Shallows

by Tim Winton

  Queenie Cookson groaned and glanced across at Barney Wilkins the driver who grinned and winked. Behind the two thick-thighed, bright-haired matrons about twenty people in their early twenties gazed apprehensively through the breath-misted windows at the vast, grey bruise of the Sound, visible as the road wound southward. The young people were a party of students, Queenie decided, observing their art folios, probably on an assignment from the university in the city. They seemed in poor spirits, speaking nervously amongst themselves.

  It had been a dull trip so far this morning. Queenie was tired and worn from the silence at home, and this peninsula tour had begun to give her nightmares, dreams in which she starred as a middle-aged, blue-haired, bowel-bound woman like those she tour-guided every day. It would be worse, she knew, when the wildflower season began. The thought of being fifty and incapable of keeping her knees together, her moustache peroxided and her perspiration contained at an age when dignity was all she could conceive to strive for, revolted and frightened Queenie.

  At an earlier stop at the Blowholes, Queenie noticed a slightly older member of the party, a man in a cashmere sweater whose face was furrowed with impatience and fatigue. She happened to stand near him when the party gathered around the fluted openings in the rock as the ocean expelled pent-up wind and sent some of them scurrying backwards. She saw his brooding eyes and sinewy features and was puzzled by him. She watched him again at the next stop – the Gap – where the Southern Ocean surged into a vee in the cliffs like the space in a cut cake, and thundered across a flat, submerged shelf, slammed up against the blunt cliff-face sending spume hundreds of feet into the air almost to where the tour party cowered in the wrought-iron lookout on the brink. From her Tourist Bureau Guide’s Brochure Queenie recited macabre but compulsory details of horrific drownings and thwarted rescues and she saw her flock huddling together involuntarily as she shepherded them back.

  This place always held some mystery for Queenie Cookson. As a child she heard it said that beneath this vast stretch of cliffs, on this the seaward side of the curving peninsula, there were caves whose tunnels extended inland as far as the Nullabor a thousand miles away.

  Queenie led her party down a path in a wilderness of salt-streaked granite to the edge of the Natural Bridge, an arch of grey granite across a spumescent chasm, and gave them more depressing history and depressed herself further.

  On the road to the final stop, as rain blunted itself against the windows and Queenie pointed out marks of supposed interest, the two middle-aged women cooed and tutted, rolling their stockings down a little, and turned to the group of young people behind.

  ‘Listen, loves,’ one of them said over the top of Queenie’s droll recital, ‘you all look so pale and nervy this is a scenic tour which is supposed to be a happy time why don’t we have a sing-along to cheer us all up?’ With that she cawed into ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and the people up the back looked dumbfounded and long-jawed.

  ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary,

  It’s a long way to go!

  It’s a long way to Tipperary,

  To the sweedest gal I know!’

  Queenie recited, despite the singing, determined to retain both control and poise. ‘Now we are passing the turn-off to Jimmy Newhill’s Harbour . . .’

  ‘Goodbye to Piccadilly,

  Farewell Leicester Squaaaare!’

  ‘And now on the left the turn-off to the old quarantine station used until the middle of this century . . .’

  ‘It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,

  But my heart’s still there!’

  ‘Across the Sound now you can just see Tipper . . . oh, um, Angelus. Oh, shit!’

  On the next verse several of the others joined in, and on the chorus Barney Wilkins could not contain his nostalgia; and then the whole bus boomed with raucous song and the young people were laughing self-consciously. Queenie, unyielding, pressed her lips closer to the microphone as the bus ground up the final ascent before Paris Bay.

  As the bus crept down the long bitumenised slope, the silver storage tanks and cluster of small buildings came into view and the singing diminished but for the ladies’ plangent chorusing. When they felt the silence, even they stopped.

  ‘The Paris Bay Whaling Company has been operating here since 1910 when a Scandinavian group of companies began the venture. In 1918 it came under Australian ownership and has been so ever since. The Paris Bay operation is the last land-based whaling venture left in Australia. Land-based whaling has a tradition in the Angelus region more than a hundred and fifty years old . . .’

  Silence prevailed in the bus for the last half-mile until they rolled into the gravel car park outside the whaling station compound. The pneumatic hiss of the door opening seemed a shattering sound.

  Queenie got out of the bus and watched. It took twenty seconds before the small crowd blossomed with coloured handkerchiefs as the stench of boiling blubber descended on them. Let’s get on with it, she thought; this is what you’re all here for. Just then, as the party moved forward through the gates, the bearded man she had been watching came up to her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, with a foreign accent, ‘could you tell me, please, where I could find a telephone here? Most important.’ He ran the fingers of one hand through the greying spines of his dark beard.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Queenie said, walking towards the little museum and souvenir shop outside which stood an old mounted harpoon gun and a nineteenth-century trypot. ‘In there.’ She indicated the pay phone in the foyer of the museum.

  He nodded and went in and Queenie joined the small mob moving downhill with the song leaders in the lead. The students carried their cumbersome folios under their arms, clinging to them as if the wind might snatch them away.

  Down at the flensing deck, a long ramp running into the bloody shallows, a whale was being winched up, hooks through the flukes of its tail, chains and cables moving, taut, noisy. Men hosed the platform, standing in gumboots and bloodied singlets. Plumes of putrid steam lifted from the sheds where boilers and furnaces and generators roared. Amid the bitter stench other gumbooted men wandered nonchalantly, waiting with what looked like long hockey sticks. When the whale’s carcass was firmly in place and its Gargantuan presence established in the minds of the observers, these men went to work with their hockey sticks and sliced deep into the glistening, black blubber and proceeded to whittle the great body down. Blubber peeled away in long, smooth strips as thick as mattresses. The ladies gasped and went closer. A young man bent over and vomited, spattering the feet of those around. Gulls arced back and forward, feathers greasy from the steam. Steadily, bloodily, the sperm whale was dismantled like a salvaged vessel.

  Other whales lay moored and buoyed out on the water where gulls buried their heads in the huge promontory backs. A launch circled the carcasses and gunshots rippled across the water.

  Queenie stood rooted, as always, watching these proceedings she had witnessed countless times since childhood. It was the smell she could not ignore. She remembered the day she brought Cleve here in the first weeks of their marriage, when Cleve had marvelled at the size of the whales and admired the men who hunted and dissected them. That evening they argued while he fried sausages and the argument became bitter and Queenie fled upstairs and he chased her and made love to her as the house filled with the stench of cremating sausages.

  ‘Revolting.’ It was the foreigner beside her.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘It is a repulsive sight to the sensitive.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Cameras clicked. Flensers’ boots were gummed with blood; their faces, hands, beards smeared with it. Out on the glass water the launch forced up a sturdy bow-wave with an inflated, bird-backed whale in tow. As it neared, the projectile shapes of sharks showed in the water, milling, snouts disappearing into the flanks of the whale which shuddered with the impact. A man with a rifle stood at the gunwhale, shooting into the water.

  ‘The press will
be here soon,’ the man who had telephoned said to someone Queenie saw from the corner of her eye.

  Men moved along the abdomen with their knives and viscera began to tumble out, and soon the flensers were knee-deep. Saws sirened. Queenie concentrated on getting a glimpse of the whale’s eye, but the head was obscured by loose meat as it was dragged to the upper deck.

  ‘Soon,’ the same man said to the third person. Queenie felt like an eavesdropper.

  Sharks broke water all round as the launch idled in. Even gulls were seized as they settled upon the water; Queenie saw a gull’s wing floating detached. The towed whale was bunted and buffeted and finally brought to the foot of the ramp, and as it was dragged from the water, tattered black and pink, a shark came up with it, still writhing into the blubber, shaking meat away with every drill-bit turn of its head. The flensers laughed, placing verbal bets, but were disappointed when the shark fell away, tumbling, snapping, down the deck into the water. The two women, handkerchiefs plastered to their faces, shook their heads at the wonder of it. Queenie heard an American accent. More thick blood; more inescapable stink.

  ‘Bastards,’ the foreigner said. He looked behind, up to the car park. ‘Has been nearly twenty minutes. Now will do. Now!’

  Then things began to happen and Queenie felt faint with the shock of it. From art folios all around her Queenie saw sheets of card and neat lettering; folios fell to the ground open-winged like big stiff birds and people were on the flensing deck and lying down in the blood and hosewater and shreds of meat with placards over their chests. Flensers shouted in anger and surprise. The winch ground to silence; the head-saw ceased its coming and going. The only people left standing were the station hands, the middle-aged tourists, and Queenie Cookson, and for a few seconds the only audible sounds were the slow run of water and blood down the deck into the sea and the distant crump of rifle fire. Queenie, for a few moments, could only look. Behind the prostrate, pink-saturated young people with their signs STOP THIS SLAUGHTER and BLOOD ON YOUR HEAD, PARIS BAY and BUTCHERS loomed the colossal bulk of a sperm whale which leaked from orifices and punctures. The great wound in its back exuded blood thick as lava. Queenie heard the middle-aged women shouting.

  ‘Get off there! Go on get off there you silly irresponsible twits my God this is a disgrace I never would have thought . . .’

  The women clenched their fists and shook their big ham-arms; and Queenie saw the flensers fidgeting at one end of the deck, and behind her she heard Barney Wilkins bellowing abuse as he came down the hill. SHAME! a sign said. Queenie Cookson willed her feet forward and slopped across to where, in his now-bloodied cashmere sweater, the foreigner lay; and she sat, then settled into the pink slush and some cheered. From the corner of her eye she saw Barney Wilkins shaking his fist, she saw the lovable man who had driven her school bus call her names and spit on the ground. Down the hill men were running with cameras and notepads and tape-recorders. Then the young people were singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and the old women were choking in disgust. Queenie, without a placard, held up the only printed matter to hand and flattened it across her chest for security’s sake.

  HAVE A WHALE OF A TIME IN ANGELUS, W.A. the tour guides’ brochure said.

  Then the cameras were there and then the flensers turned the hoses upon them, and through the haze of her nausea Queenie Cookson heard gunfire.

  VI

  Born fifty-eight years ago on the bar of the hotel he now owns and manages, Hassa Staats, Reformist, member of the Angelus chamber of commerce, sits back in his father’s old swivel chair and shoves the papers on his desk into a ragged pile in the centre. Other men might light a cigarette at this point of completion, when Friday’s paperwork is done for another week and the stocks organised and the pools and numbers finalised. But Hassa Staats lives in daily fear of cancer – he sweats in the small hours over it – and instead of a cigarette he draws from his top pocket a twist of barley sugar from which he blows a wad of lint before breaking a piece off in his teeth.

  ‘Mara!’ he calls to his wife serving in the lounge bar. ‘Ask one of them lazy boggers to fill in for you; I want you to post some mail for me!’

  There is no reply from the lounge bar, only a murmur of music and a click of glass. Staats calls again and when no reply is forthcoming he gathers up the mail and strides out into the lounge and is suddenly conscious of the early lunchtime customers and he reins in the shout between his teeth and shoves through the glass doors onto the street. One day I’ll beat the livin’ crepp out of that woman, he thinks.

  Out on the street his spirits rise. The new shops, new cars, new widening roads, soothe him as always; he breathes the town into his lungs: bakery-warm, cannery-sour, Tourist Bureau-fresh, and walks up from his pub near the waterfront to the post office halfway up the street. On the warm brick wall outside the post office six Aborigines sit watching. Staats, deflated, hates them for their black, blunt noses and their shaggy hair and their unmatched clothing and their rough bandages and falsetto whispers; he has always hated them. And they watch him, knowing that he is Hassa Staats the big man of the Bright Star who won’t let them into his public bar, whose father sold five-gallon drums of muscat to their fathers and uncles off the back of a utility up at the Reserve, whose employees took payment from their women, and they know him and cut him with their stares.

  Staats notes when he pushes the mail into the slot that he has crushed the letters in his fist and left sweaty prints on the envelopes. Passing the Aborigines soberly on his way back, he doesn’t even dare spit, and he walks with his fists in the pockets of his Vinyl coat. What right do they have? he asks himself. Look over there at the Town Hall, look at them dirtying the place up with their scabby, sulking looks and jabber-jabber crepp, cluttering the most important parts of town.

  Staats is the chamber of commerce member who suggested at the last meeting that the tour buses no longer park outside the Town Hall or the post office and the Wildflower Cafe, and their decision to follow his recommendation has been some compensation for him. It makes him melancholy to see the town poorly represented; he shudders to think how his father would behave if he was still alive in this town. Okke Staats had been a big, pink, meaty, fisty man who sold the Hacker Arms to the Seeds in 1950 because of the quality of clientele it had begun to attract. Hassa still fears him as he fears the distant and featureless God of his fathers.

  At the corner of Goormwood Street and Harbour Terrace Staats pauses for a moment to see how work on the replica of the Onan is progressing. Down in front of the seventy times rebuilt Residency, now a museum, lumber and pulleys and scaffolding surround the skeleton of the brig’s hull. The Onan brought convicts and infantrymen and Governor Payne and pigs and sheep and building and agricultural supplies through the narrow neck of the harbour on 2 January 1829. In May of that year she came aground at the mouth of the Derwent River where she sank and lay until 1969 when a salvage team raised her timbers and cannon. The town of Angelus plans to have the replica of the Onan built for 2 January 1979 for the visiting Queen of England and her natty husband to admire.

  For decades the Bright Star has been a meeting place and drinking place for the whalers. They come in around nine o’clock in the evening when their work is over; they argue and shout drinks, blow up clouds of tobacco smoke, chase women and fight amongst themselves. Hassa Staats, like his father before him, admires these men their freedom and their noble profanity. ‘It was the whalers that made this country!’ he often roars.

  It is six in the evening and Staats has three hours to wait. He sits in the smoke-filled public bar with Ernie Easton, a retired whaleman with whom he often spends the early evening telling and hearing stories and gossip. Ernie downs glass after glass, tantalising Staats with withheld information; he enjoys the discomfort of listeners, an old habit acquired as a seaman.

  ‘Yes,’ Staats agrees impatiently, ‘the Onan’s coming along nicely. Make a good boost for publicity.’

  ‘Reckon they’ll get it done orright,
’ Easton says. ‘Only hope the bloody Residency holds up another six months; been fallin’ down since I was a kid.’

  ‘Before,’ says Staats whose father taught him the town’s history.

  ‘Comes down like bloody autumn.’

  Staats nods. He wishes Ernie Easton would tell him the gossip he is withholding. Sometimes, he thinks, I could wring the little bogger’s neck; he’s nothin’ but a dried up barnacle and he’s stuck to this pub as a good lurk. Staats orders him another beer on the house.

  ‘Saw ol’ Dick and Darcy yesterd’y evening,’ Ernie Easton says, his squid-beak of a mouth hooked over the glass. ‘They sent a cheerio and asked could I get ’em another couple of bottles of VO. Said the fish were bitin’ too good to leave.’

  ‘Okay,’ Staats says, ‘I’ll get one of the girls to set you up with a couple of botts.’

  ‘Shall I tell ’em it’s on the house?’

  ‘It’s always on the bloody house.’ Staats scowls. Twenty years he has been the old men’s patron, a duty left to him by his father on his deathbed. Some say Dick and Darcy are brothers born Siamese twins, and others say they were fishermen who became lovers, and still others claim they are the same deformed person. As a younger man Hassa Staats lay awake nights contemplating this mystery; but age and weariness and parenthood have blunted his curiosity and left him with other things to keep him awake.