Shallows Read online

  Daniel Coupar’s father was a massive, booming, neurotic man with grand schemes and grander failures. He was a man known in the district by his ancestry and by the things he had tried and failed. His supplementary ventures into salmon fishing and the flensing of beached whales were legendary for their incompetence; they earned him respect in the district. He often beat his son and wept shamefully afterwards, doubling the boy’s punishment. Daniel often heard him in the night pacing, gouging the kitchen fire, muttering, as though cursing or in prayer.

  At school, boarding with the other farm boys, Daniel Coupar marvelled at how dry and lifeless his textbooks rendered the world. He longed for holidays and the freedoms of the farm, the hill, the sea, the intricacies of dried watercourses, the deep occasional shadows of whales moving offshore. He loved, too, the work of the farm, jobs that let him think of other things while he worked.

  In 1920, in the soft, misty confusion of a winter dawn, Martin Coupar shot himself. He left his wife and son in great debt, dispossessing them of their land. The funeral in Angelus had been paid for before his death. Rain turned the cemetery to mud. The funeral party had to leave the coffin with one end pointing at the black sky as gravediggers discussed the logistics of burying a man too long for his family crypt.

  Clouds towered and burnt in the sunset. Fourpeaks was a lighthouse with the white sun behind it. Daniel Coupar bounced through the ribbons of shadows, saw birds settling to roost, smelt the dry-grass smell of approaching night. Torn hulks of discarded tyres began to look like the sleeping forms of children at the roadside. Coupar’s necktie slapped his shoulders: pat-pat. In the deep tread of the tractor’s rear tyres, the pulped bodies of twenty-eights revolved and cast up an occasional gummy feather. At the Fourpeaks Roadhouse a dumbfounded Herb Hindle looked up from his bowser to see the Fordson trundle past with the unmistakeable form of Daniel Coupar in suit and tie poised over the wheel. Coupar waved. Hindle spilt petrol down the side of the black panel van which was full of groping, adolescent bodies.

  Daniel Coupar and his mother moved to Kindred, a hundred miles north of Angelus, where he tended horses and she cooked and cleaned for a miserly bachelor. His mother read to him at night when their employer had retired to his room. They shared long, warm silences. Coupar knew the sweet warmth of horse-dung and the benevolent chawing of horses and the gloss-backed beetles on the flags. Sometimes, when he forked hay and crap on winter mornings, hearing the nasal bark of his employer berating his mother in the distance, Coupar was overcome by both love and hate, unable to separate them. He missed the sea and the seasonal passing of the remnant of whales that marked the passage of time.

  There were nights when his mother spoke about his father in a way he had never known her to speak. ‘Your father,’ she said, ‘was a man too small for his ideas. He was a blamer: he blamed God, his tools, his friends, his family, his ancestry, for all his shortcomings. I think, deep down, he knew he was small. He envied other people, but he was too proud to treat them like superiors or even equals. Oh, pride! His pride got between him and God, between his fingers even. Made him think that . . . doing away with himself was something he had a right to do. Oh, my boy,’ she told him, looking grey and fragile in the lamplight, ‘he was a Coupar’s Coupar.’

  In 1922 Coupar’s mother died of pneumonia. On her deathbed she told him what a fine son he had been to her, and he was greatly affected. Till then he had not doubted he was anything less, but his mother’s last words stung him with doubt. A week later he was dismissed. He returned soon after in the still of night to empty a bag of horse manure into the old man’s watertank.

  Coupar spent months idling about the main street of Kindred until he began work as offsider to Shit-Tin Bill, the night-cart man. Shit-Tin Bill had a dark, ugly, eaten face; his racial heritage was uncertain. He had white hair, and blotchy yellowish-brown skin, and a mystical status in the town. He was never spoken to and neither was he badly spoken to. His old mare Lilac farted in time with her roll-lopping gait as he led Daniel Coupar down the back lanes at dusk. Coupar spent his first Christmas as an orphan taking the pieces of fruitcake from toilet seats, drinking port in the first light of dawn with big, black-green blowflies nesting in his eyebrows.

  ‘If they have to shit on me,’ Bill told him as they trundled down a potted lane with the sun steaming dew from the ground, ‘I ask ’em to do it in winter when there’s less flies and a fresh turd’ll keep me warm.’ Coupar laughed and punched his newfound friend who stank always of ammonia, knowing that he meant every word. ‘I am the least and the most,’ Bill said, cuffing the wide shoulders of his apprentice. ‘They know it, I know, and the Lord knows it, boy.’

  It was then, with the tins snattering and chattering, and Lilac clop-fart, clop-farting along that lane between the sagging iron fences and the ivy-thick outhouses, that Coupar vowed never to leave Shit-Tin Bill and Kindred.

  When he reached the Hacker River bridge it was almost dark and he saw the silhouettes of pelicans floating down in the twilight. Along the banks he saw the fallen hippy-houses in which old farmers without land had begun to squat. The bridge rumbled. He smelt the reedy odour of the estuary farther downstream and noticed across the bridge, on the Angelus side of the river, how lush the land was. In a yellowish, smudgy cluster, the lights of the Hacker Arms approached and fell behind. Coupar, buttock-sore and red-eyed, inhaled the sweetness from the wet earth and felt his dread retract a little within him. Farther along the road, passing small dairy farms on the outer perimeter of Angelus, he realised that he was speaking aloud, rehearsing lines.

  Daniel Coupar left Kindred and Shit-Tin Bill without a word and without hesitation. The last of the Misses Coupar died in 1924, bequeathing the old habourside house built by Nathaniel Coupar to her only nephew and relative. Not once since Martin Coupar’s embarrassing death had any of his sisters communicated with their next of kin. Martin Coupar’s wife was a proud woman. She did nothing to break the silence. Daniel had forgotten his aunts existed until the message came. He arrived in Angelus with the chest of things his mother had left him, a hat and an old broken-down gelding.

  In the next six years Coupar worked on roads and boats, on the wharf, at the whaling station, on trucks and trains. He found that he spent little of his money, having no rent to pay and no interest in gambling, and he soon had a generous wad of money in the biscuit tin he kept in his wardrobe. He spent evenings in the Bright Star and the Black and White listening to the whalers and the fishermen talk.

  One Saturday afternoon, resting in the shade outside the old Presbyterian church he met a white-bearded, wiry old man who offered him his tobacco pouch and papers and said, lighting his own, ‘There’s no kindness in this world any more, son.’ It was only after the old man left, striding up Goormwood Street, that Coupar recognised him as Anderson Pell, the father of Billy Pell. The old man was dead the next year and Coupar went to the funeral. There he saw the hulking form of William Pell who already looked twice his twenty years. It was the first time they had met in ten years. ‘People only catch up with one another at funerals, in this town,’ Pell said composedly. They spoke for some time. Coupar felt an exuberance in Pell that seemed unnatural; he suspected it was part of grief.

  Oftentimes Daniel Coupar fished in the harbour from an old clinker-built punt. One morning he rowed out into the Sound, past the heads, to fish for sharks. He caught nothing and was capsized by a rogue swell. In a state akin to hysteria or religious ecstacy he swam the mile to shore – I am the least and the most . . . they know it, I know it, and the Lord knows it, boy . . . I am the least and the most – and came floundering into the shallows of Middle Beach, full of seawater and a curious light.

  That year Benjamin Pustling found his way to Angelus. Coupar found that men he had spoken to in pubs, women he had bantered with outside the church, began to come to his door at night. As the Depression deepened and people became more desperate and the Pustlings prospered, he discovered that he had more money than most, fewer liabilit
ies and less fear. People twice his age came to him for advice. He told them what he thought. In time they had a leader. During that time he married. Townspeople were forced to sell their land to the Pustlings and to become tenants of and debtors to them. Coupar organised against the Pustlings during the winter of 1932 and heroic and dramatic events occurred. But when Pustling gained control of church and civic leaders, bought the influence of newspapers as far away as the city, Angelus became a quiet town again. Coupar was suddenly alone, and he hid himself in the house by the harbour. He retreated from his newly wed wife, from that immanent light he had known, and for years his isolation remained complete.

  It was the summer of 1931 when Coupar met his bride. As he rowed wearily up the Hacker River with the brown light of sunset falling at his feet and the long shaggy arms of the paperbarks reaching at him from either bank, he peaked his oars and rested to catch his breath a moment. The boat was heavy, loaded with food parcels for families upriver. He was startled by a heavy swash near the left bank. He looked over but saw nothing but the hypnotic circles widening on the surface. Then he distinguished a shape in the coppery water moving towards him. Platypus? Crocodile? Neither belonged in the Hacker. He slipped an oar from its rowlock and waited with it raised. When the surface broke just near the gunwhale he gasped: a human, a woman, a girl. Tossing her hair back she blew a jet of air and smiled. Coupar did not smile; he was too shocked.

  ‘You should come in for a dip,’ she said, treading water with wide, white movements that flashed in the tea-coloured water.

  ‘I’m busy.’ He waved an arm at the boxes in the boat. But it was well after dark before Daniel Coupar resumed his rowing. He sat with her beside the rickety little jetty amidst the faint screams of the mosquitoes and listened to her talk; he did not listen to what she said, only the wandering register of her voice. He smelt the warm, algal breeze, heard the lap-lap of water and the soughing of the paperbarks. They shared a bag of sugar from Coupar’s boat, like two greedy children, and when they vomited it back up, they nursed each other and saw each other’s face in the milk of the rising moon and became quiet. Six months afterwards Daniel Coupar and Maureen Bolt were married in the church in Angelus.

  Nathaniel Coupar’s journals attracted him in the late 1930s. He was reading them in 1939 when, on the eve of a distant war and the birth of his only daughter, Coupar got drunk and rode through and through Angelus on his BSA until he capsized in full sail. As he floated across the new macadamed surface of the road, he had a distinct notion of hovering over darkness which lasted a second or two before he came to rest in a hedge of lantana. Mistaking the Salvation Army hall for a first-aid post, he staggered in, bruised and bloody, and prostrated himself. In the unfocused distance a first-aid man bellowed about Jesus Christ walking upon the water. Coupar, who had seen flies walking on the skin of water, who had only recently experienced a similar sensation hovering above the black road, was unconvinced by the man; he was filled with contempt and a great nostalgia and he passed out.

  Later that year the old Coupar land at Wirrup came up for auction. Daniel Coupar went, drunk and reckless, to throw bids at the auctioneer, to goad him. When his bids were untopped he found himself the owner of his father’s farm.

  The tasks of the farm helped Coupar in his retreat. His wife was kept busy with their child and the domestic chores; she waited patiently for him to mend, to reemerge from himself. The child, Eileen, was of little interest to him. She was not a friendly child, and as she grew from child to young woman she spent less and less time at Wirrup. During one visit home in 1956 she gave birth to a daughter, and within weeks she was gone again and never returned. The Coupars called the girl Queenie, and not even Daniel Coupar could resist her. From the moment she was born, it was constant work for him to remain in isolation.

  The Fordson roared and bounced through the lit, rainslicked streets of Angelus. Daniel Coupar took the chill wind on his face and breathed the briny smell of the harbour. Squat houses came and went, windows blue with television. He rolled down Goormwood Street past the memorial, past the Wildflower Cafe and its glossy, parked motorcycles, past bakery, church, florist, the pubs with their ooze of light and noise. His body felt petrified as a root. Turning up towards the old house by the harbour, he felt a disappointment rising in him: Angelus had not changed since last year.

  Cleve’s Land Rover was in the driveway when he pulled in and doused the sharp stutter of the diesel, but there were no lights on in the house and he knew at once that he had failed. He got down gingerly and felt pain in his feet. He did not bother knocking on the front door, but went round to the back, catching in the corner of his vision the image of Miss Thrim’s face between the lace curtains next door. By the back door there were the pungent fragrances of mint and parsley and thyme, and the sweet smell of hanging baskets brimming with flowers. He knelt and felt under the step and found the key.

  Inside, the house had the odour of bacon fat and dust, an unaired closeness. Coupar switched a light on. The kitchen was strewn with newspapers and dead matches, flakes of wood-ash and plates pigmented with grease. On the jarrah table there were beer bottles, books – Angelus: a short history, Whaler’s Haven: Angelus 1820–1899, Whalemen Adventurers, Typee, Gardener’s Almanac – and blunt pencils. The living-room was strewn with cushions and beanbags, the big fireplace cold and black. Coupar negotiated the narrow, steep stairs cautiously, noting the old creaks at the third and seventh stairs. The hand-smoothed banister was solid and familiar to the touch.

  In the spare room there was piled junk: stringless tennis racquets, a folded tent, picture frames, spare mattress, a kite. Coupar was pleased to see the old tapestry of the wind-torn clipper still above the bed in the main room. The sheets on the bed were grey and wrung. Coupar moved about the room, found Cleve’s clothes in the wardrobe, but not Queenie’s. The empty end smelt of her. Then he sat for a while, immobilised for a moment by a fork of concentration. He looked out through the big window with its curtains aside and askew to the blue wharf lights and the mild blemishes around the harbour. He got up, turned the light out, sat back on the bed.

  ‘Oh, Queenie,’ he whispered, ‘what are you doing?’

  In the mottled dark of the bedroom Coupar saw his hands nested together in his lap; they were his father’s hands, probably his grandfather’s. At times they seemed separate from him, motivated by another will. There were nights when his hands and arms lost circulation and feeling and he woke, conscious of reptilian things resting on his chest, near his throat; he slid from beneath them, let them fall aside like butchered cuts of meat.

  Coupar tried to rein in his thoughts, slow them down long enough to organise and deliver them: they passed him in blurs, the things he wanted to tell Queenie Coupar; they left him breathless and panicky. He wanted to tell her of the pride of the Coupars, their piety, the bloodshed and suicide and disappointment, and he wanted to confess things, but he rambled and confused himself and his stomach clenched in his frustration.

  ‘I was going to write,’ he said aloud, ‘but the Coupars always write the important things and never say them: it comes from passing too many notes in drawing-rooms and classrooms and churches. So I came to tell you things, Queenie, and bugger me if you’re not here. Where the hell are you? God damn you, girl, you should be here!

  ‘Ah, I’m a stranger here. This house, this town, this bloody body. But we all are, your pisswit husband included, poor lad. Aliens. Sometimes I think the Abos thought they didn’t belong, sometimes, pining for their dreams. Damn you, I’ve come a long, long way and you should be listening. Something’s going to happen, I can feel it right up my arse. Head feels like a rotten pigmelon, just black seeds, dust, stink. Feel odd.

  ‘Inheritance, Queenie, it’s a bugger. Everything done before you by your ancestors, the bad, bad things, even, benefits you and you want to pretend it isn’t true. Sometimes I can feel bones underfoot. Dust is like dried blood. People were driven off land, shot and beaten, and now we have land, we h
ave Angelus – roads, cars, houses, parks, beaches – and there’s nothing we can do about it. In dreams I go back into the past – it’s like a well – and change it all back around, make the past right again and then I wake up and I don’t exist any more. My father horsewhipped a man for wanting to walk on his old land again. I saw it, and what am I to do? Yes, I’m ashamed of my father; I’m ashamed of Adam, damn him, but at least Adam lived out his days like a man.

  ‘You have to inherit lots, Queenie, and I don’t want you to. You’re the last real Coupar. Funny how it ends up being a woman. A woman. To be a Coupar and a woman has never been much of a life, you know. The Coupars treated their women poorly, like packhorses. Your grandmother, too; I treated her like a packhorse and worse. She carried me and the farm, the house, you. Still she had to carry herself and her disappointment. And she didn’t even get to see you become a woman. She was a wonderful bitch. Remember the time you came off the school bus trying to hide your mess, your blood? You think I didn’t know? Oh, I wanted to laugh and hug you and even rub my nose in it to show it didn’t matter, but we both acted like Coupars and never said a word. I bet those other kids gave you shit. Wished I was a woman, meself, that day. Maybe if I was a woman it would’ve been easier for you – maybe if I was a better man. And your grandmother didn’t see the day. She died and there was only me and you.