Shallows

  To Denise, with love

  So close behind some promontory lie

  The huge leviathans to attend their prey,

  And give no chace, but swallow in the fry,

  Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way.

  Annus Mirabilis, Dryden

  those grim travellers in dawn skies

  see the beauty – makes them cry inside

  makes them angry and they don’t know why

  grim travellers in dawn skies

  ‘Grim Travellers’, Bruce Cockburn

  PROLOGUE

  Here – it is 1831 on the southernmost tip of the newest and oldest continent, the bottom of the world. In the wintery gauze of dawn, the American whaler Family of Man weighs anchor and leaves the harbour and its search for deserters. An hour later, the Governor of the British Colony of Angelus, a globular man with regally inflamed haemorrhoids, watches the races. Because horses are so precious in the colony, it is the men who race; first the enlisted men, and then the convicts. The enlisted men in their shirtsleeves laugh together in the wild stubble beside the Governor’s marquee. They have already raced and bloodied themselves, but their race is but a preliminary event, and with different rules. All eyes are on the shambling figures of two convicts who roll keg-sized stones up the flank of Mount Clement.

  The harbour is still as memory, the scrub vibrates, and the granite quarry gapes.

  At the foot of the hill the officers and enlisted men and the handful of free settlers cheer as the two convicts grovel up, each inching his great stone towards the peg on the brow of the hill. They toil, pray, push, and find themselves at the same moment at the peg where they let go their stones to race them downhill. Scrub slashes their shins as they career down, and behind them the stones grumble and accelerate and bounce at their heels. The small crowd barracks and bellows: the race is close, man with man, stone with stone, right until the moment Liam O’Gogram trips and falls and is mounted by his stone, leaving convict James Seed to finish amid a disappointed exchange of currency and a distracted avoidance of boulders.

  On the outskirts of the settlement, two infantrymen on patrol come upon the wasted hulk of a man on a sand-bar at the mouth of the river. His mad eyes unnerve the soldiers; they are eyes from another world. The man’s name is Nathaniel Coupar and his ordeal has left him barely alive, barely a man.

  Down on a shelly beach near the entrance to the harbour, a humpback whale lies where it has been jettisoned by the sea, rotting, caving in, rumbling in its decay, left alone by even the sharp-beaked gulls that hunt the lonely shallows for smelt and mullet.

  And now it is the year 1978 in Angelus, Western Australia.

  The town’s station wagons form a metal and glass perimeter around Angelus Oval. Two teams of men slog about in the turfy mud, upending one another, punching and kicking the soggy leather kernel from one end of the swampy ground to the other. The townspeople cheer and jeer from the waxed fenders of their Kingswoods.

  Behind the circle of cars, boys play in the muddy gravel, damming up the ochre water, and girls spatter their floral frocks in games of hopscotch, watched by the old woman with the shopping bags who leans on one leg – bun slipping from the side of her head like a cherry from the tip of a melting cupcake – a cathedral of noise in her ears.

  After the game, half the town is ushered into the belly of the rickety grandstand for celebrations. Des Pustling, patron of both teams, spits another tooth and sucks his bloodless gums as he signals for the spearing of the kegs. For an hour, this afternoon, black footballers and their families drink with the whites.

  In the evening, the pubs are full of talk. Old drinkers in the Royal Albert fling stories and froth and wisdom about; grey-suited men in the London talk through the crooks of their arms and scatter void betting slips. Businessmen in the Amity and the World shout with their heads low to the bar, and at the Black & White words and darts fly thudding into the walls. And down by the waterfront, as he waits for the whalemen to arrive, Hassa Staats, the Aryan publican of the Bright Star, pours watery beers for old men whose fathers drank here, and whose sons will drink here when they tire of youth. His anticipation is boyish, incongruous to his sixteen stone. He almost hops from foot to foot. On the floor, head resting in the sputum and ash of the foot-tray, Ernie Easton, Staats’s oldest customer, unable to remount his bucking stool, is dreaming of 1915.

  When at last the whalers descend upon the Bright Star Hassa Staats shouts beer on the house and friendly fights break out between crews, and bottles open scalps and spectators clap one another on the back, afraid not to laugh. Ernie Easton, in showers of beer and flying glass, tells himself stories of the sea and reminds himself of his pioneering ancestors in order to coax his eyelids to lift so he can watch. Hassa Staats is so happy.

  In the main street an old woman sleeps against the window display of the new Woolworths store.

  Off the main street, an old man writes his sermon for the morning, eyes stung to tears by the fumes from a kerosene heater.

  Those Aborigines strong and sober enough wander down from the Reserve, caught in the chiaroscuro of lightning, to sit outside the pubs and beg bottles of Brandovino from the white men who fall and fight on the footpaths. On a deserted golf links across town, their sons fight a rival group from out of town with crowbars and reticulation spikes.

  A young couple lie in bed. Their house overlooking the harbour from its perch on the side of Mount Clement has stood for generations. The man is thin and whip-haired; the woman is broadbacked with skin the colour of almond kernels. They have not been long married. Marriage has been a surprise for them. The woman is dreaming and not quite asleep. The man is awake and will be for hours. She stirs; she grips his arm, lets go, and settles.

  It is one hundred and forty-nine years since the day the Onan anchored in Angelus harbour. This town, scar between two scrubby hills, is not a big town, and it has few sustaining industries. But against all odds, all human sense, by some unknown grace, Angelus prevails.

  Angelus

  I

  In a bay east from the town of Angelus, cries resounded in the night. A tent stood silhouetted on moonlit sand and, beside it, the shape of a tractor. The interior of the tent was warmed by a gas lamp. A man and a woman lay naked on their bedding. The man read a musty journal, resting it on the woman’s buttocks. She listened to the lovemaking of the whales out in the bay, the sounds of her childhood. She quivered.

  ‘They haven’t been here since I was a little girl,’ she murmured.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The whales. They used to have a strange effect on me.’

  The man shook his long, thin hair from his eyes. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘When they were around at this time of year, I used to have this dream, over and over. I heard . . .’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It didn’t seem so odd, then. I was only a little girl. I heard the voice of God calling from down in the bay. I got up to the window to look. He was calling Poppa. Quite a patient voice. Daniel . . . Daniel. Poppa didn’t come out. After a while He stopped calling and from down in the bay came this thunderous splash and the whole farm shook and in the moonlight I saw this glistening, black . . . whale inching up towards the house. I screamed and fell back into bed and pulled the sheet over my face and there was thunder all of a sudden and heavy rain. When the storm was over I went to Poppa’s room and he was gone and the floor was wet and I was alone in the world. I went back to my bed and decided never to wake up. And that was when I woke up. Poppa would be there by my bed with the lamp and a glass of milk. It was God, I’d say. And he’d smile and say, “Yes, I know.”’

  ‘This happen every year?’ the man asked.

  ‘For a couple of years. Then one year the whales didn’t come.’

&
nbsp; The man sighed. ‘You Coupars!’

  ‘Poppa says the Coupars have always been fools.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Fools-elect, or something.’

  The man shrugged, closed his book, and turned out the light. He thought he heard the chafe and creak of rowlocks, but there were no boats about. The sound was the old men’s noise the peppermints made in the breeze.

  Out in the bay the black skins of right whales fresh from the southern ice glistened in the thickening moonlight, their breath settling vaporously on the water.

  In the cutting light of afternoon the man and woman walked along the surf-hazed beach to a deep sheltered pool in the lee of the headland. With masks and fins, they plunged in. As he watched her long legs scissoring the water ahead of him, it occurred to the man that his wife ought not to have been born a land mammal. Her lungs were fantastic; she was strong, lithe and quick in the water, and he was sometimes afraid of her. She torpedoed out of the haze to take him by the legs, shaking him as a shark shakes its prey. He saw bold, curious fish, and found their vulnerability attractive. But he could only observe: she forbade weapons in the water. He saw her big body as it went deep again, moving over paddocks of shells in the pellucid light below.

  On the beach she showed him the bright, sea-worn objects she had found, pausing to let him wring the brine from her hair. He bit her on the neck.

  ‘Poppa will be expecting us,’ she said.

  II

  The same day, as he leaves his sad hulk of a car and gathers the pile of blankets in his arms, smelling the sharpness of their mothball odour, William Pell remembers something that happened ten years ago and he chuckles at himself as he sets out up the winding gravel track towards the Reserve.

  A tiny wren alights on a branch before him, turns its head and is gone, the branch not even vibrating under its weight. Pell marvels at the delicacy of it, thanks God for it and moves on with his memories and thoughts. An irony is upon him. A hundred years ago, he muses, these blankets I’m carrying would have been laced with typhoid, and here I am, a century later, still bringing them blankets. He guffaws humourlessly and sighs. Well, they need blankets now, he thinks, so I bring them, that’s all.

  In the clearing the iron of the humpies is wet with dew and the morning sun offers the scene a forlorn radiance. A man lies immobile on the wet ground by the corpse of a fire. Bottles glow green and gold and brown in the grass. Pell drops a blanket over the man and leaves the pile outside the biggest humpy. Inside the huts the people are sleeping and those awake are possessed by some deep-rooted shame which prevents them from coming out to greet him. Moving back down the crisp-wet track towards his car, the Reverend William Pell nurses his own shame: 1968 creeps back into his mind, how he travelled with the current, negotiating, bargaining with God, and how the moon hid behind a hedge of cloud.

  Pell spends the morning at home in his office. He writes a letter to the editor of the Advocate and spends time with his clipboard in the spare room that is crammed dangerously full with boxes of food and blankets and clothing. Dust lifts and hovers about him in a grubby aura.

  Later he walks down the main street nodding to all those who demand it of him, buys two tins of tobacco at the Wildflower Cafe where the bikies slouch around on the Laminex with their GOD’S GARBAGE insignia embossed on their leather jackets, and stops outside the office of the Advocate to deliver his letter. Each day he rings at the desk he hears the journalists calling to each other.

  ‘And never send to know for whom the Pell tolls!’

  ‘He tolls for thee!’

  On his walk to the deepwater jetty in the harbour, Pell is reminded of his age; he is seventy-two and well overdue for retirement. In fact, his retirement has been set for the first of July, little more than six weeks away. Presbytery in the city has decided that the church in Angelus needs a younger man: after all, the Anglicans have one and the Methodists as well, though the Catholics will never again have a young one. The last young Catholic priest in the town was a drunkard who drove his Morris Minor into the sewage treatment plant outside town and drowned. Pell knows the town will welcome Darby, his successor, because Darby is a clean young man who keeps his religion to himself and Sunday.

  Without hailing them, Pell climbs down the gnarled wooden steps to the low landing close to the water and sits beside two of his old schoolmates. Dick and Darcy, warm inside their greatcoat, fish, and are mesmerised by the water.

  ‘G’day, Bill,’ they say.

  ‘Hello, Dick, Darc. How’s the fish?’

  Their eyes never leave the sky that is mirrored in the water.

  ‘Well’s can be expected,’ Dick says. Darcy nods. ‘They’re there.’

  ‘Good,’ says Pell, smiling.

  ‘How’s God, then?’ Darcy asks, a grin awry on his battered and toothless face.

  ‘Oh,’ Pell laughs, ‘well’s can be expected. He’s there, too.’

  All three laugh together and the sound is a strange thing to the gulls that stir along the jetty, frightened of the old men’s joke which seems as old as the timbers themselves. Pell looks out across the harbour with its flats and torpid shallows where once he and these old men chased fat, lazy mullet and found oysters in the mud and punted about in half-submerged dories, ankle-deep in guano. He gives them tobacco, which is all they will take from him, and leaves them to their reflections with a warmth and a sadness in him.

  On his way uptown he passes the old Coupar house on Brunswick Street where the old Misses Coupar had lived, where Daniel Coupar himself lived for a short time during the Depression, where Coupar’s granddaughter has lived now for a year with her husband from the city. Queenie Coupar is now Queenie Cookson. Pell thinks: a strange fellow, that Cookson, a square peg in any hole. Pell remembers the headlines in an old Advocate, EX-JOURNO CAUGHT BARE, and he laughs to himself. Anyone who swims in the raw at Middle Beach in an Angelus winter needs to be arrested for his own wellbeing, Pell muses. Queenie Cookson had also been naked on that beach that day, but Judge Moorhead Wilkes knew whose daughter she was and she did not appear before the court. Queenie Coupar has always been a curiosity in Angelus. As a child, she was smitten with innocence, unlike her deserting mother, a child who told stories at school that had the teachers wondering, stories about conversations with dolphins and hearing God in seashells, a fear of thunder and lightning which made her seem eccentric to all.

  Pell steps into the Richardson Bakery, built in his father’s youth, and orders a tank loaf and says hello to the girl who serves him.

  ‘Hello, Father,’ she says. He winces.

  ‘Oh, and I’d better have a dozen scones, too, my dear,’ he says. ‘People always expect scones when they come to my place. And lots of milky tea, for some reason.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ she says, fidgeting with floury hands in the till.

  ‘I’m not your father, girl,’ Pell says with a half-jolly chuckle. ‘I swear it.’

  The girl wraps his order, confused, and thinks what a silly old man and Pell squirms, pays hastily, and leaves.

  On the veranda of the manse, in the cool shadow of the old church, Pell suddenly tears a scone from the bag and hurls it at the picket fence; the scone clips the fence, sheds raisin-shrapnel, and bounces into the lane where some passer-by calls out in surprise. Pell slips quickly inside.

  Cleaning out his drawers after lunch with dust-motes raining on him in the heatless afternoon light, Pell finds an old manila folder and stops for a moment to read the title. PROPOSAL FOR CONVERSION OF EXISTING OPERATION OF WHALING STATION AT PARIS BAY, 1972. Riffling through the pages he strikes on a paragraph that he reads.

  . . . as tried and successfully executed on the east coast of the U.S. where old whalechasers and seiners are converted into whale-observing vessels bearing tourists and students who can view these awesome mammals at close range in their own habitat. The right and humpback whales are almost extinct. The sperm, still hunted, could if left alone be replenished and move closer to land fur
ther facilitating a venture of this sort. Whale observation might not be as lucrative as whale exploitation, but could be viable enough to sustain employment for many of those seamen and workers who must inevitably lose their jobs when finally the whaling industry in Angelus causes its own redundancy. . . .

  Pell drops the yellowed submission into the bin without emotion. ‘You’re just not a leader,’ he says, nostalgic for the days in Angelus when there were wise men and women not afraid to speak out. People who led. Old men like his father; young men like his old friend Daniel Coupar.

  From his Goormwood Street office this Monday morning Des Pustling can see the marble slab of the Goormwood Memorial with its recently installed wishing well. It marks the grave of Edgar Goormwood, the first English gentleman to die in Angelus. Convicts died quickly and regularly in those early years. The first free man to die was an infantryman who shot his foot off and died of gangrene in 1829. But gentlemen were rare and gentlemanly deaths history. Goormwood was a sensitive man who, upon arriving in the colony, took to bed and died with a volume of Milton on the coverlet. The stonemason and his brother who acted as an undertaker, drunkards both, buried Goormwood on the wrong day at dawn, too close to the town limits, with the epitaph:

  Here lieth Edgar Wallace Goormwood

  Died of Greif 16th December, 1832

  God rest his immoral soul

  The sudden grave and the exotic disease ‘Greif’ sent the town into a panic and the townspeople locked themselves indoors for a week. Within two years the main thoroughfare parted on either side of the grave, leaving it like a tiny, ugly islet: which within another thirty years became the centre of the town of Angelus. The Pustlings, who arrived a century later, were distant relations to the Goormwoods of Oxford, having been Goormwood-Pustlings themselves until they shed the hyphen and the connection with the advent of the twentieth century. In the 1920s many of them forsook the comfort of England for the opportunity of the colonies. Benjamin Pustling of Surrey found Angelus, Western Australia, and made it his task to prosper and to own.