The Grand Hotel (10 page)

Nan's Towering Inferno

It was only two weeks after we'd opened the hotel, with the wheat sorted from the chaff by Veronica's frankincense fumigation, when tragedy struck the town. The spring rains had come on strong – we hadn't had such October downpours in years – and I remember thinking that if it wasn't for the intense humidity accompanying the rains, you could almost believe the local climate was reverting to its patterns of yore, to keep in step with the reopening of The Grand Hotel.

A strange upshot of the rains, however, was that the shire's controversial indoor creek, which had never been embraced by the young mothers it was intended for, had finally found a niche in the culture of the New Mangowak. Every day after school kids would gather in the pouring weather, to swim untroubled by the heavy downpours that came in chaotic rhythms from both the inland and far out to sea. On any weeknight you could find eight or ten teenagers under that newfangled retractable structure overarching the creek. They would huddle in there as if in an adolescent clubroom, smoking, texting, tagging the tin, listening to their iPods and swinging off the high-tensile polypropylene rope that had been attached to a specially installed gantry designed for the purpose.

This re-installed swing-rope had a history and was viewed by some in the town as an example of the benefits of community consultation and compromise. It all came about because the original swing-rope, which hung from an old manna gum on the riverbank, had been deemed unsafe by the shire. This was only possible due to the fact that once public infrastructure, such as the indoor creek, was installed on the river, by law the shire then became legally responsible for any injuries that occurred in its new ‘riparian precinct'. Of course there was such an outcry when it was revealed that swinging from that thirty-year-old farm rope hanging from that one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old manna gum was going to become illegal that the shire just had to act. Meetings were conducted on the riverbank itself to sort out the problem and finally the powers that be agreed to incorporate a new swing-rope in the design of the indoor creek, which they promised to be bigger and better than ever.

As it turned out, the indoor creek swing-rope was higher than the old manna gum version, and the polypropylene and Kevlar rope was apparently made of the same material that climbers of Everest used when they were ascending the mountain. From the day it was installed, though, the kids showed no interest until suddenly, with the October downpours, they'd finally taken to it. Sadly, however, the hi-tech shire-endorsed swing-rope came to its tragic demise on a completely unsuspecting Tuesday afternoon, as the kids gathered there after school in what felt like a very unseasonable tropical North Queensland storm.

The indoor creek structure was built firmly into the bank, with pile-driven pre-rusted steel foundations, but as the thunder began to grumble from far out over the hills of Minapre, and the wind began to lash from the south along the course of that stretch of the river, whipping up under the roof of the indoor creek and thrumming loudly on its fashionable corrugations, the river-rope gantry that had been affixed on the eastern wall of the structure came loose. Givva Way's boy, Alex, was swinging from the rope at the time and with the unexpected collapse of the gantry fell awkwardly onto the water, injuring his spine.

For a time the town was in shock, as it looked like Alex Way was never going to walk again. The recriminations over the accident were running thick and fast. Alex was in the spinal ward at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, and his mother, Christine, had taken a flat in Heidelberg to be nearby. Givva, though, remained in Mangowak to work and visited his wife and only son on weekends. He spent his weeknights in The Grand Hotel, furiously drowning his sorrows and talking to anyone who would listen about what had happened to his son.

Everyone was sympathetic, of course, despite the fact that Givva had always had a reputation in town as being loose with his mouth and liable to bullshit. But now he was a man in pain and I was determined, despite my traditional wariness of him, that the hotel would be his shelter from the storm. He could offload onto sympathetic minds, particularly in relation to the culpability of the shire, and we could watch him closely and make sure he didn't drink himself into an oblivion from which he wouldn't be able to work, or travel to Melbourne every weekend to see his son.

Veronica and Nan both had no time for Givva Way and found it difficult to have him in the hotel night after night, alternately venting his spleen or overbrimming with bitter mirth at the brutality of life. I found it difficult to accommodate Givva also, especially as my modus operandi for coping with the New Mangowak had become a creative type of humour. There was, after all, nothing at all funny about Alex Way's accident. But, as I was at pains to explain to Veronica, and Nan, whose distaste of Givva went right back to when they lived together in a surfers' share-house on the inlet, a good pub as I had been brought up to understand it could cope with tears as well as laughter. And a good publican would always see that the local loose cannons were safe from harm. ‘If we don't look after him,' I told them both on more than one occasion, ‘the cops will. And you know his history with Greg Beer. It'd get ugly for sure.'

So Veronica and Nan tolerated the situation, and often at stumps, after a hard night on the turps, I would help Givva up the narrow staircase to the middle room, unclip his paint-spattered working overalls and sling him onto the bed. I'd put a laundry bucket on the floor next to him and leave him to his drunken blur. In the mornings he'd come down for breakfast with a blank expression and together we'd sit over unseasonable mushrooms on sourdough, sometimes with Kooka or The Blonde Maria, and talk more rationally about his situation and the world at large. By the time breakfast had finished, Givva would invariably be feeling better, after good counsel and the delicious climate-change mushrooms. He'd wander off home to jump in his ute and head off to work, where he'd spend his days painting house sides at the top of telescopic ladders, before turning up again around 5pm for yet another session of grief and recrimination.

This went on for quite a few weeks until the good news started to filter out of the spinal ward at the Austin that Alex would recover fully from the accident and Givva and Christine plucked up the hide to lay an accident insurance claim against the shire. By the time young Alex was discharged and back at home, Givva had thrown off his cloud of woe and resumed his traditional role as the town earbasher. He still drank at The Grand, of course, and was in his own way grateful for what we'd done for him, but he'd tell any unsuspecting stranger who'd listen that as soon as Alex's insurance money came through he was packing up and moving to Western Australia. ‘Fuckin' hole this town these days,' Givva would bleat, holding court in his spattered overalls at the bar. ‘No fuckin' peace and quiet anymore. People don't look out for each other like they used to. Cunts have wrecked it.'

Joan and I would listen to him as we poured the Dancing Brolgas, look at each other and roll our eyes. We knew Givva would never leave town and that the insurance money wasn't his to spend anyway. But off he'd go on a longwinded diatribe to whichever Swedish or Italian backpacker he'd managed to bail up. He'd regale them with descriptions of the beauty of the west, tell them about the times he'd spent over there crayfishing in Geraldton in his thirties. But always, after he'd reached a certain threshold with the Dancing Brolgas, he'd end up singing the praises of the old days in Mangowak, the 1970s, and yes, he'd wheel out the old chestnut about singing the song ‘Down Under', all twenty-seven verses, with Colin Hay from Men At Work when he was passing through town on tour to Adelaide. Some of the backpackers, of course, would know the song – it was a hit all over the world after all – and Givva would get his mileage. ‘Yeah, good bloke, Colin,' he'd say, taking another sip. ‘Scottish he is. Not many people know that. Doesn't mind the hoochy cooch either. No, doesn't mind it at all.'

It was during the time that The Grand Hotel was Givva Way's shoulder to cry on that I threw the Happy Hour entertainment open to the clientele. It's a little known fact that people who live in country areas like ours are often more technologically savvy than city dwellers. People in Mangowak and in the surrounding hills use the internet like people in Melbourne use the trams and trains. There's no cinema or bands to go to see at night, so invariably people here are involved in some clandestine activity or another on the net. Some are researching surfboard design, others are listening to Alaskan fishing reports, some are co-writing graphic novels with schoolkids in Kyoto, while others are uploading local video grabs onto YouTube. Some, as was evident on the wall of The Horse Room, are using Photoshop to reconstruct the landscapes of the past, while others are connected to research networks monitoring banded seabirds as they fly magnetically across the globe. There're locals into the gaming scene, global embroidery guilds and of course more and more people around here doing what the Europeans call ‘telecottaging' – working online from home.

The idea of handing over the live-streaming from the internet during Happy Hour brought a lot of these bush-technos out of their huts and bungalows. I figured that whatever they did, as long as they weren't broadcasting free-to-air TV, would be somehow interesting enough to fit The Grand Hotel Charter. There'd be no outright expressions of art, of course – no, the idiosyncratic hobby and the furtively anarchistic fetish would be brought to the fore.

Luckily for us first cab off the rank was Nan Burns, who, as one of the most vocal critics of the nightly streaming of the Vatican Radio, which had been the staple absurdist fare during Happy Hour since we'd opened the hotel, had taken up the challenge.

Nan lives by herself these days, on a farm out the back of town, where she spends a lot of time in the warmer months up a fire tower the Country Fire Authority installed on the property years ago. She's got a very comfortable arrangement up there in that tower, with a kitchen, a bed and shower, and of course beautiful views across the east Otways. With a wireless computer, a telescope, and two huge mounted sets of binoculars she keeps an eye on the landscape around her for wind shifts, for glassy glints and wisps of smoke, and is paid a nominal fee to maintain a webcam and report on fire-related matters to the authorities. Now, with her characteristically biting humour, she displayed her subversive contribution to Happy Hour on the big screen in the bar.

It was called ‘Nan's Towering Inferno' and consisted of wobbly but high-powered footage of all the properties within view of her tower, complete with a voice-over describing how pathetically reprehensible her neighbours were when it came to preparing themselves for bushfire. The catch was she didn't talk about the clearing of their properties or their sprinkler systems or whether or not they'd built bunkers. Instead, in a deadly serious voice, she talked about the quirks and foibles of the residents themselves, their fondness for the bong or the bottle, their tendency to either blather on or remain monosyllabic, their penchants for not answering the phone and not listening to the radio, their liking for keeping their watertanks empty so they could sing into them instead of drinking or hosing from them, or the men's fondness for ‘freeballing', as she called it – i.e. not wearing underwear – and how all these attributes would hamper or hinder everyone in a fire crisis. Basically it was Nan's shot at the level of emergency-style surveillance that had become expected in our area of late. And because a lot of the people she was talking about were either in the bar watching or known to those of us who were, ‘Nan's Towering Inferno' brought the house down.

A bit later that night, after The Blonde Maria had sung yet another lascivious set of scalding-hot blues songs with sexual subtexts, songs such as ‘Let Me Play with Your Poodle', ‘Pig Meat Papa', ‘The Best Jockey in Town' and ‘Keep On Eatin'', I was standing in The Horse Room feeling pretty pleased with myself when Maria herself came down off the stage, marched through the bar and flung herself down onto the couch beside me. She let out a heartrending groan.

‘All these songs are driving me crazy, Noel,' she said. ‘You do realise I left a perfectly good young man back in Melbourne, don't you, a sweet young Goth with blue hair? I'm a goddess to him, Noel. All I have to do is ask, and he'll do anything I like. And I mean anything! I was expecting some real man-action down here in the wild west, some vigorous country fare here at The Grand. And all I'm seein' is a bunch of old farmers and tradesmen farting at the tables, and sunburnt surfies half spent and dribblin' into their beers. And what's more they won't take their eyes off
moi
coz my physical attributes are just about the only thing they recognise, due to the weird shit you're dishing up in the rest of the pub. You'd have to admit that things are pretty odd if my cleavage represents the mainstream around here. Where in God's earth did that fella Givva Way come from? I mean, is he for real?'