Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds

  Gregory Day’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Eels, won the prestigious Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2006. His previous books include the poetry collection Trace (in collaboration with photographer Robert Ashton). He lives in Victoria.

  Also by Gregory Day

  The Patron Saint of Eels

  A NOVEL

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  PART: I

  ONE: DUCKS IN THE DARK

  TWO: THE WORLD THROUGH HEXAGONS

  THREE: LOOKING AT THE KOALA

  FOUR: CHECKING THE SURF

  FIVE: AFTER THE MUPPETS

  SIX: A HANDSHAKE WITH DOM KHOURI

  SEVEN: THE NEW ACOUSTICS

  EIGHT: FEATHER-LIGHT AND HEAVY AS LEAD

  PART: II

  NINE: A BONAFIDE PRIEST

  TEN: LIZ AND CARLA GO FOR A WALK

  ELEVEN: SON OF A PIONEER SURFER

  TWELVE: THE SNOUTCAT AND THE TINWHISTLE BIRD

  THIRTEEN: CRAIG’S BIRTHDAY WISH

  FOURTEEN: SAD MUSIC FOR THE RABBITS AND THE THRUSH

  FIFTEEN: FEEDING THE BRISTLEBIRDS

  SIXTEEN: GOING TO SEE THE BORGS

  SEVENTEEN: A LETTER FROM THE QUEEN

  EIGHTEEN: RIVERBUST

  NINETEEN: LIZ TURNS THE CORNER

  TWENTY: THE NEW SPIRITUALITY

  TWENTY-ONE: LIZ’S PILGRIMAG

  TWENTY-TWO: BATTY THE TRESPASSER

  TWENTY-THREE: AUCTION AT ‘THE ORCHARD’

  PART: III

  TWENTY-FOUR: MIN AND THE SEASHELL

  TWENTY-FIVE: THE RUST FALLS AWAY

  TWENTY-SIX: A CLIFFTOP BURIAL

  TWENTY-SEVEN: OLD SON

  TWENTY-EIGHT: THE BIG GIFT

  TWENTY-NINE: CRAIG PAYS RON A VISIT

  THIRTY: UNDER THE GLOOMP

  THIRTY-ONE: THE TIP-OFF

  THIRTY-TWO: A PORTERGAFF CHAT

  THIRTY-THREE: DIAMOND BOAT AT NIGHT

  THIRTY-FOUR: KIND OF BLUE

  THIRTY-FIVE: DROPPING OFF THE PAPERWORK

  CODA

  Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds is a work of the imagination. It should in no way be interpreted as a factual version of any real event. Nor should any character in this book be mistaken for any actual person, living or dead.

  ‘The Sacred Way’ by AD Hope is reproduced with the kind permission of

  The Estate of AD Hope, c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd.

  First published 2008 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Gregory Day 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Day, Gregory.

  Ron McCoy’s sea of diamonds.

  ISBN 978 0330 42332 8 (pbk.).

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  Typeset in 12.5/16 pt Granjon by Post Pre-press Group

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds

  Gregory Day

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  978-1-74198-045-5

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  978-1-74198-046-2

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  for the children, and the child inside,

  love the earth . . .

  ‘What’s water but the generated soul?’

  W. B. YEATS

  I

  ONE

  DUCKS IN THE DARK

  Noel Lea had been up late at night for a week, creating what he hoped would be a series of pictures on the marks that cars and other vehicles made in the unsealed rose-gold roads of Mangowak. He lived alone in the riverflat, at the corner of the Dray Road, on his family’s ramshackle acre full of outbuildings and strewn farm gear, and when he wasn’t labouring on various building sites around the area, he spent his time working on pictures in a big slab-bark barn at the northern end of the family block, just beyond the shadows of two pine trees that towered on either side of his driveway gate.

  With carefully applied gouache, textured with sand and iron-bark pollen fibres, he would depict in loose outline the road and its verges before allowing himself no more than a dozen quick strokes to represent the variations of marks he’d catalogued when wandering and studying the roads: scuffs, slides, zigzags, donuts, spinning-wheel troughs, crisscrosses, scrapes, skids, worn shoulders, splashes, sprays, u-ies, and something he called ‘chat-marks’: a four-line horizontal or diagonal configuration which was created when two cars going in opposite directions braked in the middle of a road to stop and pass the time of day. Never would he have imagined that something so incidental as these marks could be the subject of a whole exhibition but with the gradual sealing of roads in Mangowak a visual quality that he had always taken for granted had become something on notice, something withering away, a passing beauty, a disappearing pleasure.

  The town was settled on the sunrise side of a small river, amongst tree-clad folds and reedy gullies, and more noticeably on an iron-bark ridge running south above the riverflat towards high cliffs along the ocean shore. The roads were covered with local gravel, and, like the town’s ocean cliffs, this gravel had a honeycomb tone that when thrown on the inclines and curves and fat stretches of the roads would glow and give off its rose-gold effect. On a day of summer sun and blue sky the colour of the roads became emblematic and vivid, whilst in winter, under a grey doona of cloud, when wattle and tiny heath flowers were the only bright colours around, the hue of the roads would provide a welcome contrast. As the Brinbeal shire had begun a policy of kerbing and channelling in Mangowak, Noel had come to see the unsealed roads not only as canvases for a painterly traffic but as thoroughfares representing open ground, textured with the days, soft, bushcrafted, and imbued with a distinctive palette from the local earth. They had become a creative obsession for him and also a helpful way of furthering his experiments with gouache.

  It was about 3 am on a clear Monday night when he heard Ron McCoy’s ute idling in the road alongside his barn, followed by a knock on his wall.

  He climbed down his ladder from the loft where he worked and opened the double doors to find Darren Traherne stand
ing under the stars near the parsley patch, smoking a cigarette.

  Noel knew what he was there for but when Darren said, ‘Ducks,’ Noel raised his eyebrows and replied, ‘Bit dark, isn’t it?’

  Darren just shrugged, scratching his neck under a long brown ponytail, and Noel disappeared back inside to get his boots and gun.

  The two young men climbed into the cabin of Ron McCoy’s idling ute and the three of them set off along the Dray Road heading inland. Not far along, as they approached the bend in the river that ran closest to the road, Ron put the ute into neutral and slowed down, peering across his two passengers towards the dark water. The ute rolled to a standstill, its engine quietened to a tick, and he waited a few seconds, checking for jumping trout. The river-top was still, uncrinkled. Frogs were clacking on the grassy banks. Noel looked towards the river too but Darren, sitting in the middle, watched as a kangaroo crossed the road in front of them, in one easy bound leaping the roadside fence into the riverflat paddock and away. Ron put the ute back into gear and slowly they picked up speed again.

  They drove along the Dray Road, through the valley in the night.

  ‘Are you good, Noel?’ the old man said, adjusting the cushion he had behind his back in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Yeah, good, Ron. You didn’t even have to wake me up.’

  ‘Some people keep strange hours,’ said Darren.

  Noel and Darren were the sons of two of Ron McCoy’s oldest friends, Wally Lea and Norm Traherne. Though Darren’s grandmother, old Rhyll Traherne, was still fit and living in her house on the westfacing slope of the ridge, the boys’ fathers, Wally and Norm, had both died within months of each other only a few years back. Missing their company, Ron had not long after begun taking Noel and Darren out with him on the occasional night’s hunting.

  The ute turned left at the back of the riverflat, climbing up the Dray Road and into the heavily timbered hills. As they rounded the high shoulder of the Mexico Bend the road grew rough and stony. The windows rattled as they descended on the other side, shuddering across a stretch of washboarded road near the entrance to the Birdsong brothers’ small quarry. When the road grew smooth again, Ron McCoy leant forward and turned off his transistor radio, which had been parroting subliminally on the dash. With one gloved hand on the wheel he began to speak intermittently through the bumps.

  ‘Those darn crows have finished up,’ he said. ‘Been the rark rark rark since January. Had dozens of them up near us . . . feeding on the heath currant. The mother hates them, she collects the currants. To tell you boys the truth I don’t mind the crows so much but she’s always bellyaching about it. Bloody ravens bloody ravens. I get sick of that.’

  Darren and Noel listened as Ron negotiated the surface of the road and the night whooshed past them.

  ‘You had that nankeen heron in your pine trees, Noely? Eh? I spot it in the swamp in the afternoons. Just waking up, I reckon. Makes a fella like me look sociable . . . which reminds me, after that rain last week the snails were all over the mouth. Like billy-o on the sedge there. Out of their shells drinkin’ on the wet. But only for a couple of hours. Caught six bumper whiting next morning. Almost as good as cliff-worms, those snails.’

  ‘You have to be quick,’ Darren said.

  ‘Not quick, just there,’ Ron replied.

  They turned off west into the Poorool Road with three wallabies standing beside the dam on the high corner watching them pass. Ron began half humming, half singing the once famous song ‘Shenandoah’.

  ‘Road’s crook,’ he said as they lurched over the holes in the dip beside the pine plantation. He resumed humming.

  They headed up the incline and onto the first of the two Poorool saddles. When they’d reached the highest point they rolled down the other side in neutral and climbed the next one. The ute clattered and moaned. At the top and along a little way, Ron stopped at the fence of a cleared paddock sloping gently away from them and seawards. They were a good twenty miles inland by then. All three of them looked out for signs of first light over a faraway ocean. There were none.

  Ron wound down his window and Noel did the same. The crisp air of the higher altitude entered the cabin. Darren fished in his shirt pocket for his smokes and Ron leant under the driver’s seat and pulled out three stubbies of Melbourne Bitter from a BYO bag. He handed one each to the boys and opened one for himself.

  As the years had passed and people had died or moved on, Ron McCoy felt more at ease with these two men in their thirties than he did with most people his own age. At least they knew the landmarks and could talk of the same people. Ron could reminisce if he chose, almost as if he was with Wally and Norm, and the boys would remember some of the events he spoke of and be curious about those they didn’t. In the middle of the night something uncanny would slip into the clean air between them, and the old man would speak to Darren and Noel as if they were his contemporaries. ‘Remember when Fred Ayling broke his leg in that coupe on the Gentle Annie,’ he’d say, as if Darren and Noel had been members of the party which carried Fred down the difficult ridge on the messmate and calico stretcher in 1959. Or: ‘Was it Pat Burns who first showed us that currawong and 44-gallon drum trick? That was at Booligal that time, wasn’t it? Or was it the Womboin? Blowed if I can remember.’

  Noel was content to preserve the illusion, he found it pleasurable to be addressed as if he was his dead father. But Darren was often blunt. He’d say, in his high-pitched voice, ‘I was two years old in 1969, Ron!’ or ‘It’s not Dad you’re talking to, Ron.’ Or even: ‘I never went on that trip to Booligal, they wouldn’t let me out of kindergarten.’

  Ron feigned not to notice but of course that wasn’t the case. He would continue talking. It was enough that Darren knew what the word ‘Booligal’ meant for his question not to require a u-turn or an apology.

  Despite his jokes, it was pleasurable also for Darren to hear Ron speak, to hear his father’s name mentioned again as if he was crowded in with them in the cabin of the ute. When Norm Traherne had been alive he was always talking about Ron when his friend wasn’t there. It was ‘Ron reckons this’ and ‘Ron says that’. Now the tables were turned. Darren loved listening to the clipped yarns in which his dad invariably played a major part. He felt at home when Ron spoke, the old man’s normally shy tongue loosened by the dark hour and the respect Darren and Noel had for him, his nous about the bush and ocean spilling into them like stars out of the onyx night.

  Looking out through the windscreen, Ron took a sip of his stubby and said, ‘Bit dark for ducks.’

  The boys nodded and waited. It was confusing. If it had been eels he wanted to get, or illegal firewood, it would have made sense. But not ducks. Sunrise was not until five thirty. You couldn’t have fired a shot before six. They were both thinking a similar thing. Maybe he just wanted some company.

  Eventually Noel said, ‘Nice night, though.’

  Ron nodded, took another sip.

  ‘What do you reckon about them sealing the roads, Ron?’ Noel asked, after a long silence.

  ‘They’re running out of gravel,’ Darren said.

  ‘Either that or the price is too high,’ said Ron.

  ‘You don’t reckon it’s just dickheads complaining about the dust?’

  ‘Could be. Could be public liability the same as them cutting down all the pines,’ Ron said.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Noel told them.

  ‘Ah, I don’t know,’ Ron said. ‘It’s hard on the vehicles.’

  Noel looked out the window. That was exactly what his father would have said.

  ‘You know they used to get the gravel out the front of my place,’ Ron told them. ‘When the war broke out, it was blokes digging the gravel out there that told us. I used to stand off and watch them. Straight down into the cliff they went. Had to stop in the end, though. Got a bit dangerous. The whole bloody cliff-face could’ve caved in.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t have got enough up there to do all the roads, would they?’ Darren as
ked.

  ‘Not many roads then, boy. The Ocean Road of course, but there weren’t many others. The Old Breheny Road’s always just been clay so they didn’t have to do that. Probably only a handful of others. Mostly old bullock ruts.’

  Their eyes had adjusted to the night now. They could see a huddle of sheep across the paddock beside them, standing out in the open, as still as hardwood.

  Noel knew there was no point mentioning the changing aesthetic of the roads to Ron. It wouldn’t be that kind of change that Ron would object to, if he did object, it would more likely be that the town was getting too crowded with people and regulations, like a suburb.

  Looking down through the chute of the treed gullies towards the sea, there was still no sign of light. Ron leant under the driver’s seat again and pulled out three more stubbies. Darren picked up an empty cartridge shell from the dashboard and turned it in his fingers, trying to figure why it was that Ron had brought them out there. Maybe he was finally losing it, he thought disturbingly.

  Beside him Noel was thinking that loneliness wasn’t a crime.

  Ron could feel the boys becoming unsettled but chose to ignore it for the time being. They could put up with it. He just needed to sit a little, to drink with them some more. Soon enough Darren would push him, wanting to know what the hell he was up to. But timing was always something he’d felt confident with. So he talked about ducks, to reassure them that he hadn’t lost the scent.

  ‘No-one was a better shot than your old man,’ he told Darren. ‘Except his old man.’

  ‘Grandma wasn’t bad either, when she was younger,’ said Darren.

  ‘True. Rhyll used to shoot cormorants from a tent on the estuary when she first turned up, I remember that. There was a bounty on ’em then. Fishermen reckoned they were eating too much. It was fair game on cormorants for a bit. And your Grandma Rhyll used to prop there in front of the tent with a bottle of muscat and have a great old shot. Then send your old man out into the water to get ’em when they fell.’