Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (24 page)

Once the formalities were completed and the locals had wandered away to their cars, a clutch of cloud towered in from the southwest, bringing with it a light mist and casting the property in a midday shadow that threatened to bring rain. With their shoes crunching the Lilydale toppings, Colin, Craig, Liz and Carla chatted by the gold Tribute before heading off. The kids were in the car, Reef and Paul still wrestling as Marisa sat slumped in the front seat sucking her thumb. Scowling, with her knees tucked up under her arms, she was staring out the window, straight at the man in the Akubra who was talking to her mum.

‘That was quite a performance,' Carla said to Colin with a wry grin.

‘Ah well, when in doubt, give it the full treatment,' he said.

‘Didn't look like you had too much doubt.'

‘You'd be surprised,' Colin told her. ‘I was nervous as hell for this one. Christ, I'd already spieled the place only two years ago. Two-thirds of the crowd were there that day. I had to get a new pitch. Went all right, though, eh?'

‘Certainly did,' said Craig.

Turning back to Carla, Colin asked, ‘How you going?'

‘Fine, thanks.'

‘Bit of a surprise to see you here.'

Carla looked at him blankly. She could smell Colin's aftershave. She almost continued the conversation but decided against it. She didn't want to risk being flirtatious. And she hated aftershave.

Quickly seeing where things were headed, Craig began to move off around the front of the 4WD to the driver's side, allowing Carla and Liz to break the conversation without being rude.

Inside the 4WD, Marisa jumped over into the back seat as Liz and Carla got in. Colin stood alone now under his Akubra as a few heavy drops of rain began to fall. He still had his eyes on Carla, who was busy fixing little Marisa's seatbelt.

As Craig backed out to drive away, the auctioneer gave a quick and decisive wave with his open hand, as if clutching at something. Liz shook her head quietly to herself where she sat in the passenger seat next to her husband.

Colin Batty watched the Wilsons' Tribute disappear into the trees on the fenceline and then leave the property. Casting a brief glance back at the Svenssons' house but seeing no signs of activity inside, he turned to leave, walking down the driveway ruts, watching the raindrops loosening the compacted white dust at his feet. Shrouded now in the tall forest at the fringes of the property and under the heavy dark cloud, a familiar loneliness filled his being.

One point nine million isn't bad, he consoled himself as he reached the front gate and headed along the roadside verge to his car. But in fact he was a little disappointed. He wouldn't allow his
staff to take bets in the office but he played a game with himself before each auction in which he'd be rewarded if he could pick the sale price. Generally his track record was excellent but in the cocoon of his mudbrick shower that morning he'd gauged to himself that ‘The Orchard' would go for at least two point one. Somehow or other he'd fallen short of the mark.

 

 

M
in McCoy had always thought that getting off to a good start in life was the key to her happiness but she'd never spared a thought for what might make life's end a tolerable thing. Both her father's and her sister's deaths had entailed no suffering. Papa Mahoney had simply fallen asleep in the kitchen beside the cockatoo cage, never to wake up again, and Elsie had dropped stone dead from a heart attack under her pergola in Balwyn, without a moment to think. Min always presumed her bloodline would see her head off in the same way, without fuss, and without drawing anyone else into a sacrificial bother.

On the deep myrtle-beech sill of the kitchen sink window where she'd stood for untold hours over the years, there was a spearmint coloured saucer with a cake of yellow soap and a small crystal vase which she kept fresh with a flower from the garden. In between these two fixtures had always been, or so it seemed, a small coffee coloured seashell, which somewhere along the line she or Len or Ron had picked up and deposited there. In all the years Min had
hardly noticed that shell but now, as her body began to fail and her lung developed a brackling wheeze along with the coughing and catarrh, for some reason or other she began to dwell on it. One evening after dinner she asked Ron if he knew when or how on earth that shell had come to be on the windowsill all this time. He shook his head, after glancing over to the sink to check that he knew exactly what shell it was she was talking about.

Min needed time to acquaint herself with her decline, time to grow familiar with death's season as it surrounded her, and surprisingly, the coffee coloured shell had moved to the forefront of the small aids and talismans she rested on for assistance, along with her one or two books, her cup, and the memories which kept re-emerging now after lying fallow for so many years. Her life had had its illnesses and difficulties, but her enchantment with small things had never dwindled for long. But somehow she had never really noticed the shell, an extraordinary shell she now realised, that had lain in front of her through it all.

Now, a little bit like her grandmother with her rosary, she would take the seashell up in her palm and carry it as she went about the house, or sit with it at the kitchen table or in the Papa Mahoney chair in the brighter light of the front room, and regard it.

She didn't know anything much about shells; she knew a periwinkle from a pippy, a limpet from a cowry, an abalone from an elephant fish, the kind of information she'd picked up along the way, but that was all. The seashell from the windowsill was less than an inch wide at its base, and spiral shaped. It wound around itself in a perfect whorl, as if made by a confectioner, until at its nipple-like tip its colour vanished, leaving a bone-white but translucent nub. On close inspection, Min reflected that the reason for the body of the shell's exact likeness to the colour of coffee was that its surface was deceptively complex – it was variegated, like the breast of the bristlebird, with dark brown dots, slightly raised, alternating
in a kind of miniature latticework with the lighter brown background. This gave the shell's colour a layered, vivifying depth, and also an ephemerality in keeping with the ocean's currents, the mysteries from which it came.

Min liked to hold the shell and rub her thumb on its lower band where the raised dots were darkest and its texture both smooth and coarse at the same time. She could rub her thumb over that slightly knobbly surface and think of baubles hanging on strips in open doorways, or sea-buoys clumped together along the old fencelines, or the braille the nuns in the convent at Abbotsford would have liked her to learn so that she could help the blind. It was as if the rhythmic and minute unevenness of the seashell was a trigger for reflections on her life itself, with all its pocks and peaks attaining a hindsighted symmetry when viewed in her mind from her chair.

As the days of summer passed, as Ron went about his business, coming in and out the porch door with bream and crabs, tools or a gun, beer and vegetables dripping soil, she remained heavily dressed even in the heat. She gazed at the seashell's structure and slowly began to gather a rendition of the course of her life and an acquaintance, more importantly, with her impending death. During the January days she saw how the shell spiralled in space, ascending in motion towards its height, where its earthly appearance fell away and transformed into lucency. Gone at the tip was its coffee tone, its movement stilled, replaced by the clarifying fulfilment of the form completing itself.

Min thought it was uncanny that just when she needed it most, when she was beginning to falter, the little shell had made itself conspicuous where for decades it had merely been another object of many that the sea had jettisoned and that were lying about their home. She found she could read into it almost inexhaustibly, depicting time and herself, in the nights and days it took for the shell's stair to arrive at its tip. She began to see the darker dots as the nights of
her life and the lighter in-between ones as all her days and outward moments. As the broad whorl curled upward and became a narrower band, she noticed the darker dots lightening, which she interpreted as the pattern of her sleep, which had grown lighter and lighter the older she got, to the point that now she wasn't sure whether she ever really slept at all. She remembered herself as a teenager in those earlier, darker dots, those nights of the broad whorl at the shell's base, sleeping sometimes fourteen hours at a time, moaning as her father came up the stairs in his heavy apron between customers to stroke her hair and implore her to greet what was left of the day. And then she saw the prime of life in the shell's middle band, so clearly defined and distinct from her childhood, where she married and took on adulthood. Where the shell had two small holes knocked out of it, probably from activity on the sill over the years, Min saw her father's death and then the death of Len.

This distinction between eras in her life transformed, however, if she turned the shell ever so slowly in her fingers. Time became a continuum again and everything in life was merged on a single fluid ramp towards heaven. The first hole, the death of her father, led inexorably on then to the death of her husband, they were in the same stream as she revolved the shell; but if she held it still and looked again, it was as if she'd had three lives rather than one, three bands ascending, and everything was separate and to be held so. She saw in the shell the story not only of her life but of the nature of life itself, she saw the growing, the middle age, the penultimate stage and then the rising. The rising of which the Bible speaks. And the poets. And now the kitchen sill shell in her fingers.

The one thing Min could not make out from the shell, however, was her beginning. There was no starting point to the shell. The broad band at its base sprung from a sheer lip which turned and disappeared into the centre of its hollow underneath. So, right there, turning the shell upside down and looking back into its base,
she began to see all infinity. Again and again as she peered into the hollow, all it did was make her turn the shell over, and look again at its spiralling. There was no solution, no visible source. There was an underside to it all but seemingly no first moment. Or perhaps that first moment was not hers to see. Perhaps it was her mother and father alone who could share that beginning. Or perhaps it was only God's mystery. Either way there would be no doubt, Min thought, the seashell from the kitchen window showed that life was perfect and that the physical senses could never trace it to its ultimate source, and that therefore death, despite the doomsayers, could well be the greatest perfection of all.

Ron did not tell Min what he'd noticed missing from the woodpile and when he found the timber on the beach below he didn't for one minute think that it was anything else but teenagers out on holiday having a bit of a night-time adventure. From time to time over the years they'd had rocks rained down on their roof at night during summer holidays, and wood from his woodpile over the cliff was just another version on the theme. He did marvel, however, at how he hadn't been woken by the knocking of the melaleuca gate.

He knew Min was ailing. He could hear fluid sloshing about in her chest as she breathed and even when she spoke now her voice was inflected with it. Despite her age, Ron still couldn't get over how quickly she was going downhill. The sheer speed of it. It did not seem long ago at all that he'd been holding the ladder for her as she cleaned the spouting in her dishwashing gloves. But now she spent most days sitting in the Papa Mahoney chair in the front room, wrapped up in a maroon shawl despite the January sun, which seemed to Ron particularly ferocious that year.

They'd had Christmas on their own, and happily so, with brief visits from Rhyll and Darren, Sweet William, and Nanette Burns. More and more, Min tapped her left underwrist as she coughed in
her chair and Ron couldn't remember whether Sweet William's explanation for that mannerism had been to do with the fact that that was where she kept her hanky or that that was where she'd worn her watch. When he asked Min about it, he knew she was not telling the truth when she said she must be getting old and had forgotten to put her watch on. Despite her loss of weight and the deterioration of her lungs, Min's memory seemed to Ron, if anything, to be better than ever.

They shared the cooking now but Ron did most of his on the barbecue outside. He'd cook chops or bacon and eggs, or smoke an eel or a bream. He could make mashed potato but Min always had to fix a salad if they wanted that. She restricted herself to simple meals that could cook themselves and on her doctor's instructions for the first time ever she had begun to cook spaghetti bolognese. Ron took to it with relish and one pot could last them three days. So it became a favourite, even when the temperature climbed over thirty degrees.

Through January, Dr Bernard Feast recommended that they visit him at the Colac hospital once a fortnight to drain her lung but after their first visit of the new year he said they'd better make it once a week. Although it was a simple procedure the doctor was worried about Min having to travel so much but when he questioned her, and later Ron, about her having it done by the local GP in Mangowak, he realised they wouldn't hear of it. It wasn't that they had anything against the doctor where they lived, it was just that they were used to Dr Feast. He was a link in a chain that fed all the way back to the days in the 1920s and '30s when Dr Dwyer had looked after them in Minapre. Bernard Feast knew how difficult a change of doctors could be for elderly people, and that Ron was now elderly as well as his mother. He decided on balance, however, that Min should risk the travel, mainly because he knew she'd prefer it that way, given that he couldn't get out to the house.

When Dom Khouri heard that Min was failing he offered any help he could. One Sunday he showed up at the door having arrived back in the country from a business trip only the previous day. He sat with Min and Ron in the kitchen like he had on the day they'd met and told them all about America and how glad he was to be home. When he heard that they were making weekly visits to Colac he offered to send them a driver and a car but, although it appealed in some ways to Ron, Min wouldn't hear of it.