Shallows

by Tim Winton

  ‘They never leave for good,’ he says. ‘Even if they come back horizontal, they come back some time. Even my Rick will be back some time.’ And this thought depresses him still further.

  He goes inside, feeling his weight and his years, and more.

  X

  The next Wednesday morning Queenie read a day-old newspaper as she sat in a steamy corner of the laundrobar. She hated the two blocks trek in the rain to wash her clothes in machines used by hundreds of other people. Their pubic hairs, lint, skin flakes, cigarette butts and tissue pulp never ceased to revolt her. She read her paper lightly, keeping an eye on the Italian boys who stole along the rows of chugging washers with cupfuls of washing powder and collusion on their faces, until a news-story caught her eye long enough for her to read it over and over.

  Abbie Tanks, promising new recruit from the country club of North Angelus, has been found critically injured in the car park of Metropolitan Oval. He was found to have massive head and internal injuries and was rushed to Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre where his condition is now described as fair. Doctors said that both Tanks’ knees were shattered and his skull and one hand were fractured.

  Police said they found the Aboriginal footballer beside his car outside his new home ground comatose and in a pool of blood. They said they were seeking witnesses who might have been in the area between six and ten on the evening of Tuesday 14th June.

  It is a major blow to the Metropolitan Club who expected Tanks to play in his first city league game this Saturday.

  My God, I know him, Queenie thought. From school. He was the one who used to have his head shaved for lice every summer. He was the one who hit the headmaster back. I know him.

  Queenie had seen Abbie Tanks play when she went with Cleve to the football when Cleve was still working for the Advocate; both found the game dull, the atmosphere of dreary effort compounded by the weather, but there was always a pleasure in seeing one player do what he did to perfection. She remembered Abbie Tanks winning the school Athlete’s Trophy at fourteen, and hearing, the next year, of his expulsion for setting fire to the school. He had been in some of Queenie’s classes: thin, quiet, quick. She had never spoken to him.

  Schooldays. She unloaded her wet laundry into the wicker basket and hoisted it onto her back. Schooldays. The long rides into and out of town on the bus that Barney Wilkins drove, and in particular she remembered one trip home during her final year of primary school when she sat on Trent Nathan’s knee. Trent Nathan was a year older and somehow desirable and Queenie sat on his lap, buttocks contracted nervously, inventing and rehearsing lines of dialogue, ashamed of her plaits and her big brown knees. Other high school boys flicked snot and spitballs from the back of the bus. Girls sat in clusters singing songs learnt from the radio in strained American accents. Across the aisle, a big farm boy slept, a light fuzz on his chin and a furious pimple on his cheek. Every few minutes Barney Wilkins stopped at a kerosene-tin letterbox and let out one or two children who swung their bags into the door jumping down. Queenie and Trent Nathan looked questioningly at one another, and she saw him glance secretly at the promising lumps in the front of her pinafore. He smiled at her; she smiled back and realised there was no need for conversation; her happiness blossomed with every mile past the Ranges towards Fourpeaks and Wirrup beyond. She knew that Trent Nathan appreciated her sitting on his knee and would ask her to again tomorrow morning; she also knew that she could beat him in a fight because he was frail and handsome. Before Trent Nathan’s stop, Queenie felt her happiness and confidence turning into that crawly feeling she guessed was love and it made her cross her legs. But when the boy’s stop came and she slid, smiling, from his knee, she knew otherwise. Trent Nathan screamed. Heads bobbed and bent into the aisle. Barney Wilkins turned in his seat.

  ‘Ah . . .’ Trent Nathan gasped at the black-red stain on his trousers and then at the patchwork of faces about him. ‘Flog a dog,’ he said, near tears.

  ‘Flog a dog!’ called the girls up the back.

  ‘Flog a dog,’ muttered the sleeping boy with the unhappy pimple.

  ‘Flogadooorrg!’ screamed the girls again.

  A spitball hit Trent Nathan on the forehead as he crabbed down the aisle with his schoolbag over the stain. The bus jerked away after some hesitation, and Queenie writhed, smudging the upholstery, with twenty minutes travelling time ahead. She slid low in her seat, too shocked for tears.

  ‘Queenie Coupar’s got the bloods!’ the girls called from the rear. Spitballs ricochetted overhead. The bus moved on unhurriedly.

  From that afternoon Queenie Coupar forgot boys and turned back to swimming; she began to train for the school team, and by the time she was sixteen she was the school team. She hoed through chlorine water in carnivals and inter-town meets, winning trophies and pennants that she gave to the school and her bewildered grandfather. Although she hated the smell and taste of it, Queenie loved the colour of the pool under water – the hazy wall becoming defined as she closed upon it, the thud of limbs on the surface, the aquamarine spills of light that fell behind as she tumble-turned for the final lap – because it reminded her of the colour of the shoals at Wirrup and the pastel blue of her dreams. In the pool and in the surf she felt strong and quick and graceful, but in class she felt heavy, thought herself dull and plodding.

  Queenie humped her wet washing along beneath the shop awnings, feeling a new sadness in her, remembering those days.

  Back on her bed that afternoon, Queenie could not help but daydream. Homely things tormented her: the sounds of wood being split, the smells of capsicums, tomatoes, the combustion stove, the sound of the canning factory siren in the still harbour. She hurt herself with images of firelight and cabernet and Jarlsberg cheese – even the thin warmth of Cleveland Cookson; and the thoughts exhausted her, made her so tired, so earthbound. I had to, she told herself. Dammit, I had to leave him. There’s no room in him for me. There’s not enough time to wait for things.

  Through an ultramarine haze towards a distant and indistinct light and tiny sounds like the tinkling the sea makes against rocks, Queenie ploughed on with her heartbeat in her ears. Stippled sand passed below. Cool sea moved between her thighs as she pounded forward into gossamer. Her body propelled itself, willed her on, informed itself, wanted, needed, burrowed onward to that space in the light where she felt the beginnings of a vortex, farther, closer, then the long fence of ivory, and she tipped forward into the cavity, tumbling, then dark. Twilight misted about her as she lay in viscous wetness. Gurglings. The slush had a bitter gastric smell and she felt it begin to burn. The belly of a whale, she thought: this is the belly of the whale. She saw her hands, her knees, the skin flaking, dissolving already; hair came away in her palms as she touched the crown of her head. Acid. A stench of bile. Standing, she whimpered, took a foetid breath and stumbled forward towards the hint of light that came and went. Lumpy obstacles caught her legs, ensnared her feet; the way ahead was arduous. Forwards or backwards? she thought. Mouth or anus? A wave of slush hit her from behind, knocking her to her knees in a nest of entanglements and she saw they were limbs, grey-green, rotted, half-digested, with white peeps of bone and sinew and partially decomposed faces. She saw Staats the publican, jowls dissolving agape, and beneath, Richardson the baker, and the contorted, inflated corpses of Des Pustling, Abbie Tanks, Easton the old whaler, a bikie she once dated, Trent Nathan, Fleurier. And Cleve, horribly incomplete. Queenie floundered forward, burning, legs caught, hands brushing aside papyrus flaps of skin. She heard a scream, the scream of a child, and saw myriads of light.

  Waking, she heard the piercing screech of a truck braking outside her window. She heard the landlady fussing in the corridor. She fell back into the mushy bed, stiff and sore with tension.

  XI

  It is the fifteenth of June 1978.

  William Pell wakes after eighteen hours. Still his body tells him it must have more rest. He rises regardless and falls into a lukewarm shower, gazing at his flat toes throug
h the sluicing bars of water, passing coarse soap under his arms, between his legs, over the little pot-belly, and slowly he wakes.

  Before his breakfast he empties the refrigerator of curdled milk and anything that has grown a beard, then goes out to pick up the week’s copies of the Advocate from where they lie – rolled and half composted – on the dewy lawn. He reads the headlines, Wednesday to Wednesday, unravelling.

  NORTHS TO HAVE NEW OVAL

  EVERY DOG HAS HIS . . .

  BEACH RESCUE

  LOCAL WINES POPULAR

  ONAN PROGRESS

  LOCAL FOOTBALLER MUGGED

  ABBIE TANKS CRITICAL

  Pell gathers the wet, curling papers under his arm and goes around the side of the house to the bin, but he drops the armful before he reaches it, grunting in surprise. The truck in his driveway is up on blocks, tyreless. Pell walks over to the driver’s-side door and reads the note taped to the chrome handle:

  Wherever the spirit would go, they would

  go, and the wheels would rise along with

  them, because the spirit of the living

  creatures was in the wheels.

  Jeremiah.

  ‘Pustling, you ignoramus,’ Pell sighed. ‘It’s from Ezekiel.’ He went inside. He needed more sleep.

  XII

  It was as though there was neither night nor day. Cleve read, drank, ate and slept; there seemed no difference between the jetty and the house, work and rest. At times he found difficulty in distinguishing 1831 from 1978, and it was rarely that he noticed the tin walls quaking in the squalls, or the laughter of the old men below, the emptiness of his bed when he slept without resting in the day. Cleve did not notice the queue running onto the street outside the Social Security office, the milling youths in the lee of the post office, and he overlooked newspapers and heard radio news without listening. He read. He drove and beat his body as though it was merely an enclosure which housed him, and he retreated within it. He almost forgot himself.

  June 29th, 1831 Today at noon whilst chasing a cow we saw the British warship Keen drop anchor by the headland in the lee of the easterly and put a boat ashore. We lost sight of the cow in the course of time and soon made for shore.

  The Englishmen are leaving in the morning. They make no secret of thinking us disgusting barbarians as they look down their noses at us and speak in their stiff, mannered tones. As yet they have not inquired into the anonymous graves on the beach. They show distaste at the smell all about which we seem to have forgotten. I will be glad when these priggish men take their leave of us for I feel manifestly unclean in their presence.

  June 30th, 1831 The Keen has departed for Angelus Harbour which is not far to the east from here. It is a penal colony of some sort for the British.

  A man from Finn’s crew is sick. He screams like an animal in the night and throws furniture about.

  Finn’s crew took a bull today.

  Winter thrashed the town of Angelus. Rain and wind hurtled in off the ocean, jostling the settlement around the harbour. Outside the harbour entrance the Sound was white and broken, and beyond the heads the Southern Ocean moved about like an unsteady mountain range. Few vessels ventured out, though several straggled in from the Bight, wind-torn and waterlogged, to take shelter in the buttressed harbour.

  July 2nd, 1831 This evening the most peculiar thing occurred. A light, like a great ball of starlight, moved across the bay and passed over the beach and our encampment. All saw it. We stood speechless and watched and felt it pass. Mr Jamieson says he has seen something similar in the Pacific, but has no scientific explanation for it. The men grumble. Some call it an omen. There is some argument. All are uneasy.

  Few natives bring us wood now, and the graves on the beach have been robbed in the night.I fear the blacks are hostile at the present. Daily an expedition is sent out to collect firewood, a perilous routine.

  On the eighteenth of this month the Family of Man is due to drop supplies or to take us aboard should the fishery prove hopeless. I have resolved to leave this company at the next hospitable port, confident as I am of the failure of this expedition. Desertion of such a party as this can be no sin.

  When he was reading Cleve felt a sense of purpose, of control, a forward movement he had felt few times in his life. It was rare that he felt so compelled.

  July 3rd, 1831 There being no whales in sight all morning and having executed duties in good time, I spent this afternoon exploring the length of the beach for the first time. I found, to my great surprise and delight, a well formed, clean, dry cave at the base of the westerly headland. It had a rare quality I could not for a moment identify. Then I realised that the air inside was pure, that it did not reek of boiled flesh and fly-blown skeletons. I sat inside, observing the smooth grey walls, savouring the cleanness of it, a veritable haven. Before leaving I memorised the location of my new discovery. I am certain I can find it again.

  At dusk today Finn’s crew took the lunatic Bale into the bush, returning without him an hour later. They have left him to his own insane nature.

  July 4th, 1831 Sealers from Bald Island arrived this morning in a whaleboat, apparently to celebrate. They are mostly from New Bedford and Nantucket.

  I spent the evening, dismissed from my duties, in my sanctuary up the beach. The sand is ghostly in the moonlight. I was free from the carousing and revelry of the camp, and I wrote and meditated by the light of a candle. After perhaps two hours I returned to find that the celebrations had soured and fighting resulted. The sealers were preparing to sleep on the beach.

  It is late now – perhaps near morning – and I cannot sleep. My bunk has been destroyed in the evening’s commotion and the floor is rife with draughts. I write with the illumination of the moon.

  Hale is disinclined to speak to me these past days. He mumbles about me keeping too much to myself and has twice called me ‘High an’ Holy’ as though in jest, though there seems to be some sincerity behind his humour. Doan and Smithson, always reluctant to talk, never speak at all now. I am so much younger than they. Perhaps the loneliness of extreme youth was Churling’s source of despair.

  For Cleve, the realness and aliveness of the journal were precious. Other people’s experiences had often seemed more exciting, closer to the truth, than his own: but never before had he felt so close to owning the experience of another as he had with Nathaniel Coupar. He felt he was there, as though his eyes were Coupar’s eyes. It was an almost supernatural feeling, as it had been in the dinghy on the estuary with Queenie when he had been filled with wholeness and absence and an exceptional grace which let him feel what it was to be her and himself at once. There were moments when he suspected there could be a meaning to his existence.

  But, too, as he read there was sometimes a vague unease, something more than sadness, like a splinter beneath the skin.

  July 5th, 1831 Sealers left early in jovial spirits. Returning to Bald Island which is west of here.

  No whales.

  6th No whales. Men arguing, fighting.

  One night with the sea rocketing about beneath him and the dusty one-bar heater fizzing and ticking beside him, Cleve Cookson shut the journal and stood up, prickling with a memory. It was like the momentary breaking of a spell. He was in the old Presbyterian church, at his own wedding. Hesitant faces all around. Organ music. Coupar ludicrous in a suit. The plodding vows at the altar. His own dreadful words, his lifelong motto: I will (you never do), I will (but you won’t you’re spineless), I will . . . It mocked him. Then out on the pavement he felt the townspeople throwing rice with an alarming enthusiasm, as though aiming for his eyes or wanting to pit his cheeks. They’re stoning me, he thought. And there he is, old Coupar, waiting for me to run. Queenie was a white light beside him. He heard her laughter. Her nose was girlishly sunburnt and beginning to peel, her teeth white, and a speck – a grain of rice – stuck to her lower lip as she laughed and held him with her brown eyes. And there was old man Pell, Bible on his hip like a flask or a weapon
, eyes narrowed thoughtfully in the sun. He knew, Cleve thought; he knew we would be like this.

  At that moment, Cleve plunged out of the hut into the wedging rain, and bellowed into the blackness: ‘I will! I will! I am not useless!’ There were flickerings of light and laughter from below. Rain stung him like pelted rice. Cleve turned his chin up in the dark. She’s ruined me, he told himself; she’s made me even weaker.

  Next morning Cleveland Cookson bought a speargun. He carried it out of Bill’s Sport & Tackle wrapped in brown paper, and the wrapping gave it an even more forbidden feel. He strolled downtown with it under his arm and saw Ollie Fingle the barber watch him pass. The Advocate office bore headlines in the window, HOPES DOWN FOR TANKS; they were nonsense to him. He walked home, drunk with excitement.

  Around the curve of the ivory beach the chimneys of the Paris Bay whaling station shot steam into the air and it drifted white across the blunt grey of the sky. A few hundred yards out from where flensers moved over the lumps of carcasses, more whales were moored. A launch circled the moored whales. Gunshots did not disturb the busy gulls burrowing into their backs.

  Cleve dangled his fins in the dull water; there was a taste of rum in his mouth. He fumbled with the speargun, unused to its bulk and lethal certainty of purpose, and slid with it into the water. His heart flinched at the cold and the immediate fear. Grey water loomed about him. He peered into the unfocused distance. He read the label Bazooka on the butt of the weapon, but in the water now it looked to him like a furled umbrella. Thick schools of sweep and herring milled about; each nervous turn they took, each flinch in unison, sent his body to the verge of convulsion. His pores were tight.