The Grand Hotel (13 page)

The Little-Girl Voice

I didn't see The Lazy Tenor for the rest of the day, but at 5pm sharp he was standing at the bar, leaning on his elbow with a glass in his hand, his jaw jutting out and a sociable twinkle in his eye.

First he started talking to Joan Sutherland behind the bar, but instead of small-talking his way towards familiarity or exchanging pleasantries in order to establish a healthy and indefatigable drinker-to-barman relationship, he launched straight into describing his own purpose in life, which, as he said, was once to ‘shag anything that moved' and now was simply to tell people about it by writing his upstairs masterpiece.

But of course, after Jen and the boys had had to go home early the night before, Big Joan was not as genial as he normally would've been. In fact, declaring his ground straightaway, he suggested to The Lazy Tenor that The Horse Room might be a more suitable place for the retelling of his exploits. ‘Plus,' said Joan, ‘tonight for Happy Hour we're reverting to Noel's old favourite, live-streaming Vatican Radio from Italy. I think you and the Pope might be at cross purposes.'

On hearing this information The Lazy Tenor beamed, just like he had when he'd heard the ‘Drunken Seals' loop on Duchamp. It seemed that the crazier the pub was the more he liked it. When Guido the Tourist and a friend walked in during Happy Hour, I watched closely for their reactions. As they ordered their drinks from Joan, they had Pope Benedict on one side, whining away at his digital angelus, and The Lazy Tenor on the other side, describing ‘shoehorning a salesgirl in a back room at Northland'. I don't know quite whether you would call the scenario Dada but it was certainly uproarious, contradictory and atypical, as the look on the faces of the two out-of-towners showed as they took their drinks and sat down at a table.

Once again Veronica was aghast at The Lazy Tenor's narratives. She kept glaring at me as she moved about the hotel, picking up dirty glasses and plates and emptying ashtrays. She had a point, of course. It wasn't as if The Lazy Tenor's exploits made for brilliant entertainment – most of the tales were told purely to the advantage of his own sexual prowess and for that they lacked both charm and imagination. The thing was, though, he very seldom actually swore. His language was too euphemistic to be foul, and therefore it required a certain amount of interpretation along the way. Because of this it seemed almost possible that children could've stayed in the bar after all, as he spoke of the ‘hairy magnet' and the ‘shoehorn'. In the end, however, it's always too difficult to tell just how much your average nine-or ten-year-old does understand about sex. And so, for that reason alone, with The Lazy Tenor as a Happy Hour fixture I feared that the public bar of The Grand Hotel was about to become like a typical Australian public bar of old, full of men and men alone, all clutching their beers for dear life as over in the lounge, or outside in the beer garden, or back at home, their wives and kids left them alone to their shickered shadow life. Any inkling of such a scene in a hotel of mine had to be stopped. We had both a tradition and a new charter to uphold, a tradition going back to the original Grand Hotel, of true and open hospitality in Mangowak, and a new charter that called for a different type of open slather, for the spreading of the freedom virus and a new knockabout rendition of the end of the world.

This of course was where the problems lay. On the one hand, yes, an eight-year-old could no longer pour beer in the bar with The Lazy Tenor in full swing but, on the other hand, the very idea of such a wildcard turning up to stay was very much in the spirit of our charter. Struck by the dilemma, I poured myself a Dancing Brolga and sat quietly on one of the old church pews at the big table to ruminate. ‘If only he wasn't so boorish,' I was thinking, when Oscar stepped through from the sunroom looking for me.

The kid had a worried look on his face and sat down beside me on the pew. He whispered up close, ‘What the hell have you done to The Blonde Maria?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, she's up in her room, still in a dressing gown and refusing to come down and sing. And people keep on coming up to me wanting to know when we're starting. They're sick of listening to bozo over there.'

He pointed in the direction of The Lazy Tenor, who was midstream with his hands out wide, re-enacting another scenario for Kooka, the Grundig, Givva Way, and a frustrated Joan Sutherland behind the bar.

‘Well why won't she come down?' I asked Oscar.

‘She won't say. She's totally different all of a sudden. She's talking in a little-girl voice like Marilyn Monroe and drinking ouzo out of the bottle. And she won't budge.'

‘Shit.'

‘Yeah, shit, Uncle Noel. Me and Dad and the boys are ready to roll, and believe you me if we don't play something soon that bloke over there at the bar's gonna get lynched.'

I frowned and drained the rest of my beer. ‘I'll go and have a word with her,' I said, getting up off the pew.

I stomped upstairs, giving The Blonde Maria plenty of footfall by way of a warning that I was coming. At the top of the stairs, however, I found the platypus and black ducks floating happily in the hallway carpet and the willows of the old unrevegetated wallpaper rustling blithely above me. The air was soothing, cool and quiet after the dynamics of the bar.

After knocking gently, I entered the room to find her sitting, just as Oscar had described, on a chair by the window table in her dressing gown. Looking up at me, she smiled meekly.

In front of her on the table was a bottle of ouzo, a packet of Peter Stuyvesants, and a half finished jigsaw of the Bavarian Alps. I pulled up a chair and sat beside her, facing the pine trees out the window. She bowed her head but said nothing.

I don't know why I didn't come straight to the point. I just sensed that the situation was suddenly very delicate and that our previously bawdy chanteuse had now to be treated with kid gloves. Idly I started flicking through the pieces of the jigsaw, looking for the solid block of pale blue that the jigsaw lid showed the alpine light was reflecting in the window of the mountain hut.

The Blonde Maria took a swig from the ouzo bottle and silently the two of us looked at the little hut in the foothills, dwarfed by the great Bavarian mountains behind. The Blonde Maria lit a cigarette. She offered me one by pushing the pack towards me, but I declined.

‘So what is it?' I asked gently. ‘They're all expecting you down there.'

In a tiny tremulous little voice she replied, ‘I know.'

I frowned. She was in a very strange state.

‘So what's wrong, Maria? Why won't you get dressed and come down? Jim and Oscar and the band are itching to start.'

‘I don't know,' she said, again in the frail little-girl voice.

‘Well you must have some idea.'

She shook her head, with an ashamed look on her face.

I leant back on my chair and stared out at the pine trees. ‘The thing is, Maria ... you can tell me what's on your mind, whatever it is that's troubling you. I can take it.'

She took a drag on her smoke and looked sheepish again, but apart from that nothing, just silence.

Out in the hallway now I almost thought I could hear the river lapping at the door.

‘Look,' I said, a bit more firmly. ‘If you don't come down and sing, The Connotations are gonna become The Barrels again. They'll bore everyone senseless.' I laughed, to make light of things. ‘And someone will bop The Lazy Tenor right on the nose. Probably Joan Sutherland I reckon.'

At this apparently innocuous remark the ouzo-swilling jigsaw player just crumpled in her dressing gown. She began sobbing uncontrollably.

I got the shock of my life. What the hell was going on? Instinctively I put my arm around her, comforting her, while trying to nut it out.

She sobbed and sobbed, her body rocking to and fro on the chair. Finally, and still in the little-girl voice, she said, ‘I'd like the night off, Noel, please, if that's okay. I need the night off.'

Her pain was so demonstrative and her voice so fey and eerie that I had no hesitation. ‘Okay, Maria,' I said. ‘That's absolutely fine. Take the night off. You've been going hard haven't you? You've been a trooper. I'll tell Jim and the boys to go back to the stuff they were doing before you showed up. Who knows, we might even get The Lazy Tenor to sing. Did I tell you how come he's called The Lazy Tenor?'

With this question she started sobbing uncontrollably again and didn't answer. I rubbed her back and cooed. ‘There there,' I said. ‘Calm down. It's alright. You're just tired. Why don't you get into bed?'

Ten minutes later I left her still in the chair, having settled down a bit after I changed the subject back to the jigsaw. I told her I'd pop back up later in the evening to check that she was alright and that I'd even bring her a plate of Nan's mushroom moussaka, which was on the menu that night. The Blonde Maria nodded and smiled at me weakly. For the moment there was nothing more I could do. I clicked her door shut and headed back down the stairs.

Kooka Falls Off His Perch

When I got back downstairs, a row had erupted, but not the one I was expecting. The seemingly innocuous Italian tourist Guido had turned up with a T-shirt that had ‘Skinheads D'Italia' written on it, and when someone had asked him about it all hell had broken loose. Guido had gone on a long and obscure political tirade about the glacial inadequacies of democratic processes in the climate-change era and the can-do powers of neo-fascism.

It seemed Skinheads D'Italia was a far-right cult who worshipped at the shrine of Mussolini. Guido had obviously had quite a few Dancing Brolgas, and his normally sociable and gregarious personality had warped into a defiant stance. Challenged by a cluster of locals on the philosophy of the Skinheads D'Italia cult, he grew increasingly arrogant. As Ash Bowen started accusing him of anti-Semitism, Guido took a patronising tone, dismissing not the Jewish peoples but rather Australia and Australians as the idiot children of the global village. ‘Yoo are sheltaired. To yoo laiff iz a plything,' he was saying, as I made my way behind the bar to stand beside Joan. ‘But, een Yoorope we mast faize ther chairlengerz. We mast be ztrong end see ther sityooaijen en howl eet ken be kyewered.'

Of course neo-fascism was one thing but saying that Australians were irrelevant innocents was another. People really started to get their backs up, and the more riled they became the more supercilious Guido's smile of certainty became. Even The Lazy Tenor interrupted his own monologues to tell Guido to ‘put a sock in it'. Well, that was a turn-up. Eventually Veronica and Ash Bowen engaged Guido in some serious analysis of the Skinheads D'Italia platform and the three of them went over to the pews to argue it out.

The bar was quite full by this stage, and noisy as all get-out. What with The Lazy Tenor still bar-slapping about his exploits to a small but appreciative crowd and the declarations of Guido raising the room temperature, and of course with Jim, Oscar, and the rest of The Barrels impatiently tuning up and noodling on their instruments, not to mention Pope Benedict's whining incantations from the speakers at the bar, the scene was quite chaotic.

I poured myself a Loosener and went over to tell Jim that The Blonde Maria wasn't coming down. He was demoralised by the news. I tried to cheer him up. ‘Come on,' I cajoled, ‘it's only one night. You played plenty of gigs before she ever showed up.'

‘Yeah, but we had no idea what it was to play great live music then,' Jim declared. ‘She's showed us, Noely. She's raised the bar. We can't go back to
Top Cat
and
Morning of the Earth
now. It just feels backward.'

I rolled my eyes. That was all I needed. ‘Come on,' I said. ‘If you guys don't start up, everyone'll be stuck with either bozo at the bar or the Nazi in the corner. You wouldn't want that would ya?'

Jim peered over at The Lazy Tenor and then across at where Guido was gesticulating at Veronica and Ash. He shook his head slowly. But he said nothing. Eventually he just blurted, ‘It's a fuckin' mess, Noel,' stood up and began putting his guitar back into its case.

‘Hey, wait a minute,' I said, alarmed. ‘Don't put that away yet. I'm relying on you.'

Jim swung back around angrily and brought his face up close to mine. Our noses were nearly touching as he pulled big-brother rank over me.

‘Now you listen here, kid,' he said. ‘Don't you dare lay that trip on me. You're the one who's dragged everyone into this weirdo freakshow you're calling a hotel. What do you reckon Mum and Dad would say about this place? Hey?'

I wiped the spittle of my elder brother off my cheeks and scoffed. ‘What, and you haven't been having a good time? Don't give me that.'

At which point Jim pushed me in the chest. But just as we were ready to have our first fist fight in many a long year, a loud resounding CRACK was heard from across the room. Jim and I forgot our disagreement and looked over to see old Kooka falling from his bentwood bar stool onto the hard wooden floor.

Everyone stopped their conversations and immediately hurried to Kooka's aid. The old bloke with the bronzed bull head was lying pale and crumpled in his slacks and white singlet on the floor. His mouth was pursed and his eyes pinched, closed tight in pain. Veronica and Joan leant over him and checked his pulse and breathing. He was still alive but his complexion was ghostly white and he looked to be in some degree of discomfort. What was going on? Had the stool collapsed under him, or was he having a heart attack?

From the beer garden Jen Sutherland miraculously appeared with a first-aid kit and, grabbing a cushion from one of the bar-room couches, propped it under Kooka's head and made him more comfortable. As I leant across and clicked off the ‘record' button on the Grundig, it seemed that Kooka was coming around. Maybe he had just fainted? Joan took two white towels from his wife and ran them under a cold tap behind the bar. He handed them back to Jen, who wiped the old-timer's brow and told everyone gently to stand back.

After a few minutes it seemed that Kooka was quite stable. He still hadn't opened his eyes but he was breathing evenly and responding to questions. When Jen offered him a glass of water, he shook his head and asked for a claret. Jen suggested that mightn't be such a good idea but Kooka was adamant. ‘A claret. Lovely,' he said, in a hoarse but calm voice.

As the licensee of the hotel and a great supporter of Kooka's historical activities, I cut straight to the chase. I reached up above the bar into our claret store and popped the cork on a 1971 Hardys Red. Slopping a bit into a glass to check that it hadn't turned, I took a sip and then filled up the remainder. What a drop! It was full, complex, a tonic for even the healthier among us, let alone those who'd just fallen off their perch.

‘Here you go, old fella,' I said, leaning down and putting the claret to Kooka's lips. Still he didn't open his eyes. But he took a sip and breathed easy.

‘Been known to cure a broken leg,' he said quietly.

He took another sip and ran his tongue across his lips. But then his eyes pinched again and he grimaced, obviously still in some kind of pain. ‘Nice drop,' he said in a whisper, and then, ‘Hit “stop”.'

‘What's that, Kooka?' I said.

‘Hit “stop”,' he said again, but still I couldn't make out what he meant. I looked over my shoulder at Jen to see whether she heard it more clearly. Jen just shrugged.

‘Sorry, Kooka, I didn't catch that,' I said, leaning in towards him with my right ear.

‘Hit “stop”,' he said again, but this time added, ‘on the Grundig.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘It's already done, Kooka. I stopped the tape just after you fell.'

Kooka nodded slowly. ‘More plonk,' he said then.

Before long he had drained the glass but was still wincing occasionally with pain and hadn't opened his eyes. What were we going to do? At some point he'd have to see a doctor, but he didn't look like he wanted to be moved far right then. The Lazy Tenor, who'd been waiting patiently at the corner of the bar to resume his narratives, suggested we carry the old fella upstairs and pop him on his bed in The Sewing Room. It seemed like a sensible idea.

‘Would you like to lie down upstairs for a while, Kooka?' Jen whispered in his ear, as she stroked his brow with the cool towel.

The old man nodded. ‘Yairs,' he said. ‘A little lie down.'

The problem was he couldn't walk. We weren't even sure he could stand. Eventually we decided we'd have to carry him.

Immediately The Lazy Tenor left his talking post at the corner of the bar and moved towards Kooka. ‘Here,' he said. ‘I'll carry him upstairs.'

Before any of us could protest, The Lazy Tenor had bent down on his haunches and carefully, even tenderly, lifted Kooka up off the hotel floor. In one fluid movement he hoisted him over his left shoulder, just as you would a bag of Yeo potatoes. Kooka didn't even flinch. He just hung there, claret-lipped, slack-mouthed, draped over The Lazy Tenor's towering frame, where he promptly fell fast asleep.

The Lazy Tenor marched out of the bar, through the sunroom, past The Horse Room and Duchamp and up the stairs. I followed with Jen, the first-aid kit and the bottle of 1971 Hardys. As we reached the Sewing Room door, I could hear the opening strains of ‘Peace in the Valley' coming from downstairs. It seemed that Kooka's turn had changed Jim's mind. The Barrels were up and running again.

Since Kooka had moved into The Sewing Room, I'd paid little attention to it. In fact I'd hardly even been in there since the day we helped him move. To my surprise now, as we entered, I found the room just as we'd left it that day. The boxes and crates of the archive sat unopened near the ocean-facing window, and the only furniture was the single bed in the middle of the large room, the wicker chair beside it, a small bedside table and Mum's two old standard lamps. Apart from that the room was empty and as always seemed quite a vast and cavernous space.

Gently The Lazy Tenor eased old Kooka down onto the bed, and Jen removed his shoes. We let him lie there above the blankets for a time, just to observe how he was faring. There was a little bit of colour coming back into his face but even so he had still not opened his eyes. He was obviously exhausted. The Lazy Tenor stepped back out of the room without a word, no doubt keen to get back downstairs, and left myself and Jen to attend to the old man.

Jen started asking Kooka questions, trying to ascertain whether he'd broken any bones or was feeling any physical discomfort, but he would just shake his head and finally she stopped asking. The two of us sat there with Kooka under the high pitched roofs of The Sewing Room and shrugged our shoulders. We discussed the possibilities in a whisper and agreed that we'd call our local doctor, Bernard Feast, first thing in the morning. For the time being it seemed as if Kooka was happy to rest.

Jen had left her two boys at home with her sister, and so she stayed beside Kooka's bed for the rest of the night until stumps. Downstairs in the bar The Barrels seemed to have found a way to enjoy just being an old surf band again and The Lazy Tenor had retired to The Horse Room so his stories could be heard without the racket. At closing time, when I went upstairs and took over from Jen, she assured me that Kooka was quite calm. I sat there falling in and out of sleep right through the small hours. Even though I was meant to be keeping an eye on the old bloke, I have to admit that sitting in the quiet of The Sewing Room in the middle of the night flooded me with memories, not only of my goodnight chats with Mum as a kid but also of all the old stories she used to tell us about growing up with Papa in the meteorological station.

When the next morning dawned with the warbling of magpies, Kooka didn't wake up. Well, he did briefly – he even opened his eyes at one point and looked around the large room – but he closed his eyes again straightaway, rearranged his body among the bedclothes and began to snore.

When Dr Feast arrived after breakfast, he stood at the end of Kooka's bed for quite some time, just observing him. Eventually he woke the old fella gently, felt his pulse with his finger, checked his heart rate with his ear, before declaring that there seemed nothing much the matter with him. Dr Feast, as thorough and old fashioned as he is, could only describe what had happened to Kooka as ‘a turn'. He suggested he have a break from alcohol and just lie in the bed in The Sewing Room and rest.

After the check-up I did the usual thing and asked Dr Feast to join me downstairs for a cup of tea and a biscuit. We sat in the bar talking casually about the town, and of course about the progress of the hotel. Then, just as he was finishing his tea and getting up to leave, we heard that honey-toned morning voice again, singing from upstairs in Room One.

At hearing the opening words of the famous aria from
La Traviata
, Bernard Feast's eyes opened wide at the bar. Without so much as a word to me he put down his Gladstone bag and walked slowly into the sunroom, where he stood listening. Then, as if in a trance, he stepped out of the sunroom and into the backyard. I watched him stop there under the pine trees, looking up towards The Lazy Tenor's window quite agog.

The Lazy Tenor sang the aria over and over again that morning. The weather was still fine, the pollen still drifting, and with his voice in the gauzy air, time, as we have grown accustomed to it, once again ceased to exist.

I sat down on the two-seater couch in the sunroom and experienced the double pleasure of listening to The Lazy Tenor's morning song and watching Dr Feast's enjoyment of it. He obviously knew the piece, because after a while he started mouthing the words. When finally The Lazy Tenor concluded his morning session, the good doctor, whose sure hands and safe judgement had brought nearly the whole population of Mangowak and Minapre into the world over the years, shook his head slowly from side to side and began to applaud.

It's funny but I immediately panicked, fearing The Lazy Tenor mightn't respond well to applause for what seemed to be just a personal habit of his mornings. Abruptly I raised my hand in the air, gesturing urgently through the window to the doctor to stop.