Shallows Read online

  ‘I have to tell you about her. I wasted her heart. Ah, I could fill a silo with regrets, Queenie. She didn’t die from the tractor; that was a lie. She fell from the top of the waterfall: she was nuddy and laughing and my bloody trousers were in a tree. Seemed sick at the time. Don’t know now. I lied to you.

  ‘Oh, there’s lots’ve things I wish I’d never done. There’s sins of inaction, too, you know. My grandpa could tell you all about that. Times I wish God’d made it easier for me to live with Him. Wish I could stop everything and start again, feed everyone, heal everyone, make everyone see and understand like I thought I could when I was a younger, better man. I am the least and the most . . . poor old Bill. Why couldn’t I have been Bill?

  ‘I wanted to tell you that I saw Cookson and you in the fall. It wasn’t deliberate, but I lingered. I wish I never gave him the journals. He worries me. Gawd, he’s like me without a background; he doesn’t know his arse from a hole in the ground and neither do you, I suspect. But you need him. Can’t think why, though.

  ‘I should have been a better guardian. Oh, I’m tired. Feel like I’ve been fasting all my life.’

  Coupar fixed his eye on the cold, blue lights of the wharf. A wind was pacing about the harbour.

  ‘It’s having the choices that kills a man. It’s the best and the worst. You get to choose and you get to regret. Almost guaranteed to bugger it up. And sometimes not.

  ‘Remember when I used to read to you? Remember all the stories? Remember when you learnt to read? Hell, you were disappointed. All that time in church you’d thought the Lord was saying, “Take Mary and Jesus and the Flea into Egypt”. Export the flea, Joseph! Hmph.’ Coupar couldn’t resist a laugh. ‘Oh, Lord, what a child! And where the hell are you?’

  Coupar got up, drew the curtains and sat in the blackness for some time before leaving. The third and seventh stairs cried like trodden-on animals. A fine drizzle fell as he mounted the dark, cacophonous shadow of the Fordson. He felt a narrow coolness within and it frightened him. The lights of a whale-chaser slid across from the entrance of the harbour.

  IV

  Des Pustling ushers the advertising executive into his BMW, and as he rounds the bonnet to the driver’s side he sees the silhouette of Marion Lowell locking up the office. Behind the wheel, he realises how much he has drunk; such rare irresponsibility thrills him. Slipping down in the passenger’s seat, the advertising man from the city belches and sighs. Pustling wonders what is to be done with him; he can think of many unpleasant people whose company he would prefer. Since six o’clock they have been drinking Black Douglas in Pustling’s office.

  ‘Ah, all sewn up, Mr Pustling.’

  ‘Des.’

  ‘Des. Sewn like a caesar.’

  ‘Well, I hope your boys are onto the right thing, Phil.’

  ‘Mr Notts.’

  ‘Phil.’ Pustling pulls out into Goormwood Street, accelerating smoothly.

  ‘Oh, mind all the traffic, Des. Don’t wanna get caught in a traffic jam, now do we? Harf, harf! No, as I was saying, you small-towners have no trust. Probably the hillbilly in you, you know. No offence, of course. Promo is a sophisticated business, Des. This town’s hundred and fiftieth birthday’ll be a balltearer because of us, don’t you worry. Look, you’ve got a big promo, the Queen coming, maybe even Rolf Harris. You jus’ leave it to us, Dezza. My team are making a success of it in advance: 1979 will see Angelus finally on the map of life. The world’ll know about it. Your tourism’ll go wild. Your trouble, Des – now don’t get me wrong – is no faith. F-A-I-T-H. If you had faith you’d be out there now supervising the construction of another five caravan parks, hotels, motels, restaurants, massage parlours, drive-in churches. Instead of a three-month summer peak and the wildflower thing in spring, you’d be all peak – the Matterhorn – full-on boom, like the big bad city.’

  ‘A doubling of tourist trade doesn’t make us the big bad city, Phil. And there is a recession and a drought east of the Hacker.’

  ‘But the logo, the motif!’

  ‘No, the whale’s fine, Phil.’

  ‘Damn right it is, Dezza. You’ll see. This hick town’ll see new life, the good life, the bright lights, the good times!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Pustling says, changing gears.

  ‘The bright life, Pusser. The good lights, the new brights, the . . . the —’

  ‘Yes, Phil.’

  ‘Bloody hicks’ll see.’ The man grunts, trying to loosen his tie, half chokes himself. ‘Hicks. Hic!’

  Pustling winces, converts it to his smile and notices in his rear-view mirror that a long slice of bloodless gum hangs down over his front teeth, and he smoothes it back with his tongue, remembering those awful days at university. On the street today a small boy tapped him on the leg and said: ‘Drop something, sport?’ The child was pointing to a yellowish incisor on the footpath; Pustling had just sneezed.

  Goormwood Street is quiet tonight, even for a Thursday night. An elderly couple walk a collie, coats heavy about them. Closed, lit shopfronts give the pavements a more barren look than even they deserve. Spirals of paper lift in the freshening breeze from the harbour. To think that last year we won Tidy Town award, Pustling thinks. Then, on the other side, rolling downhill, a tractor. Pustling slows, takes a long look at that tractor and its driver, and turns off towards Middle Beach, thinking quickly.

  And at this moment Hassa Staats stands behind the bar surveying his regulars. Each man standing in this bar stands where he remembers their fathers standing.

  Staats can remember the days when he brought messages down for his father, those special times when he was allowed behind the bar with its glistening pipes and glass and wet wood. He saw the red faces of the farmers in for market, soldiers home on leave, men doing business at tables, the Salvoes shaking tins, the whalemen drinking from jugs. Those brief moments between delivering the message and taking a cuff on the head, he saw and heard things that excited him. The Rrrr! sound of men talking, the chink of glass, the sour, thrilling stink of beer.

  Staats wonders if his father felt the same things all those years he stood behind the bar. Only sometimes is it like those days now.

  Staats glances about, sighs. He has heard that Ted Baer did poorly today taking only one small shark which broke a trace just before being gaffed. And to add to Staats’s feeling of deflation, Baer is reported to be staying at the Ocean View down on Middle Beach. Wonder if I said something wrong, Staats thinks, squeezing beer out of the bar towel. He’s always stopped here. He feels the need for fresh air all of a sudden and leaves Mara behind the bar.

  Outside in the cold clean wind, he bites off a chunk of barley sugar with a crack and leans against the low, frosted window, hands in the warm pockets of his jacket. From the windy harbour a truck labours uphill, crashing gear. The street looks deserted, shabby; it adds to his melancholy. The tightness in his chest has been with him several weeks now, a constriction like the aftermath of a sentimental film. He grinds barley sugar, thoughtful. He wonders automatically how the whalers went today. He wonders, too, about those bloody foreigners.

  He grates his leather soles on the concrete, and his eye, even before his ear, catches the tractor churning down the hill.

  Daniel Coupar is down on the pavement, walking towards Staats before he is recognised. His thinning white hair stands back, windblown into a peak, the suit is smeared with grease at the knees, the black shoes shine ludicrously. Hassa Staats chokes and spits crystals of barley sugar; and Coupar walks right past him into the public bar. Stupefied, Staats stands for a moment, tosses a stub of sugar into the gutter as one would the butt of a cigarette, and lets his breath shoot out in a long, sticky hiss.

  ‘Well, bogger me,’ he says, listening to the sudden silence spilling from the bar.

  When he hears the talk and laughter resume, Staats goes inside. Coupar, at the bar, has his back towards the door and Mara is pouring him a beer, caught, for once, without words.

  Well, thinks Hassa Staats sta
nding awkwardly near the cigarette machine, this is a turn up. What’s he doing in town? Staats smiles inwardly. This bent old man, ludicrous in a suit, hiding shiny black shoes beneath the bar, is the man his father had called a dangerous rabble-rouser. He looks as pitiful as the last time Staats saw him – at the wedding. Around the room, others glance too casually, talk with false spontaneity, drink too rapidly. Willis Willis, come to buy cigarettes, startles the big, red publican and displaces him from his position by the machine.

  ‘Taken to the ol’ Marlboros, eh Hassa?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, no, nah, wouldn’t touch the boggers. Filthy habit.’ Exposed, he has no choice but to go back behind the bar where Mara glares at him with those eyes he’d swear glowed in the dark like a cat’s.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she says, clawing at the register. ‘You look like another darkie’s walked in. And he’s on his second middy already.’

  He scowls, pulling up a stool to rest his bulk, and looks along the puddled timbertop bar to where Coupar hunches over his glass. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes he observes him, and not once does Coupar look up from his succession of glasses.

  Pustling dumps his drunken ad-man outside a respectable brothel. As he U-turns to head back into town, he sees the man collapse on the front lawn and the porch light comes on.

  Eventually Hassa Staats can no longer bear it; he slides his stool the length of the bar and sits directly in front of Coupar as the old man finishes another glass. It has been a long time since Staats has seen a man drink so much so quickly without falling to the floor, poisoned, and he feels an odd regret at the sight.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing that to yourself, you know,’ he says to Coupar, rolling the empty in his hands. Flecks of foam spin out from his fingers.

  ‘Not like you to give a stuff what a man does to himself, Hassa,’ Coupar says quietly, with obvious concentration.

  ‘No,’ Staats admits with a smile.

  ‘So piss off.’

  ‘But I own the place.’

  Coupar motions to Mara for another beer.

  ‘What brings you to Angelus?’ Hassa traces figures of eight in the damp surface of the timber.

  ‘The Fordson. Too far to walk.’

  Staats grins. Neither man looks at the other.

  ‘A man’d think you were up to no good, turnin’ up like this.’

  ‘Leave the thinking to the men, then.’

  ‘Prickly old bastard.’ Staats laughs. ‘You’re early if you’ve come for Foundation Day, it’s —’

  ‘What do I care about bloody Foundation Day? Gawd A’mighty!’

  ‘A man might think you’ve come to do some rabble-rousing with your girl, then, eh?’

  Coupar takes a beer from Mara and looks at Staats. His eyes are bloodshot, his flesh the colour of tallow, his beard wind-thinned.

  ‘Well, she’s left town,’ Staats says, meeting his gaze. ‘With the lunatic fringe. Become a troublemaker, that girl of yours. Comes from bad discipline, not enough —’

  ‘That’s why your boy’s been in the city the last ten years, is it? An upbringing so bloody perfect he just had to run away from home.’

  ‘Hopeless bugger, too, but he never caused grief to this town.’

  ‘Only to you and Mara. Doesn’t that count? ’Sides, his father and his father’s father did enough grief between ’em. Why should he worry? Might be he’s the best of a bad bunch.’

  ‘Might be I’ll have to ask you to leave.’

  ‘Exiled from Paradise. The Bright and Shining Star.’ Coupar eyes him from over the edge of his glass. ‘When did Queenie leave?’

  ‘About three weeks, I s’pose. And not a moment too soon. Trying to kill this town.’

  ‘It’s not young twits that wreck towns, Hassa.’

  ‘That’s what Des calls ’em – young twits. But they’ve got spirit, he says; one day they’ll make good decision-makers; good business people; good people. Pah! All I can say is that I admire his patience. Otherwise I’d think he didn’t care.’

  ‘Always been a patient man, old Pusarse.’

  ‘But they have to be stopped, and with any luck this union ban’ll keep ’em out. Otherwise the old whaling station might be on borrowed time.’

  ‘Always has been. This whole town is. The lot of us. It’s always been borrowed time.’

  ‘Ah, you’re sounding religious, Daniel.’

  ‘Piss off.’

  ‘I think you’ve —’

  ‘Piss off! Piss off!’

  And at this moment Des Pustling comes in, an expression of mild amusement on his face.

  ‘Will you help this gentleman out, please, Mr Pustling?’ Staats says, rounding the bar, taking the old man’s lapel between his fingers. ‘I think he’s had a nudge too many.’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Staats,’ Pustling says, eyes sharp as polished precious stones.

  As Coupar lets himself be led outside, legs promising to buckle and slide away beneath him, he snatches a dart from the board near the door and calls: ‘The beer stinks. Try cleaning your pipes. Your father was scum but at least he cleaned his pipes.’

  Pustling unhands him outside. ‘Don’t mind poor old Hassa. Got the brains of a Saint Bernard. How about some coffee?’

  ‘A cup of tea, Puslips. God, if I ever thought I’d —’

  ‘My car or yours?’

  Coupar does not answer. He is thinking. He gets into the BMW and feels it thrust him forward. He feels like a projectile. Pustling lets third gear work awhile, excited, sensing that something is happening. He feels his ennui fall behind.

  V

  That night, sheltered from the brawling southerly on the water, Cleveland Cookson sat and read. Spreadeagled paperbacks curled their wings at him, face-down where they had been abandoned: Moby Dick, Ultramarine, The Jacket, Lord Jim, books he had begun and scuttled before. Cleve had drunk enough to be reckless and warm – enough to push a sodden road-worker off his stool earlier in the evening. He didn’t know why he had unseated him; they had neither spoken nor noticed one another in the hour they sat abreast the bar.

  Cleve read, and the browning script seemed to throb with clarity before him.

  June 20th, 1831 No whales. I spend afternoons walking the length of the beach doling out rope to have it inspected and re-coiled again.

  Yesterday Mr Jamieson sent our crew out in search of kangaroos. We climbed the hills and moved along precipitous gullies until we came to a flat, swampy area where drab birds rose and scattered into the air. We came upon a herd of kangaroos standing motionless as they seem to do. Mountford put a ball into the biggest of them. Cain wounded another in the thigh and the animal staggered about frightening its fellows off. The creature made a frightful noise, and the dogs harried it to the ground. We found it throatless against the broad base of a tree.

  On the trek back we were alarmed by the appearance of a dozen blacks on the top of a ridge – they were such ghostly figures! They made no sign of observing us, and we passed beneath them in the gully without a sound.

  June 21st, 1831 The only talk now is of black women. Cain and Leek spruik their foul and immoral stories by the fire at night and the rest of the men grow excited and the mood of the camp becomes restless.

  Nowles sleeps no better. At night I can smell an unsavoury odour. In his slumber he often calls out ‘No! No!’ and the others in the hut will reply ‘Aye, aye, ye rotting beggar!’ I fear there is little we can offer him in his pain. Hale applies sulfa and rags but this is all.

  June 22nd, 1831 Both Churling and myself in the lookout this morning as I write this. I hope I can trust him not to report me writing up here. He quakes as if with cold. I sense some hidden knowledge in him which far exceeds his years.

  June 23rd, 1831 Cain and Leek forced entry into the rum store last night. After midnight I woke to shouting and carousal in the other hut. There was chanting and lewd singing and sounds of fighting. I heard Churling singing or shouting or screaming. The headmen Jamieson and Finn were nowhere abou
t.

  This morning I woke and began turn at the lookout, and as I was rising I saw outside in the poor light a staggering lubra, naked, besmirched and inebriated. She struck her fists against the door of the hut opposite without response. Then she proceeded to hammer upon our door also. Nowles cried out: ‘No, not yet!’ in his delirium and the others merely grunted. The woman staggered away into the bush. I saw drizzle descending, and, hanging from a bough near our hut, a pair of trousers – they looked almost too small for a man.

  I passed the garment on my way up to the hill without touching it. There were drops of dried blood on the legs.

  Strange, but I dreamt I heard a child weeping in my sleep.

  Noon. Have just seen whales breaching and the boats are out. I see a lone figure standing on the beach just now. Where is he looking? It is not out to sea, but across and upward. A bird?

  7 p.m. Cut the calf from the womb of its mother this evening. Wading about in entrails sometimes strikes me as profane. At one moment I found myself chest-deep and sliding off deeper and had to be dragged out by Mountford and Doan. What must it feel to be buried alive?

  June 24th, 1831 Nowles is dead. His hand, concealed beneath a blanket these past days, was petrified and black and most foul. The stench in his bedding has rendered it useless, though Mr Jamieson has suggested we trade his blankets to the blacks.

  Nowles buried at sea after rites on the beach. Mr Jamieson read from the second chapter of The Book of Jonah: out of the belly of hell cried I, and Thou heardest my voice . . . Sealed and drugged, the body was stowed in the stern at Mr Jamieson’s feet until we were far enough out in the bay to tip it overboard.

  Sat by the fire this night with Churling. He is haggard and pale, like a man whose soul has left him. Is he sick or troubled? I feel it is not my business to offer help until he asks it of me. Altogether an odd fellow. Sometimes he looks quite . . . forsaken? This pathetic countenance causes me to recoil from him, revile him. Never have I seen such a hopeless man.