Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (15 page)

‘What is it?'

Craig pulled his lips back over his teeth and hesitated before speaking.

‘I don't think you're gonna like this, Col,' he finally said.

‘Like what?' Colin Batty shot out, alarm bells ringing. He knew Craig was astute enough by now not to bother him with some minor issue. ‘Spit it out,' he said.

‘You know the Morris house at Bonafide View?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Did you know it was gonna be sold?'

‘What do you mean “it was gonna be sold”? Leo Morris left it to his nephews in his will. They're never gonna sell it. I ring one of them from time to time just to check.'

Craig pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, pulled at his shirt, stared out the tinted window towards the old children's playground on the other side of the road, did everything he could to avoid telling Colin what came next. Eventually he straightened his neck and just stared knowingly into his boss's eyes.

‘Fuck, Craig,' Colin exploded, standing up. ‘What are you trying to tell me? Are you saying they're selling it? How the fuck would you know, anyway?'

‘I'm saying they've sold it,' Craig said, deadpan, lowering his head.

Colin Batty immediately sat down again, and assumed an air of calm, a kind of dormancy. Although Craig was not frightened of Colin as such, he decided at that moment that this man he worked for was a scary individual indeed.

When Leo Morris had bought his house in 1938 it had been a hotel for the previous thirty years, a long, two-storey timber building set into the first ridge across the Ocean Road from the beach, with verandahs along its front where patrons used to dance and drink and look out over a salt-streaked
en-tout-cas
tennis court at the romantic vista across Bass Strait. Leo Morris couldn't believe his luck when the hotel licence ceased and it came into his possession. Increasingly, because of the building's history and the further kudos it accrued with the famous Doctor of Music buying it, as well as the fact that it had survived the bushfires in which so many other old buildings had been destroyed, the Morris house had become one of the unofficial local icons of the coast.

‘Who sold it?' Colin asked Craig impassively.

‘Nobody.'

Colin sighed wearily now and placed the thumb and forefinger of his right hand in his nostrils. Craig noticed that on the desk in front of him was a travel brochure for the Maldives.

‘Well, come on, Willo,' Colin said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Tell me what you know.'

Craig Wilson also leant back in his chair and told his boss how a friend of Liz was married to Givva Way, the painter working on Dom Khouri's house, and how Givva had said that the sister of the architect who designed Khouri's place had bought the Morris house at Bonafide View. Apparently the architect's sister had asked if there might be anything on the coast for her and her husband and through Ron McCoy she was put in touch with the family, who subsequently sold.

Craig waited for Colin Batty to absorb the information. As soon as possible he planned to get the hell out of that office. But it was too early yet. On the other side of the desk, Colin held his stare.

‘You're fucking joking?'

Craig snorted. ‘Yeah right, Col. This is the kind of thing I'd joke with
you
about. I don't think so.'

Colin Batty's face squinted up before he turned his head away.

‘That old prick,' he said, gazing out the window with his jaw dropped in wonder.

Craig's distaste for his boss, which had been building for months now, couldn't help but surface. ‘It's not the end of the world, Col,' he said derisively. ‘It's just one house.'

Colin turned his head back to meet Craig's eyes. ‘You don't understand,' he said.

‘What don't I understand? Is it only one house, or isn't it?'

‘Yes, it is more than just one house, Craig,' Colin said, in an angry, patronising tone. ‘It's about the real value of things, get it? It's about a bit of fucken respect, that's what. The rest is just shit, mate. Dime a dozen beach houses. Fake Murcutts and yuppie one-upmanship. White-trash shit. But this is more. It's a dignity outcome. Get it? Can you get it, Craig?'

Colin Batty stared at his employee, with green eyes flecked with fury, a hardness in them like the granite in the hills. ‘I know what you're thinking,' he said, ‘but I'll fuck myself up over whatever I
want, all right? There's things you don't get till you've been around here a while. What applies generally across the board, say in Melbourne, doesn't necessarily apply here. Right?'

Craig had heard enough. The last thing he needed was someone else making him feel like an innocent newcomer. He stood up and said, ‘Well, anyway, I've told you. I'm off to Minapre to see about the permits for the Patterson units. I'll see ya.'

He turned and made for the door. As he stepped out of his boss's office he heard Colin say, ‘Thanks, Craig,' in an almost contrite voice. He didn't feel like responding.

He walked past the front desk to the glass doors and raised his eyebrows to Angela at the computer terminal as he went past. ‘Good luck, Ange,' he said over his shoulder, going out the doors. But Angela couldn't hear him, not with her dictation headset on.

O
nce Ron was old enough to be let out of the chickenwire cage on the clifftop, he spent his time helping his father as Len McCoy enacted what he'd outlined for Mr Bolitho's pastoral lease. More interested in the rotation of the crops than making sure his sheep weren't having their tongues eaten by foxes, Len left his son to watch over the riverflat stock, setting him up in an old hut at the bottom of the Boatbuilders Track with instructions, checking in on him from time to time to make sure he hadn't fallen off the bush-wood punt he loved to push along the river, or that he hadn't been snakebitten.

From the age of eight the boy was furnished with a gun, a fern-hook, a stockwhip, a black and white Border collie named Gluey, rabbit traps, and told to keep his wits about him, which is what he did. He combed the grass and river, shaping and bunching the sheep, singing out to the dog in a high voice, watching the sky for signs above the hill on the western side of the flat. Min worried herself sick, about him doing a man's job with a brain full of a child's
dreams, and more particularly about him setting the savage spring-loaded teeth of the rabbit traps, which were heavy and could mangle a limb and crush through bone in the most violent fashion.

The tiny Meteorological Station schoolroom that had previously existed in Mangowak had been closed when the station's operations became largely automatic. In years gone by, at least three scientific families were resident at the station and the few children that there were from the surrounding hills and coves would traipse or ride to the small gabled school on the rivermouth side of the headland to join the scientific families in their lessons. By the time Ron was born, however, only one meteorologist lived at the station at any given time, the schoolroom became empty, and so Min worried also about his lack of an education.

On this count, Len would assure her that tending sheep had always been a job for boys and a good way for Ron to learn the ways of the world. Min knew that by ‘the ways of the world' Len meant the way the sheep reacted to the world, to the weather as it moved across the sky, to the foibles of the birds and the rhythms of the foxes, to the budding and withering cycles of the native fruits, the conversation between moon and sun, river and ocean, that would allow him to predict the day ahead; and so she'd wander down to the valley to seek her son out at lunchtime, sitting with him on the riverbank or in the hut in colder weather, teaching him what she could as together they ate whatever food she'd brought. During these lunchtimes, Min would try to foster other kinds of knowledge in Ron, of numbers, and written-down things, of cities like the one where she had grown, of science (what little she knew of it), of history and of music.

It was difficult, however, for words were clearly not his currency at all. He'd pick at the plaiting of his whip or peer endlessly at the dun or twinkling leaves on the western hill, munching the food between his fleshy lips, seemingly uninterested. Frustrating as this
was, she did not blame him but tried to tease him out, to conjure the fluency from the Mahoney side of his blood to accompany the silent knowledge of the McCoy side.

There was a poem she had in her book which together they would read, or, rather, she would read and he would stare away from, a poem she thought might resemble something of his world. Called ‘The Hermit's Song' she would speak it to him repeatedly during these lunchtimes on the flats, believing he might turn towards it as any child might to a story, or at the very least have it in his memory always. She would show him the spelling, the way the lines ran and ended, trying to interest him in the subject, trying to convey the fact that there was a lot even in books which he might like and even want to know about.

The poem was centuries old and constituted a hermit's list of the difficulties and bounties a life amongst nature afforded. Min had been read the poem many times back among the cobbles and railway-clanking sounds of Clifton Hill, so far from the scenes it described. Now in an airy chant on the riverflat she'd say the words and encourage her son to insert the lines with his own local creatures, sights he'd see every day. Yes the ‘black cap' mentioned in the poem could be a tern, the ‘hips and haws' replaced with the white fruit of the bearded heath. The ‘oak' the hermit lived beneath in the poem could be an ash and the geese flying over were the swans. Ron couldn't help but laugh at the idea of something called a ‘pignut', but the cress the hermit ate was the same and so was the thrush, at least by name, the honey and the salmon, the trout, the skies, the summer. He told Min he'd like to see a real woodpecker and hear its tapping sound but the nearest they had was the clicking bird he'd seen climbing tree trunks in the bush. The bleating of Mr Bolitho's flock could replace the lowing of the poem's heifers, though, and even still he knew the sound of ‘lowing' from the occasional dray that would come on by. But he would never agree with the hermit
that wrens could be teary, nor with the idea of a gull coming inland. His father agreed it was just too strange, and nothing Min could say about the origins of the poem would explain it.

Between times, alone on the riverflat with the sheep, Ron would dutifully shoot any fox on sight and with his fishing line would cruise the river on his punt, or killick Mr Bolitho's tiny black row-boat on a bend, breaming and hooking mullet and eels to take back to Min to cook at night, and always rotating the rabbit traps. He made his own more benign traps too, out of whippy tea-tree spars and bracken fronds and the long reeds that grew by the river. In these riggings, these lovingly snecked box and drum snares, he'd catch the myriad small marsupials that dwelt all around him: quolls, bush rats, bandicoots, possums, sugar gliders. He'd watch them closely and get to know their ways, sometimes feeding them and sometimes taunting them to watch their reaction, even going so far as setting the traps alight with the creatures inside, to witness their relationship with fire, and with fear.

Occasionally he'd catch the strangest things in his traps as well: a tawny frogmouth owl, for instance, a Cape Barren goose, a yellow-bellied water rat, and once a catlike animal he'd never heard anyone ever say a word about. Ron kept this catlike creature in the trap under the river redgums for two whole weeks, fascinated by the pale independence in its eyes and the seemingly unperturbed way it curled up in the trap, as if entirely sure it would eventually be let out. Ron set it free one morning at the Old Breheny Road bridge but christened it the ‘snoutcat' before he did so, because of its long nose. As he raised the door of the trap the snoutcat bolted, low to the ground, across the river paddocks towards the bush on the other side. Ron never saw one again, but didn't need to. From then on, looking up from the riverflat at the often purplish collar of the hills beyond, he would always know it was out there, the snout-cat, a symbol of the unknowable nature of the bush, of its sureness,
its indifference to people, proof of all the things that could never be proven.

He grew to know all the calls of the birds, the gang-gangs, the parrots, the owls, the groundlarks, the bellyfull cormorants, the various ducks – musk, black, teal, wood, mountain – as well as the other waterbirds. There was one bird in particular whose song he knew as well as any but which he had never seen in the act of singing. Ron called this bird the ‘tinwhistle bird', purely because, like the snoutcat, he had no other name for it. The tinwhistle bird had a piping repetitious song: first, three notes in rapid succession, high and clear, and then three more in an identical rhythm but lower down the scale. It was like a call and answer, a conversation, and the purity of the sound would dominate the air if ever it was around.

Leo Morris observed the teenage boy closely after Albert Bolitho died and the pastoral lease was broken up when Ron was fourteen. No longer busy with shepherding and unable therefore to disappear each day into his own demesne, Leo had sensed a crowded feeling about the boy, a lostness, a need to replace the feeling of his days alone amongst the sheep and weather on the flat. He also observed a certain held-in expressiveness about him. After the Sunday masses in the music room at Bonafide View, Ron would be monosyllabic but always hovering near the priest's harmonium and fingering the sheafs of music scattered around on every table and bench. Well, it could do no harm, Leo decided, his own days on the instrument had been shortlived anyway. He'd always preferred the precision of the piano.

And so it came to be, with a smiling wink from the priest, that Ron and his father arrived on the tractor that blue-black day during the war, to take possession of the Thomas pump organ from Ontario, Canada. Leo could see the anticipation in the boy's crinkled brow as he drank a cup of tea with Len McCoy and talked about the family's changed circumstances. They chatted about Len's plans now he
didn't have an employer, about how he could rustle together a living from fencing, mending, digging and shooting, from his knowledge of the ground of the old Bolitho lease, and how newcomers would no doubt need him for similar reasons to Albert Bolitho. They talked confidently about this, and also about the war in New Guinea, for a good half-hour. Ron sat at the table without saying a word.