Shallows Read online

  Des Pustling, without thought to his link with history beneath the wishing well, merely glances across the street to the Presbyterian church and then looks back to his desk-top. Marion Lowell is busy behind him with two handsful of his girdle, like someone trying to stuff too many groceries into an undersize bag, hoisting, hands under his shirt, smelling his deceptive odour of Cryst-O-Mint Lifesavers. She knows not to laugh. She knows the story of her predecessor who paid dearly for laughter. The young woman, seduced into Pustling’s vast bedroom by the certainty of the unemployment that would accompany refusal, lay naked on his bed and saw, as her employer undressed, a slip of smeared toilet paper gummed to his left buttock. And she laughed. In a rage, Pustling held her to the bed and penetrated her and dressed her and sacked her and manhandled her out onto his front lawn.

  With his girdle in place, Des Pustling sharpens himself to the day’s commerce. His office walls are thick with photographs of properties to let, stiff Polaroid shots of leaning bungalows and farmhouses with honest-sounding details beneath in Marion’s neat felt-pen hand: PUSTLING REALTY/To Let/Hacker Farmlet/11½ acres/river views/prime land/bore sunk/generous terms/. Pinned to the wall on his left, a curling calendar with a photograph of a kookaburra that reminds him of Robert Menzies says GOORMWOOD SERVICE AND LUBE. A few early shoppers pass in the street, stare up curiously, seeing only themselves in the tinted glass.

  Late in the morning he telephones the Reverend William Pell.

  ‘Listen, Reverend,’ he says, working a loose tooth over with his tongue, ‘can you tell me something about the church?’

  ‘About our church, Des, or the church?’ Pell answers. ‘I suppose I can try.’

  ‘Good. How does a person become an elder?’ Pustling grins, gums white.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I’d like to be an elder. You know, now that I’ve been coming along awhile. The church needs some younger blood making decisions. I know I’m no spring chicken, but the other blokes are getting too old to tie their own bootlaces, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I think I’m understanding, Des,’ Pell says. ‘And they’re not all blokes, Des. Miss Thrim, Mrs James and Mrs Galloway don’t like to be called blokes.’

  ‘Blokesses, then.’ Pustling guffaws. ‘Back to the point.’

  ‘The point is that I know what you’re up to, Des Pustling. You may not agree with Him, but the Lord set down some fairly comprehensive guidelines for the congregation’s choosing of elders. You have to be a —’

  ‘I’ll ignore your poor manners, Reverend —’

  ‘Good. I’ve been ignoring yours for years, now kindly —’

  ‘Just tell me one thing, Reverend.’

  ‘Can I choose which thing to tell you?’

  Prickly old bastard, Pustling thinks. Got more spirit left than I thought. ‘Who chooses elders, you?’

  ‘The church. The congregation. Current elders act upon the church’s recommendation. Not a perfect system, I’ll admit, but serviceable enough.’ The old man sounds winded.

  ‘Election of elders is when?’

  ‘August the second.’

  ‘Your retirement date is?’

  A long silence. Pustling can hear the old man thinking, hear his heart beating between his teeth.

  ‘The first of July. Pustling, if you think you can get control of this congregation to get yourself into some position of what you seem to think is power and influence . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ Pustling laughs.

  ‘Firstly, you won’t. Secondly, your reason for trying it will no longer exist. Most of it doesn’t exist already. I made a mistake, letting this moment become possible. I made a grave error about your cunning, though I thank God that you’ve made a worse blunder about mine.’

  Pustling stares out across the street, looking at the limestone blocks of the old church on the other side of the road as if the building itself has just hung up on him.

  III

  With his collapsed gumboots lying like dollops of dung beside him attracting more flies, Daniel Coupar sat waiting, shifting his feet on the veranda rail, farting painfully. It was Monday, 16 May. From below where pasture descended into dried swamp and veldt-grass and dunes, the tractor bellowed like a milk-heavy cow and Coupar cursed that idiot Cleveland Cookson for not knowing the difference between high and low ratios. Sixteen months ago, the city boy had come and stolen Queenie from him. Since then, it had not rained.

  Coupar had not slept since the arrival of the whales a few days before; their sounds brought him memories and that feeling of vast time passing and some choleric twitch of foreboding.

  The nose of the old Fordson appeared, grinding through the dry bracken near the swamp, jerking in ruts and water-cuts. He saw his granddaughter. She pointed to something across the swamp and Coupar saw ducks rising in a single dark wing.

  When the tagga-tagga of the engine stopped, Cleve and Queenie Cookson jumped down, laughing at a joke shared in the protective din.

  ‘You drive like a bloody donkey,’ Coupar said, grinning sourly.

  ‘It’s the tractor,’ Cleve Cookson said, glancing at the festering mounds of the old man’s boots.

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Hello, Poppa,’ Queenie said, throwing back her tassels of hair, stepping up onto the veranda, kissing him. Coupar growled and accepted the kiss; he noted as she leant over that she wore no bra and he saw down to her navel. It’s what happens, he thought dully.

  ‘You’ve been eating grapes,’ she said, picking up an old stalk.

  ‘The last of them,’ Coupar said without looking up to the skeleton above. The vine was black with dryness.

  The young man went back to the tractor as they talked and untied a hessian bag from the roll-cage. He showed the old man the abalone, each the size of a split pigmelon. The old man stopped speaking to Queenie.

  ‘When I was a boy they were all that big.’

  The crisp, brown paddocks ticked like hot metal. Coupar’s fences needed repairing and the stock were bony and the cows undermilked. He was growing too old to tend the place: people had said it for years ever since his wife died; but it was only recently that he had lost his will and died a little and realised how old and how repulsive to himself he was. Even the land has putrefied and pussed up around me and worked me to the surface, he thought, and now it’s a dried scab and I’m spat out like an unclean thing. Coupar hooked his clawed feet over the rail and farted. His granddaughter looked at his feet.

  ‘Poppa, what have you been doing? Your feet are all blistered.’

  ‘Walking,’ he said.

  Obviously not working, she thought.

  Cleve went inside with the abalone, through the open room with the limestone fireplace, the burst sofa, the browning walls adorned with sombre men and women with fierce, other-worldly Coupar eyes, over rugs that were no longer anything more than multiple series of interlocking threads left colourless from the years, into the cool, dark kitchen with its smells of damp and unbled meat and saddle-soap. He moved a crusty lump of leather with his foot: it was a saddle, hard, furrowed with lack of use and maintenance. Old boots, a necktie, rabbit traps, mildewed books, an axe-head and fowl crap lay on the stone floor. Cleve wanted to belong here. He prodded the coals of the massive stove. He breathed in deep, and he listened to the talk filtering in from outside.

  Dusk descended, the paddocks greyed and there was no hint of a dew that might moisten them. There was an unnatural warmth in the air that might once have promised a thunderstorm, but the sky was cloudless, opaque, and heavy with its own dryness. The three sat out on the veranda in cane chairs, drinking Coupar’s home brew, listening to the weary sounds of the birds roosting all about, watching and feeling the arrival of darkness.

  ‘The whales are still here, Poppa,’ Queenie said, looking down towards the indigo smear of ocean still distinguishable from the evening sky.

  ‘Never thought the buggers would ever come back,’ said Coupar. ‘Last time I saw the whales in num
bers, Queenie, my girl, was when you were catching the school bus from here to town before your grandmother died, before I started feeling like an old man.’

  ‘I remember. They were here every winter.’

  Dark became complete, and the Tilley lamp clinked with moths that butted against the hot white glass, their shadows reeling across the ground below the veranda.

  ‘When are you going back to town?’ the old man asked, emptying the last bottle.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Cleve said.

  ‘Our anniversary.’

  The old man knew only too well, pretended not to hear, and for a few minutes no one spoke. Cleve pushed his chair back, as if making motions for bed, and the old man stirred.

  ‘There’s two more bottles cooling down at the bore,’ Coupar murmured. ‘If you can handle it, that is.’ He wanted them to stay up with him even if it meant childish ploys; he wanted to talk with them, these distant strangers, so young, so lithe, so ripe for catastrophe. And he was jealous of them because they were so much closer to the beginning of their lives than he was.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ Cleve said, rising.

  ‘No, I’ll go.’ Queenie was already off the veranda and into the darkness. She found her way without hesitation, feeling her infant footprints in the dust.

  The old man watched her form absorbed by night.

  ‘So,’ he said, without looking up at Cleve, ‘you found the journals.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Cleve nodded, observing the pink rasher of pate showing through the old man’s white hair. ‘I figured you let me find them on purpose.’

  ‘Read them properly. Read it for . . .’ He hesitated, thinking, the best I can hope for is a disturbance, a stick in the stagnant pool.

  ‘For what?’ Cleve asked, tantalised.

  ‘I dunno,’ Coupar sighed. ‘Read it for the things that aren’t there.’

  ‘Oh?’ Cleve waited.

  ‘The Coupars have been a proud family.’ He thought: They have not loved. Plenty of passion, only no love.

  ‘I know. From Queenie.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘Well, maybe I’ll find out.’

  Coupar shrugged. This was indeed a youth before him. He wished Queenie would come. Cleve was beginning to embarrass him.

  The water of the bore was cool, cold-hard where the fresh current twisted up out of the ground beneath the solid, memorial spread of the clunking windmill. When she was a child Queenie climbed the windmill to see the whales surfacing in the bay, spouting vapour like gunsmoke. Up there, high above the winter green of the farm, she had thought about the story of Jonah, how the whale was God’s appointed messenger, and she had hooked her limbs about the salt-stained legs of the mill and watched the big backs idling, and waited for a message from God, the one she was certain would come. She waited for the whales to belly up to the foot of the mill to attend to her queries. Each winter she climbed and waited, each year the questions were modified; one year the whales did not appear at all.

  Queenie Cookson listened to movement in the bracken, the vegetation her grandfather hated so. She loved its stiff greenery, had spent hours, days, lying amongst the fronds, hearing the wind-shivers. At length, she felt around and found the bottles half-submerged by the bank and walked back with them towards the light of the house. They’ll be talking about those bloody journals, she thought. God knows, I thought Poppa’d have more sense – he knows what Cleve’s like.

  Coupar slept dreamlessly on the hard cot in which he had taken solace since his wife’s death. In the front room, the Cooksons lay on the big bed, sheets kicked down, and Queenie breathed metrically on her side, asleep with her husband’s arm about her and his thumb in her navel. Cleve, awake, restless, contemplated the outline of her back, the same innocent arc he noticed the day of their first meeting when he came upon her lying in a rock-pool on this same beach. He had, a week before, lost his job, the last in a sad string of failures; and he had traversed half the State considering his next move. He had no ideas. He startled her; she tossed her thick hair and snatched him up in her loneliness. At the end of that first day of summer a year and a half ago, Cleveland Cookson still had no ideas, but he had a euphoric sense of flight that shunted from his mind all memory of failure, of cowardice and mundaneness; and flight was enough.

  Cleve untangled himself from Queenie’s sleeping form and got up and found the lamp on the table in the far corner and lit it and let it burn low. Opening the brick-like volume he cast off his unremarkable heritage.

  . . . And so it was with a great despondency settling upon me that I pulled on my oar on that our final departure from the Family of Man, watching her fall sternward, anchor swinging and a few old sailors waving aft, calling ribald farewells mostly lost in the breeze. Someone said then in the boat that he dubbed this place the Bay of Whales. It is a hopeful title . . .

  Cleve read of the setting free of the kangaroo dogs for water, the whiteness of the beach, the pitching of tents, the lighting of fires.

  . . . I am afraid of Finn’s crew who all seem to be criminals. Leek their harpooneer has the face of a mongrel dog. Cain their second harpooneer has had his left earlobe torn off in a past fight. Hale our ponderously fat cook tells me that Cain yet keeps the shrivelled lobe in his sea-chest. Hale is taunting me in fun, I am sure. Last night I slept beside him – a veritable hillock of flesh – watching before I slumbered, the firelight dancing upon the canvas. I woke in the night thinking of the dried flesh fused to Cain’s earring. I turned over against the protective bulk of Hale and took fright at the dogs whimpering coldly outside.

  May 28th, 1831 We are a large party on this expeditional fishery: twenty-five strong, thousands of miles from Hobart Town, our last port of call. I am alone. I make no address to a reader in this journal of loneliness, but merely record emotions and happenings for the sake of memory and mental occupation. Churling is an odd fellow . . .

  Cleve, suddenly feeling the long day’s activity in his limbs, closed the journal, turned out the light and went to bed, encircling Queenie and feeling her breasts against his forearm.

  Daniel Coupar sat on the veranda beneath the scratch of crows in the guttering. He brooded, looking up to the bare granite cheeks of Wirrup Hill where he knew his granddaughter and her husband had gone. The hill hunkered high over the brown, creased paddocks and the albescent beaches, high over the house and the sheds and the spindly stock. Coupar cursed its smooth, bland face and muttered to himself, overcome by memories. He stomped his feet against the veranda rail and the crows above him scarcely moved. He went inside to straighten the bedclothes on the big bed, leaving his own a rancid, grey knot, and as he shuffled agitatedly around the room he whispered: ‘God A’mighty, what’s wrong, old man? What is it?’ He sat out on the veranda again and saw the hill and heard the whales from far below and his body ached as it did with changes of season.

  Up on the hill the incline was clotted with small trees growing in the soil that covered the granite foundation, and many of them were as disfigured as leper’s limbs, gnarled and twisted. Everywhere, granite knobs, wounds, shapeless extrusions. Queenie picked her way up the gully full of a hopeless hope, every muscle strained towards the waterfall which meant so much to her. It should have been spilling from the bluff in this beginning of winter, but at Wirrup there had been no autumn and before that no summer and certainly no spring, only an unexplained heat. There’ll be some water, Queenie told herself; it can’t be dry. But there was no water. The fall near the summit of the hill was just a stain on the bluff and the shrunken pool at its base was still, its gangrenous surface pimpled with larvae.

  The Cooksons stood wordless. This was the place where they came together, a summer ago. Even then the weather was out of control: it had snowed in the ranges. Then, the waterfall was thick, a translucent sickle cutting at the rocks, and prisms dazzled the bark of trees. Their laughter had tolled in the gullies as, naked, they stood beneath the fall and felt the water on their closed eyes. In the brill
iant cascade, they fell and were yoked by the weight of water drumming into their eyes, on their backs. Their pores pricked tight. They sheltered deep in one another, were grafted in water and light, and even when, in exhaustion, they were pummelled apart, they remained fused.

  Queenie and Cleve looked at one another. It was inevitable, each saw. They were hungry for that moment. Queenie freed her breasts. Cleve shucked out of his shorts. The soupy green pool barely moved as they ground away with insects on their backs, their eyes shut.

  The afternoon sun scythed the dead paddocks with its heat and crows loped across it, low to the earth. Coupar remained inert in his chair on the veranda as Cleve and Queenie prepared to leave; his head ached and his bones pained him. I don’t want to be alone in this Godforsaken place any more, he thought. Even the bloody dogs have left me and this land for better prospects; even the dogs, and a dog’s about as patient as a bloody Pustling. Coupar did not want the young people to go; he would have shamed them into staying, had he any imagination left. As she came out onto the veranda for the last time, he pressed into Queenie’s hands a small calico bag, an heirloom.

  ‘Oh . . .’ she murmured, opening its drawstring neck, ‘whales’ teeth, sperm teeth.’ The long curving cones were scrimshawed with the image of a man in the jaws of a sperm whale, the man with a stylised, vacant horror on his face, eyes popping.

  ‘Belonged to Nathaniel Coupar.’

  Queenie smiled, hesitant. Cleve beamed, turning the yellowed relics preciously in his hands.

  ‘For the anniversary,’ the old man said, going inside, leaving Cleve and Queenie together, dumbfounded, on the veranda.

  ‘Um, I’ll get my bag,’ Queenie said, going in after him. In the dark kitchen the old man was swinging the stove door open and shut. ‘Poppa?’