Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds

by Gregory Day

  For a moment Craig was terrified that in his enthusiasm his boss was going to tell him that he wanked in the boat, but thankfully he didn’t. As they drove down into the Mangowak riverflat, Colin went quiet and flicked on the radio. He picked an FM preset and Super-tramp’s ‘Take the Long Way Home’ flooded into the car through all six speakers. Colin tapped on the steering wheel and started mouthing the words as the car rippled across the bridge. Craig was smiling, staring straight ahead now.

  They rounded the woodyard and the old crafts gallery, climbed out of the valley and up the hill, past the Dick Lake Sanctuary and towards the hotel. Making as if to go past, at the last minute Colin suddenly threw the steering wheel and they careered up the corrugated driveway and into the pub carpark. With Supertramp blaring Colin stopped the car and yelled: ‘WHAT THE FUCK, WILLO, LET’S HAVE A COUNTERY. WE’VE DONE A GOOD MORNING’S WORK.’

  Craig nodded but now instead of being amused at his boss’s boating stories he was suddenly bored at the prospect of them continuing over lunch. And what’s more, he thought, as ‘Take the Long Way Home’ ended and Colin turned off the ignition, the more bored I get the more foul that image of him in the boat’s gonna be. But what could he do? He was trapped. It was a working day and Colin Batty was his boss. Even at lunchtime.

  SEVENTEEN

  A LETTER FROM THE QUEEN

  As Colin Batty and Craig Wilson got out of the car in the pub carpark, Ron McCoy was walking quickly through the tea-tree colonnade on the clifftop. He was headed home with a letter from the Queen.

  Min’s one hundredth birthday had finally arrived and, not knowing exactly when the expected letter was going to turn up, Ron had been checking at the post office religiously for the previous fortnight, just in case. Concerned that on the actual day itself the letter wouldn’t show, he nervously appeared at the post office, only to be greeted with smiles and claps on the back from David and Nora, who held the letter up behind the counter as if it was treasure itself.

  As Ron studied the illustrious lettering on the front of the envelope, Leo Morris came to mind. The ornamentation of the handwriting reminded him of those occasional letters Leo would receive from the Vatican, which Ron would find tossed aside onto ladderback chairs with other papers in the house at Bonafide View. How he wished Leo was alive on this day. For a moment, as he stood in his cap and dark brown v-neck jumper, his boots shined for the little gathering to come at the house, Ron was welling up inside.

  They’d invited Rhyll Traherne, Darren Traherne and his sister Barb, Sweet William and his wife Eve, the Lea brothers, two of whom couldn’t make it, Nanette Burns and Martin Elliot’s son Bob, who now ran a pub in the Mallee and was coming all that way. Min would have liked to invite more people, the ladies she’d worked with on the District Association raffles, for instance, and those from the CWA in Minapre, but in the end she and Ron decided that any more than a handful would be a bit tiring for her.

  When he arrived back at the house, everyone except Noel Lea and Barb Traherne were there, all gathered around Min in the front room with presents and glasses of beer and wine and muscat. He walked through the kitchen, glancing at all the tinfoiled and Glad-Wrapped food that had been brought in and placed on the table. He passed through the galley door to the hallway and then into the brighter daylight of the front room, with the letter held out in his hand in front of him. Min was sitting on the Papa Mahoney armchair in the southwest corner with everyone standing or sitting or kneeling around her. They all looked around when they heard Ron enter. Min could see his excitement, as if he was a boy again, bringing home something of which he was particularly proud. A black duck perhaps, a tiny bandicoot pup, a pair of perfectly headshot rabbits from Mr Bolitho’s paddocks, the annual pot of saltwater ready to boil down into salt.

  Ron handed her the letter without a word. She put on her glasses and looked down at the insignia beside her name and address in the royal font.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I see the Poms have acknowledged my existence at last!’

  The room broke into laughter. With tanned and spindly fingers, Min opened the envelope and pulled out the letter.

  ‘Dear Mrs Minnie McCoy,’ she read out to them all in her best voice, ‘On behalf of the House of Windsor and the members of the Commonwealth I congratulate you on reaching a century of years. As Queen of Australia, I hope you have a wonderful day. Best wishes and good health for the years ahead. Yours, HRH Queen Elizabeth II.’

  The little crowd broke into applause and just as they did, Barb Traherne arrived with her daughter Isabella. ‘Look, dear,’ Min said to the five year old as the child came across the rug holding her mother’s hand, ‘come and look at my letter from the Queen.’

  Isabella rushed instead to her great-grandmother Rhyll, whose swarthy round face opened with delight. Rhyll patted her head and let her be shy. Min folded the letter and went to return it to the envelope but everyone wanted to look at it so it was handed around.

  Noel Lea turned up not long after, dressed in a dark suit and orange tie, with a bright red waistcoat, which drew much hilarity from those present.

  ‘You pack of ol’ bushies,’ he exclaimed fondly, leaning down to give Min a kiss on the cheek. ‘It’s not every day someone turns a hundred!’

  On the sideboard next to the dining table were the cards that people had brought and that Min had received in the post, every last one of them proudly displaying the magic number 100 on the front. As Noel gave Min his unusual version of a card – a small oil painting he’d done of the wooden bridge over the creek on the Old Breheny Road, with ‘Happy One Hundredth Min’ scrawled across the road in the foreground – they all began to discuss ‘what a bloody rigmarole’ it was to get a hold of a 100th birthday card. Of course, no newsagent stocked them permanently and some were even reluctant to order one in.

  ‘It’s all right for you artistic types,’ Nanette Burns jibed at Noel. ‘You don’t even have to pick up the phone. You can just rustle one up whenever you feel like it.’

  Ron pointed out to everyone that there was more cold beer and stout and wine on ice in the laundry trough and red wine and muscat on the table. Noel went off to find the beer and brought back one for himself, Eve, and a bottle of stout for Ron and Sweet William. As the letter was passed around, portergaffs were being mixed and Isabella began to come out of her shell. She was telling Rhyll and Min all about her school excursion to the wildlife sanctuary over at the You Yangs. ‘Oh, those sugar gliders, they’re my friends. And I know a wombat.’

  Before long the room had settled into noise and laughter, and Sweet William observed that they would not have been together in a group like this for many a long year.

  The talk was about their world, and inevitably the changes in it, and also about the dead, all those people like Leo Morris and Len McCoy, Fred Ayling and Jolly Owen, Wally and Audrey Lea and Sid and Norm and Mary Traherne, and Martin Elliot, who really had no right not to be there. Jim Lea asked Bob Elliot if he’d inherited his father’s famous habit of being able to burp ‘God Save the Queen’ and Bob held his hand up and shook his head, laughing, saying, ‘No way.’

  ‘Come on, Bobby, eh, it’s in your blood. Give it a go, seeing we’ve got a letter right here from the good lady herself,’ said Jim Lea.

  ‘What about “Waltzing Matilda” then, Bob. Can you burp that?’ teased Nan.

  ‘Nah, bit sad, that one. Can’t burp in a minor key,’ said Bob, and the whole room sniggered at the thought of it.

  At 2 pm the party sat down at the large blackwood dining room table, Min at one head and Rhyll at the other. They raised a first toast with full glasses, champagne flutes and stubby holders.

  Sweet William, standing up, adjusted his lapels and proclaimed: ‘To Min McCoy. A lady of one hundred years and one thousand virtues.’ He’d been composing the line for the whole of the previous week. Satisfied, he sat down again, tucked a serviette into his collar, and began to eat.

  The table was laden with pies, salads, snapp
er, a huge eel that Darren had smoked at Rhyll’s house, two crayfish that Walker Lea had stolen out of craypots on the Heatherbrae side, new potatoes, broad beans, a bowl of peas and four large red candles placed in Rhyll Traherne’s heirloom Venetian glass candelabra. The knives and forks clicked and the two-inch nails slid and burrowed deep into the claws of the crayfish. Numerous little toasts were made, as well as the bigger toasts, and as early as three o’clock the singing had begun.

  It started with Sweet William and ‘Off to Philadelphia’ and went on, around the table. Rhyll Traherne sang a po-faced rendition of ‘I Wish I Was a Fascinating Bitch’, which everyone remembered as Audrey Lea’s song, and Bob Elliot, with his penchant for trad jazz and show tunes, sang three in a row, ‘What’ll I Do’, ‘Night and Day’ and ‘Don’t Fence Me In’. Each of the old crew had a song that was synonymous with them and when Min’s turn came, those old enough to be in the know – Sweet William, Rhyll, Ron and Bob Elliot – called for ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’. Min sat with her head tilted to one side as if she was trying to see around a corner, and sang her song in a fragile tremolo.

  As soon as she’d finished they requested she sing ‘The Road to Gundagai’. She consented self-deprecatingly, but with an old style vaudeville charm creeping into her eye.

  When she reached the end of the song, the party called for an encore and so she said she’d sing it again if they’d all join in on the chorus, which they did, even Ron. Then, after that, they wanted still more but Min was reluctant until Rhyll piped up: ‘Well, what about a poem, Minnie?’

  In her early nineties herself, Rhyll knew more than anyone in the room the intimate details of Min’s life, the hard graft and the happiness, the implacability of her husband, the rugged move from Clifton Hill, the miscarriages, the crisis after Len died. She also knew what store her friend held in poetry. Now she gave her a gentle wink, from deep down in their long friendship, as she called for a poem.

  Min stood, with her hand on the edge of the table. Staring over the heads of her guests and out to the grey sea through the large windows, she began to recite ‘The Sacred Way’, an Australian poem she had known for many a year but which had come to mean a lot to her of late.

  ‘I wake in the night. I turn and think of the age.

  What image has it of man; what roots for the mind?

  What names now does Imagination find

  To fix our heritage?

  The world I grew up in now belongs to the past;

  Round my cradle, behind my pillow there stood

  Hercules, Samson, Roland, Robin Hood

  To say: Stand firm, stand fast!

  My unripe soul, groping to fill its need,

  Found in those legends a food by which it grew.

  Whatever we learned, the heroes were what we knew.

  We were fortunate indeed.’

  Isabella was restless. Barb quietly took her out through the kitchen to the backyard. Lowering her eyes to the table after looking at Rhyll down the other end, Min delivered the last verse:

  ‘We have lost that world. How shall my son go on

  To form his archetypal image of man?

  Frankenstein? Faust? Dracula? Don Juan?

  O Absolom, my son.’

  She sat down. The table was hushed. The usually optimistic Min had taken them by surprise. Ron stared with a slight wobbling of his head from side to side. And then he looked down at the tablecloth and fiddled with his knife. He’d loved the way she’d said the poem. He knew it was the Mahoney in her.

  They kicked on with songs and stories, and with the big chocolate ripple cake, till six o’clock. Then, admitting that they weren’t as young as they used to be, Min and Rhyll agreed that it was time to pull up stumps. It had been a blessed day.

  As everyone left, Min and Ron went out to the driveway with them all, cajoling them to take the leftover food, saying goodbye at the Belvedere sign as their friends got into their cars. Darren and Noel lingered with Min and Ron for a short while before walking home. Min and Ron watched them wandering off, joking and relaxed, gesticulating with stubby holders and cigarettes in their hands.

  Back in the house there was little cleaning up to do, Barb and Nanette had seen to that. So Min and Ron sat down at the kitchen table for a cup of tea. Halfway through drinking it Min suddenly decided that she hadn’t had enough after all.

  ‘How about you take me out to the shed and play me a tune?’ she said.

  ‘But it’s cold, Mum,’ Ron drawled. ‘Still wet out there from the rain. You’ll catch your death.’

  Min was adamant. ‘No I won’t. And anyway, what if I did? We’ve had a good run now, son.’

  Ron rolled his eyes, but smiled. He heard the cheeky parody in her voice. ‘Very well. But only one song. And then it’s back in by this stove.’

  They got up from the table and Ron fetched his mother’s shawl from the hall. An hour and a half later, the birds and the possums in the bushes around were still listening to the pump organ playing from the shed.

  EIGHTEEN

  RIVERBUST

  In starlight at five o’clock the next morning, Ron walked the old cliff track, through the tea-tree and she-oaks in front of Dom Khouri’s house, and headed down a recent landslip to the river-mouth. The slip was irresistible. It came out on the beach amongst blown grass right next to the two sea-caves which, when the tide and conditions were right, he’d sometimes slept in over the years. As a teenager he’d once spent a whole Easter living in the caves, purely for the enjoyment of it. He’d eaten abalone from the rocks, slept by a driftwood fire and fished on the turn of the king tides. He’d never forgotten the feeling when he eventually returned to his bed in the house on top of the cliff. He’d felt wild, as if his skin was a pelt and his eyes as bright as a quoll’s.

  Now he walked down the beach to the west of the caves and the Meteorological Station and watched the mouth burst open to the sea. The sound was like a detonation, a boom from deep in the logic of the water and land.

  In the darkness he watched the channel cut as the swans rose honking off the water further back. Out rushed the river in a turbulence, the water quarrying the beach, hewing deep, forcing itself out to the waves whose power met the stream in chaos. Crests and hulking shapes grew up and flared at the seam of the waters, until a mad rhythm was found, by trial and error, in the timeless scything kiss of river and ocean.

  In his mind’s eye, Ron saw a stone causeway deep under the water, down in the riverbed. His father had told him that before he was born the children from the creeks along the four miles of dune to the west had crossed the causeway to get to the meteorologists’ schoolroom on the headland. He had never seen it, even when the river was at its lowest ebb, and so it fascinated him. For the umpteenth time he saw a barnacled gate swing open and low, in the dark and grainy undercalm of the channel, and how the fish could scoot through it now, bright silver-grey bream moving into the estuary, and duller tanbrown bream heading out to sea. Some of the bright bream dashed from the ocean swell right on in, dart-like, while others hovered at the hinges of Ron’s imaginary gate, lingering in the undermurk, as if sniffing around at the threshold of a territory both familiar and strange.

  From experience he would never fish the river in the week that it broke to the ocean. It was a hunch he’d had, in the early days. He’d thrown his lines with Wally Lea into the roiling channel only hours after it busted in the first postwar autumn of 1946. They’d hauled enough bream and mullet and eels out of there to fill two hessian sacks in a little over two hours. They were amazed and yelling to one another over the roar of the new water, but afterwards Ron had the notion that to do such a thing was a type of sin. A boon so easy it had to bring trouble.

  So he waited with interest for the next break, in the spring of the same year. He watched as the waters banked up and then cut, and he knew. He was sure the fish needed to settle in the changed element before things could return to normal. If they weren’t allowed to settle it made sense that they might
never return through the rivermouth at all.

  He watched as others fished the flurried mouth, Wally included, like they had earlier in the year. By the time of the river’s break a couple of years later, in the autumn of ’48, he noticed the easy catch was diminishing. He told Wally afterwards what he thought but Wally was ambivalent. ‘If it’s good enough for the cormorants, Ron, it’s probably good enough for me,’ Wally said. Ron said, ‘Okey doke,’ and then went quiet. He had an image come to him of what was different about birds and men. He was wading out into the freshly blown channel with webbed fingers, grabbing bream and mullet from the tribulation of the water and gorging on them right there and then, scales and fins, innards and all, his face covered in gut-slime, his body in powerful water up to his waist.

  Now he stood at the mouth and watched the new, refreshed linkage between his home river and the ocean. Min’s party had left him feeling calm and contented. It had been a close to perfect day, what with the royal letter, the old gang and the singing, and then just the two of them and the pump organ in the open shed later on after dark. Not to mention the quiet, now that Dom Khouri’s house was finished. The world was back in place again. The days had been restored to them. Finally he could look forward to returning from his morning forays to a cooked breakfast on the Primus in the open shed when the weather was fine, and a warm kitchen with Min when it wasn’t.