Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (18 page)

Fortunately for them, spring was the ideal time of year to sell and Colin and Craig assured them as they sat in the Surrey style sunroom with cups of tea and baklava that an auction in early December, with the rain cleared and the summer visitors beginning to arrive, would be to their advantage. The Svenssons agreed, but almost dismissively, Craig thought, as if they were pissed off and just wanted to be done with it. When he mentioned this to Colin after they'd made the tentative arrangements and were on their way home in the car, he was told that ‘The Borgs' were ‘arrogant Euro snobs' whose idea of Minapre's ‘village life' had not had anything to do with reality.

‘They thought they were coming to live in some Mediterranean fishing village,' Colin told Craig. ‘Got a bloody shock when they realised Minapre was swarming with tourists and there was hardly a fishing boat in sight!'

Craig didn't mention that it was Colin himself who'd sold the Svenssons ‘The Orchard' only two years previously, at an auction where typically he spruiked the very things he was now calling the Svenssons naive for believing. He could hardly wait for the new auction in early December to see what his boss would have to tell the punters then.

Craig had noticed, since the news of the Morris house selling via Ron McCoy, that Colin's manner had got a permanent trace of bitterness about it, as if he didn't care for the masquerade anymore.
Where once he would fire up and enthuse about property and clients and ‘the progress of the showcase coast', now he spoke cynically of just about every situation. In boxing terms it was as if the gloves had come off, but Craig deliberately decided that he wouldn't worry about it too much and that he wouldn't take the bait. He'd rather ride with the punches in the hope that things would right themselves in the end.

As they rounded Turtle Head they looked out across a slate-grey ocean where great squalls of rain descended like rice, scuffing the surface white. Colin began to rave about how much he loved getting out in his boat by himself and going fishing.

‘Ah, it's fucking grouse,' he told Craig. ‘You can leave all the shit behind, you know. If the weather's right I can putt around all day out there, in and out of the coves, catch some fish, maybe have a swim if it's hot, read the paper, have a stubby or two.'

‘Sounds all right.'

‘It's better than all right, mate, believe you me. There's no fuckin' Borgs or Ron McCoys out there, nah, just you, the outboard, the mobile, the rod and the big ocean. It's excellent.'

Craig could hardly contain himself in the passenger seat as Colin Batty continued his blunt rhapsody about his days on the boat. Recently, a woman Liz knew, Louise Niall, had been looking out to sea through binoculars with her husband Jamie from their big family room on the hill at Boat Creek, when Jamie got Colin Batty's boat in view. To his disbelief he saw Colin in the boat, far out from shore and thinking he was invisible, leaning back on the aluminium gunwale with the zip of his shorts open, masturbating. Jamie Niall had handed the glasses to Louise with a big grin on his face and said, ‘Find the wanker in the boat.' She trained the binoculars on the water and when she found Colin she shrieked in disgust. Jamie had taken another look just to make sure they weren't imagining it but Louise wouldn't dare. So Jamie sat there with his feet
on the coffee table, muttering to himself and chuckling as Colin Batty, in his fourteen-foot tinny on a perfectly calm sea, pleasured himself. ‘Wouldn't it have been great if they'd had his mobile number,' Craig had said to Liz when she told him about it. ‘Imagine.
Mr Colin Batty, this is Officer Wilson from Fisheries and Wildlife. I'm afraid I'm going to have to fine you for tossing off without a licence
. Can you see the look on his face!' But Liz was like Louise Niall, she didn't find it funny at all, she found it revolting.

So now Craig was bursting inside as Colin continued with his fervent descriptions of his days off in the boat.

‘I've always wanted to spend the night out there but, to tell you the truth, I'm chicken, mate. I've got no GPS and you just never know what the weather's gonna do when you can't see it coming. But it's
that
good, Craig. I can just sit there for hours, anywhere between Minapre and the Two Pointers, and look back at the hills and the cars winding themselves around the road and think what a pack of morons they all are. They spend half their weekends driving and the other half spending money, dumb cunts. But I'm sittin' still as a brolga, mate, with the water lapping at the boat, a good book, and the fish biting, and I'm loving it. And the great thing is, Craig, that you don't need to be a rich man to do it. I mean, what does a tinny cost with a trailer and the motor and the safety gear and all that? Maybe three and a half, four grand when all's said and done. Not bad, is it? When you consider what you get out of it. Peace and quiet. I tell you, out there I see all the guys on boards fighting for take-off on a Saturday or Sunday and I think surfing's got hairs on it. Meanwhile, I'm out on me own, doing exactly what I please. I could be shooting up out there and nobody would know. I could be doing anything I like. You should think about it, Craig. Get yourself a boat. You'd love it. Gives you time to think.'

For a moment Craig was terrified that in his enthusiasm his boss was going to tell him that he wanked in the boat, but thankfully he
didn't. As they drove down into the Mangowak riverflat, Colin went quiet and flicked on the radio. He picked an FM preset and Super-tramp's ‘Take the Long Way Home' flooded into the car through all six speakers. Colin tapped on the steering wheel and started mouthing the words as the car rippled across the bridge. Craig was smiling, staring straight ahead now.

They rounded the woodyard and the old crafts gallery, climbed out of the valley and up the hill, past the Dick Lake Sanctuary and towards the hotel. Making as if to go past, at the last minute Colin suddenly threw the steering wheel and they careered up the corrugated driveway and into the pub carpark. With Supertramp blaring Colin stopped the car and yelled: ‘WHAT THE FUCK, WILLO, LET'S HAVE A COUNTERY. WE'VE DONE A GOOD MORNING'S WORK.'

Craig nodded but now instead of being amused at his boss's boating stories he was suddenly bored at the prospect of them continuing over lunch. And what's more, he thought, as ‘Take the Long Way Home' ended and Colin turned off the ignition, the more bored I get the more foul that image of him in the boat's gonna be. But what could he do? He was trapped. It was a working day and Colin Batty was his boss. Even at lunchtime.

A
s Colin Batty and Craig Wilson got out of the car in the pub carpark, Ron McCoy was walking quickly through the tea-tree colonnade on the clifftop. He was headed home with a letter from the Queen.

Min's one hundredth birthday had finally arrived and, not knowing exactly when the expected letter was going to turn up, Ron had been checking at the post office religiously for the previous fortnight, just in case. Concerned that on the actual day itself the letter wouldn't show, he nervously appeared at the post office, only to be greeted with smiles and claps on the back from David and Nora, who held the letter up behind the counter as if it was treasure itself.

As Ron studied the illustrious lettering on the front of the envelope, Leo Morris came to mind. The ornamentation of the handwriting reminded him of those occasional letters Leo would receive from the Vatican, which Ron would find tossed aside onto ladderback chairs with other papers in the house at Bonafide View. How he wished Leo was alive on this day. For a moment, as he stood in his cap and
dark brown v-neck jumper, his boots shined for the little gathering to come at the house, Ron was welling up inside.

They'd invited Rhyll Traherne, Darren Traherne and his sister Barb, Sweet William and his wife Eve, the Lea brothers, two of whom couldn't make it, Nanette Burns and Martin Elliot's son Bob, who now ran a pub in the Mallee and was coming all that way. Min would have liked to invite more people, the ladies she'd worked with on the District Association raffles, for instance, and those from the CWA in Minapre, but in the end she and Ron decided that any more than a handful would be a bit tiring for her.

When he arrived back at the house, everyone except Noel Lea and Barb Traherne were there, all gathered around Min in the front room with presents and glasses of beer and wine and muscat. He walked through the kitchen, glancing at all the tinfoiled and Glad-Wrapped food that had been brought in and placed on the table. He passed through the galley door to the hallway and then into the brighter daylight of the front room, with the letter held out in his hand in front of him. Min was sitting on the Papa Mahoney armchair in the southwest corner with everyone standing or sitting or kneeling around her. They all looked around when they heard Ron enter. Min could see his excitement, as if he was a boy again, bringing home something of which he was particularly proud. A black duck perhaps, a tiny bandicoot pup, a pair of perfectly headshot rabbits from Mr Bolitho's paddocks, the annual pot of saltwater ready to boil down into salt.

Ron handed her the letter without a word. She put on her glasses and looked down at the insignia beside her name and address in the royal font.

‘Ah,' she said, ‘I see the Poms have acknowledged my existence at last!'

The room broke into laughter. With tanned and spindly fingers, Min opened the envelope and pulled out the letter.

‘
Dear Mrs Minnie McCoy
,' she read out to them all in her best voice, ‘
On behalf of the House of Windsor and the members of the Commonwealth I congratulate you on reaching a century of years. As Queen of Australia, I hope you have a wonderful day. Best wishes and good health for the years ahead. Yours, HRH Queen Elizabeth II
.'

The little crowd broke into applause and just as they did, Barb Traherne arrived with her daughter Isabella. ‘Look, dear,' Min said to the five year old as the child came across the rug holding her mother's hand, ‘come and look at my letter from the Queen.'

Isabella rushed instead to her great-grandmother Rhyll, whose swarthy round face opened with delight. Rhyll patted her head and let her be shy. Min folded the letter and went to return it to the envelope but everyone wanted to look at it so it was handed around.

Noel Lea turned up not long after, dressed in a dark suit and orange tie, with a bright red waistcoat, which drew much hilarity from those present.

‘You pack of ol' bushies,' he exclaimed fondly, leaning down to give Min a kiss on the cheek. ‘It's not every day someone turns a hundred!'

On the sideboard next to the dining table were the cards that people had brought and that Min had received in the post, every last one of them proudly displaying the magic number 100 on the front. As Noel gave Min his unusual version of a card – a small oil painting he'd done of the wooden bridge over the creek on the Old Breheny Road, with ‘Happy One Hundredth Min' scrawled across the road in the foreground – they all began to discuss ‘what a bloody rigmarole' it was to get a hold of a 100th birthday card. Of course, no newsagent stocked them permanently and some were even reluctant to order one in.

‘It's all right for you artistic types,' Nanette Burns jibed at Noel. ‘You don't even have to pick up the phone. You can just rustle one up whenever you feel like it.'

Ron pointed out to everyone that there was more cold beer and
stout and wine on ice in the laundry trough and red wine and muscat on the table. Noel went off to find the beer and brought back one for himself, Eve, and a bottle of stout for Ron and Sweet William. As the letter was passed around, portergaffs were being mixed and Isabella began to come out of her shell. She was telling Rhyll and Min all about her school excursion to the wildlife sanctuary over at the You Yangs. ‘Oh, those sugar gliders, they're my friends. And I know a wombat.'

Before long the room had settled into noise and laughter, and Sweet William observed that they would not have been together in a group like this for many a long year.

The talk was about their world, and inevitably the changes in it, and also about the dead, all those people like Leo Morris and Len McCoy, Fred Ayling and Jolly Owen, Wally and Audrey Lea and Sid and Norm and Mary Traherne, and Martin Elliot, who really had no right not to be there. Jim Lea asked Bob Elliot if he'd inherited his father's famous habit of being able to burp ‘God Save the Queen' and Bob held his hand up and shook his head, laughing, saying, ‘No way.'

‘Come on, Bobby, eh, it's in your blood. Give it a go, seeing we've got a letter right here from the good lady herself,' said Jim Lea.

‘What about “Waltzing Matilda” then, Bob. Can you burp that?' teased Nan.

‘Nah, bit sad, that one. Can't burp in a minor key,' said Bob, and the whole room sniggered at the thought of it.

At 2 pm the party sat down at the large blackwood dining room table, Min at one head and Rhyll at the other. They raised a first toast with full glasses, champagne flutes and stubby holders.

Sweet William, standing up, adjusted his lapels and proclaimed: ‘To Min McCoy. A lady of one hundred years and one thousand virtues.' He'd been composing the line for the whole of the previous week. Satisfied, he sat down again, tucked a serviette into his collar, and began to eat.

The table was laden with pies, salads, snapper, a huge eel that Darren had smoked at Rhyll's house, two crayfish that Walker Lea had stolen out of craypots on the Heatherbrae side, new potatoes, broad beans, a bowl of peas and four large red candles placed in Rhyll Traherne's heirloom Venetian glass candelabra. The knives and forks clicked and the two-inch nails slid and burrowed deep into the claws of the crayfish. Numerous little toasts were made, as well as the bigger toasts, and as early as three o'clock the singing had begun.