by Gregory Day
‘Well, as we know, this kind of thing is increasingly hard to find. In my business, we see one, maybe two of these properties a decade. And that is why, ladies and gents, this auction today is one out of the box, why it’s special, and why I feel genuinely excited to be conducting it.
‘You would’ve felt as you drove in here today the immense store of unbroken history that this elite property has. The fruit trees that you can see over there in the far corner by the bluegums are over a hundred years old. No doubt you noticed the two quince trees – the size of my real estate office back in Mangowak! Unbelievable. And of course you would’ve also noticed under the grand old oak by the stables the child’s rope-swing that looks as if it has been frozen in time. Absolutely priceless. It’s as I always say, you can’t put a dollar value on memories.
‘So today, ladies and gents, is your chance to buy a piece of beautifully appointed history, a slice of heritage Victoria in great nick, old but immaculate, never having been owned by anyone, if I might say, short of a quid. I’m sure if it wasn’t for certain physical ailments there’d be no way known the current vendors would be moving anywhere else.’
Craig shut his eyes as Colin Batty spoke. He was amused now to learn that the Svenssons were unwell. It was the first he’d heard of it. His boss was on a roll, making it up spontaneously. Colin knew that no untruths would matter to the Svenssons if the place came in at the right price.
Craig opened his eyes as Colin wound up his preamble with a long description of The Orchard’s six homestay studios – ‘sleek and rustic. Old but immaculate. Paint your own Frederick McCubbin in peace! Or a lovely still life using the handy fruit on the orchard trees!’ Clapping his hands with relish, Colin then announced that bidding would begin at half a million dollars. At which point he set his Akubra aside and signalled to Craig to keep his eye open for shy bids.
As he scanned the crowd and listened to the price begin to rise, Craig could see Reef and Paul chasing each other and falling down over on the grass between the fruit trees. Liz and Carla and Marisa were standing right in the centre of the crowd watching the events.
The bidding began and rose quickly, and as it did, Colin Batty’s voice grew in emphasis, his vowels rounding out like a race caller or an old style football commentator. The auction was lured into a steady upward rhythm by his technique, the gestures and sibilance encouraging and cajoling constant excitement and activity. Nothing could stand still, especially not the price, with Colin Batty whipping it up into a frenzy.
Of course a lot of people in the crowd had seen him in action before. The Minapre locals were, in fact, quite blasé when it came to an auctioneer’s techniques but were interested in what ‘The Orchard’ would fetch and what relation that might bear to their own properties. Liz and Carla noticed familiar faces too, including, to Liz’s surprise, her yoga teacher, Walker Lea, from Vrindarvan. He was standing off to the far side of the crowd with a younger man, perhaps his son, Liz thought. The younger man had a head of curls just like the musician Ben Harper.
In 2000 the property had sold to the Svenssons for $1.1 million but now, in the rapid flurry, the bidding soared, culminating eventually in an emphatic silence. Colin Batty stared at the crowd. He waited. It was an old trick, compelling someone to fill the silence. But only the crows by the roadside ironbarks studded it now.
He opened his arms wide once again. ‘One point nine million. Does that match up? In the current climate, this is a good price. An excellent catch. One point nine I have. Yes, ladies and gents, we’re at one point nine. Now we’re looking for passion. Scandinavian-designed industrial strength kitchen with a renovated woodfire oven option as well. Original parquet floors, ADSL broadband and satellite. Central heating. Looking for trailblazers now. With the studios you’re purchasing a silent business as well as a home. Yes. One point nine and looking for two. Do we have two million? Can you take us there, sir? I have one point nine, one point nine for bluechip I have. Sir? No? Have a think now. Excuse me, ladies and gents.’
With his Akubra in his hand he stepped away from the crowd and made his way casually up to the patio where, watched by the crowd, he crouched on his haunches and spoke with theatrical discretion to the Svenssons, who remained seated on the stainless-steel chairs with news papers spread. When he eventually returned he informed the throng that the property would definitely be sold that day, but after much encouragement and further rhapsodic descriptions, Colin Batty was left with no alternative but to declare: ‘Going once at one point nine million, going twice here, at one point nine million. All righty then, all offers up? So it is. After consultation with the vendors I declare “The Orchard” sold for the sum of one point nine million. There we have it, ladies and gents. On behalf of Batty Real Estate I’d like to thank you all for your time.’
In the richly scented forest air the coiled tension of the performance was released and the local crowd broke immediately into small talk and smiles as the unsuccessful bidders drifted quietly away. Inside the house afterwards, Colin assured the Svenssons that the sunshine had been worth at least $200 000 on the day.
‘It also shone the day we bought it,’ Lars Svensson countered flatly.
‘Well then, it’s only fair that it shone again today,’ Colin bluffly replied.
The successful bidders were a couple from Hamilton looking to retire early. ‘The Orchard’ would be perfect for them, Craig thought. There’d be no disappointment this time. They had the complexion of people who’d worked outside but the clothes and cars of people for whom the hard work had been worthwhile. Craig liked them, he found them professional but also genuinely thrilled as they signed the documents under his guidance on the red cedar dresser in the Svenssons’ hallway. Colin was happy about them too. They were solid types. He was sure they’d be staying for keeps.
Once the formalities were completed and the locals had wandered away to their cars, a clutch of cloud towered in from the southwest, bringing with it a light mist and casting the property in a midday shadow that threatened to bring rain. With their shoes crunching the Lilydale toppings, Colin, Craig, Liz and Carla chatted by the gold Tribute before heading off. The kids were in the car, Reef and Paul still wrestling as Marisa sat slumped in the front seat sucking her thumb. Scowling, with her knees tucked up under her arms, she was staring out the window, straight at the man in the Akubra who was talking to her mum.
‘That was quite a performance,’ Carla said to Colin with a wry grin.
‘Ah well, when in doubt, give it the full treatment,’ he said.
‘Didn’t look like you had too much doubt.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Colin told her. ‘I was nervous as hell for this one. Christ, I’d already spieled the place only two years ago. Two-thirds of the crowd were there that day. I had to get a new pitch. Went all right, though, eh?’
‘Certainly did,’ said Craig.
Turning back to Carla, Colin asked, ‘How you going?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘Bit of a surprise to see you here.’
Carla looked at him blankly. She could smell Colin’s aftershave. She almost continued the conversation but decided against it. She didn’t want to risk being flirtatious. And she hated aftershave.
Quickly seeing where things were headed, Craig began to move off around the front of the 4WD to the driver’s side, allowing Carla and Liz to break the conversation without being rude.
Inside the 4WD, Marisa jumped over into the back seat as Liz and Carla got in. Colin stood alone now under his Akubra as a few heavy drops of rain began to fall. He still had his eyes on Carla, who was busy fixing little Marisa’s seatbelt.
As Craig backed out to drive away, the auctioneer gave a quick and decisive wave with his open hand, as if clutching at something. Liz shook her head quietly to herself where she sat in the passenger seat next to her husband.
Colin Batty watched the Wilsons’ Tribute disappear into the trees on the fenceline and then leave the property. Casting a brief g
lance back at the Svenssons’ house but seeing no signs of activity inside, he turned to leave, walking down the driveway ruts, watching the raindrops loosening the compacted white dust at his feet. Shrouded now in the tall forest at the fringes of the property and under the heavy dark cloud, a familiar loneliness filled his being.
One point nine million isn’t bad, he consoled himself as he reached the front gate and headed along the roadside verge to his car. But in fact he was a little disappointed. He wouldn’t allow his staff to take bets in the office but he played a game with himself before each auction in which he’d be rewarded if he could pick the sale price. Generally his track record was excellent but in the cocoon of his mudbrick shower that morning he’d gauged to himself that ‘The Orchard’ would go for at least two point one. Somehow or other he’d fallen short of the mark.
III
TWENTY-FOUR
MIN AND THE SEASHELL
Min McCoy had always thought that getting off to a good start in life was the key to her happiness but she’d never spared a thought for what might make life’s end a tolerable thing. Both her father’s and her sister’s deaths had entailed no suffering. Papa Mahoney had simply fallen asleep in the kitchen beside the cockatoo cage, never to wake up again, and Elsie had dropped stone dead from a heart attack under her pergola in Balwyn, without a moment to think. Min always presumed her bloodline would see her head off in the same way, without fuss, and without drawing anyone else into a sacrificial bother.
On the deep myrtle-beech sill of the kitchen sink window where she’d stood for untold hours over the years, there was a spearmint coloured saucer with a cake of yellow soap and a small crystal vase which she kept fresh with a flower from the garden. In between these two fixtures had always been, or so it seemed, a small coffee coloured seashell, which somewhere along the line she or Len or Ron had picked up and deposited there. In all the years Min had hardly noticed that shell but now, as her body began to fail and her lung developed a brackling wheeze along with the coughing and catarrh, for some reason or other she began to dwell on it. One evening after dinner she asked Ron if he knew when or how on earth that shell had come to be on the windowsill all this time. He shook his head, after glancing over to the sink to check that he knew exactly what shell it was she was talking about.
Min needed time to acquaint herself with her decline, time to grow familiar with death’s season as it surrounded her, and surprisingly, the coffee coloured shell had moved to the forefront of the small aids and talismans she rested on for assistance, along with her one or two books, her cup, and the memories which kept re-emerging now after lying fallow for so many years. Her life had had its illnesses and difficulties, but her enchantment with small things had never dwindled for long. But somehow she had never really noticed the shell, an extraordinary shell she now realised, that had lain in front of her through it all.
Now, a little bit like her grandmother with her rosary, she would take the seashell up in her palm and carry it as she went about the house, or sit with it at the kitchen table or in the Papa Mahoney chair in the brighter light of the front room, and regard it.
She didn’t know anything much about shells; she knew a periwinkle from a pippy, a limpet from a cowry, an abalone from an elephant fish, the kind of information she’d picked up along the way, but that was all. The seashell from the windowsill was less than an inch wide at its base, and spiral shaped. It wound around itself in a perfect whorl, as if made by a confectioner, until at its nipple-like tip its colour vanished, leaving a bone-white but translucent nub. On close inspection, Min reflected that the reason for the body of the shell’s exact likeness to the colour of coffee was that its surface was deceptively complex – it was variegated, like the breast of the bristlebird, with dark brown dots, slightly raised, alternating in a kind of miniature latticework with the lighter brown background. This gave the shell’s colour a layered, vivifying depth, and also an ephemerality in keeping with the ocean’s currents, the mysteries from which it came.
Min liked to hold the shell and rub her thumb on its lower band where the raised dots were darkest and its texture both smooth and coarse at the same time. She could rub her thumb over that slightly knobbly surface and think of baubles hanging on strips in open doorways, or sea-buoys clumped together along the old fencelines, or the braille the nuns in the convent at Abbotsford would have liked her to learn so that she could help the blind. It was as if the rhythmic and minute unevenness of the seashell was a trigger for reflections on her life itself, with all its pocks and peaks attaining a hindsighted symmetry when viewed in her mind from her chair.
As the days of summer passed, as Ron went about his business, coming in and out the porch door with bream and crabs, tools or a gun, beer and vegetables dripping soil, she remained heavily dressed even in the heat. She gazed at the seashell’s structure and slowly began to gather a rendition of the course of her life and an acquaintance, more importantly, with her impending death. During the January days she saw how the shell spiralled in space, ascending in motion towards its height, where its earthly appearance fell away and transformed into lucency. Gone at the tip was its coffee tone, its movement stilled, replaced by the clarifying fulfilment of the form completing itself.
Min thought it was uncanny that just when she needed it most, when she was beginning to falter, the little shell had made itself conspicuous where for decades it had merely been another object of many that the sea had jettisoned and that were lying about their home. She found she could read into it almost inexhaustibly, depicting time and herself, in the nights and days it took for the shell’s stair to arrive at its tip. She began to see the darker dots as the nights of her life and the lighter in-between ones as all her days and outward moments. As the broad whorl curled upward and became a narrower band, she noticed the darker dots lightening, which she interpreted as the pattern of her sleep, which had grown lighter and lighter the older she got, to the point that now she wasn’t sure whether she ever really slept at all. She remembered herself as a teenager in those earlier, darker dots, those nights of the broad whorl at the shell’s base, sleeping sometimes fourteen hours at a time, moaning as her father came up the stairs in his heavy apron between customers to stroke her hair and implore her to greet what was left of the day. And then she saw the prime of life in the shell’s middle band, so clearly defined and distinct from her childhood, where she married and took on adulthood. Where the shell had two small holes knocked out of it, probably from activity on the sill over the years, Min saw her father’s death and then the death of Len.
This distinction between eras in her life transformed, however, if she turned the shell ever so slowly in her fingers. Time became a continuum again and everything in life was merged on a single fluid ramp towards heaven. The first hole, the death of her father, led inexorably on then to the death of her husband, they were in the same stream as she revolved the shell; but if she held it still and looked again, it was as if she’d had three lives rather than one, three bands ascending, and everything was separate and to be held so. She saw in the shell the story not only of her life but of the nature of life itself, she saw the growing, the middle age, the penultimate stage and then the rising. The rising of which the Bible speaks. And the poets. And now the kitchen sill shell in her fingers.
The one thing Min could not make out from the shell, however, was her beginning. There was no starting point to the shell. The broad band at its base sprung from a sheer lip which turned and disappeared into the centre of its hollow underneath. So, right there, turning the shell upside down and looking back into its base, she began to see all infinity. Again and again as she peered into the hollow, all it did was make her turn the shell over, and look again at its spiralling. There was no solution, no visible source. There was an underside to it all but seemingly no first moment. Or perhaps that first moment was not hers to see. Perhaps it was her mother and father alone who could share that beginning. Or perhaps it was only God’s mystery. Either way there
would be no doubt, Min thought, the seashell from the kitchen window showed that life was perfect and that the physical senses could never trace it to its ultimate source, and that therefore death, despite the doomsayers, could well be the greatest perfection of all.
Ron did not tell Min what he’d noticed missing from the woodpile and when he found the timber on the beach below he didn’t for one minute think that it was anything else but teenagers out on holiday having a bit of a night-time adventure. From time to time over the years they’d had rocks rained down on their roof at night during summer holidays, and wood from his woodpile over the cliff was just another version on the theme. He did marvel, however, at how he hadn’t been woken by the knocking of the melaleuca gate.
He knew Min was ailing. He could hear fluid sloshing about in her chest as she breathed and even when she spoke now her voice was inflected with it. Despite her age, Ron still couldn’t get over how quickly she was going downhill. The sheer speed of it. It did not seem long ago at all that he’d been holding the ladder for her as she cleaned the spouting in her dishwashing gloves. But now she spent most days sitting in the Papa Mahoney chair in the front room, wrapped up in a maroon shawl despite the January sun, which seemed to Ron particularly ferocious that year.
They’d had Christmas on their own, and happily so, with brief visits from Rhyll and Darren, Sweet William, and Nanette Burns. More and more, Min tapped her left underwrist as she coughed in her chair and Ron couldn’t remember whether Sweet William’s explanation for that mannerism had been to do with the fact that that was where she kept her hanky or that that was where she’d worn her watch. When he asked Min about it, he knew she was not telling the truth when she said she must be getting old and had forgotten to put her watch on. Despite her loss of weight and the deterioration of her lungs, Min’s memory seemed to Ron, if anything, to be better than ever.
