by Gregory Day
Picking up her keys off the sideboard she went up the hall and through the door into the garage, where she pushed the button on the wall to open the roller door. As she sat patiently in the driver’s seat watching the trees and sky slowly appear behind her, she searched with her fingers through the CD stacker for something suitable. Eventually, after finding nothing to fit her mood, she pushed the 774 preset.
She pulled out into the street half-listening to Alex Harte discussing the war in Iraq. Then the Federal Treasurer came on to dampen speculation about a likely rise in home interest rates. She pricked up her ears at that and hoped he was telling the truth. An interest rate rise was the last thing she and Craig needed.
It was quiet at the store as she pulled in and parked beside the old water tanks. Hers was the only car there. Wrapping her jacket around her against the chill, she went in, said hello to Emma behind the counter, and got the milk from the fridge. As she handed over her ten-dollar note, Emma asked her what she thought of cyclists on the Ocean Road. Liz could see the local paper open on the counter beside the cash register and a headline that read: CYCLING INTO DANGER. The consensus was that sooner or later a cyclist would get killed on the road due to the increased tourist traffic. She answered briefly that although it was like a last resort she could see no alternative but to ban the cyclists. As Emma agreed and handed over her change, Colin Batty entered the store. For a moment Liz attempted to avert her gaze but realising it was impossible to hide with only the two of them in the store, she said a polite hello. Colin was more friendly.
‘G’day, Lizzie. That bastard forget to bring you home some milk, did he?’
‘Yeah. Or someone drank it all.’
‘Must’ve been the cat. The big one with the whiskers.’
‘You could be right, Colin.’
Colin Batty said a cheery hello to Emma as well and then as Liz made to leave he said: ‘Can you tell Craig I’ve finished that paperwork for him, love. Tell him to come into the office and get it first thing rather than go out to the Pattersons’. Priorities, you know.’ And then he winked at her.
‘I’ll pass it on,’ Liz replied, barely able to hide her distaste. She said goodbye to Emma and left the store.
Back at the house, Craig lay awake in bed with his orange juice after a broken night’s sleep. Feeling vaguely nauseous he’d got up at 3 am and sat on the couch until nearly dawn with the Rabbit-Proof Fence soundtrack on his headphones, reading a book his brother had recommended to him. The book was about an Afghani boy, the son of a baker, whose family are dispersed by war, leaving him alone in a hut with a jackal and a goat. By four o’clock, Craig was engrossed in the unusual story of how the boy trains the jackal to scrounge food for him, and was feeling better. It wasn’t for another hour and a half, after copious cups of hot chocolate, that his eyelids began to grow heavy and he made his way back to bed.
Hearing Liz return from the shop now he got up, opened the curtains and made his way into the shower. He felt surprisingly good given how little sleep he’d had and he thought about the boy and the jackal as he shaved under the hot jet of water. He got out of the shower, dressed in a white shirt and blue suit pants and greeted his wife and Reef at the Mambo bench for breakfast. He could hear water running in Libby’s ensuite and felt relieved that he didn’t have to hassle her about running late for school.
They ate their muesli with 774 on in the background and after establishing that it was Craig who’d drunk the milk Liz passed on Colin’s message.
‘Fair enough,’ he replied to his wife and then rang the Pattersons at Woody’s Junction on his mobile to tell them he wouldn’t make it out there until after lunch.
At eight thirty he left in the car with Libby and Reef, dropping his daughter off at the bus stop and Reef at the primary school and then made his way to Batty Real Estate. Colin wasn’t there but Angela had the paperwork for Ron McCoy at the front desk and he sat for a while with her and had a chat over a cup of tea. Angela was Colin’s third cousin but the distant blood tie didn’t stop her having reservations about the boss, which increasingly she and Craig would discuss. They talked for half an hour about how wired he’d become of late and then she asked Craig’s advice on behalf of a friend of hers who was thinking of opening a cafe in Minapre. Craig told her about the long hours involved in hospitality but admitted that at times he missed standing behind a coffee machine and chewing the fat.
‘You’re not a salesman, running a cafe,’ he told her. ‘People come through the door because they want something. But it’s hard work, Ange. Best to go into it with a five-year plan. Work your guts out, have a good time, then get out, when the business is worth something.’
Angela liked Craig, she found him easy to talk to, and she thanked him for the advice. At around nine thirty he said goodbye to her and left the office to drive up to Ron McCoy’s.
The sky was shark-grey as he turned off the main road and headed for Two Pointers Way. There was no wind and no-one much around. In his belly Craig was beginning to feel the effect of not having enough sleep. He fossicked in the console until he found his sugarfree gum and took two pieces out and popped them into his mouth.
Pulling in to Two Pointers Way he caught sight of the Meteorological Station, its black roofs and limestone chimneys almost glowing amongst the still, grey weather. He noticed a Brinbeal shire streetsweeping truck at the bottom of the hill near the Dick Lake Sanctuary as he turned out of Two Pointers Way and then right again into Merna Street. He remembered being surprised when he’d first seen one of those streetsweeping trucks in Mangowak. It had symbolised something that he thought he’d left behind in Melbourne.
With no music on his car stereo he pulled in to Ron McCoy’s drive, turned off the ignition and got out with the paperwork in a folder under his arm. He’d looked at it whilst talking to Angela and saw that Colin had offered Ron better terms than he’d ever known him to offer anyone else. He was prepared to handle the whole sale for only a tiny commission. On a projected 2 million property that still amounted to a lot of money but, even so, Craig thought it was generous. As Colin had made clear to him though, the only way to get the old fella to agree was to be the cheapest on the market. They weren’t going to get any favouritism because, as far as Ron was concerned, they were practically strangers anyway. The only way was to give him a cut rate and be nice.
He walked down the driveway whistling. It wasn’t that he was feeling particularly happy about the task at hand but he often found himself whistling bright tunes to gear himself up for something he was a little nervous about.
The house was quiet, the porch door slightly ajar. He couldn’t see Ron anywhere in the garden, so he poked his head into the porch and called out. There was no answer. He could smell boot nugget and fish, and saw a tackle bag and a pile of dirty washing on the porch floor in front of him. He’d never entered Ron’s house before and, once again as he peered in, he had a sense of the old man living in a world almost forgotten.
He waited and called again, thinking Ron might be in the toilet, but after a couple of minutes without any response he decided he’d go around the front and see if he was in his shed.
He walked on the path of beach pebbles that ran around the house wall and noticed the wheelbarrow full of compost still sitting where it had been when he’d shared a portergaff with Ron on his last visit. Walking past it he entered the shadows of the shed and looked inside. On the red card table were two empty beer glasses, a bottle opener and a deck of cards. But there was no sign of Ron. He stood for a while, marvelling at the contents of the shed, and couldn’t help but go over and make a sound on the pump organ. Pedalling with one foot he pressed the bass C note and heard its pure low tone. He would have liked to play for longer but decided against it. He didn’t want to get Ron offside. Glancing amusedly at a picture near the entrance of dogs playing snooker, he turned and left the shed.
He wandered across the garden towards the gate and the woodpile. He looked out across the water. It was mood
y, silver-coloured. Alone there, with the old fella seemingly nowhere about, he felt the magic of Ron’s property. It was truly beautiful up there, Craig thought.
Beyond the bench on the clifftop, he caught sight of an opening in the she-oaks and tea-tree further along in front of the Khouri house. Figuring it to be the existing clifftop track Ron had told him about, he clicked through the melaleuca gate and headed towards it.
Craig entered under a natural arch of foliage and found, to his delight, a secluded path leading out along the headland. It was immediately aromatic, with a mixture of melaleuca oil, the ocean, and the rich loamy path underfoot.
He followed the track out to a small fenced-in clearing where the navigational light sat on its bluestone knoll on the very tip of the land. The track resumed again on the other side and Craig decided to continue. He had nothing pressing and the longer he was gone, the more likely he would be to find Ron on his return.
On the other side of the clearing a fox darted away into the tea-tree as he stepped again through a shadowy opening into what seemed to be a secret space amongst the bushes. The track wound down from there as the cliff’s height tapered in the direction of the rivermouth. Before long, it ended abruptly where a landslip of rose-gold clay ran gently down to the beach. Navigating the sticky descent, he came out on the sand beside the sea-caves.
He sat down on a molten-looking rock and started scraping the bright clay of the landslip off his shoes with a flat stone. He reached for his mobile phone to check his messages but decided against it. He thought of the boy in the hut with the jackal again and was looking forward to resuming the story when he got home. Then, looking to his left, he noticed something near the mouth of the cave nearest to where he sat. Something metallic was catching the light. He stood up and with the elevation was shocked to see what it was. A gun. He took three steps in its direction and then saw a confusion of colour behind the gun. There was something else there.
He walked forward some more and then his face blanched and twisted. He saw the plaid of a dressing gown, pyjamas, on legs, and a mass of wet blood. It was a body, lying on its back, a shape at an angle and flung back, an eye, open, and nothing more than a mass of shattered gore. Craig stared and started to shake violently. He didn’t have to move any closer to know. It was Ron McCoy.
Trembling uncontrollably, he stepped backwards towards the rock where he’d been sitting and then bent from the waist and vomited onto the sand wildly, splattering his clothes. Then he ran past the rock and back towards the landslip until he stopped suddenly. He grabbed his mobile phone from his shirt pocket and dialled 000.
‘There’s a dead body,’ he yelled into the phone. ‘At Mangowak, in the caves on the beach under the headland.’
He waited halfway back up the landslip, trembling on his haunches, for the police to arrive. ‘Oh fuck,’ he kept saying under his breath. ‘Oh fuck.’
When finally he saw two policemen coming up the beach from the rivermouth he slid down the slip and began running towards them. They saw him running and could tell immediately that it was the man who had called. As he approached them they saw he had fresh stains on his shirt and trousers, orange clay on his shoes, and that his face was distorted with fear. The look of him scared them and quickly they attempted to calm him down.
CODA
It was like a sleet-storm in midsummer, a shock of such inclemency that it cast a dull pall of despair over all who had known him well. In the bush gullies, wallabies huddled beside the trunks of damp established trees, as branches where gang-gangs only recently had twirled like baubles at a fair were snapped and flung sideways. The riverwater snaking through the fat paddocks of the town changed colour three times, first to a tropical sage green, then to a pale hopsy colour like home brew, and finally to a charcoal black befitting the mood. It was hard to speak about, and so silence seemed to verify the air, to underlie most conversations, as if the permanent earth itself was waiting, watching, like a witness.
Darren and Noel had not been able to let it rest. Amidst the stark atmosphere at Ron’s small funeral at the convent they both agreed he probably wasn’t even in attendance. The normally loquacious priest seemed either out of form or lost for words and there was no music, not even the usual shrill singing of the nuns, who didn’t attend due to the fact it was a suicide.
‘He wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble of shooting himself to hang around for that,’ Noel had said afterwards in a bitter voice.
There was an uncomfortable little wake in the tea-room at St Catherine’s, and of course that was where the different forms of speculation began to surface. The general consensus was that Ron couldn’t live on without Min, and Sweet William for one, as chief mourner and the person the police had called to identify the body, definitely put it down to that. But a few people muttered other things, there were questions apparently about his prostate, and the real estate agencies were putting him under pressure to sell his land. Who knows what other factors were in play? Ron had been such a private man, he could have been dying of a brain tumour for all anyone knew. Of course, if Dr Feast had been able to attend the funeral they could have asked. But he hadn’t, he sent a note of apology to the post office.
Dom Khouri was at both the funeral and the wake, however, and about ten days afterwards, having got Darren Traherne’s phone number from the builder Dave Buckley, he rang Darren, wondering if they could get together and have a chat about Ron.
Darren knew Dom Khouri by sight, having worked on his house, but had never actually spoken to him. They met at the cafe down in the valley. Dom Khouri thanked Darren for coming and began by asking if it was true there was a rumour circulating that he’d pressured Ron to get off his land. Darren agreed he’d heard something about Dom Khouri and the Brinbeal shire teaming up to develop the clifftop along with the new marine park and the climate museum. Dom Khouri shook his head and said that the very idea that he would’ve done such a thing was insulting and wrong. He described the rumour as barbaric, and Darren was struck by the force of the word. To help clear things up, Dom Khouri explained how the shire had approached him to fund an extension to the clifftop walk out in front of his and Ron’s houses, but that in the end he had not only declined but fought against it, due to his own desire for privacy and the fact that they were demanding the old bench Len McCoy had built for the soldiers be removed for reasons of public liability.
‘They said it was unsafe,’ Dom Khouri told Darren, ‘which was absurd, because, as I pointed out to them, the seat had survived for nearly a century right in the path of the weather. It’s as solid now as it’s ever been. There could be no greater test of whether it was safe or not.’
So Dom Khouri hadn’t co-operated with the shire plans for the clifftop walk extension, and the marine park infrastructure was to be focused around the climate museum and at the carpark overlooking Horseshoe Cove. Darren could only agree wholeheartedly with his reasons.
‘I liked Ron a lot,’ Dom Khouri told Darren sadly. ‘He reminded me of people back in Tripoli, in Lebanon, where I was born. And he, I think, respected me.’
Dom Khouri seemed so genuinely sad about what had happened that Darren immediately warmed to him. He thought how easy it was for small-minded people around town to demonise Dom Khouri purely because he was rich and Lebanese.
Dom Khouri then moved on to say that he had an idea, given how awful things had become surrounding Ron, with the way he died and all the speculation, that there should be some kind of public acknowledgment of what Ron had meant to Mangowak. Even in the grim atmosphere at the wake after Ron’s funeral Dom Khouri had got a powerful sense of the helplessness everyone was feeling with the death. He asked Darren if it wasn’t true that Ron McCoy was almost the soul of Mangowak. Darren agreed. Dom Khouri said then that he thought it was important that something occurred, some action or monument or something, to acknowledge Ron. ‘It need only be a small thing,’ Dom said, ‘Ron would not be comfortable with anything more. But something at least, don’t
you think, Darren?’
Darren said he’d have a think about it and ask a few people what they reckoned. He was sure Ron himself would’ve hated the idea but he was touched by how Dom Khouri described Ron’s importance to the town. ‘The soul of this place is shy, marsupial shy,’ his father Norm had said to him once, and it did seem true that Ron himself was a bit like that.
Dom Khouri assured Darren that if everyone thought it was a good idea, he’d pay for whatever they decided upon. And if they didn’t think it was a good idea after all, then so be it. The two men parted on good terms and Darren ran his idea past family and friends in the days following.
When Darren discussed it with Noel Lea, it wasn’t long before the two of them had taken to Dom Khouri’s idea as if it had been their own. They went immediately into a clandestine conference in Noel’s barn, to work out what they could do. At 9 pm they went to visit Sweet William at his home to see what he thought of the ideas they’d come up with and to choose one that he thought fitting.
Sweet William had been ravaged by the sight of Ron’s body and had developed a tremor in his hands since. He welcomed them in but with a hardness in his eyes and an uncharacteristically clipped manner. They talked things over. When it came time to leave, Eve assured the two younger men that they’d cheered Sweet William up and that they should be proud of what they were doing. ‘And all I would say is ask yourself what Min would have liked,’ she said to them on the painted brick step as they said goodbye.
That same night they settled on an idea they thought they could manage, and Darren relayed the news to Dom Khouri, who seemed delighted. He gave Darren his mobile phone number and told him to call whenever they needed something.