by Gregory Day
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 Hallcould 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, smilin
g 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?
Nan’s Towering Inferno
It was only two weeks after we’d opened the hotel, with the wheat sorted from the chaff by Veronica’s frankincense fumigation, when tragedy struck the town. The spring rains had come on strong – we hadn’t had such October downpours in years – and I remember thinking that if it wasn’t for the intense humidity accompanying the rains, you could almost believe the local climate was reverting to its patterns of yore, to keep in step with the reopening of The Grand Hotel.
A strange upshot of the rains, however, was that the shire’s controversial indoor creek, which had never been embraced by the young mothers it was intended for, had finally found a niche in the culture of the New Mangowak. Every day after school kids would gather in the pouring weather, to swim untroubled by the heavy downpours that came in chaotic rhythms from both the inland and far out to sea. On any weeknight you could find eight or ten teenagers under that newfangled retractable structure overarching the creek. They would huddle in there as if in an adolescent clubroom, smoking, texting, tagging the tin, listening to their iPods and swinging off the high-tensile polypropylene rope that had been attached to a specially installed gantry designed for the purpose.
This re-installed swing-rope had a history and was viewed by some in the town as an example of the benefits of community consultation and compromise. It all came about because the original swing-rope, which hung from an old manna gum on the riverbank, had been deemed unsafe by the shire. This was only possible due to the fact that once public infrastructure, such as the indoor creek, was installed on the river, by law the shire then became legally responsible for any injuries that occurred in its new ‘riparian precinct’. Of course there was such an outcry when it was revealed that swinging from that thirty-year-old farm rope hanging from that one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old manna gum was going to become illegal that the shire just had to act. Meetings were conducted on the riverbank itself to sort out the problem and finally the powers that be agreed to incorporate a new swing-rope in the design of the indoor creek, which they promised to be bigger and better than ever.
As it turned out, the indoor creek swing-rope was higher than the old manna gum version, and the polypropylene and Kevlar rope was apparently made of the same material that climbers of Everest used when they were ascending the mountain. From the day it was installed, though, the kids showed no interest until suddenly, with the October downpours, they’d finally taken to it. Sadly, however, the hi-tech shire-endorsed swing-rope came to its tragic demise on a completely unsuspecting Tuesday afternoon, as the kids gathered there after school in what felt like a very unseasonable tropical North Queensland storm.
The indoor creek structure was built firmly into the bank, with pile-driven pre-rusted steel foundations, but as the thunder began to grumble from far out over the hills of Minapre, and the wind began to lash from the south along the course of that stretch of the river, whipping up under the roof of the indoor creek and thrumming loudly on its fashionable corrugations, the river-rope gantry that had been affixed on the eastern wall of the structure came loose. Givva Way’s boy, Alex, was swinging from the rope at the time and with the unexpected collapse of the gantry fell awkwardly onto the water, injuring his spine.
For a time the town was in shock, as it looked like Alex Way was never going to walk again. The recriminations over the accident were running thick and fast. Alex was in the spinal ward at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, and his mother, Christine, had taken a flat in Heidelberg to be nearby. Givva, though, remained in Mangowak to work and visited his wife and only son on weekends. He spent his weeknights in The Grand Hotel, furiously drowning his sorrows and talking to anyone who would listen about what had happened to his son.
Everyone was sympathetic, of course, despite the fact that Givva had always had a reputation in town as being loose with his mouth and liable to bullshit. But now he was a man in pain and I was determined, despite my traditional wariness of him, that the hotel would be his shelter from the storm. He could offload onto sympathetic minds, particularly in relation to the culpability of the shire, and we could watch him closely and make sure he didn’t drink himself into an oblivion from which he wouldn’t be able to work, or travel to Melbourne every weekend to see his son.
Veronica and Nan both had no time for Givva Way and found it difficult to have him in the hotel night after night, alternately venting his spleen or overbrimming with bitter mirth at the brutality of life. I found it difficult to accommodate Givva also, especially as my modus operandi for coping with the New Mangowak had become a creative type of humour. There was, after all, nothing at all funny about Alex Way’s acciden
t. But, as I was at pains to explain to Veronica, and Nan, whose distaste of Givva went right back to when they lived together in a surfers’ share-house on the inlet, a good pub as I had been brought up to understand it could cope with tears as well as laughter. And a good publican would always see that the local loose cannons were safe from harm. ‘If we don’t look after him,’ I told them both on more than one occasion, ‘the cops will. And you know his history with Greg Beer. It’d get ugly for sure.’
So Veronica and Nan tolerated the situation, and often at stumps, after a hard night on the turps, I would help Givva up the narrow staircase to the middle room, unclip his paint-spattered working overalls and sling him onto the bed. I’d put a laundry bucket on the floor next to him and leave him to his drunken blur. In the mornings he’d come down for breakfast with a blank expression and together we’d sit over unseasonable mushrooms on sourdough, sometimes with Kooka or The Blonde Maria, and talk more rationally about his situation and the world at large. By the time breakfast had finished, Givva would invariably be feeling better, after good counsel and the delicious climate-change mushrooms. He’d wander off home to jump in his ute and head off to work, where he’d spend his days painting house sides at the top of telescopic ladders, before turning up again around 5pm for yet another session of grief and recrimination.
This went on for quite a few weeks until the good news started to filter out of the spinal ward at the Austin that Alex would recover fully from the accident and Givva and Christine plucked up the hide to lay an accident insurance claim against the shire. By the time young Alex was discharged and back at home, Givva had thrown off his cloud of woe and resumed his traditional role as the town earbasher. He still drank at The Grand, of course, and was in his own way grateful for what we’d done for him, but he’d tell any unsuspecting stranger who’d listen that as soon as Alex’s insurance money came through he was packing up and moving to Western Australia. ‘Fuckin’ hole this town these days,’ Givva would bleat, holding court in his spattered overalls at the bar. ‘No fuckin’ peace and quiet anymore. People don’t look out for each other like they used to. Cunts have wrecked it.’
