The Grand Hotel (39 page)

With an almighty effort in the scalding air Dylan extended the telescopic ladder out to its full height and then heaved it up against the side of the building. As I reached out to my left and dragged the high end of it into position, Joan screamed for Dylan to get away from the building as Jim assembled everyone back in the room in the order in which they would come down. First Jen, who would wait a few rungs down the ladder for her terrified youngest son to come behind her, then Veronica, Maria, Nan, Givva, Ash, Darren, Oscar, Jim, and then Joan and I would together help move Kooka. In all the drama of Dylan jumping out the window, everyone had forgotten about the old fella, who had now woken up and was watching the goings on silently from his bed.

As Jen Sutherland stepped out onto the ladder to escape the burning hotel, the brave boy at the bottom stood grimacing in the heat while holding the ladder steady. Joan leant out of the window and screamed at him to get back, assuring him that his mum would be alright, that we'd hold the ladder secure from above. Dylan nodded thankfully and darted away from the building, where he stood watching from halfway back towards the barn.

Jen and Dougie were slow to come down but eventually they made it and ran over to hug their Dylan. From there everyone moved quickly and in an orderly fashion, except for Maria, who was bawling and crying out that the fire was all her fault. Eventually Nan slapped her clean across the cheek and without saying another word The Blonde Maria descended.

By the time everyone but Joan, myself and my brother Jim were safely down, the smoke in The Sewing Room was becoming almost too thick to breathe in. The lights had gone out, visibility was non-existent, and we could hear out in the direction of the hallway that the upstairs storey was now catching alight as well. Jim stubbornly refused to get down before he'd checked on Kooka, who had almost disappeared in a Prussian blue fug now in the centre of the room. Squinting and gasping, with our shirts up over our mouths and noses, the three of us rushed in the direction of the bed to help the old man. With our faces flushed from the anxiety and the heat, we called his name. When we got to him, we could barely see but could feel the lumps of his heavily blanketed body in the bed. When we called his name, there was no reply.

‘Stand back!' shouted Joan through the smoke, and Jim and I did as we were told. Through the nightmarish light I dimly saw big Joan Sutherland lift Kooka's form out of the bed and throw him over his shoulder. Then he staggered in the direction of the window.

Jim and I followed, and as we did I heard sirens from somewhere in the night. Joan screamed for Jim to take Kooka and then the big dairy farmer stepped through the window onto the ladder and demanded him back. Old Kooka, all eighty-two years of him, winnowed away as his body was by time and life, was passed to Joan through the window. He managed to wrap his recently mended arm around Kooka's waist and carry him down the ladder to safety.

The flashing light of the CFA fire truck pulled into the driveway as first Jim, then I, followed Joan and Kooka down the ladder. We hit the ground running, and as we reached the others right down near the barn at the back of the yard the upper storey of the hotel shifted then collapsed in one almighty and resounding finale of timber, sparks and flying cinders. The scalding whoosh that came after this nearly knocked us all to the ground.

We watched as the CFA guys turned on their hoses to put out the fire. The ambulance from Minapre also arrived out on the Dray Road. Veronica ran quickly to greet them and to tell them about Kooka, who was now lying in Nan's arms, unconscious on the grass. The ambos rushed in with a stretcher and went straight to work trying to revive him. Unsuccessful, they placed him on the stretcher and hurried him to the ambulance, where they could work on him out of the flying sparks and billowing heat. One of them went around checking that everyone else was okay, which seemed to be the case. A couple of bottles of water were passed among us and we stood in a ragged arrangement on the grass and watched the hotel burn.

It was just before dawn when Sergeant Greg Beer and an offsider walked onto the scene. By this time we were all sitting down on the grass in a tight group, with blankets around our shoulders, passing around two bottles of cold champagne, which, along with a bottle of lemonade for the two Sutherland boys, were the only drinks I could find when I went looking in the barn. Even in our state of shock we had already managed to raise two toasts to the bravery of Joan and Jen's eldest son.

The sergeant stood with his constable watching the smouldering heap that was both my family home and the grandest of hotels. He began talking and the constable, like a secretary, started taking notes. One of the CFA guys, who was still hosing the rubble, seeing the two policemen standing there, called out, ‘What kept you guys?'

Neither Sergeant Beer nor his constable answered. Instead they went on with what they were doing, completely ignoring the question.

Eventually, after wandering around what remained of the fire, I heard the sergeant ask the CFA officer in charge if there had been any casualties. He told Greg Beer that an elderly man had been rushed to Minapre Hospital suffering from smoke inhalation and that one of the lodgers in the hotel had not been accounted for.

‘Very well then,' said the sergeant, turning to his offsider. ‘Constable, we'll need to cordon off the area.'

The constable went off under the pines and out the driveway to get the police tape.

Greg Beer thanked the fireman and then walked back across the yard to where we were sitting drinking the champagne and the lemonade. ‘Is everyone okay here?' he asked officiously.

‘Yep. We're all okay,' Ash Bowen told him.

‘Well, it mightn't be the time right now but you all understand I will have to interview you about this. It's rather early to say, but the CFA opinion seems to be that the fire was lit intentionally.'

‘Yeah, whatever...' Darren Traherne replied, taking a swig from the champagne.

Greg Beer stood alone in front of us, looking tight and uncomfortable.

For a brief minute I tossed up whether I could be bothered saying anything to him but in the end I just decided what the heck.

‘Oh, Sergeant,' I said, in a matter-of-fact voice.

He turned and replied sternly, ‘Yes, Noel?'

‘I was just thinking. I'd offer you a drink but the champagne's running low, and of course the kids need the lemonade. Oh yeah, and we're clean out of XXXX.'

The sergeant narrowed his eyes into a look that could kill. Then he stormed off in the direction of his car.

‘What was all that about?' asked Darren, sitting next to me. ‘We've never even stocked XXXX.'

I shook my head slowly from side to side, as the morning's first magpie began to sing from the top of the barn roof behind us. ‘Believe me,' I said, draping an arm around the shoulder of my friend, ‘you really don't want to know.'

Afterword in Autumn

After a hot and barren summer the autumn after the hotel burnt down was downright classical in its proliferation of mushrooms, chestnuts, yabbies, whiting and black duck. Not to mention rain. As if the hotel fire still needed dousing, the rain fell in roof-thrumming bucketloads, in looping pitter-pats and wild staccato bursts, and all as if in sympathy with the ashes. Right down the coast the creeks were swollen, their brown mouths brimming to the edge of the white waves, as if they were about to give birth to something. I wore my Rainbird coat and wandered about the riverflat deliriously, throwing a line in here, sliding fingers under the chocolate gills of field mushrooms there, at a loose end but nevertheless ecstatic at the mercurial nature of the light.

Kooka was in the recently rebuilt Minapre Hospital, in the old people's wing, not so much as a patient but as a permanent resident. He'd recovered fully from the smoke inhalation and, according to the doctors, there was absolutely nothing else physically wrong with him. He'd only decided to stay put in the residential wing because now that there was no longer a house or a hotel for him to live in, he couldn't be bothered organising anything else.

Through the curtains of rain filing into the bay from the southwest, you couldn't even see Minapre from Mangowak during those days; it was as if the old glamour cove had receded to an entirely separate and more western universe. Kooka was over there – we knew that – and occasionally we'd brave the bends and visit him, but because of the weather Minapre may as well have ascended into its own rather heavenly idea of itself, taking Kooka along with it, away from our own lowly and worrybeaten world.

One day in early April, in a rare clear-skied moment, I decided to take him round a feed from his old home patch. The last time I'd visited, he'd been complaining about the food, and I knew there was a flash new kitchen down the hall from his room. I figured he might well be up to catering for himself if he had the right ingredients.

So I drove around the road in the shining break, entered the town and parked on the slope between the hospital and the sea.

Upstairs I was ushered by a young male nurse onto the hospital's new verandah, where Kooka was sitting solo in a floppy lady's hat, taking in the sun.

We said hello, and he seemed glad enough to see me, though a bit weary. I handed over the bag of food, explaining my idea that he might like to cook himself a meal, and described the contents: yabbies already cooked and peeled, chestnuts already scored, freshly picked mushrooms, Otway pepper, plus my own garlic and herbs. He said he was more than grateful.

We sat on silver slatted seats, comfortable but for the coldness of the metal. We looked back east over the tops of the bluegums and across Snook Bay to Mangowak. In silence. I couldn't help but wonder, after all that had happened, what was in Kooka's head nowadays.

‘I've been watching the box, Noel,' he said to me eventually, closing his eyes and letting the sun warm his face. ‘In the common room, just on the other side of the glass there.'

‘Oh yeah, Kooka?' I replied. ‘Anything decent on?'

‘Nah, not really. It's just the bloody weather's been like it has. I keep eyein' off this perch out here but can never get out to it. So yairs, I've been watchin' the box.'

‘Well, it's bloody nice out here today,' I said.

‘Mmm. Too right.'

‘You know, Kooka, I'd have you at my place don't you? It's just that all I've got left is the barn.'

He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Nah, don't worry about it, kid. Nan's offered me a room at hers too, but I don't want it. You know I could rebuild if I chose. Get out the nailbag. But nah, that's all in the past.'

‘Fair enough. But how do you go with the others up here, Kooka? There's a few in worse nick than you. Especially in the top paddock.'

Kooka smiled and shook his head, as if I was a bit of a dill. ‘What are you talkin' about, Noely? They're no trouble. It's just a halfway house, my boy. We're all in it together. And we'll all be checkin' out soon enough.'

I frowned at this but he laughed. ‘It's no bloody hotel, Noel. More like the holding cell they put you in after a big night. Speaking of which, did they ever catch up with the big fella? You know, the singer Maria was keen on?'

‘Nah, they never did, Kooka. But we're all still waiting for his book to appear. We're hoping it might explain a few things. Maria's doin' well though. She's back in Melbourne, but come July she's touring Europe with her new band.'

‘Tourin' Europe? You don't say?'

‘Yeah, Europe. They're supportin' some big acts too. She'll blow 'em away no doubt.'

‘No doubt,' Kooka agreed. ‘The girl's a one-off. You know she came and saw me here, when I was still on the oxygen mask?'

‘Is that right?'

‘Yairs. I was a bit rusty to tell ya the truth, Noel. High as a balloon actually, from all that pure air.'

‘Sounds alright,' I chuckled.

‘Yairs, I suppose it was. But I couldn't make hide nor hair outa what she was sayin'. She was tellin' me the strangest stuff, about the fire an' that, and I reckon I was mishearing her anyway. Poor girl, she must've thought I was a looney.'

‘Well, she knows you're not now. I've filled her in about how well you're doing.'

Kooka nodded. ‘Yairs, well that's good then. Send her my best won't you?'

‘I will.'

We sat in silence again, looking out across the water. We could see the Mangowak lighthouse, standing tall, far in the distance.

‘Yairs, so anyway, Noel, I've been watching the box.'

‘So you said, Kooka.'

‘You know I met my Mary here don't you? Her old man was the doctor at this hospital. He ran the joint. They lived in the big house across the road.'

‘Yeah, you've told me that.'

‘Yairs, well, I was a nobody then. Son of a dead St Kilda prostitute. Reckoned I had no chance. Thought Mary was a Minapre snob.'

‘But she wasn't was she, Kooka?'

‘Nah, no fear. Not Mary. Had a definite touch of class though. A definite touch of class.'

‘No question.'

‘So anyway, Noel. Did I tell you I've been watching the box?'

‘You did, Kooka. Nothing decent on, eh?'

‘Nup, not really. Bit of sport. Mass on Sundays. But nah.'

Behind us in the common room a group of patients and nurses had come in to get ready for an exercise class. They began moving the furniture about and then the sun went behind a cloud. Kooka winced and I helped him up to go inside.

Briefly we went to the kitchen to put his food in the cupboard and then I saw him down the hallway to his room. He plonked himself in the chair by the corner window, which looked out not on Snook Bay but on an internal courtyard. It was pleasant enough but it wasn't the sea and you couldn't see the lighthouse.

Kooka picked up the remote and turned on the television. We sat together in virtual silence then, for perhaps two hours, watching daytime television from America. Early on I protested, but he waved me down, said it was fine, told me to relax. When they came around to get him for his lunch, I reminded him about the food I'd brought, but again he waved me down. Said he might have it for tea.

By the time I was back in the car and rounding the high cliffs at Turtle Head, the rain was belting down. I swished down onto the flat at Bonafide View, took a left at Breheny Creek, and drove the back way home through the bush.

When I got to my driveway, my tears had already dried. And as I got out of the car, I heard a sound and noticed a movement in the ditches near the road. The ditches were full with the rain and now I recognised the sound. The time had come, the local eels were up and about, making their way towards the river and then out to sea for their big migration. Kooka had had a long and wonderful life and now the cycle was beginning all over again. I walked back out towards the road along the driveway, and came out from under the pines and into the rain.