The Grand Hotel

by Gregory Day

  This surprising new guest looked to be in his late thirties, and the old green suede jacket he wore looked like it had accompanied him on most of his escapades. His arrival gave the bar an unexpected charge, so much so that for the first time Happy Hour was technology free that night. Once he’d established that a room was available, Louis Daley propped up the bar for a good two hours, telling anyone who did or didn’t want to listen about the book he was going to write.

  ‘I needed somewhere real quiet, but somewhere I could get a good feed, and a decent drink. Coz this is gonna be a flat-out masterpiece this. It’s gonna take some doin’.’

  Nan had arrived for her evening shift still wearing a pair of farm overalls, and she and Darren were working the bar. By the look on her face I could see she was taking this new guest with a grain of salt. ‘So has this “masterpiece” got a title yet?’ she asked Louis Daley, pouring him another drink.

  The big man from Blokey Hollow’s face creased with pleasure. ‘I’m bloody glad you asked,’ he replied. ‘Too right it’s got a title. You ready for it? “The Tradesman’s Entrance”. Yep. That’s what this book’s gonna be called.’

  On two separate occasions on that evening of The Lazy Tenor’s arrival I was taken aside with conciliatory gestures for ‘a bit of a chat’. Firstly by Veronica. She nabbed me upstairs while I was making up Room One for our new guest. She demanded some answers.

  ‘You’re not going to let that big idiot stay here are you, Noel?’

  ‘Well, what else am I meant to do? I’ve told you, Ronnie, any pub of mine has to have open doors.’

  ‘But he’s gross! What a pig! He’s in the bar now telling the whole world about his sexual conquests back in Melbourne. “The Tradesman’s Entrance”! He’s a sick mind.’

  I quietly puffed up the pillows of The Lazy Tenor’s bed to be – a white cast-iron cot from the long defunct Birregurra Hospital, where my aunt had been a matron. I flicked on the bedside lamp to make sure it was still working, then simply shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t much of an answer but what could I do? Our new guest had come a long way; I could hardly just throw him out on the spot.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘he’s probably just a bit excited to be out of town. Let’s see if he settles down a bit.’

  She looked at me dubiously.

  ‘But in the meantime,’ I continued, ‘don’t forget Arthur Cravan, the Dada boxer. He was a complete oaf probably, but he was a free agent. He got thrown out of just about every joint he entered didn’t he? And what for? Just for being a different ingredient in the pot. Maybe this red-headed fella’s a bit like that.’

  ‘I think you’re being a bit optimistic there, Noel.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ I replied, ‘but I’m not ruling anything out.’

  Later on that night at around ten o’clock I was ushered in to stand in front of Duchamp with Joan Sutherland. As our genial barman unzipped his Yakkas, he told me he was ‘a little concerned’ about our new guest. ‘It’s just Jen and the kids, Noely,’ he began. ‘I can’t have Dylan and Dougie in the bar with a fella carrying on like that. He was just telling the whole world how his book’s gonna begin with him shagging some chemist girl who’d come to his garage to have her car looked at. He reckons he got into the front seat alongside her and then his mate hit the hoist button and up they went. The two of them were up there near the ceiling, rocking her little Hyundai for hours. But he went into too much detail, Noel. I told him to leave off, I tried to be nice, suggested he keep the juicy bits for the book, but Givva and a couple of others were encouraging him. And Kooka, the filthy old mongrel, was recording the lot. I had to send Jen and the kids home. I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything in your own pub, but I reckon you’ll have to send him packing. That’s if it continues of course.’

  Because we were standing right where we were, I decided to join Joan and empty my bladder. Before I could reply to his concern, the loop on Duchamp the Talking Pissoir was doing it for me:

  The Lifestyle Republic

  Democracy means freedom. Freedom to follow your dreams, to speak out on issues that concern you, to laugh and cry with loved ones in your own cherished home. Here at Rockpool Interiors (www.rockpoolinteriors.com) we’re democrats through and through. Come in and see our newly imported panoply of antique voyeuse and shepherdess chairs, hand-picked from the flea markets of France, the home of style and liberty. Or what about our range of elite bedding ensembles, complete with scintillating free-to-speak customer testimonials? Come on, Australia, enjoy your right as citizens of the lifestyle republic. Come in and feel the freedom. At Rockpool Interiors there’s no horizon when it comes to comfort.

  The loop had been put in Duchamp to take the piss out of the lifestyle set but now, as Joan and I shook ourselves down, the word ‘freedom’ was all I could hear.

  The night drifted on like a cloud in the sky or, to be more precise, with the dogged persistence of a bad rumour. Somehow, for the rest of the evening, the usually crisp and salient tempo that could be found in The Grand was sullied. Kooka and Givva Way stayed perched at the bar listening to The Lazy Tenor’s stories. (Kooka, of course, could almost be excused due to his vocational ulterior motive. Givva, as usual, had no excuse.) Everyone else hunkered in the corners and pokey shadows of the building. Many clustered sulkily in The Horse Room playing perfunctory games of pool, some nestled disheartened on the verandah and listened to The Blonde Maria and The Connotations sarcastically mocking early Bob Dylan covers (the chanteuse had taken my advice about her singing political songs, but with a grain of salt. Bob Dylan was God to a lot of the old surfie types, especially to the boys in the band, and she was really digging the knife in), while others, like Veronica and Nan for instance, took the opportunity to go home early. They weren’t needed, it was true; the amount of beer consumed that night in The Grand was only a fraction of the usual, but I for one was disappointed at the small town conservatism or, dare I say it, the wider-world political correctness that this big red-headed stranger had triggered merely by turning up and announcing himself. Sure he was loud, sure he was an earbasher and yeah, he had a dirty mouth, but we weren’t at a meeting of the Presbyterian Quilters Guild! This wasa hotel after all.

  But what a difference a good sleep can make, especially when there’s melaleuca and music in the air. On the day after The Lazy Tenor’s arrival I woke up to the blessed and freakish delivery of an authentic bit of local spring weather. I’d been dreaming of the sap and the sea. In days gone by my brothers and I would help our parents harvest melaleuca oil and mussels on mornings rich with the scent of flaky timbers. As caterpillars moseyed lazily over the rose-gold clifftop pathways, and new crafts of life emerged from every dusty dangling cocoon nearby, deep in the lilac tidal beat and the dark lap-lap of the water around the jetty poles we’d float like pale jellyfish with improvised scraping tools: paint-strippers, discarded garage-door hinges, screwdrivers. We’d harvest the purple mussels from the old sea-blonded uprights. Then we’d come out of the water and slash the twigs off the whippy tea tree spars of the dunes to take home for Mum to distil and extract the oil. The melaleuca oil was a cure-all then and of course remains so now. But my mother was ahead-of-her-time mad for it. She not only prescribed it for our cuts and colds but used to have us shine our school shoes with it as well. We must have entered the already salty classroom pungent with the stuff.

  Looking back, of course, they seem like golden days, when the notion of an indoor creek would have been as strange as a tall ship sailing into Botany Bay. But now as I rolled languidly in my dream towards the familiar scents coming through my loft shutter-door, I felt as though I’d returned to the timeless harvest of my childhood, or as if somehow it had returned to me.

  There was a tingling on the perimeters of my waking state. Still half in the dream I could only feel the essence of what it was, an essence so pleasurable, so effortless and heartening that the bridge between golden dream and present day reality seemed no bridge at all. As I emerged, it w
as as if I was making my descent from high up in the air, and with a pelican’s stable wings. The romantic gliding feeling has never left me to this day, nor has the memory of when my eyes opened and I finally registered, albeit unbelievingly, the ingredients that were making up my pleasure.

  It was hard to fathom at first – not so much the familiar perfection of the perfumes but the unexpected beauty of the sound. Others described it later to me as their musical awakening. The Blonde Maria for one was humbled, almost beyond recall. She flat out refused to sing in The Grand Hotel for weeks afterwards, thereby setting in train the hotel’s most miraculous moments but also perhaps its eventual demise.

  As my eyes opened from the dream of golden harvests, I breathed deeply through my nose and lay still. Along with the rhythmic healing wafts of riverflat melaleuca drifting into my loft came a song, a song like no other.

  It really was a song, in the purest sense. And it came from a voice at once so beautiful and ordinary that it seemed both as substantial and ethereal as the sky. In fact, to be more accurate, it was a voice that seemed to contain all the dark heaped-up soil of the earth as well as the endless consolations of the sky’s blue light. In the gentle gusts of our local wind this song sailed like the sun itself from an upper-storey window of the hotel out into the morning air of the backyard, convincing everything it touched and anything that heard it that time itself was no more than a sighing, loving, somehow wistful thing.

  I learnt later that it was ‘Di Provenza il mar’, Germont’s baritone aria from La Traviata, but that’s to somehow trivialise what I heard at the time. I knew nothing of operatic names – I still don’t. All I knew was the beauty of a lost world somehow restored to me. Awakening from my dream, it was as if monstrous and needless fissures had been healed.

  I propped myself up on an elbow and the singer began the aria again from its beginning. It grew fainter and louder again, and the penny dropped. It could only be The Lazy Tenor, singing this extraordinary welcome to his first day in Mangowak as he moved about his room.

  So I lay back again, flat on my pillow, staring joyously at the old barn rafters. What had I said to Veronica when she’d pooh-poohed my comparison of our new visitor with Arthur Cravan? I said I was remaining open to everything.

  ‘Di Provenza il mar’ has a gentle pulse rather than a time signature, more an aquatic current than a rhythm, but of course, as The Lazy Tenor sang it from his upstairs room that morning, any orchestration there was could only come from the weather itself. In an instant, and for the very first time, I understood all the fuss about operatic singing. I understood the word ‘aria’ for the first time too, the word ‘air’, and that this is the very beautiful thing that sustains us. This was a sound as superlative and fresh as low-tide abalone, a song with all the tangy nourishment of a December strawberry; it was as miraculous as a champion racehorse from a backwater town, as awe-inspiring as a giant Otway mountain ash. It seemed to capture all peace, hold all power, and at the same time set it free. It included all restless and aimless desires but it also had the certainty of a well struck hammer blow.

  As The Lazy Tenor began the aria for the third and last time, a new certainty of my own had begun growing within my chest. There was no way, no way on heaven and earth, that this new guest would be turfed out of my hotel.

  It took me a long time, but finally, after the singing had stopped, I managed to rise and climb down my ladder. Pulling back the big barn doors, I went out to investigate.

  There was not a sound from the hotel now, either upstairs or down. I made my way through the sunroom into the bar. I fossicked in the cupboards and started to fix myself an omelette. As I cracked a large galaxially speckled Heatherbrae pullet into the skillet, I noticed that still lying on the bar mat was a pink business card from an Altona hairdresser, which The Lazy Tenor had been exhibiting the night before as a souvenir of one of his conquests. The likelihood of the singing I’d just heard coming from the very same man who’d brandished that card like a trophy of war began to seem more and more remote. By the time the fourth egg was in my hands and I’d split it on the cast-iron rim, I was convinced the aria just had to be part of my dream, along with the melaleuca and the mussel harvests.

  I leant down into the old champagne bucket where we kept the cut herbs and threw them in with the eggs: parsley, oregano, French tarragon, thyme and Vietnamese mint. As I kept prodding the moist parts of the omelette into the centre of the pan and fluffed and finally folded it onto my plate, the everyday reality of food had almost convinced me that, yes, the super-real aria was from the dream. But then I heard a shifting on the furniture, a creak from near the ashes of last night’s fire. And a quiet voice asked, ‘Is that you, Noel?’

  I picked up my plate and carried it to the other side of the bar. I looked around the corner of the L-shaped room. There was The Blonde Maria, seated at one of the brown laminated tables in her dressing gown, smoking a tailor-made cigarette, with a half eaten chicken carcass and a bottle of ouzo in front of her.

  ‘An ancient Greek breakfast,’ I joked, pulling up a chair beside her and putting down my plate.

  She smiled mildly, then laughed quietly through her nose. She took a swig of ouzo, straight from the bottle.

  ‘All we need is naked men,’ she said.

  I nodded, laughed quietly, then tucked into my omelette. My appetite was strong. Beside me The Blonde Maria just puffed on her cigarette.

  Eventually she leant back in her chair, let out a deep chicken-scented breath and asked, ‘Could it really have been him?’

  My knife and fork stilled. I considered the question and then asked tentatively, ‘Do you mean the singing?’

  The Blonde Maria gazed into my eyes with a glazy look. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,’ she said.

  I swallowed, filled my cheeks with air and blew. ‘Well, you won’t get any arguments on that from me. I was just beginning to think I’d dreamt it.’

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ she went on. ‘I really can’t. I’d just woken up from the most beautiful dreams. I was riding a grey mare on the indigo slopes back in Dookie. I opened my eyes, felt so free and relaxed, and was about to go down to the ocean for a swim when I heard a man’s footsteps in the hallway and remembered he was staying. So I stopped, sat down on the edge of the bed looking out the window, and waited. And then it started. Oh my God it was beautiful.’

  I began eating again. Tink, tink, went the knife and fork. So I hadn’t imagined it, or dreamt it. And up there in the room above us the singer still sat, presumably hunched over a laptop, writing his ribald book.

  ‘I know there were a few people unhappy with his behaviour last night, Noel, but you can’t kick him out. Not if he sings like that!’ said The Blonde Maria.

  I didn’t reply. I finished off the omelette and wiped my mouth. Then I reached over and grabbed the ouzo bottle and took a burst for myself. A hot course of aniseed rushed through my blood.

  ‘You don’t have to worry, Maria,’ I said then. ‘That fella can stay in my hotel any old time. Let’s just hope “The Tradesman’s Entrance” is a bloody long book.’

  Italian Yoga

  Later that day, in a mood somewhere between happiness and bafflement, I was standing alone in the toilet, having just installed the day’s new loop in Duchamp, when our illustrious singer himself appeared, busting for a piss. He looked dishevelled, he reeked of beer and seaweed, but although his boots and shirt were wet on his huge frame he was buttoned to the cuffs, just like a boy from the inland would be.

  He told me gruffly he’d been drinking on the beach since well before lunch. As his pent-up golden stream splashed into the stainless steel, the new contribution I’d chosen for Duchamp sounded almost more apt than surreal:

  Drunken Seals

  Sometimes large seals climb into the vineyards at night to steal our grapes, just like Christians on a bender. Many people have had their grapes stolen that way. And when the seals have had enough, they fold themselv
es into a sort of ball, like an orange, and roll back into the sea, and drink and drink and drink...

  I’d chosen this particular loop to inspire a greater intake of alcohol, after the paltry quantities that were drunk the night before due to the distraction of our new guest. Now, as he finished pissing and zipped up, he asked me with a big smile if we could hear the loop again. So I stepped up onto the pissoir and had a turn. When I finished halfway through the second repeat, he clapped his big hands together and crowed, ‘Well fuck me! That is deadset weird.’ He put a thoughtful hand up to his chin and broke into a broad grin. ‘This pub is tops. I slept like a twit up there last night. Nice room, nice breeze, nice fartsack. Took myself down to the beach this morning after breakfast, thought I’d give myself a day to settle in before I began the book. Bloody beautiful. Gotta watch the sunburn though. Freckly bastard aren’t I, hey? The red hair and that. Mate, I might be able to drink but I’m no bloody drunken seal yet, that’s for sure.’

  Seeing him so happy, I decided to test the waters. I had to – I just couldn’t stand the cultural confusion. The guy was like a walking collage. ‘If you like Duchamp,’ I said innocently, ‘maybe you could sing something for us and we’ll put it on the loop one day? That was yousinging upstairs this morning wasn’t it?’

  He thrust his lips forward, turned his head to one side and began scratching his neck. ‘Singing?’ he said. ‘Is that what you’d call it? You should hear me on a good day.’

  ‘Well I’d like to. What I heard this morning was beautiful.’

  ‘Beautiful!’ the big man scoffed, loudly, with a full horsey snort. ‘No, mate, let me tell ya, only women are beautiful, only women. Well, maybe a recording or two of Tito Gobbi, in his prime mind you, but that stuff this mornin’, nah, I was just stretchin’. Italian yoga I call it.’