The Grand Hotel (4 page)

Kooka listened to all this without batting an eyelid. He simply stared at me and waited for me to finish, almost as if I was having some kind of regular fit. When I finally stopped speaking and my chuckling dwindled away, he was still staring at me. His big brow was lowered and his eyes were doleful.

‘Jim said he thought you might get your back up a bit,' he offered at last.

I gave him an exasperated look, which he straightaway returned with an irrepressibly broad kookaburra smile. Three hours later, due mostly to the fuel of home-made shandies and fistfuls of peanuts, we were still in there, discussing the idea.

The Freedom Virus

That first night back in town I went to sleep in the barn thinking of the brolga, but when I woke to Pippy's familiar yapyap the next morning all I could think about was The Grand Hotel. Kooka had painted such a picture the day before in the archive that by the time I'd left his house just before midnight, I was almost considering his proposition plausible.

He'd told me all about The Grand Hotel of yore, how the bullock drays'd come down from Corrievale and Winchelsea, do their business on the old coast and range track, and then what? Have a few snorts of course. And then a few more. Kooka had concluded that his block must have been the site of the hotel bottle dump, due to all the nineteenth-century glass he'd found lying around over the years. In a tartan shortbread tin on his desk he kept his favourite shards of that curious time-smoothed glass, which he himself said was the catalyst for the hotel becoming his number one obsession among the larger interest he had in the town's history in general.

He'd told me about Joan Sweeney, who was the last publican at the old Grand, and what a formidable person she was. As Kooka had said, to head out on your own to these parts as a young woman back in those days was a gutsy enough choice, but to take on the running of a salty frontier pub chocked with hard-hearted bullock drivers, lawless loggers and craymen, lonely-eyed swagmen and runaway saunterers was another thing entirely. Most of those men had blood of some kind or another on their hands, some of them native blood, but by all accounts Joan Sweeney ran a tight ship and was much respected, on both sides of the ledger.

Kooka had nothing but good words to say about her; in fact, on the strength of his research, he described her as nothing less than ‘a woman of grace'. When the hotel had burnt down and the colonial police had tried to get to the bottom of exactly why, she'd walked out from among the debris and refused to cooperate. She hadn't even bothered to wind up the licence, which explained the strange fact of its still being current for the absurd option of my use. She'd taken a ship to America and settled briefly in Chicago, before returning to Victoria in 1906. Years later, in the heat of the anti-conscription debates during the First World War, she had been a well-known and outspoken participant for the case against. Kooka spoke of her with great animation and reverence, and the way he saw it the idea of being Joan Sweeney's belated successor as publican of The Grand Hotel, Mangowak, was far from a mediocre prospect. He said I'd have to have my wits about me even just to measure up.

After lying in my loft that morning musing about all this, I climbed down the ironbark ladder and made my way across the yard and into the house for my first indoor breakfast in weeks. I found four eggs in the door of the fridge and broke three of them into a skillet. Miraculously the eggs hadn't gone off, so I tossed in some herbs from the garden, a sprinkle of local forest pepper, and was just sitting down with great anticipation to the omelette and a pot of tea when Veronica Khouri appeared through the louvres at the sunroom door with my canary, Frankie.

She let herself in with Frankie in the bamboo cage. Veronica had cut off her usual long black ringlets and dyed what was left of them a vivid cinnamon colour. Her big brown eyes were shining. Frankie was dancing happily about on his perch and she was full of assurances about how comfortable and happy he'd been during his stay with her in the studio up on the cliff.

‘He didn't mind the winds?' I asked, gesturing for her to sit down for a cup of tea with me at the table.

‘No, not at all,' she declared. ‘I put him on the shelf in the window on the southeast side and he'd just sing away every morning. Wouldn't you, Frankie? And then in the afternoons I'd let him out for a while and he'd fly around a bit and shit on my work. I had to have a special Frankie-rag always at hand, just in case the cack dried and left a stain. Apart from that he was perfect company, Noel.'

I looked at Frankie in the cage where Veronica had placed it on the table and he did look a picture of health. His orange feathers had a real lustre. In a burst of self-pity I thought that both he and Pippy had perhaps been happier without me while I was away.

Veronica Khouri and I had originally met years before at art school in Melbourne. She was half Lebanese and half Argentinian, an exotic, precocious and heavily politicised star of that art school scene, whereas I was a little more inconspicuous, though I did have my moments. We didn't set eyes on each other for years afterwards, until her wealthy father bought Ron McCoy's land up on the Mangowak cliff opposite the Two Pointer Rocks. After that I'd bump into her every now and again when she was around but one day, a couple of years after old Ron died, she told me she was moving into town permanently. Well, this was quite a surprise. I'd followed her career over the years since we'd graduated – she had become a sculptor of some note internationally – but then, as we had stood chatting in the general store, she said she'd had enough of the travel and especially the art industry bullshit and just wanted somewhere quiet to live and work. Her father, Dom, who worshipped the ground his only daughter walked on, had agreed to build her a studio among the vegetable gardens and fruit trees he'd planted on the site of the McCoys' old house.

At the time this was a piece of news I found disconcerting, because it required me to knit together two disparate, and up until then entirely separate, threads of my life. On the one hand there was my artistic self, and my own private imaginings, which on a day-to-day level I kept pretty much contained within the confines of my barn, where I worked. On the other hand there was the quiet, almost nondescript life I led in my home town, where I preferred to shelter that artistic self behind a more homely persona. The news that Veronica, who'd been a provocative and even intimidating presence in those earlier days at art school, and with whom back then I'd shared a passionate love of Dada and the Surrealists, was moving into my provincial little realm, and setting up creative camp on the McCoys' old cliff, would require an interesting series of readjustments.

As I poured the tea, Veronica said her mother had seen me pass in front of their house the previous day on my way back into town along the clifftop track. She'd said I was carrying a bunch of coloured balloons. Briefly we talked about where I'd been in my time away but I kept the details hazy. I told her that I'd found the balloons on the beach but said nothing of the Reverse Pinocchio and even less about the brolga.

Then I changed the subject and we talked about how her work was progressing. She had constructed a transparent lifesized human body out of Perspex, which she was painstakingly filling with a collection of what she called ‘three-dimensional techno-biographical influences'. To me it sounded like a twenty-first-century version of Giuseppe Arcimboldo's paintings, but in 3D. I was interested. I pressed her on it but got the feeling she wanted to keep her own details hazy as well. Fair enough. But then she surprised me by coming straight out and asking if I had agreed to open my house to the public as The Grand Hotel.

It seemed that Kooka's bright idea had already been floated widely in the town while I was away. It also appeared that everyone was in favour of it. Veronica said that at first when she was told she couldn't quite imagine me taking it on, but she was so outraged by the Wathaurong Heights development that she decided to offer any help she could.

And so, she wondered, what did I think about it all? Was I keen?

I answered with a diverting giggle and assured her that it could never happen. She must have picked up some other layer in my voice, however, because typically, in her hot-blooded way, she pounced. She demanded to know my specific objections and then, one by one, started dismissing them. To my protests that I was a hopeless businessman she assured me that Gene Sutherland's wife, Jen, had agreed to look after the books. To my confident objection that the house was not fit to be resuscitated to occupational-health-and-safety standards she said that my brother Jim had already had a shire building inspector suss it out and that, providing certain considerations were taken care of, the house had been deemed fundamentally solid and given the potential thumbs up.

‘Phew,' I said. ‘It seems a committee has already been set up without me. I feel ambushed.'

All the reservations I'd expressed so far, both to Kooka and now to Veronica, were of a practical nature, but it was to my more overriding objections, such as how my quiet life would be ruined and how the beloved house my grandfather had built would be plastered with huge signs advertising beer and skittles, my block mangled for car parking, etc. – in short how the whole hard-won atmosphere of my life would be ruined – that Veronica countered with her most convincing argument. Kooka had wooed me pretty well in his archive, with tales of continuing the independent traditions of his beloved old Grand Hotel, but it was only when Veronica reminded me of the freedom virus that I began to see the whole thing as perhaps being already written in the stars.

Becoming increasingly annoyed with my deflections and objections, Veronica said, ‘You don't have to be a meathead about it, Noel. No one's looking for a pub like any other! Remember Kurt Schwitters, remember Hugo Ball, remember Dada and the freedom virus? Well that's it. Let's get infected. Isn't it possible to please the likes of Kooka and Givva Way and the other drunkards, and do something that's interesting as well? No one can be pissed off with you about it coz without you there'd be no pub in the town. C'mon, Noel, just see it as one big work of art.'

I said nothing. I just tucked into my omelette and jokingly rolled my eyes. A hotel as a work of art in little ol' Mangowak? It was about as unlikely as an indoor creek. But Veronica's mention of the Dada freedom virus had actually struck a chord. It was coincidentally just after the era of the original Grand Hotel in Mangowak when the Dada artists on the other side of the world had responded to the hellish capitalist machinery of the First World War by setting their own selves free. Free from the so-called rationalism that had produced such an in-your-face nightmare, and free from adding to the plush pile of comfortable art that seemed to serve no other purpose than to amuse the upper-class technicians of the disaster. Rather than picking up the usual instruments and singing some harmoniously predictable dirge of despair, the Dadaists had broken open European culture with an axe blow. They had declared their own war on meaning itself, and had taken the piss out of absolutely everything, particularly art. They had turned their backs on ‘quality' and ‘tradition' in favour of nonsense and relentless liberation. They called this burst springtime pod Dada, anti-art, the freedom virus. It was vivid, absurd, profoundly meaningless. No one had ever seen anything like it. And nothing in the art world had ever been the same since.

My own slow transformation out in the clefts and overhangs seemed suddenly to have been heading all the while to this point. A hundred years after the original festivities of Dada were unleashed, I'd been completely floored, not only by our human savaging of the planet on a global scale but also by the surreal appropriations that were happening in the tiny little realm of my home town. I'd stumbled off into the bush like a zombie until, with the vision of the brolga, I realised I could return, but only with a light step and a heart reconfigured for laughter. I had come back not knowing where this new attitude would lead, and not needing to know either, only to find that, lo and behold, my friends and loved ones had somehow already divined an unlikely solution on my behalf: The Grand Hotel.

From down at the rivermouth I could hear the Plinth bells beginning to chime in the sea breeze. I sipped my tea. It would be my pub after all, on the site of the old Grand Hotel and in my grandfather's house. I could do what I liked. There were no rules about what beer you had to serve, what pictures you had to have on the walls, and surely it wasn't compulsory that every publican turn into a pot-bellied Sky-channel addict!

As I chewed on my omelette, a spicy burst of Vietnamese mint exploded in my mouth. My brain started to buzz with excitement. My skin began to tingle. Two definite symptoms of the freedom virus. But I said nothing. Across the table Veronica was peering at me ferociously, in a vain attempt to read my mind.

Eventually I looked across at her and winked. I put down my knife and fork, leant across the table and unhitched Frankie's birdcage door. He flew straight out and joyfully began to circle the golden cypress ceiling of what would shortly become the main bar of The Grand Hotel.