Shallows

  Queenie flicked the lid of the Milo tin with the edge of a teaspoon and made two mugs of it, filling them from the electric jug on the table near her bed. Her hands were steady, her face crimson from the cold. Cleve sat on the end of the bed, nervous and fatigued.

  ‘I thought some bugger was going to slug me earlier on,’ he said.

  ‘You were lucky. They’re pretty edgy at the moment.’ She stirred with the spoon. ‘Georges and Marks got beaten up once, too, you know.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the mug from her.

  ‘You’ve been drinking.’

  He looked at his clothes; there was a vomit stain on his sleeve. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What for?’ Her voice was timbred with severity.

  ‘Oh, had a rough time these past few weeks.’

  ‘Why weren’t you at work earlier on? It’s not . . . oh. I should’ve known.’ She sipped her drink, disgusted.

  ‘Yeah. Sacked.’

  ‘You look so bloody awful.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not me you have to please.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Back off, Cleve.’

  Cleve sipped the hot drink. Down the back of his neck he felt a hot-cold prickling – he was sweating. Both of them felt the discomfort of an unalterable propinquity that made being rude as difficult as being sentimental.

  ‘Sorry again.’

  ‘So you’re a drunk now as well.’

  ‘No,’ he said, rubbing the coarseness of his chin. ‘I’m not a drunk.’

  ‘What is it, an act then?’

  ‘No. What d’you mean?’

  ‘Pale and haggard. Win the lady’s heart back.’

  ‘No. I’m going to a fancy dress ball looking like Dylan Thomas.’

  ‘You’re pining then.’

  ‘Pining? Whimpering on the end of a leash?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Okay, so I’m a dog. I confess.’

  Queenie smiled; Cleve took careful note of it.

  ‘You smell like a dog.’

  ‘I know. Do I really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I use your shower?’ he asked. ‘Clean up a bit?’

  ‘No.’

  He hooked a sneakered foot through the strap of a bra that lay on the floor with a heap of other clothes. ‘Your friends’ll think poorly of you, leaving me helpless, treating me badly, letting me go round like this, like some bloody . . . widower.’

  ‘I think they’ve enough of a poor idea,’ Queenie said, her voice rising. ‘They think I’m a cretin to have married you. And I agree.’

  ‘Then why did you marry me?’

  Queenie did not look at him. ‘Hell, I dunno. I thought . . . there was something about you, something good, some-thing not ready yet, but kind of . . . promising, I guess. I thought you were bloody marvellous. I wanted to be that with you.’

  ‘And neither of us are that.’

  ‘No.’

  Neither spoke for a full minute.

  ‘I’ve finished your ancestor’s journals,’ Cleve said, at length.

  ‘Oh, great. Glad to see you finish something,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Not a pretty picture.’

  ‘Forget it, will you?’ she said, her voice beginning to break.

  ‘I’ll have to understand it before I’ll forget it. You know, you’re a real Coupar, never mind the dubious parentage. Stubborn, idealistic, self-righteous.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Strong. Capable of great good.’

  Queenie shrugged, finishing her drink, and she took his half-full mug from him. ‘Are you going to try to sabotage us?’

  ‘Our marriage?’

  She flinched. ‘No, Cachalot.’

  ‘No, I don’t give a stuff about that any more.’

  ‘Because your side is losing.’

  ‘My side? My side’s aching from sleeping on concrete.’ She did not respond, so he sighed and continued. ‘Anyway, everyone’s losing. And I’ve withdrawn from the competition.’

  ‘You were never in it, Cleve.’

  ‘True, but I don’t want any part of it, not even an attitude.’

  ‘You still think the whalers should be allowed to continue then.’

  ‘No. Probably they should go before the whales. They will. They can’t last much longer. I think the whales will outlast them. Anyway, I think the whaling should stop.’ He paused, looking up at her to see the annoyance and pleasure in her face. ‘Looks as though I’ve still got an attitude. Shame about that.’

  ‘You’ve changed your mind. Why?’ Queenie strode across the room to take up an interrogator’s stance above him.

  ‘A whaler called you a slut and gave me a thick ear.’

  ‘My God, is that all! Is that the stuff that makes up your mind for you?’

  ‘A thick ear seems valid enough to me.’

  Queenie sat across the room from him trying to relax, to calm herself. It seemed valid enough to me once, too, she thought to herself. ‘Well, why don’t you do something about this new conviction of yours?’

  ‘I don’t feel that strongly about it,’ he said with a flick of his shoulders. ‘Because it’s not as important as some other things.’

  ‘So you join the silent majority.’

  ‘And use soap and fertiliser and margarine and icecream and candles and lipstick . . .’

  ‘Big deal. You are so inconsistent, Cleve.’

  ‘Like you. Like your mates. Only I’m not pretending to be. I’m not pretending.’

  ‘At least we’re confronting the issue.’

  ‘No, you’re confronting the media. It’s all play-acting. You’re no different from the whalers or anyone else for that matter. Think you’re bloody crusaders. And how many whales have you saved?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘Okay.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not consistent. I can’t see anything through. I’m not even very nice.’ He stood up and jabbed a finger at her. ‘But I’m not pretending. Your whole little campaign is crook, it’s as dishonest as hell, as fake as this whole town.’

  ‘No, it’s not true,’ Queenie said, trembling with feeling. ‘It’s an honest, meaningful thing. We’re trying.’

  ‘Trying to manipulate people, being manipulated. Oh, you’re trying.’

  Queenie went to the window; rain was falling. She put a hand up to her face, ran the back of it across her cheek and a quicksilver flash, a tear, fell from her.

  ‘And I’m trying,’ Cleve said. ‘I need you.’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘Why? Why Queenie?’

  ‘Because you’re as much a manipulator as any of us.’

  Cleve got up, began to say something but left off, suddenly windless. She closed the door as soon as he was in the corridor. He walked like a man with artificial limbs.

  Outside twilight gave landmarks a weepy, grey look, the sadness of the night before an insubstantial dawn.

  ‘Bitch,’ he said aloud, opening the frosted door of the Land Rover. His breath floated from him.

  XII

  Traffic streams into town from the north. The low sky promises rain. Goormwood Street is congested with tourists and journalists, and the town’s hotels and motels are booked out by early afternoon. Latecomers are forced to find accommodation in on-site caravans, chalets, tents and sleazy harbourside guest houses. Public telephones grow appendages, queues of journalists and representatives making reports. The three whalechasers moored at the town jetty are photographed and posed in front of. Enterprising locals, realising that the chasers will not work today because of the sea conditions, organise impromptu tours, and every historical monument, every ramshackle old building rumoured to be consigned to the National Trust, every natural and unnatural marvel, has its hungry pilgrims. The Advocate comes out with the headline MAYOR IN BLOODBATH. Nine political counter-factions sell badges on the street in competition with the tin-shaking old women from the Salvation Army and the D
aughters of Charity. Behind a warehouse on the waterfront the crew of a national current affairs programme takes an aerosol can of paint, sprays WHALING IS MURDER on a blotchy wall and films the slogan from six different angles.

  The telephone exchange is in an uproar. By dusk Angelus makes news in Vancouver, Baltimore, Leeds, and Brisbane. In an upper room of the Bright Star the Sesquicentenary Committee meets and a round of drinks is bought and backs are slapped.

  At seven o’clock the news of the Angelus Party has got around and the Angelus Oval hall begins to fill. Hassa Staats’s free kegs hiss open, greeting the tourists and mediators who pour through the doors. Two journalists dressed in fashionable war surplus are attacked in the dark as they pee behind the hall, and as they leave their assailants shout ‘Greenie pigs!’ and disappear into the night. There is, too, a minor clash between the Leninist-Calvinists and the Libertarian Revolutionary Front, and for an hour the Wimmin’s Left Front occupies both the male and female toilets. The Protestant Free Commerce Association distributes pamphlets outside in the rain. A dance band grinds away at one end of the packed hall, and the odour of sheep dung from the agricultural show is slowly but certainly conquered by the sweet stink of human sweat, while outside the southerly storm redoubles itself as it moves in off the ocean, wedging open the sky with its puce lightning.

  As Desmond Pustling drives through the rain-filled midnight streets towards Middle Beach, he marvels at his acumen. Monday’s embarrassment seems far behind. His new secretary has pleased him thus far; she is frightened and ambitious and vain. I’ve rallied, he thinks, as my old man would have rallied. When you get hit, even if it only stings a little, you come back hard and enthusiastic. Something this whole cretinous town could learn from. You have to remember who you are, who you have, who you want. Remember what you control.

  Halfway home, Pustling veers round and points his BMW back into the centre of town. Goormwood Street is absurdly crowded. Milkbars and public bars have closed and the newcomers are drifting back to their accommodation. He makes a slow pass of Pell’s manse, taking a long glance as he passes. Lights are on in the house and uncurtained windows illuminate the diagonal rain. When he is past and half a block away, Pustling swerves over the kerb outside the Richardson Bakery and parks. He gets out into the rain and walks unhurriedly back, his three-piece woollen suit soaking up the moisture. He passes shops and the familiar old office fronts before he reaches the hedge-lined driveway whose potted gravel is awash. His shoes slish through the lawn as he crosses towards the nearest window and, stealthily, moves across the frame to look inside. An empty room, much dust and a few balls of paper. The light burns from its unadorned fixture. You’re a wastrel with the electricity, Pustling thinks, confirming some deep suspicions. With his head below the level of the window he runs in a crouch to the other front-facing window and slowly straightens to look inside. Pell sits in his chair, big white feet on the hearth, some books open in his lap, dressing-gown firm about his lumpy frame. A bottle of port sits corked on the little table beside him. Furniture glows with reflected firelight.

  An old man, thinks Pustling. He’s just an old man, look at him. What’s he reading, I wonder? Ah, tomorrow, the last sermon. Thank God. What is it about you, Pell? What is it?

  Rain pours from the rusted gutters and the sky murmurs as Pustling stands outside the manse window feeling the moisture lining his collar.

  This is my town, old man, my inheritance. Old man.

  A car passes on the street. Pustling falls to his knees in the flowerbed with its smell of mulched blood and bone.

  Skippers of the chasers do not even bother to try the seas outside the Sound next morning. The current forcing its way into the harbour can be felt as far in as the town jetty where the Paris boats and Ted Baer’s launch and the tugs jostle at their moorings.

  At dawn the lobby of the Ocean View is crammed. Cachalot and Ted Baer hold independent press conferences at either end. Brent, Marks and Fleurier, grey-faced, try to rally support for their cause. The sharkfisherman, too, has a desperate look about him, cursing the inopportune weather.

  By mid-morning cars are leaving Angelus in tiny convoys. The remaining, more dogged, observers fill the lobbies or tax room service in their hotels.

  Just before noon William Pell finishes delivering his sermon, an unremarkable twenty minutes on the Parables, and he shakes hands at the door with the same half-absent feeling of last week, feeling or imagining the intense cold in the palm of Des Pustling as he shakes his hand and nods in greeting.

  ‘Fine sermon, Reverend,’ Pustling says, grinning widely.

  It is late afternoon when Pell sees Queenie Cookson sitting on the retaining wall above the sand on Middle Beach. He has been walking, alone, his big shoes under his arm, watching the gulls twitch nervously in the trees contemplating the sea weather, feeling his toes in the cold, white sand. He remembers summer mornings here in his youth, the giggling of girls, the smell of coconut oil, the sounds of people scrunching by in the sand as he sprawled on a towel, wondering what lay beyond the surf-white dome of Coldsea Island, what made women walk the way they did, what made the short swells falling lightly on the shore with that whispering: yes, yes, yes, yes.

  Always the sea we come back to, he thinks to himself, even a farm boy like me.

  The moment he sees Queenie Cookson she turns her head. Pell hesitates, faltering in his steps. Round on the headland boys fish from the rocks, rugged against the cold. A man jogs past close to shore. Pell goes over to the retaining wall.

  ‘Queenie?’

  She looks up at him with an audible sigh. ‘Hello, Reverend.’

  ‘Hello. I was just walking. I —’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pell scrabbles up beside her, feeling graceless and intrusive.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh . . .’ Her voice trails off.

  ‘Not going out today?’

  ‘No, too rough. You know, then. About me.’

  ‘I should think the whole town knows the whole of everything. Everything unimportant.’

  ‘Cleve and I aren’t living together at the moment.’

  ‘The whole town seems to know that as well.’

  Queenie looks up at him. He winces inwardly, knowing he has let his disappointment show.

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Even your grandfather knows.’

  ‘What? Oh, shit. Sorry. Oh, hell. How is he?’

  ‘Bad, I should think. Or maybe good – who can tell? And you?’

  ‘Can’t tell either. Don’t come on pastoral, Reverend, okay? I know you did marry us and everything, but it’s . . .’

  Pell nods, forces his hands down into his pockets. The wind is cold, gusts hard and sharp as blades. I just haven’t got room for it, he thinks. God, I just can’t feel concerned enough about it. Look at it. Young love. Convenience. How can I? I’ve got my own worries. Make them see!

  ‘. . . he’s so, so damned stupid. He can’t do anything, he won’t. It just hasn’t been what – I dunno. And this is so important, the whales. And he doesn’t understand, he won’t. Jesus, it’s so frustrating!’

  Pell claps his shoes together to shake the sand off and he digs his grey socks out of the toes and begins putting them on. Old feet, he thinks. She’s repelled by them. To hell with it.

  ‘Who do you want?’ he says, lacing up his black shoes.

  ‘What?’ Queenie looks at him, a hint of irritation in her tanned, hair-blown face. The face of a child, Pell thinks. The hair of something out of ancient history.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, pulling her hair aside.

  At six o’clock in the evening in a glittering glass unit in the city’s biggest hospital two hundred miles away, Abbie Tanks dies from a brain haemorrhage. The nurse who plugs the orifices of his body marvels at how pink he is in some places.

  XIII

  But no rain fell on the land at Wirrup, though sometimes waterspouts and rain squalls
were seen or imagined out over the sea as the weather passed. It was unnatural, as though God Himself steered the weather away. Every mile east from there the land was drier still and all but lifeless. Bushfires erupted in isolation. In the farthest recesses before the gazetted desert, birds fell from the sky. There was no winter.

  In pain, Daniel Coupar lay on the wide brass bed he had once shared with his wife. It was big, soft-quilted and dusty from neglect. Sleep would not come to ease his pain and he was disturbed by the silence from the bay, the absence of the whales that had long moved farther west and north.

  It’s bloody shameful, he thought, the upbringing a man has that’ll keep him awake at night. All night a man lies here remembering Sunday School texts and cooking recipes and the best way to polish boots, and maps and blokes he met in pubs. What day is it? What’m I lying on?

  On his side, Coupar dragged the big box shape from under him. It was his Bible, the one his mother had given him. He turned pages and saw it was an edition of 1901, the year of his birth, and written on a blank leaf in ink that was almost grey:

  A poor woman’s gift to her son, the things she knows. Be a servant of others, Daniel, and be a fool for God the Father. Remember Romans 13 and remember I have loved you.

  Mother 6/1/02

  Ah, mother, he thought fondly with a sadness that all but enveloped his pain, you were a wonderful woman. A lot like my wife Maureen, you know; you would have liked each other. You’d have got on like a house on fire. Romans, Romans . . . thirteen. Ah, now how does it go, ah . . . therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than we first believed. My God, twelve years of Sunday School – all so a man can recite to himself in his senility. Awake out of sleep be buggered. I haven’t had a decent sleep in a lifetime.

  In time, Coupar slept, discomforted by the black lump of rice-paper that worked itself under him in the night.

  He woke in the cool period foreshadowing the heat of the day, not rising for several hours. Far off, in the trees it seemed, a bantam rooster crowed. Coupar ached. He wanted to tell so many things. Before he could even rise the heat of the day defeated him.