Shallows Read online

  ‘They was talkin’ about that young fella Queenie Coupar married, the one they caught in the raw on the beach,’ Ernie Easton says. ‘They reckon he’s just had his first weddin’ anniversary.’

  ‘Yeah, must be a year since she married the stupid bogger.’

  Ernie Easton giggles. ‘They watch him through the holes in the shed.’

  ‘They what?’ Staats says, delighted.

  ‘They say he’s readin’ old books and he had a blue with his missus. She’s – was the tour guide for the Bureau.’

  ‘Reads old books, eh?’ Staats says. ‘What sort?’

  ‘About her mob, they reckon.’

  ‘How do they know?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘The Coupars. That girl must’ve been a lame one to get caught with the likes of him. Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife . . . lazy bludger.’

  Staats recalls an evening when he was drawn into conversation with Cookson. Being a journalist and a city boy did the young man little good in the Bright Star. Staats remembers the cowed, slack slope of his shoulders, the look of a poorly transplanted seedling. A weed, Staats thought. Staats and Cookson had spoken about local history, about the Goormwood grave, about the whalers, about the Coupars at Wirrup and the old house overlooking the harbour where the old Misses Coupar once lived. They talked about the convict races and Staats told him the Seeds were the alcoholic remnant of James Seed, the last surviving convict before Angelus ceased to be a penal colony. Staats informed the young man that his, Cookson’s, wife was descended from Nathaniel Coupar, American deserter, who appeared in Angelus one morning in 1831.

  ‘Settlers put him up for weeks until he was fit and a bit more sane,’ Staats told him. ‘The ship he scuttled sank with all hands a day out of the Sound. People got suspicious about Coupar. He did some smuggling, some labouring, cut sandalwood, shot roos, sold American grog to the pubs. Got quite a fortune together, they say, and bought that land out east at Wirrup. Seemed a bit funny about the place. Anyway, he made a piece of land out of it. Coupars been there ever since, off and on.’ Staats had found himself wanting to slap the boy on the back for marrying into history, but he refrained, overcome by a feeling of distaste.

  ‘Tell me your news, Ernie,’ Staats says. ‘I’ve been feedin’ you beer all afternoon.’

  The pub is filling. Darts thump into the wall. The TV above the bar flashes and winks with city news.

  ‘First the good news.’

  ‘That means there’s bad news.’

  ‘Hass, yer a bright one, I can’t dispute it. Good news is that Ted Baer has got his boat at the town jetty and he’s back in town for a crack at the world record for shark catchin’.’

  ‘Ah, now that is good news. Good for Angelus, plenty of news coverage. Now there’s a real man.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What’s the bad news?’

  ‘There was a circus at the whaling station today. A pro-test.’

  ‘What?’ Staats yells, standing, as if to defend himself. ‘Didn’t anyone do anything? And no one told me?’

  ‘There’s more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘Queenie Coupar was one of ’em. She took ’em out on a tour and paraded with ’em. They’re foreigners.’

  ‘Bogger me!’

  ‘There’s more.’

  Hassa Staats sits down shakily. ‘How can there be more?’

  ‘Three of ’em are with Queenie Coupar in there playing pool.’ Ernie Easton points to the door marked CLUB BAR.

  VII

  ‘So who are you all, then?’ Queenie Cookson said, fingering her stiff, bloodied clothes.

  ‘We call ourselves Cachalot & Company,’ said the man who had introduced himself as Georges Fleurier in the taxi on the way back from Paris Bay.

  ‘Cachalot. That’s another name for the sperm whale, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, pulling at his clotted beard. His cashmere sweater was black and crusty. Two other Cachalot members chipped coloured balls into pockets beneath a white fluorescent light.

  ‘You’re French,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Fleurier said casually. ‘And he’s American. The other is Canadian.’

  ‘And I’m an accomplice,’ she said.

  ‘An activist,’ said one of the pool players, between chinks of ivory – the American.

  ‘Never heard of Cachalot & Company,’ Queenie said, sipping her Guinness.

  ‘We are three weeks old,’ Fleurier said. ‘We came to join some Australians to close down Paris Bay.’

  ‘And,’ the American pool player said, ‘our Aussie friends have screwed up.’ His face was shiny, hard and creased like pigskin. ‘Our little introductory effort out there today is wasted because our Zodiacs haven’t turned up. And they won’t turn up, I know it. If you’d like to know, Zodiacs are inflatable boats, okay?’

  ‘Hey, nice lady,’ the other pool player, a short man with a wild sphere of hair, said, ‘we have a problem. We need a boat.’

  ‘Charter? You? In this town?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the hair-mass said, shooting his white ball into a pocket.

  ‘You haven’t got a chance.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ the hairy pool shooter said, conceding two shots to his opponent. ‘This is a fishing village; there’s boats.’

  ‘This is not a village and you’ll never get a boat.’

  ‘We have money enough,’ the Frenchman said, sipping his vodka. The hotel had fallen quiet; they didn’t notice.

  ‘You can’t buy friends in this town,’ Queenie lied.

  ‘Can you tell us where we might ask?’ the Frenchman said.

  ‘The fisherman’s harbour. I could ask for you. No, let me think about it,’ she said, annoyed by the pool players, and a little afraid. She had just lost her job with the Bureau, been cursed by an old friend, and washed in a whale’s blood; the accents made her dizzy and she felt an exhilaration and a compulsion and some shaft of doubt. As she sat tilting the milky black stout in her glass, the swing door to the public bar slapped back on its hinges and the barmaids stopped pouring, every pool player stopped shooting, and the mottled jowls of Hassa Staats began to work.

  It was dark and street lights buzzed and sputtered and tinkled with moths as Queenie Cookson walked uptown with Georges Fleurier. The two pool players walked ahead, talking loudly, looking into shop windows.

  ‘Who are your friends?’ Queenie asked, shakily, still quivering with embarrassment.

  ‘Marks, the American —’

  ‘With the face like a wallet?’

  ‘Yes, he is a strandings expert,’ Fleurier said. ‘Perhaps you would like his credentials?’ he said sourly.

  ‘Hope they’re better than his pool playing.’

  ‘The other is Brent. Brent is our media organiser, a hippy, a nut, a musician.’

  ‘Marvellous!’ Queenie sighed. ‘Strandings. That’s when whales suicide, isn’t it?’

  ‘Suicide? An inappropriate term.’

  ‘I’ve seen it happen.’ Queenie recalled the wallowing bulk of a pygmy sperm grinding through shallows, inching, cudgelling the water with its tail, being forsaken by the receding surf. Had she seen it at the age of six she might have thought her wait over, that a messenger from God had finally come; but she was sixteen and the event struck her as brutal, not mysterious.

  ‘And you still think they suicide? Such an intelligent species? Do you know the size of a sperm whale’s brain? Do you know what goes on in that enormous cavity?’

  ‘No more than you, I suppose,’ Queenie said, crossing the street with him.

  ‘You are not stupid.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll rest easy now.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  She shrugged, suspicious of him; there was a casual rudeness about him that aggravated her.

  ‘Death is a testament,’ Fleurier said, holding a finger in the air as though testing the wind. ‘One can learn a great deal about the life and mind of someth
ing from the manner in which it dies. Marks is a valuable man because he has studied the deaths of many whales. He is a man of great compassion.’

  ‘If you happen to be a whale,’ Queenie said.

  They walked a few moments in silence past a group of Aborigines who sat quietly on the steps of the Town Hall, showing the whites of teeth and eyes and bandages.

  ‘You’re going to get trouble, you know,’ she said.

  ‘The people are apathetic,’ Fleurier said. ‘Or perhaps sympathetic.’

  ‘It’s the accents,’ she said. ‘As soon as you try another stunt, as soon as you threaten anything, anything at all – even that bloody stupid grave in the middle of the main street – they’ll change. People don’t want anything unless it’s likely to be taken from them.’

  Queenie heard herself quoting her grandfather; he had said it many times. ‘You call what happened in the pub apathy? Believe me, you’ll have trouble.’ She felt a curious and dangerous mixture of feelings: half of her wanted to defend the town against these invaders, the other half of her made her wish she was one of them. ‘How did you get mixed up in this game, anyway?’ she said, irritable.

  ‘It is no game.’

  ‘Well, why the whales?’

  ‘My father was a diver and I dived with him and I learnt some things about the sea and the balance of life and the possibility of cetacean intelligence. My father was a fool. He dove with Cousteau and Dumas in the Mediterranean. He wasted his life and talent on wrecks and salvage and mystery. He said he wanted to find some answers about Man – as if Hitler and Hiroshima didn’t tell us all we needed – and he was looking for Atlantis, the lost civilisation. My father drowned in a swimming pool in Spain when I was twenty. Do you see the irony in that? He was a fool, a dear fool, and he found nothing. He didn’t realise that his life was a waste of time. People allowed him to chase relics instead of guiding him towards the future, and our future lies in communication between the species, coexistence with the environment. Not in the follies of the past.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘Perhaps we think alike.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Is this where you’re staying?’ They stood outside the Angelus Motor Lodge where in the gardens at the front a concrete whale spouted a fountain.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We are all here. Our Australian comrades must all be in bed. Did you notice all the concrete whales in this town are smiling?’ he said, reaching into his shoulder bag.

  ‘Another irony, I think you’d call it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he smiled grimly. ‘Here.’ He took from his bag a crumpled manila folder. ‘Read this. I have ten more, all different. I carry my brain around in scrapbooks.’

  Queenie took it and thanked him and walked home, taut inside.

  In the warmth of the kitchen with its familiar friendly smells of apples and capsicums, and the sweet furry smell of last season’s apricots still emanating from the fruit baskets which made her think of summer and Cleve and indestructible moments of happiness, Queenie flicked through the loose pages in the manila folder: excerpts from journals and newspapers, books and television scripts, government documents, copies, carbons, cuttings in no apparent order.

  . . . Corpora albicantia: scars on the ovaries of rorquals and humpbacks. Each scar = liberation of one egg . . .

  . . . whereas earlier in whale research, stainless steel darts were shot from a twelve-bore gun into the backs of the whales as markings. To lodge properly the projectile had to penetrate deep into the muscles of the back . . .

  A humpback whale once found with 1,000 lbs of barnacles adhering to it. Humpbacks, it is said, migrating up Africa’s west coast will often move close to the coast specifically where the Congo flows into the sea, to kill their barnacles off in the fresh water . . . it is also said that sail-boats were taken there for the same reason.

  i. no need of whaling industry ii. mercury levels iii. population studies suspect iv. sperm whale intelligence v. method of killing (150 lb grenade harpoon).

  Paris Bay, Angelus, W.A. Last land operation in Australia. 1975 quota: 1,395. Average size of 42.7 feet. One whale = 3 tons whalemeal (stock, poultry feed, fertiliser), 8 tons oil (margarine, lard, confectionery, soap, candles, cosmetics, textiles, detergents, paints, plastics).

  1963 humpback whale protected/recovery 100 years.

  . . . even the killer whale has not been found guilty of homicide . . .

  . . . in the Azores found a 47-foot sperm with a 405 lb squid in its stomach, 34 feet across . . . sucker marks from tentacles 4 inches across. Architeuthis dux, the largest known species of squid, known to fight sperm whales.

  Humpbacks and southern right whales migrating north close to shore were easy prey for bay whalers who operated in small parties in the early 1800s . . .

  Whales make a variety of groans, ticks and high whistles which, it can be assumed, are used in communication as well as echo-location.

  . . . that each whale has a unique voice, as do humans, and that it is theoretically possible for this communication to be understood and interpreted by humans . . . a kind of sensual telepathy . . .

  . . . have always been the objects of superstition. Jonah of the ancient myth, for instance . . .

  Closing the folder, she looked out on the lights of the harbour, the metallic wharf lights, the yellowish glow of the dog-legged deepwater jetty and felt a long way from the homely timber scents and colours and sounds of the old house in which she had always dreamed of living. She put on her coat and mittens; they smelled faintly of damp and mildew. Her stomach was hard as a knot of wet, shrunken rope. She put one of Cleve’s woollen scarves on; it smelled of him. Outside it was so cold it made her squint.

  VIII

  Angelus vibrates with the news this Friday evening, and behind the offices of the Advocate the press clatters out tomorrow morning’s heading: WHALE FRACAS. Tomorrow the high school debating team will test the issue against good locution, and butchers, as they wrap and snap, will mention the incident at Paris Bay as an addendum to the price per kilo, raising pruned forefingers reasonably to make their point; but tonight there are the meetings. Taxi drivers sit chastised and bitching in the Royal Albert recounting the afternoon’s lucrative but forbidden fares. Waterside workers meet to contemplate another strike. The Rotary Club meets, the yacht club meets, the chamber of commerce meets, the meatworkers meet, the Masons meet and the men of the town tire of one another’s company as committees are formed, re-formed, malformed, deformed, dissolved.

  Twenty miles offshore, ploughing through a heavy swell as the rain thrashes rust from rails and catwalks, three whalechasers keep desultory radio contact.

  Tonight the sesquicentenary has been forgotten: women have suspended the sewing of period costumes; papier-mâché models of placid natives are left wet and incomplete. Tonight the talk is of whales and invasion. Offshore a small pod of humpback whales moves slowly north-west along the coast to warmer and warmer water.

  There is a particular kind of unselfconscious manner a man who has lived and dined most of his life alone will employ at table. William Pell displays this hunched over his dinner, chewing, smoking, reading. Were his mother alive, were he still an oversized, taciturn boy on the farm outside town, Pell would have the back of his neck stung with a floral teatowel and his old, hoary father would stare grimly from the end of the table and say, ‘Your mother is a goodun with a teatowel, Billy,’ and attend to his soup.

  Pell’s father, born in 1842, lived to be eighty-eight; William’s sister Elizabeth was born in 1867, forty-one years before him. She was the only one of his brothers and sisters he ever met, and he loved her above all else. She was a nurse. In 1916 she died in Flanders of typhoid. It was then that William, six years old, decided that wars were not good, that nurses died like normal people, that King George’s letters were signed by a machine in red ink, and that his sister Elizabeth was a saint. He told his father who had wept for a week that he wanted to be like Elizabeth. I want to be good
, he said. Anderson Pell who had once, when asked by an old swaggie for a pound of flour and a blanket, undressed completely on the veranda where he stood and given the sojourner all his clothes in a bundle, looked up from his weeping and said, quoting by heart: ‘He has showed you, o man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?’ William, standing at the dam’s edge with his father, watching a long and a short reflection in the water, gripped his father’s bony old leg and said: ‘Then I should?’ whereupon his father took him up in his arms, kissed him wetly about the face and tossed him, with a laugh, into the dam.

  Anderson Pell died in 1930 a very old man. Every now and then Pell will remember washing his father’s body, helped by his dry-eyed mother. He remembers a lamp burning, cicadas drumming, a thick warm sense of peace. Pell was at theological college in Sydney when his mother died in 1936 and he made the long journey home to Angelus by train, like a man in a vacuum. The white heat of the Nullabor Plain did not touch him. When he returned he found his mother buried and young Daniel Coupar beaten: the Pustlings controlled the town.

  Already Pell is tired and aching, even before the sleepless night ahead. Night has come and the air contracts with the promise of rain. Singing floats across the damp lawn from the church hall as the Ladies’ Guild strides through Sankey’s songbooks. He sits for a while with his big hands around a tiny cup of espresso coffee, listening and thinking. He cannot help but recall the faces in the street today; they were somehow thin and fragile as though underneath there was a force which threatened to craze and shatter and explode the heads from their shoulders. Yes, he thinks, that’s how Queenie Cookson looked just now when I saw her pass, as though she might fall to the ground and scream. Poor Queenie, what’ll you do with yourself now? The gossip has reached him; the town knows. Sipping his coffee, Pell remembers her as a child, something she once wrote during one of his dull sermons in the safe sixties when the world’s problems didn’t exist, when everyone seemed to have a job, when the Aborigines were a bad memory from mission days. From the pulpit he saw her intent upon it, scribbling away, and after the service he asked her what she had written that was more interesting than his sermon on charity. She shrugged and gave it to him and Daniel and Maureen Coupar shrugged with her.