The Grand Hotel (25 page)

If it was the eternal motif of pure sexual envy that propelled Joan Sutherland's destiny forward, it was at least to lay a blow for sincerity and humility against the conceit of this unabashed nemesis. Forgetting even to open my papa's handcrafted verandah screen doors, he simply burst straight through them, just as The Lazy Tenor was raising the Lalique to the sky. He leapt down from the hardwood planks of the verandah, skittled two of the tables on landing, and lunged at the maker of the toast.

The Lazy Tenor, his slickened hair glistening under the galah-less sky, was so enraptured by the sound of his own voice that he was caught by surprise. Joan was able to enclose that throat of vainglory and golden song in a massive Otway grip. Then, with natural propulsion, these two huge men tumbled onto and then straight over the head table, bringing the fish cutlery, the jug of Black Velvet, Ash and Vita Bowen, Veronica, Darren and Barbara Traherne, and of course Aunty Rita's Laliques crashing to the ground.

No wonder the galahs on the powerline had got out of there. Birds are not this planet's auguries for no reason. If they had've stayed, however, they would've witnessed in broad daylight the first genuine all-in brawl in Mangowak since a travelling car-fridge salesman had accused Big Martin Elliot of watering the beer down in the Mangowak Hotel on Remembrance Day, 1979.

That was a long time ago, when fist fights in hotels were as common as brains and bacon. Which made it even more surprising to see the almost genetic relish with which that whole sartorially dressed garden party in The Grand Hotel took to the brawl. Was it race memory, or just the held-in frustrations of our era of bloodless bureaucracies and litigation?

Joan Sutherland's ample frame was sprawled on top of a struggling and furious Lazy Tenor. In a cartoon you would've seen steam coming from both their ears. The Blonde Maria, of course, was aghast at what was happening, but before she could dive onto the back of Joan Sutherland and pummel him with her sharp Dookie fists The Lazy Tenor managed to upturn the big dairy farmer and with scant regard for his already broken arm thrust him into the bindi-infested kikuyu lawn. Joan, however, still had the singer by the throat, and The Lazy Tenor's face was now the colour of the canned tomato juice my father used to drink on that very lawn every breakfast time on summer weekends. Perhaps alarmed by this, and disappointed no doubt that his Dancing Brolga Ale had been spilt all down the front of his heirloom pinstripe Hersch's suit, Darren Traherne, as stout as a keg and well toned from abalone-diving, launched himself at the pair on the grass like a bowling ball at a set of pins.

The three of them splayed across the kikuyu, Joan and The Lazy Tenor momentarily separating before scrambling back towards each other on their hands and knees with Darren throwing wild punches in between them. One of these punches managed to catch Vita Bowen on the back of the head as she was picking herself up off the ground, having toppled over with the table. I'm quite sure, having grown up with three elder brothers, that Vita would've been familiar with the burning sensation of an old fashioned clip over the ear but her husband, Ash, who was of course well known in the town for his balanced outlook on all local issues and also for his calm advocation of yoga and non-violence, had never before witnessed his wife take a hit. It was too much for him, and his deep devotion to Vita, mother of his children and light of his life, surfaced in a most surprising hail of expletives and abuse before he ripped off his rimless glasses and threw himself grimacing into the fray.

Vita Bowen simply shrieked at the sight of it. You could make a strong case to say she was tougher than Ash, who at five foot nine inches and weighing in at sixty-five kilograms was of a delicate constitution. So, fearing her husband snapping sheer in half like a twig, Vita stepped sideways into the action, bending at the hips like an expert wrestler before tackling The Lazy Tenor around his emerald-suited waist.

Well, the sight of a woman getting involved was what the climate-change experts would have called the ‘tipping point' of the brawl. All those who had been standing aghast at the other tables, shouting and screaming at Joan and The Lazy Tenor to STOP IT PLEASE STOP IT were now torn from the passive horror of spectating and galvanised in their direction. First Simon Karinis from Minapre, a well-known ‘basher' in his days at Minapre High before becoming a respected ice-cream shop owner, stripped off his jacket to jump in. Then the party of Boat Creek lifesavers on Table Three did the same, their blond zinc-creamed heads, tanned legs and arms and bright Lycra surfwear adding a riot of bronze and iridescence to the spectacle. In no time whatsoever at least fifteen of the garden party guests were in the fight, blood was spattering the pelargoniums on one side and the flowering tea tree of the hedge on the other, spittle was flying, and curses were threading the air. The Blonde Maria was screaming in distress, as were at least a handful of other non-participants, while the remaining onlookers either barracked with a long-forgotten aptitude or furiously prodded their mobile phones to pass on the dramatic news to the rest of the town.

I stood untouched, as if in the eye of the storm, wondering how on earth things had come to this. All I'd ever wanted from this hotel was to express myself freely, to give everyone the chance to do likewise, and sure, to lance a few wounds in the process, but this was ridiculous! I watched on as if immune to the pain. We may all have been sage at times, calm like Ash Bowen, honest like Nan Burns, inspired like Veronica Khouri, and dignified like Jen, but who among us did not have a walledin knot of personal frustrations, of forgotten animal instincts that just wanted to shout out HELLO!, to scream, and to strike out in anguish at whatever was nearest at hand? Well, the scene in front of me was proof of it, and in that brief moment of stillness I felt no shame or despair at the gnashing, clawing mob in my midst but rather a mild and quite airy humour, as if some rightful catharsis was all that had occurred.

Much sartorial finery was ripped and torn in that brawl on the Grand Hotel lawn, although miraculously no one was too badly hurt. There were cuts and scratches, of course, torn fingernails, gashes that later required a few stitches, and even clumps of hair lying about among the bindies; but expensive suits and dresses, flash jewellery and hi-tech watches and phones and the like were ruined beyond repair. As often happens with all-in brawls, the mob eventually evolved into one organism, one grappling lump of fifteen or so bodies wobbling around the yard like a giant jellyfish. Eventually the jellyfish began to divide itself again into duelling pairs and threesomes: Givva Way boxing on with Darren Traherne; Jamie Niall from Boat Creek cramming Simon Karinis's head into the tea tree hedge as if he was stuffing a sleeping-bag back into its outer skin; Ash and Vita Bowen, teaming up now to fight the one-armed Joan Sutherland, who in the chaos of the donnybrook had lost his tea-towel sling and was waving his graffitied plaster-cast about like a lethal weapon. Meanwhile The Lazy Tenor was sprawled on the kikuyu, with a quartet of Boat Creek lifesavers pounding into him as if their lives depended on it. Our reluctant household name gnashed his teeth and struck back at them with both his vitriolic inlander's tongue and his slip-on blue suede shoes.

Eventually, and ironically I suppose, it was the weather that brought an end to the garden party brawl. As the fists and feet were flying, the day had been darkening in more ways than one. Clouds had been massing in the southwest. As Ash and Vita finally wrestled Big Joan to the ground and he began to unclench his rage and loosen instead into a crumpled, sobbing mess, the wind picked up out of the east, as if to remind us of the very reason for the gathering.

It began to blow hard, in snapping, chilling gusts. One by one the fighters registered the drop in temperature and also the sound of Joan's heartrending sobs where he lay under Ash and Vita on the lawn. The punches slowed, the headlocks loosened, Jamie Niall allowed Simon Karinis to rest unmolested in the hedge, Givva Way started looking around for some alcoholic refreshment, and Ash Bowen began whispering a soothing mantra into Joan's ear. The gnarly wind from the east, the only wind that ever managed to pry into the garden space between the hotel and its south facing hedge, began one by one to pick up the strewn paper entries for the Naming the Winds competition, which had been scattered when the head table fell, and send them fluttering, first into the air around us, then gradually lifting them higher and higher until the sky above us was momentarily blotted with the unread lexicon of our local winds, the ideas scattering like the ashes of a great personage on one of the very winds we had failed to call by name.

I feel certain that as we all looked skyward, to the soundtrack of the dairy farmer's lovebitten, land-torn grief, every one of us at the party had a strong sense of our great and eternal human idiocy. We stood among blood-splattered flowers and smashed antique glassware, watching as the unread names, turned up at the edges by the wind, sailed off like paper boats towards our river, towards Boat Creek, Turtle Head, and the hills beyond. The paper boats sailed away from us like a lost communal knowledge we weren't equipped to know. The afternoon had been overtaken by demons, and not for the first time we had feet of clay in our own locale.

As Joan continued to sob and Ash to whisper his Sanskrit mantra, others began to giggle and then to outright laugh at the scene as they finally took a look about them. Before long it was a strange type of music that laced the air in the wake of the windname flotilla, a music born half from primal grief and half from hopeless failure, a music of concussive sobs, consoling cadences, and surrendering mirth. The laughter was the humble outlook of little Mangowak caught in the signature human tune of loss and pain. And of course Ash's mantra, whispered close in poor Joan's ear but audible to all, was, as always, a yearning for the very gods that flew away from us in disgust upon the air.

It was at that moment, and only then, that I first had an inkling of The Grand Hotel as a truly magical place, a hotel where profound and confronting telepathies were somehow possible, a hotel born from the very human music I was now listening to. But before I could indulge any further in such thoughts, I caught Jen Sutherland out the corner of my eye, watching from the verandah, with the silent tears of love's eternal tragedy running down her cheeks. I knew then that for her the penny had dropped long ago. All I'd been through out in the clefts and overhangs, and all my fumbling attempts at coping since, was old knowledge to Jen. And now, as her husband lost his mind on the lawn in front of us, she had had enough. She'd known all along what he was up to, that was clear to me now, but she also knew what it had meant to him to leave the cows behind and come to town. She had given him what my mother would've called ‘a period of grace', and his participation in the Grand Hotel shenanigans was all part of that grace. It seemed that now, however, the grace was over.

A brief moment of indecision crossed her eyes as she turned to watch her husband losing his mind on the lawn. For a split second she contemplated if she could be bothered walking across to comfort him in this his most stricken and undignified moment. But then there was a flicker in her eyes as her love for him reasserted itself, and, wiping back the tears, she moved off the verandah and over to his side.

Poor Joan lay drooling, bleeding, and babbling like a madman. His talk had finally unhooked itself from what was going on around him and he muttered phrases broken and incomprehensible. Jen nursed his head in her lap and spoke to him in what was obviously their own intimate language. She half warbled and half sang in their own wedded dialect in an attempt to calm him down. For a while it seemed to work; his mutterings lessened, his breathing slowed. But then he suddenly sat bolt upright, nearly knocking her over and, pointing at the cloudy afternoon sky, began to name the constellations of the night sky, as if it was midnight. He raved, listing stars and planets, marvelling at the Pleiades one minute then trying to get a due south bearing from the Two Pointers the next. It was as if his eyes had glassed over and he was looking at another world, a world turned upside-down. And then he started calling out: ‘There's the brolga! See the brolga dancing! Up there in the Milky Way!'

Before long everyone began to notice what was happening to the man we were all so fond of. The mood behind the hedge grew solemn. People stood back and watched while licking their wounds. Simon Karinis stepped forward with a glass of water for Joan only to trip over an upturned chair and send the water flying. Nan called out gruffly for everyone to just stand back and give Jen and Joan some space.

‘Even better,' I said, flabbergasted by what was coming out of Joan's mouth, ‘why don't you all just piss off home now and leave us to get Joan sorted out. I think it's safe to say the party's over.'

Half an hour later, with Jen and Joan still sitting among the aftermath of the brawl on the lawn, as Darren, Veronica, Nan and I sat on the pews back in the bar discussing what to do, Sergeant Greg Beer turned up with a young constable in tow. He said he'd been notified of a public disturbance at The Grand Hotel and had come to investigate. Apparently there'd been a fight, he said, and began to crane his neck towards the strewn chaos out behind the hedge, where occasionally we could hear Joan calling out at a falling star. The sergeant then proceeded to make a little speech, chiefly for the new constable's benefit no doubt, about how Mangowak had a proud tradition of public restraint and good behaviour, how it had become in the town's best interests to market itself as a ‘charming and community-minded coastal village', and how any interruption to that proud tradition of public order would not only have consequences in the law but could also damage us all economically.

‘I can see that there has been some kind of ruckus here today, Noel,' the sergeant continued. ‘The garden out there looks like it's been hit by a bomb. And who's that I can hear out there? No one drunk and disorderly I hope.'