Shallows

by Tim Winton

And then, before it rained, a faint rainbow appeared over the Sound. Queenie began to laugh. ‘Aah,’ the crowd murmured. Yes, she thought, yes!

  III

  Cleve Cookson was given his dismissal that morning over the telephone. Haggard and hungover, he drove down to the town jetty, seeing as he left the glance Miss Thrim cast at him, and he returned her stare as one would return a baited dog to its owner. He saw, too, the ugly stubble and greyness of his face and winced. Last night was a nightmare now, just a part of his drilling headache. He had been hours late for work, drunk, delirious; he had wept. An empty beer bottle rolled about under the clutch pedal as he drove downtown. The harbour was flat, gleaming, becoming still as the southerly died.

  He parked in the gravel patch at the end of the town jetty. Already he had heard of yesterday’s catch, but he had not seen for himself. He walked out slowly, carefully, because of his head and his fatigue, and as he went he was seized with a sudden fear of falling through between the planks. He slowed, made each step with the utmost precision.

  At the end of the jetty he joined the small congregation around the towering carcass whose sharp, ammoniac smell made him even more light-headed. A fourteen-foot white pointer hung by its tail from the gallows. Its skin was dry and tearing where the chains held it. The huge guts had fallen forward, bunching grotesquely behind the head, and weepy juices drolled from the mouth. There was little of the shark about it: it looked to Cleve more like a gigantic leather trunk full of stinking wet laundry. Organs even protruded from the mouth, forced down by their own weight. On the grey flank the catch weight was written in chalk: 1,993 lbs. Its girth was the equivalent of a middle-aged jarrah tree; two men could not have locked arms around it. Beside the shark Ted Baer, tired and hungover himself, posed for photographs for the steady procession of townspeople. Someone dragged a hose across and played it about over the planks near the open mouth. Cleve sighed and was about to leave when Ted Baer caught his eye and beckoned him over. Cleve hesitated. He felt others watching him, even heard the startled blood ticking in his ears. He went closer.

  ‘Not bad, eh?’ Baer said, smacking the emery flank with gloved hands. ‘Not a record, but a nice fight. Forty minutes he was.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cleve said. Tell him it’s bloody disgraceful, he thought; tell him what you think of hanging it up like that going out of shape, stinking like a . . . ‘Nice.’

  ‘Shoulda been there, mate.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cleve said. Like hell, he thought.

  ‘What about comin’ out next time? See how broad yer skills are, eh?’

  ‘Well —’ My God, what’s the point of it, Cleve thought, where’s the sense in it?

  ‘You can sell what you catch.’

  How? How? When you let it go rotten like this? ‘Well, I’ve got sort of business commitments this week,’ Cleve mumbled.

  ‘Today’s Monday,’ Baer said. ‘There’s all week.’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Baer laughed, with an eye on the gathering. ‘Second thoughts. Woman’s prerogative.’

  There was a nervous titter, and Cleve left, full to bursting with the smell and the anger of it. Slits of sea loomed up between his feet. You can piss off, mate, he thought, you and all your men’s shit.

  The long walk along the deepwater jetty did nothing to dispel his fear of falling between the planks. The water was twice as far down and twice as deep; the journey out seemed like an endless crossing of precipices. A great rust-scaly tanker shouldered the last section of the jetty beyond the security hut. Across the harbour cars wended their way out along the peninsula. He felt nothing but contempt for Ted Baer and his sack of soiled meat.

  Cleve’s humiliation on the town jetty receded in the pride he took in walking away. Best thing I’ve done in a long time, he thought. He thought it odd that he could not remember the last time he had done something well, something good for himself or for someone else. His life seemed such a ludicrous jumble of non-events, memories with great troughs of blankness between. Most of his memories seemed to be disappointments. To distract himself from his fear, he sifted through them for moments of joy, fragments of pride to value, to cherish. Before he reached the watchman’s shed he had those moments in the palm of his mind. They were moments worth living for, he knew, and he also knew that they couldn’t be repeated, though perhaps, in kind, they might in some way be revisited. It’s her, he thought, there’s just her. And her grandfather, the old bastard, much as I hate him. Cleve knew then how much he wanted to be wanted by them. He felt like nothing.

  A cardboard box of books and pencils, a rolled poster and a pair of seaboots stood outside the door of the watchman’s hut. Cleve hesitated at the door and decided not to knock; instead he took the box under his arm and went down to the lower landing to where Dick and Darcy fished.

  ‘Fishin’?’ Dick asked, without turning.

  ‘No,’ Cleve said, sitting. He watched their boots dangling over the edge. Look at them, he thought, they heard it all last night, they know what’s up – somehow they always know what’s up.

  ‘Wanna guzz?’ Darcy offered his bottle, but Cleve shook his head.

  A storm in every port, he thought wryly. He sensed them watching his box and he looked at the slate water, thinking. ‘Either of you want these boots?’ he asked, pulling them out and holding them up. He couldn’t think how he came to have them; they had always been in the hut and he had never worn them.

  The old men shook their heads. Neither did they want the paperbacks or his poster of John Lennon.

  ‘Shouldn’t be wastin’ yer time here,’ Dick said, looking at his jiggling line in the water. ‘I hear there’s another barney on out at Paris Bay. And that granddaughter o’ Daniel Coupar’s was in town this mornin’.’

  ‘What?’ Cleve almost shrieked.

  ‘But I’m just an ol’ bludger,’ Dick murmured. ‘Could be jus’ another rumour.’

  Cleve leapt up the steps and left them chuckling. Water blurred beneath his feet as he ran down the jetty.

  Other cars seemed to be idling along in the same direction, unusual for a Monday, and he overtook them on the winding road around the harbour and along the peninsula.

  From the hill above Paris Bay, with his engine ticking, Cleve saw the crowd below outside the compound of the whaling station waving placards and cameras and fists and inflated toys. Cars and black motorcycles were parked all over; a minibus, roof thick with young spectators. A man stood on the bonnet of a car, denim arms waving at the inattentive crowd. An inflatable boat sliced through the red field of water at the base of the flensing deck where the open guts of a sperm whale beaconed in his vision and a great murmur went up from the mob. Steam oozed up from the chimneys, rolling in the breeze like smoke from cannons. He heard singing. He scanned the crowd again painstakingly and he saw a bulbous head of hair beside which he saw the blonde colour that burned into his senses, into his stomach; the recognition quickened his heart.

  Driving back with the image of Queenie Coupar’s aureate hair sharp before him, Cleve knew he was afraid. But it was another kind of fear. A persistent prism, a tiny rainbow glowed in his side mirror. A hard and dark rain fell as he reached Angelus.

  IV

  Even turning the blotchy pages is an effort. Pell reads the occasional column of interest, resting his eyes frequently; he is tired and today, again, he feels like an old man. In the lane next door he can hear the thud of a football as boys play in the rain. Gutters gurgle and grottle and moisture creeps down the windows. And Pell sees his own name in a lonely column between advertisements for pantyhose and harvesters.

  Another citizen retiring from service this week is the Rev. William Pell, a familiar face to all in Angelus whose work in the Presbyterian church here has spanned several decades. Mr Pell (68) will preach his last sermon this coming Sunday 26th June and his ministry will terminate officially on 1st July. Mr Pell has been active in pastoral concerns throughout the community and in the native community for many years a
nd the Advocate wishes him well in his retirement.

  ‘I’ll bet you do, boys,’ he says, turning the page.

  Pell feels nerves springing in his arms and legs as he lights a cigarette and throws the newspaper aside. He remembers yesterday’s service, the hymns, the long, long delivery of his sermon, and Des Pustling down there in the congregation smiling, nodding. The bone colour of the walls were the same bone colour of Pell’s childhood and probably, he thought at the time, the same colour as the convicts made it those years ago. It occurred to him as he preached how little the old building meant to him. There were small memories like his initials in the pew up the back on the right dating back to 1914, and the pews under which he had, over the years, planted gobs of gum – they were still there, fossilised lumps – and the special pews from which he had glutted on the sight of the naked necks of girls and their mothers, pews on which in moments of meditation he’d overheard whispers of pregnancy and divorce and pledges of pubescent love. He even remembered, as he stood there, the time Mrs Bray, the late organist, took a fit mid-way through ‘Be Thou My Vision’, dentures a-rattle. And yet he knew as he preached, feeling himself outside of himself, that these were small, whimsical memories, and that the place he would truly hate to leave was the manse, the place where he hoarded his supplies, his memories, his prayers, his reserves of strength.

  He had seen astounding things under that roof, people healed and broken, people dead and some born. The manse was a place of doubts, and on occasion a place where people had held certainty between their teeth. Men, women, children had come to vent their doubts; they doubted themselves, the existence of God (others wondered whether He knew what he was doing), the existence of existence. Pell looked back on those times with nostalgia: it was a curious sensation to have while preaching from the pulpit. He knew the value of doubt, and he saw the lack of it in the faces of so many of his congregation as he spoke, the malevolent calm in the faces whose minds and spirits had gone warmly stagnant and grown a water-skin upon which his words were only insects dancing.

  Pell rubs his eyes between thumb and forefinger. Across the lawn over the gentle sound of the rain comes the brawling noise of the piano and the unified voice of the Ladies’ Guild in song. Why do they sing? he wonders. Why do they bother? They never do anything but practise and Lord knows the practice doesn’t seem to help. Monday noon and already they’re at it.

  Pell knows he has things to get on with, but he cannot move from his chair. Someone has towed the truck away in the night, and this morning he discovered the distributor cap missing from under the bonnet of his Wolseley. The thud of the football reverberates in the lane and he wonders why those boys aren’t in school. He wonders, too, about that feeling, yesterday, when it was as though he stood outside of himself. He had felt it when he shook hands at the door. It was as though he had been cut off, as though he was only partly present but still observing.

  Coupar said something about that feeling once, he thinks, or something like it. He said it was like a retirement of the spirit. And I thought he was just making excuses for himself, for his self-exile. Goodness, he was a younger man when he said that. And so was I. The other night – hell, it was weeks ago – that night near the Hacker he had that desperate pensioner’s look, as though he wanted to come out of retirement. But he looked helpless – half dead. It’s been a long retreat for him all these years. No, I don’t want that. Just because they give my job to someone else and I go on the pension doesn’t mean I retire. Never.

  He sits listlessly in his chair, wishing that Daniel Coupar could be here with him, that they could share a cold leg of lamb and a bottle of beer and a verbal wrangle. Idly, too, he wishes Daniel Coupar could once again shake this town by the ears, seize people’s imaginations and make them see and act; but he knows those days are gone for Angelus and even for Coupar. He remembers the days of the boys’ camps out at the old quarantine station before the wars, when the young Coupar had been a fiendish if sullen storyteller frightening the younger boys in their camp beds with tales his mother had read him from the Bible. Coupar rearranged details to his own purposes, a fault of his public addresses years later; but the stories were superb.

  I remember that one about Jonah – oh, there were a dozen variants – where Jonah is swallowed by the whale and in the whale he meets the Devil himself and the fight is on. It’s the violence of the fighting that makes the creature spew Jonah back up on the beach. A neat little ending with the Evil One dragged off into the deep, still a captive. I lay still as a lizard all through it. And the language of the fight! I’d never heard such filth in all my life – the things Satan said to Jonah and the words Jonah chucked back – and I’ve never heard them used so well since. I can’t think what the masters would have done to him if they’d heard. Ah, he was a wonderful liar, Pell thinks. Always used the truth when it suited him though. And I s’pose the truth always used him when it suited itself. Always whales with these Coupars. And Jonah’s a wretched vice with them.

  Wearily, he reaches across to the coffee table where one of his Bibles lies, and he drags it into his lap with a sigh.

  But God said to Jonah, ‘Do you do well to be angry for the plant?’ And he said, ‘I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.’ And the Lord said ‘You pity the plant, for which you did not labour, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hands from their left, and also much cattle?’

  He sighs. And he starts at the knock on the door. With a feat of will he rises to answer it. Miss Thrim stands on the veranda with a Pelaco shirt box in her hands and behind her, shifting from foot to foot, are several other members of the Ladies’ Guild cricking their knuckles like street fighters.

  ‘Mr Pell,’ she says, ‘these are some scones baked by us all as tokens of what you have meant to us over the years.’ She hands him the box and there is a shuffle of sensible soles and a low murmur of approval.

  ‘Well,’ he stammers, unable to look Miss Thrim in the eye, ‘I’m sure the Ladies’ Guild bakes scones as well as it sings.’

  ‘Flattery, Reverend.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ he mumbles.

  Umbrellas bloom. The Ladies move off the veranda into the rain, and Pell regrets that he has not asked them inside for tea or thanked them more effusively. He stands alone with Miss Thrim at the threshold. She clears her throat, a bird-sound.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Reverend,’ she confides, ‘It’s not over yet.’ Then she is gone, wrapped in a mac, across the lawn before Pell has time to answer. He watches her disappear into the rear of the church hall.

  Taking his Pelaco box of scones inside William Pell thinks: Good Lord, whatever does she mean? Old Thrim! As he sits back in his chair he pulls the greased paper aside and surveys the golden backs of the fresh-smelling scones. Looking across the room to where the cardboard box of notes and cheques and record books stands in the open near the dark timber of the bookshelf, he muses, Old Thrim? Old? Hell, she’s no older than me! And I can’t ever remember her being young. Wonder what she was like?

  He bites into a scone. Over the sound of the rain the singing resumes.

  V

  The paddocks shimmered at sunset. Daniel Coupar saw the ripples, their unrefreshing streams of movement, and he was not satisfied. Something hurt him deep in his chest; the open graze on his arm had hardened like the crust of a creekbed and flies sucked on it.

  Coupar had slept beneath the toppled tractor, that night almost a fortnight ago, until the barks of crows woke him in the dawn. Above him, full of dried crud, the great rear wheel shaded him from the first rays of sun. He smelt rubber and axle grease and diesel. The arm of his suit was torn away and he could see the grey flesh of his belly between the tears in his shirt. Somewhere, he could hear the aimless feet of sheep. From the almost perpendicular axle a snake of wire lolled, its barbed head turning
; slivers of wood were caught up in the tangle that stretched like a train behind the tractor, twisted and full of those small things it had netted in the journey across the paddock. To his surprise, Coupar found that he was able to drag himself out from under the hollow of the fallen tractor and into the open where he stood in stages, experimenting with back and limbs. With the taste of old vomit in his mouth he set out, stiff and bent with the pain in his belly and side and head and arm, for the house across the way with its black shawl of dead vines and its cluster of falling sheds and emaciated fowls.

  He spent that day in bed sleeping and waking to stare at the webs in the corners of the ceiling, observing the dark spots that were once spitballs – paper chewed to a pulp and catapulted with a steel rule – he had sent up on those dull afternoons when his father locked him in his room. Or were some of them Queenie’s? He wondered how many spitballs she had sent up to join his there. And his own daughter? The only sign of his daughter having ever existed in this place was that . . . thing he found behind the wardrobe, that sanitary pad, black and hard as a biscuit, wedged in and iced with tiny and delicate spiders’ webs.

  The next day, rested but still in pain, Coupar rose and went out to the nearest shed and seized a hen from her brood behind an old Coolgardie safe, feeling its awful lightness – what do they eat? he thought – as he took its horn feet and searched for the axe. It took him the whole day to kill and dress the hen; it hurt him to split wood and kindle the fire, and he scalded his hands in the boiling water. Feathers gummed themselves to him. The bird, when dressed, was small enough to hold in one hand. He basted it hastily and roasted it the way his wife had. He ate the old boiler in one sitting without accompaniment and took to bed again, nursing his pain and, soon enough, his indigestion.

  This past week Daniel Coupar had been sitting out on the veranda, eating an occasional boiled egg, noticing how little different it was to look out onto his own paddocks and know they were not his own, not his family’s. Makes no difference at all, he thought. It’s not that I miss. It’s that bloody Queenie. And her idiot.