The Grand Hotel (23 page)

Tom String had put the sudden halt down to his horse's pure contrariness and had begun to curse. ‘You can't prop here and leave us hangin' off the hillside! C'mon, horse, it's not just me and the coal you're haulin'. Think of your good friend, Mrs Sweeney, damn you!'

Then Joan Sweeney had called out, ‘It's a hedgehog, Tom, in the middle of the track. That's what's stopped him.'

Sure enough the next thing was Tom String jumping down off the cart and shoo-shooing the echidna. He knew Paul wasn't budging and he grew increasingly frustrated, caught as he was between the stubborn self-preserving instincts of two animals. Eventually he asked Joan Sweeney to pass him down the mattock from the cart. ‘Nothing that a bump on the scone won't fix,' he said.

In The Sewing Room Maria was alarmed, but quickly there was a dull thump, a crunch, and then a bosky slither-sound in sandy soil, as Tom String pushed the dead echidna to the side of the track. By the gristly noise of it he gutted the creature right on the spot and then picked it up, no doubt tentatively, and placed it with the coal in the back of the dray. He laid the mattock in its toolbox, hauled himself back into position with a grunt, and once again geed the horse. With the echidna out of his line the tinkle of Paul's harness resumed, as did the wooden music of the dray.

When they reached the top of their climb, the effort in Paul's nostrils grew easy, and he was even congratulated by Tom String. ‘There's a boy, Pauly, we're back on top of the world now, old son.'

‘Yes, and thanks to you we've got a hedgehog to boil tonight,' Joan Sweeney chimed in. ‘Good work, Pauly.'

‘Now don't get too excited, missus,' said Tom String. ‘One won't go far in the 'otel. Unless you're Jesus Christ.'

‘Mmm, that's right. It's a delicacy, Tom. I'd nearly eat one all by myself. If we see another one heading back, let's get it.'

‘Rightio, missus. And look out for some pigface would ya, to cut the fat.'

The level ground now reduced the sound of the dray, and the tread of the palomino's hooves was duller in the dirt. Tom String had mentioned the Boatbuilder's Track previously, and naturally Maria took it to be what these days we call Boatbuilder's Road. So now she pictured the dray heading across the long ridge to where the Boatbuilder's eventually descends steeply down onto the riverflat.

As they jigged along more easily, Joan Sweeney discussed hotel matters with her right-hand man while he pursed away again at his pipe.

‘Mr Arvo suggested he might stay another week,' she said matter-of-factly. ‘Said he approves of the fare and there's no point leaving the sea in fine weather.'

‘Exotic lodgers eh, Mrs Sweeney?' replied Tom String, his voice suddenly a little surly. ‘Well, a few extra coins I suppose. Mind you he's got the top room. But make sure he pays in pounds and shillin's. Not books like last time. Come to think of it, what do they use for money in the Baltic?'

‘I asked him, Tom. It's markkas where he's from. But he's not out here for the gold. And he only left the books last time because I suggested it – for the hotel shelf. A bit of reading matter for weary travellers. Don't you worry, he'll have the right stuff.'

‘Oh well, you know best. But don't get me wrong, missus. I don't mind Mr Arvo.'

‘Turn it up, Tom String, that's not what I heard.'

‘How do you mean, missus?'

‘I heard you told him to stop singing the other night.'

‘Aw, that was only because he was making the beer go flat.'

Joan Sweeney scoffed in amusement.

‘No, but in all seriousness, missus, a few of the boys were concentratin' hard on Bertie Bolitho's round of poker. Didn't want any blood spilt. Not from the old Balt. Plus, his music's from a different country to mine. Must say, though, he was quite accommodatin' when I put it to 'im.'

‘I bet he was. A man of your size.'

‘Well, you know me, missus. I don't throw me weight around unless it's warranted.'

‘That's true, Tom. But Mr Arvo doesn't know that.'

For a moment then the tranny glitched, Maria gave a start in the wicker chair, and Kooka adjusted himself in the bedclothes. Her thirst was raging as she watched him hunch up his shoulders and chap his lips together, before turning off his side and away from where he'd been facing the tranny, to lie flat on his back right in front of her. The tranny spluttered, as if mis-receiving short wave, once again she bit her lip, not able to bear the thought that she'd lose contact, and then, as a gust of night wind fluttered the curtains in the inland window beyond the pool of light, the transmission cleared. Kooka chapped his lips together one last time, and the sound of the rollicking cart, with its load of black Bass Strait coal and a gutted echidna, disappeared from the room.

Naming the Winds

It was around ten o'clock that night, after my Black Velvet session with The Lazy Tenor, when The Blonde Maria made an unexpected but brief visit downstairs. She burst frantically into the bar, started fossicking madly around in the spirits store for booze, before dashing straight back out again with a bottle of Yarra Valley Marsala in her fist. Of course by that stage I was too drunk to take any notice and she was too desperate to get back upstairs to Kooka to mention a word of what was happening up there to me.

Earlier on The Lazy Tenor hadn't hung around after we'd polished off the Black Velvets. He said it was all too much, he was having too much fun. He left me alone in the bar, with more end-of-the-day customers rolling in. It was hopeless; even then I was too far gone to run the Happy Hour, and dinnertime was fast approaching. Veronica was rostered to handle the food, Darren would be in at some point, but they'd need a hand, and frankly I didn't feel up to it.

But I kept drinking – something was willing me on. I poured a few Dancing Brolgas for the punters in the bar, gingerly handwashed Aunty Rita's Laliques in the sink and realised I hadn't refreshed the loop in Duchamp. We still had an old bush verse in there from the day before. It had been Nan Burns's choice. She'd dug it out of a book in her fire tower. We couldn't get Kooka to read it – he was snoring his head off at the time – so we'd had an impromptu lucky dip in the bar to see who'd do the honours. Joan and Jen's youngest, Dougie, was the name we pulled out of the hat. He was up for it, keen to be involved, so it was his clear as crystal eight-year-old voice that went onto the loop. Given his vintage it was inevitable his performance had a whiff of hip-hop about it.

Dougie was chuffed with his contribution. He'd hovered outside the toilet door all the previous evening, listening for himself on the loop and also for the comments at the pissoir. Before he went home that night, he told me his brother Dylan had renamed him DJ Dunny, and Joan, who with his broken arm and hangdog heart needed cheering up, apparently thought this was every bit as funny as Dougie did.

I decided, conveniently for me, that given how much Dougie had enjoyed his debut on Duchamp it would be okay to leave his contribution there for another night. That, at least, was one responsibility I didn't have to deal with. And then just as I was pouring myself a glass of the Finnish wine I'd been serving up to Kooka at lunchtimes, and consoling myself that I'd been working too hard, too hard in fact to find time for a swim or to get drunk, and that today was the day to do both, Jen Sutherland walked into the bar and declared herself available as her husband's replacement.

‘There's only one condition,' she said. ‘I want Frankie with me behind the bar. A kindred spirit to talk to, you know.'

Perhaps if I'd been sober I would've argued the point – not about the canary, but about her as a barmaid – but in my velveteen state I immediately grew fond of the idea. For a start the Sutherlands would be getting a double income – a thought that appealed. I've always liked the idea of money going to a good home. And if I was perfectly honest with myself, I had to admit that I also liked the idea of having Jen around the place all the time. I watched her slip around behind the bar and pick up a dishrag, all the time pretending that she hadn't noticed I was drunk, and I thought she looked about as good as a woman could in jeans and a freshly ironed Miller shirt. And then Darren walked in and between them they started organising things for Happy Hour. They went straight into action. It was seamless. The Grand Hotel was fast becoming a well run pub as well as an emotionally dysfunctional off-the-wall folly. Satisfied, I dug out a longneck of Coopers Stout from the coolroom and made straight for The Horse Room to continue my session.

With the barman problem fixed for the time being, and none of us any the wiser about what was going on up in The Sewing Room, we could continue our usual routines and events. Jen performed more than adequately that first night, and there were a lot of wry jokes about Joan never getting his job back. She seemed to take it all in her stride, so much so that she left me sprawled over the pool table in The Horse Room at stumps, snoring my head off. Perhaps on Darren's advice she didn't bother to wake me but instead just tucked a cushion between my head and the hard edges of the corner pocket, placed a blanket over me and locked up on her own.

The next morning, of course, I felt terrible about this but had no time to dwell on it because it was not only banking day but also the day we'd set aside for our Naming the Winds garden party. As I opened my eyes on the dust motes of The Horse Room, I realised we hadn't even sorted through the entries.

My head felt as leaden and spiky as a late summer haybale, but I levered myself up off the pool table and went and had a shower upstairs. The hot jet of tangy Mangowak water soothed me as it hit my skin. Then, just as I started to feel normal enough to attempt an in-the-shower version of ‘Flame Trees' by Cold Chisel, I heard someone else singing through the walls. Of course it was The Lazy Tenor and his morning aria.

I turned off the water and slowly dried myself to this exceptional accompaniment. He was right next door in his room. The song was so close I fancied I could hear The Blonde Maria gasping with pleasure as he sang, but I'm sure my hungover mind was playing tricks on me. Still, the aria was worth a gasp or two, and when it finally came to an end I was almost tempted to drop my towel and applaud.

Skipping breakfast, but for a can of Coke, or ‘Choke' as we call it around these parts, due to its ability to help start a hungover early-morning engine, I drove around the winding road of the coast to Minapre to do the banking. I had the windows wound up in Kooka's Brumby but still the cold southerly found its way into the cabin to keep me alert. The Wake-Up Wind, I ventured aloud as I drove, thinking of the contest scheduled for later that day. Or maybe Hair of the Dog.

By eleven o'clock I was back in Mangowak with hamburger stains on my shirt, fully fed and with the banking all done, ready for the specially convened Naming the Winds luncheon scheduled for 12.30pm in the beer garden behind the hedge. Yes, we were opening uncharacteristically early and had thirty-two bookings for the lunch. I had no doubt others would turn up unannounced as well, given that it was a Friday.

In the bar Oscar, Nan and Ash Bowen were cooking up a storm, while out in the beer garden Jen was setting tablecloths and placing flowers on all the tables, and putting our best fish cutlery down as well. With the tea tree hedge in bloom and morning coastal cloud clearing from the sky overhead, everything looked set for a royal afternoon.

We'd had a Naming the Winds box and an information sheet in the bar for over a month, explaining the rules and purpose of the competition. Of course if you dangle something as contested and provocative as theories on the local weather in front of the locals as they drink every night, you're gonna get a genuine discussion. I'd heard a lot of anecdotes and ideas over the preceding couple of weeks, and a lot of potential names for all directions of the compass, as well as for the often more conspicuous gradations in between.

Travellers passing through had also put their two bob's worth in, and in fact it was our Dutch guest from Room Two who had unwittingly kickstarted the whole idea. One night he was telling a few of us in the bar how he grew up in a little farming town just out of Rotterdam called Skee. Apparently in Skee there were two distinctive local winds. One was an icy breeze that sprang out of a nearby lake, even in the middle of summer. He said that no matter the temperature of the air, as the wind rolled from the north towards the lake, by the time it got to the other side of it and reached Skee it was freezing, as if the lake itself was acting like some kind of Coolgardie Safe. He said the locals in Skee called this wind the
Ousburg Opspringen
, or Ousburg Shiver in English, after the Ousburg lake.

From the other side of Skee came another distinctive wind, he said. This south wind was like a distant northern cousin to the Sirocco. In the imagination of the residents of Skee this wind blew its way over farming country from way down south, accruing heat from the baking summer lands as it did so. He told us they called this one The Coughing Wind, due to the hoarse staccato sounds it made in the crisp drying wheat crops all about them. I remember thinking it curious that the people of Skee imagined the character of the two winds as being determined not by currents in the air or meteorological concentrations in the sky but rather always by the land itself. That part of Europe isn't called The Low Countries for nothing, I suppose.

There'd been an old Greek fella in the bar as our Rotterdam lodger was describing the winds of Skee. He was an occasional drinker in the hotel and this night had been fishing unsuccessfully for salmon on the beach in the flood-tide. Now he was sitting on a low stool near the fire, still wearing his scaly and surf-sodden mittens and thigh-boots. He'd lived in an outer suburb of Geelong for the last thirty years, but that didn't stop him beginning to speak about the winds with all the authority of blind Homer himself.

He sneered derisively at the Dutch lodger and his town of Skee for only having two noteworthy winds. ‘It's because you're atheists,' he said belligerently. ‘You always were in Holland. Only gods can explain the winds.'

I got up quickly from where I'd been eating my dinner at the big table and ducked around behind the bar to fetch the fisherman a Metaxa on the house.

‘Where I'm from,' he went on, as he accepted the drink from me without batting an eyelid, ‘we have Aeolus, and that's that. He keeps all the winds, all their different moods, in a bag by his side. It'd be a bloody pathetic bag if he only had two winds in it, eh?'

Our guest from Rotterdam smiled ironically, having already made up his mind with characteristic northern European rationality that the Greek fisherman was both bonkers and very entertaining company as well.

‘And did they ever tell you by your silly little lake that a wind can impregnate a horse?' the fisherman went on, between smoking his cigarette, sipping the Metaxa and spitting in the hearth. ‘Of course they didn't. The fastest horses are always fathered by Boreas, the north wind.'

Despite the growing bemusement of the drinkers in the bar, the lesson continued unabated like this for a good half an hour. The fisherman from Geelong's initial look of scorn for the pathetic two winds of Skee transformed into something quite possessed as he told us that even to this day he always had to contend with Aeolus and his winds in his quest for the perfect fish.

‘Tonight for instance,' he spat, ‘what was that shitty
harpyiai
that came in from the east after the sun? Then it got dark, the line went limp and sparks started flying into the air, all the way down the dunes. What was that if it wasn't a pest sent on behalf of Zeus? I packed up straightaway when I saw it. Next thing I came in here for the warmth of the fire. And find this wanker holding his own among midgets. Bah.'

He hunched his shoulders and moved closer to the fire, turning his broad back on the rest of us. Before long everyone was listening to Joe Conebush the electrician as he explained how an easterly was the most salt-laced of our local winds and that the salt in the air fizzed and crackled on the hot metal pans of the power poles on the roadside, causing the ‘sparks of Zeus' that the Greek bloke was talking about. ‘It's like throwing salt onto a hot frypan,' Joe explained. ‘It crackles, fizzes. It's the same in the easterly.'

The fisherman appeared not to even notice this explanation as he stared at the fire and no doubt the dancing horses within. But then, after observing everyone spend the rest of the night debating the vagaries and temperaments of our local winds around the fire, and prompted by the discussion to wonder what the local band of the Wathaurong had called them, on his walk home from the pub Ash Bowen had his brainwave. Before long his idea of officially naming the local winds was being discussed and heartily approved of in the conducive atmosphere by the fire in the bar.

Nan had been wanting to stage a special luncheon in the pub for weeks, ostensibly to support some local winegrowers out near her farm who'd been having a rough trot trying to compete with the big corporate wineries moving into the area. This was the perfect excuse.

In our first venture into the highly controversial waters of junk mail we popped this invitation into everyone's post-office box the very next day and had thirty-two takers in no time; and in the weeks leading up to the actual event we had so many ideas for wind-names dropped into the box in the bar that we had to empty it out three times before the big day arrived.