The Grand Hotel (9 page)

Veronica didn't answer, and I could see from where I was standing under the window near the sink that her profile was in full scowl.

Joan turned back to the posse, nonplussed. ‘Look, I know it's a slow cook this dish but geez, it's already been in there four hours. So anytime now I'd say. Why don't you order some drinks, take a seat and relax? We'll look after you.'

Once again the suits consulted with the polo shirts and eventually, after much head-swivelling and squinting at the pictures and maps and slogans on the walls, they conceded to take up Joan's offer.

Next they asked about the beers and the fella in the mustard suit said he'd actually heard good things about The Dancing Brolga Ale. That was interesting. Nevertheless the others were keen on a little more research and began quizzing Joan at length about what else was available. Eventually, with the mustard suit's encouragement, they decided against the monastery-brewed Belgian Pilsener and agreed to sample The Dancing Brolga. Fortuitously for them the whole dining-room table had been vacated by the time they turned to sit down.

As soon as the posse had settled in, they began to spread paperwork across the table. It became obvious that they had availed themselves of the Grand Hotel bar for the purposes of conducting a business meeting. Mustard Suit flicked open his laptop and began talking in a deadpan dialect easily recognisable as planning-department legalese. This seemed as incongruous in the Grand Hotel bar as aftershave on a bush track. Before long anyone with ears had worked out that the two casually dressed blokes were the architects of the Wathaurong Heights housing cluster, the two fellas in grey suits were from the Brinbeal shire, and the fella in the blue suit was the owner of the land. Mustard Suit was, without a shadow of a doubt, the legal eagle.

I can't say that the hackles were rising on the back of my neck at the presence of these people in the hotel, but as Veronica turned away from the food in the stove and headed out through the sunroom it would be safe to say that hers were. Was I dreaming or had she suddenly taken on the spiky protruding backbone of one of our long-ago local dinosaurs? When she hadn't come back after twenty minutes and the posse were reinvestigating the possibility of dinner, I surmised that like the dinosaurs she'd gone on temporary strike. She wanted nothing to do with these blokes.

I popped open the oven door and checked under the foil of the three huge baking dishes to see where the lamb was at. I prodded it with a serving fork and the meat fell lasciviously off the bone. It was perfectly cooked.

As Darren Traherne appeared from The Horse Room with a tray of empty glasses, the two of us set to carving the lamb and sluicing it with salad onto the old Coalmine Creek Golf Club green and white plates. Joan did his quick whiparound of the patrons to see how many takers there were for food. He was gone for a good ten minutes, off into The Horse Room, back through the sunroom, out onto the verandah, and back through the bar until he declared that there were thirty-seven hands up for dinner. Darren and I looked at each other and then down at the food. ‘Easy,' we agreed.

By this stage the Wathaurong Heights meeting was raising a few eyebrows among other people in the hotel. Their discussion, complete with architectural spreadsheets, procedural bullet lists, PDF flowcharts, planning caveats and the like, was becoming a bit heated. It seemed that the shire suits were disagreeing with the blue-suited owner and his architects on heightlines, sightlines and particularly on plumbing arrangements in the ‘eco-cluster'.

The shire suits were put out because after approving the development as an eco-cluster it seemed that now the intended grey-water scheme and on-site sewerage treatment plants had vanished from the plans. For their part the architects were claiming that the density of the proposed occupancy on the land, complete with some three-and even four-storey apartment buildings, simply disallowed for some of the green components of the original plan. As a sweetener, however, the architects were promising to ramp up the use of photovoltaic solar cells in the buildings and also to investigate the possibilities of the whole Wathaurong Heights estate becoming carbon neutral somewhere down the track.

At this suggestion Mustard Suit the Lawyer looked up from his laptop screen and raised his hand with emphasis. It seemed he was recommending extreme caution in regards to such spontaneous proposals on behalf of his clients. As his discretionary palm returned to rest near the mousepad of his Hewlett-Packard, the senior of the two shire representatives seemed suddenly to lose his temper.

‘Oh this is very unclear,' he spat out crossly, ‘very unclear indeed. What you presented in the proposal
must
take place. And if you find this architecturally impossible, then you must reduce the number of apartments, not abandon the green components of the cluster. This is all highly unprofessional.'

During this outburst the owner of the land and financier of the whole Wathaurong Heights development sat impassively on the red cedar pew on the sunset window side of the table. His face was stony but calm, almost as if he was thinking of something else entirely.

It was at this point, just as Nan Burns and Ash Bowen were beginning to hand around the plates of lemon lamb, cooked superbly to the traditional recipe, that I noticed Veronica re-enter the bar through the verandah double doors. Ever so slowly she headed around the room, ducking in and out of the furniture and leaning politely but silently across conversations, all the while placing small silver disc-shaped objects on every available surface. One by one as she went she lit these discs with a large kitchen-box of matches.

Looking out through the sunroom, I could see wisps of smoke wafting about – she'd obviously made her way through The Horse Room already – and before long the delicious aromas of the slow-cooked lemon lamb were being gradually replaced by the unmistakable scent of frankincense.

Of course different cultures have different purposes for frankincense, depending on the history of its ritual role in their society, but for me personally it has only ever been associated with one thing: funerals. As Veronica moved around the bar with her jaw set, lighting countless of her frankincense discs, and as the smoke from The Horse Room and sunroom started to billow through the doorway, Joan Sutherland began coughing behind the bar. Before long the air was absolutely thick with the stuff and so pungent it was as if there was a funeral pyre set alight in the middle of the room.

Chaos ensued. Some people started shouting in anger while others were spluttering and cackling in amazement. Suddenly it occurred to me what was going on. Veronica had decided that evil spirits had inhabited our hotel and was using her own hybrid of Lebanese and Argentinian understandings of frankincense to cleanse the space. It was brilliant – entirely symbolic, of course, but practically effective as well.

Quickly covering the plates of food on the benches behind the bar so they wouldn't taste of death, I watched as the posse from Wathaurong Heights simultaneously reached for their snowy-white handkerchiefs and placed them over their mouths. Cries of ‘outrageous' and ‘unprofessional' came muffled from behind the hankies as they gathered up their documents and charts and made for the door. Did they have any idea, I wondered as I watched them go, that they were being fumigated?

Within no time the whole hotel had emptied out into the backyard; the frankincense smoke was so thick inside that you could hardly see, let alone breathe. Clientele who up until that point had been prepared to go along with the anomalies of the establishment now took off in a bewildered huff towards their houses. Some of the more asthmatic among them never ever returned. Others loitered around under the pine trees, still unsure as to whether or not the building had caught fire.

Veronica, meanwhile, was standing alone by my giant aloe vera plant down near the barn, glowering in my direction. I ignored her, not because I disapproved of what she'd done but because I was intimidated by the ferocity of her mood, the sheer willpower of this woman. With one lateral step she had not only got rid of the Wathaurong Heights delegation but had also revealed the extent to which The Grand Hotel was prepared to go to emulate its original predecessor. If Kooka was right and they did let a one hundred and forty pound black pig into the original Grand every evening to clean up the scraps, then using frankincense as a bouncer to remove riff-raff from the premises seemed somehow quite apt.

After about half an hour, of the seventy or so people who were in the hotel when the frankincense was lit, about twenty remained on the grass in the yard. Joan, Darren and myself made our way back into the building. Quickly we opened all the windows and doors to help the ritual fog subside. Then, waving our hands to clear a path, we raided the coolroom for slabs of the Belgian monastery beer, which we took outside and distributed among the crowd. Given the religious atmosphere caused by the frankincense, it was an appropriate choice.

‘What about the lemon lamb?' someone cried.

‘Great idea,' said Joan, and together he and I headed back through the smoke to grab the oven dishes, the bowls of salad, and an armful of cutlery and plates.

When we returned outside, we placed the food on the upturned boat under the blackwood trees and everyone helped themselves. All the fuss had obviously awoken The Blonde Maria upstairs, because as we washed the lamb and salad down with swigs of the monastic Pilsener, strains of
Charles Aznavour at Carnegie Hall
could be heard coming through her open window. I must say it was quite a celebratory soundtrack to what in the end was a lovely al fresco meal.

Later that night, when most of the frankincense had cleared and The Blonde Maria had come down from her room, she and The Barrels, who now announced they were to be called The Blonde Maria and The Connotations, played an astonishing inaugural set of blues and jazz riffs and rhythms, with The Blonde Maria medleying through old delta woes, bog-Irish lamentations, and joyous and dexterous improvisations on her luck in arriving at The Grand Hotel.

Jim and Oscar and the other boys in the band were feeling lucky too, as The Blonde Maria was saving their skin, releasing them from their hackneyed west coast surfer's repertoire and directing their very capable musical abilities into previously unknown territory. To a man their grins were a mile wide as they rumbled along behind her pipey voice and torch-song charm. As a band they seemed to arrive at textures and to risk dissonances that they never before would have dreamt of. For the small audience dancing behind the front hedge under starlight, it was a memorable gig indeed. Veronica, of course, had no doubt as to what it was that had released the band's creative juices. As far as she was concerned, the smoking of the hotel with frankincense was its true beginning, and The Blonde Maria's work with The Connotations was just a part of it.

It has to be said that although we never again had the numbers in the place that we'd had on those first three nights, the fumigation of the posse from Wathaurong Heights really crystallised the essence of the hotel. From that point on you were either in, or you were out. A bit like the old days in the pub back up on the hill, when given the opportunity to kick on after stumps you could only accept if you were prepared to go the long haul and stay until the magpies started singing up the dawn.

False Alarm

At nine o'clock the next morning I had Sergeant Greg Beer slamming on my barn door. I'd been enjoying a long satisfying sleep after a terrific night and was rudely awoken.

I threw open the timber shutter of my loft and looked below. There was his freshly showered scalp right underneath me, the skin the colour of strawboard under fastidiously combed wet wisps of hair.

‘What do you want, Greg?' I called down.

He stepped away from the double doors below and tilted his head back to see me. ‘Good morning, Noel. Sorry to wake you – but it is 9am.'

‘Yeah. We had a late night. You keep different hours when you're running a pub, Sergeant.'

‘Yes. I suppose you do. But, Noel, I need you to come down and talk to me. There's an issue I'd like to discuss.'

‘It can't wait?'

‘No, it most certainly can't.'

I closed the shutter and groaned. Of course Greg Beer and I had never got on, even as kids, and I could sense now that The Grand Hotel was going to be his opportunity to make my life difficult.

After climbing down my ladder, I pushed the button on the barn kettle and then flung open the double doors, letting the bright morning light hit my face.

‘Would you like a cup of tea while we chat?' I asked him, in a friendly enough way.

It took him a moment or two to answer as his eyes absorbed the chaos of equipment in the barn behind me: half built frames and half finished pictures everywhere, scattered tubes of paint, lopsided high shelves loaded with manuals and books. There was refuse from the land and seascape covering every surface: fronds of mistletoe, switches of moonah, cereal bags full of pollen fibres, broken road signs, swan-down and heron feathers, scraps of wallaby hide, rusted farm axles, albatross mandibles, sheaves of dried sedge and clubrush, clusters of horny conebush, washed-out stacks of all the different coloured plastics the ocean offers up. The sergeant's analytical squint betrayed the fact that the inside of my barn was helping him complete a picture he'd long ago begun to compose – of Noel Lea as a slob, as a slackarse and a madman, a dangerous variant to everything decent, clean and respectable in his home town. His distaste for what he saw warped the narrow features of his face and I couldn't help but surmise that it all may have reminded him of his own childhood home up on Carroll Street, where chaos always reigned and stuff was always strewn around his poor mum as she sat wrestling her cask of demons at the kitchen table.

Eventually he curled up his nose at the scent of turps and sea wrack and said, ‘No, no tea for me thanks. I've had breakfast, Noel. I was actually wanting to have a look around your hotel. Apparently you had quite a deal of smoke in there last night and I've had a report that no alarms went off. You're aware of course, Noel, that to run a hotel without smoke alarms is a serious offence – not to mention an extremely dangerous course of action. I thought you might like to show me where your alarms are, and together we could ascertain why they failed to work last night.'

Bloody smoke alarms! I should've known. Some pissed-off victim of Veronica's frankincense fumigation had gone whining to the cops. Probably one of the Wathaurong Heights posse – most likely one of the suits from the shire. I flicked the kettle back off and stepped out of the barn. All I could do was feign innocence.

‘Yeah,' I said casually to Greg Beer as we walked across the yard towards the hotel. ‘I thought it was funny they didn't go off. There was quite a bit of smoke after all.'

The truth was that as soon as the health-and-safety inspections had been completed, I'd taken the batteries out of all the smoke alarms before we'd opened the hotel. None of them were active.

The thing with smoke alarms is that if you're cooking with any degree of flair at all, or smoking cigarettes like it's 1958, the bloody things go off unannounced! It's too annoying, not to mention damaging to the eardrums. I wasn't gonna have that nerve-tingling racket going off all the time. But now I had to explain that to Greg Beer.

As we stepped into the sunroom of the hotel, I bought myself some thinking time by opening all the louvre windows one by one, to let the fresh air in from the garden. Beside me I could feel the sergeant developing a relish for his task. He was sure he was onto something, and I knew that as far as the law went smoke alarms without batteries are just the same as no smoke alarms at all.

‘Okay then,' Sergeant Beer said, as I ran out of louvres. ‘If you could please point out where your alarms are located, we'll see what we can find. I presume you do have alarms installed, Noel?'

Nice try, Sergeant, I thought, but it's not going to be that easy.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘we've got sixteen in total. Let's go through to the bar and see if we can solve the mystery.'

As we walked through the sunroom, I was racking my brains for a solution but needn't have bothered. Behind the bar we found big Joan Sutherland in a pair of green cargo shorts and a flannelette shirt, standing on a stool with a plastic bag of AAA Duracell batteries hanging from his wrist. Directly above him on the ceiling the white plastic lid of the smoke alarm was hanging down.

‘Morning, Noel. Morning, Sergeant,' Joan said, smiling broadly as he saw us. ‘Noel, I've just been swapping the batteries over in all the alarms. Must've been duds in them last night, what with all that smoke and them not going off. I got some Duracells from the store. They're the best. Those no-name ones that were in there are next to useless.'

With his right hand he selected two batteries from the bag, clicked them into place and then closed the lid of the alarm. Then he fished out a Winfield Blue from his shirt pocket, lit it with a match and took a big drag. With his huge ruddy frame only centimetres from the device, he exhaled the blue smoke all over it. Straightaway the unbearably high pitched BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP began. Greg Beer and I dived for cover, blocking our ears.

Nonchalantly Joan unclipped the lid of the alarm and switched it off. ‘There,' he said. ‘That's more like it. So what brings you here before opening hours, Sergeant?'

Greg Beer took his hands from his ears and grimaced. He ignored the question.

‘Great minds must think alike, Joan,' I said. ‘Greg had come round to check on our alarms after last night. He was concerned for our safety. But you've had the same thought. And what's more, you've done something about it. Have you replaced all sixteen?'

Joan stepped down gingerly from the bentwood stool, which miraculously hadn't folded under his frame. ‘Yep, all except the one in The Blonde Maria's room. She's still sleeping. I wouldn't dare wake her after the show she put on last night. You should've seen it, Sergeant,' he said, turning to Greg Beer. ‘The girl's magnificent. Everyone who stayed after the smoke had an absolute ball!'

It was now Joan's turn to offer Sergeant Beer a cup of tea or coffee but once again he refused. Muttering something about paperwork back at the station, he made his farewells and promptly left through the sunroom door.

I turned to Joan and positively cheered. ‘How the fuckin' hell did you know he was here for the alarms?'

Joan shook his head from side to side in wonderment. ‘I didn't, Noely. I was genuinely checking the bloody things. Couldn't work out how come they hadn't gone off. Woke up in the middle of the night worrying about it. Then I find there's no friggin' batteries in any of 'em! But of course I couldn't tell the sergeant that. I twigged right away that he wasn't here for bacon and eggs.'

‘Certainly wasn't,' I said. ‘Now take those bloody batteries out again, will ya? You can't even suck a cigarette in here without the silly things going off. And you just proved it.'

Although we never had to fumigate property developers from the hotel again, if we left those batteries in the alarms they would've been sure to go off over the following weeks. Especially on those lucky nights when my brother Jim would agree to cook up his famous west coast bisque for the patrons. As he poured the St Agnes brandy over the charred crab and crayfish shells, the crowd in the bar, nicely sluiced on the Dancing Brolgas, would stand around in keen anticipation. And then the moment would come. With a flourish Jim would ignite the dish, which roared into flame. The crowd would hoot with excitement, all the while licking their lips at the thought of the dinner ahead. The flames would re-settle, giving off the rich aromatic smoke, and Joan Sutherland would do his nightly whip around to see how many takers there were. Who would ever want to ruin such a dramatic, oceanic, culinary moment as that with an earbashing siren from some electrical shop?