The Grand Hotel (27 page)

‘Did she die in a fire?'

Kooka's eyes narrowed and he sat up a little in bed. ‘Well, how on earth would you know that, young lady? Has Noely been gasbagging to you?'

The Blonde Maria winced. ‘No,' she said. ‘But some nights when I'm sitting by your bed, well, you have dreams. It's like you talk in your sleep or something.'

‘Is that so?'

‘Yeah, and ... there's often something about a fire.'

Kooka smiled at The Blonde Maria. ‘Yes, well, Mum died in a fire alright. When I was just a kid. But I got my dancing shoes from her. And I got my lovely Mary by dint of dancing. At the 1949 Minapre Debutantes' Ball.'

The Blonde Maria's face broadened into a grin. ‘I never knew you were a dancer, Kooka.'

‘Oh, too right I was. Mary and I. I got the talent from my mum. But as for Mary's talent, well, it was a gift from God I suppose.'

He licked his lips in satisfaction at the thought. ‘You know, Maria, it's a long time since anyone's been close enough to listen in on my dreams. Not since Mary died. I like the thought of it.' Then he pointed at the book. ‘But let's get back to that boy and his boat now. I'm keen to see how he gets on.'

For fear of disturbing the old man's sleep, she had wept silent tears then as night after night he revisited the St Kilda brothel fire that had killed his mother, thereby proving her love and foresight in sending him to Mangowak to live with her cousins the Conebushes. She had also wept silently, though this time for joy, when by constant dreaming reassurance his beloved Mary had proven to Kooka that yes it was her who had stopped the apricot tree from bearing fruit that first year after she died. By convincing him of this from beyond the grave, she had healed him of the great anguish he'd felt over the vanishing act of her death, and, as a consequence, of the fanatical interest in history that had taken over his life when she died. Or so at first it appeared.

Maria had listened in wonder as both Kooka's burning mother and Mary slowly, ever so slowly, disappeared from his nightly broadcasts altogether.

For a time what remained seemed only the random associative assemblages of an old man's reconciled mind. There were scenes with present day figures such as Darren Traherne or Nan Burns going out on ferreting trips with Ron McCoy and old Fred Ayling, or other people long dead. There was one long broadcast, which kept Maria up till dawn, where a dead body had been found adorned with forest flowers on the end of the Minapre Pier. The police were called to the scene only to find not a human being but a dead sea elephant ringed with the flowers.

For Maria these evenings were too weird and magical to communicate, until it became evident that the other mysterious recurring figure she had not been able to explain, the swimming woman with the lists, turned out to be Joan Sweeney, the publican of the original Grand Hotel.

It was very late one night, around 2 am, three weeks after Greg Beer's threat. I was drawing up in my loft, with a glass of the Finland wine, when I heard the hotel door open and close and footsteps coming across the yard. Naturally I was curious about who it was but the drawing I was working on – of poor Joan Sutherland curled up in foetal position within a giant Lalique glass – was so absorbing that I didn't bother to open the timber shutter of the old open-air window in the loft to look out.

I continued the picture with one ear cocked, noticing that the footsteps did not continue along the crunch of the driveway and out onto the road as I expected but instead had crossed straight over the yard, padding softly, before coming to a standstill next to my barn.

Now I looked up from the picture of Joan in the Lalique and waited. Silence. Until the anxious call of a plover, way out on the riverflat.

Then I heard my name called tentatively in the night. ‘Noel. Are you up there, Noel?'

I put the drawing aside, came down the ironbark ladder, and a few minutes later was sitting quietly downstairs in the barn, sharing my wine with Maria.

The sweet taste of the Baltic liquor on her lips must have fortified her against the unlikely nature of what she was about to tell me. After the usual enquiries about the chaos of bush refuse and ocean flotsam and jetsam scattered everywhere around my barn, she began to relate the amazing tale she'd gingerly crossed the night yard to tell.

As I listened without a word to Maria describing what had been happening with Kooka and the tranny beside his bed, I could see that she felt she was gambling on her relationship with me by recounting it. Would I believe her? Would I suspect she was having a lend of me? Would I write her off as finally and categorically mad, like Joan Sutherland seeing constellations in the daylight?

She needn't have worried. As she told me in great detail about Kooka's mother and the fire, about Mary and the apricots, and how these scenes would repeat themselves over and over through the little tranny until gradually they faded away to be replaced by more typical, if fanciful things, it was clear that not even in her most unhinged state could Maria have possibly concocted the scenario she was expecting me to believe. The final proof for me, however, was when she made a particular point of describing what Mary's voice was like as she spoke with Kooka in the broadcasts. The voice Maria described was inimitably Mary, with the exact characteristics I remember so fondly from my childhood. Mary Dwyer was well brought up, in a country-town sort of way, with her father being Dr Bernard Feast's liberal-minded medical predecessor in Minapre; and so, as Maria described, Mary spoke not with a plum as such but with well-educated vowels tempered and textured by her more practical country life. As Maria said, you would not have described Mary's accent as in any way ‘tough' but there was a matter-of-factness about the way she spoke that precluded her being described as merely upper crust. But more importantly, Maria described to a tee the occasional speech impediment Mary had, a little difficulty with pronouncing the letter ‘r' when it occurred in the middle of a word. I remember clearly as a child that lovely Mary often said ‘Chwistmas' for ‘Christmas', and my brothers and I used to make the usual jokes about such a thing among ourselves. As Maria told me, the word ‘apricot' often, but not always, brought out this impediment in Mary's speech, so that when Maria sat in The Sewing Room listening night after night to their love affair from beyond the grave she found the voice of Kooka's wife unmistakable and distinctive. She said she couldn't count the amount of times she'd heard Mary say ‘apwicot' for ‘apricot', but almost as if it was a hangover from when she was a little girl, because she didn't always pronounce the word that way.

Finally then, once she could see that I was at least halfway open to what she had to say, and that I wasn't writing her off as a lunatic, Maria told me about the other dream that Kooka had been having, the dream of the swimming woman and the lists, the dream that after many nights was the only one that kept recurring, until finally the swimming woman had emerged from the ocean to reveal herself as Joan Sweeney and make the trip back towards the hotel with the half Aboriginal fella called Tom String and the dray of coal.

For the life of me now I could hardly believe what I was being told. It was one thing for Kooka to dream about people from his past but quite another entirely for him to be conjuring up the long-ago history of the town. But, as Maria rambled on, excitedly describing Tom String and his dray, and how he'd gathered the coal from the ocean reefs and how he killed and gutted the echidna, and also as she recounted the contents of the lists Joan Sweeney would recite as she swam in the waves, the most intense feeling of déjà vu rose up within me. I felt as if I was about to burst into tears.

The surge of emotion was both overwhelming and mysterious. I had to excuse myself and go outside into the yard for a piss. The stars were out, and as I looked up at the three studs in Orion's Belt the urge to cry passed, only to be replaced by an acute sensation inside my head, which I can only describe as my mind butting up against something, like a goat butts a fence when there's blackberries on the other side. I shivered, a little freaked out, and then was distracted by the sound of Maria slopping more of the Finland wine into our glasses back in the barn. I zipped up, deciding I needed another drink to calm me down, and went back inside.

We talked for another couple of hours, and before she left Maria and I excitedly agreed that I should join her in The Sewing Room after stumps the following evening, both to satisfy my own curiosity and to see whether or not she wasn't just imagining it all. I slept like a top once she'd gone, and dreamt not of Joan Sweeney, nor of Tom String and the drayload of coal, but of a long-legged angel descending into my unfinished drawing. It was Jen Sutherland, all feathery and elongated, flying over the reeds and nobby clubrushes of the riverflat, with closed eyelids pushed back by the breeze and with her husband's curled-up body sleeping blissfully in the grip of her talons. Together they flew with a loping wingbeat westward towards the Otway hills. I knew where they were headed, off over Snook Bay and the forest to the quiet lap-lap of the Barroworn River on the Sutherland dairy farm property. I watched them go in the dream and wished them well, happily assured that my good friend Joan was safe now in the loving claws of his bird.

Gravity Feed

The next day was a day like any other in the hotel – we had a new delivery of beer from Rennie Vigata, a new guest arrive, a new loop in Duchamp (perhaps chastened by Veronica's frustrations, I chose for this one a tone-poem recording Kurt Schwitters had made in England before he died a Dada legend at the ripe old age of seventy-six), and as usual we opened right on the dot of three. But for me, of course, it was a day with an extra dimension, as I wandered from task to task with a swarm of fluttering butterflies in my stomach at the thought of what I might be privy to later that evening.

I saw hide nor hair of The Blonde Maria all day. When I took Kooka up his breakfast in the morning, he said she'd obviously needed a good sleep-in because she hadn't appeared to give him his morning foot massage. I half fibbed to Kooka, saying yes, The Blonde Maria and I had been up late in my barn drinking the Finland wine. At the mention of this wine his eyes brightened and he asked me if he could have a ‘drop of that beautiful Baltic nectar' with his sausages and eggs for breakfast. Laughing, I went downstairs to fetch him a bottle, and by the time I collected his dirty dishes at one o'clock the old bugger had drunk almost all of it. I told him he had an iron gut but he just laughed and said he felt like ‘waxing lyrical'. I said, ‘How do you mean, Kooka?' and he started going on about how he'd never been happier since he'd given up the history-bug and taken to the Sewing Room bed.

‘That wouldn't by any chance have anything to do with the bottle of wine you've had for breakfast?' I joked.

Kooka arranged his lips into a perfect O shape, his bright eyes shone and he released a hoarse and play-acting breath. ‘No, Noel,' he said emphatically. ‘You know yourself the grog's just oiling the machine. Sometimes we just need an extra drop or two for the old contraption to run smoothly.'

I smiled and leant over to take the bottle off Kooka's bedside table, feigning the stern cast of a Lutheran missionary as I did so. Beside the bottle was his black transistor radio and I couldn't help but stare at it. In the dappled morning light of The Sewing Room I couldn't imagine how that ordinary little box with its station dial and its two AAA batteries tucked away inside, seemingly so inanimate and ordinary, could perform the task that The Blonde Maria had assured me it did. I looked at it as if for some sign that it was special, that it wasn't just a run-of-the-mill tranny, but found none. Gathering up Kooka's plate and cup, I told him I was rapt he was so happy in The Sewing Room and that Mum would be too, and if he liked he was welcome to stay until he met his maker.

‘You're a good boy, Noel,' he replied, ‘and you run a good pub. But there's no need to get maudlin about things.'

He winked at me and with a knowing smile turned on his side to face the light filtering through the pines outside the inland window. He reached over and clicked on the tranny, pulled up his blankets, and began to hum along with the French hurdy-gurdy tune that started coming out of the magic box.

I turned for the door, full of questions, and left him to it.

Happy Hour that night was a risky affair, as it was Craig Wilson from Breheny Creek's turn to show his wares on the big screen. Craig was rhythm guitarist in The Barrels and had been quietly pestering us all to give him a spot for weeks. He reckoned he and his girlfriend, Angela, had put a little pearler together, but when we actually got to see it that night, well, with Sergeant Greg Beer watching the place like a fish-hawk, the content of the film made us all a little nervous.

Craig Wilson runs a cafe in Minapre but when he first showed up in Mangowak a few years ago it was to work for one of our local estate agents, Colin Batty, up at Batty Real Estate. Craig soon learnt he was a bit sensitive for the often brutal cut and thrust of selling people's homes, though not before it had cost him his marriage and, temporarily at least, his peace of mind. These days he lives a much happier life with his new girlfriend, Angela, in their cedar house on the front row at Breheny Creek. As well as running his popular cafe and playing in the band, he surfs a bit, mucks around online and takes off for long stints in the Top End every winter. He told me with a grin that his humble little Happy Hour creation was called ‘Gravity Feed' and that he'd gone to a lot of trouble and expense with a new Red One camera and digital-editing software to get it right.

As it flickered onto the screen, ‘Gravity Feed' immediately drew the attention of the Happy Hour crowd, most of whom, like me, had been primed for the occasion by Craig and Angela for weeks. The film began innocently enough, with a nice series of shots of home watertanks on the first sloping ridge of houses at Breheny Creek. Craig and Ange live at the bottom of this ridge, right near the main road and the dunes, and slowly, as one by one the camera switched from watertank to watertank in the back and front yards of the weekenders' houses on the ridge, an old fashioned alarm clock pasted into the top righthand corner of the screen showed the minutes and hours of a normal day on the coast ticking by. Time passed and the camera went from old watertank to new watertank, from hooped iron tanks wedged into silver scrub on the upslopes of old holiday blocks to modern plastic tanks positioned snugly under elevated Murcuttish weekenders. Eventually the daylight began slowly to leach out of the picture until finally, as the hands of the alarm clock showed nine o'clock, the alarm began to ring, the sun disappeared beyond the western hills, and nightfall with its canopy of stars began.

This long sequence of ordinary watertanks captured in the passing light was shot in the style of the opening credits to a spy thriller, complete with a foreboding soundtrack and typewritten dossier-style text that appeared letter by letter on the screen along with each and every different tank. As the text appeared, the soundtrack was overlaid with the clicking sound of the typewriter, which gave us the address of the property the watertank belonged to, the occupation of its owners, and the approximate amount of days and nights those owners had spent in their beach-house the previous year. For instance, the rusty twin tanks we saw as the clock showed twelve noon were apparently from ‘SALT WINDS, WALLABY STREET, BREHENY CREEK ... DEMOGRAPHER ... FLORIST ... 22/365
...
', whereas the brand new charcoal-black watertanks shown at 4pm were from ‘AMALFI, CORREA AVENUE, BREHENY CREEK ... QUEEN'S COUNSEL ... GALLERY OWNER ... 12/365'.

As night fell and the faux alarm clock began to ring with a
Looney Tunes
style clangety-clang, the increasingly enigmatic sequence of watertanks was exchanged for wobbly
verité
style footage of Craig and Ange hauling large rings of industrial rubber hose out of their fibro garage. With collar-microphones on they chatted to each other in good spirits – Craig had obviously had to hand over the cameraman and lighting duties to others for these shots, as the action continually went in and out of focus, as well as in and out of the single high-powered lamp they were using to light the scenes.

The technical difficulties didn't matter so much at this stage, however – at least not to the audience in the Grand Hotel bar, as everyone stood sipping their Dancing Brolgas and craning their necks to find out what the hell Craig and Ange were up to in ‘Gravity Feed'.

Well, the title must surely have given it away to some, but those who didn't twig didn't have to wait long. The next stage of the film was the juicy bit. It showed Angela, po-faced with a torch, strategically placing the end of the large industrial hose into their own two concrete watertanks. Next we saw Craig and Ange trudging under cover of the night, unwinding the big hose as they went back up the ridge along sheoak and wattle lined shortcuts, before attaching the other end of the hose to one of the weekenders' watertanks they'd filmed during the day. One by one, in scenes which by their lack of continuity were obviously shot on a succession of midweek evenings, Craig and Ange part-drained each and every one of the weekenders' watertanks, running the stolen rainwater down the slope of the first Breheny Creek ridge and straight into their own supply nestled in beside the boobiallas back next to their house.

There was a cheery chorus of hoots and boos as everyone in the bar finally cottoned on to what they were watching. Craig and Angela were stealing water. It all felt very illicit, almost like watching a snuff movie. Because neither the hose nor the tanks were transparent, no one could be absolutely sure whether Craig and Ange had actually drained the water or not, but one thing was for sure: they demonstrated how easy it would've been to do exactly that if anyone was ever inclined to in a drought.

The final shots of the film would have been in bad taste were it not for the soundtrack switching ridiculously to the theme from the old British comedy
The Benny Hill Show
as Craig and Ange enjoyed long showers and champagne and crayfish spas together in their home with its big waterviews over Snook Bay.

I for one was relieved when the Happy Hour drew to a close and the twelve minutes of ‘Gravity Feed' was shown for the third and final time. Reading my mind, Darren leant over as he continued pouring Dancing Brolgas for the happy crowd. ‘If the good Sergeant Beer gets wind of that one, Noel, he's not gonna like it.'

I nodded, frowning, although given it wasn't me or any of the hotel staff who'd made the film I couldn't see how we could get in trouble for it. Even so, it was true enough that we knew without a doubt now that Greg Beer wanted to shut us down; we'd forever kick ourselves if we were stupid enough to hand him an easy excuse.

The rest of the evening sailed by with music from The Barrels and a queue of zipping-up patrons emerging from their encounter with Duchamp with quizzical looks on their faces. The Lazy Tenor held court with the Grundig in The Horse Room, and Donny ‘Shark Bait' Johnston from Minapre won the pool comp. This caused a great stir, as Nan had been the champion for the last six weeks in a row after Donny had made a few cracks about women not being able to play pool. To fiery Nan, of course, this was like laying down some kind of gauntlet, and over the next few weeks she concentrated hard, hell-bent on rubbing Donny's nose in it. Well, she'd succeeded alright, and Donny had copped a lot of stick as a result. He'd taken it all pretty good-humouredly. A lot of his macho bluster was just that: bluster – or, to be more precise, like a lot of fishermen in their prime Donny loved nothing better than laying out the bait and then winding a few people up with it. He'd certainly hooked Nan this time, but after a few weeks of champion status she decided to relax and let Donny reassume the crown. Or that was how she described her loss anyway.

But I was distracted the whole night, and even the roar from The Horse Room when Donny Johnston'd potted the black didn't really make an impression. All I could think about was going upstairs later on to sit by Kooka's bed with The Blonde Maria. So at 11pm, when the crowd in the hotel began to dwindle, I decided to shut up shop, knowing that in The Sewing Room Maria would already be sitting in the wicker chair reading to the old-timer in the pool of light.

‘Time, please!' was my tried-and-true cry as I went from room to room and out onto the verandah, gathering up glasses and moving people on. Luckily for me they were a tame bunch that night and even the mob in The Horse Room celebrating the pool-comp final made no real objections. Of course The Lazy Tenor glared at me as he leant over to switch off the Grundig, but I was used to that, and less than half an hour after first calling ‘Time' the pub was empty but for Darren, Veronica and myself wiping down the benches and bar, loading and unloading the dishwasher, counting the takings and making notes of which stock needed topping up and which liquor suppliers needed calling. We were experts at all that by now and did it with a glass of port each and a platter of Bennett's wallaby salami – a combination that I had at first been dubious about (I would have preferred cashews) until Darren insisted and made it our ritual every night as we cleaned up.

Nan had hung around and was full of beans, wanting to sit down at the pews, kick on with the port and salami and chat about the fact that she had let Donny win the pool comp. She thought it was hilarious how excited he'd got – she was nothing if not a fiercely proud loser – but of course I had other fish to fry and so kept yawning big mock-yawns and saying how tired I was until she got the message and followed Darren and Veronica out into the warm early summer night.

By the time I got to the top of the stairs twenty minutes later, after ducking out to my barn to slip the night's cash takings into the shoebox, the watery light of the old fashioned hallway globes and the willows of the wallpaper made for an almost Oriental river scene, if it weren't for the very local looking black ducks and platypi still swimming about in the carpet.

I stood for a few moments with my hand still on the banister-knob, wondering what on earth was going to ensue when I entered The Sewing Room. Finally, I shrugged my shoulders and made my way along the hall, before gently turning the metal handle of the Sewing Room door and slipping inside.