Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (36 page)

Liz tried to be his anchor and guide after that terrible day but she'd found it difficult. Since Craig's tears just wouldn't stop flowing and he'd stooped so low as to throw up in their bed, she reverted to tough love. That was when she recommended he pull himself together. The job at the cafe was a godsend. Before that he'd mope around the house, constantly returning to the same subject, and she thought he would drive her mad.

As soon as he began at the cafe she took up walking to the convent again. During these walks she came to the conclusion that Craig and herself were actually two very different people. Now that she finally felt strong, the last thing she needed was her husband losing his mind. Her dad had seen countless dead bodies during the war but hadn't fallen apart at the seams. She loved Craig, she knew her good counsel and discipline were helping him, but nevertheless she felt let down. It was the harried look he got in his eyes which disturbed her the most. It wasn't good for Reef to be around and she was glad that Craig had begun to feel the need to walk at night after dinner. While he was out, usually between eight and ten o'clock, she'd ply Reef with games and fun, and keep the mood on the up. Libby was OK – if anything she and Craig seemed to be getting on all right for the very first time – but it was Reef she was worried about. Life was just too complex. She wondered how people survived without any kind of spiritual practice. It was a mystery to her now how she herself had survived in the past.

Darren and Noel's plan was that as soon as they'd finished the structural side of the job they'd wrap the whole thing up in sheets of black insulation plastic and drive it up to Thias Roebuck's place to allow him to give it the finishing touches. Thias was in his sixties, with grey hair tied back in a ponytail and glassy blue eyes. He lived on the highest point of the hill up behind Minapre and was a timber master, a patternmaker by trade who'd gone his own way and ended up taking a respected place in a rarefied echelon of woodworking artists across the globe. Thias had known Ron McCoy from when he himself lived in Mangowak in the 1980s and was friends with them all, especially with Noel, with whom he shared a love of the paintings of Fred Williams.

Darren and Noel dropped their ‘baby' off one night at Thias Roebuck's workshop, stayed for a cup of tea and a piece of his partner
Maureen's fruit cake. They spent a tranquil half-hour chatting whilst listening to Thias's ingenious wind chimes, which hung all around the outside of the house. The chimes were fashioned out of sea stones and ploughshares; the hanging stone would hit the old metal with a bell-like resonance. Then they left him to it.

After a measured appraisal, Thias had told them he thought it'd take him a week or two to do what was needed, if that was all right by them. They agreed, almost embarrassed to think of Thias Roebuck having to bother himself with correcting their shoddy work. Although Darren was a builder by trade, not in his wildest dreams would he have ever shown Thias his own experiments with furniture or sculpture but, of course, this was different. They were doing it for Ron, who, like Thias, had preferred a slower way of doing things, a fastidious way that had almost become lost to the world.

As Darren and Noel drove back through the night, they began to speculate on how they could get back at Colin Batty for the pressure he'd exerted on Ron. It infuriated them that he was getting away with it. He'd stayed put in his office and had carried on his business as normal. Noel favoured slashing his tyres and disfiguring his real estate signs but, as Darren said, that wasn't really making a point.

By the time they'd passed through the hills at Poorool and were back down on the Dray Road heading for Mangowak, they were laughing their heads off. With an overwhelming and immediate need to vent some of their frustration, they stopped briefly back at Noel's to pick up a ladder, some beer, paint and brushes, and then headed for the carpark on the Heatherbrae cliff, where they sat and drank for a couple of hours until the whole town was asleep.

Half pissed they drove back across the main road and parked under trees near the kindergarten. They headed by foot with the ladder and paint along a shortcut towards Colin Batty's office. When they got there they rested the ladder against the large salmon-pink besser-brick wall on the eastern side of the real estate agency,
and Noel scaled the rungs with a can and brush and began to paint. It seemed to take forever, with Noel in a meticulous mood. Eventually, Darren managed to hurry him up by giving the ladder a good shake and threatening to leave him. The message took less than half an hour to finish but, with their adrenalin pumping and the fear of being caught, it seemed like an eternity to them both.

They slept late the next morning, with nothing urgent pressing now that the project was in Thias Roebuck's hands. Darren was woken by his sister Barbara just before nine, clicking through his house in the heels she wore to work, telling him what someone had graffitied on the big side wall of the estate agency.

‘You're kidding,' he said smugly from amongst the pillows. Barbara realised immediately. With a smile on her face she told him he was fuckin' crazy, and Darren said, ‘It's amazing what you get up to after a few beers, isn't it?'

All morning until the shire truck arrived at midday to clean the wall, people coming into town along the main road couldn't help but see the very large and very wonky words painted on the besser-brick wall in red paint: COLIN BATTY IS CORRUPT TO THE HILT! What with the drip lines and the ornate irregularity of Noel's drunkenly applied paint, it was a mad looking sign indeed. When Liz Wilson drove past on her way to check her post office box and saw it she was horrified. She concluded that Craig was responsible. It was one thing to go crazy in the privacy of your own home, she thought, but to make it public like that was just going way too far.

It took Thias Roebuck a full month to get back to Noel and Darren and by the end of that time, the two of them were edgy with anticipation. When finally he called and they drove back up the hill behind Minapre and laid eyes on the work that Thias had done, both of them agreed it was worth the wait. Darren and Noel were
effusively grateful for the vast improvements Thias had made. The craftsman just stared at them deadpan in the midst of all the thanks, as if suddenly bored with the project and ready to move on. Afterwards they again enjoyed a cup of tea and a piece of fruit cake with Thias and Maureen, and listened once more to the sea-stone and ploughshare chimes. Then they went on their way. Thias and Maureen stood at their front door with their two Jack Russells, waving goodbye under the outside light.

Now they had to paint the thing. Most of that would be done by Noel, with Darren only able to help here and there, when a whole plane of colour was required, for instance, or the lacquer needed applying. Nan Burns kept them company at nights in the barn as Noel slaved away, and together the three of them devised exactly the story of what should be painted and where. They delved back into their past and into Ron's, and at the end of it all, when they stood back after a full ten days and nights of applying the paint, and then the lacquer, they felt almost as if someone else had cast the spell. There in front of their eyes, in three-dimensional reality, was the tale of so much that had gone on, for them, for their parents and grandparents, and of course for Ron. What had started out as merely a suggestion by Dom Khouri had, by dint of weeks of hard work in the barn, become a real thing. All that was left was to put it where it was intended, to reveal it forever to the world.

When Darren arrived at his grandmother Rhyll's to pick her up on the day of the unveiling of Dom Khouri's bequest, he found her sitting at her kitchen table drinking muscat with an unexpected guest. Trumpeter Carson, Martin Elliot's old fiddle-playing lodger and barman, who hadn't set foot in Mangowak for over twenty years, had turned up unannounced on Rhyll's doorstep that very morning. Trumpeter was a tall old man with a fine head of silver hair brushed back from his brow and a weathered complexion from the
many years of an itinerant life. Darren was barely old enough to remember him, but he'd often heard the old timers remark at parties that it was a shame Trumpeter Carson wasn't still around to play a few tunes. He greeted Trumpeter warmly and then, glancing across at the brown violin case and swag sitting on the seagrass matting near the door, assured him that his timing was impeccable.

Rhyll had already told Trumpeter Carson about Ron and now he remarked to Darren how greatly saddened he was by the news. He said that, as he recalled it, Ron always had a streak of independence about him. As proof he said that it wasn't until he himself had lived at Martin Elliot's hotel for seven years that he found out Ron was a dab hand at the harmonium. ‘And there was I,' he laughed, ‘making a fool of myself in the bar with my fiddle every night.' Rhyll scoffed at that and reiterated to her grandson what a great musician Trumpeter was. She then said she agreed with Trumpeter about Ron's independent streak, but only partially. ‘Ron was left high and dry without Min around the house,' she told him.

Darren filled Trumpeter Carson in about the unveiling that afternoon and, after a few minutes of pleasant chat about Trumpeter's travels since he'd left Mangowak, the time came to leave the house.

As Darren and Rhyll and Trumpeter Carson drove along the Dray Road towards Ron's place in Darren's green Commodore station wagon, they passed Craig and Liz Wilson walking along the road. Darren gave a steering wheel wave with his index finger as he went past and Craig, looking around to see whose car was coming, waved back.

‘Who was that?' Liz asked.

‘Oh, they're friends of Ron's. They'll be there,' Craig replied.

He'd taken the afternoon off work and Liz had cancelled a trip to Melbourne with Carla at his request. Craig felt he needed his wife beside him if he was going back to the scene of his nightmares, to stand amongst Ron's friends who no doubt would know of the role
he had played in Colin Batty's pursuit of the clifftop land. Liz was reluctant, but as Craig pointed out, if she didn't accompany him he wouldn't be able to front up himself and that would only exacerbate the whole problem. He already felt paranoid around town, thinking that everyone was judging him behind his back. If he didn't accept the invitation to attend the little gathering the die would be cast – he'd be on the margins in Mangowak forever.

As they walked past the Leas' place on the corner, with its tottering post and rail fence, its old pine trees at the gate, the palomino mare tethered to an iron garden stake amongst all the slab bark outbuildings, and horse gear and firewood stacks lying all about, Liz said: ‘That place gives me the creeps.'

‘That's Noel Lea's house,' Craig told her. ‘He's an artist. He's Walker Lea's brother, your yoga teacher.'

‘Walker Lea's brother?' Liz said incredulously. ‘Then I've seen some of his pictures. They're hanging at the Vrindarvan Centre.'

‘Well, there you go.'

‘They're really good.'

‘Well, see that big barn at the back there? That's where he does them.'

‘You're kidding, aren't you?'

‘No. Why would I be?'

Liz stopped by the driveway and looked across the property towards the barn. She'd always hated what a mess the place on the corner was. Rusted and half-broken things lay about, barrels, garden pots, fridges, wooden trailers piled with tins of paint and other junk. Dogs barked and chooks clucked and bickered somewhere out of sight. A huge discoloured tugboat rope hung down like a giant noose from the crook of one of the old pines.

‘That's weird,' Liz said, turning back to the road and continuing beside her husband. ‘I was thinking of buying one of his pictures for you. And he lives there!'

Despite his nervousness when he had knocked on the barn door that rainy night a few weeks before, Craig had also been excited at the prospect of being inside the fence of Noel's place. Even though he hadn't let him inside the barn, Noel had been warm towards Craig, which had come as a relief and had made him feel a little better about everything. He could see what Liz meant about the ramshackle look of the place, but he disagreed. And her perspective annoyed him.

They walked around the Dick Lake Sanctuary with moorhens scurrying away from them on the path, and began to scale the road up the hill towards the cliff. A Britz campervan came slowly down the road past them, the driver distracted, reading maps and pointing, wandering from gutter to gutter as he descended the hill.

‘We should do that again,' Liz said to Craig. ‘We should do New Zealand.'

Craig nodded. The last time they'd been on a camper van holiday Libby was only six years old and Reef was one. From memory it had been nothing but difficult. But maybe it was time to do it again. It'd be a lot cheaper than going to Prague.

‘Yeah, that could be good,' he said, putting his hand lightly on her back.

As they climbed the hill, Craig's hand fell away. He had a sense that any thread holding himself and Liz together was now tenuous and frail. He had been vulnerable, deranged even, but an awful thing had happened. What he had seen in the cave would stay with him forever. And for all her great advice, she wasn't showing him much compassion. He needed her right now and there she was beside him. But she felt cold and impatient. Distant. She was fulfilling a duty, that was all. Something between them was lost. He feared it would never return.

A few cars passed them on the way up the hill and, as they reached the top and looked to their right down Merna Street, they saw about ten or so parked outside the McCoys'. Craig felt sick in the stomach at
the view down the street, where only a few months ago he had been badgering the poor old fella to sell his home. When he had found the body in the cave his self-loathing was instantaneous. He was a mess when the police arrived and they'd had to calm him down just so he could show them what he'd found. Then he'd staggered away and thrown up amongst some rocks. The police had told him gruffly to sit tight until they'd attended to their duties.