Shallows

  Strandings (a) disease, (b) sonar fault, (c) loyalty, (d) distress signals, (e) stress, (f) other, unknown.

  Even though in a mass stranding the cause of whales returning to the beach once rescued can be attributed to the leader’s distress calls, on other occasions a lone, apparently healthy whale will strand on a safe beach and on being towed out will deliberately return to the beach. The reason for this remains a mystery.

  . . . a testis from a blue whale can weigh 100 lbs and be difficult to manipulate . . . a heart = 1000 lbs; liver = 1 ton; ovaries like volley balls . . .

  Difficult to manipulate, thought Queenie. Hell’s bells! Rain continued to fall and she heard cars passing on the esplanade below.

  As whales were flensed, scientists delved into the depths of their carcasses . . . drenched in blood, often buried and sometimes suffocated in avalanches of entrails.

  . . . the intercourse itself is brief, perhaps a few seconds. Whales lie horizontal or vertical, belly to belly. Loveplay or foreplay precedes this at great length. Some whales like humpbacks caress and slap each other. Such extended foreplay is necessary in an environment where scent is of little consequence. The male gauges the female’s readiness by the tone of her responses. If fertilised successfully, the female carries a single embryo back to the cold feeding waters of the Antarctic where the foetus is fattened. After 10–12 months the cow (whalebone and rorqual) returns to warmer waters and gives birth, force-feeding the infant calf with a muscle-pump teat that emits milk.

  Cow with calf were easy prey for bay whalers because the cow was slowed by her offspring and often ensnared by her own maternal instincts. If a calf was harpooned and towed in, the mother would follow and be slaughtered.

  Sperm: polygamous

  Whalebone: monogamous

  Male Sperms fight each other for supremacy during the mating season and victors secure harems.

  Queenie dropped that file and took up another. How do you take it all in? she wondered. How can you ever know it all?

  She left Fleurier’s room and went downstairs to the bar where several of the others were drinking and watching the rain sluice down the plate glass. Brent and Marks, they said, were up in their rooms, feverish and vomiting. A mass of Australian newspapers lay all about, on the bar, tables, stools, and the floor. Cachalot members from Sydney and Melbourne guiltily read the sports pages of the Age and the Herald, feeding their homesickness. The campaign was now page-eight material in that part of the country. In the city to the north it was page three, and in Angelus it was still front page news. ROUND ONE TO WHALERS, the headlines said.

  The afternoon wore on in Angelus, passing like a heavy fogbank indistinguishable from the dusk when it finally came. Winds swept a chill off the harbour that seeped into homes and buildings and numbed those caught outside.

  VIII

  The beer is free for an hour tonight at the Bright Star and the place is full. Ernie Easton is there, shouting until his eyes ache. Ted Baer has his own ammoniac corner of tall tales, and the crews of the Paris IV and the other two chasers are there with spirits and voices wound tight. They tell old stories: about the flenser who tied the whale’s penis to the back of a tourist bus, about limbs and lives lost, the old days hunting humpbacks before the ban, and they bring scars for a show-and-tell of proof. More seamen come in, greeted by the woman drumming up custom at the door. During this free hour the darts teams take a sixty-minute recess for some hard, fast drinking. Workers from the abattoirs and the cannery – big meaty men and women fresh from the shift still wearing their hairnets and gumboots – fantasise about having their hands on one of those long-haired poofters from out of town. Hassa Staats sweats, feels the beer slop bubble on his forearms. Celebrate! he thinks. Celebrate! A school of reporters slides through the doors and Staats holds a jug high to them.

  And at the end of the hour Hassa Staats watches them settle back into the blue cloud of smoke and some thrifty drinking. He notices the tightness is still there in his chest and he has to fight back the compulsion to cough. It has been with him for weeks now and he has been consulting his old school friend, Doc Duffield, who, days ago, beat gobs of sputum out of him into little yellow-lidded jars for scrutiny. Next Monday he is due to visit Duffield again to get an opinion. He hopes his childhood asthma is not returning.

  Cleveland Cookson, conspicuously alone at the bar, with his haunted, amputated look, catches Staats’s eye as he passes. Staats also passes his wife Mara but he avoids her eyes and looks away from her thin, pruned frame and that tight mouth which never opens on his account. He makes his way to the WC; he cannot hold it back; a great racking cough bursts out of him and it all moves and he coughs and spits and coughs. I’ve got the bogger going now, he thinks, seeing spots in his vision. He coughs with greedy satisfaction and a sense of doom.

  IX

  Next morning the town wakes to an extraordinary phenomenon. Soon after dawn scores of townspeople gather in the drizzle to watch. Whalechasers remain moored at the town jetty and for an hour the two Zodiacs hover about just outside the entrance to the harbour before they give in and return to Middle Beach behind the headland. Later in the morning, townspeople in their hundreds picket the slope above the harbour mouth to see the right whale and her calf lazing in the channel, lolling flukes, blowing mist from their spiracles. The whalers have given up trying to lure them into the shallower waters inside the harbour and the whales refuse to be frightened outside and away from the narrow entrance. Skippers and crews argue helplessly. The right whale is an endangered species and protected by law. There are too many spectators for harpoons to be deployed secretly. The water either side of the whales is much too shallow for them to pass safely.

  Joining the throng on the hill, some members of Cachalot & Company wince, imagining the headlines WHALES DO THEIR OWN FIGHTING. They are eager to avenge yesterday’s embarrassment. Telescopes and binoculars glint in the dull light. Hearing the news on radio wealthy tourists take their launches across the harbour to see; they are booed and hissed by the burgeoning crowd as they take their vessels close. The dimensions of the whales come as a shock to many of the townspeople and the out-of-towners who continue to stand in the rain for much of the day; many of them would never have believed that anything on earth could be so big. The cow sometimes has the appearance of a capsized tugboat animated by some unseen current below the surface. Once, only once, she turns a tight circle in the narrow gap and tosses herself in the air, landing with a bellowing crash to the sounds of wild applause from the hill.

  Outside his home above Angelus harbour after dark, the town’s rotund and powerless major has a bucket of pigs’ blood emptied on him as strobe flashes blind him. Two stocking-headed persons escape in the oystery night.

  Two women give birth in the Angelus Regional Hospital. Fingers and toes are counted, limbs joggled.

  Towards midnight women lock their drunken husbands out in the rain while their children snuggle deep and curl their toes at the sound of the rain in the gutters.

  After midnight four Aboriginal boys aged thirteen hot-wire a mini-moke and drive it four hundred yards uphill before it runs out of petrol and rolls back to where it was parked.

  Wind strengthens. Out beyond the Sound the ocean mashes itself. By the time dawn comes the storm will have intensified and no craft will leave Angelus harbour. The gulls have already flown inland to roost.

  X

  In the hours before dawn on Friday, 24 June, after the previous day’s storm had finally abated leaving a steady south-westerly swell in its wake, it became apparent to the Cachalot party that Brent and Marks were too ill to ride in the Zodiacs and replacements needed to be chosen. The company bickered in the lobby of the Ocean View Hotel as rain spattered in the darkness outside. Moving around their stamping feet, a porter sucked cigarette butts up with a vacuum cleaner. Even in the lobby their angry breaths blossomed steamily. The argument grew bitter and personal. Two Australians were chosen to crew one boat, and Queenie Cookson, the only other
Cachalot member ever to have been in a boat, was made crewmate to Fleurier.

  As the Zodiacs were dragged down the low-shelving beach to the water Queenie drew in long breaths to ease her anger and her fear.

  Over the low tuttle of the small auxiliary engine she could still hear the arguments in the dark as she rose and fell in the sharp inshore swell. Fleurier engaged the bigger motor and gunned the inflatable out across the south towards the headland light to meet the whalers emerging from the harbour. Queenie settled uncomfortably in the bow surrounded by plastic fuel drums, heavy in her layers of wetsuit and outer clothing, clinging on as the flimsy bows quivered on the tops of the swells. The engine roared in her ears and the whole ocean seemed alive with vibration beneath her.

  Paris II heard them coming and surged out of the harbour, quickly coming up to her steady fifteen-knot chase speed, and the Zodiacs never caught up. A few minutes later, however, Paris IV cruised up behind, bunting out an audible bow-wave, lights swelling as she closed up to them, and as she passed the Zodiacs fell in behind and followed with ease. Fleurier kept to one side out of the immediate turbulence of the wake, and the two Australians in the other Zodiac followed a hundred yards farther behind for a few minutes until the gap between them widened suddenly and they lost sight of one another. Fleurier cursed and hesitated, then throttled on. Queenie braced herself uneasily as they passed the sombre outline of Bell Head and the swells became longer and deeper and her stomach revolved with the steady undulation.

  An hour passed.

  Queenie Cookson had never been in such an expanse of water before, and although she couldn’t properly see it she sensed its vastness and felt the absence of land in every pore, and was afraid. Yesterday she had told Fleurier and the others about the sharks and for a moment he went pale before his features resumed their grim set and nothing more was said. Queenie had sat alone at the bar for an hour afterwards, hearing them gasping and murmuring amongst themselves.

  Grasping a loop of rope for a handhold, she now held herself tight to prevent undignified yelps of fear escaping her. She knew that a white-pointer the size Ted Baer was after could bite an inflatable in half, could swallow an outboard engine, could pierce an aluminium hull. She felt the Zodiac, small and pliable, almost hugging itself to her as her mind filled with newsreel images of launches being towed about by threshing monsters, their sterns battered by caudal fins that looked like huge, honed gunmetal hatchets. She imagined the serpentine copper eyes and the belly full of refuse: sheep, steel cable, anonymous flesh, nylon line, and she felt the panic of nightmares seeping into her.

  As dawn came Fleurier’s face was revealed, set hard with purpose and preoccupation; the roar of the big outboard discouraged even the thought of conversation. There was nothing in sight but the flaking rump of the Paris IV ahead. She wondered, without cynicism, what Brent’s gods had in store for her.

  Aboard the Paris IV the crew woke their captain, a big, heavy man, and the chaser prepared itself for the day’s hunt. There were no pressmen aboard this morning and the atmosphere above deck was jovial. The deckhands threw a few goodnatured obscenities in the direction of the Zodiac as the tiny craft came abreast with a camera. The harpoongun was unsheathed and swivelled and elevated a few times by the first mate who, it was said, appreciated a bit of drama.

  Queenie took photos with Brent’s big camera until her arms became wooden with cold and her fingers could not adjust exposure or shutterspeed, and for another three hours she rode the movement of the water and listened to the harsh melodies within the larger noise of the engine. Whales no longer claimed her attention; she was busy feeling cold and alone and afraid.

  Near eleven o’clock she vomited messily. Fleurier wiped it from his shoulder without expression, gazing ahead towards the black flanks of the chaser.

  But Fleurier came back to life when the sloping spout of the sperm whale erupted near them, so close they could both smell and feel the fine vapour of its breath as the long, sleek shape glided forwards lifting its flukes nonchalantly. The Zodiac swerved and moved along the swells coming from the south, and there were shouts from the chaser’s bridge that Queenie heard above the engine noise.

  The lumbering cachalot left flat patches of water in its wake and sounded again. Queenie felt the Zodiac rear at the tip of a swell that lifted them sideways; the bow yawed across. A short breach; the sperm showed its breakwater back and continued ahead. Twisting round, Queenie saw the skipper moving along the catwalk to the gun.

  Oh God, no, she thought. Please.

  Fleurier swung the inflatable back round into the swell and Queenie rose high above him as the Zodiac climbed a crest, perched there for a moment, until they climbed down its back with the propeller screaming, out of the water for a moment.

  The chaser bore down on them. Fleurier held back from the whale and drifted across and under the bows of the Paris IV. Crewmen waved fists and shouted. Queenie’s body went rigid. The bow-wave hissed at her back.

  The whale surfaced to starboard and ahead, blowing shallowly. Queenie felt a sudden lurch of speed. She saw the long, wide, slick back and felt an almost maternal protectiveness, and as she turned to raise a finger of contempt at the bows of Paris IV she saw a puff of smoke from the end of the catwalk.

  The next ten seconds plodded past unnaturally. First the hair-prickling feeling of the projectile and the wind of steel cable and manila rope passing overhead, then the thunder and, in the ensuing deafness, the silent shower of flesh and blood. Then time was fast. The cable reared, twanged tight, and on it the Zodiac ascended, caught up in its bar-tautness, lifted out of the water. Fleurier fell on the stalled engine, tilting it and the Zodiac jerked free, slewed sideways and fell back into the water as the cable sang above their heads. From then, as she bellowed at the slate sky, Queenie felt time faltering. The whale flurried at the end of the line, throwing blood and water into the air until the second shot passed overhead and there was a muffled crump and it went still. Queenie only half saw the carcass inflated and marked; it made no sense to her. She heard the chaser sound her horn as she cut away, leaving them drifting near the bloated hulk with its slick of blood and the garlands of white excrement that fell from descending seabirds.

  Fleurier started the outboard and steered them away from the whale before the sharks came. He had not spoken to Queenie in the eight hours since leaving Angelus. He took the compass from her stained coat and steered north-west.

  By the time the lighthouse of Coldsea Island and the muted glow of Angelus came into view, many things had passed through Queenie Cookson’s mind. It was as though the gunshot over her head that morning had set her mind in motion like a sprinter under a starter’s gun. Vomit swilled about in the bilgewater with the frozen white petals of guano.

  Several times in the hours she saw herself between the grey knees of her grandfather who held a heavy, benign object which whispered with a soft flurry of ricepaper, and she saw his big, battered hands turning pages, felt against her ear the deep wheeze and warmth of his chest. The burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; in the haunts where jackals once lay shall grow grass and reeds and papyrus . . .

  She saw the submarine blue of the pool and the distorted forms of the school cheer squad at the edge. Swim, swim, swim, go, go! Where? she thought, where to, where to go?

  The first real swimming lessons were those her grandfather gave her before she was old enough for school lessons. He rowed out into the bay and tossed her over the side and rowed towards the shore, always just out of her reach, calling, ‘Swim, Queenie, swim! It’s the only way!’ And sometimes between desperate strokes she saw the tears glistening on his face as he rowed. Swim, she told herself, it’s the only way.

  Skittering in the face of those long, deep southerly swells with the scream of the outboard in her head, Queenie made herself imagine the swim to land. For ever, she thought, it would take for ever ploughing through those swells with no sense of direction, no clear blue, only t
he long, long slog, arm after arm after arm . . . stroke . . . stroke . . .

  Looking back, it seemed ludicrous to teach little girls to do the dead man’s float; it had been so hard to imagine being dead then, harder to imagine being a man.

  Swim, swim . . .

  I could never be anything else, she told herself.

  The only time she had come close to being someone else was one day in the bottom of a boat on the Hacker River when she saw herself behind the eyes of Cleveland Cookson beneath her. Him, she was in him, inside him, of him, was him, and yet she had never been more herself, more distinct before in her life. She was herself reflected, still, not thrashing, not swimming. Dead man’s float? Two and one in the patchwork paperbark light.

  Queenie hugged herself in the dreamy nauseous solitude of the ocean.

  Fleurier touched her on the shoulder and she saw the lights on the beach: headlights, floodlights, camera flashes, television lights, and she closed her eyes to protect herself.

  XI

  During the day Cleve kept himself in the creaking house, needing somehow the protection of its sturdy old walls and the comforting monologues of shifting timbers to stay calm. His savings were low and the dole had not arrived and he was loath to spend money on petrol, though he longed to drive out along lonely roads allowing the actions, the automatic responses, to absorb his attention, to make him feel active and functioning. Instead, he slept, on his face, the blank sleep of the tired and destitute and the truly unconscious; he slept for most of the day with drizzle crawling down the window that overlooked the agitated surface of the harbour.

  At 4 a.m. he had been awake, barely conscious but standing at the window to see the low, lit shapes of the chasers gliding out of the harbour towards the sea. He felt no excitement at the sight, no gooseflesh as he might have felt even a week before. As the lights slid out of the harbour and out of sight Cleve’s mind was flat, untouched, and he fell back onto the bed. Before he slept he had a series of short, racing dreams which ran through him like a badly chopped tape. He saw the patronising and angry faces of teachers, foremen, contractors, lecturers; he saw the dew on the windowsill on a winter morning and his faceless mother and father waking him. The last dream was longest. A girl passed him a note in class, sticking the cone of paper in his inkwell and thinking it was a love-letter, he opened it and read it quickly. You are a dumbhead. Pass it on. But he was at the end, last desk before the wall, so he put the note in his pocket, shamed.