by Gregory Day
Noel set aside the paintings he’d been doing and, with Darren, concentrated on the job at hand. They figured it was going to take a good three months to accomplish and in that time the two of them worked with a purpose they’d never before known. Day and night, from within the walls of Noel’s barn, passers-by could hear them hammering and planing, with Tim Buckley or Will Oldham or Neil Young or Radiohead blaring out of the stereo and rocking the barn walls. No-one in the town suspected what they were doing but everyone knew that they were up to something in there.
One night at about nine thirty there was a knock on the barn door and they heard a stranger’s voice, a man, call hello. Pulling the big doors slightly ajar and looking out, Noel saw, under the hood of a red oilskin coat, the face of the guy who used to work for Colin Batty, Craig Wilson. He was the guy who had found Ron’s body. He was standing next to the vegetable garden lattice in the light rain, looking very uncomfortable. Noel, of course, wasn’t about to let him into the barn to see what they were doing.
‘G’day. I’m Craig Wilson. I keep hearing the music as I’m going by and, well, I wouldn’t mind a chat with you guys.’
In the barn Darren turned the music down so he could hear.
‘Sorry, mate, what was that?’ Noel said, his face barely poking out through the gap in the barn doors.
Craig stepped forward. ‘G’day,’ he said. ‘You’re Noel, aren’t you?’
He put his hand out and through the doors Noel thrust his hand out and shook it. ‘I’m Craig Wilson. I was saying, I keep hearing the music as I’m passing by. I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind a chat.’
Craig had been working up the gall to do this for days but now he felt like a complete idiot. Noel Lea wouldn’t even open the door more than a few inches, let alone welcome him inside. Noel, in fact, felt rude standing there looking out through the crack like an old crone but he didn’t have a choice. I should never have answered the door, he thought. Eventually, all he could manage to say was: ‘Not many people walk around here at night. I didn’t hear a car, did I?’
‘No, no. I’m walking,’ Craig replied gently. ‘Clears my head a bit.’
Noel fidgeted behind the doors. He had to talk to Darren. ‘Yair, well, um, I’m sorry but can you just hold on a minute, mate.’ He closed the gap in the barn doors, retreating back inside.
‘Who is it?’ Darren asked.
‘Craig Wilson’s out there.’
‘What does he want?’
‘He said he heard the music and wants to have a chat.’
Darren opened his arms wide and gestured incredulously at the contents of the room. Noel nodded. It felt a bit callous but he’d have to put the guy off.
After Ron’s death, Darren and Noel had learnt all about Craig Wilson from Sweet William and from Angela, Colin Batty’s receptionist, with whom they went way back. Sweet William had met Craig on the day they had found the body and, in fact, the two of them, apart from the police and the like, were the only people who actually saw Ron McCoy dead. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Craig Wilson had visited Sweet William from time to time in the weeks since to talk about it. Sweet William thought he was a decent bloke and had told Darren that he should be invited to the unveiling of Dom Khouri’s bequest, when the time arrived.
Angela from the estate agency, also a big fan of Craig Wilson’s, had actually helped him find the job managing the cafe in Minapre when he quit working for Colin Batty straight after Ron’s death. She’d told Noel and Darren that Craig was in an awful mess about Ron and that if it wasn’t for his wife he’d probably be suicidal himself. Angela said he’d described to her briefly what he’d seen down in the cave that day and that he’d also said that Colin Batty was an ‘evil bastard’. According to Craig, Batty had struck a deal with someone to buy Ron’s place if it went on the market, with a view to building a restaurant and apartments. Craig Wilson hadn’t waited for this piece of information before he’d quit, though. He’d gone in a blur to Colin Batty’s office on the very day he’d found Ron, with the vomit stains still on his clothing, and told him it was all over. Angela had watched him as he passed through reception, leaving sticky clay footprints all the way down the passageway to Colin’s office. She had heard the conversation from the front desk. She said Colin Batty hadn’t argued.
Noel went back to the barn door now, but this time he stepped outside into the misty rain to talk with Craig. He was apologetic. They stood there beside the vegetables, both of them with their eyes trained on Noel’s palomino, who was nuzzling the chickenwire of the disused bird aviary where the chaff was kept. For a few brief moments they talked about, of all things, Neil Young, who they could still hear singing inside the barn. It was, at least, a topic with which Noel could assure Craig Wilson that he bore him no ill feeling. As soon as he could, he excused himself and went back inside, leaving Craig to wander off in his red coat, to walk the beaches at night, as he had been doing, on Liz’s recommendation, ever since finding Ron McCoy like a nightmare in the cave.
At first she loved him tenderly, and he wept in her arms and trembled. After a fortnight, though, she decided that enough was enough and that he had to pull himself together, even just for the kids, who were freaked out at his state. It was beginning to spook them.
But Craig was helpless. He didn’t sleep at night, or, if he did, he’d wake out of breath from having revisited the scene. Liz recommended counselling, given all the time he had on his hands at first, but he refused point blank so then she suggested he take over her little pilgrimage and walk to St Catherine’s every day. Desperate, he tried this for three or four days until Angela rang about the job in the cafe her friend was opening in Minapre and his walks during the day had to cease.
He hadn’t felt up to starting a new job, and when Liz told him a few days earlier that Jamie Niall was opening his own real estate office in the old kiosk building at Boat Creek, he’d refused even to go and see him. He knew that Liz was right when she said that Jamie would run a good clean business but he just couldn’t face it. When the cafe job in Minapre came up though, he felt different. Liz convinced him it was the right thing to do and he hadn’t regretted it. Even in the midst of his difficulty, managing a cafe seemed so much simpler after what he’d been through. He could hardly believe now that he’d ended up selling property at all.
Often in the middle of things, however, he’d have to rush out the back and wash dishes for a while, away from the public, to deal privately with flashbacks that came upon him in seemingly random moments. He was fragile in a way that he had never conceived of, his body felt different, his mind seemed to work in splinters and fragments rather than with its usual logical flow. But, much to his own amazement, talking to people still seemed to be a thing that he was capable of, and the practice of leaning on the coffee machine for a chat, a posture he’d adopted for years before he’d moved out of Melbourne, came back to him a bit like an old skin. Because they hadn’t known him beforehand no-one in the cafe seemed to notice how haunted he was, which, although scary in itself, was just as well. He only had to wait, Liz assured him, and get on with things. The trauma would slowly pass. He found this hard to believe, though, precisely because he knew his guilt would never pass. It was there for keeps, for as long as Ron McCoy lay dead.
An unexpected consolation during this time was his improved relations with Libby. Now that the family trip to Prague was out of the question financially, her trip to Japan was very much a possibility. Once Craig had been at the cafe for six weeks and it looked as though it was going to work out long term, he told Libby that Japan was a goer. She was overjoyed and ever since had been a lot easier to get on with. Craig found himself stealing into her room after his walks at night, where she would play him the music she was into and he’d explain to her, laughingly, why it was rubbish. He found her room comforting, her posters on the walls, her litter of well-loved knick-knacks everywhere, and although he wondered at times if their getting on better was solely to do with her getting what she w
anted, he often found it hard to drag himself away and return to his own room and the difficulty of going to sleep.
In his suffering he felt constant waves of compassion, for the sick or injured he saw on the news, for roadkill as he drove along the Ocean Road to work. He couldn’t help but reflect on how he hadn’t felt these things in the past. The pain and insensitivity of the world was so obvious once you saw it, it was as real as the grass at your feet. He realised just by talking to Libby about any old nonsense that she herself had suffered more than he knew by losing contact with her biological dad. He’d understood this in theory but he now felt it in his heart and, as he returned from Minapre at the end of each day, it was his stepdaughter, more so than Liz or Reef, that Craig was looking forward to seeing at home. She’d always carried a secret pain in her own home, and in a way now he did too. The images would keep flashing through his head, and particularly the recurring memory he had of playing the organ in the open shed, while at the bottom of the headland Ron was lying dead in the cave. The very thought of that would flood him with remorse.
Liz tried to be his anchor and guide after that terrible day but she’d found it difficult. Since Craig’s tears just wouldn’t stop flowing and he’d stooped so low as to throw up in their bed, she reverted to tough love. That was when she recommended he pull himself together. The job at the cafe was a godsend. Before that he’d mope around the house, constantly returning to the same subject, and she thought he would drive her mad.
As soon as he began at the cafe she took up walking to the convent again. During these walks she came to the conclusion that Craig and herself were actually two very different people. Now that she finally felt strong, the last thing she needed was her husband losing his mind. Her dad had seen countless dead bodies during the war but hadn’t fallen apart at the seams. She loved Craig, she knew her good counsel and discipline were helping him, but nevertheless she felt let down. It was the harried look he got in his eyes which disturbed her the most. It wasn’t good for Reef to be around and she was glad that Craig had begun to feel the need to walk at night after dinner. While he was out, usually between eight and ten o’clock, she’d ply Reef with games and fun, and keep the mood on the up. Libby was OK – if anything she and Craig seemed to be getting on all right for the very first time – but it was Reef she was worried about. Life was just too complex. She wondered how people survived without any kind of spiritual practice. It was a mystery to her now how she herself had survived in the past.
Darren and Noel’s plan was that as soon as they’d finished the structural side of the job they’d wrap the whole thing up in sheets of black insulation plastic and drive it up to Thias Roebuck’s place to allow him to give it the finishing touches. Thias was in his sixties, with grey hair tied back in a ponytail and glassy blue eyes. He lived on the highest point of the hill up behind Minapre and was a timber master, a patternmaker by trade who’d gone his own way and ended up taking a respected place in a rarefied echelon of woodworking artists across the globe. Thias had known Ron McCoy from when he himself lived in Mangowak in the 1980s and was friends with them all, especially with Noel, with whom he shared a love of the paintings of Fred Williams.
Darren and Noel dropped their ‘baby’ off one night at Thias Roebuck’s workshop, stayed for a cup of tea and a piece of his partner Maureen’s fruit cake. They spent a tranquil half-hour chatting whilst listening to Thias’s ingenious wind chimes, which hung all around the outside of the house. The chimes were fashioned out of sea stones and ploughshares; the hanging stone would hit the old metal with a bell-like resonance. Then they left him to it.
After a measured appraisal, Thias had told them he thought it’d take him a week or two to do what was needed, if that was all right by them. They agreed, almost embarrassed to think of Thias Roebuck having to bother himself with correcting their shoddy work. Although Darren was a builder by trade, not in his wildest dreams would he have ever shown Thias his own experiments with furniture or sculpture but, of course, this was different. They were doing it for Ron, who, like Thias, had preferred a slower way of doing things, a fastidious way that had almost become lost to the world.
As Darren and Noel drove back through the night, they began to speculate on how they could get back at Colin Batty for the pressure he’d exerted on Ron. It infuriated them that he was getting away with it. He’d stayed put in his office and had carried on his business as normal. Noel favoured slashing his tyres and disfiguring his real estate signs but, as Darren said, that wasn’t really making a point.
By the time they’d passed through the hills at Poorool and were back down on the Dray Road heading for Mangowak, they were laughing their heads off. With an overwhelming and immediate need to vent some of their frustration, they stopped briefly back at Noel’s to pick up a ladder, some beer, paint and brushes, and then headed for the carpark on the Heatherbrae cliff, where they sat and drank for a couple of hours until the whole town was asleep.
Half pissed they drove back across the main road and parked under trees near the kindergarten. They headed by foot with the ladder and paint along a shortcut towards Colin Batty’s office. When they got there they rested the ladder against the large salmon-pink besser-brick wall on the eastern side of the real estate agency, and Noel scaled the rungs with a can and brush and began to paint. It seemed to take forever, with Noel in a meticulous mood. Eventually, Darren managed to hurry him up by giving the ladder a good shake and threatening to leave him. The message took less than half an hour to finish but, with their adrenalin pumping and the fear of being caught, it seemed like an eternity to them both.
They slept late the next morning, with nothing urgent pressing now that the project was in Thias Roebuck’s hands. Darren was woken by his sister Barbara just before nine, clicking through his house in the heels she wore to work, telling him what someone had graffitied on the big side wall of the estate agency.
‘You’re kidding,’ he said smugly from amongst the pillows. Barbara realised immediately. With a smile on her face she told him he was fuckin’ crazy, and Darren said, ‘It’s amazing what you get up to after a few beers, isn’t it?’
All morning until the shire truck arrived at midday to clean the wall, people coming into town along the main road couldn’t help but see the very large and very wonky words painted on the besser-brick wall in red paint: COLIN BATTY IS CORRUPT TO THE HILT! What with the drip lines and the ornate irregularity of Noel’s drunkenly applied paint, it was a mad looking sign indeed. When Liz Wilson drove past on her way to check her post office box and saw it she was horrified. She concluded that Craig was responsible. It was one thing to go crazy in the privacy of your own home, she thought, but to make it public like that was just going way too far.
It took Thias Roebuck a full month to get back to Noel and Darren and by the end of that time, the two of them were edgy with anticipation. When finally he called and they drove back up the hill behind Minapre and laid eyes on the work that Thias had done, both of them agreed it was worth the wait. Darren and Noel were effusively grateful for the vast improvements Thias had made. The craftsman just stared at them deadpan in the midst of all the thanks, as if suddenly bored with the project and ready to move on. Afterwards they again enjoyed a cup of tea and a piece of fruit cake with Thias and Maureen, and listened once more to the sea-stone and ploughshare chimes. Then they went on their way. Thias and Maureen stood at their front door with their two Jack Russells, waving goodbye under the outside light.
Now they had to paint the thing. Most of that would be done by Noel, with Darren only able to help here and there, when a whole plane of colour was required, for instance, or the lacquer needed applying. Nan Burns kept them company at nights in the barn as Noel slaved away, and together the three of them devised exactly the story of what should be painted and where. They delved back into their past and into Ron’s, and at the end of it all, when they stood back after a full ten days and nights of applying the paint, and then the lacquer, they felt almos
t as if someone else had cast the spell. There in front of their eyes, in three-dimensional reality, was the tale of so much that had gone on, for them, for their parents and grandparents, and of course for Ron. What had started out as merely a suggestion by Dom Khouri had, by dint of weeks of hard work in the barn, become a real thing. All that was left was to put it where it was intended, to reveal it forever to the world.
When Darren arrived at his grandmother Rhyll’s to pick her up on the day of the unveiling of Dom Khouri’s bequest, he found her sitting at her kitchen table drinking muscat with an unexpected guest. Trumpeter Carson, Martin Elliot’s old fiddle-playing lodger and barman, who hadn’t set foot in Mangowak for over twenty years, had turned up unannounced on Rhyll’s doorstep that very morning. Trumpeter was a tall old man with a fine head of silver hair brushed back from his brow and a weathered complexion from the many years of an itinerant life. Darren was barely old enough to remember him, but he’d often heard the old timers remark at parties that it was a shame Trumpeter Carson wasn’t still around to play a few tunes. He greeted Trumpeter warmly and then, glancing across at the brown violin case and swag sitting on the seagrass matting near the door, assured him that his timing was impeccable.
Rhyll had already told Trumpeter Carson about Ron and now he remarked to Darren how greatly saddened he was by the news. He said that, as he recalled it, Ron always had a streak of independence about him. As proof he said that it wasn’t until he himself had lived at Martin Elliot’s hotel for seven years that he found out Ron was a dab hand at the harmonium. ‘And there was I,’ he laughed, ‘making a fool of myself in the bar with my fiddle every night.’ Rhyll scoffed at that and reiterated to her grandson what a great musician Trumpeter was. She then said she agreed with Trumpeter about Ron’s independent streak, but only partially. ‘Ron was left high and dry without Min around the house,’ she told him.