Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (19 page)

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.

I
n 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.

He found himself a perch on a rock at the front of the headland and sat with his cap pulled forward and his nose in the air. He seldom sat on the beach doing nothing and yet this is what he now continued to do.

On the other side of the riverbust he could see loops of dried seaweed on the half-buried sand dune fence, hanging like black washing on a line. He felt the warm waves in the air of the day
beginning. Looking across Snook Bay towards Minapre, he could make out yet another curtain of rain heading over the sea. The offer that Dom Khouri had made as they fed the bristlebirds only a few weeks before came to mind. He could see that Dom Khouri felt guilty for having brought it up. He needn't have worried, he thought, the time might well come.

His association with the kind, rich man from Tripoli had revived something that had existed only as a memory since Leo Morris died. The longing, in Ron's case the shy and intensely private longing, for a height. Something level with the cliff where he was born. A glory in keeping with the sea of diamonds. He found it in the music and he suspected it was in what large amounts of money could buy as well.

Now he looked around from where he sat to check whether the navigational light out on the edge of the headland had stopped flashing. It had. The human day had begun. There was light enough now from the risen sun to guide the passing ships, even if, because of the GPS, they didn't need it anymore. Getting up, he dug his pocket knife out and went southward across the beach and into the hem of the tide. He prised some bait off the half-submerged rocks. He lifted others for the little crabs underneath. He made a mental note to tell Sweet William how warm the water was, perhaps warmer than he'd known it. He would fish later that evening off the sand. A few peri winkles and a crab or two would do. Maybe a worm as well, from the cliff-face later on.

After gathering the bait he briefly returned to the serrated cliff of sand beside the burst rivermouth and watched the flow. It was a good deep cut. He estimated the depth at around twelve feet. He could see terns swooping sharply back in the stiller water of the estuary. They were the experts. He thought of Wally Lea. And then he thought of his father. He wished he'd been at the party but somewhere inside he knew that his mother didn't. He turned and made his way along the sand for the steps back up to the road.

I
t was yoga that cured Liz of her ecophobia. Friends had been evangelising to her about it for years but she'd never taken the plunge. She was, in fact, a little wary of spiritual practices from Asian countries. She'd seen people go completely gaga after returning from monasteries and retreats in India and Thailand. But one morning in Minapre, turning the corner from the busy main street with the newspapers and the latest copy of
Wallpaper
magazine under her arm, she saw the very attractive poster that changed her mind.

It was stuck onto the front window of the Anise Juicery and Cafe alongside another poster advertising a clearance sale scheduled for that weekend in the Uniting Church Hall. It was the clearance sale advertisement that first caught her eye but then as she stood there reading the list of ‘. . . jewellery, lingerie, wetsuits, swimwear, audio books, Macintosh computer parts . . .' and thinking that it all sounded a little dodgy, she noticed the better designed poster beside it. Perhaps it was the wording – ‘Exploring classical & contemporary yoga systems, we will unite masculine and feminine practices
to strengthen & deepen our connection to life through the heart' – or perhaps just the timing, but whatever it was Liz's trepidation about yoga cleared like a cloud in a freshening wind.

When Liz got home she rang the Woody's Junction number of the ‘Vrindarvan Yoga Room' and spoke to one of the teachers, who told her that she didn't have to wait the fortnight until the sessions advertised on the poster and that if she wanted she could come to a class that very evening. Liz thought the teacher sounded not at all new-agey and so she agreed. Then she rang Craig on his mobile and asked him if he could cook tea.

When she got off the phone she fixed herself an espresso and sat out on the verandah looking down at the riverflat. The air was springy and the land looked lush. She already felt different. Before even having gone to the class. The wedge of tension that had been ruling her since the beginning of winter seemed to be dissipating minute by minute. There was pollen floating in the sunlight, she could see the tiny golden filaments sailing past all around her, wild freesias dotted the paddocks, and her body felt energetic again. She stood up and touched her toes. Then, spreading her legs, she began to swing her arms across her body, her right hand touching the left toe of her Pumas and so on. Then she did some lower back rotations. After months of coiled anxiety and displacement, Liz had turned the corner.