Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (9 page)

Ron blushed again, reminded of Dom Khouri's wealth and stature.

‘It'll be your land. You can build what you like,' he said bluntly.

‘Don't worry, Ron. Either way we'll work something out with the shed, won't we?'

‘Yairs, we'll work something out.'

After Dom Khouri had gone and Ron told Min about the conversation concerning the shed, Min pointed out to her son that he wouldn't be comfortable playing music on someone else's land because he would be overheard. Ron hadn't even thought of that, so accustomed was he to his mother and the birds being his only audience. But she was right. The shed would have to be moved. There was no way around it.

That night Ron and Min had crème de cacao in Papa Mahoney's liqueur glasses to celebrate the handshake agreement Ron had made with Dom Khouri by the gate as he was leaving. They felt sad but excited. And when he thought of his father, Ron felt proud
that he was looking after Min. Min, on the other hand, didn't spare a thought for Len McCoy once that evening. There was no point dwelling. She was getting very old, she was with her dear son, and things had taken a happy turn.

‘He's the nicest millionaire I've ever met,' she said to Ron as they made the toast.

‘Nicer than me, Mum?' Ron drawled, with a gleam in his eye.

That night Ron McCoy went to bed half drunk and proud of having struck a deal with a man like Dom Khouri. He fell asleep smiling and dreamt of becoming a partner in Dom Khouri's construction empire. Specialising in sheds.

O
nce he'd decided that he wouldn't be comfortable playing the organ where all Dom Khouri's family and friends could hear him, Ron got cracking and moved the shed straightaway. He rang Dom Khouri and told him that he could begin the house excavations as soon as he'd been granted the planning permits. But what a load of gear Ron had to move! A whole lifetime of stowing, and his father's whole married lifetime before that, stuff everywhere, strewn in an order that no-one could expect to fathom.

He hitched his wooden trailer to the ute, drove in through the flowering gums on what was now to be Dom Khouri's land, and began to fill it with whatever was first at hand. Under the boobial-las nearby he threw all the things that were destined for the tip.

He realised that six cracked plastic plumbing pipes on a painted treated pine frame, which he'd rigged up for hydroponic vegetables in 1977, had to go. Not to mention the three huge Goodyear tractor tyres from the days when his dad and he used to make their rattling way from the cliff down to Mr Bolitho's paddocks in the
valley on the Massey Ferguson. And what about the monstrous vibroplate Ron had borrowed from Russ Urquhart out on Rifle Butts Road three days before the cops came and fetched Russ for drowning his missus in a water tank. The bloody thing weighed a ton. To get it on the trailer, Ron had to throw down a ramp and haul the vibroplate across the irregular, rooty ground and then on up the ramp by rope. He'd be glad to see the end of the haunted bloody thing.

But he kept far more than he threw out. Rolls of every different type of fencing wire, barbed wire, high tensile, ringlock, hinged joint, strainers and stays, piles of music books that Leo Morris had given him but that he'd never read, kitchen chairs, a red and white postman's scooter, punnets and jars and plastic tubs full of fertilisers and plant food and dead worms and nails and door hinges, piles of besser bricks which he was always planning to use to build another more ‘permanent' shed; four card tables, one ripped old black one which his father used to use as a washstand and three red ones in rickety but good order; drop-nets, drum-nets, nets on twine and nets with fluorescent orange handles, old life-jackets of the same colour but streaked with riversilt and casuarina dust, three different anchors, rakes, spades, three whipper-snippers and various other tools broken or otherwise, an ICE-RITE bait fridge, two full-size three-in-one record players and one small pink portable turntable with a detachable speaker-lid that Min bought second hand at a Woody's Junction fair and which he preferred to the other bigger ones; a candlestand, a bamboo xylophone, fuel cans and glass demijohns, redgum beams, rolls of black irrigation hose, mission-brown lattices, mowers, folding garden chairs, empty shark-grey gas cylinders, milk crates, fishing crates he'd found washed up on the shore from vessels out at sea, two identical chainsaws, spare chains for the chainsaws, a welding helmet, cans of clearance-sale paint and brushes and rollers, wooden-shafted golf-clubs, niblicks and cleeks,
a portable Convair air conditioner, smoke alarms still in their packets, rolls of linoleum . . . and, of course, the pump organ.

He still had the piano trolley with which he'd moved the organ from Leo Morris's house all those years ago. The tyres were flat but with them pumped up it would do. He levered the heavy organ carefully onto the trolley and wheeled it across the block ever so slowly to the front porch where it was to stay overnight until the shed was re-erected in its new position. He wouldn't have risked leaving it out in the weather. It was a delicate thing, with its oak casing, its beautiful keyboard, and one hundred and ten reeds inside. One downpour could ruin it forever.

It took him two full days to clear the shed. Half of its contents he placed under tarps near the pine boundary not far from where the shed would be moved to and the remaining lot he left on the trailer and in the long tray of his ute overnight. Then, early on the third morning, Darren Traherne arrived along with Noel Lea and his brother Jim, with hacksaws and crowbars and wood-splitters, spanners, gloves and spades and new hardwood posts, and knocked the old shed down in a jiffy.

Keeping as much of the original tin as they could without cutting their hands to ribbons with the rust and the bolting and unbolting, they had the new shed posts up by midafternoon. All that remained was to bolt and tie the sides and make sure any gaps were sealed. Then Jim would hoist himself up onto the new rafters and drill the roof on flat but with a twenty-degree tilt against the ocean, frapping the flashing tight so the wind's fingers couldn't get under and wedge it off. The new shed was placed strategically on the inland side of a leaning screen of tea-tree, but even so the winds of the world would never give up trying to find any gaps and would work at the tin sheets night and day.

All the men agreed it was a top spot for the new shed, better, in fact, than the original, if Ron would only put a little window in the southern wall to look at the water through the tea-tree copse. Ron saw no need
for the shed to have a view, however, and was content as he always had been with its wide opening on the inland side. He fixed the same green roll of canvas to the beam at the top of this opening so that it could be rolled down from its eyelets like a blind on those few days when vicious wind and even winter rain came from the north. Still, he figured with the house close by in that direction, there'd be even less need to roll the canvas down than there had been in the old spot, where only the boobi-allas provided screening. This he thought of as a definite improvement, for he loved the ventilation of the opening and the way it kept him connected with the outside. He could smell the pelargoniums from where he sat at the organ, he could watch the bristlebirds scurry past as he tossed the cards about with Sweet William, and he would always avoid the air of the shed becoming either too pungent or stale. In many ways he wasn't as far away from the house as he would have liked but there was this upside, and maybe being nearby was the best thing anyway, because what if Min had a turn or something?

Selecting and matching the right tin sheets for the sides and roof and bolting them in took longer than expected but afterwards, once Jim and Noel and Darren had had their fill of soup and chops and headed off home, Ron sat down at the organ where it stood on its old square metre of Papa Mahoney's striped carpet, alone in its position facing the eastern wall in the new shed.

The pump organ was immaculate and shining, even after all these years. He lifted back the oak lid and pumped slowly with his feet, playing a few notes to see how it felt. He checked all the turned timber stops to make sure they hadn't been damaged by the move. Not for the first time he cursed the Bass Coupler stop that still wasn't working; he remembered how handy it had been. He placed his hands fully on the keyboard then and jaunted out a few bars of ‘The Road to Gundagai', with the
Gemaphon
,
Clarabella
,
Vox Celeste
and
Pipe Melodia
stops all pulled in the treble to see how they sounded. He usually played without these stops.

In the kitchen, Min heard the instrument, and a lot more clearly than she was used to. Would she mind? She smiled and stared absently down at the bowl of currants soaking in front of her. She vowed not to pass opinion on what he played now that she could hear it so well. She wouldn't interfere. She didn't tell him how to bait his hook and the music was private. Like fishing. Except more so.

Ron had been honest when he said to Dom Khouri that once the land was his he could do with it what he wanted. He'd be paying big money after all, and anyway, Ron wouldn't have sold it to him if he didn't think he'd do the right thing. But Dom Khouri, as down-to-earth as he was, had big ideas for his new patch of clifftop. When the front-end loaders arrived the week after the open shed had been moved, Ron got quite a shock. On a quiet Tuesday morning the air was rent, not with the sound of surf crashing onto the Two Pointers, nor with the sawing call of wattlebirds or the splash of honeyeaters in the spouting, but with the much louder sound of three large mustard coloured machines beginning the substantial job of clearing and moulding the cliff to Dom Khouri's vision. Since Len McCoy bought the land in 1922 there'd been no morning like it. And certainly not in the long sweep back through history before that.

As Dom Khouri had told Ron, he wanted to build a big house, a house big enough, in fact, to accommodate his large extended family. With his architect he came up with a plan that included nine bedrooms, each with an ensuite and spa; a forty-seater cinema, a library, and various living and working spaces spread over four levels, all with large Taweel Glass views of the ocean. Despite the scale of the four-level house, the architect had designed it so that from where people entered on Merna Street it would only be one storey high, and quite a low storey at that. This low side of the house would be made almost entirely of glass so that by picking up the reflections of the surrounding bushes, flowering gums and sky, it would blend seamlessly into the environment. To achieve this effect
of modesty required an enormous excavation into the clifftop, so that whereas at the front door the house looked humble, from a boat out at sea its full enormity was on show.

Deep into the pink and ochre earth of the cliff, Dom Khouri's machines dug a space large enough to accommodate his Levantine vision. Ron and Min could never have conceived of such a plan and, in fact, Ron would've doubted that the cliff itself could endure it. But endure it it did, day after deafening day, the earthmovers transforming the headland into a great hole the size of twenty-five swimming pools. The locals who operated the machines were as amazed by the scale of the job as Ron was. They'd worked on the sides of a lot of hills before, turned over a lot of ground, but they'd never done anything like this, and never so precariously close to the cliff edge.

Ron could be seen at dusk, on most evenings during the two weeks of the excavation, standing still on his mown kikuyu slope overlooking the cleared heath and moonah and she-oak, and the massive hole. He gazed down at the strata of topsoil, pink clay, rock and sandstone, and his soul was mute. His ground had literally been ripped open. He'd cross back over the remainder of his land and continue the job of lining the new shed. He could hear the bristlebirds in the tea-tree on the other side of the tin. Scurrying, quickstepping, but also gathering like himself. He would sit down at the organ but his feet would remain still on the carpeted pedals. He couldn't play. The bellows remained empty.

Min listened to the machines all day long but didn't dare go and look at what they were up to. She stayed inside and battled her way through the new acoustics. She'd imagined a nice team of builders hammering away and popping in for cups of tea or a slice of fudge. When she asked Ron about their progress all he said was that they were digging a big hole. When she complained to him that it was noisy, he nodded and said, ‘It's a free country.'

The machines would start up at seven thirty every morning, as
Ron returned from the river or the beach or the bush. The world was the same place out there but coming home for breakfast was like having stones hurled at him.

After two weeks, however, the digging was done, the machines were switched off, and Dom Khouri arrived with his wife and the architect. They liked what they saw. Ron was introduced to the architect, and to Isabelle Khouri, who was plump and spoke with a thick Argentinian accent. He stood nervously alongside the group, looking into the huge hole as his new neighbour explained his vision for the house. Yes, it would be built on four levels, predominantly from steel and glass, but the high ocean-facing wall and verandah on the cliff would be built from local stone, with ironwork heavily influenced by the Art Nouveau architecture of Tripoli. There would be a very costly three-metre-high rusted corten steel wall shielding the property from the street as well as down the western boundary. All Ron could really latch on to was that there would be a cinema. That's what stuck in his mind.

It was a different world they were bringing to his own, a big world to a little world and for a moment his green eyes flickered as he wondered how he would fit.

Later on that day as he sat with his old friend Sweet William in the shed, dealing out the cards and sipping his stout, Ron mentioned that a little house down on the river flat might be all right for him and his mum sometime in the future. Old Sweet William, lanky and debonair in his pale golf cap, his face scarlet-patched from skin cancer grafts, his right knee swinging over his left as if to the sound of some imaginary big-band tune, looked up from his cards, sipped his stout and shook his head, smiling.