Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds

by Gregory Day

  They shared the cooking now but Ron did most of his on the barbecue outside. He’d cook chops or bacon and eggs, or smoke an eel or a bream. He could make mashed potato but Min always had to fix a salad if they wanted that. She restricted herself to simple meals that could cook themselves and on her doctor’s instructions for the first time ever she had begun to cook spaghetti bolognese. Ron took to it with relish and one pot could last them three days. So it became a favourite, even when the temperature climbed over thirty degrees.

  Through January, Dr Bernard Feast recommended that they visit him at the Colac hospital once a fortnight to drain her lung but after their first visit of the new year he said they’d better make it once a week. Although it was a simple procedure the doctor was worried about Min having to travel so much but when he questioned her, and later Ron, about her having it done by the local GP in Mangowak, he realised they wouldn’t hear of it. It wasn’t that they had anything against the doctor where they lived, it was just that they were used to Dr Feast. He was a link in a chain that fed all the way back to the days in the 1920s and ’30s when Dr Dwyer had looked after them in Minapre. Bernard Feast knew how difficult a change of doctors could be for elderly people, and that Ron was now elderly as well as his mother. He decided on balance, however, that Min should risk the travel, mainly because he knew she’d prefer it that way, given that he couldn’t get out to the house.

  When Dom Khouri heard that Min was failing he offered any help he could. One Sunday he showed up at the door having arrived back in the country from a business trip only the previous day. He sat with Min and Ron in the kitchen like he had on the day they’d met and told them all about America and how glad he was to be home. When he heard that they were making weekly visits to Colac he offered to send them a driver and a car but, although it appealed in some ways to Ron, Min wouldn’t hear of it.

  Dom Khouri was a good conversationalist and Min talked to him about his life, his early days back in Lebanon, and her own memories too. She could talk to him in a way that she couldn’t to her son. She could be blunt about death whereas in Ron’s presence she wouldn’t mention it at all. She even showed Dom Khouri the coffee coloured seashell. ‘I love it like a rosary,’ she told him, and he had raised his hooded eyes from the shell in his hand to hers and smiled in acknowledgment.

  Dom Khouri, of course, was worried not only for Min but also for Ron, as was Dr Feast, and Sweet William, and anyone who cared about him. All Ron would say of Min’s condition when asked was that ‘she’s slipped a bit’, but that in itself, given her irrepressibility over the years, spoke volumes to those in the know. Occasionally, over the cards and stout with Sweet William, Ron would go so far as to speculate about life without her, but in his deeper self, in the Ron that slept and dreamt of diamond boats, and trod the riverbanks and beaches before light, the Ron who swooned in the songs he played on the pump organ at night, there was never going to be life without Min. It was about as likely as Martians arriving on Gannet Rock.

  So their relationship remained the same as ever through her dying days, although occasionally his body would quiver with an involuntary foreboding. Min’s mind was sharp and thus in conversation no role reversal had taken place. She still cosseted him with her voice, asked his opinions as if she was asking those of the Prime Minister, wondered aloud about his health rather than her own. And still they sat, on the long summer nights, together over dinner and afterwards, talking, scanning the local rag for tidbits of interest or the country Trading Post for bargains, drinking stout and tea, Min with the shell either in her hand or in the pouch of her apron, Ron with one ear cocked to the weather outside, listening for windshifts and, occasionally now, for teenagers up to no good in the yard.

  Before bed Min had pills to take, and a liquid medicine which she loathed, and Ron would help her up from where she sat, shoulder her through the swinging galley door, down the hallway to her room. He would leave her to undress herself, put on her nightie and then he’d hear her in the bathroom coughing and wheezing loudly, and then brushing her teeth and humming again between laboured breaths as she crossed back over the boards and hallway runner to her room.

  He’d finish the dishes he was washing at the sink, or the tackle he was arranging, and go in and kiss her on the forehead, his lips puckering and moist and her smiling up at him with love but wheezing terribly from the exertion of getting into bed. After a time, though, her chest would settle down and she’d take up The Gift of Poetry or the Bible and read with the light of the bedside lamp. Midst the sound of the ocean she’d listen to her son off in the kitchen and pray for him. And she loved it when he went to the open shed and played for her. As the reedy tunes drifted across the clifftop to her ears she would believe the story the seashell told her more than anything on earth. She waited almost patiently then for the moment when her own life’s spiral would reach its fruition.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE RUST FALLS AWAY

  In the days leading up to Min’s death, Ron had noticed a cat without a bell hanging around the house. It was a small charcoal-coloured cat with a bit of the kitten still in it, and Ron was sure that it was there to play havoc with the bristlebirds. Then, on the day before Min’s condition worsened dramatically, he saw three teenage boys sniggering and furtively pointing as they walked past his driveway and then heard them calling the cat by its name.

  That night, after he’d settled Min in her bed for sleep and played her ‘Bantry Bay’ on the pump organ, he went to the bathroom cupboard, took an aspirin pill out of its foil and placed it on the kitchen table next to an empty jar he got out of the low cupboard under the sink. He sat then at the table in silence, with the jar and the aspirin in front of him, listening for his mother’s breath until, at a little before midnight, he got up, went to the fridge, took out the bottle of Gellibrand milk and three-quarter filled the jar. Then he took up the aspirin and crumbled it with his fingers into the milk in the jar and shook it vigorously until he was sure its contents had merged. He stood up, placed the Gellibrand milk back in the fridge, put the jar in the pocket of his gaberdine coat, and left the house.

  With his nose for reconnaissance he’d seen where the teenagers and the cat were staying and now walked down Two Pointers Way towards the house. It was half a mile east from his place, on the rise before what used to be the burn-off paddock. At the house the lights were all out but after slipping quietly down the side walkway he found a small bungalow from which he could hear music and teenage voices. He stood still by the wire fence separating the house from its neighbours, camouflaged by bottlebrush trees. He gauged that due to the music there was practically no risk.

  He stepped out from the side of the house into the open backyard and made his way soundlessly to the back step. As he had presumed, the cat’s bowl was there, next to a screen door and a jumble of sandals, tennis balls and boots. Kneeling gently down he pulled out the jar from his pocket, unscrewed the lid and poured its contents into the bowl. ‘Lap, lap, little cat,’ he said to himself under his breath and then quickly rose and made his way across the yard, up the side of the house and was gone.

  Because of his late night, Ron didn’t rise from bed the next morning until seven o’clock and when he did, he found his mother breathing uncomfortably and unable to speak. She had not been out of bed now for three days and Ron was hoping that the rest would set her right but, in fact, as it now occurred to him, it was the beginning of the end. He tried to rouse her to conversation and he stroked her forehead and spoke to her but, apart from the laboured pulse of her breath, she remained still, with her eyes closed. He went to the kitchen and made some toast with jam and took it in with the hope that the smell might rouse her but the plate just sat unattended on her bedside table, beside her books and her watch where she had left it when she’d taken it off weeks ago, and the coffee coloured seashell.

  Gradually, as the minutes of the morning passed and Min showed no signs of coming around, Ron began to grow bewildered. For nearly an hour b
etween nine and ten o’clock he paced the house, opening and shutting windows, imploring his mother to open her eyes and talk to him, until he eventually burst into tears. In his distress he felt the conundrum of needing another her to help him, to tell him what to do. But there was no other Min, there was only this one, and there she lay in her uniqueness, pale as a broken wave in her bed.

  Eventually, at around ten thirty, Ron decided he should calm down and ring Dr Feast at Minapre Hospital. He spoke to reception and was told that Dr Feast was on duty in Colac but when he rang there they told him he was on a rostered day off and could not be contacted. Ron tried to explain that Min was not just another patient to Dr Feast but met a stonewall of hospital protocol and there was nothing he could do. He hung up the phone. He thought of dialling 000 for emergency but just as he was ruling out the arrival of some anonymous ambulance workers an unexpected strength came over him. As he stood there at the phone table in the dim light of the hall it was as though his emotional self had suddenly stepped aside and left him only with a calm reason. He realised in an instant that he was alone, that he had a job to do, and that Min’s duty towards him was finally discharged.

  He re-entered her room with a cold flannel and, sitting beside her bed, gently touched her brow with it. Her breathing had changed now, from a halting, obfuscated wheeze to something almost imperceptible, so that he laid his head to one side on her breast from time to time, and placed his thumb and forefinger under her nose, to make sure she was still alive. He held her hand in his and spoke. He told her that he’d fixed that darned cat who was after the bristlebirds and that they were nearly out of milk so it was just as well she didn’t want her usual cups of tea. Then he told her about the woodpile and how the cat’s owners had done it but that now the cat was dead they wouldn’t be coming back. He said that Sweet William had to go to Melbourne the day before to see the specialist about his skin cancer. He called her Minnie, which he never had before, but remained unaware that he had called her by that name. He said, ‘Minnie, do you want to call Rhyll?’ and awaited no reply. It was all sinking in, and as the time passed she was a creature for whom the end was getting closer and closer.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Ron was jerked from his calm attendance as Min momentarily opened her eyes and gazed at him. For an instant she looked terrified and tightened her grip on his hand and Ron was lost again. He’d never noticed any kind of fear in his mother’s eyes and he felt as if the earth had just been swallowed and that there was nothing solid at all to walk on. Then she averted her gaze and looked straight ahead at the big brown dresser against the wall in front of her bed. He followed her line of sight and found comfort in the solidity of the hulking old piece. Her breathing grew audible again and for a time she seemed to be concentrating on the dresser just so she could continue. Then she closed her eyelids and said: ‘The rust is falling. It’s going away. Look, Molly.’

  At around 6 pm, as the cloud remained thick in the sky and the wind from the southwest could be heard thrumming on the open shed, Min passed away while Ron was in the bathroom refreshing her flannel. A little earlier her chain-stoking had begun and Ron had recognised what he had heard before in animals. He let go of her hand in respect as he heard it and sat on the chair beside her and prayed to Leo Morris. He prayed aloud and asked their old friend to greet her when she came, to look after her as if she was one of his own. Then he got up to refresh the flannel and when he returned, Min had gone.

  She lay, still warm, with her son’s hand on her own. Her face, in the last whisper of life, had arranged itself into a contented smile. She had worked it off, at the end, this life. As she struggled through the previous night, the living she once had clung to like a raft in grey water had become an obstacle to her movement. Her impetus was to pass on, to be released from the body’s weight and tribulations, but it wouldn’t let her go. Like a broken husk still attached by a stubborn filament she remained moored in her skin, with her chest aching, and the moisture in her lungs threatening to drown her ascension and reduce her to a hell. It was then, after hours of anguish, with her energy caught between pushing outward into breath and turning inward into the freshness of death, that she saw the rust. The coagulation of cinnabar and russet, contorting whatever it touched. All her life’s experiences, all her efforts and meetings, were just rust now growing like a parasite on what she was. She saw it clearly and knew that all she had to do was wipe it clean. Bit by bit, rusted moment by rusted moment, until all that was left was a thing pristine enough to rise and flow on, to leave the bed in which she lay, and the room, and to rise from her body until she was out in the night, far above the cliff and the house and the wind’s whitecaps, further and further, until even the Two Pointer rocks were just distant specks that she’d left behind for all time, and after all these years. Beyond the waves and stars, where there was no motherhood or wifeliness, no chatter and no sun, where all was sheer and brilliant, she went out of her life’s enclosure and into an infinite openness.

  Time had ceased as a line, it was a spindle that had gathered but gathered no more.

  Ron sat stunned and in awe. And, as the night fell and the room grew dense, there was no need for light. It was as if for a time he nearly went with her and all space had dissolved. There were no shapes anymore in the room. He heard nothing. He held her fingers in his hand and moved way out, beyond feeling, beyond music even. And then at around midnight he heard a bird, a heron’s guttural bark, and he felt her fingers’ warmth had gone. It came like a sting, sharp and quick, and piercing enough to shock him out of where he had gone with her and back to a desire for light.

  He let her fingers fall dead and got up from the chair and moved to the wall near the door. He flicked on the switch. And then, in that brutal exposure, he called, he let out a horrifying cry from deep in the extreme plumb of himself. His body buckled and he fell on his knees to the bedside and wept. He wept wildly, with his shoulders and with his guts, as hoarsely and as achingly as a human being can.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A CLIFFTOP BURIAL

  At 5:30 am he rang Sweet William, who came straight over with his wife Eve in the dawn. Eve had only ever been in Min and Ron’s house one or two times before. When they arrived, Ron was in the garden under the peach tree, sitting on an old fish box. He watched Sweet William and Eve get out of their car and go to the porch door and knock. He was grateful that they’d come but didn’t know how to behave when all he wanted to do was to have his own mother console him. They waited at the door but then, as Sweet William began to move around the house to check the open shed, Ron got up so that he would be seen.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Ron,’ his friend said as they walked towards each other. Sweet William took Ron’s hand in his and with his other he clutched Ron’s shoulder tightly.

  ‘She had a good innings,’ Ron said. ‘Hello, Eve.’

  Sweet William’s wife kissed Ron on the cheek and gave him a brief hug. ‘She’s with God now,’ Eve told the grief-stricken old son.

  They went inside and sat in the kitchen and Ron showed Eve where there was an old electric kettle they could use to make the tea. No-one, at that moment, had the wherewithal to light the Rayburn.

  Ron told them what he could remember of the events of the last twenty-four hours and how she looked peaceful now that she had died. As he spoke, the kitchen was brightening with the sun as it rose higher out in the day, the cupboards and walls losing their ashen tones and becoming cream and green and blue as they were. Eve, in her practical slacks and brown sleeveless jacket zipped up to the neck, had brought a carry bag of food and efficiently now sought out what she needed to make a pot of tea and arranged the cups on the table. The galley door was open. All three of them felt keenly the presence of Min down the hallway in her room.

  When she’d finished pouring the tea from a tall red pot that Ron had never seen used, Eve said, ‘These bronchial things drag on for some people, Ron. It might be best that she went so quickly in the end.’

&nbs
p; ‘It’s probably true,’ Sweet William concurred, with deep sympathy in his voice. ‘It wasn’t so long ago that she was bright as a button on her birthday, was it, Ron?’

  ‘Three months,’ he said.

  ‘Well, it was a great life,’ Eve said. And then, with her voice hushed as if Min might hear her, she said, ‘She was one in a million.’

  ‘No risk,’ Sweet William concurred again.

  Ron allowed Eve to ring the hospital to get a message to Bernard Feast. He knew if they told Dr Feast what had happened he’d arrange the rest. By 11 am the doctor himself had arrived, offering grave condolences to Ron and verifying that Min had indeed passed on. He could see that Ron was in deep shock and told Eve to pour him a Tullamore Dew from the bottle on the kitchen mantel, which she did. As the undertakers arrived to remove Min from the house, Ron and Sweet William were in by her bed, drinking whiskey and talking quietly to Bernard Feast. Eve remained in the kitchen, where she had bothered to light the Rayburn and was making a stew, to see Ron through the next couple of days.

  As the man and woman arrived with the shining chrome stretcher bed on wheels, Ron and Sweet William left Min’s side and went out into the yard to wait to see her off. Ron, who in the world of marsupials and fish was a master of death and death’s equipment, could not bear to see his mother’s body handled and placed on the trolley. When the uniforms appeared at the porch door only a few minutes later, with the stretcher in tow and Min lying upon it with a sheet now pulled over her face and black straps across her birdlike form, Sweet William put his arm around Ron’s shoulder as if to guide him, though the two of them did not move from the mown slope as the trolley bed was wheeled awkwardly down the quartz of the driveway to be taken away. Ron’s mouth remained slightly open as they watched and Sweet William had tears now running over his heavily grafted face.