Shallows

  On the jetty in the bleary light before dawn, the huge, groaning cadaver of the shark, torn through by its own weight, falls to the boards with a thwacking gout of spray, sending a single beam into the air.

  Before this, though, to avoid the Zodiacs in the Sound, the Paris IV slips from the harbour early, her skipper and crew tired of the duelling and the publicity and the shooting over people’s heads. Within twenty minutes Paris III follows.

  When the Zodiacs skim out from Middle Beach and wait in the Sound for the chasers, none appear. They wait thirty minutes, rocking on the abated swell. Another thirty. The crews confer, alongside one another, bickering in the dark. They will wait until dawn.

  It is barely dawn when Paris II surges from the harbour at full speed, cutting through the gloom. Her crew, only minutes before, have seen the shark fall to the jetty and spring the great plank that spun high in the air and come down onto Ted Baer’s launch, piercing the bow. They are late because they have been attempting to contact Ted Baer via the police. Two salvage operators were already at the jetty when they left. Paris II takes only minutes to sight the Zodiacs as they speed towards her, skipping across the tops of the swells. Paris II is barely out of the Sound when she receives the message of emergency. The Zodiacs follow as she makes a wide turn east around the Head.

  Dozens of townspeople and tourists and reporters know that a man has fallen into the sea beneath the Natural Bridge because they were there when it happened. A man, drunk, excited and foolhardy enough had climbed down at dawn underneath the towering granite structure and was quickly claimed by the swell. He was not sucked beneath the shelf at the base of the cliffs as is usual, but tumbled out seawards in a rip.

  Twenty minutes after receiving the distress call, Paris II, wary of king waves, heaves to a distance from the cliffs and commences to lower boats for a search. The crew is hastened by the sound of outboard motors nearing. A spotter-plane banks away above and comes in low to the water, close to the cliffs.

  The crews of the Zodiacs, without radio equipment, are puzzled, only beginning to comprehend when they see the crowds lining the cliff and the boats being winched down from the chaser. At full throttle they scud in close to the cliffs, teetering on the crests of swells until one crew sights the white spot in the grey-black water. And above them, the crowd, enervated by the dregs of alcohol, finds new stimulation: a race has begun. Hungover journalists collect their wits and their cameras and notebooks. The race lasts two minutes.

  Ted Baer, almost dead, is pulled from the water by Queenie Cookson who, when she finally has him on his back in the bottom of the inflatable, gives a cry of recognition. He has been in the water forty minutes, floating stubbornly at the petering edges of the rip, and he is aware of no irony as he is resuscitated in the bottom of the Cachalot Zodiac. Queenie hears her swimming teacher’s voice again as she tilts his head and pokes in his throat with a finger.

  Before he is conscious, before he is even transferred to the Paris II, headlines have been made, and the next race is to the nearest telephone.

  XVI

  Music and car engines reverberated in the rain-slicked car park of the Ocean View. Queenie Cookson stood limp and somehow guilty by the window of an old station wagon. It was Friday, 1 July 1978, and she felt sick and had been crying and her throat was sore from shouting; the rolled Advocate in her hands was blackening her fingers and smudging her jeans with newsprint.

  ‘Well,’ Fleurier said, head and elbow out of the car window. ‘See you some time, Queenie.’

  ‘Yeah, no hard feelings,’ Marks said from the passenger seat.

  Loaded cars were leaving, some sounding their horns as they pulled out onto the road. Some had left days ago after the outboards were stolen.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The gods’re on your side.’ But Brent was asleep already on the back seat and she was robbed of a parting shot.

  ‘Look after this town,’ Marks said. ‘Put a match to it.’

  She nodded. She shook hands with Fleurier. And when it became evident that nothing else could or would be said, Queenie shrugged and let the last cars leave. A horn or two sounded, fading up the esplanade.

  Queenie walked out onto the esplanade and saw gulls huddled on the beach where she had learnt to do the dead man’s float. Mothers with prams moved along the footpaths and small children screamed gleefully, rocketing up on trampolines. A cluster of truants’ bicycles, all fallen together like an obscure sculpture, glinted in a brief showing of sun. An old man fished with a long rod off the beach. Retired couples strolled along the beach picking up shells, pointed, held hands. A cormorant alighted on the roof of the public toilets. A baby cried. A motorbike passed with a train of two-stroke fumes that reminded Queenie of outboard motors and seasickness. Two truanting girls compared winter tans on the lawn in the heatless sun. Queenie Cookson wanted very much to go down to the beach, but after a few minutes of wistful observation, she went back into the smoky hotel to pack.

  Bay of Whales

  I

  When at first Cleve became hazily aware of it, he thought the knocking sound he could hear was the thud of his own pulse in his ear; but as sleep left him and his head cleared and his eyes opened to behold the morning light it occurred to him that the noise might be from outside him, from outside. Someone was knocking at the door downstairs. He gave out a short cry, sprang out of bed, fell down the short, steep stairs and opened the front door in his underpants.

  ‘Hi.’ Queenie stood inside the timber porch, eyes swollen and sick-looking. Over her shoulder, boats crept across the surface of the harbour. ‘You look dazzling in your jockettes.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cleve stammered, looking at the suitcase and the bags. ‘Anything for attention. Thought it was Miss Thrim for a moment. We’ve become very close.’ His tongue rattled on independent of him.

  ‘Hnn.’ She looked at him nervously, not daring to look anywhere for more than a moment. He was shivering, she could see. Tell him, she thought. Words, words. ‘Two things to tell you.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Cleve rubbed his chin, dazed.

  ‘Firstly, I want to come back here and live —’

  ‘Well, it’s your place after —’

  ‘— and secondly, I’m —’

  ‘Kicking me out,’ he sighed.

  ‘No, better. Worse. Better. God.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Come in and shut the door. I’m cold. Coffee?’

  She followed him in, dragging her luggage, to the kitchen which was crowded with bottles and plates gummed grey with fat and newspapers, where he filled the kettle and stoked the night’s coals, adding kindling. She sat at the table next to the big window, made room for her elbows, looked out across the harbour and thought: be calm, don’t let him see you go berserk.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said with his head in the door of the woodbox.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’ His mouth seemed dry enough to crackle; everything in him raced. What does she want me to do? Laugh? Explode?

  ‘I don’t know.’ She smiled self-consciously. There was a silence between them when only the flames of the fire could be heard.

  ‘The others then? Is it all over?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. But that’s not why I’m back.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  She smiled. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ She looked round the room at the motley of old furniture and the precipitous stairs and the familiar tones of wood and worn polish. ‘No, it wasn’t just that they’re gone. I’ve got money to pay for accommodation. No, it’s lots of things. God, I love this house.’

  The kettle began to stir.

  ‘So do I.’

  Their eyes met for a moment.

  ‘I embarrassed you the other day,’ Cleve said, still poking at the fire. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. It was embarrassing as hell for me, to
o. Well, I’m a bit sorry,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Well, I s’pose it’s an improvement.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  The kettle ticked and creaked and they both watched its burnished heating. The kitchen felt crowded to Cleve with another person, but to Queenie, after the smoky hotel rooms, it was expansive and even the smell of it was beautiful.

  ‘Is all the news about the rescue true?’ Cleve asked, pouring the coffee. ‘About Ted Baer?’

  ‘That I was the one who resuscitated him? Yes. We got to him first. And I damn’ near threw him back.’

  ‘Was it the rescue that made you all give up?’ He saw her head rear a little in surprise.

  ‘ANTI-WHALERS SAVE SHARK KILLER. Worldwide. It killed our PR. And somehow it was my fault. But it wasn’t just that. It was going off anyway. Someone stole our motors the same night. People were just leaving, the rest of us fighting like dogs. And I wanted it to work. And then – bang – it’s over. All that effort.’

  Somewhere in him Cleve sensed and felt himself sharing her immense frustration and he wished he could tell her.

  ‘Go and put some clothes on,’ she said, ‘before your balls go blue.’ As he went upstairs Queenie looked out over the harbour where the wind coddled craft along the top of the water, and thought: he looked as if he wanted to cry. Or to run.

  All day Cleve stalked about the house, stunned and uneasy. He kept out of Queenie’s way, did not even stand close for fear of touching her. The very way she moved, the words she used, told him that she had been away, she had been places, met people, done things without him. There was a sadness in her voice despite the new hardness of her that suggested new hurts, new growths of which he knew nothing, that left him with the inferiority of not having been away, of withering a little. He paced, ashamed of the state of the house, the colour of the sheets, the putty look at his own face, the gracelessness of his pacing. At noon he took baskets of dirty linen from the bedroom and, while she lay in an exhausted sleep curled on the sofa, he opened her suitcase and pulled out her soiled, sour-smelling clothes stained with vomit and her sweetish perspiration. Fearing discovery, he crept out the back door and coasted the Land Rover down the street until out of earshot.

  When he returned he found her on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, and the look in her eyes made him refrain from protest. He hung the washing out, conscious of the neighbours’ scrutiny even though he could see no one.

  At tea, which he cooked before she could stop him, he gathered courage enough to ask questions. Queenie ate quietly, with her elbows confident on the table, pouring cabernet distractedly.

  ‘You’re sure you’re pregnant?’ he asked her, every word causing him to wince inside.

  ‘Duffed. Well and truly.’

  ‘Well . . .’ He worried his moussaka.

  ‘Yours,’ she said.

  ‘Oh.’ He caught himself sighing.

  ‘What did you think?’ she asked him, turning a fork in the light.

  ‘I just . . .’

  ‘Georges?’

  ‘I don’t know. Jesus, how’m I supposed to know? You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

  She gave him no sign, knowing it was true. Cleve stuffed his mouth full of moussaka, furious with himself.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured.

  ‘So’m I.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘I dunno. Talk?’ Consequences loomed like shadows, incoherent shapes in her mind. Cleve felt the urge to touch her reddened cheek, to fall into her lap, to do something vicious, run away.

  II

  For five nights, in his brief sleep, Daniel Coupar had the same dream: he dreamt he was a boy again camping at the old quarantine station with his friends, goggling in the bays there for mussels and whales’ teeth and abalone. They dared each other, dared themselves to dive deeper than they could bear, down into the greenish depths, further into the dark chill until the greyness of death reached out and brushed their skins. It was as if they willed themselves to death in order to feel alive; they toyed with life and did not understand it, felt no need to. They locked one another in the convict-built cell out on the point, and were thrilled by the dimness, wishing somehow the tiny cell window could be blocked off and the darkness made complete.

  Images distorted and passed him in his dream. Once he lay a whole night on the mortuary block in the quarantine hospital with two shillings and a piece of mirror in his hands that he earned from the dare. In his dream, Coupar saw his boyish, strong body on the block and he called out in exasperation at the frightened, stubborn boy; but he, the boy, didn’t seem to hear, staring up into the sky through the rotten roof, waiting for first light. Coupar shouted himself hoarse and then the dream took its crazy course. He had dreamt it so many times it was difficult for him to distinguish it from memory. The sun rose like a thrown ball. It was suddenly day. He was outside in the sun and his skin, his tanned boy’s skin, shrivelled and burnt hard on him; he saw it flaking off like ash. He stood still, shocked, as Job might have stood, waiting for explanation. But then he began to feel pain and he wanted relief and he sought shelter from the sun in a low crack in the granite near the water’s edge. Inside, he found it was a cave and the farther he went the cooler it became and the less his flesh tormented him. And then he realised that there was darkness, real darkness, so dark that he could not see his fingers before his eyes, could not hear his own voice when he cried out, and all sensation was gone, as if all his nerve-ends had withered in his hollow body. It was not uncomfortable; it was not anything. Until he saw, in a glow, a skeleton, luminous, limp, far below him. He called out to it, but no sound came. Then there were others, other bones, messes of bones with no integration, no order, no coherence: fingers, skulls, teeth, and he called out again without voice. For a moment his bodily sensation returned and he was wading through this sea of bones, and the sharp pieces pierced his hands and feet as he stumbled, and the pain grew in him until he found he had willed sensation away again and he grovelled on and the bones became rubble to him, and then dirt, then cool beach sand; he smelt salt and seaweed and felt the shell-grit moist and cool beneath his feet, comforted by the earthly smell of his own sweat. He stood still, content. And then in the distance he heard the great thunder, not like the blue cracking thunder he had heard as a child, running to his mother’s bed, but the sound of mountains moving. He called out at the shock of it and then he knew it was the thunder of water, water mountains, and next second it milled about his shins, storming out of the dark from where he had come through the crack by the sea. He could not go back out; the water was already up to his knees. He called out again, hoarse with panic, and his voice mocked him from all directions. Blindly, he struck out, groping ahead with the water at his back and darkness, all darkness ahead, and he woke in a sweat.

  The dream terrified Daniel Coupar. He did not, would not, allow himself to understand it. He only knew it would visit him again and he feared sleep because of it.

  III

  The first small group of humpback whales rounds the western capes of the continent, instinctively moving southwards and eastwards. Some are old, and a few are strong and young and lean from a warm season without mass feeding. The land stays at their left and moves slowly past. Each humpback, flanks tough with barnacles and tiny parasites and old weed, sounds shallowly, surfaces, spouts, and cruises on the surface for a time before repeating the motion almost without volition, following the flukes of the tail ahead. The water vibrates with the oscillation of their sounds. The Antarctic, nameless and timeless, only a colour, a temperature and a density of food, draws them on.

  They are months early. A thousand miles behind, others follow.

  IV

  The first morning, after waking in the old mahogany bed with a sheet of winter light warming the quilt, Queenie opened all the wardrobes to smell the familiar fragrances, pulled open drawers and secretly pressed Cleve’s shirts to her face. Through the window she saw the still water and
the steady clouds reflected in it. Saturday’s yachts becalmed. She pulled on an old windcheater and found a clean pair of jeans folded at the end of the bed. Her limbs were still tired and her head still heavy with the long night’s talk. Down in the kitchen she found the stove embers still hot and she rekindled the fire, casting stealthy glances into the living-room where Cleve slept still on a mattress before the fireplace. He slept on his back with his mouth open, hair askew, an arm flung behind, and he looked as though he had struggled in his sleep. She cooked him bacon and eggs and brewed him some coffee, knowing it would make him feel guilty, knowing, too, that she wanted to do it regardless.

  During the day they did not talk much.

  In the afternoon Cleve watched her washing her hair at the kitchen sink, the bread colour of it all forward, the curve of her brown neck agitating him until he rose from where he sat pretending to read and, from behind, wet his hands in the warm, running water, and kneaded with her. At first he felt tension in her neck and in her back at his touch, but in time, without a word spoken, her body relaxed and Cleve buried his hands in the lathered hair, looking past it, every now and then, to the empty sails on the harbour.

  With the water cascading past her cheeks, Queenie felt his hands on her and felt her own hands tight on the marble edge of the sink, and she wondered whether her tension was fear or wanting. She was glad he did not speak, frightened his words might give her an answer.