by Gregory Day
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 cheapochemist-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:
The furrows are ill-drained, the wheat is ill-thatched, thrashing is performed in open air on the ground, much corn is shed in the field, rotation of crops is never observed, variety of produce is not recorded, roads are left unattended, and worst of all, no economy of labour is observed ... I once saw five men merely standing around, looking on at a bee swarming!
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 aro
und 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?’
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 musttake 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.
