Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (32 page)

Huddled there on the cypress block, a blanket wrapped around him, Ron's heart lifted at the prospect of going out on the water, perhaps with Noel and Darren in Wally Lea's old tinny. Maybe something would start to make sense again. It was not so much a thought that had formed in him but an instinct for shelter, for an enclosure to shield himself within a world that was his alone. The imaginary harbour of the sea of diamonds surfaced in his heart as an inexorable solution, an escape, a medicine, just as it was when he dreamt away the hours in the chickenwire cage upon the cliff as a boy.

Two nights later, despite the cold, Darren Traherne was happy and relieved when Ron knocked on his bedroom window at ten past three. As it happened, Darren had been uncomfortably awake in the aftermath of a nightmare. When he heard the familiar knock on the window he sat up and gave Ron the answering call. When he got out to the car he was told they were going out in the boat. Darren was glad to lay eyes on the old man, who'd been constantly
in his thoughts. The only reason he hadn't gone up to see him on the cliff was because he presumed he'd rather be left alone.

In the cabin of the ute, Ron looked to Darren as if he'd aged in the time since Min's death. His cheeks were a little hollowed out, his expression drawn. He looked somehow smaller too, sitting at the steering wheel with his cap pulled low. Darren couldn't help thinking that maybe he should have visited after all. Ron had obviously been through the wringer.

As they drove down the Stilgoes' Hill to pick up Noel and his boat, Darren filled Ron in about what he'd been up to and made sure the old fella knew how happy he was that he'd come to get him. He told Ron he was beginning to wonder whether they'd ever go out together again, he said he was almost thinking Ron had retired. Ron seemed quite amused by that and assured him that as long as he breathed he'd never hang up the rod or the gun, and that, anyway, he was not someone anyone needed to worry about.

They turned into the Dray Road under pinpoint starlight and a quarter moon, with no wind, and before long Darren was tapping on Noel's barn door and telling him the score. After throwing on cords and boots, Noel emerged and the two of them went straight to work hitching up the twelve-foot tinny to the towbar of Ron's ute. Then Noel disappeared into the cupboard shed on the wall of his house and returned with the reserve petrol and his rod and tackle bag.

‘What's biting?' he asked Darren, brushing away the pine needles and spider-webs, checking the boat with torches for life-jackets and flares.

‘I dunno,' Darren replied. ‘Hasn't said. Maybe gars.'

With the boat hitched up and the three of them in the bench seat of the ute under the Leas' grand old pines, they were ready to go. Ron flicked the light on in the cabin and leant across the others to fetch his wireless from the glove box. He began to search through
stations on the trannie in his hands. Looking across the seat from the passenger side Noel too noticed that Ron looked a bit the worse for wear. In the wonky yellow light of the ute's cabin, the profile of Ron searching for a station in the night occurred to him as an image he could make. Perhaps he'd paint it one day. It was painful, but true, and he'd never made a picture of Ron.

Ron flicked the light off in the cabin and with talkback fighting static on the dashboard they drove out of Noel's place, turned right where the Dray Road met the Ocean Road, and drove without seeing another car the four miles to the nearest boat ramp below Turtle Head.

Both Noel and Darren noted that Ron had no trouble backing the boat trailer down the steep ramp and onto the beach in the darkness. They jumped out then and Ron sat alone with the wireless in the car. Darren and Noel unhitched the trailer and began pushing it down the heavy sand towards the water. Ron steered the ute back up the ramp and parked it in the carpark under the scarp of cushion bush running upwards from the sea-level to the road. By the time he'd walked back down the beach through clumps of kelp the boat was floated and he was handed the rope as Darren and Noel dragged the trailer back up the sand and out of the tide.

The night ocean was flat, the tide hinged on the still point between turning. Their eyes had already adjusted to the darkness and their escape from the shore through the waves was smooth, with a minimum of whack on the bow. Darren and Ron sat on the middle bench with their coats buttoned tightly against the wind chill and Noel sat alone at the 35-horsepower Evinrude, steering them east on a course beyond the snapper holes, back along the black water towards Gannet Rock. The plan was to anchor just out from the cliff in front of Ron's place, between the Two Pointers, and to fish for silver trevally into the dawn.

Next to Ron on the cold tin seat, his eyes watering with the speed
of the boat, Darren focused into the darkness, feeling the cold moisture of the night on his cheeks, happy that Ron had risen from his grief to come and get them at last. Behind them in the stern, Noel was thinking the water looked like black insulation plastic as they cut their way through it.

The conditions were good – a flat sea, no wind, a waxing moon – and Ron felt relieved to be on the ocean, glad in fact to be off the land with the two young men whose respect he could count on. The night was perfect for the trevally. Looking up at the wall of stars climbing out of the horizon he could tell by the clarity of their texture in the sky that the fish would be biting.

Eventually, after crossing the rough patch straight out from the Mangowak rivermouth, Noel slowed the motor. They entered the calmer waters beyond the sea-caves in the headland east of the mouth. Above the caves the little squid-shaped bulb of the navigational light blinked its ray across the water and the bushes of the clifftop were lit as it did so. Ron looked slowly back and forth from stern to bow, navigating Noel into position, and they rounded the south side of Gannet Rock and puttered east into the gloss of the tiny bay on the near side of King Cormorant Rock. Then Ron directed them due south for a minute or two until he put his hand up for Noel to cut the motor. Darren threw the anchor overboard. The boat's position where it bobbed made a triangle pointing straight at the Southern Cross, with the King Cormorant Rock and the Gannet Rock the two points at the triangle's base.

He knew exactly where they were in relation to the movements of the fish under the water, but it hadn't always been so. As a boy, his father, or Darren's grandfather Sid Traherne, if he was in the boat with them, would throw a long line with a lead attached to the end of it into the water, to read the ocean bed. The piece of lead had been dipped beforehand in a syrup tin full of mutton fat that Min had provided. When the men felt the lead reach the bottom
they would haul it back up and inspect it closely. They could tell by the indentations in the grease whether they were over a reef, and what type of reef it was, or, alternatively, if sand had stuck to the lead they would know they were over sand. Ron remembered what seemed like hours and hours of these soundings on the boat in his childhood, before any fishing would begin. As frustrated as he was at the time at not being able to just throw out a jig or a hook, he'd been grateful ever since to have had such knowledge from those early days when his father and Sid, and Wally Lea and the rest of them, were getting to know the ocean.

Noel's tinny drifted side-on now to the shore, they were directly out off Ron's place. If he'd still been sitting by Min's grave back on land, Ron would have been looking straight down upon them. With the aid of the Dolphin lantern, Darren and Noel now began to prepare their rods.

The old man ran his eye over the contours of his home-cliff. Under moon and starlight alone the land itself was nothing more than a dark lump rising in the night, but with the rhythm of the navigational light shining at intervals, he could make out his own fenceline, the melaleuca gate, the top half of the southern wall of his open shed, the pines beside it, and the La Branca bench on the edge of the cliff. On the beach below, in the darkness between flashes, tiny clusters of phosphor were spreading out across the sand of the cove. It crossed his mind each time the flash resumed that he may well see the outline of a man up on the brow near his woodpile. They may even hear, he thought, the scream over the windless sea as the steel jaws of his rabbit trap bit down on the wood-thief's flesh.

Within minutes, Darren and Noel had dropped lines, baited with cliff-worms Ron had provided, and the three men were silent. Ron didn't fish as yet and the younger men asked no questions. They were just glad to be out there, with the ocean skin clinking peacefully on the metal drum of the boat's hull, and the occasional falling
star cascading through the night, helping them order and evaluate their dreams and desires.

So now, just as Ron had imagined, Noel's tinny was sitting right amongst the sea of diamonds, and he felt almost relieved enough to make a wish himself at a starfall. It was as he thought. There was something full and easy inside him. Alone on the cliff of ghosts, with real estate agents pecking at him and strangers stealing his wood, with Dom Khouri's judgement being questioned, Ron's desire to see again what he'd conjured as a child made perfect sense. He knew it. He had had to get his feet off the ground and away from human settlement. If he could touch these waters, for a time at least the core of his pain would be washed away.

With his two surrogate sons sitting poised with trigger fingers on their lines, Ron dipped his own fingers into the water over the side of the boat. He felt his anguish go free. Even with his head tilted back to the stars he knew now the phosphor had gathered at his fingertips and was glinting around the edges of his skin in the water, the sea of diamonds sprung to life again at his touch. He looked down to find it was true. Straightaway as he saw the phosphor his eyes shut tight and he saw the staircases descending away underwater, the shining manna-gum stairs and the banisters of red cedar, disappearing deep below the boat into the sweep of waving furrows and channels and guzzles of the sea-bed, the gutters full to overflowing with jewels in the grainy light he'd played amongst as a boy. It was all still there, no risk, at his fingertips after all: the coral halls, the glinting granite tors, the fizzing champagne light under the night-time sea.

He drifted deep, and in a running sea fissure far below, he spied that old syrup tin of mutton fat, lying on its side amidst shining diamonds and the fish. Smiling at the sight, his face tilted up again to the stars as he leant against the gunwale. There was the furniture and the pictures, with frames laden and encrusted in the sea. Once
again he kicked his tiny feet and swam the great palace, the rooms flowing with opalescent shoals of sea-grape and weed and schools of bright fish, with proud bucking mako sharks shooting by, and long-forgotten tea-tree craypots and sunken encrusted sloops, all brimming with the diamonds.

He dwelt in these familiar depths and eventually when he opened his eyes to the air a star fell blazing through his new vision. A wish upmerged without thinking: for the music. To come back and soothe him. To ferry him away as it had always done. He didn't wish for Min but for the music, without which he would be jammed, with time a trespasser in his life, and no relief from the confusion of other people. The star, as he wished upon it, blitzed the onyx sky. He watched it go, and then lifted his fingers out of the water and back into the boat.

He went to work then, with tackle and bait, in the vicinity of bliss, if it weren't for the ordinariness of his relief. With his pen-torch he dug out what he needed from his bag, still stealing glances out over the gunwale as he did so, at the scattering phosphor.

Before long, Noel got a solid nab on his line and stood up quickly to negotiate. Darren caught Ron's gaze, steady and smiling, his eyebrows slightly raised at the wonder of the world, and they both watched as Noel ran the hooked creature on the line out towards the King Cormorant Rock and back towards the boat, until it seemed to tire and a very large trevally came flipping into the boat.

‘There's something in the air,' Darren told Ron, and Noel nodded silently as he killed the fish on the bread board they'd placed on the bench in the stern. A minute later, Darren had a similar bite on his line and began to reel and both of them started congratulating Ron on picking it again. His judgement and timing were second to none.

In the tin boat they remained anchored under stars in the sea of diamonds and the fish kept biting. Ron baited his rod and got in on
the action as well. Every five or six minutes one of them would feel the nab and begin to work the fish towards them. They'd struck a school of trevally, as Ron thought they might. Under the veil of night, in a sea glinting with buckling bands of kelp, phosphor like fairy dust and starlight, the trevally and the diamonds seemed almost the same thing anyway.

The enormous edifice of King Cormorant Rock loomed high out of the water some sixty feet northeast between them and the land. As they fished, Ron began to speak, to tell in his slow way how he used to climb the rock as a teenager and sit up there watching the cormorants and sea-eagles surveying the horizon. Darren and Noel had never heard, neither from Ron nor from their parents, of anyone climbing one of the Two Pointers before. Ron described how the west face of King Cormorant Rock used to have a series of natural footholds close enough together to allow him to scale the height. There'd been a slip on that west face in the 1950s and ever since the rock had become unassailable.

Between bites the three of them looked up at the rock in the dark and Darren and Noel imagined what the top of it might have been like from the descriptions Ron gave. He told them how once, during the same week the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, while everyone was huddled around the wireless listening to the news, he slept a whole night on the absolute top of the rock. He said that although the top of the rock was almost level with the height of the cliff where the house stood opposite, it was much windier. When they asked if he didn't get scared he told Darren and Noel that back then he hardly ever got chicken at all. He told them that as a teenager he had imagined a kind of bridge that could be built across the water to link the rock in the sea to the land. He had thought that he might even like to live out there, build a hut or something, but, of course, he'd known in his heart that the gales would be too strong and that, anyway, his mother wouldn't hear of it.