by Gregory Day
They sat at the table sipping at six-ounce glasses. Ron didn’t talk, he just pursed his lips and waited. Craig found to his surprise that the mixture of stout and lemonade tasted good.
‘You’ve got a lot of stuff in here,’ he said, looking around the shed.
‘Not as much as before we had to move the thing.’
‘How do you mean?’ The open shed looked to Craig as if it’d been there since the dawn of time.
‘It used to be over on what’s now Dom Khouri’s. It’s only been here since we sold that block off.’
‘Gee. It must have been quite a move.’
Ron snorted through his nose a little in amusement and his eyes smiled. ‘Yairs,’ he said, ‘took a bit of sortin’ through.’
Craig shifted in his seat. ‘So did it sit where the Khouri house is now, Ron?’
‘No. It was out in front of that. In amongst the tea-tree. Good spot. My father built it there in 1922. Knocked it up himself, of course. Did everything himself, my father.’
‘I see.’
Now there was a silence in which Ron’s gaze seemed to focus on something straight over Craig’s shoulder. Craig turned around, to see what Ron was looking at, but there was nothing there, just the opening of the shed and beyond that the southern wall of the main house.
Once again, Ron pursed his lips and waited for his visitor to speak. This time Craig opened his gambit.
‘So anyway, Ron, it’s come to our attention, through a tip-off from the shire, that there’s gonna be a bit of change up here on the clifftop.’
On the dark side of the table where he sat, Ron felt an unpleasant tremor pass through him. He squinted at Craig now. ‘What do you mean by “change”?’ he asked.
‘Oh, well, er, it seems they’re planning to turn all this area around the Two Pointers into a marine park.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well, it means it’ll be illegal to fish in the ocean between Boat Creek and Heatherbrae.’
‘What would they wanna do that for?’
‘Oh, I suppose to preserve the ocean, Ron. For future generations.’
Ron was silent. Craig sipped his drink and licked the foam from his lip. ‘Yeah, well, the thing is, Ron, that as a result of the marine park they’re gonna extend the coastal cliffwalk right past this place and on to the Meteorological Station. You would have heard that that’s going to be turned into a museum.’
‘Yair. But why do they need to extend the walk?’
‘Oh, I suppose so people can look at the park, Ron. So they can enjoy the cliff, you know, the view of the Two Pointers and that. And it’ll link up the clifftop walk to the new climate museum, of course, and then on down to the rivermouth.’
Ron frowned disbelievingly. ‘But you can already walk through here,’ he said. ‘It’s public land, the cliff edge. There’s always been a bit of a track through the tea-tree and the odd person coming through. Locals mostly, of course.’
‘Yeah, well, I think that’s the point, Ron. The shire wants to make it more accessible. Wouldn’t be your cup of tea, though, would it?’
‘Probably not.’
‘And what with your neighbour’s potential involvement . . .’
Ron took a sip of his portergaff. Now he smelt a rat, and any buoyancy the swifts and the rabbit-trap inspiration had given him was fast dwindling.
‘What do you mean by my “neighbour’s involvement”?’ he asked quietly, with foam on his upper lip.
Craig laughed through his nose, in a friendly way but nervously. ‘Oh, you know, Ron, the shire’s virtually bankrupt. It seems they’re going to seek financial assistance for the cliffwalk extension from Dom Khouri,’ he said.
‘Go on,’ said Ron.
‘Well, we just think Dom Khouri’s likely to get on board, being the community-minded person that he is. But we just wanted to give you the tip, Ron, and to let you know that we could make things simple for you if you decided the prospect of strangers looking in on you all day was a bit much. Colin owns a little place down on the riverbank, he said you’ve talked of moving down there from time to time. I don’t know, we could just do a changeover, work out something fair. That way you wouldn’t get stuck.’
Craig laughed again, this time a little more relaxed. ‘Despite what you might think, I’m not into being a real estate pest and badgering you, Ron. Just want to let you know where we’re coming from. We just thought it was important that you knew what was likely to happen and that you had another option. That you knew where you stood.’
Craig had signalled the end of the conversation and Ron was glad that he had. For a full two minutes, however, the two of them sat in as uncomfortable a silence as Craig had ever experienced. Eventually, Ron rose and they stepped out of the open shed and into the late afternoon light. Still neither of them said a word. Craig could see by the look on the old man’s face that the information he had imparted was being sorted and sifted very carefully.
They stepped around a wheelbarrow full of compost and made their way around the house to the driveway.
‘Of course, it’s entirely up to you what you choose to do, Ron, and we respect that,’ Craig said, as he shook Ron’s hand again near the porch door.
Ron nodded, and blinked slowly.
Craig walked the short distance to his car and opened the driver’s door. With one foot up in the Tribute and one on the quartz of the driveway, he said, ‘Anyway, Ron, you know where we are. And thanks for the drink. It was good. Never had a portergaff before.’
Craig jumped up into the car and started it. Calling ‘Take care’ out the window, he reversed the gold 4WD out of the driveway.
As Ron watched him go, up in the sky clouds began to gather around him. He raised his eyebrows where he stood, dumbfounded. The world seemed no longer able to leave him alone.
He was relieved when, just a few moments later, Sweet William’s blue Subaru pulled into the drive for their nightly hand of cards.
THIRTY-THREE
DIAMOND BOAT AT NIGHT
Ron continued to sleep amongst the blue-green Warr nambool blankets of his mother’s bed until the scent of her faded, and faded more, and it seemed as if she was almost not there at all. Still, he slept more soundly there than in his own bed, where the sense of Min’s vanishing was too powerful to bear. As he lay down each night he felt the possibility remained that he too could slip away forever, gone with the saltspray, the stars and his mother’s loving-kindness, off into the benign dark.
Amongst the blankets he would read the local paper over and over, recognising names, making mental notes of things for sale. He’d take up Min’s Bible or The Gift of Poetry, not to read but just to hold, until sleep would beckon like a cove to enfold him. Inhaling deeply he would turn and lie facing the window and the surf, whose roar and hiss at night he knew almost as well as Min’s voice.
Some nights, however, as the mothering scent amidst the blankets faded, he couldn’t sleep at all. On such evenings he would go outside to the shed and try to play the organ but often that would only distress him more. The keys and stops had become just cold ivory and dead timber. From their combinations he could conjure no music. The tunes he knew also seemed as wooden as the oak case of the organ itself, he was incapable of anything spontaneous to take their place.
One night in this harrowed state he sat on the cypress block beside Min’s grave, to at least have the proof beside him. His father was there too, and the dogs. He watched the starlight reflected in a calm sea between King Cormorant and Gannet rocks. In the queerness of his distress and the faltering of his imagination, he began to think as if with shards of his child’s mind. The reflections of the stars on the black swell held his gaze and it was almost as if Orion’s belt itself were the three fallen buoys of some celestial cray-pot. He yearned to go out upon the water, to at least touch the sea of diamonds.
Huddled there on the cypress block, a blanket wrapped around him, Ron’s heart lifted at the prospect of going out on the water
, perhaps with Noel and Darren in Wally Lea’s old tinny. Maybe something would start to make sense again. It was not so much a thought that had formed in him but an instinct for shelter, for an enclosure to shield himself within a world that was his alone. The imaginary harbour of the sea of diamonds surfaced in his heart as an inexorable solution, an escape, a medicine, just as it was when he dreamt away the hours in the chickenwire cage upon the cliff as a boy.
Two nights later, despite the cold, Darren Traherne was happy and relieved when Ron knocked on his bedroom window at ten past three. As it happened, Darren had been uncomfortably awake in the aftermath of a nightmare. When he heard the familiar knock on the window he sat up and gave Ron the answering call. When he got out to the car he was told they were going out in the boat. Darren was glad to lay eyes on the old man, who’d been constantly in his thoughts. The only reason he hadn’t gone up to see him on the cliff was because he presumed he’d rather be left alone.
In the cabin of the ute, Ron looked to Darren as if he’d aged in the time since Min’s death. His cheeks were a little hollowed out, his expression drawn. He looked somehow smaller too, sitting at the steering wheel with his cap pulled low. Darren couldn’t help thinking that maybe he should have visited after all. Ron had obviously been through the wringer.
As they drove down the Stilgoes’ Hill to pick up Noel and his boat, Darren filled Ron in about what he’d been up to and made sure the old fella knew how happy he was that he’d come to get him. He told Ron he was beginning to wonder whether they’d ever go out together again, he said he was almost thinking Ron had retired. Ron seemed quite amused by that and assured him that as long as he breathed he’d never hang up the rod or the gun, and that, anyway, he was not someone anyone needed to worry about.
They turned into the Dray Road under pinpoint starlight and a quarter moon, with no wind, and before long Darren was tapping on Noel’s barn door and telling him the score. After throwing on cords and boots, Noel emerged and the two of them went straight to work hitching up the twelve-foot tinny to the towbar of Ron’s ute. Then Noel disappeared into the cupboard shed on the wall of his house and returned with the reserve petrol and his rod and tackle bag.
‘What’s biting?’ he asked Darren, brushing away the pine needles and spider-webs, checking the boat with torches for life-jackets and flares.
‘I dunno,’ Darren replied. ‘Hasn’t said. Maybe gars.’
With the boat hitched up and the three of them in the bench seat of the ute under the Leas’ grand old pines, they were ready to go. Ron flicked the light on in the cabin and leant across the others to fetch his wireless from the glove box. He began to search through stations on the trannie in his hands. Looking across the seat from the passenger side Noel too noticed that Ron looked a bit the worse for wear. In the wonky yellow light of the ute’s cabin, the profile of Ron searching for a station in the night occurred to him as an image he could make. Perhaps he’d paint it one day. It was painful, but true, and he’d never made a picture of Ron.
Ron flicked the light off in the cabin and with talkback fighting static on the dashboard they drove out of Noel’s place, turned right where the Dray Road met the Ocean Road, and drove without seeing another car the four miles to the nearest boat ramp below Turtle Head.
Both Noel and Darren noted that Ron had no trouble backing the boat trailer down the steep ramp and onto the beach in the darkness. They jumped out then and Ron sat alone with the wireless in the car. Darren and Noel unhitched the trailer and began pushing it down the heavy sand towards the water. Ron steered the ute back up the ramp and parked it in the carpark under the scarp of cushion bush running upwards from the sea-level to the road. By the time he’d walked back down the beach through clumps of kelp the boat was floated and he was handed the rope as Darren and Noel dragged the trailer back up the sand and out of the tide.
The night ocean was flat, the tide hinged on the still point between turning. Their eyes had already adjusted to the darkness and their escape from the shore through the waves was smooth, with a minimum of whack on the bow. Darren and Ron sat on the middle bench with their coats buttoned tightly against the wind chill and Noel sat alone at the 35-horsepower Evinrude, steering them east on a course beyond the snapper holes, back along the black water towards Gannet Rock. The plan was to anchor just out from the cliff in front of Ron’s place, between the Two Pointers, and to fish for silver trevally into the dawn.
Next to Ron on the cold tin seat, his eyes watering with the speed of the boat, Darren focused into the darkness, feeling the cold moisture of the night on his cheeks, happy that Ron had risen from his grief to come and get them at last. Behind them in the stern, Noel was thinking the water looked like black insulation plastic as they cut their way through it.
The conditions were good – a flat sea, no wind, a waxing moon – and Ron felt relieved to be on the ocean, glad in fact to be off the land with the two young men whose respect he could count on. The night was perfect for the trevally. Looking up at the wall of stars climbing out of the horizon he could tell by the clarity of their texture in the sky that the fish would be biting.
Eventually, after crossing the rough patch straight out from the Mangowak rivermouth, Noel slowed the motor. They entered the calmer waters beyond the sea-caves in the headland east of the mouth. Above the caves the little squid-shaped bulb of the navigational light blinked its ray across the water and the bushes of the clifftop were lit as it did so. Ron looked slowly back and forth from stern to bow, navigating Noel into position, and they rounded the south side of Gannet Rock and puttered east into the gloss of the tiny bay on the near side of King Cormorant Rock. Then Ron directed them due south for a minute or two until he put his hand up for Noel to cut the motor. Darren threw the anchor overboard. The boat’s position where it bobbed made a triangle pointing straight at the Southern Cross, with the King Cormorant Rock and the Gannet Rock the two points at the triangle’s base.
He knew exactly where they were in relation to the movements of the fish under the water, but it hadn’t always been so. As a boy, his father, or Darren’s grandfather Sid Traherne, if he was in the boat with them, would throw a long line with a lead attached to the end of it into the water, to read the ocean bed. The piece of lead had been dipped beforehand in a syrup tin full of mutton fat that Min had provided. When the men felt the lead reach the bottom they would haul it back up and inspect it closely. They could tell by the indentations in the grease whether they were over a reef, and what type of reef it was, or, alternatively, if sand had stuck to the lead they would know they were over sand. Ron remembered what seemed like hours and hours of these soundings on the boat in his childhood, before any fishing would begin. As frustrated as he was at the time at not being able to just throw out a jig or a hook, he’d been grateful ever since to have had such knowledge from those early days when his father and Sid, and Wally Lea and the rest of them, were getting to know the ocean.
Noel’s tinny drifted side-on now to the shore, they were directly out off Ron’s place. If he’d still been sitting by Min’s grave back on land, Ron would have been looking straight down upon them. With the aid of the Dolphin lantern, Darren and Noel now began to prepare their rods.
The old man ran his eye over the contours of his home-cliff. Under moon and starlight alone the land itself was nothing more than a dark lump rising in the night, but with the rhythm of the navigational light shining at intervals, he could make out his own fenceline, the melaleuca gate, the top half of the southern wall of his open shed, the pines beside it, and the La Branca bench on the edge of the cliff. On the beach below, in the darkness between flashes, tiny clusters of phosphor were spreading out across the sand of the cove. It crossed his mind each time the flash resumed that he may well see the outline of a man up on the brow near his woodpile. They may even hear, he thought, the scream over the windless sea as the steel jaws of his rabbit trap bit down on the wood-thief’s flesh.
Within minutes, Darren and Noel had
dropped lines, baited with cliff-worms Ron had provided, and the three men were silent. Ron didn’t fish as yet and the younger men asked no questions. They were just glad to be out there, with the ocean skin clinking peacefully on the metal drum of the boat’s hull, and the occasional falling star cascading through the night, helping them order and evaluate their dreams and desires.
So now, just as Ron had imagined, Noel’s tinny was sitting right amongst the sea of diamonds, and he felt almost relieved enough to make a wish himself at a starfall. It was as he thought. There was something full and easy inside him. Alone on the cliff of ghosts, with real estate agents pecking at him and strangers stealing his wood, with Dom Khouri’s judgement being questioned, Ron’s desire to see again what he’d conjured as a child made perfect sense. He knew it. He had had to get his feet off the ground and away from human settlement. If he could touch these waters, for a time at least the core of his pain would be washed away.
With his two surrogate sons sitting poised with trigger fingers on their lines, Ron dipped his own fingers into the water over the side of the boat. He felt his anguish go free. Even with his head tilted back to the stars he knew now the phosphor had gathered at his fingertips and was glinting around the edges of his skin in the water, the sea of diamonds sprung to life again at his touch. He looked down to find it was true. Straightaway as he saw the phosphor his eyes shut tight and he saw the staircases descending away underwater, the shining manna-gum stairs and the banisters of red cedar, disappearing deep below the boat into the sweep of waving furrows and channels and guzzles of the sea-bed, the gutters full to overflowing with jewels in the grainy light he’d played amongst as a boy. It was all still there, no risk, at his fingertips after all: the coral halls, the glinting granite tors, the fizzing champagne light under the night-time sea.
He drifted deep, and in a running sea fissure far below, he spied that old syrup tin of mutton fat, lying on its side amidst shining diamonds and the fish. Smiling at the sight, his face tilted up again to the stars as he leant against the gunwale. There was the furniture and the pictures, with frames laden and encrusted in the sea. Once again he kicked his tiny feet and swam the great palace, the rooms flowing with opalescent shoals of sea-grape and weed and schools of bright fish, with proud bucking mako sharks shooting by, and long-forgotten tea-tree craypots and sunken encrusted sloops, all brimming with the diamonds.