Shallows

by Tim Winton

  ‘My reputation blossoms daily.’

  ‘You mean you’re ashamed of me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Queenie walked across the hut and slumped into an old cane chair, fingering twists of her hair. ‘Well, I’ve always been a bit ashamed of you, I s’pose. Evens it up. Georges was right, deep down people are arseholes.’

  ‘Georges, eh?’ Cleve sneered.

  ‘Yes, he’s French. His father dived with Cousteau.’

  ‘Well, the sun does shine out of his arse, then. Permanent spot of sunlight between his heels wherever he walks.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  The rain on the water became a menacing sound; inside the hut it was hot, smelly, damp. Their breathing was excited and painful, bringing an ambiguity into the room.

  ‘What is it about these whales?’ Cleve asked, not wanting to let this peter out into a vicious silence. ‘They’re just animals, you know. Okay, it doesn’t look all that good on the flensing deck and the smell’s a bit ripe; but we both eat meat, it’s the same at the abattoirs. Some animals are killed so we survive.’

  ‘And some, you silly prick, don’t need to be killed. We don’t eat them. Even the by-products are all obsolete. Geez, Cleve, do you know how big a whale’s brain cavity is? We could be killing the most intelligent companions we have.’

  ‘You don’t seem to remember that we’ve been killing other people for longer.’

  ‘You sound proud of it.’

  ‘You sound pathetic.’

  ‘I am – look who I married. I thought you’d understand,’ she said, bitterly. ‘Bugger you, I thought you’d at least listen. You never listen any more, all you ever do is read this crap,’ she said, pointing to the journal on the table. ‘You can’t do anything else!’

  ‘Oh, it keeps me out of trouble.’ He grinned. ‘You should try something your —’

  It was then that Queenie got up and swept the journal from the table, snapping it shut as it yawned open, and Cleve grabbed at her and the table teetered and fell and she fenced him away and was suddenly on all fours with the book tight in the space between floorboards with all her weight pushing down on it and him screaming at the thought of years falling away unread, sinking into the Sound. He straddled the fallen table and his fist came down on her back and she went flat.

  For a few moments all he could do was listen to her winded gasps and the tick of blood in his own ears; he saw the heaving of her back, the shaking gossamer drops of rain still on her coat and in her hair, the flattened arc of her spine. With each breath she seemed to gain strength and harden. Then he bent down close and saw that her face was tightly screwed, squeezing moisture out. Her cheek rested against the upright spine of the bitter-smelling book. Her tears stained the plank floor and she dribbled like a child from the corner of her mouth. Outside, a splash like a bottle hitting water. Trickles of rain ratted their way down the walls.

  ‘Queenie?’ He wished the last five minutes of his life could have been erased. For starters. He felt his testicles shrivel at the memory of those other hundreds of moments, years, he would dearly love to be stripped of.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That was stupid, very, very stupid.’ He ran his hand feebly through her hair, stricken with a desire to bury himself in it, find a cool, dark hiding place in it.

  ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘not stupid; bloody unforgivable.’

  He did not dare touch her when she left. The journal stuck up out of the floor, wedged between the planks, like a tombstone. The rain stopped and started. He went down to the landing, feeling almost drunk with emotion. Dick and Darcy were staring, befuddled, at a small herring that flipped and turned like a misshapen new coin. It had a big, ragged piece of meat and the hook halfway down its gullet and the old men looked at him as if to say the fish had caught itself, as if to say they wanted absolution from this event. But Cleve was too full, too drunk with shock, to speak to them.

  At three-thirty, two men stood outside the shed on the deep-water jetty, exhausted. Cleve Cookson opened the door at their knock and reluctantly bade them enter. He knew by the clothes and their accents and the way they looked about uncertainly that they were not seamen. He separated himself from them, moving behind his desk; he didn’t ask them to sit. He sat, spread his hands out on the table.

  ‘Someone said we might find a boat through you,’ Fleurier said.

  ‘Did . . . they?’ Cleve looked at his hands, surprised by the wide span of his fingers; he had never noticed how big his hands were and he felt the two men were watching them also.

  ‘That you might set us up with a connection, seeing you’re well situated here,’ Marks said, his big pigskin pores shifting about on his face. ‘We need something about thirty–forty feet, fast, reliable, you know.’

  ‘Where?’ Cleve asked, sensing a new position of power, enjoying his importance, even if it was only illusion. He had no influence with seamen in this harbour.

  ‘Long trips, far as the Shelf, further, maybe.’

  ‘That’s some ride. Fishing, are you? Marlin? Sharks?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘That is our business,’ Fleurier said, irritated.

  ‘Listen, buddy, we’re not crooks,’ Marks said. ‘We pay like anyone else. We’ll pay good money, ultra-good money.’

  ‘And who’ll organise the insurance? What skipper in this harbour would be able to get insurance for the sort of sightseeing you’ve got planned? To say nothing about where he’s going to live after he does the job. Angelus wouldn’t be the same for him, you know what I mean? People in small towns like this stick together. They don’t want you here.’

  ‘Are you the spokesman for the town?’ Fleurier asked, finger pointing at the soft part between Cleve’s eyes.

  ‘Well, I haven’t been voted in, but’ – he smiled – ‘I don’t suppose the whales’ve gone to the polls about you, either, eh?’

  ‘Then you won’t help us?’

  ‘Not even if I could, mate.’

  ‘We have a right to be heard,’ Fleurier said, hands signalling his fatigue and his desperation.

  ‘My guess is that tomorrow morning you won’t be able to buy a Mars Bar in this town. They wouldn’t let you piss in a public toilet. People are gonna lose their jobs over you.’

  ‘Well what sort of a goddam town is this?’ Marks said, fumbling in his pockets for a cigarette.

  ‘A whaling town, mate.’

  ‘Full of goddam hicks.’

  ‘Look, I don’t wanna sit here and argue about bloody whales all night: my answer is no.’

  ‘You won’t think about it?’ Marks said, dropping the anger from his voice in a last effort.

  ‘It would please Queenie,’ Fleurier said with a quiet precision.

  Cleve slammed his chair back against the wall as he stood, lifting his hands from the table. ‘You ever use that on me I’ll kill you.’

  ‘I was told that you were an enlightened and intelligent man, Mr Cookson.’ Fleurier smiled. ‘Perhaps you are only a violent one?’

  ‘Get out of here before you find out.’

  The two men left the hut, slamming the door with a force that shook the walls and silenced the gnawing of rats. Cleve stood in the cloud of smoke Marks had left, still smelling their presence in the room. He listened to their footsteps and observed his own big, shaking, shameful hands. He cocked his ear: something different. The footfalls hammered confusedly, still audible over the intensifying rain. Cleve opened the door and peered outside, but saw nothing; even the irregular floodlights were smothered and stifled in rain. He heard a man’s cry. He put his head down and ran into the haze of rain, feeling each jarring step like a surprise blow.

  He came suddenly upon the prostrate figure of Marks, a third of the way along, winded, gagging, face-up in the rain. Close by, Fleurier held the rail, weak-legged, coughing and bleeding from the nose and lips.

  ‘It seems,’ Fleurier said, through his split lips, ‘that we have found out what y
ou mean. Only you’re more violent than we expected.’

  He resisted Cleve’s clumsy efforts to help him, moving away from the rail, as if frightened of being pushed over. Rain fell so hard Cleve felt it suffocating him.

  Hours later he argued in the darkness of the bedroom, unable to be attentive to his wife’s busyness. Her breathing was rapid; the room was thick with the smell of talcum powder, the aftermath of her shower, but panic gave him no time to notice.

  ‘You gotta con them outta this,’ he pleaded. ‘They’ll get themselves knocked around; they already have. Tell ’em to go home, to get outta town.’

  There was no answer from her as she moved about in the darkness.

  ‘Look, I don’t want to see anyone hurt. God, it was awful out there tonight. Who the hell could have done it?’

  No response.

  ‘You think I organised it.’ Again only a bustling silence. ‘Hell, I’m a thug now, eh?’ He got no denial from Queenie. ‘Tell them to get out before something really serious happens.’

  Queenie stood straight; she knew he sensed it. There was the sound of a heavy zipper.

  ‘They are,’ she said. ‘We are. And it has.’

  She hauled the big bag onto her shoulder and went out the door and downstairs into the twilight. Cleve squawked in disbelief, unable to craft even small words as he followed her down with useless hand movements. Brunswick Street and the harbour and the somnolent crouch of the small town were barely touched by the brushstrokes of the false dawn.

  ‘Hey, what about me?’ he called lamely, standing in the doorway as she disappeared into the grey, trafficless street. The house creaked about him; he refused to believe.

  X

  It is 1978, late in May, night. In the unflickering light of their lamp with the rain folding about them in clean, cold sheets, two old men move inside their greatcoat, giggling. They are winded and panting from their long trek through the dark, smutty labyrinths of the jetty’s underbelly, and as they wait for their breath to return they show each other the places where skin is missing from their knuckles and where barnacles have torn their hard old palms. Their bristly chins chafe together as they settle and fend off the rain. The sky is lightening. The small herring at their feet is curled taut. Their lines are in the water and in their tender, split palms, they feel live things touching them. From above there is the sound of a man pacing, and the sounds of rats about their business. And the rain eases and the dawn bides its time.

  Ports

  I

  On the veranda of the house his grandfather built at Wirrup, in the shade of its long, drooping roof, Daniel Coupar crushed grape leaves in his hands, watching the brittle pulp blow from his palms and settle below on the powdery dry earth. June was half gone and there had been no rain at Wirrup, though Coupar was not surprised. He had been sitting on his veranda many days watching the sky without expectation. No one had come in that time, no rain had fallen.

  Towards the end of the morning Coupar hoisted himself upright and walked down off the veranda. Unnerved by his sudden movement, the crows stirred on their posts. Coupar’s feet hurt in his boots from the long, restless walk the night before. The ground crackled beneath him as he went down towards the bore. He took from his pocket a cube of bread, furry with lint, and he put it into his mouth and felt it slowly dissolve and his belly respond.

  Sitting on the solitary green tuft by the bore, he remembered Queenie swimming through bracken mimicking the sounds of the windmill and the songs of the whales. She was an amphibian-child, skinny, shiny-skinned, shimming through bodies of water and vegetation. She bore none of the features of her mother who was dry and savage in her restlessness. Daniel Coupar had no sons, though this had not disappointed him: he was content to be the last in the line, glad there could be an end of it.

  He shucked each boot off, one foot against the other, and lowered each foot into the water, observing the wise-looking corns and the innocent pink toes as he swilled about. This was the only green, wet place left. His blistered feet were soothed by the water, and the comfort softened him. ‘How beautiful are thy feet,’ he murmured chuckling. With one hand he reached into the water and groped around on the scummy bottom and brought up an abalone shell which he held up so that the mother-of-pearl inside prismed light in concentric twists where the flesh of a living, eating creature had once been. He studied the tiny imprints the coarser exterior left in his palms, then he tossed it aside and began wading about in the pool, stirring up ochre clouds. He pulled up more shells and threw them onto the closely cropped tuft of grass, reaching, bending, tossing, until his breath was short and he had to rest. Coupar sat amongst the clutter of shells he had thrown in a few weeks before, and considered them, shells from the sea. Throwing them all in had seemed immensely significant a few weeks ago after his granddaughter and her husband left, but now it seemed ludicrous. He and Queenie had collected thousands of shells once, wandering along the beach below picking over shore-scum, finding things from worlds away. He still had their plunder in boxes in the old milking sheds, hundreds of them, still exuding their salty, exotic odours. When times were hard and rabbits rank with myxomatosis and fish scarce, Daniel Coupar had subsisted on abalone. Those days, it was called muttonfish. Now, people told him, it was eaten in restaurants as a delicacy. It did not seem possible now, as he stared at them, that the contents of these hulks had sustained him.

  Thoughts and memories bore down on him. Early in life ideas had weighted him and excited him and punished him with their inconstancy. Always, he was taunted by the shortcomings of his mind: when sometimes he came in sight of understanding, his thoughts faltered, petered out, and he failed to penetrate, as though wisdom had a hide too thick for him. He remained dissatisfied with what he observed and understood, suspicious of what evaded him.

  ‘I am,’ he said to the stack of bottles winking near by in the unseasonal sun, ‘something. I am . . .’ he laughed, ‘something.’ He had said this many times before, when he was drunk or close to death or prayer; it gave him something aggressive to do with his mouth.

  At this moment his mouth was dry and he yearned for the sweet, quenching taste of grapes, to be able to reach out and take and eat. He regretted the long-expected barrenness of his vine, the sinewy old relic of his forebears. There had been other years when it had seemed spent and had lain dormant for a season, only to bear long, succulent bunches the next.

  ‘The old bitch. Wouldn’t surprise me if she came good again. It won’t. But nothing would surprise me.’

  Coupar’s attention returned to the bottles, silent, amber things, and he grew suspicious of them. Why had he begun to stack them there all those years ago? They seemed so ugly. He shuffled over and took one by the neck and dashed it against the leg of the windmill. The shattering sound moved inside his ears. He smashed another to repeat the sensation.

  ‘Empty brown bottles,’ he said. Some of them, within their amber skins, contained an odour, some the remains of unlucky locusts. He smashed another and shook a splinter of glass from his hair. The movement in his ears was unlike sound. He wondered why he did not recognise any of these bottles individually. Hadn’t he drunk each of them on separate occasions? Weren’t they all moments in his life? Coupar laughed at himself, scornful of his thoughts. ‘Comes from having too much time to think,’ he told himself, as if to quell the deep disturbance in him.

  He smashed bottles at intervals all afternoon, and the sun burnt the surface of the bore, a heat and light that began quickly to diminish as dusk approached.

  ‘How long will the land mourn, and the grass of every field wither? For the wickedness of those who dwell in it the beasts and the birds are swept away,’ he said in the twilight by the water.

  By the light of a lamp whose wick had long gone unattended, Daniel Coupar held in his hand the final detached pages of his grandfather’s journal. Nathaniel Coupar died in 1875 at Wirrup and left the journal to his son Martin who, without reading it, had given it in turn, out of respect for rit
ual, to his own son, Daniel. Daniel Coupar did not read the journal in its several volumes until after his father’s death in 1926. He had read it many times since with growing disgust.

  He shuffled the stiff, torn-out pages, and read again the last entries, glad that he had them safe in his hands. For a while he listened to the sounds of the night – grasshoppers rasping across the veranda, kangaroos thumping down towards the bore, the chittering of sheep – before taking himself through the house behind his lamp, feeling the friendly bump of furniture, to his narrow, bowed bed in the back room where Queenie had slept. Beside the bed with its dusty quilt and sheets was the table he had made for Queenie to put her books and shells on. He fancied it still smelt of her, but all her books and shells were gone from it and only his Bible, some papers, and his dead wife’s false teeth remained. Coupar rested the lamp on the low windowsill. Some nights years ago, he saw Queenie with her elbows on this sill looking out at him as he returned from long walks, thinking her asleep. More recently – two nights ago – he thought he saw her there still, wincey night gown bright in the dark, beside the figure of his wife Maureen. He saw them there, hair ruffled from sleep, puzzled expressions on their faces, and he slept out on the ground with them gazing out all night.

  This night, with the lamp on the sill, he saw only himself in the window, and when he turned the lamp out there was nothing. Much sooner than he expected, Daniel Coupar slept.

  In the first light of morning the paddocks and the sheds took on a deceptive, richer hue, which made them look less stark and desperate. Coupar prowled stiffly about his sheds for the last stored feed and found two eggs from hens long dead, and a nest of stillborn rats. He felt the promise of the day’s heat everywhere. The faint, insistent cries of animals wallowed up from the bore; they had trodden down the rotten fences and he left them to themselves and their hunger. Later in the morning he kept to the house.