Shallows

  Three times that morning he took up the mean shape of a ballpoint pen and began the letter he wanted to write; but the words were stiff and separate from him, reminding him of his grandfather, and his concentration was impeded by the sounds of neglected stock. Finally he worked his feet into boots and set off across the desiccated earth towards the hill.

  Wirrup Hill was the highest point for thirty miles in any direction. To Daniel Coupar, who spent each day with his body close to the finite ground, climbing the hill was like flying, and as he laboured on the sweatless flanks, picking his way up the tiny tracks he had used as a boy, hearing the earth vibrate with the lumberings of kangaroos in the sapless vegetation, the physical effort did not seem a part of him.

  Near the summit he came upon the fallen stone walls of the watchmen’s hut. Had it not been for the big fire of ’56 which tore across the land to the coast, the old hut would have still stood. The fire had consumed every wooden piece: lintels, roof beams, doors, shutters, and left the stones to topple.

  During the Second War Wirrup Hill had been seized by the Army as a submarine-spotting post. A small unit of soldiers, mostly locals, were sentenced to four years’ of isolation and looking out to sea. They drank sly grog and sometimes attracted an Aboriginal woman or a lonely farmer’s wife, and to pass the days they built themselves a small settlement: a stone hut with a deep fireplace, a fortress-like ablution shed, and a great granite throne they called the Looking Seat on the brow of the hill. They dynamited old native waterholes and made catchments and irrigation channels and even a Roman bath. Some of them carved their names and their lovers’ names into the granite. Daniel Coupar kept well away from them and heard the blasting from a distance; sometimes he saw their tiny shapes moving about on the bald summit. He did his best to forget them and their war. Only twice did the soldiers report sightings, and both times the submarines were found to be whales westering up the coast on their annual migration. There were no reports after that, not even of specks certain to be submarines: the men were locals and sensitive to ridicule.

  As he shuffled about the ruins of the old hut, Coupar remembered his resolution to restore it as a haven away from the farmhouse. But the year of the fire was also the year of Queenie’s birth and Coupar and his wife soon found they were the guardians of their daughter’s child, and there was time only for work and the child.

  Coupar made his way up to the flat top of the hill and the remains of the Looking Seat. Removing a few fallen lumps of rock, he sat in the generous space between the granite armrests and looked down at the creaming lines of surf on the beaches that stretched away west, one after another, to Angelus, and in particular the beach directly below where his grandfather had hunted whales a century and a half ago, where his father had shot himself, where the ribs and vertebrae of whales and other mammals surfaced each season in the moving sands.

  From here there had always been for Coupar a sense of perspective: there was order and sense, each landmark, each familiar plane of light or darkness consistent with memory and history, an immemorial constant around which, upon which, all else happened. To the north, the Ranges; to the east the white sides of Jimmy’s Rock; to the west the cloudy tips of Fourpeaks; to the south-west only Bald Island hugging the thin shoulders of Stormy Beach. Ocean. Sky. Dead land.

  After resting, Coupar moved west along the spine of the hill, stumbling on its subtle decline, crossing worn patches where the earth and bush had receded like an aged hairline to expose wide, open stretches of granite whose steepness demanded an undignified crab-walk. In the centre of one of these bare spaces, on a level terrace, stood two neat stacks of flat granite stones. Coupar negotiated the edifices carefully, sat down on the lower, seaward side of them, in their shade. When he was a boy these monuments had aroused in him a deep suspicion. The stones, stacked like houses of cards, seemed to generate silence. They looked as though a push would send them toppling. Sometimes at twilight they looked like two men standing together overlooking the sea.

  Coupar’s father, Martin Coupar, had spoken of them in a puzzled, derogatory manner, as though contemptuous and a little afraid. ‘Supposed to be some damned legend about them,’ he said, twisting his big moustache, ‘about two spirit fellows who lived here and suddenly flew away one day across there to Bald Island. Those dents in Bald Island are supposed to be where they landed. The darkies must have thought it up; Presbyterians around here haven’t the imagination.’ The young Daniel Coupar marvelled at this and visited the place often to stare out at Bald Island with its spirit-prints, but as he grew older and more sensitive to ridicule, he came to scoff at the stories and his own imagination.

  In more recent years he had come back to these structures with renewed wonder, had brought Queenie up to see, had even brought a visiting anthropologist who dismissed them as spurious.

  From the stones, the waterfall was a short walk away, farther along the spine of the hill, around and below which grew the thickest bush on the land. Daniel Coupar came suddenly to the brow of the dry fall. He peered over the edge, down at the chaotic gully and the rocks below, a drop of sixty feet. He had seen things at this place that had kept him awake nights.

  Twelve years had passed since the death of Maureen Coupar. Twelve years were not enough to diminish the immediacy of the moment in his mind.

  For weeks Maureen had been depressed and restless, wandering about the house clutching her gown about her in the night, sitting out on the veranda where thick nets of mosquitoes descended upon her. Coupar, who laboured alone all day and brooded, locked into himself most evenings, was slow in perceiving her state. He began to wake in the night with her flailing about beside him, calling out, sobbing. He found her sleepwalking, tearing her hair. One morning in February he dared to ask her, and his questions sounded awkwardly formal, as though he was addressing someone he’d only just met.

  ‘I have this dream,’ she told him without looking up from the breakfast table. ‘There . . . there is this little girl swimming like a fish – only there’s no water and she’s wriggling about in a patch of red dirt – and her ribs are all showing, she’s got no clothes on, and you can tell she’s hungry, she moves her mouth, it’s all swollen and dry and the teeth are black. She wants food. She looks as if she’s calling out only there’s no sound. Then . . . then she just bites herself and blood comes out like red dust and —’ She looked at him, eyes dark and deep. ‘It’s Queenie, sometimes, Daniel, and other times it’s me. What’s going to happen to our Queenie? And me?’

  Coupar sat, watching carefully the movements of her face. She was talking to him as though afraid of him, ready to fend off his blows. And she flinched when he reached out for her silvery hair to feel its softness.

  ‘Let’s have a picnic,’ he said.

  The previous winter had been so long and wet that, late in summer as it was, the waterfall was thick and boisterously alive. At the top of the fall, at the edge of the still-tumescent creek, they drank beer and ate cold chicken and threw the bones and the bottles over the edge and sang cheery, silly songs that made them nostalgic; they held hands like nervous youngsters. Small birds batted about. The bush whistled and bristled with life, and by noon Daniel Coupar knew that since the summer of 1932 when they had first met there had been a great void.

  What had he been doing all these years? Thirty-four years? The realisation almost stole the day’s magic from him. Since 1932 much of his life had been spent working hard, hard enough to punish his body, and brooding, mulling over his defeat in Angelus and the nature of his ancestry. And now this was 1966, the year of dollars and cents. Daniel Coupar savoured these moments, then, and tried not to think of the intimacies he had denied his wife, denied himself, those millions of things he had left unsaid.

  As the afternoon slipped by they told stories and jokes and shared suspicions and other dreams. They split a watermelon and burrowed to their ears in it, spitting juice and seeds, licking the sweetness from each other, and Daniel Coupar remembered what it was to be fr
ivolous. She danced for him the way Queenie, in town at school, would dance, and they rollicked together in the cool water near the edge where it rushed about their knees; they danced madly as though winning back lost time. Close to the edge they kicked and splashed and were unafraid.

  When she stumbled and was taken, Coupar heard her laughter, saw a hand, and was conscious of his trousers flapping from a nearby bough. He heard a shallow sound that might have been her impact or the shock of a magpie leaving a tree.

  Now twelve years later, as he made his way around to the foot of the fall, there was a roaring, not of water, but of blood in his ears. The long, granite wall was dry; lichen grew on the rockface like old man’s stubble. At the bottom, behind where in plentiful winters the water crashed into the rock, there was an undercut, a cavity that smelt of fox and marsupials. Coupar bent in to see fragments of chewed bone, sharp as needles. At the spot where his wife had opened ripely and suddenly, there was an oval scab of mosquito larvae which came to life as he passed.

  Noon was passing when he fought his way down the choked gully with its mutant trees and distorted growths, through clouds of mosquitoes and midges unsated by his thin blood, until he reached pasture and tooled land. Crossing saline, treeless patches towards the house and its tipping sheds, he thought too of last summer and the waterfall and the familiar confusion rose in his throat.

  The summer before last, when Cleveland Cookson appeared in his Land Rover, Daniel Coupar felt the beginnings of his loss. Queenie seemed to burst in bubbles of energy, leading the reedy young man about as though saving him from himself and his thin veneer of worldliness. He heard them whispering in the sheds, heard his name, strained, but could not catch the gist of what was said, and he felt his helplessness grow.

  It was quite by accident that he came upon their nakedness in the waterfall one afternoon. He had tired of working, as often happened now, and had gone walking, thinking Queenie and her young man were swimming down on the beach. The sight of them – entwined in one another, strained and coiling beneath the hammer of water – had first struck him like a blow; but as he watched and saw he was prevented from crying out in rage by the glow of their torsos, the sincerity of their movements, their clumsy innocence, and an envy that rooted him to the ground and caused him to remember. And he left.

  Walking, recalling that day as he came to the fallen fence nearest his sheds, Coupar felt a heat in his cheeks that embarrassed him.

  That afternoon, on 16 July 1978, after vainly beginning the same letter again and again, Daniel Coupar dressed in the dark suit he had worn to Cleve and Queenie’s wedding, and went out to the shed to the old Fordson. He sprayed the ignition and uttered the foulest curses and cranked until it chuggered awake.

  Crows flickered in the scant shade, watching as he passed. He reached the road, breathless from the opening and closing of gates, and he steeled himself for the ride to Angelus. He savoured the breeze in his face.

  II

  Between the deep, dark swells that march in from the south a launch rolls and twists unhurriedly, engines idling, deckhand vomiting. Ted Baer, unstrapped in his chair, gazes astern along the disappearing glitter of his line out beyond the wake where his baited rig cuts and trundles at midwater. The deckhand, a lad from Angelus who talked himself aboard at the town jetty, braces over the berley bucket and contributes generously to it. The chum of whale-oil, foodscraps, blood and fish waste aggravates his seasickness; he is applauded by the old man at the wheel who steers with a heel in the spokes, rolling a cigarette. ‘Keep ladling!’ the old man calls, lighting up.

  Also taking the swell abeam, the Paris II, a quarter of a mile distant, sounds its horn in greeting and cuts away east tracking a pod first seen at dawn nine hours ago.

  The same moment Daniel Coupar leaves his gate shut behind him at Wirrup, and within minutes of the moment the two vessels pass one another at sea, Abbie Tanks meets a man outside the Bright Star. The man with the double-knit suit and sunglasses shakes his hand and suggests they go inside. Abbie Tanks grins and hesitates, looking over the man’s shoulder to where his friends and cousins sit laughing outside Richardson’s Bakery; too timid to lead the way, he follows. Crossing the space between the door and the table the man has found for them, Abbie Tanks sees, with eyes downcast, men he has fought in the street after dark; but as he sits with the scout from the city league team he feels a cool sense of safety upon him. He is immune even from the crimson jowls of Hassa Staats who has only just seen him, peering through the sheets of smoke. Staats’s eyes bloom in his head for two seconds before he recognises the big football scout from the city. Abbie Tanks asks for a beer. The scout raises two fingers at Hassa Staats who begins to pour. The scout speaks but Abbie Tanks is only half listening, savouring this moment. Distorted behind the frosted glass of the windows, the shapes of Abbie Tanks’s cousins cavort and bob, and he thinks he hears them giggling.

  ‘This is the best day of your life,’ the scout says from behind his sunglasses. Abbie Tanks, glass in hand, with an eye on the dartboards and the red-armed men at the bar, nods in agreement.

  In the ancient remains of an easy chair on a veranda William Pell wakes to the swampy smell of the Hacker River whose brackish flats swarm with birds. Pell’s back aches; his body feels as though it has been beaten. He sees across the water the tiny jetty, the nest of paperbarks below a tilting house where forty years ago he spent an afternoon with Maureen Bolt before she had even met Daniel Coupar. He remembers her bare, rough feet and the black crust beneath her fingernails and the fat bellow of her father from the house above. As he twists in the musty old chair he recalls how he tried to attract her attention to him with witty turns of phrase and the dropping of names and how she kept on regardless, telling him the things she had heard about a footloose young man in town who was organising farmers and tenants in resistance. He would protect them from the Pustlings, she said. They had been burning their farms before walking off. They were singing ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’, she told him. Pell remembers rolling his eyes and surrendering to the young woman’s awe.

  Ah, he thinks to himself as a breeze comes muggily up from the paperbarks, the scummy old Hacker brings out the memories in a man. She was a fine woman, too fine even for you, Daniel Coupar.

  Pell rests for a moment with his memories. He thinks back over the half-century he has known Coupar; he remembers sitting in church on a hot, fly-buzzing morning in 1919 watching Daniel Coupar, who was older, planting gum under the pews, mimicking the minister’s fatal twitch. Pell recalls the time Coupar knocked him down in the locker room at school, and the time he came upon Coupar weeping silently behind the tuckshop. On a camp out at the old quarantine station near the entrance to the harbour, Daniel Coupar had spent a night on the block in the old mortuary, dared by the others. Some boys wagered money; Pell gave him his pocket-mirror, the only thing of value he had. Coupar had kept the money and the mirror and never spoke about the night. Billy Pell often wondered if Coupar even knew what death was. At the funeral of Coupar’s father he saw Coupar’s impassive stare as the big box was carried across the soaking ground.

  Now, as he rests and contemplates his position, Pell wishes that he could speak to Daniel Coupar. When he was a boy he once prayed to God asking that he might become Daniel Coupar.

  Mosquitoes fizz about his legs. A hand touches his shoulder and a woman of indeterminate age in a grey frock comes around beside him.

  ‘You’ve been asleep,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ Pell says, smelling the eucalypt fragrance of her.

  ‘Here’s some soup,’ she said, placing a bowl in his lap. ‘You’re not eating enough. When a Pell gets to lookin’ comf’table in his clothes, he’s not feedin’.’

  Pell looks up at the woman whom he has met only once before on a previous run, startled.

  ‘Anderson Pell was a big man,’ she says.

  ‘You knew my father?’

  ‘And when you get old I expec’ you’ll even look like him. A fine man.?
?? She stoops at the edge of the veranda to spit. ‘Eat up. You better go soon. The ol’ man’ll be back an’ he’ll likely be in a dark one when he finds a box of charity on the doorstep. He’ll take charity, but he likes to be alone when he does.’

  With a strange sense of exhilaration Pell spoons the thin broth, glancing every few moments at the gaudy truck he has rented and filled with Pustling’s money. He feels the stubble on his chin; he has been driving since Monday. A pelican floats soundlessly across the shimmering river.

  III

  Jouncing down the highway on under-inflated tyres with the hammer of the diesel engine in his ears, Daniel Coupar steered off onto the gravel every now and then to let cars overtake. His eyes stung in the slight wind. Rabbits, bursting from the petrified grass at the roadside, became mallee roots in their fright, only turning and showing their white backsides fleeing into the dead paddocks as he was almost upon them. In a normal winter this road was often under water and the paddocks on either side bobbing and bristling with birds; but this year the low pastures glowered with an unnatural heat and the water lying across the road in the distance was an illusion.

  On his left in the distance, the thin coastal hills were never out of sight. The bruise of the Ranges to his right stayed with him.

  Over the racket of the tractor engine Coupar heard the braying of another motor. He pivoted in his seat but saw nothing; the reddish bitumen twisted away empty behind. Still he heard the other motor, unseen, demonic. A minute later a black flash whipped past leaving a phrase of taped music and a wave of heat in its wake.

  Daniel Coupar shifted his benumbed buttocks. He did not want to go to Angelus. He was afraid of the compulsion he felt in his body; he wanted to disown it.

  Daniel Coupar was born on the first day of 1906, a strong-limbed, ravenous baby. His mother taught him to read and to believe before sending him to school in Angelus, and as a boy wandering the farthest reaches of their lonely farm he let the world inform his senses. Sometimes when he lay on the granite breast of the hill above the pastures and the beaches, looking up into the mesmeric blue of the sky, he felt the world swallow him, enfold and engulf him; he felt its milk-warm breath and its sap-sweetness. He learnt to name the things about him with the aid of some water-stained cyclopaedias. His mother read to him from the Bible and he lived and re-lived the magical stories of Moses and Ruth and Jonah. When he dreamt, when he sat out on the veranda watching the sun haul itself up from behind the trees, when he lay by a creek watching the million bubbles tumble past, each with its sealed cargo of white light, he knew that anything was possible, all things were good, and he could doubt nothing.