My mate, Ted.

My friend Ted was a shearer.
He was one of those people you meet who, for reasons that defy explanation, become part of your life.
Birthdays, anniversaries, Rugby League grand finals on TV - Ted would be there (as long as there was free beer.)

We'd previously given our teenage daughter an acoustic guitar for her birthday, in the hope that the gift might awaken a dormant creative talent and love of music. 
It didn't, and the guitar stood silently at the back of her wardrobe, gathering dust motes.

Somehow Ted had found it. 
(WTF he was doing in my daughter's wardrobe was a question we were disinclined to pursue.)
He would sit in our lounge room, tunelessly plunking away at the guitar in a fog of smoke, a scrawny roll-your-own dangling from his bottom lip, singing his own words to a tune only he could hear, undeterred by the noisy demands to "shut the fuck up, Ted", which he apparently interpreted as choral accompaniment. 

Ted was also a man of never-ending plans and ideas, get-rich schemes involving other people's money, usually mine. 

Ideas which invariably failed.

But he was funny and likeable, a real-life Mick Dundee, without the good-looking girlfriend. (This is no reflection on the young ladies of the village, many of whom would have reasonably considered themselves, at one time or another, to be Jack's girlfriend, but on the fact that Ms Kovlowski is an uncommonly beautiful lady.)
                                                                                                                                              

The most memorable of Ted's schemes involved me buying 1,000 wethers (castrated male sheep), me droving them the 15km to my property, and me running them on my property in direct competition for feed with my 300 head herd of Hereford cattle until they were ready for shearing, when Ted and some of his shearer mates would shear them in my woolshed, with Ted and I going halves in the proceeds. After "expenses".

Sounds fair, you might say, after a few beers. 
If you came down in the last shower.

Some years later a neighbour called and made an offer on my property. The offer coincided with changed circumstances within my family, and was, frankly, irrationally too high and too good to refuse. 
We left the Tablelands for the coast.

There was many an emotional beer consumed with my friends, accompanied by the  inevitable atonal background music from Ted and my daughter's  guitar, at a subdued informal farewell piss-up.                                                      

         *************

We kept in touch with friends who passed on gossip and news, including the bad news that Ted had lung cancer, and a bit later the news that the cancer had spread to his other lung.

About a month ago, Ted arrived at our home on the coast, in a car driven by a nice lady from the village who had chosen to look after him.

He had made the 150km trip down to say goodbye.
It took around 15 minutes for him to climb the stairs in our house so we could have a beer together, and for him to tell me "I'm fucked, Ben". 
Then he returned to the Tablelands.

Some weeks later I received a phone call to tell me Ted was dead.
He had visited his close friends in the village, then drove his car to the dam. He swam out from the shore of until he was too exhausted to swim any further, too exhausted to swim back to the shore and too exhausted to change his mind.

Then, like Aegeus, he sank.

Rest in peace, old mate.