Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (28 page)

The water was still warm, despite the fact that it was now officially autumn. Liz leant down into it and let it come up like a frill to her neck. She pissed and felt her own warmth around her. Then she slid horizontal and breaststroked across the marbling slack, parallel with the waves. As the whitewater reached her she ducked and then rose again and continued stroking, looking east as she did so, back down the stretch of beach to the Meteorological Station on the headland.

Craig watched Reef surfing and felt buoyed by Liz's reaction. Thank God I'm married to a positive woman, he told himself.

Now he was reflecting on how perfect the timing was. Pretty soon Reef would be ready for secondary school and this way they could comfortably send both the kids to Blackwoods, the private college in the forest on the outskirts of Colac. And Liz was happier now, with her new direction. As far as Craig was concerned a woman was a spiritual creature and he'd always been attracted to
nourishers
, as his brother Richard called them.

As she swam towards the Meteorological Station Liz was thinking how her new spirituality would be in perfect balance with Craig taking over the business. If they could be rich and healthy and spiritually aware all at the same time, to her way of thinking, that would constitute success. Life was all about balance, diversity. She knew that now.
What's the point of being rich if you remain in ignorance? There was no point. At Vrindarvan they stressed the importance of balance as the pathway to awareness. And that balance is achieved through the breath. Well, as Craig made the money she would breathe for the whole family, she decided. And she would be an even better mother than she'd been so far.

She'd swum far enough. She stood up in the water and turned back towards Craig and Reef. Slowly she walked in thigh-deep water towards them. The sun was setting low in front of her over Turtle Head. She could see the cattle browsing on the steep cleared slope and above that one kangaroo standing on the hill-line in silhouette, watching. In the foreground, Reef had tucked the board under his arm and was walking in towards his father. She wished Libby was there with them at that moment. She was such a challenge, that girl, it drove Liz crazy. She couldn't remember being quite that difficult at her age. She wished she could help but anything she said made it worse. It was such a shame. Libby was at home staring at the computer while the three of them were sharing a special moment in paradise.

It's funny, Liz thought as she reached the beach and trod the crab-stippled sand back to her husband and son, just how close together heaven and hell can be.

R
on stroked the canoe soundlessly along the skin of the river until he was under the bridge. In the echoey dimness he manoeuvred the boat to sit side-on to the current, the stern occasionally tapping the concrete base of the pylons. The metal depth gauge on the town side of the bridge confirmed the river was low, low enough for the base of the pylons to be exposed. A deluge of rain should be heading their way any day now.

From the canoe looking south down the channel towards the dune bar, the riverflat on either side was exposed in a crust of salt, a brindle of withered birdbone, burnished shell, pale gold weed and beige flotsam. He could see an egret poking in the shallows at the far end where the paperbarks rose above the bearded heath, and a group of terns pausing still on the wide crust. Their black caps, slightly bowed where they stood, were always easy to count. There were twelve of them. An even dozen.

In the grey rafters of the bridge above his head, swallows finicked on the ledges, disturbed by his presence, and only fifty yards
downstream a little pied cormorant was diving for mullet with some success. He had noticed earlier that the river was full of baby mullet. At four or five inches they were favourites for the smaller cormorants and the terns, and the egret as well, for that matter.

Since Min's death he took refuge with the birds where previously he might only have been hunting. Leaning back against the L-shape of styrofoam he used for a seat he wished he could fly away too, up beyond the hill-lines and and the treelines and the fleeting clouds and never come back.

The waterbirds had an old store of land and sky nous. They were often silent and quizzical. The last thing he felt like now was more words. His grief was in the doing, like fingers untying a knot. The way the birds moved and scoured the river was their language and you needed eyes more than ears to understand. If you watched, you hardly even had to interpret their behaviour. It was plain obvious after a while. When you'd got to know that standing on a rock or an overhanging branch for hours with wings open was not a sign of gluttony or laziness, it was a necessity of digestion. And that the swallows like to draw their nimble flight against the sky at dusk for no other reason than that the air is cool and easy to glide through. Life was obvious. Death was too. But what happened afterwards was definitely not.

It had been Ron's inclination to stay put at home. But after a fortnight of eating out of tins or from what friends had brought him, and feeling alternately numb, angry and inconsolable beside her grave, he decided he might as well make himself useful and do his grieving as he went. He resumed his usual hours – up at four and in bed by nine – and tried to come to terms with the fact that what he was catching and gathering would be eaten by him alone. When he arrived back at the house in the morning for breakfast he took to listening to the radio to fill the silence at the table, the silence like a drought, waterless, loveless, his being as empty as Min's chair on
the other side of the table-top. The radio was rubbish, but it was better than that emptiness.

Now he flicked the canoe around with his paddle to keep himself in view of the cormorant and the egret. He breathed in and righted himself against a sudden tendency to just lie down in the boat, to drop the paddle into the water and let sadness ferry him away.

This impulse to collapse, to stop, was a constant. It had taken him days and days after the funeral to realise that all the things that needed doing around the house were actually the tasks that could keep him upright. After gentle prodding from Sweet William he set about sawing four great cross-sections of cypress he'd been drying out down the eastern side of the house. Cocooned in the noise of the chainsaw he thought of nothing at all and then for some reason of Roma McPherson from Moriac. In the roar of his yellow McCulloch he began to saw carelessly through the cypress, still angry at her rebuttal so many years before and almost daring the resiny cypress to kick back or the chainsaw to rear up and savage him. He could still see every thing as though it was yesterday, her branking out of the church and ignoring him after he'd driven all the way out there to meet her. She'd ended up marrying a cow-cocky and had eight children. That was, in the end, some kind of solace, proof they wouldn't have been suited. Eight children was about six too many, Ron thought.

He sat motionless in the canoe, listening to cars rippling over the bridge above him as the cormorant continued to dive. In a space at the bow was a plastic crate half full of eels. He'd caught them before dawn on lines tied to upside-down beer bottles he'd left bobbing in the reeds. Occasionally now he could hear the eels thudding against the sides of the crate, gloshing the water he'd provided them with.

It was getting on to breakfast, almost eight o'clock, but instead of rowing towards the mouth and home he just sat there, watching the birds, listening to the eels slap the crate, and the echoing river lapping at the sides of his canoe under the bridge.

The pied cormorant rose from the water, flew away heavy to digest the mullet. Ron pushed off from a pylon with his paddle and began to stroke oceanward again, into the exposure of the bared estuary. From there he could glance over, across a wide barrier of sedge and grasses, at the small cluster of buildings in the riverflat on the other side of the road. He could see a minibus parked outside the old crafts gallery and tradesmen coming and going from the wood-yard – it all seemed a long way away, they looked like ants. In and out the tradesmen went, under the wood-yard's solitary Norfolk pine, stopping to chat and then pressing on, waiting to turn out of the carpark with their blinkers on, running into the bakery to get the paper or a bun. The slight plashing of his paddle, as smooth as it was, was much louder in his ears than all that activity. Ron watched from deep in the enigma of the river, as the crow flies, less than a kilometre away.

Now more than ever the natural world stood no comparison with the world of men. It was unfussed, simple. It remained completely oblivious to Min's passing and that was a great comfort. He could enter a realm where no-one's passing warranted a ceremony. The only ceremony worth noting was the rising and setting of the sun. The growing of the moon. The changing of the wind. The ocean rain flowing in. Every ripple, every frisking of wings and blinking of gills, was testament to the fact that nothing ever ends.

He paddled through the elbow until he was parallel with the dune bar, its gnarled old paperbarks full of roosting cormorants with jet-black wings spread to the inland. He could see their gullets working, even from down on the river.

When he reached the rivermouth, the sandbar was solid between the tea coloured shallows and the sea. He dragged the canoe by its rope up onto the sand and bumped it up the timber steps of the path to his ute. He took out the crate of eels and tucked them up into the corner of the tray under the cabin window and then slid the canoe
in lengthways. His ute had a long tray but still the canoe stuck out a couple of feet over the tailgate once he'd closed it.

Turning into Merna Street, he saw a gold coloured 4WD parked under his Belvedere sign and a young man with a receding hairline in a neat blue shirt and pants leaning against it talking into a mobile phone. As he turned into his driveway the man looked in his direction and waved as if he'd been waiting for him.

Ron pulled the car up at the front porch and switched off the engine. Getting out he saw the young man walking up the driveway towards him with a smile on his face. He looked to Ron like some sort of salesman.

‘G'day. Ron McCoy, is it?' the man asked as he approached the ute. For a minute Ron thought that he might be a copper so he said nothing, just stared.

‘I'm Craig Wilson, Ron, from Batty Real Estate. I think I met you in the pub a while back with Colin. Sorry if it's a bad time.'

He put out his hand for Ron to shake. Ron did so and said hello.

Craig nodded at the black paddle in the tray of the ute and said, ‘Been for a bit of a row, hey?'

‘Yair,' said Ron, distracted. He wanted to get the eels out of the tray of the ute but it was against his instinct to do that with anyone else around. Especially this fella.

‘You been fishing?' Craig asked.

Ron ignored the question and looked at his visitor as if to ask him to get to the point. But Craig wasn't to be hurried.

‘There's a few salmon around at the moment, hey, Ron? I got a couple myself the other night after work.'

‘Whereabouts?'

‘Off the beach there under Turtle Head. With pilchards.' Craig looked into the tray of the ute and said: ‘Get any this morning?'

Ron ignored the question, but thought it miraculous that the eels were still. ‘What do you want?' he asked bluntly.

Craig smiled and put his hand up as if to say he didn't mean to pry. He immediately liked the old man, and the atmosphere of his land, but there was something private and childlike in Ron's eyes that he was unwilling to disturb.

‘Oh, I've just come for a chat to see if there's anything we can help you with.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I don't know, Ron . . . if you've got any questions you need answering. Basically it's just a visit to let you know that we're here if you need us.'

‘Why would I be needing you?'

‘Well, I know you've suffered a bereavement recently. Colin's told me what a great old lady your mother was.'

Ron stared at him, then looked away.

‘You might be looking at doing some investing, maybe a land portfolio or something. Who knows, you might even be thinking that all this up here's a bit too much to cope with. You might want to simplify things, as a quality of life issue. We just want you to know that if you need a hand with anything, anything at all, then we're here for you.'

Craig could sense that Ron was unimpressed. Feeling uncomfortable and deciding that he wasn't going to get much further that day, he pulled his business card out of his shirt pocket and offered it to Ron.

‘This is my card, anyway. Give us a call if you've got any questions, eh.'

Ron took the card, too shy to refuse it. He looked down and read: ‘Batty Real Estate, est. 1982 “The Seachange Property Specialists”', followed by Craig's name, contact numbers and email address. As he peered at the words and numbers arranged elegantly on the card, Ron felt a wave of pleasure at his own importance. Looking back up at Craig, he found him having a good look around the block. Ron turned sideways on the quartz of his driveway and followed his line of sight.

‘Geez, it's a good spot up here, Ron,' Craig said sincerely, his eyes ranging over the vegetable gardens to where the woodpile and the melaleuca gate provided a foreground for the sea and the Two Pointers. ‘How long you been here again?'

‘Born here,' Ron said.

Craig shook his head in admiration. ‘Gee,' he said, ‘you must have seen a bit over the years.'

Ron nodded.

‘And you used to own next door as well, didn't you?'

Ron nodded again and glanced over to where he could just see the dry-stone wall and the blue awning of Dom Khouri's bar through his screen of fruit trees. ‘Yair,' he said.