The Grand Hotel (26 page)

‘No, no, Sergeant,' I said, mustering an energetic voice. ‘It's all just been a bit of fun. And that's Jen and Joan Sutherland out there, getting a bit of time alone from the kids.'

‘Well, do you mind if myself and the constable take a look, Noel?'

‘No, not at all.'

Well, what else could I do? As we waited for the policemen to inspect the scene, Darren poured us all a Dancing Brolga, which given Joan's cries on the lawn seemed now to contain some weird sort of portent. We discussed what the police would find in low voices and even began to amuse ourselves at the thought of Greg Beer picking his way through the broken glass.

‘Ah yes, the “charming community of Mangowak”, now there's a toast,' whispered Nan, raising her pot.

We all clinked glasses and had a sip. I prayed that Jen would be able to control Joan while the coppas were out there. The only way that Greg Beer could lay anything on us would be if Joan suddenly flew into a rage again.

Eventually Greg Beer and the constable re-appeared with notebooks in hand and stern expressions. Greg Beer's bloodless lips pursed, his grey eyes narrowed, and he asked me if I'd step outside into the backyard for a chat. I drained the remainder of my beer and joined him.

We stood beside his police four-wheel drive where he had parked it under the driveway pines. ‘It's quite obvious, Noel, that a sizeable fracas has taken place in this establishment today. That was the information I received earlier by phone and has only been confirmed by what I have now seen with my own eyes. We both know that I have arrived too late to make any arrests, but this matter is nevertheless of great concern. To be frank I have long considered this hotel of yours a blot on the good character of this town. The establishment is your responsibility and I deplore the way you are exploiting the community's need for a licensed meeting place for your own personal benefit. It's too easy, Noel, isn't it? But who's to take responsibility for this breakdown in the family unit occurring right here in our midst? Who's to blame for the distress of good people such as the Sutherlands, who are sitting out there in your garden in a terrible state? You and I both know what fine upstanding country people they are. And now look at them. Do you feel any responsibility for that, Noel? No, I doubt it. But as far as I am concerned, as both a police officer and a citizen of this town, you are
directly
responsible. And I'm hereby putting you on notice. I'll be watching this place, Noel, and if you give me even the slightest reason to close it down, rest assured I will.'

And with that he nodded to the young constable and the two of them got into the car and drove away.

A Gentle and Magical Aftermath

When I look back at my years growing up here in Mangowak, I don't think I could say I was an unusual child – I did all the fishing, swimming, watching telly and playing footy that other boys did – but I did perhaps have an unusually strong sense of vocation at quite an early age. One weekend when I was about twelve years old, I remember attempting to arrange the pictures I enjoyed finding in the gumleaves on my wanderings through the bush. I had collected a cereal box full of them, and emptying them out onto the floor of the sunroom I began annotating each leaf on cardboard labels my mother had lent me from her kitchen drawer. I described the leaf-pictures with titles and also recorded the date and the spot in which I found them. To my surprise, however, by the time the leaves had been in the cereal box for not much longer than a month or two, the beautiful acidic greens and sunburnt reds, and the scribbly discolourations and lines that created the figures within the leaf-face, had faded and changed decidedly. The life, and it seemed the art, had begun to leach out of them.

This got me thinking. Would the pictures on the leaves fade as quickly if they had never been removed from the spot where they had fallen in the bush? Or, exposed to the air and light where they fell, would the images fade, or at least change, even more quickly than they had in the cereal box? All of a sudden this seemed a most important question, and I decided to see if I could find out the answer, if for no other reason than to make sure I hadn't begun to destroy the very thing I had lovingly noticed in the first place.

On a Sunday morning I went back out into the bush and tied little bits of string to new picture-leaves I found, attaching the strings at the other end to a fencewire or a branch, or some other thing that would be suitable as a stay. And then, the following Saturday, I went back out to the leaves to check what had happened. To my surprise I found the leaves completely transformed, to the extent that not only had the images vanished but also the whole palette of each leaf had become unrecognisable in only a week's worth of weather and light. Green had become russet, russet had become pale gold, pale gold had become a kind of oaten white. Totally disenchanted, but reassured in my task of collecting the leaves for annotating and safekeeping, I went home thinking of new storage techniques, convinced that I was to the pictures in the leaves as a curator is to the objects in a museum. Without the impulse to preserve, the beauty of the natural world would simply waste away all around us.

It took me ages – well, it actually took me until I was sixteen – to find the deeper lesson in the beauty of the leaves I had collected. My elder brothers had all moved out of home by this time and thus I was in line to take up residence in the much treasured barn, where of course I still reside to this day. Gathering all my stuff together from my bedroom in the house, in order to carry it out to the barn, I came upon the old cereal box of gumleaves from years ago. Opening it up, I gently tipped out the contents onto my bedroom chair and began to sort through them.

As I flicked through the leaves, I was invaded by a mounting sense of what I could only describe as shame. One by one I checked the script on the cardboard labels against the leaves they had once described. And time and again, without fail, I was left with an empty sense of nothing but my own imagination. Stuffed away in the forgotten box, the leaves had of course lost all their vibrancy, all their imagery, and were, without exception, drab, brittle and grey. And yet, on the labels, written in my immature hand of four years previous, were wondrous titles like ‘Reef in the Sky', ‘The Flight of the Eagle', and ‘The Singing Leaf'.

In one instant I realised what it was that I treasured so much about seeing the pictures in the leaves. It was not just the images I had been enjoying but each image's special span of existence, each picture's fragile time in the light, and in each brief and imaginary moment it was the air itself that was the painter.

This was happenstance – ‘accident and chance' my mum would call it – but to me it was a lot more. By the vanishing of the images in the cereal box, I understood instantly that the world itself was a kind of artist, that time was a kind of music, and that it was a misunderstanding of nature, in short a sin, to stuff that music away in some old forgotten box. That was like throwing a blanket over beauty, like silencing music, silencing time, which in the end was the same as silencing life. I swore to myself, right there on the very day that I moved into the barn, in the kind of moral swoon readily available to a dreamy and excitable sixteen-year-old, that I would endeavour never to silence the world's music again. Instead, I swore, I would treasure the pictures in the leaves as I noticed them, and leave them where they lay. I would treat them as my teachers of time, colour and the universe, and I would spend my life trying to make pictures that no museum curator's blanket could be thrown over.

Well, I'd be the last person to suggest that I've succeeded in such pure ambitions, but in The Grand Hotel at least, I've had a taste of what I understood so deeply back when I was sixteen.

In those days following the brawl, The Lazy Tenor and The Blonde Maria were often seen out walking when normally they would have been holed up in their rooms. The Lazy Tenor's neck had three deep gouges in it from where Joan's Otway claws had grappled him, and he'd been persuaded by Maria that swimming in the ocean would help them heal more quickly. It struck me again, as I occasionally sighted them walking the clifftops or lying beside the Siren's rockpool, what a handsome couple they were. The Christmas holiday tourist season was fast approaching but for the time being the two of them could lounge about the quiet spring shoreline like a pair of millionaires.

The Lazy Tenor held no grudges from the fight; in fact he'd laughed the whole thing off when he re-emerged from his room later that same night to continue recording the exploits from ‘The Tradesman's Entrance' in The Horse Room. The wounds on his neck were his only concern, and whether or not they would affect his morning arias. As it happened, that was the main purpose of their walks to the beach.

When he'd begun to sing his aria on the morning after the brawl, the expansion of his vocal muscles had reopened the fresh wounds. According to Maria he sang on despite the pain and with blood trickling from his neck, across his collarbones and down his naked chest. She told me this with the telltale wide eyes of devotion you see on people who claim to have witnessed some kind of religious miracle at Lourdes or some other sacred site. I understood straightaway how appealing the trickling blood would have been to Maria, a true marriage of sacrifice and song, and I listened every morning for any difference in The Lazy Tenor's actual tone. But I couldn't detect any extra profundity or artistry, or indeed any divine atmosphere around the arias. Of course, as far as I was concerned, his voice could not possibly have improved from what I had already heard, but Maria begged to differ.

The very person I needed to keep an eye on things and to make sure we didn't make ourselves vulnerable to the prying gaze of Sergeant Greg Beer was the person whose madness had kickstarted our new problems: Joan Sutherland. It was Joan, after all, who had averted the disaster when Greg Beer came to inspect the smoke alarms. But now that he was sick at home, and Jen was required to nurse him, once again I felt as if I had to do the work of three men. I decided not to complicate matters by employing a replacement bartender but rather to redouble my own efforts and to keep a closer eye on the goings on of the hotel. All the clientele, bar the passing trade, knew the police were waiting to pounce, and it was heartening to observe everyone on their best behaviour in those next few days – still enjoying themselves, of course, but with no inclination to cause another stir.

I actually have fond memories of the lovely rhythm we settled into during those fateful days, beginning each morning with The Lazy Tenor's bloodletting aria. I'd have a quiet breakfast with whoever came down to the bar before taking something up to Kooka. Then I'd make my way over to the river and swim like a merman on the seaward end of the indoor creek while listening to the Plinth bells ringing down at the rivermouth. After lunch we'd ready ourselves to open and after 3pm we were of course in full swing right until stumps.

Such was my weariness after mopping and tidying beyond closing that come one o'clock I often couldn't get to sleep in the barn. Those early December nights were quiet and warm, and it was pleasant just to sit up in my loft with a cigarette and a sketchbook, and unwind. There would be no more wild parties in The Blonde Maria's room, no more frankincense fumigations in the bar down below, not while Greg Beer was watching. The ironic thing, however, was that right under his nose, and right under mine for that matter, the most radical events to ever take place in The Grand Hotel were unfolding on those quiet, seemingly innocuous evenings in the wake of the brawl.

Every night, after making love with The Lazy Tenor, The Blonde Maria had been treading her path through the willows and ducks in the hallway to read aloud to Kooka from the novels in the bookcase in her room. By early December, a week after the garden party brawl, they were re-reading
The World of Carrick's Cove
, after making their way through
The Country of the Pointed Firs
and nearly all the novels of Esther May Protheroe. But of course it wasn't the novels that were drawing The Blonde Maria to Kooka's bedside every night but rather the electronic telepathies being transmitted through his little black transistor.

Initially Maria would listen, as if in a pact of good faith, to the old man's dreams, and in the morning, by asking him apparently unimportant questions while massaging his feet, she would patch together a version of what was taking place in them, of who was who and what referred to what. At first, of course, she'd had no idea who the woman was screaming in the fire, just as she'd had no idea who the woman was swimming in the waves with her lists. But then one night Kooka burst into wakefulness in the middle of the fire-woman's screams. Or at least Maria thought he'd awoken. He sat up straight in the bed, his eyes even opened and looked wildly all about the room, but he was still locked inside the dream. And then, in tandem with the tranny on the bedside table, Kooka spoke – in fact he yelled – calling MOTHER MOTHER I'M HERE OUT HERE! THROUGH THE DOORWAY! IT'S JOHNNY MOTHER! I CAUGHT THE TRAIN! And before Maria could lean over to quieten the poor old man, he slumped back into the bed again, closed his eyes and lay there quietly as the horses' hooves came clattering down the street and the firemen appeared.

The Blonde Maria sat dead still. She wondered if anyone else in the hotel had heard Kooka's cry. She waited. As usual The Barrels were still playing downstairs; she could hear the dull thud of Oscar's bass through the floorboards. But no unusual movements. And no one coming up the stairs.

The tranny glitched again and went silent. And then on came Mary and John, and an everyday conversation about Mary's brother Vin, who was a trainee-priest in the seminary at Manly and wanted to come home for Christmas.

At that moment, however, Maria cared about nothing but the fire. It had been Kooka's mother who was screaming all along. And the ‘Johnny' was him. Of course she knew nothing of Kooka's history – she had no idea his mother was a Tivoli dancer who became a prostitute in St Kilda and had sent him to her Conebush cousins in Mangowak to give him a future. But now at least she knew something about the fire.

The following evening, when she entered The Sewing Room with
The World of Carrick's Cove
in her hand, she managed to broach the subject by referring to the book. ‘You know, Kooka,' she said gently, ‘I feel sorry for this poor boy in Carrick's Cove. He's got such a hopeless father. Every time he's starting to get somewhere with his boat, the old man ruins it for him. It would be hard to have a parent like that.'

‘I reckon so,' Kooka said.

‘What about your parents, Kooka?' she went on. ‘How did you get along with them? Were they a help or a hindrance?'

Kooka pursed his lips and looked towards the seaward wall. ‘Well,' he said, after a pause, ‘I never knew my father, but my mother was no hindrance at all.'

‘Well, I'm happy to hear it.'

‘In fact,' Kooka went on, ‘some might say that it was the other way around.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘Yairs, well, she was an entertainer, my mum. A little like you, Maria. But they were hard days, and having a bub around as a single mum didn't really suit her talents.'

‘What kind of entertainer was she, Kooka? A singer?'

‘No, love, she was a dancer. At the Tivoli up in Melbourne. And she sent me to her cousins down here, the Conebushes, for a better chance in life.'

‘Can I ask you a personal question, Kooka?' Maria said.

‘Go ahead.'