The Grand Hotel (35 page)

With my heart replenished, I stepped out of The Sewing Room into the hallway to find that once again the creek had come to life. The black ducks swam jauntily along beside me as I headed for the stairs, and this time from The Lazy Tenor's room there was not a sound.

Radios Don't Broadcast Dreams

By the time I had installed the loop, it was close to three o'clock and from the bar I could hear Joan Sutherland's big laughter as he, Jen and their two boys had arrived to help prepare for the night ahead. Of course his laughter was due to Veronica's cucumber mask, and as I walked into the bar Jen was painstakingly helping Veronica to take it off. I could see Jen biting her lip as slowly she unpeeled each disc, trying to keep herself from giggling. Veronica, however, was unamused. Seeing me walk in, she said, ‘So are you ready for our little chat now, Noel?'

‘G'day, Noel,' Joan Sutherland said, cutting in. And then nodding over towards Veronica near the bar sink, he said, ‘Glad to see the ol' Grand is still full of surprises.'

Once all the cucumber had been removed from Veronica's face, the Sutherlands set about opening the pub while Veronica and I stepped out onto the verandah and down into the beer garden so she could tell me what was on her mind. We sat on the coloured gymkhana wheels and Veronica's face was so serious that I wondered for a brief moment whether somehow she had found out about the XXXX fiasco.

‘Noel, I was talking with Givva Way up at the shop this morning and he reckons you're starting to get beaten down by the powers that be at the shire. He reckons you've started to sell out.'

I made a slow blink and put on a droll face, out of pure exasperation. ‘Well, if Givva Way says it,' I said, ‘then it must be true.'

As usual Veronica had no ear for sarcasm and continued with her Maoist-style show-trial of my moral and political worth. ‘He said that yesterday you collaborated with the shire to have the stoneskimming comp shut down.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Thereby denying his son the chance for international glory
and
denying Givva the chance to waste young Alex's compo money on some ridiculous stoneskimming tour overseas.'

Veronica's lips pursed. ‘Yes, well there's selfish motivation in all our actions, Noel, but the point is you've started collaborating with the enemy.'

‘The enemy? That's a bit strong, Ronnie. All I did was avoid a blue so as not to give Sergeant Beer another reason to shut us down.'

‘Aha!' she said. ‘So Givva was right. You
compromised
.'

‘No, you're wrong,' I said angrily. ‘What I did was make sure the future of the hotel wasn't compromised. That's what I did.'

‘So are you saying now that any type of behaviour that draws the attention of the police to the pub is off limits? Is that what this means?'

‘No, not at all. Just about anything we do at the moment draws the attention of the police anyway. Opening the hotel doors draws their attention. Greg Beer's hell-bent. You can take it from me.'

‘Okay, then. So it's about time we started those Grand Hotel Wellbeing Nights we'd planned.'

Veronica was testing me now, seeing how much truth there was in what Givva had told her at the shop. ‘Wellbeing' was a word that a lot of us had nailed early on as being a classic example of the Brinbeal shire's corporate muzak. According to their signage and marketing statements, everywhere you turned in our part of the world you came face to face with your own rude health.

The fact that the term had been handed to them on a heavily invoiced platter by a consultant from Melbourne, who in their language had only ever been an
excursionist
in the shire – i.e.
‘a visitor who doesn't stay the night'
– and who had driven down from the city when the shire was rebadging itself a few years ago, was never mentioned. Presumably the consultant drove onto the coast road, registered the unnerving sense of space and the tart astringent air, and quickly scanned his bullet lists for the appropriate term:
wellbeing.
In actual fact the consultant was probably feeling something other than wellbeing at the time. Perhaps he was feeling a little
anxious
, a touch
agoraphobic
, a trifle
rushed
, maybe even a little bit
panicky
, but knew himself well enough to understand that these types of edgy feelings usually
translated financially
. When he arrived in Minapre, he would've rustled up a quick laptop precis of his proposal over a strong macchiato and once inside the meeting all the gurus around the board table would've nodded in agreement. The deal, and the language, would have been locked in, as if purposely to irritate those spirits of the past and present whose souls, unlike that of the consultant, will have to dwell in this shire for all eternity.

Early on, when Veronica and I had discussed what we would get up to on the weekly Wellbeing Nights, she'd been full of brilliant ideas. Since then, in her studio up on the cliff, she'd been busily making preparations. For instance, with the shire's neurotic addiction to gardening machinery, they made sure these days that no blade of grass in any public space ever grew higher than ten centimetres. So Veronica had been patiently making what she called ‘Mocking Grass', which was basically hundreds of unruly looking wire and paper blades of grass stitched onto sheets of green shadecloth that could be pinned into the soil on top of the shaven shire nature strips and verges. She had a vision of one morning waking up in Mangowak to see her wild Mocking Grass in all the prominent manicured spots. The point would be made and the ‘wellbeing' of everyone in the town would be restored by having a bloody good laugh about it.

Our other ideas ranged quite widely, from a large sign at the entrance of the town depicting an oversized Robert Crumb-style rooster declaring war on insomniac weekenders from the city, to our own mock-heritage plaques that we would erect at night on popular tourist walks. These plaques would say things such as OTWAY CREEKS ARE CURRENTLY STREAMING LIVE OR CAN WALLABIES BUY REAL ESTATE? OR THE ONLY LOCALS ARE THE TREES. And not only would the humorous effect of our weekly escapades enhance the wellbeing of anyone who came across them (apart from bleary-eyed weekenders and shire officials, of course, and members of the temperance guilds and straight-out wowsers) but they would also stimulate our own wellbeing as perpetrators of the creations. Simply by going out under starlight, we would be lancing old wounds, healing old sores, cathartically curing long-held frustrations. For brief hilarious moments we would achieve a deep understanding of the term wellbeing. And no one would be any the worse off for us doing so.

The sad thing of course was that now, as Veronica raised the possibility of finally getting the Wellbeing Nights up and running, I knew that our whole audacious experiment, The Grand Hotel no less, was doomed. But I couldn't tell her – partly because I didn't know precisely when Greg Beer was going to pounce and also because I knew exactly how the hot-blooded Veronica would react. She'd head straight out to Poorool to confront Rennie Vigata and could get herself killed in the process. Plus I couldn't see the point of ruining everyone's final hours of enjoyment as the hotel descended to its close. So, as if rising to the challenge in her shining brown eyes, I agreed wholeheartedly with getting the Wellbeing Nights up and running – thereby quietening the Givva Way inspired murmurs that I'd sold out – even though I knew very well that it would all now never happen. Sheer delight instantly appeared on her cucumber-shiny face and she hugged me tightly there on the gymkhana wheels and told me how it was all gonna be great fun. ‘Yep,' I said, ‘I'm looking forward to it too, Ronnie. The Mocking Grass alone will make the whole thing a blast.'

We could hear voices inside the bar now, as the first drinkers started arriving. It was with a sad but invisible stomach-knowledge of foreboding, and a bright and illusory mine host smile, that I walked up the verandah steps and into the bar to greet the patrons.

The crowd grew quickly, and as with Kooka's ‘Mangowak Ode' it was almost as if everyone intuited the significance of the day. Craig Wilson, whose ‘Gravity Feed' film had been an entertaining contribution to Happy Hour, now approached me from across the room with the idea of us running a Grand Hotel short-film festival. With a frosty glass of ‘Dancing Brolga Ale' in his hand he confessed how dubious he had been about my unconventional establishment at first, but now he wanted to show his appreciation of all the good times, to put something back into it. What did I think about the idea of a festival, he asked.

I put an affectionate hand on the shoulder of the ex-real-estate agent and smiled. I liked Craig, but somehow he had missed the point. How could you have a festival in The Grand Hotel when The Grand Hotel was a festival in itself? Once again feeling a mixture of guilt and wistfulness, I told him I thought a film festival was a great idea. He beamed back at me happily and began to knock around a few possibilities. I listened patiently until making the excuse that Joan looked like he needed a bit of a help behind the bar. I left Craig to it.

In actual fact Big Joan was handling things fine behind the bar, and apart from an occasional twitch of his shoulder and a few darting glances towards the doorway into the sunroom, one could've been mistaken for thinking he'd never clapped eyes on The Blonde Maria or that he'd ever needed to take time off work.

An hour or so later, however, when Happy Hour was bubbling along and the crowd in the bar was spilling out onto the verandah and the beer garden, The Blonde Maria did appear, dishevelled, half dressed, distraught, in the sunroom doorway, and gave Joan the shock of his life. I watched as he stepped back from the tap and valiantly tried to hold himself together. As if on cue Darren Traherne dropped the big mulloway he'd been scaling on the bench and moved seamlessly into Joan's position, pouring Dancing Brolgas for the thirsty customers who were ordering them thick and fast, almost as if they were going out of fashion.

The Blonde Maria didn't even notice that Big Joan was in the pub. She looked wildly around the room, with her hair in a mess, wearing only a lilac bodice with a frilly lace edge and a pair of jeans. Eventually her eyes rested on me where I was standing under the catfish skeleton on the wall, talking to Ash Bowen and Dave Buckley.

She pushed her way through the crowd. ‘Noel, he's gone nuts!' she cried out to me as she approached. ‘I'm scared.'

‘Who's gone nuts?' I said, throwing a glance over to the bar where Joan was nodding calmly while Jen spoke intently into his face.

‘That fucking big red-haired bastard, that's who. Louis. The Lazy Tenor.'

‘The Lazy Tenor. Why? What's wrong with him?'

‘He thinks you and I are having an affair.'

I rolled my eyes. That must've been what they were arguing about when I went up to record the loop with Kooka earlier on.

‘He's crazed,' she went on. ‘He reckons you and me are out in your barn fucking all night when we're in The Sewing Room listening to Kooka.'

I groaned with dread, as the logic behind The Lazy Tenor's suspicions became clear. It was true that for the last two nights we'd been up till nearly dawn together, but even so The Lazy Tenor's reaction was a bit weird, given that he always gave the impression that as far as women went, The Blonde Maria included, he could take 'em or leave 'em.

‘Yeah, well now he wants to kill me, or you, or somebody,' Maria said. ‘He's so upset he didn't even sing his aria this morning. Didn't you notice?'

‘I was out.'

‘Well he didn't – for the first time ever. He was too busy bawling like a baby and then smashing up the room. I don't know what to do, Noel. He's so out of control I'm thinking maybe we should ring the cops.'

Maria, of course, didn't know how preposterous this suggestion was. ‘No, no, no,' I said quickly. ‘We can't do that. Maybe you should go out for a while, go for a walk or something. Or even better just stay down here with us all night until he calms down.'

Maria looked down at what she was wearing, as if to suggest that she wasn't quite dressed for socialising.

‘Don't worry about that,' I said. ‘You look fine – you always do. But listen, just stay out of Joan Sutherland's way, okay? Otherwise you'll have to handle the problem upstairs yourself.'

The Blonde Maria looked over at Joan behind the bar, who now had his back to the room, washing the dishes. Jen, however, was looking straight at Maria and as their eyes met she had an all-knowing look.

‘I don't think that woman likes me,' Maria said, with a hint of the little-girl voice she had adopted during her St Thérèse of Lisieux phase.

Ash Bowen started laughing. ‘Oh really, Maria, whatever makes you think that?' he said.

Maria let Ash's comment fly right over her head and promptly asked me if I'd go behind the bar and fix her a drink.

‘Okay,' I drawled, a little dubiously. ‘What'll it be?'

The Blonde Maria broke into a beautiful glittery smile. ‘Well how about one of those ones that Joan Sweeney and the whores were drinking last night? You know, the Black Velvets.'