Shallows

  XIV

  At four-thirty next morning the swells reared up out of the dark to meet them. Queenie’s cheeks chilled in the drizzle. Past Coldsea Island the swells ran high and deep from the south like a mountain range proceeding from an unseen horizon. Fleurier bent his head to the cold; she could see his teeth flash white in the dark. The Paris IV cut open the swollen shoulders of the swells and the Zodiacs followed in the wound of her wake, keeping bearings by her lights.

  Queenie braced herself between the fuel drums, letting her mind wander, welcoming any distraction from this menacing darkness. For a while she saw the whiteness of Ted Baer’s launch in the distance as it cut away to the south-west. Behind, Brent and Marks, ostensibly recovered from their illnesses, sat low and just visible in the other Zodiac. Weak but determined, Queenie thought: like the rest of us. And aren’t the Aussies pissed off.

  Queenie had fresh in her mind the renewed arguments in the lobby an hour ago where Brent and Marks had talked their way back into the water to the disgust of the Australian crew. Queenie’s position was now impregnable; she was a veteran of the Friday shooting incident and, too, she had Fleurier, the patron, on her side. Two Australians had left town immediately. The women argued for equal representation. Accents were mimicked, people accused of bad manners and bad breath. The number on the beach launching the inflatables in the cold rain was depleted; they were outnumbered by irritable, foot-stamping journalists.

  Queenie thought of yesterday’s headlines, ANGELUS ENTERTAINS, with bitterness. They even bring out an Advocate on a Sunday, she thought. A circus, a stupid circus. It’s as though nothing can stop it, nothing can happen outside of it. Oh, how long can we last out in all this? God, I’m so tired. It’s all buggered around. We’re just another town entertainment, middle billing on the Angelus Show. Nobody even bothers to threaten us any more – they want us around all of a sudden for the media. And Cleve . . . oh, that word makes me mad. He looks so sick and awful. He’s not even eating properly, his last consistent function – he can’t even commit himself to do that. He looked so frightened. God, what am I supposed to feel?

  Queenie still had that fork of emotion from Saturday morning: the disgust and loathing, the compulsion to strike him, to beat the frightened, vulnerable look off his face, to bend his fingers back, make him denounce himself, make him someone else; but also the rooted desire to tear the raggedy clothes off his back and the blue stubble from his chin, to bathe him and cover him with her big, tanned limbs and to beat that grubby hide of new experience from him with her fists, to open and ventilate his skin with her nails to make him young and fresh-faced and hopeless again, the Cleveland Cookson she had locked in her thighs in the waterfall when summer was a corroboree of cicadas in the ear. He was somehow changed, and it frightened her. But she wanted him. Some of him.

  Fleurier’s hand on her shoulder roused her from her thoughts. He pointed. The crew of the chaser was visible in the twilight, moving about on deck, and as Fleurier steered the Zodiac out to starboard and abreast of the ship the first mate could be seen uncovering the gun at the bow, elevating and swivelling the barbed snout. With a quick rap on the throttle Fleurier sped them out ahead of the chaser and across under her bows, lifting his finger in the by now customary salute of contempt. The chaser sounded her horn. Queenie managed to take a picture as they raced down the port side, jouncing in the bow-wave, though she held out little hope for it in that light.

  Paris IV mustered speed and the Zodiacs fell behind and to starboard.

  At nine-thirty the three craft came upon a large pod of whales which sounded shallowly, giving short, excited blows, riding the swells that mounted their flanks.

  Paris IV steamed away at full speed, rolling in the swell as she turned to give chase. With the swells rolling them sideways, tossing them aside and off course, the Zodiacs could not keep up.

  Queenie, low in the bow, shook the spray from her eyes, felt the shuddering vibrations of motor and sea. Swim, swim! Swells came abeam. Go! Go! Swim! She caught sight of the skipper of the chaser moving out along the catwalk to the harpoon gun as she had seen once before. They followed. Fifteen minutes of following and lurching behind and seeing, from the top of each sea, the breaches of the whales and the manoeuvres of the chaser obscuring the view each turn; and each minute compounded the feeling in her of something slipping from her grasp. They were too far behind. She motioned to Fleurier for speed, but at the brink of each tilting swell the outboard’s propeller ripped out of the water leaving them no purchase. They lost ground.

  Then as they went down into the chesty trough of a big swell where there was only sky and water and the vomit swilling in the bottom of the boat to see, the crack of the gun shocked across the water, and as they climbed again and nosed into the air Queenie craned and saw the eruption in the water two hundred yards off where the harpoon ricocheted off the glossy back of the whale. They’re hurrying their shots, she thought; we’ve unnerved them.

  The chaser drifted, reloading, and Fleurier gunned the Zodiac until they came abreast of the bow and the men reloading the gun shouted and gesticulated, and Queenie caught sight of the stunned sperm again and pointed and held on and the Zodiac bucked across to the wide, flat spots of water that stood out on the swells like footprints. She believed again. She saw Brent standing in the other careering Zodiac, battling to adjust a lens. He and Marks broadsided under the bows of the chaser. The horn sounded.

  Swim, she thought, swim whales! Dive! Go, fuck you!

  The whale breached briefly in front showing the streaming wound in its back and its breath-vapour wafted across in the wind. Queenie stood to see the flukes breaking water. It was beginning to meander, too tired, too winded, and Queenie heard the sound behind, the hiss of the bow-wave. Fleurier tried to get closer, but it was hard to judge in the swell. The horn sounded. And Queenie saw Brent and Marks almost foundering in the bow-wave, right in the shadow of the ship, and over all their heads came the crack and the cable and, ahead, the smattering impact of steel and blubber. The cachalot cleared the water in a brief, blood-spraying flurry. The flukes battered the water, interrupted by another shot. Fleurier was shouting, shouting over the idle of the engine. Queenie looked away. The whale was still, being drawn in abeam. Other shouts. Brent stood in the other Zodiac, drifting across towards her, calling. The two inflatables rubbed gunwhales and Brent held up his camera.

  ‘I got it!’

  ‘You mean they got it, you stupid bastard!’

  ‘No,’ Brent yelled, ‘I got it on film. Godammit, I got it for ever!’

  Queenie put her head on her knees and covered her face with her hands. She saw through her fingers Fleurier’s legs trembling.

  ‘It was worth it, then,’ Fleurier said, engaging the motor and throttling away. There was a small spot of blood on his chin, already dry.

  Queenie settled in the space between fuel drums and held on as the Zodiac skittered with the swell astern. They could not follow the chaser further; it was outside their range already. Every now and then, on a rising swell, the bridge of the Paris IV came into view as it moved farther east looking for the rest of the pod. She held on, heady with nausea, restraining herself from screaming. At least we’ll be back by dark, she thought, no before dark, before dark. Oh, why won’t they stop it?

  An hour later the outboard cut out, running down to a murmur and then nothing. Fleurier and Queenie looked at one another in horror. The others came up beside them.

  ‘It just died,’ Fleurier called.

  Queenie began to cry.

  ‘Just stopped?’ Marks called, ignoring her.

  ‘Yes. What now?’

  ‘Have a look.’

  Fleurier lifted the cover inexpertly and poked about inside for a minute.

  ‘How’s it look?’ Marks called out, impatient.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for,’ said Fleurier, panicky.

  A moment later Marks fell into the bottom of the Zodiac at Queenie’s feet and climbed ove
r her to the stern and the hatless motor. He cursed and checked as many parts as he had become familiar with during the constant breaking down of his own motor. It was ten minutes afterwards, when the nausea had almost overcome Queenie completely, making her want to die as the boat pitched and rolled, that Marks cursed and held up a hand as if to strike Fleurier across the face.

  ‘You’ve used up one of your drums, you asshole!’ he screamed. ‘Unhook the line, clip it on. Right! Simple. Even a half-ass goddamm French playboy can do it!’ He bounded out of the inflatable and into the other alongside. Brent was leaning over the far gunwhale with his heaving back towards them. In a few seconds the outboard came to life and the wind blew fumes back into Queenie’s face and she too vomited over the side.

  The Zodiacs skittered northwards until mid-afternoon, when through a blur of nausea and seaspray Coldsea Island, its flanks creaming with surf, became a mark on the unsteady horizon. Queenie found herself yearning for Angelus, that dirty smudge intermittent in her vision.

  XV

  Ten minutes before the Zodiacs flounder onto the sand at Middle Beach, Ted Baer arrives triumphant at the town jetty with a 2,700-lb white shark lashed alongside, and within minutes the jetty and the foreshore are packed with onlookers. The twenty-five foot shark is hoisted with pulleys and tackle onto the groaning timbers of the jetty, jaws still flexing despite the nest of bullet holes in its head, and then tail-up onto the gallows where it gushes and bleeds, stretching under its own weight. A representative of the International Gamefish Federation fights his way through the jostling journalists, half blind with camera flashes, to announce the catchweight to Baer, still on the bow of his bespattered launch, all his muscles jerking and seizing. A great cry goes up and the crowd echoes it. And then begins the long night, the frenzy of relief and adulation. The town can forget whales and protests. Tonight Angelus is the home of the biggest sharks in the world. There is something to celebrate.

  Just before dusk Cachalot & Company retire to their rooms at the Ocean View. Few words are spoken. They pester room service. They sniff their food, scrutinise the colour of their orange juice. The lobby is empty.

  As night falls, the floodlit monolith on the town jetty draws more light, more noise, more beer-spray about it as it drips and groans at the end of its chained tail. Cameras, eskies, eyes glitter as the drizzle falls and is ignored. Ted Baer’s night becomes fragmented: his own unfinished accounts, flashes of light, bursts of music, and the delirious blare of car-horns. Bikies embrace blue-haired matrons. A helicopter descends and lands on the foreshore, disgorging the current affairs team. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ wends its way round the harbour from vessel to vessel and an atmosphere of carnivals and armistices, elections and football finals, seizes the townspeople, rugged, collared and coated, at the edge of the water. One by one the Paris Bay chasers glide in to dock, horns baying, and the crews, who have heard the news already, join the celebrations. Des Pustling mingles with the mob, winking, smiling, squeezing hands.

  Confused by the frenzied throngs outside the pubs, the falling beer cans, hats, shoes in Goormwood Street, Marion Lowell shoulders her way to the lane beside the old church and walks, Valium-light, along the ragged hedge towards the manse. The house is partly obscured by the church but she can see a strip of guttering in a warm flicker of light. Even the hedge winks. Shadows shrink and bulge weirdly. And as she comes round the hedge feeling her head moving away from her body she sees the fire.

  ‘Reverend Pell?’

  ‘Yes?’ He looks at once stricken and triumphant.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Come closer – oh, Miss Lowell. Burning a few things.’

  Marion Lowell puts her palm to her mouth to stifle a sound. Neither of them knows if it is a cry or a guffaw.

  ‘The money?’

  Pell rakes the blazing mound at his feet. ‘The lot.’

  ‘My God, isn’t that illegal?’ she says.

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘Cash?’ Marion Lowell comes closer to the warmth.

  ‘Yes. And cheques.’

  ‘Think of it,’ she whispers.

  ‘It hurts for a while, you know. But then it gets easy. We suspend our disbelief to make the paper valuable, and then we have to find our disbelief again to burn it.’ He bends down, knees cricking like brittle cane, and fists more paper onto the fire. From the street comes the sound of breaking glass. Marion stands close beside him. Their faces soften in the orange-red light. Pell fights off the urge to embrace her; it seems so long since he has felt the touch of another person. Wind rattles in over the rooftops bringing cheers and car noise, eddying around the little mound of smouldering ash and sputtering flame, and a burning curl of paper rises in its tiny vortex, lifted above their heads for a few seconds, pirouetting, rocking, before dissipating in a shower of smuts.

  ‘I bet that was a thousand dollars,’ Marion says, stifling a giggle.

  ‘I don’t believe so,’ he murmurs.

  ‘We can’t beat him, you know.’

  ‘We can try.’

  ‘We won’t win.’

  ‘Neither will we lose.’

  She shakes her head. ‘I —’

  He smiles and lays a big arm about her shoulders, feels his own body trembling as he rakes the embers with the other hand. She smells the smoke in his clothing, feels the heat on her shins. He stoops to put the last of the papers on the fire, then the cardboard box, and the flames force them back, lighting the whole yard with their incandescence, and the wet lawn glitters like tinsel.

  ‘But I’m nothing in this town now,’ she says. ‘No one will employ me. No one’ll want to know.’

  Pell shifts his weight from foot to foot. Yes, he thinks with some relief, both of us nothing.

  ‘Where will you go?’ she asks.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘But what’ll you do?’

  ‘Oh, nothings are useful for other nothings, you know. There’s lots of them.’

  ‘There’s someone coming.’

  ‘Yes,’ he shrugs, not bothering to let her go. He keeps his eyes on the faintly wind-stirred mound as the figures advance across the lawn into the circle of light.

  With the big manila envelope under his arm, Hassa Staats leaves his hotel where men and beer-spray hit the walls, where whistling, singing, shouting, smother his voice – his screams for attention – and where his wife Mara shoves him aside, afraid of the look on his face that threatens to dissolve these precious moments of celebration. Cold, benumbed, horribly sober, Hassa Staats reels into the street. If I had the guts and if there was any point, he thinks, I’d go back in there with a shotgun and drive ’em all out – Easton, the whalers, the women, the spongers, the drunks, that bitch of a wife – just so I could see it for myself, that cloud, that blue smoke they’ve killed me with. Just to point to it and say there, that’s what’s done it to me. I hate them. I hate it. Hate.

  He throws the X-rays into a bin as he staggers down the street, gradually recollecting his gait. Those areas, Hassa, he says to me, do you see them? I can’t even say the bloody word. Other people’s smoke, for Christ’s sake? My lungs. Mine.

  He walks down towards the waterfront, not feeling the light southerly. Music and laughter float up. Calmer, he strides down, hands in his coat pockets, and sees down along the town jetty the floodlit shark and the wild mob. Two days ago – two hours ago – Staats would have fallen to his knees at the sight; he would have poured beer into all those open mouths, rubbed it into their cheeks; but now he feels nothing. There is no room.

  He walks along the port road leaving the carnival behind and in the wind he hears car horns and bugles sounding in the streets above. He walks. Me. Me. Me, he thinks.

  He walks slowly on the deepwater jetty, mindful of the black water far below, hearing the rats ricocheting about the superstructure beneath.

  A light leads him down to a landing where a thickbacked figure with two heads hunches over the edge, intent on the aquamarine water and the two thin li
nes rippling in the wind. He stands behind, is not seen, and leaves.

  He sticks his head in the door of the watchman’s shack, thinking of a sudden that he might strike up a conversation with that young fellow Cookson. The man’s head is on the desk, a crescent of drool on the record book, a bottle of White Horse on the table, and a small rat perches, nose in the air, on the back of his chair. Staats closes the door.

  He walks, then, past the security signs and the encrusted cyclone wire and out along the hulking side of the tanker against the jetty. Exposed by its bright lights, he hurries its entire length nearly at a run, conscious of his suddenly unrestricted chest. Out of the amber wash of light he walks more slowly out to the end where, behind the row of bollards, there is only the dredged water below. He hears the chop-chop of waves against the piles and, far away, a car horn, as he sits on a rusted bollard and unloops the belt from his trousers. His big belly sags out into his lap and he is ashamed.

  ‘It’s a boong’s life,’ he mutters, strapping his left foot to his right hand.

  It is some moments before Pell recognises Billy and Clara Tanks and the others of the clan. Their dark skins hold firelight, their eyes have lost some timidity. An old, white-haired woman is wailing. They have come to ask him to bury Abbie Tanks and Pell knows it before they ask. Boys pull pickets from the church fence and add them to the fire. They are all sitting, Pell and Marion Lowell included, around the spitting fire speaking quietly, when, from the church, another group emerges and crosses the lawn.

  My Great God, Pell thinks, staring at the slight figures joining them by the fire. I’m dreaming, the Ladies’ Guild . . . with scones . . .

  By midnight the shark catch celebrations have become mobile: convoys of cheering, can-throwing people move from house to house, thinning towards dawn. Outside the pubs Ted Baer wakes groups of Aborigines, shakes hands with them, presses warm cans of beer into their hands, thumps their backs and receives their dumb, frightened looks and moves on. The convoy becomes a racing, haphazard tour to every tourist spot known to those still able to remember and think and speak. Ted Baer, staggering, incoherent, is rushed to the site of every man-made and natural marvel within fifteen miles of Goormwood Street, trailing a motley of locals, media personalities, lushes and wildflower tourists. Near dawn he is nauseated with speed and exhaustion and coastline and he has a manic urge to vomit or to sleep or to do something spectacular.