The Grand Hotel (36 page)

Ash Bowen and Dave Buckley looked at me, both with querulous grins. I waved my hand at them and said quickly, ‘Don't worry. It's a long story,' before making a beeline for the bar to fix us all the drinks.

As I poured the Guinness and champagne into a jug behind the bar, I asked Joan quietly if he was alright.

‘Yeah, I'm fine,' he said, with his head bent low over the sink. ‘But did she have to come down half dressed?'

When the Black Velvet had settled magnificently in its jug, I took it over to where Maria, Ash and Dave had planted themselves on the pews at the big communal table. Meanwhile Oscar had sighted Maria and wandered over to see if he could convince her to get up again and sing with the band. She hadn't been seen in the bar during the evening for weeks, and Oscar, on behalf of The Barrels, was super-keen.

Maria, however, wasn't having a bar of it. She was more interested in talking to Ash and Dave. They were quizzing her about who this Joan Sweeney was she had mentioned earlier, and who the hell the whores were she'd also mentioned. For a while Maria just played dumb and pretended that they must have been hearing things.

‘That's right,' I chimed in with support. ‘I don't know what the two of you are on about. You're obviously a bit distracted by Maria's casual attire. Despite the fact that you're spiritually enlightened.'

‘No, no,' Dave Buckley said emphatically. ‘As comely as you do look tonight, Maria, I distinctly heard you refer to the Black Velvets here as something that was drunk last night by “Joan Sweeney and the whores”.'

‘Joan Sweeney and the Whores,' repeated Givva Way, as he was passing the table on his way to the bar. ‘Good band name that. What do ya reckon, Maria?'

The Blonde Maria smiled up at Givva with Black Velvet foam on her upper lip.

‘Seriously, though,' Oscar said, taking his bass plectrum out of his big white teeth. ‘Wasn't Joan Sweeney the name of the publican of the original Grand Hotel? The one that Kooka was always on about? The one Big Joan got his nickname from?'

‘Of course!' cried Ash Bowen and Dave Buckley in unison.

‘Yeah. But, Dave, who are the whores?' asked Oscar. And then, with a mischievous young grin, ‘Or should I say
where
are the whores?'

‘Well, you're the muso, Ossie,' said Ash Bowen. ‘You tell us.'

After everyone had had a chuckle at this, Dave Buckley, sporting a very fetching Black Velvet moustache himself now, said determinedly, ‘Come on, you two. Why were you referring to Joan Sweeney and whores? And what happened last night?'

‘Aw, get over it would you, Dave?' I said. ‘Surely a spiritual fella like you has something better to meditate on.'

As Oscar wandered off to get ready to go on stage, The Blonde Maria drained the last dregs of her pot glass of Black Velvet and poured herself another. I could see a familiar little rose in her cheeks now. The alcohol was relaxing her, no doubt helping her to forget about the belligerent bloke from Blokey Hollow upstairs.

‘Wow, this is a very nice drop, isn't it?' she said. ‘You've been hiding this one under a bushel, Noely.'

‘Not really,' I said. ‘If you hadn't been holed up with your pet project upstairs for the last few weeks, you might have discovered it earlier.'

She smiled meekly. ‘You might be right,' she said. And then, with the Black Velvet coursing happily through her veins, she pushed out her breasts proudly and said, ‘Well anyway, here's to Mr Arvo Nuortila's mint. Hey? What do you reckon, Noely?'

I couldn't help but laugh. This girl had always had a loose tongue and a playful sense of humour when she got on the grog. It felt nice to have her back in the bar.

‘Okay,' I said, raising my glass to deliberately bait Ash and Dave. ‘Here's to the Nuortila mint.'

The two of us clinked our glasses, drinking long and deep as Ash and Dave looked on none the wiser. Maria gave a cute wink in my direction. She was beginning to look radiant.

‘Well, folks,' I said, ‘I've got some tables to clear. I'll leave you with the Black Velvets. You know where the bar is if you fancy some more. I'll let Maria field any more questions you might have about the Nuortila mint, Joan Sweeney or the whores. I'll guarantee you won't get any satisfactory answers though.'

By the time The Barrels took to the stage, everyone was getting well and truly sloshed. It was the biggest crowd we'd had in the pub for a few weeks, and I was sure Greg Beer was gonna show up to shut it all down at any tick of the clock.

People kept coming up to me to comment on ‘The Mangowak Ode', and it seemed the more pissed they were the more they liked it. Nan Burns told me she went in expecting another laugh and came out with a tear in her eye. Only Givva Way had any objections to the poem on the loop. He told me in a slurry voice that he'd come to rely on The Grand Hotel to cheer him up, not to drag him down. ‘Nah, this joint is losing the plot, Noel. You especially. And as for this band ... well, they're alright, I suppose, but not a patch on some we used to get comin' through town. Did I ever tell you about the time I smoked bucket bongs with Brod Smith and The Dingoes? Geez, it was unreal, just when they were at their...'

I waved my hand in the pissed house-painter's face, not even bothering with the niceties. ‘Shut the fuck up would ya, Givva? Or I'll show you the door.'

Givva's jaw dropped in appalled vindication. It was as if he'd caught a ten-kilo fish on a ten-pound line. ‘Oh, so that's it now is it? The great pub that never kicks anyone out is barring its most loyal customers! You've lost it, Noel, you've crossed over to the dark side.'

‘Yeah, whatever you reckon, Givva,' I said, shouldering past him to make my way out to the sunroom.

Now I needed some fresh air. As ridiculous as he was, Givva had got under my collar. Maybe he was right, I thought, stepping outside into the crisp night of the backyard. Maybe the responsibilities of running the pub had changed me – all the bookwork, the restocking and ordering, having to be social every day of your life. I'd had a lot of help but still the brunt of the place was mine. It even occurred to me that maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the whole thing was shut down. Otherwise it was bound to end up going straight. It was a strange fact after all that I had
collaborated
, as Veronica had put it, with Raelene Press to shut the stoneskimming down. I mean, who cares if the Plinths were being wrecked? If that had've happened back when we opened the hotel, we all would have been throwing twice as hard, me included. Maybe The Grand Hotel was just like any other institution that starts to calcify as it does what has to be done to survive over time. Of course that was the thing about the Dada greats – they did it in a blaze then got out quickly. They were elemental, a passing storm. You never saw Tristan Tzara or Hugo Ball doing Dada Classic Hits Tours down through the decades of the twentieth century. And definitely not my hero Arthur Cravan!

Standing in the driveway now with a head full of such thoughts, I figured I needed a stroll. I walked out the back, under the pines and onto the Dray Road. There was no one about, either north or south, looking up and down the road. It seemed the whole of Mangowak, but for the sick, the pious, and Sergeant Greg Beer, was in The Grand Hotel. At that moment a cheer went up inside the hotel, and as it did I raised my hand to the night sky as if in a gesture of farewell. A weight seemed to lift from my shoulders. I had surrendered. As far as I was concerned, my time as an unlikely publican was over. All that was left now was to enjoy what was left of the night.

The cheer I'd heard outside on the road was for The Blonde Maria, who with the help of a few more Black Velvets had finally agreed to get back up on stage and resume her career with The Connotations. By the time I walked back into the bar, the joint was absolutely rocking as she strutted her stuff in what suddenly seemed like the ultimate Blonde Maria sexkitten costume.

The Connotations played a blistering reunion set – ‘Stinging Snake Blues', ‘Comb Your Kitty Cat', ‘You Got to Give Me Some of It', ‘Keep On Eatin'', ‘The Best Jockey in Town', finishing off with the Shirley Bassey classic ‘Diamonds Are Forever'. For this one my brother Jim pulled out his sunstained old trumpet and played the horn solo under the melody. Maria let her singing kick and soar above the horn. Her voice seemed to have new maturity; she was sounding better than ever. She must've learnt a thing or two by spending all those weeks upstairs devoting herself to The Lazy Tenor's prodigious gift. But now, as she belted out the middle eight of ‘Diamonds Are Forever', with her whole heart and body behind the song, she was letting us know she'd been betrayed by that gift and was kissing it goodbye forever.

When the song finished, the crowd in the bar went wild. Maria raised both hands in the air before taking a deep bow. Everyone could feel that she had just got something major off her chest. Big Joan behind the bar was clapping, with a broad smile, no doubt happy that she'd just publicly dispensed with The Lazy Tenor. And like the rest of us he couldn't help but be delighted to have her back on stage with the band.

Of course The Lazy Tenor himself was nowhere to be seen, not even in The Horse Room, which remained empty throughout that last night, as everyone was drawn in by the magnetic atmosphere of the bar. By ten o'clock a few people started to wander off home, so I cut to the chase and declared all drinks on the house. Darren and Nan both came up to me independently and asked if I'd gone stark raving mad, and I said that yeah, maybe I had, but that it had been a bumper crowd with a magnificent thirst and we'd already taken a small fortune.

‘And besides,' I said, ‘we're celebrating Mr Arvo and the Nuortila mint. Haven't you heard?'

They both looked at me as if I'd just confirmed their suspicions about my sanity and wandered off in separate directions to keep clearing tables.

When the cuckoo clock above the catfish opened its tiny doors to strike ten thirty, we were half an hour past our Sunday night licence. It was as if I was laying out obvious bait for Greg Beer, daring him to come and shut down the fun. Little Dougie, the youngest of the two Sutherland boys, had got up on a stool behind the bar and taken over from his dad behind the tap. He'd been well brought up – for an eight-year-old he was pouring a pretty damn fine illegal beer. Next to him his mum and dad were busy pouring the Black Velvets, Jen on the champagne side of each jug and Joan on the Guinness side. By this stage I was getting stuck into it myself and remained unaware of the whisper going around the bar concerning The Blonde Maria's drunken confessions about what had been taking place in The Sewing Room every night.

Before long Ash Bowen and Dave Buckley had cornered me over near the fireplace and demanded I tell them it was all lies. That put me in a dilemma. On the one hand I didn't want to say anything because I knew their curiosity could potentially threaten whatever dream Kooka had in store for us that night, but on the other hand, given that I'd just surrendered out on the road to the night sky, it seemed as if this wider awakening to Kooka's magic tranny was simply written above. In the end, and in the true spirit of Dada, I decided to deny nothing.

Ash and Dave were incredulous and derisive, saying it couldn't possibly be true. I laughed and proceeded to tell them what I knew about the visual capabilities of goldfish. ‘There's stuff all around us here that we can't see,' I said. ‘But meanwhile the humble goldfish can. It sees well beyond us, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. So who knows the things that are swirling about if we'd only open our hearts and minds. For supposedly spiritual men you two are pretty damn materialistic when it comes down to it.'

By eleven o'clock there were only a dozen or so of us left in the room, and Kooka's dreams were all that anyone was discussing. Now I was afraid that with Maria still down in the bar with us it was getting too late and that Kooka may well have already fallen asleep upstairs. At the very least he'd be wondering what was going on. So I called everyone, the two Sutherland kids included, over to the pews at the communal table, and Maria and I began officially to fill them in.

First we told them about Kooka's mother, about his wife, Mary, and how initially the dreams broadcast through the tranny were about them. Now that they'd all sampled ‘The Mangowak Ode' on Duchamp countless times, this was at least half familiar information. Then we talked about Joan Sweeney and her publican's lists in the waves and then about Tom String, the ride in the cart with the reef-coal, and Mr Arvo, before clearing up the mystery of the Nuortila mint. We talked about the whores of the previous night, about Cumquat May, Jadey and Rose, and how Joan Sweeney had a way of telling the authorities what they wanted to hear and then continuing with what she thought was best regardless. We even told them about Ted the Scotsman being kicked out of the hotel for talking disrespectfully to the whores, and also about Bait Belcher and Ding Dong.

By the end of our descriptions, it was clear to almost everyone that we couldn't have made it all up. Certainly it was hard to believe but no one was point-blank sceptical anymore except for Givva Way, my brother Jim, and young Dylan Sutherland. Givva was a perpetual naysayer and perhaps his fetish for the stories of days gone by just couldn't cope with this ultimate double-barrel hit. Jim was not quite as dismissive but was convinced that his little brother was busy pulling one god-almighty hoax; whereas Dylan was very matter of fact, as eleven-year-olds can be, saying straight out that the whole thing was impossible because ‘radios don't broadcast dreams'.

A Never Ending Echo

Gathering up our drinks, and a few extra bottles of wine, there was no alternative now but for us all to climb the stairs and wait till Maria's bedside reading lulled Kooka into sleep. Then, one by one, everyone could ever so quietly tiptoe into the room and sit down on the floor around the walls outside the bedside pool of light so that if Kooka woke up he wouldn't see them. Any doubts I had about this invasion en masse of Kooka's dreaming space were dismissed by the overwhelming destiny of the moment. I felt sure that the tranny broadcasts had gone beyond the privacy of an old man's retrospecting heart. Surely now this was a history we all had a share in.

There was only one difficult matter I wanted to clear up first, and that was Givva Way. Well, he wasn't called Givva Way for nothing. I felt sure that if Givva was allowed into The Sewing Room to listen to the dreams, he was bound to find a way to ruin everything. Either he'd drop a glass or trip over or even shout out some contrary piece of nonsense from where he was sitting against the wall. He might even just take it upon himself to wake Kooka up and protect him from the eavesdroppers. Either way he would, as he always did, find a way to put his foot in it, and we couldn't run the risk.

Taking him aside as everyone went off to have a final leak before what could be a long night, I told him I didn't want him upstairs with the rest of us. Naturally enough, he was outraged. After pleading with me for a while but getting nowhere, he threatened to stand outside in the backyard and throw stones at the Sewing Room window. ‘That'll sure wake him up,' he said triumphantly.

He had me stymied. It seemed the lesser risk now was to let him come. But I made him swear, on the ghost of all the great bands that had played in Mangowak in the 1970s, that he wouldn't act up. He agreed, solemnly, then smiling like a winner went off through the sunroom for a last piss on Duchamp.

We assembled at the bottom of the staircase like a select group of novitiates waiting to be inducted into a sacred form of knowledge. I suppose the only difference between us and a group of novitiates was that we were all, except for Dylan and Dougie and their mother, pretty bloody drunk. I noticed that Joan was keeping himself way back and away from The Blonde Maria, who already had one foot on the stairs and was about to lead us up. I also noticed that Oscar had produced an iPod out of his pocket to which he was busily fixing a little black microphone. I placed my palm over the light from the iPod screen and said, ‘No, Ossie. I don't think that'd be wise.'

Oscar looked surprised for a moment but then nodded his head sagaciously, saying, ‘Oh, of course, Uncle Noely, sorry. It might affect the reception.'

As quietly as fourteen people in various states of inebriation could, we began to climb the hotel stairs, with The Blonde Maria up front and myself right behind her. On the erstwhile ironbark my grandfather had used to build the staircase all those years ago the twenty-eight feet of our drunken party played all kinds of creaking bung notes as we ascended.

When we reached the top, it was quiet on the creek, with just a light breeze rustling in the wallpaper willows. For a moment we all paused, milling about near the banister rail, partly no doubt to prepare ourselves for what was to come and partly because of the mercurial watery light of the old hallway globes.

From The Lazy Tenor's room there wasn't a sound as one by one we stepped gingerly out among the carpet ducks and platypi. I went first, with Maria, Ash Bowen and Oscar just beside me, Oscar still with his bass plectrum between his teeth. Nan Burns followed, with Jen, Big Joan and the two boys. My brother Jim, Darren Traherne and Dave Buckley came next, with Veronica and Givva Way following. As I looked back over my shoulder, I saw Darren thrusting his nose in the air, as if sniffing for fish swimming past on the current downstream. And behind him Givva Way was peering with concern down at his shoes, as if they were being ruined by the imaginary waters of our very own indoor creek.

Before the hotel had begun, none of them could ever have expected to have seen what they'd seen, heard what they'd heard, and been exposed to so many unlikely experiences. The pleasures had been immense, the surprises had been incessant, and now this unwitting education was having the desired effect. A hush came over the crowd as we approached the Sewing Room door, and I sensed that even the doubters were thinking again. No one said a word. I was sure they understood now, perhaps for the first time, that anything was possible in The Grand Hotel.

It was an exciting moment, with us all full of anticipation, but it was always in the back of my mind that Greg Beer might turn up when we least expected it. As we arrived at the door, Maria carefully clicked the waggly old doorknob and the two of us went inside, leaving the others to wait, just as we'd planned. We stepped into The Sewing Room to find Kooka in high spirits, though a little miffed that we were both so late.

‘By the sound of it it's been a big night down there,' the old fella said. ‘I was beginning to think you'd forgotten all about me.'

Maria sat down in the wicker chair and opened the book on her lap. Kooka for the moment couldn't keep his eyes off her cleavage. Not only was her lilac undergarment very low-cut but it was also made of a lightly elasticised silk so that her nipples were pert and prominent. I saw the old man swallow hard with pleasure as she began to read George Santayana from where we'd left off the previous night.

As Maria read, Kooka closed his eyes so as not to be distracted by her dishevelled beauty. As a consequence it wasn't at all long before he raised his hand for the nightly instalment to finish. It was late after all; the old fella was obviously very tired.

Of course we were very thankful for this, not only because of the others waiting at the Sewing Room door but also because, in her now-drunken state, Maria was having great trouble reading without slurring the words. As she gratefully closed the pages of George Santayana, I slowly leant across her to the bedside table and switched the tranny on.

Three commentators were discussing the long-forgotten sketchbooks of the Australian artist Jean Gullyside. Two of them were gushing about her position in the ‘outsider art' and ‘brute art' movements while the other one was dismissing the Gullyside sketchbooks as ‘purely psychiatric'. Now this was the first discussion I'd heard on the radio for months that interested me, but I couldn't believe the timing. I was suddenly caught between not wanting Kooka to fall asleep and send the tranny into static and, of course, wanting him to very much.

For better or worse, however, I could see Kooka showing the telltale signs of sleepiness where he lay under the crocheted rug. Our plan was that when (or if, as we still couldn't be absolutely sure that the broadcasts would continue) the static began, we would use it as sound cover to let everyone quietly file into the room. We just had to bank on the fact that the static would last long enough for this to be achieved.

As I say, I was torn, as on the tranny the two commentators went deeper and deeper into their appreciation of Jean Gullyside's work, the sceptical third commentator out in the cold. Eventually, as the discussion turned to the possibility of staging an exhibition called
Scrawl
, devoted purely to Australian works done in coloured pencil, old Kooka finally crossed over and the tranny spluttered before going completely silent.

Maria and I looked at each other, concerned. All we could hear were the frogs in the night, and beyond that the hiss and occasional crash of the ocean down at the rivermouth. There were no Plinth bells, and looking up to the tiny window high in the western wall it was blank, with no bogong moth trying to get in to the light, just bare cold glass and the unpainted sheoak sill.

We sat frozen in our chairs and waited to see what would happen. On the pillow Kooka's closed eyes had narrowed his brow into a furrow. It was a look of concentration, even though he was asleep, as if the dreaming kookaburra on the branch had once again spotted his prey. Eventually his face relaxed into a deep pleasured smile as someone out in the hallway bumped lightly against the door. At that very moment the tranny burst back into life; well, into the raucous half life of oceanic static anyway.

Carefully I got off my chair and tiptoed to the door. This was the moment we'd all been waiting for. Turning the knob, I found my friends just as I'd left them, waiting patiently and attentively, proving that it doesn't always take a bucket of cold water to sober people up. Between them they had drunk a lot of Dancing Brolgas and a lot of Black Velvets that night, but no one had the giggles and no one was throwing up. It was only The Blonde Maria back on the wicker chair next to Kooka's bed who was showing signs of being a little worse for wear.

First Nan then Darren stepped up and quietly entered the room. Under directions they stuck close to the eastern wall, well away from the pool of light, before rounding the northeast corner and lowering themselves to sit on the floor under the inland window. Carefully then Joan Sutherland and his dairy family came in, Dylan and Dougie obviously enraptured by the late-night adventure; I winked at them all as they stepped past me in the doorway. They turned right along the eastern wall in the same direction as Nan and Darren. Finally came Ash and Dave, Jim, Oscar, Givva and Veronica, again under my directions. These six entered the open Sewing Room door and headed the other way, to the left along the eastern wall, towards the ocean window where the lump of Kooka's boxed-up archive sat inert and shadowy in the dark. I watched as the silhouettes of Ash and Dave crossed in front of the ocean window before they sat down with their backs against the boxes of the archive. Jim and Oscar followed them and sat under the window while Givva and Veronica sat on either side of the southeastern corner of the room.

Thankfully the static continued as I gently closed the door on the creek and made my way back to my chair. Kooka's sleep had not been disturbed and the knot of pleasure on his face seemed if anything to have deepened since I had got up to let everyone in.

Minutes passed. Still the static reigned, and I feared it would be the two Sutherland boys sitting with their parents on the wall behind me and to my right who would grow impatient first. They were only kids after all.

I needn't have worried. What followed next most definitely kept their interest. As the shape of Kooka's mouth opened into a perfect O, the static ceased on the tranny, to be replaced by the solitary pleasure of Tom String.

He was obviously out in the bush because the first sounds we heard were the ratcheting and sawing of nearby wattlebirds in the trees. Then the charismatic song of a dusky woodswallow and the flow of a river nearby. And then Tom String's voice, in a tone Maria and I had not heard before, groaning with pleasure. We could hear a bright rhythmic sound too, of liquid and skin squelching, and it became clear that we were listening to him masturbating.

Immediately I was wondering what everyone in the darkness against the walls was making of it, and in particular I could sense Jen Sutherland's disapproval that her boys were in the room. Tom String's groans became more fervent, until they turned from just sounds of sexual pleasure into words of pure devotion. ‘Aw, missus ... they're like raspberries ... so pink and right. Can I juice them, here, in my teeth, like this? ... oh yes ... and feel here, put your lovely lady's hand on big Tom String ... oh yairs ... oh, my sweet missus ... Joan ... and slip 'em off ... oh missus, that's right ... look at that ... it's you, oh ... how do ya do? ... let me ... touch ... oh ... oh ... your arse, your lilywhite arse ... oh yes, and there it is ... oh, like silk, like a silk purse ... can you feel that? ... oh yairs ... the full ... yes it's good ... and you ... you're good ... I love ... oh ... Joan ... aw...'ere ... oh ... oh, missus! ... missus! oh,
fark
,
fark
, oh
faark,
aw ... yairs ... I love ... oaaah.'

With a huge exhalation Tom String arrived at his destination and his voice descended into a soft vulnerable whimpering. His ecstasy stilled. In front of us Kooka hadn't moved but the O shape of his mouth had closed and the look of intense pleasure had exchanged itself for the usual impervious peace of a sleeping face.