The Grand Hotel (8 page)

A New Use for Frankincense

For the second night of the hotel we changed the recording in Duchamp, swapping ‘The Irridex' with a piece called ‘Lifeline to the Perfect Man'. Like the night before I got Kooka to read it onto tape in his warbly old-timer's voice:

Once again, when we opened at three, people were hell-bent on drinking fast just so they could hear what Duchamp had to tell them. And like on the opening night, when the tradesmen arrived after knock-off at 4.30, you could have sold tickets to get into the toilet. They thought ‘Lifeline to the Perfect Man' was, once again, a pisser.

On the verges and banks of the grassy ditches all around the house there were half as many cars and utes as the previous night, but just as many people inside the hotel. The cut rate for walkers and cyclists had chimed in nicely and an unexpected by-product was that Greg Beer, our local coppa, congratulated me on what he thought was a masterstroke in the battle against drink-driving.

Greg Beer's personality will always be defined for me by the fact that back at primary school he chose to spend his lunchtimes picking up papers in the yard while the rest of us were hounding bluetongue lizards or throwing water bombs. ‘Before you get too carried away,' I said to the wiry sergeant in the bar, ‘tonight we're calling for contributions towards our “Clippin' the Eucalyptus Film Night”. We're gonna show as many examples as we can get of legendary drink-driving escapades captured on people's home movies. You know, picnics being sideswiped, bogged Holden station wagons, utes in creekbeds. And plenty of people just driving along, without a care in the world, playing a tune with their zigzagging vehicles on the leaves of the roadside gums. You'd be aware yourself, Greg, that there's bound to be a bumper crop.'

Greg Beer frowned at me. ‘And why would you wanna do that for, Noel? Just when I thought you were making some kind of valid community contribution.'

I laughed. ‘Oh this'll be a great contribution, Greg. It's the gathering of local history. Speak to Kooka about it, he'll tell you. You shouldn't deny your past after all. You shouldn't cover over your history, should you? Well, there'll be none of that at The Grand Hotel, I can assure you of that, Sergeant.'

Greg Beer gave me one of his squinty looks, as if he thought I was barking mad. In actual fact we both knew the truth was a little more complex. I had just touched a raw nerve. Greg Beer and his sister Susan had had a hard time being raised by their alcoholic mother, Meryl, in their fibro house up on Carroll Street, and at times Greg's whole subsequent life as an abstemious policeman seemed like one hugely determined effort to erase the memory. No doubt the image of his poor mum slumped over the green Coolabah cask in the Carroll Street kitchen was in both our minds as we agreed to disagree over the drink-driving question in the bar.

That second night was packed, uproarious, with The Blonde Maria thoroughly enjoying meeting everyone in the bar, particularly the members of The Barrels, and all the locals seeming to enjoy encountering the oddities of the establishment. I actually spent a lot of that night in The Horse Room playing pool. This was the room at the bottom of the stairs beyond the sunroom, where my elder brothers had slept when we were young. It was called The Horse Room because in the days before my grandfather built the barn he used to mend saddles, bits, bridles and halters in there on an unusual myrtle-beech bench he had fixed under the high strip of louvre windows running all the way down its eastern wall. Even in later years, when Bernard and Walker slept in there, Papa liked to keep all the paperwork concerning the horses in a trunk under the bench, as well as his meteorological records, and he'd sit in there of an evening after dinner, mumbling to himself and poring over the contents of the trunk, telling my brothers stories when they were meant to be doing their homework, tales of bogged horses and rogue waves and legendary runs of weather on the coast, until Mum or Dad would come and shoo him out, back to the fire in the living room or to his own bedroom upstairs.

For the sake of the hotel we'd decked The Horse Room out with Papa's old prints of dogs playing snooker, his Common Seabirds posters, and a few other choice pieces, like the collage Donny Johnston from Minapre had made with a mako shark's jaw framing a picture of unsuspecting swimmers at the starting line of the 1997 Mangowak to Minapre Ocean Swim. In the corner of the picture Donny had scrawled in fat Artline texta, ‘Yum Yum!' He had this piece along with a few other of his parochial creations stored in a back room behind the freezers at the Minapre Fishermen's Co-Op, and I'd persuaded him to let us have it on loan. First-timers at The Grand always got a good cack out of it and of course shark stories became a talking point.

I'd moved our old couches into The Horse Room too, and Dad's old dragnet hung from the roof, with the corks still down one side and the sinkers down the other, and still with the dried strips of sea lettuce tangled in its web from the last time we'd ever dragged it: 16 March 1994. That was the night Greg Beer told us we'd had our last warning – one more time and we'd cop a big fine. Not that that stopped him from accepting the three mullet we gave him to take home and cook for himself and poor old Meryl.

Both the legendary dragnet on the roof and Donny's Yum Yum picture on the wall acted as tall-tale triggers in The Horse Room, as did Kooka's ingenious and colourful map of what the local area would look like after the projected sea-level rises due to global warming. Kooka's map was especially curious from my point of view as the big transparent pink sprawl of his reckonings with the highlighter pen showed that if you were up on the ridges on either side of the valley in years to come you would still be high and dry, whereas the riverflat itself, including the five little shops, the old plasterer's shed and the woodyard, not to mention the main road, would be well and truly inundated. A pink-highlighted mass of new water surged across the gradually thinning blue river as well as the green catchment area of the flats, showing clearly that if you expected to look at that exact same map on that exact same wall of The Grand Hotel in fifteen years' time you'd need a pretty decent snorkel.

Kooka's big map dominated Papa's long bench wall in The Horse Room, but right alongside it was a smaller picture, tiny in fact, hung in an
el cheapo
chemist-shop frame, which attracted just as much attention. This picture quickly came to be known in the days of the hotel as ‘Where's Wally?', and it had arrived mysteriously as a JPEG in my email inbox one day from an unknown source. It was a photo of the town, reconstructed in Photoshop to look like it would have before, or just after, white settlement. Whoever made the image must have had horticultural knowledge, because where nowadays the five shops sit between the main road and the riverbank, all had been erased and replaced with very complex, authentic looking flora. Running down the slope from the meteorological station headland (in the picture, of course, there was no meteorological station, nor any navigational light), the bearded heath bunched into a valley devoid of today's infrastructure. Where the bottom shops terminate at Bon Thompson's brown-brick glazier's business, all you could see was a tongue of the heath giving on to the chartreuse reeds and rushes around the inlet. There was no road, no cars, only tufted sedge. No ‘Total Fire Ban' sign swinging in a northerly, no mown verges, no gratuitous bollards, just the river running seawards with the sky in its surface, the egret's backwash in the foreground, and in the background, on the treeline of the headland, the only giveaway that the picture wasn't real: the spiky outline of a non-native cypress tree silhouetted against the blue sky.

It quickly became a game in The Horse Room for people to test each other to find this telltale cypress in the picture, hence the ‘Where's Wally?' nickname. I'd wondered ever since I'd received the email if the cypress was left there on purpose, like the Amish always leave one mistaken stitch in a quilt to acknowledge that only God is perfect. It was reassuring to think that someone in Mangowak had the combination of spiritual and technological savvy required to not just reconstruct the inlet but also include the intentional flawed stitch of the cypress.

I came and went from The Horse Room on that second night, between shifts helping Joan in the bar or doing the rounds picking up glasses or restocking fridges from the coolroom. As stumps approached, I sat on the orange couch in there just taking it all in. Occasionally people would sit down beside me to give me their two bob's worth, and most of them had already picked up that The Grand Hotel represented a new way to cope with not only the absurdities of life but also what was happening in the town in particular. I must admit I found it peculiarly Australian how even people who'd always been pro-development seemed to be enjoying the Dada vibe of the pub. The existence of a new waterhole seemed to override any philosophical differences we might have had. Well, it is a dry country after all.

It was the very next night, however, the third night of The Grand Hotel, when we encountered our first real challenge, not so much to the existence of the place but to the idea and philosophy behind it.

With The Blonde Maria still upstairs snoring off her huge first day of drinking, we opened again at three, despite Joan running a little bit late due to his own Maria-inspired massive hangover. Kooka and I looked after the bar until he arrived. The loop in Duchamp had been refreshed again, but this time I had changed tack. ‘Lifeline to the Perfect Man' was replaced with a subtle bleating quote about the proliferation of laziness and the lack of farming craft in the early days of the colony of Victoria:

Not surprisingly this offering from Duchamp produced more bewilderment and confusion than hilarity, and in fact I did overhear some of the tradesmen express outright disappointment at it early in the night. None of us had any way of knowing, however, just how pertinent the loop would become only a little later that evening.

It was around 7pm – I know that because Happy Hour had finished half an hour earlier – when the posse from Wathaurong Heights arrived. There were six of them, two in grey suits, one in a blue suit, another in a mustard double-breasted suit and the other two dressed casually in chinos, polo shirts and jackets. The two in the grey suits carried hard plastic folders under their arms, the guy in the mustard suit had a laptop, the blue-suited fella carried a sheaf of papers rolled into a cylinder and the two casually dressed guys held only their mobile phones.

The posse went straight up to the bar and asked for a table. Joan Sutherland, a little less genial than normal due to his Heineken headache, merely said, ‘Take your pick.'

The posse turned at the bar and cast their eyes around the room. All of the four-seater laminated tables were full, but one end of the big communal dining-room table was free nearby.

The shorter of the two casually dressed men turned back to the bar and said politely, ‘Do you serve meals? We'd like to sit down and have dinner.'

He was in his mid to late forties, well-built, tanned and with the rounded vowels common among successful Melbourne businessmen with an interest in yachting.

Big Joan managed a smile and said, ‘We do meals but not by request, mate. There's a set dish every night and later on in the evening we fire up some snacks on the house – you know, toasted sangers, smoked-trout pastas – just as ballast against the grog. I think tonight's main course is fricaséed bandicoot. No, only joking. Tonight we've got baked lemon lamb with Greek salad. You're more than welcome.'

The posse's elegant spokesman raised his eyebrows, smiled thinly and glanced towards his friends. After a quick consultation he turned back to Joan and said they wouldn't mind paying for their food if we could offer them a menu.

Joan Sutherland let out one of his loud good-natured country laughs and simply reiterated what he'd already told them.

Once again the posse consulted, and the tanned yachtsman turned to Joan and enquired as to what time the lamb would be served.

‘Pretty darn soon I think,' said our head barman, turning to Veronica at the stove behind him. ‘How long, Ronnie?'