Free Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds by Gregory Day

habits and dobbing him in to the authorities. He wanted to know if Dom Khouri was buying the land for an investment, for show, or for a better reason. He was not going to sell his father’s land to someone who was going to start up some gimmick for tourists right next door.
    After an hour and a half over lunch, the rain that had been hammering the roof of the warm kitchen as they ate was finally backing off and Ron felt surprisingly confident on all fronts. Through the sink window, Dom Khouri could see a rainbow stalk out to sea in front of the Meteorological Station. Ron noticed his eyes widen as he saw it.
    â€˜You’d see as many rainbows up here as you would anywhere,’ he ventured to their guest.
    â€˜It’s beautiful. With the old chimneys there and the whitecaps,’ Dom Khouri replied.
    â€˜My father told me that when he first bought this land, the sheep used to notice the rainbows. If you’d known him you’d know he wasn’t one for making things up.’
    â€˜It’s true,’ Min said.
    â€˜He’d say,’ Ron continued, ‘people think sheep are stupid, boy, and they are, so long as you reckon it’s stupid to stick together and watch rainbows go by.’
    â€˜We’re all animal lovers here,’ Min explained to Dom Khouri.
    â€˜Yair,’ said Ron, suppressing a giggle. ‘I kill ’em. I kill fish, and eels and rabbits and foxes and ducks and yabbies and that. Anything that moves.’ He made a conciliatory gesture with the back of his hand, unsure if the foreigner would cotton on to the tone of his joke. ‘But I’m honest about it. That’s fair. I don’t touch any of them when they’re breedin’ or failin’ and I don’t take too many.’
    â€˜That’s wise,’ said Dom Khouri.
    â€˜Mushrooms are a different story, of course,’ Ron smiled. ‘If there’s a paddock of field mushies I’ll take ’em all, won’t I, Mum? Bloody beautiful for breakfast with a bit of Gellibrand butter.’
    Dom Khouri nodded and smiled, thinking of the flavourless mushrooms he bought at his local grocery in Melbourne.
    â€˜And raspberries,’ Ron went on. ‘Same. Can’t resist when they’re on. Mum makes a top raspberry jam. Take a jar before you go.’
    â€˜I’d like that.’
    Min placed a hot silver pot of tea on the table and poured. As she leant over the table she shook her head in quiet amazement. By her son’s uncharacteristic chattiness she could tell that things would work out.
    Although he was showing no sign of hurrying, Ron knew that Dom Khouri was a busy man and that he couldn’t stay all afternoon. Looking to his left out the window, where the morning’s squalls hadfinally passed, he suggested that maybe he and Dom Khouri take a walk around the place so he could show him a thing or two.
    They stepped out the porch door and into the day. The cold hit them, they’d been so warm in the kitchen with Min’s fire in the Rayburn. Ron led Dom Khouri through the yard, past the nectarine trees and the stacked palings from a fence he’d helped dismantle down in the valley, and up to the woodpile.
    â€˜This is where your land would start. This would be our boundary.’
    Then he pointed along the cliff towards his open shed. ‘You’d have all this along to my shed over there and all the way back to the flowering gums near the road. It’s three acres.’
    Dom Khouri followed Ron’s pointing hand but was having a hard time concentrating on the land because of the view over to the Two Pointers immediately to their south. The cormorants were on the top of the rocks, which stood there like fabulous eyries straight out of his childhood. Between the rocks the turquoise blush had come back into the heaving banks of water after the wind and rain. Dom Khouri felt a shiver down his spine.
    Ron stepped forward and Dom Khouri