to sneer, but remembering all the time those dreams of the whale lurching up across the paddocks, spiracle whistling like wind in the eaves, to take her Poppa from his bed, to bring a sign from God, to crush their fences and roll through the swamp.

  ‘Well, sitting around having parties seems like a pretty hopeless way to save whales and discover eternal secrets. I can’t see much hope.’ She sighed.

  ‘My God, I thought tonight of all nights your hopes would be boundless.’

  ‘Why tonight?’

  She saw his face in the faint light through the drapes, puzzled, a little unsteady from the wine.

  ‘Hasn’t anybody told you?’

  Queenie squinted, sniffed.

  ‘Someone anonymous has supplied us with Zodiacs and motors and all the rest that’s still in Sydney. That’s why I thought you were here. Tomorrow we leave for Angelus.’

  Looking out across the lit city, Queenie felt a surge of hysteria. Back. She found herself counting and suddenly recounting the days since her last period.

  XV

  Drizzle descends lightly, silent as dew. Des Pustling puts his tongue out and takes from it the ugly yellow molar he has worried out of his bloodless gums in his reverie. Below, the mustard surface of the Hacker creeps downstream.

  Pustling shakes moisture from his hair and turns his collar up. He remembers the time his father brought him to this bridge the year before he died. Those times were the beginnings of prosperity after the war and even these small properties had begun to yield consistently. ‘Keep an eye on this land, Desmond,’ his father had said with his polished pigskin shoe up on the rail. ‘This will be the place to come to. Watch these people. A lot of old dreamers squat out here on these banks mulling over their lost years and fortunes – even their innocence, I don’t doubt. They’re a useless
lot, but restless at times. You’re best to leave them be useless as they are now because bad times’ll see them itching. I remember farms burning out here, with only the river safe. Made the whole place black and ugly, uglier, for a good time, though it did help with clearing shanties and bad fences and the like. One day you’ll change Angelus, son – you’ll make a permanent mark on it. If you can’t change the name or the history, change the geography, move the town away from itself. God knows, nothing will get them away from their houses around the harbour with its stinking flats. It’s as though they believe the Second Coming or the Loch Ness Monster will erupt from the harbour itself and they daren’t move an inch. No, you can’t change the people. But you can find new blood, attract people from outside the district, perhaps, I don’t know. I’m an old man. Ah, these people’re petty and proud, bred of bad stock, I suppose, and Angelus shows all the blemishes; but it’s ours, and that counts, Desmond. It’s good for a man to build and create, good for a man to reap. Reap and sow, Desmond, for we are the reapers.’

  Des Pustling does not regret being childless, heirless. Since learning of his own birth and his mother’s bloody, pale death during it, the thought of childbirth has repelled him. And the idea of passing Angelus on discomforts him. As a young man it took him some time to resign himself to the siring role of sex, from which he was saved during his university days by his dropping teeth and foul breath; the women he paid in parks and backyards were merely receptacles on their knees in the dark, nothing like the pale flesh and blood he saw in photographs of his mother. The image of Marion Lowell’s naked belly comes to him. He shakes moisture from his hair. There’s prime acreage, he thinks coolly.

  Pustling has never been certain of his sterility; he has never consulted a doctor for a final opinion, preferring to gamble with the awful possibility of linking himself with childbirth. But it is a safe gamble, he knows – more than safe, and he likes the odds. Odds, he thinks, are something else to compete with. A little minor competition – like Pell, he thinks gloatingly – is good for the system. Innocents: they take life so seriously! Old Pell will have it all on my desk within the week. Competition, safe competition, is grist to the mill, he thinks, turning, walking back along the bridge to where his BMW is parked. Like these other innocents, he muses wryly, and their rubber boats that cost me a small fortune to procure. If they only knew. Safe competition to activate the town a little. And people say I don’t have the affairs of Angelus at heart. Good grief, they forget it’s my town!

  In the car with its windscreen wipers screeking, Des Pustling takes one last look at the Hacker in his rear-view mirror as he heads towards Angelus. He thinks of the housing estate he has in mind, and the thought comes to him: ‘The only competition you have, Desmond, is the ghost of your old man.’

  XVI

  Cleve passed two days inert. He read little, slept less. Much of the time he imagined himself bitten in two, torn, mauled. His daydreams were full of speeding shadows. At home on the third day, Saturday, he watched yachts straining across the harbour in a dying wind, and he worried about his meeting with Ted Baer. All my life, he thought, there’s been some bugger mistaking me for the real thing. At school Cleve was one of those students upon whom teachers pile their hope. He tried, but he was barely mediocre. At university his manner led tutors to believe he harboured great potential and they marked him mercilessly in their disappointment. Employers picked him from the queues, seeing in his eyes speed and capability. There were many employers, many queues.

  Still, he thought, I did last two minutes in the water.

  That night Cleve went back to reading in earnest. It was a busy night on the jetty, though, and he did not begin to read uninterrupted until after midnight.

  July 7th I asked Hale some questions concerning Churling this morning, and he acted in a most peculiar way asking me to ‘leave us alone’. This evening he was found too drunk to cook supper and has been locked in his hut until he sobers.

  July 8th, 1831 No whales today.

  July 9th Nothing.

  July 12th Fighting. Leek has knocked out the front teeth of Mountford. Headsmen have taken no action. They are drinking our rum.

  July 13th Hale always drunk. We eat poorly.

  July 14th, 1831 Last night I dreamed the white light returned and took the camp up in a sudden flurry like the Rapture and left me on the beach asleep. I woke with a start.

  July 15th, 1831 Whales today. Woke to find a small pod couched in the lee of the headland. The boats worked all day. In the afternoon I rowed. We stalked a cow and her calf around the bay, manoeuvring and plotting until near dark when we caught them in shallow water near the western headland. The cow threw herself on top of her young to shield it, and while she was thus exposed Cain reared up and sank his harpoon deep into her. A brief but spirited tussle ensued, and she was lanced in an exhausted lull and died quietly with a sign and a slick of blood. Wearily, we towed her in towards shore and the fires on the beach, and were astounded and appalled to see the great carcass slide away and sink slowly in eight fathoms, almost taking us with it. There was enough rope to play out to the beach where we fastened it. We will wait for her to putrefy and bloat and rise again to the surface whereupon we shall haul her the distance to the shore with the windlass. By which time she will smell most foul.

  July 17th, 1831 Hale rummaged through my kit and stolen Churling’s clothes and his notebook. What drunken foolishness in this?

  The Family of Man is due tomorrow. There is a feeling of gloom in the camp, the men feeling certain she will not come. Behaviour these past days has been quiet enough, though sullen in the main. The natives have not been seen. No one speaks to me. Mr Jamieson smiles when I am near. He thinks me a fool, I hear. Perhaps it is this diary which makes him hostile. I spend more hours each day in the lookout where even here the stench of excrement pervades all. I am doing a poor job as lookout, writing here as I do, but at least it is safe from taunts and glares, and whales do not interest me.

  All I yearn for is the return of our ship. I will desert, but where? Hobart Town? New Zealand?

  We have become animals. No – they. Filth, and hopeless barbarity.

  July 18th No ship. Much rain.

  July 19th Rain, whale sighted but lost.

  20th   Rain. Daren’t write more.

  21st   Rain.

  July 22nd Cain, Leek and four other men from Finn’s crew have deserted. They stole the muskets, shot, powder, flour, meat, salt, sugar and tea. Hale of course in a drunken stupor offered no resistance when they broke into his hut. There are sixteen of us left, enough for two crews, but Cain and Leek were our only remaining harpooneers. Our food is almost nil. Please God bring the Family of Man soon!

  July 23rd, 1831 We will eat whalemeat, it has been decided. There being no weapons, we cannot kill kangaroos for none of us are skilled in hunting or snaring them otherwise. Fish are being caught in only pitiful numbers. It is obvious that Cain and company will strike out for Angelus Harbour, surely several days’ journey on foot. One would think their needs to have been better suited by stealing a boat and sailing west.

  Jamieson and Finn argue about who will be headman and which boat will be used. With the Family of Man overdue they have become nervous, loath to use both boats. Most of Finn’s men are gone or dead. I’ll wager Jamieson will be headsman and Finn will wield the harpoon.

  July 24th, 1831 This morning we hunt our first meal of whale. As I predicted, Jamieson is headsman and our boat is to be used. And I must go for that reason. Smithson and Doan are lookouts. It must be a long time since Finn aimed and threw a harpoon. I cannot ignore the great feeling of doom in my bowels. It is raining. We will be called any moment. Why do I feel the need to stow this diary and my other belongings in my kit? Deliver me, Lord! And I do not want to eat of Leviathan.

  So the journal ended. Through the cracks in the tin walls signs of light showed and became more insistent. The harbour was veiled in a mist that moved
close to the water catching brief strains of sunlight which withered in the oncoming cloud. Cleve stretched and yawned until his ears seemed to split. Makes no sense, he thought blearily.

  The remainder of the leather-bound journal was empty yellow pages. Cleve ran his finger along the groove where pages were missing, or was it just the spine beginning to break? I do not want to eat of Leviathan. Something ominous about it all, he thought. Must be another volume somewhere. Cleve paced, waiting for the arrival of the day man, all his nerve ends strangely alive.

  Gulls stirred from their pickings of bait scraps and pollard as Cleve approached. Cleve ran at them, chased a mess of wings along the jetty, yaahing, kicking at them, pleasantly stimulated. In the weak dawn of 19 June the harbour water was slick and jetties, wharf, seedy flanks of ships, clouds, were lightly brushed with the gentle tones of a watercolour. Behind him, down on the oiled surface of the harbour, the Paris IV slit the water’s skin nosing towards the harbour entrance.

  In the kitchen Cleve made himself a cup of tea from the kookaburra tin his mother had given him: the brew was the one he had been raised on. Stirring sugar into it, he read the labels of Queenie’s exotic blends – Jasmine, Lemon Grass, Alfalfa – teas she bought from the corner of Richardson’s store where all the eccentric goods were kept: chopsticks, taco shells, copies of Bagwhan’s Breakfast Moments, home-brewing kits. He snorted.

  A ship’s siren and the shift siren from the canning factory keened a duet.

  ‘Nathaniel Coupar,’ Cleve said, listening to the strangeness in his voice.

  In the darkness of the attic his mind was alive with thoughts; each pillar of rising dust seemed to unearth a new query, more questions to put to Nathaniel Coupar, about Bale and Churling and the others. He lanced the torch into the darkness, turning over old prams, blinds, shoeboxes, curtain rods, hatboxes, flags, rat skeletons, open crumbling boxes of Biggles books and Enid Blytons. The black dust filled his lungs until his chest was heavy with it and he was driven back down the ladder to the kitchen and more Bushells tea.