by Gregory Day
Eventually they heard the ambulance start up out on the road, amidst the sounds of tourists walking happily up to the Meteorological Station. Dr Feast appeared from the porch and when he heard the tourists it rankled. He walked across to where the two old men had turned on the grass to face the ocean.
The doctor wore a navy blue blazer and a shirt and tie. His secure voice and his formality were what Ron needed to hear. ‘You know, Ron,’ he said, taking up his position beside them, ‘every time you’d bring her for a visit she’d brighten my day. Most people live only half the life Min led. And I don’t just mean in years. There really is great cause for you to be proud. Even in the midst of your sorrow.’
In a world that had now changed irrevocably, Bernard Feast was for Ron like a stall, a temporary reprieve, a man who understood his and his mother’s world, its protocols and practicalities, its larrikin codes and knockabout etiquettes. As he looked at Dr Feast and listened to his words, tears began to slip silently out of Ron’s eyes and down his cheeks. He tasted them on his lips and he thanked the doctor. Then he blushed and accepted Bernard Feast’s offer of a cigarette.
Min died on a Monday and, as Ron requested, a small private service was held for her in the convent out in the bush behind Mangowak on the Wednesday morning. On the day of the service, Ron was quite lost and needed to be guided all the way, from what to wear to where to sit in the church. The small band of old friends, and the children of old friends, like Darren Traherne and the Lea boys, rallied around him. He wore a black Hersch’s suit of his father’s that Eve dug out from a cupboard, a white shirt and a brown tie and he sat in the front pew with the Trahernes. The mourners consisted of those who’d attended the one hundredth birthday party but also Dot John-stone from Birregurra, Dr Feast, Walker Lea who couldn’t be at the birthday because he was in New South Wales, Simon Karinis from Minapre, and Min’s sister’s son Billy. The priest was Father Murray, the Minapre Hospital Catholic chaplain who Min had liked.
A small group of nuns from the convent sang ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ from the side of the altar, as Ron had requested. Father Murray spoke not of Min’s history but briefly of what he knew of her by their conversations of recent years. Predominantly, though, he stuck to the readings, and the requiem service, leaving the shrill voices of the nuns to carry the emotional tide. Like an old hand he entirely ignored the hard crackling sound of the microphone that was pinned to his vestments and which made itself heard every time he moved.
In the walled garden of the convent after the service, Ron stood like a stranger on an island of grass near the rhododendron beds, in the public realm of his mother’s death, not knowing what to do with his hands or what to say, and unable to cease wondering who the Molly was that Min had mentioned when last she spoke. One by one, people came over to shake his hand and share fond reminiscences about his mother.
The hearse sat for quite a time in the rose-gold parking bay next to the convent entrance, as the mourners lingered with Ron in the scented garden, waiting until they felt he was ready to move on. Bernard Feast eventually took the bewildered son’s arm and guided him not to the hearse, which Ron had refused to travel in, but to Darren Traherne’s Commodore station wagon.
Ron sat in the front passenger seat, with Darren’s sister Barbara and Rhyll in the back, as Darren eventually steered the green station wagon down the Dray Road a minute or so behind the hearse, heading back towards town.
They were silent as they drove. Ron stared through the windscreen at the pitted road ahead, at the dustclouds the hearse had raised, which were slowly settling in front of them. As they passed the little quarry on the shoulder of the road before the Mexico Bend, it had to be pointed out to Ron that Ian and Brian Birdsong, and Frank Webb their offsider, were standing motionless on the bright limestone pile nearest to the road, still with their gloves on but with their hats removed and their heads bowed in respect. And then, as the station wagon rose up onto the high bend, with the ironbark gorge falling away on their left and a solid blue ocean now visible in front of them, a young kangaroo appeared on the road and bounced on ahead of the car for what must have been nearly a mile.
On the cliff where Ron’s father had been buried, and Gluey and Bobby the Rover and the rest of the dogs, a slight easterly had harried the O’Leary gravediggers while the funeral had been taking place. They had dug deep with their shovels into the pink earth as instructed, preparing the grave for when the mourners arrived and Min would be put to rest. By the time Darren’s Commodore pulled in to the driveway, with the hearse’s satin black duco filmed in dust and already parked ahead of them near the porch, the gravediggers had gone to the hotel for lunch, and the grave lay ready.
Ron, Darren, Rhyll and Barb got out of the car and made their way through the garden. Stepping up to the graveside, Ron winced to see familiar ground exposed again and leaned sideways onto Darren as they stood and waited for the others and, eventually, for the coffin to be carried across by the undertakers. When the small crowd had all drifted in with the priest, the coffin was brought, and was lowered with ceremonial words into the clifftop.
There was a brief pause before Rhyll Traherne stepped forward with difficulty from where she had been holding her granddaughter Barbara’s arm. With a firm-set, determined face, Rhyll began to sing:
‘Only one muscat for me
Unless I can share it with you
For the bottle is bottomless when
You come to my house, old friend
‘Only one muscat for you
Unless you can share it with me
For the bottle is happy and gay
When I come to your house to play
‘Two young ladies living green
Fast and bold as in a dream
Two young ladies there will be
And a bottle of muscat for tea.’
As she sang the last words of the old trad jazz song she’d shared so many times with Min, a slurry of tears swept over her face in the wind. She looked over the hole in the ground at Ron where he was being held up by her grandson and called out to him, crying, ‘Oh, Ronny, I’ll miss her, boy.’
The easterly wrapped around their suits and dresses and tear-wet strands of hair stuck to their chilled faces. The old lady was everything that they liked about the world, everything that they never wanted to disappear, and now she was in the ground.
Ron’s face was stark, dazed with grief as he stepped forward and threw a handful of dirt onto his mother’s coffin. Then he stepped back and looked briefly out to sea where the water was now bruised blue-black under cloud. One by one the rest of the mourners also stepped forward and threw some ground and offered Min their words. And finally, when they had all paid their respects, Dr Feast and Father Murray began to usher everyone away.
TWENTY-SEVEN
OLD SON
The summer sun went missing for four days following Min’s death, replaced instead by a peculiarly Victorian drop in temperature which spoke of autumn and a constant piling up of clouds out of the southwest. It was uncharacteristic of February and everyone remarked upon it, but they also agreed they felt somehow comfortable in the gloom.
They came and went from the house, bringing alcohol and food with them. Eve’s stews were replenished with more potatoes and diced beef which Noel Lea had bought from Vern the butcher over in Colac. God was never mentioned until the Friday, when Darren Traherne, a little pissed, had asked Ron out of the blue if he believed. Before the old man had a chance to feel uncomfortable, Bob Elliot had cut in and said that there was no way that anyone living could possibly know whether to believe or not, to which Rhyll had said that without a doubt Min believed in God and that for sure she had gone to the greatest piss-up any of them could imagine. That broke the awkwardness and when no-one was looking Rhyll glared at her grandson.
Darren pulled himself together and left soon after, coming back three hours later to make amends. He brought half a pot of yabbies from the Poorool dam and a magpie bream which he got Ron
to help him smoke near the barbecue just outside the porch door. He didn’t mention another word about God because he knew Ron was struggling. He’d leave it for another time. He knew from conversations they’d had on their hunting trips in the dark of night that Ron was as curious as anyone else about the mysteries of death. Once when they were standing over a dead wallaby on the river flat, Ron had said that if wallabies had a god then their heaven would be shaped like a pouch. So he’d only asked the question of Ron earlier thinking that Min’s death may have proved something like that to him. But it was stupid, he’d been too pissed. He’d sobered up now and concentrated on the fish.
For the four days that the visitors kept coming and the weather remained grey, Ron kept unusual hours, rising at seven or eight like normal people and getting to bed when the last person had left, usually at around midnight or one o’clock. He enjoyed the company and, naturally enough, grew anxious as the night wore on and the prospect of being alone drew near. Noel and Darren both offered to camp with him for a few days but he refused, that would have been stranger again, he thought. As a concession to his grief and fear, however, he decided that he wouldn’t rise before dawn, that he would avoid time in the darkness alone. He had lived like a marsupial for all these years, gathering his food in the dusk and after, and in the dawn and before, but now in his darkest moment he reverted to the culture of human hours after all.
If he fell asleep in his mother’s bed, which he did on the morning after her death and the morning after the funeral, he would wake to the light brocading the wall above his head through the tangle of the outside trees, just as he’d seen it do when bringing in tea and toast to Min on occasions through the years. On the morning directly after her death he rose at the sight of this, as if he was in transgression, but on the Thursday after the funeral he lay there and cried, and looked at her two books on the bedside table and wondered again if Molly was his unborn sister, as he fingered the coffee coloured seashell.
With the coming of the weekend, and the crowds from the city to the coast, the weather broke and the sun showered itself all over the shoreline. The cliffs below the house were golden and fresh after the gloom, and the swell around King Cormorant and Gannet Rocks was turquoise and slick with shining bull-kelp bands. Ron woke before dawn and lay in Min’s bed but did not sleep as the light came. On the contrary, he felt black as soil with the revealing of the sun. It was too soon.
That was the day, but for a visit from Nanette Burns in the morning and Sweet William at his usual hour, that the constancy of the procession of mourning visits ceased. Next door at Dom Khouri’s he could hear the usual weekender activity but he knew from the cars in the drive that Dom himself was not there. He presumed he must have been away on business. He would’ve liked to have seen him.
With the house empty he found himself opening his mother’s dresser and wondering about her clothes. He touched her frocks and remembered how, as a little boy, he’d watch her dress there in front of the mirror.
He went and sat in the Papa Mahoney chair in the front room. He placed his arms on the rests of the chair just as she used to do and looked back into the room, the ocean light through the windows reflecting off the honey-coloured she-oak skirting boards and door jambs. His eyes settled on the sideboard, the framed pictures and the empty dining table. It was all hers. Her things. Over the previous few days an avalanche of anecdotes had been unleashed about Min, stories which he had never before heard, funny stories, glancing memories and major recollections, in which she invariably figured as a presence akin to sunlight on water. He had noticed that for the younger generation, for the Lea boys and Darren and Barb Traherne and Nanette, his mother had become an instant point of pride during those days, almost as if they were from her as well, in the same way they were from Mangowak. Walker Lea had said to Ron that he considered it a privilege to have known her, to have heard her speak of the things she knew, to have counted as a friend a person who had lived throughout the entire previous century. Ron had also overheard Noel recalling the little things, the way she sucked her teeth sometimes as she talked, the way she said ‘By Jiminy Cricket’, when she was feeling strong about something or ‘I’ve come a cropper’ when she felt she’d made a blue. Now as he looked around the room full of her furniture, the china in the dresser, the faded floral rug of Papa Mahoney’s on the floor at his feet, it was impossible to believe that she wasn’t just out the back in the laundry, or on her knees in the garden, cursing the boneseed.
He heard a car outside and Nanette Burns calling from the door. He walked through to the kitchen and let her hug him. He’d known Nan since she was a fiery, freckle-faced little girl but there was nothing much to say, and she drove off after half an hour, leaving six huge yellow squashes on the bench beside the kitchen sink. ‘Best ever,’ Nan had said and after she’d gone Ron lit the Rayburn and boiled the life out of them. He ate them with some bread that Chris from the general store had dropped in the previous day. Then he opened a bottle of stout.
At five thirty when Sweet William arrived, the temperature had climbed to over thirty degrees and Ron was sitting on the La Branca bench on the clifftop with his cap on and his back half turned against the sea. He had an empty pony glass in his hand and was hunched forward when Sweet William saw him as he rounded the house for the open shed.
‘Not feeling too flash, Ron,’ his old friend said to him as he approached.
Ron looked up and stared into Sweet William’s eyes. He was crying, his eyes saturated in loss and vulnerability. Sweet William sat down on the seat and put his arm around him. The touch set Ron off and once again he let out an awful cry and his shoulders began to rock under the remorseless sun.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE BIG GIFT
When Colin Batty called Craig Wilson into his office for a chat not long after Min McCoy had died, he was an unhappy man. In a conversation at the pub a month before, Colin had learnt from Givva Way that from time to time over the years Ron McCoy had tossed around the possibility of moving from the clifftop down onto a smaller block of land in a quiet sheltered spot on the riverflat. Givva Way had conjectured to Colin Batty that with Min’s passing and a ready buyer for the land right next door, this was exactly what Ron was now likely to do. Colin quickly deduced from this information that the selling of Ron McCoy’s house and remaining land to Dom Khouri was imminent, if not already a fait accompli.
Craig Wilson sat down and squinted at Colin Batty, trying to figure what it was that had warranted the meeting. Craig had clients to see, his schedule was full to bursting and his boss knew that. This better be good, Craig thought as Colin straightened out the papers on his desk with his left hand whilst scouring his gums with his tongue and looking poker-faced around the room.
He came right out with it. ‘I’ve decided to give it away, mate,’ he said, and waited for the reaction.
There was none. Craig sat tight, his eyebrows raised in anticipation of what was coming next.
Colin Batty shifted in his seat and breathed through his nose. ‘Yeah. It’s time,’ he went on. ‘Twenty-three years this year, you know. Long enough. I don’t need the stress anymore, mate. The palaver, the kowtowing, people trying to suck you dry, squeeze every last cent. You get to a point where that stuff just straight out gives you the shits. There’s more important things in life.’
‘You’re fair dinkum?’ said Craig.
Colin sat up straight and a look of satisfaction came over his face. ‘Bloody oath, I am. God, I remember when I started out here, I would never have dreamt it’d go this well. I’ve been lucky, Craig. First the bushfires, then the sea changers. And it’s gonna continue. Mark my words, globalisation means there’ll never be another slump in the beauty spots of the western world.’
‘So you say.’
‘Nah, well, it’s just common sense. Europe’s a bloody zoo, the Yanks are nuts, it’s us and the Kiwis that’re gonna have the focus. Wait till the Chinese get in on the act, mate. Places like this will go complete
ly ballistic. And West Oz. Nah, the timing’s been perfect. We’ve had the ramp all through the eighties and nineties and now it’s really about to take off.’
He paused and looked Craig in the eye. ‘So what do you reckon about taking over?’
Liz had been right. Colin Batty was offering him his business.
‘Who, me?’
‘No, the fuckin’ fly on your nose. Yes you.’
‘Whoa. That’s a big ask, Colin.’
‘It’s a big gift, mate, that’s what it is.’
Craig ran his hand through his hair. ‘Well, yeah.’
Colin Batty continued. ‘Nah, the only reason I’ve been able to make a go of it has been because I’ve got a world view. I saw a bit before I got into this. You know that. I’m naturally curious. The kind of shmoes who buy down here like that. A bit of Riviera talk, a bit of the Tuscan stuff, Phuket, the Maldives, you know. Genuine, though, coz I’ve been to those places. It all helps. That way they don’t feel like they’re gonna be surrounded by rednecks. You know what I mean? I reckon you’ve got about the same mix I did when I started. You’ve probably got more, actually. Except you’re not a local, of course.’
Craig didn’t know where to look. He didn’t know whether to be flattered or appalled by Colin comparing him with himself.
‘Are you interested?’
‘Yeah, well, yeah, in theory I’m interested. Who wouldn’t be?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But shit, I’d have to think about it, talk it over with Liz and everything.’
Colin Batty let out a laugh, a laugh so loud there could be no doubt it was anxious and forced. ‘Of course you do. What do you reckon, I want you to sign on the dotted line right now?’
