Shallows

  In the evening they talked – safe talk about external events, a little gossip, some deliberate abstraction, and they went to their separate beds burdened with the caution of it all.

  Cleve, on his mattress beside the subdued fire, lay awake wondering how much of the past month he would share with her. He had already locked the journals in a case and returned them to the attic and he wished he could have deposited some of his memories likewise. He wondered if he could ever tell her about the kangaroo, or about the speargun he had dropped into a street bin on his way to the laundromat yesterday. No, he thought, at least not yet.

  Before Queenie slept she was disturbed by a sense of shame as insistent and discomforting as nausea. She, too, wondered how much she would tell, when she would trust him enough, when she would forgive herself. She knew Cleve had told her nothing; she could see in his face, the hesitancy of his voice, that he had things to tell, and for a few minutes she toyed with the notion of another woman, torturing herself pleasantly to sleep.

  In the morning they collided, creeping in the kitchen. It was an overcast day. They joked and kept their distance, argued gently and light-heartedly about the whales that had sojourned in the harbour entrance nearly a fortnight ago. They were like a modest courting couple: good-humoured, eager to please, wary.

  A wind arose from the south-west in the afternoon and, suddenly tired of confinement, they walked to the top of Mount Clement to the lookout. The walking relaxed them. People saw them together and it made them smile, carefully. From the top of Mount Clement the harbour became a fortified tear-drop and the town seemed to crowd itself between hills, perching on the water’s edge. The great light patches of mud-flats blemished the rich deepness of the harbour, beyond which the quarantine ruins could be seen and behind, obscured by the curve of the protective peninsula, Paris Bay was sensed rather than seen.

  Wind gusted in their clothing, buffeting their hair. Queenie was the first to speak. She looked east, over the outer fringes of Angelus, past Middle Beach towards Stormy Beach, a haze between coastal hills obscured in the distance. Closer, the Hacker River cut its way to the ocean between slight hills and patches of cleared land.

  ‘When I was a little girl,’ Queenie said, smiling, ‘I wanted to swim away.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, imagining he could see Wirrup Hill in the distance.

  ‘Because I thought there was somewhere else to swim to. And I was a hell of a good swimmer.’

  You still are, he thought, wishing he could tell her. ‘And now?’

  ‘Maybe I know better. You want so many things when you’re a kid. You want so many things and the most important ones you can’t name. You just want. And it stays with you. Even when you know you can’t have. Maybe because you can’t have. You want all of something and then you don’t like it, but you still don’t want all the opposite. You think that’s crazy?’

  ‘No. That’s what you’re like. Like your grandfather and you. You liked it when he got old because then you were the strong one – the boss; but then I reckon you started to hate him being helpless and you wanted to hear him tell you what to do every now and then. But if he did, you got pissed off.’

  Queenie looked out north towards the geometric patterns of farmland and roads, not speaking, but thinking. It frightened her, Cleve saying things like that.

  ‘With me it’s different,’ he said. ‘I never even knew that I was wanting.’ He laughed. ‘Stupid.’

  ‘And you were never much of a swimmer.’

  He glanced at her, unable to catch her eyes to see if she meant hurt. ‘No.’

  That night after dinner they splashed about in the kitchen making a steam-pudding. They ate it by the fire in the living-room picking out its soft, gluggy centre with their fingers.

  ‘Let’s do something,’ he said, licking his fingers in the firelight.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I dunno. Let’s just do something crazy – spontaneous.’

  ‘Let’s plan something spontaneous?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Let’s drive up the coast. Camp. See the beaches.’

  Queenie, near him, but not touching, looked at him. ‘Yes, let’s go away for a while. To think. Something.’

  A light rain fell. The fire burnt down. They separated for bed.

  V

  It is Monday, 4 July 1978. The most persistent journalists take their leave of the town, returning to their cities. They are only a few; the majority have been gone for days. Later in the morning, others will arrive to find they are a week late. They will sulk in public bars, then make a hopeful trip out to Paris Bay before leaving town in disgust. Out past the continental shelf the chasers from Paris Bay plough about in the grey swell which mounts their foredecks drenching gunners and crews.

  Mid-morning, Ted Baer leaves Angelus with 2,700 pounds of frozen shark. The only townspeople to see him leave are the dozen in the funeral procession on the road north to the cemetery. Since Friday’s report by the coroner Hassa Staats has remained uninterred, refused Christian burial by his church. William Pell conducts a brief service in the grey light, speaking out over the neatly pared hole in the earth which the mourners can hardly bear to see. There are eleven mourners, all members of the Ladies’ Guild.

  In the classrooms children are still whispering about the body dredged out of the harbour: it astounds them to know that it was once Mr Staats, the big, round, red man who stood outside his pub on Saturday mornings smiling at their mothers, and to think what he must have looked like after two days in the water, bloated, blue, nibbled.

  All morning, her mind straying, Marion Lowell reads to her mother from the National Geographic. She finds herself looking out of the window, wonders why.

  At noon a talent scout from the Metropolitan Football Club checks in at the Bright Star. He is met by Rick Staats and his mother who welcome him and show him to his room overlooking Goormwood Street. Down in the public bar the regulars are eulogising.

  Down on the foreshore work continues on the replica of the Onan; a mast is raised, teetering on deck, to the sound of buzz-saws and electric planes. The siren wails at the canning factory. On the deepwater jetty Dick and Darcy, cocooned in a blanket, stare reproachfully at the water. It has been days since a flagon was last brought down and there is apprehension in their crusty faces.

  And in the afternoon there is another funeral. Abbie Tanks is buried in the new cemetery on the northern outskirts of Angelus and his family and their friends and the Presbyterian Ladies’ Guild listen to Pell’s words as the wind whips about them. He prays. They stand with their faces downturned. Their only comment is a murmured Amen and for some minutes they do not disperse.

  Although he is in no hurry, late that afternoon Des Pustling drives fast along the peninsula road back from Paris Bay after his very pleasant meeting out there. In an hour he has a sesquicentenary meeting and a few backs to thump. Then Rotary. It is time for taking stock, he thinks, time to assess the exposure. He does not see the small kangaroo as he takes the bend, but when it catapults through the windscreen of the BMW he hits the brake instinctively, feels the bilious slide in the gravel at the roadside, the not-stopping, the hiss of stones, and he cannot believe the left side’s impact with the marri tree. He is upright at the wheel in the ensuing silence. He sees bluemetal, sky, the ice-cubes of windscreen in his lap, and the long smear of blood down the walnut dashboard from the animal’s mouth. In the rear-view mirror he sees a spot of it on his chin and he tries vainly to reach for his handkerchief, wondering about insurance.

  VI

  The night before, afraid of sleep, Daniel Coupar forgot his pain and climbed the hill in the dark to stand on its smooth brow and smell the dryness of the land. The sky above him was a featureless black and the stars seemed to him more like aberrant spots than other worlds. Sweat moistened his body and the pain returned. July, he thought, and no rain, no winter. He breathed in the dry air, felt it on his tongue. He sat on a flat piece of rock and got to thinking about the whales. All h
is life they had puzzled him as they came each year to sojourn in the bay and to move north and pass again later, faithfully tracing out the ancient cycles of moving, feeding, mating. Scuffing the granite with the back of his hand he remembered the time when he was a boy that a whale stranded itself on the beach below the farm and his father organised a flensing and the men from neighbouring farms came and worked inexpertly on the huge, stinking carcass, talking as they did about the way it had thrown itself upon the beach. He heard them mutter ‘mindless suicide’ and he mimicked them, dashing about in his patchy shorts calling ‘mindless silverside’ at the gulls hovering above. The whale putrefied. The little oil they gleaned was unmarketable, and the men kept it for years, using it for fishing and for lubricating old machinery. There was still an old drum of it out in one of the sheds, full of the embalmed bodies of drowned rats.

  ‘No such thing as mindless suicide,’ he said aloud. ‘Only suicide. When you know what you’re doing.’ That moment he envied the whales their unalterable pattern. They don’t know, he thought, they just do and it’s enough. Why do we have to know? Why can’t we be innocent? I’m a man and I’m s’posed to know, but where is it? Where’s what I know? Those whales. Loyal to their own, loyal to the cycle and to the Creator. And me? Loyal only to this body, this shell of memories. Innocence. When was the last time we saw innocence? Gawd, not in this family – not even Nathaniel Coupar, the first. Not his bloody pretence at innocence. Ah, the Coupars – the firm fruit. Hah! Rotten to the core with pride. And when they saw it – phhtt! Blame someone else, pretend to escape and leave someone else to labour on. My God. I want to open a door and just step outside into something else. It’s not right! It’s not.

  At that moment he stood and brought his hands up past the height of his shoulders as if to summon, to shout at the sky, the stars, the darkness, the light, but he shoved his hands abruptly into his pockets and made his way incautiously down the track.

  VII

  Moving from one warm body of shallow water to the next in the pattern imprinted upon their brains from millennia of repetition, the small and solitary pod of humpbacks moves slowly east, propelling their bodies in light and darkness, clicking and shrilling opaque melodies as they move, pausing at intervals for those cows with young, occupied by the singularity of their hunger.

  VIII

  Although it was noon when Queenie and Cleve left Angelus on Monday heading east, it might have been mistaken for early morning or late afternoon, such was the dullness of the sky and the thinness of the light. The Land Rover, winding through the swampy bush on the grey strip of road, was just another moving component of the drabness. The Cooksons sat watching the land come to meet them, blur in the corners of their eyes, and fall behind. Neither spoke. Queenie sat with an army surplus blanket over her jeaned legs to ward off the draughts. Cleve drove idly, bunched into his corner.

  They felt speed and flight, and they tried hard to feel married again.

  At the Hacker rivermouth the inlet was like stone, without birds, without reflections. No boats lay trustingly upside-down and the paperbarks seemed an impossible way away and stooped and scabby. The whole scene seemed to have dissipated with added space; memory had compacted and condensed, fitting everything too easily, identifying, giving meaning; but now the scene was vacuous, expanded from their reach. On the sandbar the Cooksons stood vainly trying to relive it. They were as resentful as the bereaved.

  They walked without intent up the long beach towards the cobalt pools where they had once swum. Sand ground away beneath them. At odd moments they caught each other’s eye. At some stage during their walk a small pod of whales came into the bay. Both saw, but neither mentioned it to the other, and they continued to stroll. Then one of them took the other’s hand; it was impossible to tell who was the initiator.

  ‘Shame about the estuary,’ Cleve said.

  ‘Yeah. It all seems different. I thought when you got older all the things you remember seem so much smaller, you know, everything shrinks.’

  ‘You saw it too, then. Everything is too . . . big.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A shame you know, because . . .’ Cleve could not finish his sentence; he grew suspicious of himself.

  ‘God, I feel so old,’ Queenie said with a bleak sigh. ‘You feel old?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  Queenie felt a grief at this; he still looked a boy and she sensed her own incongruous youth. It’s fatigue, she thought, not age. Age is different. ‘Imagine what it’s like to be old.’

  ‘The last thing I want to do,’ he murmured.

  ‘Hnn.’

  They walked ahead in silence, and after a time Cleve chuckled. ‘Old.’ He looked out across the water. ‘Once, when I was a young kid I had a good look at my grandmother and said to her, “Gee, Nanna, but you’re getting old under the arms.” I could actually notice she was ageing. The first time I ever noticed that old people used to be young.’

  ‘I would’ve smacked your bum if I was her.’ Queenie laughed.

  ‘She burst into tears.’

  Queenie did not let go his hand. It was the first time he had ever mentioned his grandparents. He sounded sad. She watched his toes digging into the sand. She stopped and scooped up a handful and let it filter through her hands. ‘Look at them,’ she said, not needing to point.

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured.

  ‘They’re early. Very early. Humpbacks.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they are.’

  ‘So much more than us.’

  They stood by the cobalt-coloured pools for a while, marvelling at how cold they looked, how different they were; they were still young enough to be amazed that things changed. Returning along the beach they walked in their own footprints, sinking their toes where their heels had been. The rest of the afternoon they wandered along the edge of the estuary and back into the paperbarks, catching glimpses of their reflections in the water, privately wondering.

  That night the Cooksons risked the appearance of the local ranger and pitched their tent in amongst the trees by the inlet. The lamp hissed, hanging from a tree limb, and the fire’s limpid flames hung in the cold air. Whale sounds came to them every few minutes from in the bay.

  ‘Mascots,’ she said.

  ‘Us or them?’

  She shrugged, smiling. They ate tinned salmon and salami and sipped claret. In bed they listened to the sag of canvas and the whale noises from the bay. Cleve found himself wondering: what are they saying? He felt Queenie’s hand on his back and he flinched.

  ‘Yeah?’ he asked, full of doubt.

  ‘Do you mind that I’m having a baby?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You?’

  The question took her by surprise. ‘No. Not really. It’s just that I don’t know what we’ll be like. As parents.’

  ‘Hm.’

  In the morning the whales were gone. The Cooksons dismantled camp after breakfast and kicked their fireplace in and moved east.

  The road to Stormy Beach uncoiled ahead of them and lashed up at the belly of the Land Rover with spits of gravel. There was a strange closeness, an anxiety between them that thawed some of their awkwardness. Galahs flashed across the road in pink spurts. Trees and stumps and juts of granite became sharp in their perception.

  On the flat white sand of Stormy Beach the Cooksons parked the Land Rover and went walking. The sun came out for a while and they lay in the powdery warm sand and slept. Queenie woke, shaking the sand from her hair, when the air began to cool. We’re waiting for something, she thought. It was then that she saw the pod lazing in the shallows several hundred yards offshore, lifting curtains of water with their flukes, their backs catching the dull light.

  ‘They’re here, Cleve,’ she said. ‘The whales. She turned and saw that he was awake. He was smiling.

  ‘I bet they’ll be at every beach we go to,’ he said.

  ‘As if
they’re keeping an eye on us.’

  In their big sleeping bag that night Queenie felt Cleve’s finger in her navel, and knew she was afraid to be a mother, afraid to be a wife again. Queenie Coupar’s got blood! she heard. Oh, no she hasn’t, she thought; not this month.

  Basking in the heat of her body, Cleve, too, thought about the child. He felt helpless, so removed from it. He couldn’t even recall the last time they made love. Wirrup? he thought; that far back? In the stagnant pool? It seemed so long ago, seemed impossible, even a little ugly.

  ‘Queen?’ he murmured. ‘You awake?’

  ‘Yeah. Thought you were asleep.’

  ‘About me hitting you that time.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her body tensed; both of them felt it.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  They shared a silence.

  ‘Well, it didn’t help things much, did it?’ she said.

  ‘Do you hate me for it?’

  ‘Not now. I don’t think so.’

  Cleve sighed and scratched the fabric of the tent. ‘Do you love me? At all?’ His voice was pathetic; it embarrassed them both.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not the same.’

  ‘That’s not necessarily bad.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  Weariness did not blunt their excitement as they drove hard along the highway to the east. The whales had been gone when they pulled camp at dawn and they had occupied all their thoughts since. The land on either side of the road was flat and shrouded with a fine mist that moved low and sluggish over its surface. Black arrows of crows emerged from it and disappeared again without sound. A wallaby tripped out of the path of the whining Land Rover and stood at the edge of the mist as it passed.

  As they sped eastwards the country became drier and paler and starker in its starvation, but they saw only the creeping strip that blurred beneath their feet. Silver-eyed mileposts marked off the distance in units that seemed unreal.