by Gregory Day
Dom Khouri’s house was to be built into a large and complicated frame of cyclone-resistant steel, and after the excavation was finished and the footings had been placed into the hole from its deepest point right back to the level closest to the entrance on Merna Street, the frame was put in place. From that day on, it seemed to Ron McCoy that just about every tradesman in Mangowak was at work on the site. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers, plasterers, sculptors, swimming-pool builders, landscape gardeners, pavers, carpet-layers and, of course, glaziers. The house, which initially had aroused some protest in the area, was paying for the mortgages and winter holidays of half the town. What at first had seemed a building that would somehow threaten the bush-democratic atmosphere in the town and accentuate Mangowak as a destination for the rich and glamorous was, in fact, the most long-lasting and interesting prospect that any of the tradesmen had ever worked on.
For the most part, Dom Khouri had decided to use local tradespeople rather than his own construction team, putting to the back of his mind any concerns he had about whether or not they would be up to the job. He was philosophical and believed in people’s capacity to fulfil their potential under good direction. Once he’d settled on the tanned, much respected sixty-year-old bachelor Dave Buckley as his builder, he had allowed no doubts about whether or not the locals could do the job. Sure, the stonemasons had to come from Sydney, due to the irregular, even idio syncratic demands of the ocean-facing wall, but Dom Khouri reckoned on the fact that the local tradesmen of a small town would know, better than most, that life was all about accomplishing one task at a time, section by section.
‘Let me and the architects and David look after the big picture,’ he would say to his wife, Isabelle, in a calm tone, ‘and the craftsmen with good guidance will join the dots we give them to join.’
As work progressed on the house, Ron began to enjoy having all the familiar faces around. And the site wasn’t anywhere near as noisy once the earthmoving machines had gone. The main noise that bothered Ron now, even more than the stonecutters and the angle-grinders, the power-saws, the popping nail guns and the jackhammers, was the commercial radio that the workers liked to listen to. The sound of it blared over the clifftop from 7.30 am to 5 pm every day, classic hits from the sixties, seventies and eighties, surf reports, newsbreaks and advertisements. Min was far enough away in the house for it not to intrude but for Ron it developed into a true bane. His idea of music was assaulted by the cacophony, the extraordinary fact that it never ceased, until song after announcement after jingle after song became nothing other than a racket. But he had no way of expressing his disturbance, except by sighing every day at 5 pm when the boom-box covered in stone dust was finally switched off and the construction site fell quiet. He consoled himself with the thought that Dom Khouri, the very man who had brought the building site into Ron’s life, would himself dislike the music his workers were playing.
Ron sought Dom Khouri out whenever he was around and Sweet William felt, during the daily card game in the new shed, that Ron had taken to talking about his new neighbour an awful lot. Try as he might, as he shuffled the fresh deck of VOLTAREN cards, or sipped his stout, to have a normal conversation about the fluctuations of his barometer or the smoking of trout, Sweet William found Ron would invariably lead the subject back to the building next door. Or to one or another of Dom Khouri’s other interests, some charity he was donating to, some public museum he was building in Queensland. Sweet William conceded that Dom Khouri could well be a decent bloke but he had little doubt in his mind that Ron was getting quite carried away. He’d always known Ron to be childlike at times so he didn’t say anything, preferring to concentrate on the cards in his hand, to keep talking about the weather and the smoked trout, and to wait for the whole shenanigan to blow over.
Dom Khouri had hardly any time to visit the site at all – he was a very busy man. So Ron would wander over to the boundary every hour or so in the afternoons and watch how things were progressing and chat with whichever tradesman was near. He didn’t know the stonemasons from Sydney of course, but almost everyone else was familiar to him from the pub, if not just from around the town in general. Dave Buckley was never too busy for a chat and he also talked to the painter Givva Way, the electrician Joe Conebush, and to the carpenter Darren Traherne of course, and the plasterer Dusty Miller, and the other tradesmen, most of whom had come to live in town for the building opportunities after the 1980s bushfires, but some of whom he could remember from further back, even as small children. He’d stand on his mown slope, directly adjacent to where Dom Khouri was installing a giant outdoor bar area looking right onto the Two Pointers, and the blokes would ask him questions about how the fish were running, or what could be expected from the weather, and he would grill them a bit on how they were going about what they were doing. They’d talk about the tensile strength of modern-day nails, the price of pavers, the weight of the larger sheets of glass, etc, and meanwhile the building would be taking shape around them all, the stone from the Birdsong quarry would keep arriving in truckloads for the ocean-facing wall, wheelbarrows would continue rippling up and down the planking ramps, and the days of raucous radio and industrious banter would pass on the cliff where once only the McCoys, the bristlebirds and the wild thrush had reigned. And then Ron would wander off back over the slope to tinker in his shed or cut some timber for the Rayburn. He’d stand and think about the progress, he’d try to estimate end-dates for particular jobs like the wiring or the flooring or the low stone wall on his boundary side. He’d rig a drum-net for the following morning or flick through the local rag for items of interest, but everything he read seemed to bear some relation to Dom Khouri’s house.
He found that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t get away from it so long as he stayed at home. And when he did take off in the early mornings or late at night to comb the slopes and the flat, the shoreline and the promontories, his new neighbour’s enterprise was often still in his head. It was a thing to wonder about, to tinker with in the mind. Sometimes he went so far as to dream at night that he had taken over Dave Buckley’s job and was following Dom Khouri’s wishes, implementing his new friend’s operatic vision. And perhaps, at the end of a long day, Dom and he could relax together in that topnotch outdoor bar, rest their stubbies on the lovely ledge of Birdsong stone, and talk about music, about Dom’s favourite movies, about Beniamino Gigli, and about Leo Morris, and the pleasurable days when Ron first learnt to play the organ.
But then he would be woken by Min’s coughing or by sudden plovers in the night, and he would lie there in an uncomfortable state between worlds. Min would cough again and through the walls he’d be reminded of the reason he’d sold the land in the first place. Without even going back to sleep he’d dream that all the stonework was beginning to slip and fall on the high ocean-facing wall, the ornate wrought ironwork of the verandah was popping loose, and that somehow, as the new man in charge, it was his fault. He’d shudder and get up and go outside for a pee on the lemon tree. The tang of the night air would break the creepy feeling. And he’d be alone again, on his clifftop and under the stars, and in the darkness the building next door would only constitute a vague lump, a hulk, a shadow. In a deepened state, he’d wish for the whole thing to go away, he’d stumble back to bed in his slippers, and it would.
II
NINE
A BONAFIDE PRIEST
There had only been one other time, in the mad weeks after his father had died, that Ron and Min had ever discussed the prospect of selling the block, although ‘discussed’ was hardly the word. It was more that the prospect was shot at them out of the blue, by Min’s unhinged distress over her husband’s sudden death.
On a February day of high cirrus cloud and stillness, Ron’s father Len McCoy, aged fifty-seven, had fallen over in the spidery gloom of the outdoor toilet. When Ron reached him, blood was pouring out of a gash above his eye. He didn’t think for one minute that his father was dead but, in fact, it was a heart at
tack that had caused him to fall and the gash was merely a bright crimson decoy. Ron stood bewitched by the sight before him, until he gathered his wits and dashed inside. He and his mother negotiated the big body, cleaned Len up and placed him on the spare bed with a sheet over his cooling body, while they waited in shock for the doctor to arrive. Ron himself couldn’t see the point of the doctor, but Min at least knew that things like death had to be certified, made official. So, Dr Sheahan had arrived in a brand new two-tone Holden.
In the following strange weeks, Min’s night crying and preoccupied air at first merely annoyed Ron. Death was a fact, he wanted to tell her, there was no bringing anyone back. Even his father. But then, as slowly his own grief sifted down, forcing him to understand how irreversible the world really was, and how he would one day most likely simply keel over as his father had just done in the hugeness of things, and die, Ron began to develop a sense of the possible knots and webbings Min had caught herself in. But when she suggested in a harried fashion only weeks after the funeral that they should sell up and move, he felt for certain that she was quite deranged.
On the day after she’d brought it up, Ron was at a property out on the Dray Road, called to shoot a city farmer’s one and only working dog. He’d known the place, he had been there before as a teenager, helping his father grub an acre for a house paddock. The dog was a clay-coloured kelpie, not at all old but it had a tumour. It looked up into the barrel of the gun with an unsettling awareness, almost as if it had been shot before, until Ron bit down on his cud and pulled the trigger. An uncustomary shiver came over him as the kelpie’s frame buckled. He took his payment, and the warm carcass in a potato sack to be thrown with a beach stone into the Bootleg Creek, excused himself from cake and lemonade, and headed straight out of there.
All the way home on the Dray Road, via the drop-off of the dog, unbidden images inflicted themselves upon his mind. He saw his father doubled over the mattock on that house paddock, with one hand pointing always at what young Ron had to learn, the other hand jockeying the wide tongue of the mattock in the obstreperous silver and black ground. He saw the disappointed truth in that clay kelpie’s eye and also the ovoid beach stones marking his father’s clifftop grave. By the time Ron was floating the ute in neutral down towards the Mangowak valley, he had the distinct scent of formic acid in his nostrils from all the ant mounds he and Len had disturbed on that city farmer’s house paddock long ago, and as he swung out of the trees to head back along the riverflat, with the dune bar low but resolute out in front of him, blocking the ocean horizon, he was certain his father would climb out of his hessian coffin in the grave on the cliff and haunt them for the rest of their lives. ‘He’s a monty to,’ he said to Min that night over tea. She scoffed at such a suggestion. But Ron insisted. ‘Selling his land. Nothing would upset him more,’ he had told her.
Crossing the dip and rise of the paddock slopes from home, on a track worn by bullocks in the days when the Meteorological Station was first operating, Ron would, in those days, go twice a week to the store and post office. From the elevated vantage of their block he could view the track slung in a slanting line across the grasses, above Tim Considine’s potato crop, as if it was a cord uniting the house and their supplies. If the grasses were left long in summer the snakes were rife and he’d take the path higher up and straight along the clifftop, through a colonnade of tea-tree, and then duck in across an untended paddock of pigface and wild orchids to get around that way to the store. In the awful weeks following his father’s death, however, Ron took to the tea-tree colonnade rather than the open slopes when he ventured that way, not because of the risk of snakes but because he didn’t want to be seen, in dark or daylight.
As he emerged from the tea-tree one midweek morning in early April, quite deaf in his worry to the ratcheting of wattlebirds all about and oblivious of the rabbits scurrying to either side, he caught sight of Dr Leo Morris over near the main road, heading along like himself in the sunlight for the store. Ron quickened his pace through the paddock. As he scaled the post and rail, Leo had disappeared but he figured he could already hear him inside the post office talking fifteen to the dozen with the postmaster, George Beal.
Ron hurried along and entered the post office to find Leo’s broad Welsh face beaming in profile, his silver spectacles catching what light there was in the dark-timbered postal room. Sensing Ron at the doorway, Leo turned from his conversation at the counter and halloed enthusiastically, waving a cream envelope about and cajoling Ron straight away to join him for a drink at the hotel. A wave of relief coursed through Ron’s body. He nodded warmly back and accepted the invitation.
As Leo Morris concluded his business with George Beal, Ron stepped out from under the post office awning and back into the sun to wait, entirely forgetting the supplies he’d come to buy from the store. When Leo himself emerged from the post office a few minutes later, the two of them headed off side by side down the hill along the road towards the hotel.
Dr Leo Morris, in his uniform powder-blue slacks, cream v-neck jumper and white shirt with gold crosses on its collar, chatted happily to Ron as they wandered along. He was a squat, ample man and it was he who had given Ron the Ontario pump organ years before. Ron had never forgotten the day, how they’d loaded it onto the tractor tray out the front of Bonafide View, with the sky threatening to bucket down and the ocean the colour of bluestone. He had been coveting it for months and Leo had noticed. When he finally took it home it had been the shortest day of the year, June 21, 1943.
A Doctor of Music, a Catholic priest and an unabashed epicurean, Leo Morris had semi-retired to the coast by the time of Len McCoy’s death, to spend his days bodysurfing the breakers in front of his house between writing and annotating folk and liturgical music in his home at Bona fide View, where he gave a regular Sunday morning mass amongst the bush rats and the sheafs of Bach and Britten and Monteverdi. He liked to pass his afternoons drinking carafes of moselle in big Martin Elliot’s pub, where on occasions he had been known to shout the bar, most particularly on the days when he received his biannual royalty cheque for the famous song ‘Click Go the Shears’, which he had overheard and written down in a shearing shed in western New South Wales just after the war, and to which he now claimed a small but pleasurable copyright. On the days when these royalties arrived at the post office, Leo Morris would saunter into the hotel and lay the cheque on the bar, for every last penny to be spent on whoever happened to be drinking there at the time. Big Martin Elliot, standing by the taps, all six foot four inches of him, balding and with a low-slung beer belly, would bellow ritualistically as he entered: ‘So, how many clicks of the shears have you got for us today, Your Holiness?’
Leo Morris would beam back up at his giant friend and point theatrically at the cheque. ‘I trust our Mine Host can read by now,’ he would say, with an ironic plum and pleasant mirth spreading all over his face.
These ‘Click Go the Shears’ afternoons had become legendary since Leo had semi-retired, and he would regale the bar with preposterous and even ribald stories from his time as a young priest studying at the Vatican or from his folk-song collecting days. His stories were often littered with famous and notorious names and peppered with exotic destinations which he had visited on his travels. Primed by the alcohol and the loquacious, iconoclastic priest, the sessions would invariably end with singing lasting well into the night.
This Wednesday, however, the cream envelope in Leo Morris’ hand held nothing more interesting than an erratum to an article he’d had printed in a Melbourne Catholic newspaper. Ron and Leo wandered together through the cypressy perfume of the pub’s carpark and past the painted red iron of the hotel garage and the bottle green hotel truck. They stepped from the brightness of the day into the dim light of the bar, said hello to Martin Elliot’s black Labrador, Guts, who was in his customary position in front of the fire, and also to the permanent lodger, Trumpeter Carson, who was manning the taps, before taking their seats on two stools bes
ide the tiny hotel aquarium set in the left-hand wall.
As soon as they were seated, after ordering a stout and a moselle from Trumpeter Carson, Leo inquired about Min.
‘How’s she getting on, Ron, without your dad?’
Ron pushed his big lips forward in consideration. He took a sip. ‘Nah, not good, I don’t think, Leo,’ he said. ‘She’s not herself.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yair, she’s not good.’
Leo’s rotund body shifted on his stool. ‘Has Rhyll paid her a visit?’
‘No, she has her hands full with Sid, I gather.’
There had been a pause then, the two of them staring at the miniature shark gliding back and forth behind the aquarium glass.
Ron said eventually: ‘We went out to Beeac the other day in the ute, to look at some Border collie pups. Billy’s on his last legs. I persuaded the mother we should get in early. Got a couple of good ones from the Tetaz farm, cheap, given their lines. That seemed to perk her up a bit. She got a bit excited. Named them straightaway.
‘Anyhow, on the way back I pulled the ute in under the ironbarks near the Telegraph Road there. We propped for a cup of tea from the Thermos. Before I know it, she’s turned away from where we were leaning on the bonnet and she’s bawling. Waving her hand, saying, “Sorry, boy”. It was crook, Leo. We got home all right in the end, the puppies cheered her up and all, but yair, it was crook. And now by her reckoning we should sell up and move.’
Leo Morris’s brow creased as he listened, but promptly as Ron fell silent the priest’s countenance brightened. Turning on his stool, he grasped Ron’s shoulder tightly in his hand, digging in with his long nails. ‘Sounds to me like I should pop over for a visit, Ron, wouldn’t you say?’
With stout foam on his large upper lip, Ron winced from the sharpness of the nails. He nodded his agreement by way of a quick and emphatic dip of the head. Leo had understood. Ron knew he would. Apart from anything else, Leo was from the city, like Min. They’d always got on like a house on fire.
