Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (26 page)

Ron told them what he could remember of the events of the last twenty-four hours and how she looked peaceful now that she had died. As he spoke, the kitchen was brightening with the sun as it rose higher out in the day, the cupboards and walls losing their ashen tones and becoming cream and green and blue as they were. Eve, in her practical slacks and brown sleeveless jacket zipped up to the neck, had brought a carry bag of food and efficiently now sought out what she needed to make a pot of tea and arranged the cups on the table. The galley door was open. All three of them felt keenly the presence of Min down the hallway in her room.

When she'd finished pouring the tea from a tall red pot that Ron had never seen used, Eve said, ‘These bronchial things drag on for some people, Ron. It might be best that she went so quickly in the end.'

‘It's probably true,' Sweet William concurred, with deep sympathy in his voice. ‘It wasn't so long ago that she was bright as a button on her birthday, was it, Ron?'

‘Three months,' he said.

‘Well, it was a great life,' Eve said. And then, with her voice hushed as if Min might hear her, she said, ‘She was one in a million.'

‘No risk,' Sweet William concurred again.

Ron allowed Eve to ring the hospital to get a message to Bernard Feast. He knew if they told Dr Feast what had happened he'd arrange the rest. By 11 am the doctor himself had arrived, offering grave condolences to Ron and verifying that Min had indeed passed on. He could see that Ron was in deep shock and told Eve to pour him a Tullamore Dew from the bottle on the kitchen mantel, which she did. As the undertakers arrived to remove Min from
the house, Ron and Sweet William were in by her bed, drinking whiskey and talking quietly to Bernard Feast. Eve remained in the kitchen, where she had bothered to light the Rayburn and was making a stew, to see Ron through the next couple of days.

As the man and woman arrived with the shining chrome stretcher bed on wheels, Ron and Sweet William left Min's side and went out into the yard to wait to see her off. Ron, who in the world of marsupials and fish was a master of death and death's equipment, could not bear to see his mother's body handled and placed on the trolley. When the uniforms appeared at the porch door only a few minutes later, with the stretcher in tow and Min lying upon it with a sheet now pulled over her face and black straps across her birdlike form, Sweet William put his arm around Ron's shoulder as if to guide him, though the two of them did not move from the mown slope as the trolley bed was wheeled awkwardly down the quartz of the driveway to be taken away. Ron's mouth remained slightly open as they watched and Sweet William had tears now running over his heavily grafted face.

Eventually they heard the ambulance start up out on the road, amidst the sounds of tourists walking happily up to the Meteorological Station. Dr Feast appeared from the porch and when he heard the tourists it rankled. He walked across to where the two old men had turned on the grass to face the ocean.

The doctor wore a navy blue blazer and a shirt and tie. His secure voice and his formality were what Ron needed to hear. ‘You know, Ron,' he said, taking up his position beside them, ‘every time you'd bring her for a visit she'd brighten my day. Most people live only half the life Min led. And I don't just mean in years. There really is great cause for you to be proud. Even in the midst of your sorrow.'

In a world that had now changed irrevocably, Bernard Feast was for Ron like a stall, a temporary reprieve, a man who understood his and his mother's world, its protocols and practicalities, its larrikin
codes and knockabout etiquettes. As he looked at Dr Feast and listened to his words, tears began to slip silently out of Ron's eyes and down his cheeks. He tasted them on his lips and he thanked the doctor. Then he blushed and accepted Bernard Feast's offer of a cigarette.

Min died on a Monday and, as Ron requested, a small private service was held for her in the convent out in the bush behind Mangowak on the Wednesday morning. On the day of the service, Ron was quite lost and needed to be guided all the way, from what to wear to where to sit in the church. The small band of old friends, and the children of old friends, like Darren Traherne and the Lea boys, rallied around him. He wore a black Hersch's suit of his father's that Eve dug out from a cupboard, a white shirt and a brown tie and he sat in the front pew with the Trahernes. The mourners consisted of those who'd attended the one hundredth birthday party but also Dot John-stone from Birregurra, Dr Feast, Walker Lea who couldn't be at the birthday because he was in New South Wales, Simon Karinis from Minapre, and Min's sister's son Billy. The priest was Father Murray, the Minapre Hospital Catholic chaplain who Min had liked.

A small group of nuns from the convent sang ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd' from the side of the altar, as Ron had requested. Father Murray spoke not of Min's history but briefly of what he knew of her by their conversations of recent years. Predominantly, though, he stuck to the readings, and the requiem service, leaving the shrill voices of the nuns to carry the emotional tide. Like an old hand he entirely ignored the hard crackling sound of the microphone that was pinned to his vestments and which made itself heard every time he moved.

In the walled garden of the convent after the service, Ron stood like a stranger on an island of grass near the rhododendron beds, in the public realm of his mother's death, not knowing what to do with his hands or what to say, and unable to cease wondering who
the Molly was that Min had mentioned when last she spoke. One by one, people came over to shake his hand and share fond reminiscences about his mother.

The hearse sat for quite a time in the rose-gold parking bay next to the convent entrance, as the mourners lingered with Ron in the scented garden, waiting until they felt he was ready to move on. Bernard Feast eventually took the bewildered son's arm and guided him not to the hearse, which Ron had refused to travel in, but to Darren Traherne's Commodore station wagon.

Ron sat in the front passenger seat, with Darren's sister Barbara and Rhyll in the back, as Darren eventually steered the green station wagon down the Dray Road a minute or so behind the hearse, heading back towards town.

They were silent as they drove. Ron stared through the windscreen at the pitted road ahead, at the dustclouds the hearse had raised, which were slowly settling in front of them. As they passed the little quarry on the shoulder of the road before the Mexico Bend, it had to be pointed out to Ron that Ian and Brian Birdsong, and Frank Webb their offsider, were standing motionless on the bright limestone pile nearest to the road, still with their gloves on but with their hats removed and their heads bowed in respect. And then, as the station wagon rose up onto the high bend, with the ironbark gorge falling away on their left and a solid blue ocean now visible in front of them, a young kangaroo appeared on the road and bounced on ahead of the car for what must have been nearly a mile.

On the cliff where Ron's father had been buried, and Gluey and Bobby the Rover and the rest of the dogs, a slight easterly had harried the O'Leary gravediggers while the funeral had been taking place. They had dug deep with their shovels into the pink earth as instructed, preparing the grave for when the mourners arrived and Min would be put to rest. By the time Darren's Commodore pulled
in to the driveway, with the hearse's satin black duco filmed in dust and already parked ahead of them near the porch, the gravediggers had gone to the hotel for lunch, and the grave lay ready.

Ron, Darren, Rhyll and Barb got out of the car and made their way through the garden. Stepping up to the graveside, Ron winced to see familiar ground exposed again and leaned sideways onto Darren as they stood and waited for the others and, eventually, for the coffin to be carried across by the undertakers. When the small crowd had all drifted in with the priest, the coffin was brought, and was lowered with ceremonial words into the clifftop.

There was a brief pause before Rhyll Traherne stepped forward with difficulty from where she had been holding her granddaughter Barbara's arm. With a firm-set, determined face, Rhyll began to sing:

‘Only one muscat for me
Unless I can share it with you
For the bottle is bottomless when
You come to my house, old friend

‘Only one muscat for you
Unless you can share it with me
For the bottle is happy and gay
When I come to your house to play

‘Two young ladies living green
Fast and bold as in a dream
Two young ladies there will be
And a bottle of muscat for tea.'

As she sang the last words of the old trad jazz song she'd shared so many times with Min, a slurry of tears swept over her face in the
wind. She looked over the hole in the ground at Ron where he was being held up by her grandson and called out to him, crying, ‘Oh, Ronny, I'll miss her, boy.'

The easterly wrapped around their suits and dresses and tear-wet strands of hair stuck to their chilled faces. The old lady was everything that they liked about the world, everything that they never wanted to disappear, and now she was in the ground.

Ron's face was stark, dazed with grief as he stepped forward and threw a handful of dirt onto his mother's coffin. Then he stepped back and looked briefly out to sea where the water was now bruised blue-black under cloud. One by one the rest of the mourners also stepped forward and threw some ground and offered Min their words. And finally, when they had all paid their respects, Dr Feast and Father Murray began to usher everyone away.

T
he summer sun went missing for four days following Min's death, replaced instead by a peculiarly Victorian drop in temperature which spoke of autumn and a constant piling up of clouds out of the southwest. It was uncharacteristic of February and everyone remarked upon it, but they also agreed they felt somehow comfortable in the gloom.

They came and went from the house, bringing alcohol and food with them. Eve's stews were replenished with more potatoes and diced beef which Noel Lea had bought from Vern the butcher over in Colac. God was never mentioned until the Friday, when Darren Traherne, a little pissed, had asked Ron out of the blue if he believed. Before the old man had a chance to feel uncomfortable, Bob Elliot had cut in and said that there was no way that anyone living could possibly know whether to believe or not, to which Rhyll had said that without a doubt Min believed in God and that for sure she had gone to the greatest piss-up any of them could imagine. That broke the awkwardness and when no-one was looking Rhyll glared at her grandson.

Darren pulled himself together and left soon after, coming back three hours later to make amends. He brought half a pot of yabbies from the Poorool dam and a magpie bream which he got Ron to help him smoke near the barbecue just outside the porch door. He didn't mention another word about God because he knew Ron was struggling. He'd leave it for another time. He knew from conversations they'd had on their hunting trips in the dark of night that Ron was as curious as anyone else about the mysteries of death. Once when they were standing over a dead wallaby on the river flat, Ron had said that if wallabies had a god then their heaven would be shaped like a pouch. So he'd only asked the question of Ron earlier thinking that Min's death may have proved something like that to him. But it was stupid, he'd been too pissed. He'd sobered up now and concentrated on the fish.

For the four days that the visitors kept coming and the weather remained grey, Ron kept unusual hours, rising at seven or eight like normal people and getting to bed when the last person had left, usually at around midnight or one o'clock. He enjoyed the company and, naturally enough, grew anxious as the night wore on and the prospect of being alone drew near. Noel and Darren both offered to camp with him for a few days but he refused, that would have been stranger again, he thought. As a concession to his grief and fear, however, he decided that he wouldn't rise before dawn, that he would avoid time in the darkness alone. He had lived like a marsupial for all these years, gathering his food in the dusk and after, and in the dawn and before, but now in his darkest moment he reverted to the culture of human hours after all.

If he fell asleep in his mother's bed, which he did on the morning after her death and the morning after the funeral, he would wake to the light brocading the wall above his head through the tangle of the outside trees, just as he'd seen it do when bringing in tea and toast to Min on occasions through the years. On the morning directly after
her death he rose at the sight of this, as if he was in transgression, but on the Thursday after the funeral he lay there and cried, and looked at her two books on the bedside table and wondered again if Molly was his unborn sister, as he fingered the coffee coloured seashell.

With the coming of the weekend, and the crowds from the city to the coast, the weather broke and the sun showered itself all over the shoreline. The cliffs below the house were golden and fresh after the gloom, and the swell around King Cormorant and Gannet Rocks was turquoise and slick with shining bull-kelp bands. Ron woke before dawn and lay in Min's bed but did not sleep as the light came. On the contrary, he felt black as soil with the revealing of the sun. It was too soon.

That was the day, but for a visit from Nanette Burns in the morning and Sweet William at his usual hour, that the constancy of the procession of mourning visits ceased. Next door at Dom Khouri's he could hear the usual weekender activity but he knew from the cars in the drive that Dom himself was not there. He presumed he must have been away on business. He would've liked to have seen him.

With the house empty he found himself opening his mother's dresser and wondering about her clothes. He touched her frocks and remembered how, as a little boy, he'd watch her dress there in front of the mirror.