Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (5 page)

Liz had always been a nature lover, even as a girl. Growing up on a half-acre in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne she'd planted bulbs and herbs with her father and trained a pungent honeysuckle all
the way down the side fence to overcome the smell of the next-door neighbours' pigeons. She loved watching wildlife docos too, and
All Creatures Great and Small
. She'd quickly realised when they moved to Riverview Drive that the ground was rough, and that because they were high on the slope of the ridge all the topsoil had long disappeared down into the valley. The garden was going to take some work. But with a good mulching and plenty of pea straw she saw it come good. She'd grown mostly natives in the front and vegetables out the back. That year was their third in Mangowak and it had been the best for vegies: lots of basil and lettuces and beans and squash and cherry tomatoes. She'd planted a passionfruit vine over the little pergola near the back door, and a lemon tree. The garden looked quite lovely, and only recently she'd watched the agapanthus flower for the first time along their front boundary. The violet fronds which mirrored the sky on a good day had given her quite a thrill.

Now, however, the very thought of the daylight outside her back door made her nauseous. She lay on the couch, with Libby coming and going between her room and the other couch, and let the movies and the books secrete her off from what all of a sudden seemed a parched and abrasive location.

When she couldn't sleep or distract herself she pulled the blankets up to her chin and asked Libby to make her things: a plate of nachos, porridge, some popcorn. It was hard. She felt phobic now. The ground was sharp and would hurt you if you fell. If you brushed past a tree or a bush it would invariably scratch. Everything prickled. There were no bears or lions but everything was serrated, inhospitable. As if the land was rebuffing you. Telling you to nick off and be gone. The russet and sage of the forest leaves, the changing colours of the ocean, the flowering gums, the wheaten grass flickering in the breeze on the riverflat were all Liz had focused on but now, in one searing moment, it had changed. Like a light had gone out, she saw
black shadows for the bush now, ashen awkward shapes, leering and irregular, and all with a potential to cut or scratch. There were a million different flying and hopping insects out there, carrying all types of unfathomable venom and pain, and she was so soft and exposed, with no hide, only bare and pale skin, and with no possible way of knowing what might be just around the corner.

After a week she would sit up but still with a blanket over her legs and still with drawn blinds and nausea and anxiety, her poisoned foot propped on the coffee table or pointing at the plasma screen, drinks at her side, books and magazines and the sickly daylight outside, on the other side of the blinds. The range of her dark thoughts continued to expand and soon she was doubting not only the landscape but even her marriage as well. She had first met Craig when travelling through Europe in her early twenties. They hadn't clicked then but ten years later when they bumped into each other back in Melbourne, things were a lot different. He was running a cute little cafe in Hawthorn and she was looking after Libby on her own in a small flat in Kew. Now she wondered whether the whole relationship was just pure pragmatism on her behalf. She had had these thoughts before but this time the room would swirl with them and she would have to rush to the toilet. This episode would pass, she tried to tell herself, the doubt and nausea would go, the weirdness, and the black thoughts about the landscape.

Craig was patient and let her find her own way. He didn't bother her with his own preoccupations, nor with questions about how she was feeling. He knew something strange was going on but to the kids he just said she was poisoned. And that they should always wear boots when they went for walks in the bush. He talked with Colin Batty at work about what had happened and Colin assured him Liz was bitten by a skipjack. Colin recommended she carry something called an EpiPen with her at all times, especially in the bush. The skipjacks were bastards, Colin said, and the EpiPen was
an adrenalin shot that cured any allergic reaction. Apparently a lot of people around Mangowak carried them in their glove boxes. When Craig told his boss that the tests in the hospital had shown Liz wasn't bitten by skipjacks, Colin Batty just laughed. ‘What the fuck else do you think it was then?'

After another week, Liz was up off the couch again, and after making her way around the house, gingerly at first, she managed to venture out to the general store for supplies. A few days after this she met her friend Carla for coffee and baguettes at the cafe but didn't even mention the ant bites. It was too weird to talk about, she decided, too embarrassing.

Liz had met Carla during her first few weeks in Mangowak, when Carla had advertised in the local paper for someone to design a flyer for the Italian lessons she planned to conduct up and down the coast. They were both recent arrivals to the area and had got on well. Now, while Liz had been through her ordeal, Carla had been flat out organising a petition to allow dogs on the beaches between six and eight in the mornings and nights after the Brinbeal shire had brought in a blanket ban on dogs only a fortnight earlier.

‘Poor Max,' Carla was saying. ‘He's been stuck in the yard all week. It's not right.'

It crossed Liz's mind that, given where they lived, the beach was not the only place to walk dogs but as she went to say this to Carla something blanched inside her at the thought of the bush and instead she said: ‘You should ring up Alex Harte and get on the ABC. Remember all the stuff he did on the flying foxes in the Botanical Gardens when people wanted to cull them? I think he's an animal lover.'

‘That's a great idea,' said Carla. ‘If 774 were talking about it the shire couldn't do anything but agree.'

‘Especially if it was on Alex Harte.'

‘Exactimento!' Carla exclaimed.

It was late spring now and more cars were around, daytrippers and international tourists enjoying the Ocean Road and its views. From where Liz and Carla sat at the cafe they could see the cars passing by and the black slate roofs and white limestone chimneys of the Meteorological Station in the background, all of which was keeping Liz from giving way to a constant inner flinching that her ordeal seemed to have created in her nervous system. Carla was talking about prospective lovers and that also distracted Liz. She herself told Carla a little bit about Craig, making up a story about how they hadn't had sex since they fucked in the shower a fortnight ago and Carla told her she'd give her left tit to have had sex so recently.

And then Liz got tense again. It was the contrast between Carla's unabashed lust for life and the inexplicable terror she'd experienced in the last three weeks. She felt a gloom in her head now, like a cloud over the sun, and an underflurry of panic. She focused her eyes on the shiny slant of the roofs of the Meteorological Station to see if that would help. She didn't want to talk to Carla about what she was feeling, it was too vague and weird and it would pass, and Carla was looking so vibrant, her black hair glossy like a brochure on the sunlit terrace of the cafe.

Two days later, Liz powerwalked for the first time since the bites. She forced herself to do it. But only on the beach. She drove her car down to the Boat Creek jetty and got out and walked the low tide. She didn't overdo it. Just a couple of k's. But it was the only way to go. Get back on the horse. Her foot felt fine. That wasn't the problem. As she walked she looked up at the she-oaks on the high ridge running parallel with the beach and thought they looked ugly. Hairy and somehow ghoulish. She'd been tempted to bring the headphones but resisted. She hated those idiots who couldn't go for a walk on the beach without headphones. She wasn't about to succumb now. No, her dumbbells would do fine.

Out on the waves she could see the gannets flying and diving into the water. Under the cloud cover she worked up quite a sweat and could almost have gone for a swim if she'd brought her bathers. But she was still a little delicate for that. Not like those birds. She marvelled at the gannets' sheer force.

Approaching Breheny Creek, where she planned to turn around and walk back along the beach the way she'd come, she noticed a large dark rock on the sand in the lip of the tide, directly opposite the tannin-coloured creek. Striding out with her arms tolling the rhythm, she shook her head in mild disbelief that she hadn't noticed such a big thing right at the mouth of the Breheny Creek before. And just as she was about to spin off into another anxious train of thought about how unsure she had suddenly become in the landscape, she thought she saw the rock move. She moved closer and, yes, it moved again, this time turning around in her direction. That wasn't a rock. That was a seal, she realised. She halted and dropped her dumbbells to her sides.
A seal! I've never seen a seal before!
she cried inside with excitement.

Liz stood twelve feet away from the dark slickened creature as it was awakened from slumber by her presence. Grumpy at being disturbed, it turned to her and flopped itself towards the waves a fraction. It opened its large mouth and Liz could see its teeth and big whiskers. And then it barked at her. A bark like a deep, gruff ‘NO'. A ‘GO AWAY'. Liz was completely absorbed. She got down on her haunches and stared. She wished she had her camera. The seal barked again. Liz was wide-eyed. It was just like some kind of dog. She couldn't get over how much like a dog it was.

Because she could tell by its movement that it could never catch her even if it chose to try, she wasn't scared of the seal at all. Just exhilarated. It was so
cute
. It turned its head back away from her and flopped forward again, moving further into the water until it was finally afloat and swimming out through the swell. Now it
shone like a tyre in the seawater. Liz stood up. She watched as the seal slipped expertly through the water until it was out beyond the last wave. Then just as she was about to turn and start heading back she caught a glimpse of its skin, shining wet in the sun with a big diamond-shaped glitter, riding a wave back towards the shore. It flicked off the wave and began to tumble in the marbled waterslack between the waves.

‘It's playing!' Liz said aloud.

The seal flipped and flopped and shone and surfed in the waves and Liz's smile grew wider and wider. Then, without her noticing quite how, the seal was gone. Her heart began to slow. After standing still and watching to see if it would reappear, she turned and walked at a normal pace back along the beach. She didn't bother to toll the dumbbells, in fact she was too preoccupied with what she'd seen even to think of it. I've never seen a seal before, she kept thinking. Oh, if only Reef had been with me. He would've been beside himself.

Liz walked excitedly back towards Boat Creek. With her jaw still open, she gazed up at the high ridge of the land beside her as she went. Without realising it the she-oaks that were so ugly not long before had, for the time being, become beautiful again. Arriving home she went straight to the computer to go online. She sent a group email telling local people she knew about the seal. ‘But if you see it,' she told them, ‘and you're walking your dog, stay well back. As cute as he is seals like that can carry distemper so don't go anywhere near it.' She signed off, ‘Take care. Liz Wilson.'

‘. . . we've got several people wanting to join the conversation here on 774 ABC Melbourne and ABC Victoria, on the usual numbers . . .'

‘You are so slick at doing that.'

‘Well, I'm doing it a bit often, Trevor, but it's important that people know who they're listening to. We get a lot of new listeners . . .'

‘Oh. Absolutely.'

Craig was parked on the Ocean Road at Boat Creek watching the surf. The water was a dark green and the waves were in-between-ish. Kind of messy. He knew he wasn't going in but he liked to just sit there anyway and watch, while he listened to the radio.

Only a couple of grommets were out in the water, bobbing about to the east of the jetty. He flicked the radio off. What a bunch of sad old bastards, he'd been thinking to himself as Neville Brennan and his guest waxed on about a music mentoring program for baby boomers called
Weekend Warriors
. It offended Craig the way that guy Bob, the mentor, talked about music as if it was some kind of twelve-step program. For fat old lonely guys. He found it so patronising.
When Craig played music it wasn't for camaraderie or because he was bored, quite the opposite. He played guitar in what he considered to be his better moments, and when he did play, all sense of age and time evaporated into the melody and lyrics.

Craig was in his late thirties, a bit younger than the target age for
Weekend Warriors
, and just young enough for his skin to crawl at how daggy and unsuspecting those baby boomers were; but he had grown up with two older brothers and an older sister so he knew his James Taylor and his Cream, he could distinguish Melanie from Joni Mitchell, and actually he didn't mind that sixties music at all. But he reckoned for him it was a choice, not just the generation he'd been born into.

The tide was coming in and the sun was dropping. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to play in a band. He pictured himself and a few guys sitting around in the big room under the house on Riverview Drive, bantering amongst amps and leads, sipping stubbies. He imagined singing Crowded House's ‘Better Be Home Soon' the way Johnny Cash might've, with gravitas, in a kind of underwater slow motion, with a haunting pedal steel guitar in the background. He began to sing it, sitting there behind the salt-laden windscreen of his 4WD. Then he sang ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather' like on the tape he had of a Dylan concert in France. He wrenched his mouth about to get the twang and whine right and he played with Dylan's phrasing, which was notorious for being so tricky you couldn't even attempt to sing it exact.