Shallows

  A tug moved across the harbour. Small craft made for the harbour entrance. Traffic stirred in the town. Cleve sat, grime-faced, by the window, lost in thought.

  I saw drizzle descending, and, hanging from a bough near our hut, a pair of trousers – they looked almost too small for a man . . . I passed the garment on my way up to the hill without touching it. There were drops of dried blood on the legs.

  He poured himself another cup and stirred it langorously. You knew whose they were all the time, he thought; you knew, you bugger. They were raping him, and you knew. And never did a thing.

  He drank his tea down in one gulp.

  It took him just over an hour to find – a rat-eaten, mildewy lump of paper, torn and wrinkled. He wiped it down and took it below.

  Before opening it – he knew it was the journal, the binding was the same, the same dull heaviness, it made the same heavy feeling in his bowels – Cleve washed himself clean of the black dirt and went downtown to buy some groceries. Goormwood Street was empty, except for the few cars parked outside the church. The delicatessen was open. The Bright Star was unofficially open, swing doors ajar. He returned home with a loaf of bread, a pepperoni and a flagon of invalid port. The bread was warm and he broke it open with his hands and ate it dry, squeezing it into pellets in his fists. He unscrewed the port and took a long draught. Then he opened the old book.

  XVII

  William Pell watched television. He was too tired, too old, it seemed to do anything else. The news programme showed footage of Angelus Harbour, and Pell recognised the robust outline of Ted Baer’s launch Bull moored at the town jetty.

  ‘The mayor of the little harbour town, Mr Herb Higgins, said today that the whole town was behind Mr Baer’s effort. He said the townspeople had a great affection and admiration for Mr Baer who has visited Angelus each year since 1967. The mayor said that if this year brought the world’s largest caught shark to Angelus, then the town would run riot with celebration.’

  Pell turned the television off with his foot, thinking maybe he wasn’t too tired or too old after all.

  I can still pray, he thought. There may be nothing else I can do for this lunatic town, but I can still pray.

  He shuffled into his room, feeling his body so far away, and his God so close.

  XVIII

  Cleve drank port from a beer mug as he flicked through the loose sheaf of papers inside the cover of the book: drawings of boats, sketches of men and scenery, monograms, doodles. In the corner of one page was a stylised representation of a man in the mouth of a sperm whale, a look of terror on his face. Cleve got up and went to the mantlepiece in the living-room: it was the same design as the scrimshawing on the whale teeth Daniel Coupar had given them. Sitting again, he drank more port and turned to the first page. The handwriting was more leisurely, long fluid strokes that gave the impression of confidence and age. To his surprise, Cleve found the first entry was dated 22 July 1875. Forty-four years, he thought, blowing away the fine pollen-yellow dust.

  July 22nd, 1875 I write this as a man past his middle years having worked too hard and seen too much and understood too little, and have resumed this journal, abandoned through circumstance and grief many years ago, because now I have some leisure time and vacant moments I fill with thought and speculation. My life has never brought the fulfilment I expected of it, even though I will not die a debtor like my parents, or a prisoner like so many before me in this colony, or a squalid whaleman breathing the ocean into his lungs at the end of a long swim; but I discover a difficulty in even showing gratitude for my survival. Since the days I came here as a young man, since my marooning, I have ceased to live, continued merely to exist. Life has disappointed me.

  The period since July 24th, 1831, has until now remained unrecorded. It will be useful to ponder in these my declining years. The value of a man’s labour in his prime is that it saves him from excessive contemplation.

  The morning of 24th July, 1831, we decided we would eat whaleflesh. Kangaroos were elusive and fish were scarce of a sudden. We rowed out into the bay. There was little wind and the rain had for a time abated. As we rowed, Finn and Jamieson argued over strategy. Despite my sense of foreboding, I felt drowsy. When they breached with an almighty hiss not forty yards from us, I almost dropped my oar. The man behind me cried out in fear. Jamieson sent us about as the whale sounded unseen. We peaked for a moment while Jamieson found his bearings, and then we followed the smooth, marbled patches on the surface which give mark to a whale’s movements; but there was no need to give chase, for in a moment the whale erupted from the water directly ahead. Although I could not see it, facing the stern as a man rowing must, I surely heard the water rolling from its brow like a waterspout. I saw our own steady wake and the clamped jaw of Jamieson at the sweep. We pulled hard at his barking.

  So hard did we pull, our speed rammed us right against the beast and we came aground on its back; and as it reared, we lifted free of the water, oars tipping, a chorus of frightened bellows, above which came the plangent, anonymously spoken word: ‘Sperm.’ Even before we smacked back into the water upright and afloat, Finn thrust out, off balance, sending his harpoon deep into the back of the monster.

  There was no time for a change of men for lancing. This was not the flurry of a sleepy right whale. Finn was suddenly in the water, falling behind as the line hissed out and I felt the wind of it against my shoulder. The keel seemed to be breaking up, such was the speed at which we raced through the steely water, clutching at our oars, clutching at anything. From my position amidships I saw the whitened face of Jamieson who held the sweep arm as though it was his only connection with life itself, as though it might not be of such desperate import that we kill this creature for its flesh, but that his fight was a duel of steerage with the Evil One himself, that his soul was in the balance.

  With good manila rope disappearing by the fathom into the deep, we skated out towards the dark line of rain-bearing weather near the horizon. The sperm, unwavering in its dash, carried us like a sleigh full of grim travellers right into the very teeth of the approaching darkness. No one made motions to sever us from him. We sat like dead men, like shades. Rain lashed the water and contributed to the deepening swill at our feet. I feared we would begin to spring timbers as I held on, feeble youth that I was, and we took more water as the monster bore round to the west, leaving us to take the seas on the port beam. I yelped when a large sea lifted us high and sent us skittering into the trough of the next, all but burying us in seawater, slowing us to a creep and catching all hands unawares with a sudden resumption of our former velocity. Hence, Mountford’s unfortunate end. I had no time but to see his hat bob once in the tempestuous wake. Oars rattled away, mine included. I resorted to bailing and summoning the attention of the Almighty.

  Before dark another two men were lost. The hurried fastenings of the rope to the stem-post had by then tightened into a steel-hard knot, an unalterable connection. The hatchet was gone from its niche, though none of us would have had the mind to use it and free ourselves of this tireless beast had it been there, I am sure. No lantern was lit, and likewise no other provisions were brought out. It was as though we were all entranced, stunned into inaction.

  Once when the whale’s pace flagged conspicuously the trance weakened and an effort was made to retrieve rope in the hope of gaining an upper hand, but the effort was clumsy and weak-willed as though all hands believed that it was more than a whale pulling us and fighting hopeless. Within moments the rope went taut again like an iron bar and we were all thrown into the bottom of the boat.

  We travelled on in darkness and rain and thunder and lightning as storm and craft converged. Land was long lost to us as were hope and – it seems to me these years later – commonsense. We cringed and held on.

  At a sudden change of direction, or collision with a freak sea (or perhaps a lightning strike, I was in no condition to make distinction), all of us were jerked from our seats once more and I found myself jammed again
st the underlip of the port gunwhale on my back. I felt nothing, heard nothing. The final, distinct wakeful (if there was ever any such thing) memory I have of that longest night of my life was an odd recognition of the absence of Jamieson at the sweep, and for a long time I held in my gaze a hand – or more correctly, five white fingers clutching the timber of the gunwhale above my head. The fingers curled from outside the boat, nails denting the wood. I made no move to go to the aid of the fingers as I could not tell whether it was they that pulled us along or whether they wanted to stay with the boat or whether they were there at all; and in any event I could not move myself. I do not recall when the fingers let go and disappeared, and I cannot tell whether I laughed or cried or was asleep or dead when I noticed them gone . . .

  Cleve paused for a moment, drained his glass, refilled, whistled through his teeth, shook his scraggy head, and read on.

  Perhaps it was the blow in falling or even a momentary madness of circumstance, but my sleep that night was lunatic. Few details have remained in my memory. There was a return of the white starlight of many nights previous above me, always ahead, and the recurrence of a scream, the highly pitched wail of a young man or woman in distress. That night I inhabited the spaces between life and death. It was as though I travelled aloft, unafraid of the sometimes indistinct forms below. The indistinctness plagues me – I saw, but I cannot identify. What did Lazarus tell his family after his resurrection? Did he describe such a half-world?

  Why did I not call out like Churling and his Jonah for deliverance, tied like a babe to the furious Cachalot? Had I truly begun to think of this beast as the Beast himself, like poor ignorant Hale? Is that why I, like the rest, made no real attempt to break free? I fear I must then have given up all hope of Salvation.

  I woke to light and the low sounds of groaning and snorting, and I crawled from the bottom of the boat to look about me. Alone, I floated in the calm shoals of a tiny inlet. The empty boat was almost full of water, and what at first appeared to be a reef beside me I suddenly recognised as the crippled and dying whale, its great back clear of the water, flukes flopping up and down idly. Its groans were pitiful and each breath showered me with pink vapours of blood and spittle from its blowhole. Finn’s harpoon quivered in the air, trailing fathoms of tangled rope which floated in the shallows like an armada of seaweed blown in by a great storm. Rain began to fall and between thunderclaps I heard the whale die; and when it was over I waded, blubbering, to shore.

  To be brief, the next days were ones of agony. I did not think to take provisions from the boat. I did not, I think, make a rational decision as to where I was headed, though deep in my delirium there was a destination and a conviction.

  Who knows how long I shambled about?

  After a journey lost to the world of dreams and madness, I eventually stumbled upon the beach of our encampment, met with desolation, huts and tryworks dismantled, oil barrels gone, whalebone gone, windlass gone – even the flensing ramp. Not a soul was left. The Family of Man had returned, taken all survivors off the beach, and given our crew up for lost. I must have been gone a number of days. I fell to my knees and cursed them all, cursed the sky and the wind and the fish of the sea, berated and spat upon their Creator. Of all men, all our company, I should have been saved. Hale and others had been taken and I had been left.

  Rotting caverns of bone lay in the still shallows near the shore and their stench overcame me. Only ruins and rubbish were left on the beach and it was through these scattered piles of litter that I fossicked in search of food, of life, discovering a bag of infested and water-hardened flour, some greenish biscuits and, ridiculously enough, my journal. Into a piece of rag I tied these things and hauled them onto my blistered shoulder, turning as I did, to walk back west. Back along the beach I noticed something protruding from the sand, and when I finally came to it, wondering how it was I had not noticed it minutes before, I saw it was a native’s spear upon which a blanket was impaled. The stench of it told me it was the blanket beneath which Nowles had rotted and died. I walked on westwards along the beach towards the headland, thinking only of the sanctuary of the little cave I had found weeks before.

  When I reached the cave, my quiet, clean place, I found the petrified form of Bale, the lunatic, his face grizzled but not tormented. In fact, it bore, despite the disfigurement of weathering and death, a look of bliss, and the chafed waste of his hands appeared clasped in his lap and his eyes, worried by ants, were frozen upward in their sockets.

  I left the defiled place and made my dream-like way west. Did I inhabit a trance, or did a trance inhabit me? Many things happened, though whether they were dreams or reality I cannot tell; nevertheless they did occur.

  First. At some time during my trek I found the remains of the four deserting crewmen who had accompanied Leek and Cain. They were by fresh water, a greenish place with stones smooth as skin. Much of the men’s flesh had been taken, not savaged as if by wild dogs, but butchered with some grim deftness. Their throats were cut, black and vile with infestation, but their heads were intact, though ant-ridden and eyeless and I felt no amiable stares from them as I had had from poor Bale. The remains were naked except for two whose feet rotted inside boots and one with a wide-brimmed hat still plastered on. Muskets lay about and it was clear to me what had happened: ammunition gone, they had fought or argued and Leek and Cain had somehow killed the others (in their sleep perhaps?) and butchered them, I can only assume, for food.

  Second. One night, some night, when food was gone, birds descended upon me (crows?) and dropped into my mouth a substance that was neither meat nor bread. They cawed and I ate and was satisfied. They returned and I drank from their red beaks, felt the cool breeze made by their black wings. Then a pack of hounds came up from out of the earth, wet-mouthed and howling with the voices of men I knew, but they were chased off by the birds who returned with the dogs’ eyes, which I declined to eat; but the birds left and returned with more, eyes that tumbled down at me until I was almost suffocated with them and blinded by them, warm bloody marbles. A single bird alighted on my chin and uttered a single word: ‘Fool’, and raked my own eyes with its talons and departed. I rose, half-blind, and went.

  I remember not marvelling at this. This happened. You know it did, Coupar, you will die before you deny it!

  Third. I saw black shadows at night, natives perhaps. They made no sound as they flew.

  Fourth. I found the inlet at which the whale and myself had come aground and heard the sounds of decomposition, haunting chemical groans, and found in the snagged boat a firkin of water, some dried biscuits and rum. I used a thin piece of stone to hack the rope anchoring the boat to its putrefying anchor, bailed out as much water and sand as was possible with my hands, and launched hopefully from the inlet with a sail I could not manage and a single oar. During the journey of an incalculable time, I had the recurring vision of the white fingers above my head cutting into the timbers.

  Two soldiers found me near the then unnamed Hacker River where it meets the sea.

  These things happened to me, Nathaniel Coupar, son of respectable debtors, fool runaway to the sea, observer chiefly, whaler, survivor, smuggler, shopbroker and latterly farmer, husband, ogre it seems. They all occurred; nevertheless I doubt them all. I am an old man already. I have survived but not lived. Married, begat, built. My wife fears me, my cries in the night, my burning tempers, my otherness. My son and my daughters fear my presence. And still I must bully this sullen soil. Mull things.

  I have looked Evil in the eye and have been confounded since.

  You do not sleep at night, Nathaniel Coupar.

  Sometimes you are at the brink of all knowledge, others you creep along the crumbling bank of all ignorance. I have no guilt. Some men speak of their guilt as though it is a valuable asset, like a potent stud ram, and the more the better, the richer the man. Rubbish.

  How strange to write this all into a journal to keep in an old sea-trunk: as a youth and as an old man, the most constr
uctive and the most useless labour of my life. Why do I not tell these things to Ellie, my beloved? Is it fear? Not shame. I am not ashamed. Perhaps, like a fool, I hope she will read this when I die, or stumble upon it by accident in my room – I often leave it open here on my desk for that reason, but she is an incorruptible woman and it is such a puerile notion. No one has known me, not my wife, not my children. Except God. He alone must know me. He must.

  Some nights Leek and Cain come back for me, for my flesh and for my soul. I am tormented. Perhaps I could tell my wife.

  Port was sweet and hot in Cleve Cookson’s mouth. A little spilled from the side of his mouth. He raced through the last pages of the journal.

  July 24th, 1875 If I was Leek or Churling or Hale or Cain I would have got down on my face and called to God for some measure of mercy and grace. If I was.

  July 25th A man is not responsible for his company. I suffered in resisting barbarity. I did not participate. I am innocent.

  July 27th, 1875 ‘Are you also still without understanding?’

  July 28th Grave doubt.

  July 29th Whose hand? Once I understood these Scriptures, but now they scramble in my mind, and sometimes I doubt God, I doubt his judgment.

  And these are only memories, after all, and I was but a child in 1831. What can one trust of childhood memories? Ah, but remember the sound of the gate in the evenings when father returned from his club? Remember the sounds of saddle-leather and horse-breath in the streets of Salem? These are, too, childhood memories. All true.

  I hardly see the whales in the bay of late.