The Grand Hotel (2 page)

Over the next few days I kept a lookout but never saw the brolga again. I began to draw in my sketchbook, and to think. I realised that back in town I had been wrongfooted, duped; I'd been naive, deluded. I had let myself be besieged by tawdry disappointments, one after the other and seemingly unstoppable, until I'd tricked myself into believing I couldn't bear it anymore.

In those last days out among the clefts and overhangs I began drawing the brolga from memory, with a few quick, fluent and easily repeatable lines. First I showed it emerging out of the bush, like a vibrant light out of the nondescript. I drew it sitting beside me at night, as a miracle companion by the fire. I drew it wide awake with a comical glint in its eye, and then asleep, with its beak and long neck tucked under its wing. That last image I keep as some kind of talisman in my wallet to this day. Simply put, it makes me happy. After all the uproarious flights and fancies of The Grand Hotel it seems the closest thing to the dreaming at its source. The world is sad, yes, tragic in fact, but out there in that little clearing by the creek I discovered how not to go under, how to survive as a stranger in an ancient land under siege.

The laughter came easily and with much relief. In the end I laughed so hard that I cried a comic's tears into the river below the little camp I'd found. And finally, with the searing taste of salt on my lips, I decided I could go back. Back to Mangowak.

With my new and unexpected lightness also came a surprising bonus. According to the geologists the land in our home valley had been inundated once, to the extent that migrating whales had swum right over the roof of my house. But thousands of years ago the waters had drawn back, leaving the two ridges and the riverflat etched in their current arrangement, like a three-dimensional print with the fluent inky line of the remnant river running seaward through the flat to the rivermouth. With the vision of the brolga in my heart and my swag hoisted high on the overhangs I now felt I could see this landform like never before. From my lookouts I understood the contours of the thing. The place where we lived was just like any dwelling: there were spaces, big and small, geological walls and balconies, wooded passageways, rocky verandahs, an entrance and exit. It was somewhere to be, a home, and of course it always had been, long before any of our houses were built.

Now I'd decided to go back, I realised I couldn't ignore this vision – that struck me right then as the worst kind of bad taste, to just walk in via the Dray Road, for instance, as I had walked out like a zombie on that earlier night. No, this time I would enter the right way, take a deeper route, and I could see as clear as day what that deeper route would be.

On the western side of our rivermouth a straight white line of beach runs away for three or so kilometres until it ends at the imposing hills that formed such a barrier between us and the town of Minapre back before the Ocean Road was carved among them. On the eastern side of our rivermouth, however, there is no such obstacle or epic sweep, only a series of coves with high cliffs that dance away, one after the other, like the shore's own cursive script. These coves eventually end at a large reddish bluff, where they simply straighten out into low dunes and another stretch of beach. But just before the coves end at the bluff is a blowhole. As I stood looking down on the world from high on a mossy bush overhang, it came to me clear that I should enter from that side, from the side where each new day begins, where every morning the universe hauls its light up above the thin rim of the sea. I would re-enter my home through the front door, not as a prodigal son as such but with new knowledge nevertheless, and new respect. I would re-enter the town through the blowhole.

The Plinths

I came scrabbling down through the rocks and trees and hit the beach at Bowman's Bluff, its big ochre brow and nose jutting out above the sea. I crossed the Ocean Road warily and with a sudden rush to the other side, looking just like some shy marsupial no doubt. Then I stepped onto the sand with bare feet, stared at the waves like a twit, resisted the temptation to splash my face, and headed across the flat rocks under the bluff.

Once around the bluff it's only half a mile or so to the blowhole: just the two last smallish coves that resist the southwesterlies and are consequently good for garfishing, a flat stretch with a big ocean pool at the end, and then up onto a raw limestone moonscape and down again to the entrance all purple with mussels.

It was good to see the keyhole of the rock again, the blowhole, one of nature's true prosceniums, a golden arch of an altogether ancient order, a marine talisman, a natural front door to the house of the town.

Its orientation is east-south-east and the ocean pounds into its long wide gutter at high tides, sundering into the limestone and basalt with a satisfying woof and whack and then a subterranean
boom
. It slaps and shapes this little spot of the earth and creates the rhythmic turquoise upwellings my brothers and I dared so often to float on as children.

Looking down from the hills, I'd timed my entrance for an outgoing tide and stepped into the thigh-deep water of the ocean gutter with my swag held above my head. As the gentle waves approached and reached for my navel, I winced for the tickling cold. But with only a few slow wading steps I was directly under the arch, in the echoey acoustic of the blowhole. Then with a shiver and a pause I passed up and through to the quiet pool on the other side.

I'd arrived. I stepped carefully along the slickened flat-stones of the pool while above me the sky had cleared. On the small strip of sand beyond the pool I felt like a broken wave. A broken wave made to sigh everlasting, to flow on, to ripple without end. I laid my swag down, coated in weeks of bush-dust, and stretched. Then I got down on wet cotton knees and splashed my face.

It felt right. By returning this way, I already felt a tuning in me, a note struck well, a lightness, like the humour of the brolga. I felt a sudden rush of the power of the ground I knew best, and everything in a proportional relation to it.

Looking up with a salty face at the arch of the blowhole and then down onto the golden rocks on either side, I saw the letters and names, the dates, the proud claims and lovers' gestures too, that had been carved in the stone over countless summers.

I sat down smiling at those carvings, remembering some, noticing others for the first time, waiting till I was rested. I picked up the swag then and headed for home, along the broad beach of the Heatherbrae Cove.

Of course I hadn't expected to find balloons but as I came around the corner of the blowhole the beach stretching out in front of me was dotted with them. First a dot of lemon, then a dot of orange, then of black, then silver, then royal blue and pale blue, white, green and finally purple. I laughed – it was becoming a habit – my mouth opening skywards, and I walked along Heatherbrae gathering up the balloons.

By the time I got to the western end of the beach, where the steps lead up through the hook and the elbow to the clifftop car park, I held a bunch of balloons all tied together with their strings. I felt like I was headed to a party and, looking back, I suppose I was.

A man was coming down the steps. He must have thought I was quite a sight. The only mirror I'd seen in ten weeks was in the still upper reaches of the river, I must have been filthy, and now I had a bunch of balloons in tow as well.

On the narrow beach path we stopped to exchange pleasantries and he told me he'd seen the balloons strewn over the sand from his beach-house up on the headland. ‘Where do you think they've come from?' he asked. ‘Do you think they've been blown in off a boat?'

Having had the vision to re-enter the town through the arch of the blowhole and then broken like a little wave on the beach, I simply smiled at him from deep within with my new attitude and said, ‘You know what? I think they've come from somewhere a little while ago, sometime back in the past.'

Suddenly then he had scribble on his brow, his frown full of nonplussed consternation, and immediately he began to look at me suspiciously, scanning me up and down with a landlordish air. Well, okay, I thought, if that's the limit of your conversation ... so I did the same to him: white hair the colour of the shore-break, polo shirt yellow as tinned counter-lunch corn, blue shorts for Rhode Island kudos on the sunny winter beach, stringy calves of an elderly golfer, black sandals smeared with silver trackdust.

Finally I pointed out to him that one of the balloons, the magenta one in the middle, had stars and spirals printed all over it, along with the words ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR!'.

Given that it was July, his mottled jaw sprang open and he shook his head in a baffled way. I laughed again, this time a bit louder, said toorah and stepped on past him, off through the spinning cocoons that always seem to dangle over the handmade Heatherbrae steps, no matter the season.

I decided, given my state of dress and the bright handful of balloons, that I'd skip the roads and the smalltown gaze, and make my way home along the relative privacy of the clifftop track.

I made my way along the high part of the track, then down through Tupong Gully and up again until I was approaching Horseshoe Cove. It felt great to be back – even greater with eyes that shone anew and flesh that had its feeling restored. I virtually pranced around the lighthouse sitting out on the point in front of the meteorological station, excited now by the proximity of home. And then, as I descended through the bearded heath from the shoulder above the rivermouth, I saw them: the Plinths.

There were three of them, towering white above the water in the middle of the estuary. They were carved from the white local limestone, tapered, wedge shaped, in the manner of Romanesque piles. The front Plinth stood right in the mouth of the river, with sea and land water mingling uneasily on either side of it, and the two others stood side by side, about thirty metres apart and statuesque, further back in the stiller inlet water behind the dune hummock. And on the top of each one was a giant bronze bell, at least two metres tall. I could see each bell swinging ever so slightly in the breeze, and then gradually a little more strongly as it freshened, until finally they began to toll loudly in the wind.

I stood on the track digesting the scene. Three white stone Plinths in the grey-black river, with bells going clackety-ding-dong-clang. God knows how loud those bells would be if the wind really picked up, I thought. God knows what a racket they'd make in a storm!

Slowly I walked down the track towards the water, snorting through my nose, before laughing outright at the thought that I, little me, could ever think myself conspicuous merely by being covered in riversilt and bushdust, and holding a bunch of coloured balloons.

‘Come on, Noely,' I said to myself out loud. ‘How could you ever compete with this?'

Stepping onto the sand by the rivermouth, I found our world-champion local earbasher Givva Way, standing patiently in his white house-painter's overalls, his fawn terrier pissing by the sea wrack on the water's edge.

‘G'day, Noel,' he said, in a friendly way. ‘What's with the balloons?'

I snorted, happily. ‘Never mind the balloons, Givva. What's with the bells?'

He looked over to the Plinths, their giant bronze bells slowly oscillating and ringing intermittently in the salty midmorning air. He ran a hand through his black mop of paint-flecked hair and said with a lopsided grin, ‘The Plinths? Bloody amazing aren't they?'

His dog finished pissing and Givva uncharacteristically left it at that. ‘Good to see you back, Noel. We've all been waiting for you to arrive,' he said, before wandering off up the beach towards the road.

I stood still, swag on my back, fit but lean after my time away. With my left hand on a bony hip and my right hand clutching the string of the bobbling balloons, I stared in astonishment again at the Plinths. They were indeed ‘bloody amazing', just as Givva had said, but more than that they were the first proof that although my exile in the clefts and overhangs was over, nothing in my life would ever be quite the same again. All ties were cut, all bets off, all melancholy and woodenness set free on a piteous chuckle.

Local Job for a Local Boy

I walked into the driveway of my house under the two towering pines and slung off my swag, wondering momentarily about Givva's comment that everyone had been waiting for me to return. Why on earth would they be waiting for me? Before I'd left, I lived so quietly – labouring part-time with my brother, rustling up pictures in my barn on the other days, seeing my close group of friends from time to time but consciously going out of my way to keep my head down. Most people would have had to be paying real attention to know I'd even gone at all.

I tied the balloons to the old tugboat rope that has hung from one of the pines since my exhibition of knot paintings in '96. The balloons looked good there, they brightened up the entrance, and below them on the ground two or three white polystyrene buoys sitting buff on the pine needles looked like part of the new arrangement.

I looked around. Nothing much seemed to have changed since I'd been gone. The only difference I could see was that the grass in the yard between my house and my barn was a foot taller, the house spouting was spiky with pine needles, and the two doors of the shed on the outside kitchen wall had come open. I walked over and closed the shed doors and was about to enter the house when my nephew Oscar drove into the driveway. In a white station wagon. Before I'd left, he didn't even have a licence.

Oscar was so proud of his new wheels he didn't get out of the car; he just wound down the window, beamed and gave me the thumbs up. A gust of breeze creaked in the pines and I heard the faint toll of the Plinth bells ringing back down at the rivermouth.

‘Well hello, Ossie,' I said fondly. ‘Your car?'

‘Yep, Uncle Noely. My car.'

‘How is it?'

‘It's
good
,' he said, with great enthusiasm. He beamed at me, with a bright flash of his big teeth. ‘Where you been, Uncle Noel? It's been months.'

‘Oh, here and there,' I said lightly. ‘Camping mainly.'

‘I see your swag's taken a hammering,' he said, glancing over to where the tattered bundle of canvas sat on the ground.

‘Yep,' I replied. ‘It's been through a bit, that's for sure.'

We went inside for a cup of tea. Luckily we both have it black, as the only milk in the fridge smelt like expensive French cheese. I chucked it out for the magpies through the front doors of the living room and dug out some shortbread from the end cupboard. We went first things first then and talked about the Plinths.

‘They're public sculptures,' Oscar told me. ‘Commissioned by the shire.'

‘I kind of figured that might be the case. But do the bells ring all night long?'

Oscar laughed. ‘They did at first. They're designed to ring in the slightest breath of wind. And boy did they ring! But then after a week or so everyone kicked up a fuss. You know how the sound travels in this valley. In the end they had to do something about it.'

‘So, what did they do?'

He laughed again. ‘Well, Uncle Noely, they pay me eighty dollars a day to row out and tie the bells down at dusk, then go out again first thing and untie.'

I nearly spilt my tea. Then I made a few quick calculations. ‘Let me get this right, Ossie. You're saying the shire pays you over five hundred bucks a week to tie and untie those bells every morning and night?'

‘Yep. I just row out in the canoe. Or swim if it's warm. It's for something called “The Year of the Maritime”. The Plinths are there to express a shipping feel. Well, that's what it says in my job description. They're gonna take them down again after twelve months, though there's a lot of people round town who seem to like them and want them to stay.'

‘Like who, the cormorants?'

‘Yeah,' laughed Oscar. ‘Anyway, did you hear about the pub, Uncle Noel?'

‘I did, Ossie,' I said, smiling. ‘Just before I left town.'

It was actually the very day before I'd left town. I was walking down the hill from the general store with my dog, Pippy, when I saw the white planning permit flapping in the breeze outside the pub. With trepidation I walked over to read it. Our town's one and only pub was to be knocked down and replaced with a cluster of eco-apartments called Wathaurong Heights.

In my wildest dreams I'd never imagined that with one stroke of a pen our town's sole watering hole and communal meeting place could be obliterated. Nor had I imagined the proud and sorrowful history of the Wathaurong ever being used as a lifestyle lure, in cahoots with a famous English romantic novel, to appeal to the cashed-up classes. The whole thing was like a sick joke.

But this was the latest in a long line of rude shocks in the town. A few months previous, when our local shire had decided to roof in a section of our creek, so that young mothers and their children could sit on the bank and enjoy the river when it rains, we were simply flummoxed. Then, when it was announced in our local paper that roosters had been outlawed in the shire for reasons of acoustic pollution, we began to get pissed off. And finally, when we had all received a letter in the post informing us that Mangowak was officially no longer to be called a town but rather a ‘village', my head began to brood. And then this. A piece of flapping white paper nailed to the treated pine pole below the ‘LIVE CRAYS' sign. As I read what it had to say, some previously wholehearted thing inside me seemed to vanish forever.

I didn't lash out or fire into an indignant rage. Instead I simply put one foot in front of the other, cut through the spare paddock down the hill to my home in the riverflat, dropped Pippy and my canary, Frankie, off with friends, and later that night walked out of town.

‘Yeah, it's terrible isn't it?' Oscar was saying now, sitting opposite me at the table. ‘They stand to make a lot more money with those apartments than they ever have out of the pub. But where are we all gonna hang out? There's plans afoot, you know, Uncle Noel. They're funny plans too, I reckon. I suppose you haven't heard, though, given you've just got back.'

‘No, I daresay I haven't. What plans are they?'

‘Well, it started off as a joke and that ... but then ... well, I dunno. Maybe I shouldn't be the one to tell you. Old Kooka's the one. He's got all the goss. Go and see him. He'll fill you in.'

Oscar started giggling, presumably thinking about these ‘funny plans' to do with the hotel. Quickly he slurped down what was left of his tea and excused himself, saying he'd really only pulled in to the old house to pick up his wetsuit from the line.

I took his cup, clapped him on the back and said it was good to see him. He said, ‘Vice versa, Uncle Noel.' At the back door I congratulated him again on finally getting his wheels.