The Grand Hotel (19 page)

This time, however, Kooka seemed perfectly content to listen at great length to the trials of the young boatbuilder of Carrick's Cove. Maria began to fear that in her keenness to lull Kooka to sleep, she was actually keeping him wide awake, that her ‘beautiful story-voice' was not as natural and settled as on previous nights, and that she'd never get to test her theory.

Try as she might to slow her reading, to flatten its lilt, to immerse herself in its content, it seemed that Kooka was unperturbed and perfectly engaged. But then, just as the boy's sloop in the book was finally being caulked and painted and the people of the cove were readying themselves for its launch, Kooka announced, once again in a strong, wide-awake voice, that he wouldn't mind ‘a bit of a spell'.

‘Perhaps I'll kip for a bit, Maria. What do you reckon?'

‘Sure, Kooka,' The Blonde Maria replied, ‘if you're feeling tired. I'll sit here for a while if you like, in case you wake up in a bit and want to hear some more.'

‘That's nice of you, love. Yes, I think I'll snooze for a bit.'

As on the previous night Kooka's left hand then reached out automatically and clicked on his little black transistor radio where it sat on the bedside table. He slipped down deeper into the bedclothes just as the radio news was finishing and a discussion about the history of the Australian film industry began. Maria leant down to the ice-cream container, got herself an apricot, and waited.

Out in the night, beyond the timber-scented darkness on the perimeter of the pool of light, she could no longer hear the Plinth bells from the rivermouth but rather the large branches of the two backyard pine trees brushing against the Sewing Room wall. She took a small bite from the apricot and listened as an erudite interviewee discussed the effects of tax deductibility on Australian creativity.

And then Kooka's dream took over.

‘You can just bundle it all up, love, but you can't bundle me. Doesn't that tell you something? Take the charts and the cabinets and the files, the tapes and the teaspoons and tobacco pouches, and...'

A woman's voice. It was Mary, from the night before. Mary and John. Mary and Kooka. Mary's voice, Kooka's wife. And now Kooka's voice as well, but so much younger, a young man in love.

‘Oh, but look at this one, Mary. It's you, on the badge of the spoon. See, it says it – MARY DWYER MINAPRE HOSPITAL FUND...'

‘It's not me, John.'

‘What's that? Look, of course it's you.'

‘No it's not, John. Am I not scattered to the winds?'

‘Oh, Mary, don't say that.'

‘The wind I'm on. You can't put my titties on the spoon, John. And our love ... remember the eagle over the water ... remember it gliding ... our love, John ... not a spoon.'

Maria herself had used Kooka's souvenir teaspoons many times since she'd arrived at the hotel. Kooka had in fact given her the WILLY COOPER BIGGEST BABY IN VICTORIA spoon to take upstairs to her room when she made such a great impression on him the day she first arrived. Now she began to join the dots as the transistor beside the bed crackled and cut away.

For a moment, though, there was silence, just the pines brushing the outside wall, before the voices recommenced.

‘Remember how much putty we used, my dear John. But I've long forgiven you, love. I'll take the honey over the putty. Any day. I shouldn't have blamed you. She couldn't resist your charms.'

‘But, Mary, I'm sticky with the putty. It's in my armpits now ... I'm all stopped up with it, Mary...'

‘You've got teaspoons in your ears, John ... shire records for socks ... what's your heart now, John, a recording?'

‘But it's in my heart, Mary, all the putty, from the hardware, you've gone...'

‘I'm not gone, John. That's why I took the apricots away...'

‘To find love in the hollow tree.'

‘We did that, John.'

‘I grew fur, Mary ... and then the fur grew on you and we lived in that hollow.'

‘As one creature, dear John.'

Maria's mouth was open in awe. She looked down at the apricot in her hand. It was small and blushed. Ripe. Now it seemed like a magical thing, an out-of-the-ordinary thing, a part of heaven. And then the tranny glitched again. She heard the same watery sounds of the night before. And the list again, of the swimmer in the waves.

‘Bronchitis Cure, The Best Test for the Chest ... eighty barrels ... wire the cooper from Corrievale for Tom String ... mounts for the new ale mirror ... fetch the grates ... bring the flowers for the rooms off the dray...'

The swimmer dived again and in The Blonde Maria's heart the whole Sewing Room seemed to sunder deep into the ocean hum. In her mind she even saw the salty underwater grain. And then the swimmer rose and opened out with spray into the air and sky. She gasped, then let out a little squeal of joy.

The Blonde Maria watched Kooka intently now. His face was impassive on the pillow but once again there was movement behind his eyes.

She stared at the tranny. Just a small black rectangular box. How could it be so?

Then, with devastating predictability, came the roaring sound of a burning building. And once again the screaming woman. FIRE! FIRE! NO I MUST SEE MY JOHNNY. OH GOD FIRE! SOMEONE PLEASE!

Maria had no idea who the woman was but looking over at Kooka now she could see his big brow knitting with concern. The screaming continued and then, as if by rote, there was the sound of horse's hooves and the voices of firemen. The fire was going out; the woman's voice had vanished.

In the pool of light Kooka's brow relaxed but now a single tear glittered as it slipped out of his dreaming eye. The voice of Mary came again: ‘And I will love you, doubly for your old mum, for the love she sold to send you here, to the ocean ... and I did, John ... and I did...'

Kooka laughed. ‘But it's overflowing now, Mary, and the blasted tap won't stop ... it's better off in the grass, a love like that...'

‘No container could hold it, John.'

‘It's better off, Mary. Makes the grass grow.'

‘No container, John, no cabinet, no pouch...'

‘Mary, did you see the brolgas that Tom String bred?'

‘I did. And all the feathers flying...'

Once again Kooka laughed in his dream but then he sniffed on the pillow, his body bunched up under the covers, and with an abrupt heave the old man turned over in the bed. The tranny glitched. And then, suddenly, Barry Humphries was talking about expatriate life in London in the 1960s.

Like a Dog on Heat

Because of the successful precedents we'd set with Duchamp the Talking Urinal, with Veronica's frankincense fumigation, and with allowing community contributions such as the screening of ‘Nan's Towering Inferno' and Jim's ‘The Dying Gardens of the Great Ocean Road' during Happy Hour, we felt a duty among our committee to keep up the good times and the vibrant flow of ideas. So, in the days following my confrontation of Maria, and now that Kooka's bar game about the mystery of the fire in the original Grand Hotel had been superseded by his interesting new condition, we called a committee meeting in The Horse Room where we agreed to three brand new Grand Hotel competitions.

The first was to be a contest that would give character names to our local winds, à la the Sirocco of the Mediterranean and The Fremantle Doctor of Perth. This idea of Ash Bowen's came from an awareness of how the devastation of the local Aboriginal people by white settlers had deprived us all of an authentic language with which to speak about the land we loved. As Ash pointed out at the meeting, the Wathaurong band in our area would surely have had names for all the various winds on the coast, but now those names were gone on the very winds they described. It therefore seemed not only worthwhile but also a good fun idea to hold a competition to come up with our own.

The second idea at that meeting was to begin what we would call our Tuesday Wellbeing Nights, where we would venture out into the town after stumps to creatively alter shire signage in the spirit of Dada and the freedom virus. This idea was the result of a collaboration between Veronica and Darren Traherne, both of whom were almost allergic to the excessive amounts of signage implemented by the shire, small tourism operators, and various state-government bodies in our area. On many occasions over the years, when he was returning from fishing the night tides, Darren himself had gone down on bended knee under the moonlight to dismantle newly erected signs he considered superfluous, only to see them replaced in the following days by the various powers that be. For a time Darren did this so regularly that he carried a hacksaw with extra blades and a shifting spanner in his fishing bag. In the end, however, he'd given up, such was the persistence of his more organised opponents. But now Veronica was suggesting a new approach. Rather than destroy the signs, we would merely use them as the raw material for public works of art. We would tag these noble civic contributions of the Grand Hotel clientele with an obscure signature – ‘DTs', short for ‘Dada Tourists' – and a prize would be awarded if anyone could create a work that was so effective and popular among the population that the shire refused to take it down.

The third competition suggested at the meeting was that we begin a Grand Hotel stoneskimming contest down among the Plinths near the rivermouth. This was Darren Traherne's idea alone, and it immediately aroused much excitement and enthusiasm from the group. I sensed in this unbridled enthusiasm a sudden yearning among the committee for some harmless fun. Joan Sutherland, for instance, was particularly keen, no doubt wanting to pretend the adulterous and licentious world he was now inhabiting was innocent and pure after all. Perhaps not surprisingly it was only Veronica, with her intense loyalty to Art with a capital A, and her relentless desire to subvert the marketing and development of the coast, who remained lukewarm about the stoneskimming idea.

In fact it was at this point, when it became obvious that her plan to refashion shire infrastructure was the least favourite of the three proposed competitions, that Veronica cracked it good and proper. For weeks now she'd been complaining to me about letting The Lazy Tenor stay in the pub, about the mainstream mediocrity of the nightly sets of The Barrels, and also about what she thought was my tendency to cater too much for what she liked to call ‘the mob'. Veronica had always been ardent, driven, and hot-blooded, and didn't want to see her radical dream of a Dada hotel die a boring death. Calling me aside during the meeting and out onto the verandah, she began hectoring me in a frustrated and derisive voice. Eventually I held up my hand. I had enough on my plate and just wasn't in the mood.

So, promptly, and I must say with a touch of rich-kid snootiness, she threatened right there and then to have nothing more to do with the hotel. I was shocked, even despite her grievances, and only managed to placate her by saying we'd put the Wellbeing Nights at the top of the list. Grudgingly she accepted this olive branch but didn't look too convinced. Saying she wasn't going back into the meeting, she turned and stepped off the verandah to head back up the hill to her studio on the cliff. As I watched her go, I couldn't help but feel diminished in the eyes of an artist I truly admired.

I had to take a few deep breaths before re-entering the meeting. I felt caught. I knew exactly where Veronica was coming from but I also felt she was missing the point. The deepest of all the ironies that the Dada movement embodied was that they scoffed at any slavish adherence to Art with a capital A, or Politics with a capital P, while simultaneously being famous for a riotous display of both. Veronica seemed to have remembered all the Dada postures but this one, which was surely the solid
and
evershifting ground that gave Dada its incomparable cock-a-hoop freedom. As much as I was looking forward to participating in the Tuesday Wellbeing Nights, it would be impossibly boring of me now to just ignore the wishes and enthusiasms of the rest of those involved in the hotel in the name of either Art or Politics.

I went back into the meeting without breathing a word of her complaint – I just said she'd gone home because she wasn't feeling well – but when the possibility of a competition to name the local winds was brought up later that night in the bar it immediately captured everyone's imagination. Then, when the stoneskimming comp was mentioned, it wasn't long before the whole bar was getting quite carried away, even to the extent that someone joked that Mangowak could be the host of the first ever World Stoneskimming Championships! People sipped at their Dancing Brolgas and were seduced by the preposterous scale of such an idea, which was of course soon scotched by a brief scoot around the internet on the big Happy Hour screen, where we found a plethora of websites devoted not only to world stoneskimming championship events but also to the sophisticated physics of the art. Despite this blow to our hope that Mangowak had finally found its very own niche of global significance, everyone was full of praise for the hotel committee in coming up with such great ideas.

In the following days and weeks not a breath of wind coursed through our valley unnoticed and more and more people could be seen down on the beach practising their skimming techniques in readiness for the comp. It seemed pretty clear I'd made a promise to Veronica that I couldn't really keep.

It was as I lay in my loft later on the night of this meeting, trying to clear my mind of all my cares and worries by counting imaginary brolgas leaping over the fences on the riverflat, that I heard a resounding crash in the night as Big Joan Sutherland fell down off the drainpipe of the second storey of The Grand Hotel.

I rushed on some clothes and went out to find the big fella lying splayed across the yard like a truly unsuccessful dog on heat. Wincing in pain, he bleated to me that he had lost his hotel key. I didn't need to ask why he hadn't come and knocked on the barn door to borrow my key. Quite obviously he had gone home after stumps to check on Jen and the kids and then come back to rendezvous with The Blonde Maria.

When he had hit the ground, still clinging to the downpipe, the crash he made was so loud it could well have been heard in the previous century. From the upstairs rooms of the hotel, however, there was absolutely no reaction. The windows were silent, inscrutably so, with no breeze to even flutter the curtains. At this stage we had a jetlagged university student from Rotterdam staying in Room Two, who perhaps understandably was either too shy or too sleepy to peer down. But I had to wonder what particular cocktail of The Blonde Maria's affections was distracting the other rooms from noticing Joan's fall. Was she still sitting in the wicker chair beside Kooka, reading him to sleep from
The World of Carrick's Cove
, or was she at the other end of the hallway in The Lazy Tenor's room, her recently pleasured body sprawled across his naked frame as she tenderly whispered her plan for world musical domination into his ear?

Down on the ground Joan was very, very sore – in fact he hadn't moved a limb as yet. I knelt down beside him and asked if he was okay. He said he thought so but that his arm hurt. I asked him which arm and he simply said, ‘My tap-arm.'

‘Oh great,' I replied, with a thick lashing of sarcasm. ‘That's all I need. A barman who can't pour drinks. Are you out of your mind?'

‘Well, thanks for the sympathy, Noel.'

The dim starless night over the hotel yard was suddenly lit up as Sergeant Greg Beer's police four-wheel drive pulled into the driveway. For a moment the ice-blue tinge of his high-beam headlights revealed more than just the Blossfeldt pattern of blackwood trees on my eastern boundary. I saw clearly and in a piercing instant that The Grand Hotel had in fact become much more than I'd bargained for, and more perhaps than I could adequately handle.

Greg Beer switched off his engine and headlights. He got out of his car and shut and locked his driver's door with a pneumatic squish and an electronic pop. He took a torch off his hip and shone it in our direction. ‘Is everything alright here, Noel?' he said. ‘I've had a report.'

‘What kind of report?'

‘Of a loud crash from your premises. What's happened to Mr Sutherland here?'

‘Oh, he's just had a little accident,' I said. ‘He misplaced his key and was attempting to find another way into the building.'

‘And he fell?'

‘Yes, he fell.'

Greg Beer stood right over us now and shone his halogen torchlight straight into Joan's face.

‘Aw, shit. Turn that thing off would ya, Greg?' Joan complained. ‘You tryin' to blind me or somethin'?'

Greg Beer clicked off his torch. Then he clicked it on again, this time pointing it at the wall of the hotel. As the light thoroughly frisked the building, he continued his investigation. ‘Any broken bones?'

‘Nah. Well, maybe my arm,' Joan replied.

‘Can you get up? Can you walk?'

‘I dunno.'

‘Do you want to lay charges, Noel?'

‘I'm sorry?' I said.

The policeman's torchlight scanned the upper storey of the hotel, obviously looking not just for signs of the accident but for anything at all incriminating he might find. I dreaded what he would see as the light moved from right to left towards The Blonde Maria's and The Lazy Tenor's rooms.

‘Well this does qualify as a breaking-and-entering offence,' the sergeant said, without taking his eyes off the torch beam.

‘Oh, come off it. Joan works here. He just lost his key that's all.'

‘Well it's up to you, Noel. But there's been a lot of this kind of thing happening in Mangowak of late. Breaking and entering. I'm determined to stamp it out.'

‘I see. Well that's very worrying. It's not like back when we were kids, eh, Greg?' I ventured.

‘What do you mean by that, Noel?'

‘There was never any break-ins back then was there?'

Greg Beer clicked off his torch again and swung around to face me. It was true, when we were growing up in Mangowak there weren't any robberies or vandalism at all, apart from the occasional celebratory Monday night sinking of a weekender's boat in the river. But that was just us kids on a bit of a lark. No, my comment was referring to the fact that Greg Beer's mother, Meryl, had been the one real exception to the rule. It wasn't that she was a kleptomaniac or anything, but from time to time she felt the overwhelming need to let herself into vacant beach-houses in the town, put her feet up on the couches and polish off the drinks cabinet. Those were the days before we had our own policeman in Mangowak, and if it wasn't for the sympathy and understanding extended to Meryl Beer and her kids by Sergeant Ted ‘Prickly' Moses, the policeman in Minapre, she would have been put in the clink as a repeat offender and her son and daughter would have been placed in an orphanage. Even as it was, on a couple of occasions she had to sober up overnight in the Minapre lock-up, and Greg and his sister Lurline were given to the sisters in St Catherine's convent in the hills out the back of town.

Admittedly this was a low blow I'd delivered to the sergeant, but I felt it was justified. There was no criminal offence occurring here, just an everyday case of male sexual passion gone wrong. And surely the police didn't have to know about that.

As I stood up from kneeling beside Joan, who himself sat up for the first time since the fall and leant on the elbow of his unbroken left arm, Sergeant Greg Beer glared at us both with a thinly disguised loathing. He fixed his torch back into its position on his hip and straightened his uniform pullover.