Shallows

by Tim Winton

  I will, he thought.

  He dived to the bottom, twelve feet, but it was so cold there he kicked up again immediately, and continued creeping along on the surface. The water felt oily. The rubbers of his gun vibrated, taut, as he moved. Limbs stiffening with cold. Come on, he thought, come on . . .

  He edged out towards the poisonous blue of the deep distance, afraid to blink. I will.

  In forty feet of featureless water he hovered, turning in a tight circle, looking, keeping every direction covered. Vertically, he began to turn like the bit of a drill, round, round. Then he heard a gunshot, muffled. Another. He stopped turning for a moment. His body hung. Negative buoyancy.

  Then he struck back along the surface towards shore without even pausing to glance over his shoulder. He heard his fins pounding the water.

  He slithered up the smooth rocks and lay rigid on his back, gasping.

  ‘Hey!’

  Cleve started. The voice came from behind him. He struggled to his feet.

  ‘For Godsake!’

  Cleve saw a big man with a deeply lined and tanned face in blue overalls and a crumpled white cap standing on the rock above.

  ‘You must be off your bloody scone, mate! You need protection from yourself. This is bloody dangerous water, son.’

  ‘I know,’ Cleve said. His jaw ached when he moved it.

  ‘You know?’ the man yelled. ‘Hey, Charlie, he bloodywell knows!’ Another man, smaller, whiter, with tufty eyebrows and greenish teeth, appeared on the top of the rock.

  ‘If you know it’s dangerous, what were you doing in there?’ the bigger, younger man said. His hands, Cleve could see, were like clams.

  ‘Sharks.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was after sharks,’ Cleve said. It sounded incredible to him now. He shrugged and manufactured a smile.

  The two men looked at one another. ‘I think the bastard’s one of us, Charlie.’

  Cleve looked at the big man without understanding.

  ‘Baer’s the name. Ted Baer. Maybe you’ve heard of me.’

  ‘The shark hunter?’

  ‘That’s him,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Yep. Looks like we’re here for the same thing as you.’

  ‘Oh, I —’

  ‘Any time you wanna come out with us, just give us a bell. Know anything about game fishing? Need a bloke with balls. Could even boat you out to good spearing grounds if you like.’

  ‘Well —’

  ‘Spearing sharks, eh?’ Ted Baer said thoughtfully. ‘Well, you only live once, I s’pose. Any time you wanna come out and see it done my way. Goin’ for the record again. Biggest white pointers in the world here, they say. Took a nineteen-hundred pounder here last year.’

  ‘Year before,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Had a girth of eight feet, the bastard. Found half a sheep in its guts. Still, there’s bigger’n that about. Goin’ for 3,000 pound. Ever seen a shark that weighed more’n a ton?’

  ‘No,’ Cleve said.

  ‘Well, you won’t have to wait long. We’re at the Ocean View, Middle Beach. Any time, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, no worries,’ Cleve said, through chattering teeth.

  ‘What’s yer name, son?’

  ‘Cookson. Cleve.’

  ‘Good-oh.’ They left.

  Cleve stood on the rock by the dull water, paralysed with shivering. Rifle fire rippled across the bay.

  XIII

  In the midst of the Friday lunch rush, television and press reporters lounge about by the fountains of Parliament House in the city, waiting for the news event to get under way. While they await the remainder of the cast they smoke, eat meat pies and spill tomato sauce on their ties. In summer they might take off their shoes and socks and dabble their feet in the pools. Rival news teams shout friendly abuse across the lawn at one another, like football teams in the change rooms. Every now and then incurious public servants and Members of Parliament pass with their hands in their pockets, stretching their legs while the weather permits. Today is warmer than yesterday, they tell one another, one eye always on the weather.

  The big woman on the steps of Parliament House is ignored. For five days she has eaten nothing, sleeping beneath an oily tarpaulin. Her placard has run in the week’s rain and is now buckled, illegible and pulpy. But she is still speaking. MPs step over and around her.

  Suddenly cameras are seized and cocked. A group of men and women marches across the asphalt car parks, through the gardens, between trees. The newsmen are on their feet, filming, and now the words of the large woman on the steps are recorded by crouching sound men. Two or three uniformed policemen appear at the rear of the mob.

  CACHALOT SUPPORTS THIS HUNGER STRIKE ON BEHALF OF INNOCENT CREATURES AND MOTHER EARTH, the first placard says.

  ‘Who?’ reporters ask one another.

  SUPPORT SALLY MILES REDEEM YOURSELF: SAVE THE WHALES

  A man climbs a tree, captured on film like rare wildlife. At the foot of the steps a large plastic parcel is laid on the ground and a tyre pump appears. A youth fits valve to nozzle and commences to pump. Fleurier stands behind him. Beside Fleurier is an impassive Marks. Brent, up in the tree, is nailing a cardboard placard to the trunk. Someone interrupts the big woman on the step and hands her a loudhailer which squeaks and pops.

  ‘How do you use this bloody . . . oh.’

  Sound men wince.

  ‘I am Sally Miles . . .’

  Ragged applause.

  ‘. . . and I am here on a hunger strike to protest against the continued slaughter of the sperm whale in our own waters by our own people. It is time the slaughter stopped. It is time the whaling industry owned up. I will not eat until these things happen . . .’

  Reporters nudge one another knowingly. Sally Miles weighs fourteen stone and they find it ironic.

  ‘. . . because the whaling industry is obsolete. It is inhumane. It is causing the extinction of what may be the most intelligent creature on our earth. Therefore it is immoral!’

  Cheers. Clunks and whirrs of cameras. Signs up.

  STOP IT, NOW!

  ‘Join us!’ Sally Miles cries. ‘Fight Paris Bay. Fight this government!’ A great inflated whale is dragged up the steps and Sally Miles hugs it by the flukes. ‘This whale is my brother!’

  Cheers from supporters. Nudges within the press. Reporters are beginning to be bored; they doodle and their cameramen pan the crowd without shooting. The plastic whale obstructs the main entrance to Parliament House. MPs wait outside, bored, still eyeing the sky. An irritable public servant kicks at the smiling head of the whale, provoking the crowd. His white hair suddenly turns red and the shoulders of his pinstriped suit are saturated. Other blood-bombs, condoms full of sheep’s blood, rain onto the steps, drenching Sally Miles and the whale. Cameras roll again. They swivel as another mob swarms across the car parks. The crowd cheers, then falls silent as the placards come into view.

  HIPPIES GO HOME

  YANKS GO HOME

  WOMEN GO HOME

  And four men carrying the vast, snaking banner: AMALGAMATED STEVEDORES DOCKERS CARRIERS SHIPWRIGHTS BUILDERS’ LABOURERS CATERERS PUBLIC SERVANTS SHOPKEEPERS METAL, ROAD AND MISCELLANEOUS WORKERS’ UNION (AUST.) There is a shocked silence. The State Secretary of the ASDCSBLCPSSMR& MWU (AUST.), whose brother lives in Angelus working as a deckhand aboard the Paris II, takes up position on the steps with his own loudhailer.

  ‘We believe it is the right of every working man in this country to work, if he so chooses, brothers, and you greenie bludgers are sacking good men. Go home to your rich mums and dads and let the workers alone. You’re worse than scabs. Paris Bay,’ he says to the newsmen, ‘Paris Bay have hired these people to help them retrench workers. It’s a smokescreen for a conspiracy!’

  A sound like gunfire. On the steps of Parliament House the bloodied public servant is slashing the whale with the paperknife he uses to cut his lunchtime apple. Shreds of plastic come away in his hands. Sally Miles wails. Cameramen cluck, delighted
at the symbolic possibilities. A blood-bomb mutes the union loudhailer. Police arrive in vans. Mobs clash. Cardboard is torn.

  Later a camera crew hovers about filming significant shreds of plastic left here and there, and a press reporter stands with an MP who chuckles goodnaturedly and says:

  ‘Of course I understand the situation. I’m a keen amateur fisherman myself, you know, and I know the value of a whale oil slick. Caught my first marlin with it, you know. No, the industry is indispensable.’

  Above them, on the tree, is nailed the sign:

  HUBBA HUBBA!

  XIV

  Queenie began to sleep late. Lethargy threatened to overcome her completely. Her will, her anger, waned. On a Sunday morning she had a dream, a static dream like a still photograph with a one-hundred-and-eighty degree panorama. It was the view of Wirrup from the top of the windmill on a winter’s morning. The house in the mid-distance, covered in a fleece of vines, was sharply defined. Thick pasture was broken only by the vermicular trails of sheep and the creek twisting down from the hill beyond. At the side of the shed nearest the house, her grandfather held a hen by the feet, axe leaning against his leg. The hen bled from its headless neck, and, framed in the doorway behind the shadowy veranda, her grandmother, arms akimbo, weight on one leg – a pale but distinct figure – watched with a mouth that was curiously awry. To one side there were the fat backs of sheep. To the other side, a solitary cow, udder gorged and swaying in the grass behind a dozen mild steers. Queenie puzzled over the expression on her grandmother’s face. Her slouching posture suggested contentment, but that mouth was questioning. Before she could understand, Queenie woke.

  If something did not happen soon, she knew her will would break. Old things pulled at her. She had an urge to ring Wirrup, but there was no phone there. She did not write letters. I should be back on the farm, she thought. I shouldn’t be here, I don’t want to be here. I haven’t turned out. It’s not right.

  Somehow the waiting had to stop.

  That afternoon, Queenie moved out of the guest house.

  A party raged on the fifteenth floor of the hotel. Queenie was let into Fleurier’s room by a very drunken Brent who breathed whisky and Lucky Strikes all over her. She followed him, stumbling over prostrate bodies in the dimness. The suite was full of smoke and people and music. Eventually, Brent found her a corner and a drink. With his lips close to her ear, he babbled about the I Ching and the reincarnation of Jim Morrison, telepathy, the Grateful Dead, Hunter S. Thompson author of Bleak House, until he fell comatose to the floor. There was a small metal badge on his soiled Mexican poncho which said: A Turnip Is Your Brother.

  With a sigh, Queenie got to her feet and picked her way through the crowd to the door, thinking: my God, this is enough, no more. She wrenched the door open and found herself face to face with Marks. He smiled, a little awkward.

  ‘So you’re back.’

  ‘Well actually I was just going.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Brent has just been drooling on me.’

  ‘Ah.’ Marks grinned, seaming his big leathery face. ‘You’re lucky he didn’t tell you about the time he saw a whale.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because then he would have been lying through his gold-plated teeth. The closest he’s come to cetacea is a childhood of watching Flipper on TV. Wanna drink?’

  ‘Okay.’ Good God, why not? she thought.

  In the next suite Queenie stretched out on the divan and Marks sat on the floor. Two sleeping mounds occupied the double bed. Geez, Queenie thought, it’s like a rock’n roll band – groupies and everything.

  ‘What are you with this mob for?’ she asked him, sipping on another drink. Music thudded through the near-side wall.

  ‘The whales,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Not to escape a tyrannical husband?’

  ‘He’s not like that. I’m in it for the whales. It’s more than you could say for some.’

  ‘What do you know about whales?’ he asked, swivelling ice about in the bottom of his glass.

  ‘Just what I’ve seen them do. They used to pass by the farm every winter. They used to tell us what time of the year it was, remind us of what we did the year before. They move west along our coast and then around the capes and up this coast northwards, and back again later in the season. Watching them is a family habit. A vice, you could say. I used to watch them when I was a kid. Then there were years when there was nothing. And this year they’re back again.’

  ‘Right whales?’

  ‘Humpbacks, too.’ Queenie warmed to the conversation; it had been a long time, and she felt a renewed purpose, an enthusiasm.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you the strandings expert?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Why do they do it? If they’re so intelligent, why do they beach themselves? I saw a pygmy sperm do that once – it was horrible.’

  Marks sighed. ‘How long you got?’

  ‘All day.’

  ‘There’s a heap of theories, you know,’ Marks said, scratching his chin. ‘The echo-location faults are the most popular at the moment, like the whaletrap theory. You see, when a pod of whales is moving north along a complex coast with inlets and coves and deep bays they sometimes come into a bay which is so deep and so big with a sweeping headland that in order to get out again they might have to swim south for a distance. You know, exactly in the opposite direction their migratory senses tell them to. Their whole beings compel them to move north – to escape they must move south. They get distressed, hesitate long enough in the swell which is often heavy – or the tide – and they can get caught in the shallows.

  ‘Whales don’t operate their best in shallow water. Very flat, long, shelving beaches are traps. The water is warm in the shallows – they like it – but their sonar gets hazy in that kind of uniform terrain. They can’t identify it properly, make mistakes, get frantic, they’re stuck. And all this complicated loyalty. If one goes, all go.

  ‘In a harem stranding juvenile males are often kicked out of the pod by the older cows who look after the nursery. Sometimes, if they exile a young bull near the coast he goes off upset, gets himself into difficulties, lets out the distress call, and, being loyal, loving creatures, they’ll all go to help and get caught like him. Being a whale in shallow water is a godawful business. Navigation is ultra-complex.

  ‘If a pod leader, for instance, gets into trouble, there’s almost a certain stranding of the pod. They will follow him anywhere. Hundreds of them, sometimes, on the beach. You can tow them right out to sea again and they’ll go right back in. They just throw themselves up and die. Unless you can kill the leader. Lately, it looks as though the only way to save stranded whales is to kill some. If you kill the leader and stop the distress signal, you have a fair chance of towing the others out and having them re-grouping and moving on, with a new leader maybe. I guess the bulls fight it out. Once in New Zealand when we first tried it, we were only guessing which was the leader. We got there late. We shot a lot of whales. God, there was blood and mucus, suffocating whales, gunshots – like a battlefield.’

  ‘Did you feel you were interfering or something, you know, in a natural process? I suppose whales’ve been beaching for years.’

  ‘Yes, we were doing that. But with the situation so desperate for whales, you have to intervene on their behalf. You have to redress the balance. Man has been interrupting a long time. That’s what this Paris Bay thing is all about. Redressing previous interruptions with more interruptions. Man, I want my children to grow up to see whales; I want them to know their place. An ocean without whales is like a wilderness without trees. No matter what kind of people they are, whether they appreciate it or not, I want them to know what the world is really like; they have to know good, bad, big, small. They have to have more than half a world; they have to be more than half people.’

  Queenie nodded. Yes, she thought, yes, yes.

  ‘Anyway now
,’ Marks said, stretching. ‘Where was – oh, yeah . . . whaletraps, harems, follow-the-leader . . . and there’s sickness, too, you know. I guess whales get sick like anyone else. They get parasites and all kind o’ things.

  ‘And there’s stress. I guess one day there’ll be cetacean psychoanalysis. After they prove cetacean intelligence. You see once they get called intelligent they’ll also be neurotic.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘I hope so. But you should hear them talk.’

  ‘The whales?’

  ‘No, the goddam theorists. Jesus, if only they spent more time and money protecting them and less time trying to make the poor bastards talk and do Rorschach tests! Like, they think, if we can prove they are intelligent then we’ll have an excuse to protect them. All this morality crap.’

  ‘Don’t you believe in whale intelligence?’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about it. They are inhabitants of the earth – they need protecting, that’s all, because they are meant to be here. Needs no justification.’

  ‘Meant to be here? Who meant them to be here?’

  ‘Geez, Mother Nature, Father God, Brother Darwin, pick your poison. A thing doesn’t have to be intelligent to need a reason to be. Retarded children, buffaloes, phytoplankton. It belongs here, it should stay. Goddam intelligence freaks,’ he muttered, ‘they’ll want whales joining the UN and the Club of Rome. How many whales wanna say “Mumma” and “Dadda” in morse code? They’ve got along fine without it.’

  ‘So,’ Queenie sighed, a little bored, ‘they’re the theories.’

  ‘Oh, there’s more. That’s just some. The easy ones. There’s stress theories, too. You know the idea that people can do amazing things under stress. Even dogs – you ever seen a dog run up a wall?’

  ‘No,’ Queenie replied, ‘but I’ve heard of people jumping out of the way of cars.’

  ‘And that story about Ernest Hemingway carrying that Italian soldier without noticing half his own kneecaps were shot away. Impossible. People can talk in different languages, break iron bars, fly. They say it comes from stress making you regress to a forgotten, primitive part of the brain. Someone called it the Reptilian Complex, I think. God, I’m no scientist.’