Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (31 page)

Gradually he refocused on the room, and on his wife watching him with a smile on the other couch.

‘I think it's time for tired husbands and fathers to go to bed,' she said to him lovingly.

He nodded and yawned, but an hour later, with Liz fast asleep in bed, he was still lying there, staring into space, the stormwater drain of his dream having opened up eastern suburban memories long stored away. Outside in the night, a possum seemed intent on dashing back and forth across the roof and further along the ridge the mopoke owl was hooting.

T
he wave was breaking to the east of King Cormorant Rock, rolling over the reef and peeling off into Horseshoe Cove. The swifts had arrived and were putting on a show. If the handful of surfers out there needed inspiration or an example to emulate, all they needed to do was look up into the sky from where they sat on their boards.

The swifts only arrived once a year and only stayed for a day or two. They appeared in the high strata, on their long journey south, before shearing down through the air to bank and curve with a speed unknown to the year thus far. They careened over the cliffs, skimming the edges of correa and groundsel, banking into the rose-gold slips and divots rising above the water, their wings sheening, tracing calligraphic arcs in the afternoon light, astonishing in their skill and drawing a further definition to the season.

Craig pulled into Ron's drive and sat for a minute as the Art of Fighting tune on 3RRR ended. At the last resounding note of the piece he waited as it was back-announced. He'd never heard
it before but already loved it. Hearing who and what it was, he gathered up his satchel from the passenger seat, popped a sugarfree piece of gum into his mouth and got out of the car.

He'd come straight from a property only a couple of miles along Two Pointers Way, a funky aubergine weekender just opposite the Heatherbrae carpark, where with his woodsplitter he'd knocked a new FOR SALE sign into the hard ground. Standing back to admire it, he couldn't help but imagine the name WILSON on the sign instead of BATTY. But maybe Liz had the right idea. Maybe the name should be something less obvious. RUTHVEN REAL ESTATE as she suggested, after Reef, or PAN ORAMA REAL ESTATE, or something like that.

Getting out of the Tribute now, he approached Ron's porch, but just as he did so he spotted the old man up beyond the woodpile at the back of the block and headed that way. He walked past the vegetables and across the yard. The air behind Ron where he stood at the woodpile was streaming with the diving and rising swifts. Craig felt a little guilty again as he caught the old man's eye and waved but reassured himself that all would be made clear once Ron had heard what he had to tell him.

Ron had been watching the swifts from the La Branca bench, and had got up only when an idea popped into his head that required a closer look at the woodpile. As the birds seared and swooped in the air all about him, plummeting over the edge of the cliff into the fathoms above the rocks below, Ron had begun to feel a share of their energy. His heart rate picked up and his mind grew clear with a solution. A rabbit trap would fix it. He wondered why he hadn't thought of it before.

So he walked back through the melaleuca gate to the woodpile and stood choosing a spot to disguise the trap that would injure the hand of anyone silly enough to pilfer his wood. He knew how to chock the steel jaws so that when it went off the teeth did not
entirely shut. He could well and truly injure his intruder without actually amputating anything. He could hurt them enough with the rabbit trap to make sure they never ever tried it again. That was for sure. It'd be like dunking a currawong in a barrel of water. A warning shot, but one that hurt. As Craig approached him, Ron had just placed the trap and was feeling a lot better for having found a solution to the problem.

‘Hello, Ron. Nice afternoon,' Craig said, thrusting out his hand.

Ron shook it. ‘Yair,' he said, in his slow drawl.

‘Getting some wood for the fire, eh?'

‘Yair. Why are you back?'

Craig stumbled on his reply but then quickly remembered that for once he actually had something concrete to tell Ron.

‘Well, I don't suppose I've come here to look at the birds, eh?'

‘No. I wouldn't reckon.'

‘Look, Ron, I've just popped in for another chat about your property.'

‘But I'm not selling.'

‘No, well, that's exactly what I've come to talk to you about. As I've said all along, we're just trying to do the right thing by you in what must be a hard time. That's why I thought you should know about a couple of things that directly affect your place.'

‘What couple of things?'

Without waiting for the answer, and still feeling buoyed by his rabbit-trap idea, Ron stepped away and motioned to Craig to follow him. It was obvious that this time the young fella had something of interest to say. They could talk in the open shed away from the woodpile where, for the moment, the dark steel of the trap was still showing.

Ron entered the open shed with Craig behind and motioned for him to sit at the card table. Now it was Craig whose attention was distracted. All about him where he sat was the accumulation of Ron's littoral and riparian existence. From light machinery to bushcrafted
traps and nets, to framed pictures and disused navigational aids, the shed was full to overflowing with sea-whitened and tannin-stained things. Hanging from a nail he could see an old Victorian-era brass plaque which read:
This Way To The Meteorological Station
. Under the plaque an old pump organ stood with its lid open. The top of the organ also served as a bench for clear plastic nail boxes.

The far reaches of the shed were dim and hard to see into but Craig sensed an endless miscellany of objects strewn and useful. The shed was crazy, a world unto itself. It smelt of petrol and ocean wrack and linseed oil and with his chambray shirt and bone slacks and his mobile phone on his hip, Craig felt straightaway out of place. Old Ron was more like a creature than a man and it seemed this shed was his burrow.

Much to Craig's surprise, Ron went over to a yellowing and rusty
Electrice
fridge and asked if he wanted a drink. Before Craig could refuse on the grounds that he was working, Ron had said, ‘I'll make it a portergaff. I know you're at work.'

They sat at the table sipping at six-ounce glasses. Ron didn't talk, he just pursed his lips and waited. Craig found to his surprise that the mixture of stout and lemonade tasted good.

‘You've got a lot of stuff in here,' he said, looking around the shed.

‘Not as much as before we had to move the thing.'

‘How do you mean?' The open shed looked to Craig as if it'd been there since the dawn of time.

‘It used to be over on what's now Dom Khouri's. It's only been here since we sold that block off.'

‘Gee. It must have been quite a move.'

Ron snorted through his nose a little in amusement and his eyes smiled. ‘Yairs,' he said, ‘took a bit of sortin' through.'

Craig shifted in his seat. ‘So did it sit where the Khouri house is now, Ron?'

‘No. It was out in front of that. In amongst the tea-tree. Good spot. My father built it there in 1922. Knocked it up himself, of course. Did everything himself, my father.'

‘I see.'

Now there was a silence in which Ron's gaze seemed to focus on something straight over Craig's shoulder. Craig turned around, to see what Ron was looking at, but there was nothing there, just the opening of the shed and beyond that the southern wall of the main house.

Once again, Ron pursed his lips and waited for his visitor to speak. This time Craig opened his gambit.

‘So anyway, Ron, it's come to our attention, through a tip-off from the shire, that there's gonna be a bit of change up here on the clifftop.'

On the dark side of the table where he sat, Ron felt an unpleasant tremor pass through him. He squinted at Craig now. ‘What do you mean by “change”?' he asked.

‘Oh, well, er, it seems they're planning to turn all this area around the Two Pointers into a marine park.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Well, it means it'll be illegal to fish in the ocean between Boat Creek and Heatherbrae.'

‘What would they wanna do that for?'

‘Oh, I suppose to preserve the ocean, Ron. For future generations.'

Ron was silent. Craig sipped his drink and licked the foam from his lip. ‘Yeah, well, the thing is, Ron, that as a result of the marine park they're gonna extend the coastal cliffwalk right past this place and on to the Meteorological Station. You would have heard that that's going to be turned into a museum.'

‘Yair. But why do they need to extend the walk?'

‘Oh, I suppose so people can look at the park, Ron. So they can enjoy the cliff, you know, the view of the Two Pointers and that.
And it'll link up the clifftop walk to the new climate museum, of course, and then on down to the rivermouth.'

Ron frowned disbelievingly. ‘But you can already walk through here,' he said. ‘It's public land, the cliff edge. There's always been a bit of a track through the tea-tree and the odd person coming through. Locals mostly, of course.'

‘Yeah, well, I think that's the point, Ron. The shire wants to make it more accessible. Wouldn't be your cup of tea, though, would it?'

‘Probably not.'

‘And what with your neighbour's potential involvement . . .'

Ron took a sip of his portergaff. Now he smelt a rat, and any buoyancy the swifts and the rabbit-trap inspiration had given him was fast dwindling.

‘What do you mean by my “neighbour's involvement”?' he asked quietly, with foam on his upper lip.

Craig laughed through his nose, in a friendly way but nervously. ‘Oh, you know, Ron, the shire's virtually bankrupt. It seems they're going to seek financial assistance for the cliffwalk extension from Dom Khouri,' he said.

‘Go on,' said Ron.

‘Well, we just think Dom Khouri's likely to get on board, being the community-minded person that he is. But we just wanted to give you the tip, Ron, and to let you know that we could make things simple for you if you decided the prospect of strangers looking in on you all day was a bit much. Colin owns a little place down on the riverbank, he said you've talked of moving down there from time to time. I don't know, we could just do a changeover, work out something fair. That way you wouldn't get stuck.'

Craig laughed again, this time a little more relaxed. ‘Despite what you might think, I'm not into being a real estate pest and badgering you, Ron. Just want to let you know where we're coming from. We just thought it was important that you knew what was
likely to happen and that you had another option. That you knew where you stood.'

Craig had signalled the end of the conversation and Ron was glad that he had. For a full two minutes, however, the two of them sat in as uncomfortable a silence as Craig had ever experienced. Eventually, Ron rose and they stepped out of the open shed and into the late afternoon light. Still neither of them said a word. Craig could see by the look on the old man's face that the information he had imparted was being sorted and sifted very carefully.

They stepped around a wheelbarrow full of compost and made their way around the house to the driveway.

‘Of course, it's entirely up to you what you choose to do, Ron, and we respect that,' Craig said, as he shook Ron's hand again near the porch door.

Ron nodded, and blinked slowly.

Craig walked the short distance to his car and opened the driver's door. With one foot up in the Tribute and one on the quartz of the driveway, he said, ‘Anyway, Ron, you know where we are. And thanks for the drink. It was good. Never had a portergaff before.'

Craig jumped up into the car and started it. Calling ‘Take care' out the window, he reversed the gold 4WD out of the driveway.

As Ron watched him go, up in the sky clouds began to gather around him. He raised his eyebrows where he stood, dumbfounded. The world seemed no longer able to leave him alone.

He was relieved when, just a few moments later, Sweet William's blue Subaru pulled into the drive for their nightly hand of cards.

R
on continued to sleep amongst the blue-green Warr nambool blankets of his mother's bed until the scent of her faded, and faded more, and it seemed as if she was almost not there at all. Still, he slept more soundly there than in his own bed, where the sense of Min's vanishing was too powerful to bear. As he lay down each night he felt the possibility remained that he too could slip away forever, gone with the saltspray, the stars and his mother's loving-kindness, off into the benign dark.

Amongst the blankets he would read the local paper over and over, recognising names, making mental notes of things for sale. He'd take up Min's Bible or
The Gift of Poetry
, not to read but just to hold, until sleep would beckon like a cove to enfold him. Inhaling deeply he would turn and lie facing the window and the surf, whose roar and hiss at night he knew almost as well as Min's voice.

Some nights, however, as the mothering scent amidst the blankets faded, he couldn't sleep at all. On such evenings he would go outside to the shed and try to play the organ but often that would
only distress him more. The keys and stops had become just cold ivory and dead timber. From their combinations he could conjure no music. The tunes he knew also seemed as wooden as the oak case of the organ itself, he was incapable of anything spontaneous to take their place.

One night in this harrowed state he sat on the cypress block beside Min's grave, to at least have the proof beside him. His father was there too, and the dogs. He watched the starlight reflected in a calm sea between King Cormorant and Gannet rocks. In the queerness of his distress and the faltering of his imagination, he began to think as if with shards of his child's mind. The reflections of the stars on the black swell held his gaze and it was almost as if Orion's belt itself were the three fallen buoys of some celestial cray-pot. He yearned to go out upon the water, to at least touch the sea of diamonds.