Shallows

by Tim Winton

  At Teal Beach the Cooksons set up camp away from the cleared paddock the Angelus Shire had called a caravan park, and waited in strained silence for signs of the whales. They lit a covert fire and cooked and ate without speaking and, without discussing the idea, they went walking. They went down the gravel track, passing unlit squatters’ shacks with their fallen, rotted water-tanks and boarded windows, and past the long, warped rails where the salmon fishermen hung their nets, down a grassy trail to the hard, flat sand of the beach. An ivory moon hung over the blank sea. They walked for an hour, earnestly, as though there were a destination ahead. On the return lap they recognised the sounds of the humpbacks, the slaps of vast bodies against water, and they whistled and hooted, cavorting in the moonlight like excited children.

  IX

  The same night, Daniel Coupar slept for an hour and woke, damp as usual. For the first time in a long time he went down across the thin, hard ground, through the baked flats of the swamp where kangaroos had been felled with musket balls, and made his unsteady way down the lightening sand track to the beach. Dunes crouched luminous, shoulder to shoulder. He moved off the rutted track between them.

  Harder than he remembered, the sand squealed beneath his boots as he scuffed along it holding a thin curl of paper in his fist. He moved towards a place he had not visited since he was a young man. It was at the end of the beach behind a thick nest of vegetation in the lee of the headland and he watched for it in the stark monochrome of night. His moonshadow skimmed beside him. Although he was hard-set with resolve, navigating himself by the lumpy shadow of the headland, he found time between his old man’s breaths to be wistful.

  He thought of his granddaughter; he wished he could see her again. He felt strong things about her. He wished with the fervour of a man in his last momentum that he could somehow inject his granddaughter with some tonic, some drug that would make her see. She was strong and mostly honest and capable of good, he thought, but foolish. He wished he could breathe into her all his years, his knowledge, the things he had touched and smelt and heard and seen and tasted and truly sensed, wished that his experience would be hers, prayed that some measure of understanding might seize her and save her from his own confusion. God, I’d take her pain, her life’s pain upon myself, her confusion even, if only you’d give her understanding now. I could suffer anything for that and die without waste and tragedy. I’d be nothing. Less. For that.

  But near the end of the beach and close to his destination he realised the meanness of his offer. It would be an easy sacrifice, he knew, to die for someone now, to suffer a little in the short time left. There were more costly sacrifices he would never consider. No, he thought, Queenie will suffer as all of us do. She will suffer herself. And I’m no use to her.

  Old Daniel Coupar had some difficulty with the undergrowth and debris that protected the cleft in the rock to which he finally fought his way. With some fear, he let his body into the crack and felt his way in. The cave resounded with distant trickles and the skitterings of crabs in the sand. A flurry of wings swept his face, startling him. Bats! he thought, before recognising the flitting sounds of swallows taking shelter in the safer dark outside. Movement became difficult for him. As a boy he had manoeuvred well in this dark, but he had forgotten the terrain. He crawled for a few yards, paper in his fist, and put his back to the wall as his grandfather had done before him, and he lit a match to find fuel, ignoring the white silhouettes opposite. Gathering old kelp and tumbleweed and fingery dried twigs and splinters of driftwood, he scuffed them into a graduated mound and set fire to them. In the improved light, Coupar found two thickish pieces of old wood and kept them at his side until the flames were ripe. He had done this on the beach and in caves many times as a boy, and now it heartened him, the deliberate, purposeful procedure.

  Then with a sigh he unrolled the paper he had carried and crumpled with him. And by the unsteady light of the fire he read.

  August 30th, 1875 All my life I have laboured and tilled and kept myself upright before God. I have shown courage and dutiful conviction. Yet God has cursed me unjustly with a fool for a son and daughters who waste away my savings in town living. In addition I have a plague of blacks who persist in returning and being driven off like locusts from the land for which I have laboured, fought and suffered, and my body has grown old too soon, a disgrace to its Maker.

  Oh, my son Martin will cause grief, I see it now. I will bear no more grief from him.

  September 1st Had I eaten the flesh of other men in an unholy Communion, had I raped native women and mutilated them, raped men of my own kind, tortured, enslaved, cheated, besotted myself with drink – then would I be unworthy.

  Where is my Blessing?

  Today I cease from work.

  10th My family have left. Forsaken me. Am I unclean? Where is respect? If I am cursed, then let them be too. Angelus, the barren. Let them go there.

  Eli, Eli lama sabachthani? I have done nothing wrong, and what others do is their own sin, their own salvation, their damnation.

  September 12th I too am angry enough to die. Will I ever be spat from this great void?

  No work.

  I have been deceived. God has deceived me. I have deceived myself. God is nothing, worse than evil.

  19th Pieces breaking in my head this morning. Smash these very ideas smash this very God and other. Sometimes in the cool of the evening I hear noises and I call out Abba but no one is there. But I call out. Had that dream again last night. I was resting under a tree and I looked up and saw a piece of food falling and I opened my mouth in shock or to receive it and it caught between my teeth, between your teeth yes. Then with great weight it forced itself down my throat and my belly bloated and I burst and sat with my guts in my lap and woke hungry.

  I spit in the face. Adam and his slut.

  20th Remember when you were twenty, Nathaniel the prophet Coupar? Had God the power to judge you innocent He would have done so. Save yourself. Save yourself. I shall. No, I shall.

  Daniel Coupar lay the pages flat on the flames, watching the brown heart burgeon until it was fire. Oh, you poor miserable sick bastard, he thought. And when I was a younger man I came near to believing you. Pride let me. But never again. The Father of Lights withholds the rain because of our pride. Our pride must finish. But pride waits until all else has withered.

  The vertebra of a right whale stood end-on against the wall opposite, grey-white, veined with corrosion, big as a mill-end. Whisks of baleen lay next to the vertebra and sections of jaw stood against the granite. Coupar sifted the shell-grit through his hands and fixed his gaze on the sheep skulls that lay together on their sides, sockets aimed at him. He had brought these relics into the cave in his childhood. The cave was once a hideout. This was the cave his grandfather came to for solitude when he was a whaler, the cave where Nathaniel Coupar had found the body of Bale the lunatic. And this was the place wherein Nathaniel Coupar, in old age, had shot himself. As an adult, Daniel had stayed clear of here.

  Another frame, the tiny skeleton of a swallow, was visible on the sand. He could have popped the skull into his mouth like a gravelstone. He moved over and touched it and it became dust. Then he picked up a sheep’s skull with trembling fingers and looked into its cavities.

  ‘Here’s your bloody Blessing, Nathaniel Coupar. To know that I beg mercy for you and for me and ours. Why is it so hard to love? To be loved? To fulfil the law?’ He felt a great weeping shout well up in him. ‘I came here to lie with the bones of my fathers like the men of old. Seems so bloody ludicrous now. Bones arise! Makes you laugh.’

  Then the shout burst from him, a great guffaw, and he felt his stomach unknot. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m not dying here with you poor buggers.’

  Still laughing, he groped his way out of the waning light of the cave and into the fresh darkness of the night outside, carrying his old frame up the beach.

  He collapsed at the bore with the insistent cries of animals in his ears.

/>   X

  Late in the morning Cleve and Queenie slithered out along the gravel of the Teal Beach road towards the highway, weaving between the lumpy carcasses of birds and rabbits and kangaroos. On the sealed road neither spoke, leaning into the curves. The engine lulled them into a trance, a dull fixity of purpose. Cleve sat at the wheel counting the carcasses as he had done when a boy. Queenie concentrated on the blur of the road just under her nose, thousands of tarred stones becoming one ribbon of grey. Flog a dog! she recalled bus rides, the winding trip home after school, and the showers of boys’ spit raining into her lap from behind. Queenie Coupar, Queenie Coupar, swim!

  The turn-off sign for Wirrup was visible for miles on the flat stretch of tinder plain. The Land Rover slipped back onto gravel. Dead land rushed past unseen.

  Before reaching Coupar land at Wirrup, they left the road, opened gates and cut across neighbours’ land to get more quickly to the beach. Queenie directed Cleve through farms, across the wasteland of paddocks, to a track that wound down the hill to the bay.

  There was no sign of the whales out on the water. The Cooksons drove along the beach, churning through soft sections of sand until they were directly below Coupar land which began at the high-water mark.

  ‘Do you think we should go up and see the old man first?’ Cleve asked as they sat waiting.

  ‘Yes. Later. I don’t want to miss anything. They might come while we’re gone and they could move on and we’ll lose them,’ Queenie said.

  Cleve shrugged and she gave him a tense smile.

  At noon they still waited, but there were no whales. As the afternoon wore on they dozed in the Land Rover, exhausted by tension and expectation. When they became hungry they ate apples and sultanas and peanuts from paper bags, and drank from a warm carton of orange juice. Outside, the air was shifting, unsettled. ‘We should at least say hello,’ he murmured.

  ‘Later,’ she said.

  Miles back along the coast, bulls and cows, tired from the months of mating and chasing and nursing, keep a steady, unhurried pace. The cows are hungry with bodies within them to be fed in the cold waters of the south. Nothing deviates them from their hunger.

  Daniel Coupar woke at the bore, still damp with the sudden dew of the night. He shivered inside his clothes. The afternoon sun was obscured by clouds and did not warm him. His sleep had been clean and dreamless and now he woke to his nightmare. The animal noises returned to him, the weak bleating of the sheep, dry-throated lowings of the surviving stock. Turning onto his side he saw grey huddles, piles, pools of starved animals. Sheep lay quivering, twitching their abysmal mouths. Daniel Coupar saw feeble lambs beside scabby carcasses and whispered, ‘My God.’

  He stood unsolidly and made steps to the nearest live sheep which lay flat on its side like a tanned rug. He took the emaciated frame in his arms and felt it slip into sections like a thin bag of dirt, and he shook it, but the sheep only opened its mouth at him revealing its wizened throat, so he lay the thing back in its own imprint in the colourless dust; the knocking in its chest stopped. Then Daniel Coupar saw the paddock writhing; it writhed with the heads of stricken animals.

  ‘Oh God.’ He wanted to crawl between the legs of his mother and butt his way back into the darkness again. He turned his head, taking in the scene. A steer had fallen on its side with its head near the bore and its weight had dragged it forwards, too weak to move, down the steep little bank until its head was slowly submerged. Coupar’s legs moved; he willed himself up towards the house, knowing that there was still some gruelling effort ahead as he stared at the shamefully bald earth and felt his breath rattle in him.

  At the house he found the big knife he and his father had slaughtered with. The weight of the knife disfigured Coupar; his right side sagged with it.

  All afternoon Daniel Coupar moved amongst his neglected animals with the knife, disconnecting withered throats. He visited each immobile huddle with darkened hands. A black-eyed lamb touched his forearm with its tongue. He was amazed that such bodies still had blood to offer.

  Near dusk he lay by the bore again and slept. The water was still and full of bodies. He rested his head on his bloody arm and slept with something moving in his near-vacant body.

  Coupar slept the sleep of a man no longer in need of dreams. He woke well into the night, smelling rain. He licked the unearthly dew from his lips, dropped the knife he had clutched all night into the body-bog of the bore and picked his way in the luminous dark to the foot of the hill. Fuelled by anticipation, he made his way up.

  At dusk the Cooksons had pitched their tent on the beach and crawled inside. They listened without moving and heard the excitement of each other’s digestive systems and the clip of lips shifting. It was humid inside the tent and so different from the freezing nights before; after two hours they became restless and dressed and went outside again. The sky was starless and hot with cloud. It felt low enough to scoop down with uplifted hands. They walked to the shore where the rising swell was thundering down with the force of falling cliffs. Foam lifted like blanched mountains rearing in the night. Every minute it grew; every lumbering breaker seemed bigger. Cleve felt a drop of rain on his arm and they returned to the tent.

  ‘What the hell are we expecting?’ Cleve asked the fabric above him as he lay on his back.

  ‘Who knows,’ Queenie murmured.

  ‘My God what a swell.’

  A raindrop thudded on the fabric.

  Utterly spent by the climb, Daniel Coupar lay on his back on the flat top of the hill and stared up into the night. For a moment he was consumed with a longing to see Queenie, but he knew his body was finished and he found himself speaking in low tones to those he had loved and betrayed, as though he was near them. His hands lay on the rock, washed clean of blood from the sweat and abrasion of climbing. He would have raised them had they obeyed him. Just an old gesture, he thought to himself.

  Rain began to fall, drops bursting on his brow and cheeks, hitting the rocks hard enough to make sparks.

  Labouring in the midst of the storm that sweeps towards the coast gathering force as it comes, the pod of humpbacks moves in closer to the coast, shunted by the wind, barrelled along by the swell, sensing the outer frontiers of the shallows.

  Daniel Coupar was buoyant, no longer supporting his own weight. He heard the thickest mass of rain coming, hissing on the water. His mouth was open – he needed it so to breathe – and he felt heavy drops hit the back of his throat and roll into him. Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me, he thought. Then rain fell without bounds as the sky fell in. Daniel Coupar heard the cries of the whales piercing the deluge impossibly. The pips and clicks twitched in his ears and he knew the whales were back and another season had finished; and then he was skimming in flight over dark like bitumen blackness and swimming and swimming and swimming strongly without fear. Light, immanent, white, speared about him and he counted as his mother had taught him, to judge the distance between light and thunder, and he felt the water at the back of his throat and himself filling and his breath bubbled as he moved with the thunderless light. As he ceased counting, the hill shuddered with a report that shook the birds from their trees and out into the deluge, and the sea flinched.

  Daniel Coupar lay shrouded in water.

  The whales press on despite the narrowness and the sharp, too-quick return of their cries from the bottom. A ripple of panic and dread moves through them. They continue.

  Over the smacking rain, Cleve and Queenie Cookson heard the cries of the whales and were suddenly awake. They lay still for some time, paralysed by joy and disbelief, hearing the sounds come closer every moment as though nearly with them.

  ‘They’ve come,’ Queenie whispered.

  ‘Yes.’ Cleve hugged her.

  Rapid scalar movements, changes of tone, sounds of unmistakeable emotion came to them, and the Cooksons dressed and rushed outside with a torch and ran down the wet sand in the rain and shone
the torch and saw the huge, stricken bodies lurching in the shallows. Queenie screamed. Surf thundered and the night was images in torch beams. Masses of flesh and barnacles covered the sand, creeping up, floundering, suffocating under their own weight. A pink vapour from spiracles descended upon Cleve and Queenie Cookson as they moved between the heaving monuments.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tim Winton has published twenty-one books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-five languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian/Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath) and twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.

  ALSO BY TIM WINTON

  Novels

  An Open Swimmer

  That Eye, the Sky

  In the Winter Dark

  Cloudstreet

  The Riders

  Dirt Music

  Breath

  Stories

  Scission

  Minimum of Two

  The Turning

  For younger readers

  Jesse

  Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo

  The Bugalugs Bum Thief

  Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster

  Lockie Leonard, Legend

  Blueback

  The Deep

  Non-fiction

  Land’s Edge

  Down to Earth (with Richard Woldendorp)

  Smalltown (with Martin Mischkulnig)

  Plays

  Rising Water

  Signs of Life

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

  707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia