by Gregory Day
I laughed. Italian yoga. That was a good one. But I couldn’t work out whether he was serious or not. Surely he’d been told all his life how amazing his voice was, and surely somewhere along the line he’d put a lot of effort into getting it to sound like that. ‘So are you a tenor?’ I asked. ‘Excuse my ignorance.’
‘Ignorance!’ he scoffed again. ‘Come off it would ya! Don’t worry about that, mate. This is your fuckin’ joint isn’t it? You can ask any question you like.’
Suddenly then his face took on a different cast. It settled, became more considered, and he said, ‘I am a tenor actually, but I’m what they call a lazy tenor. Can’t be bothered with the high notes you know. Most of the time I end up singing baritone parts. They’re more solid anyway – you know, richer tone, more manly. Like that thing from La Traviatathis morning, “Di Provenza il mar”. Magnificent piece of music that. They say Verdi wrote it but it’s more like an act of nature.’
The Lazy Tenor began to hum the aria right there in the toilet, and straightaway I could hear the honeyed resonance I’d encountered when I’d woken from my dream. Even with his lips closed, just humming, I could hear it.
He stopped as quickly as he’d started. ‘My pa back in Blokey Hollow used to sing that piece when he was fixin’ his bikes. Heavily into pushbikes my pa.’
‘Is that right?’ I replied, deciding to tease out a bit more information. ‘Did he have a good voice too?’
‘Pa? Nah, you couldn’t really say that. But I liked it, as a kid and that. He was a smart bloke, Pa. Made my first violin with his own hands. It was rough as guts lookin’ back, probably sounded like a shot cat, but he made it himself you know. In his pushgrunt workshop.’
‘In his what?’
‘His pushgrunt workshop. Pushgrunt’s what we used to call bikes in our part of the world. Pa had dozens of ’em there in his workshop. And old wheels and bits and pieces lyin’ about.’
‘So you play the violin as well?’
‘Not anymore. Don’t ride bikes anymore either. Used to though. Used to race ’em as a real young fella. And then when I got a bit older I used to chase sheilas on ’em. Geez, the miles I’ve pedalled a pushgrunt after the hairy magnet! Hey? Fuckin’ miles alright. Most of central Victoria I reckon!’
‘Is that right?’ I said, poker-faced.
‘Yep, I reckon. Used to go down to Harcourt, Castlemaine, up to Boort. Went as far as Mildura once. Folks thought I was going to sing in church choirs but nuh, I was pedallin’ after the skirt. Now tell me, would ya, who was that sheila I saw here last night? With the dyed hair and the big brown eyes? She went home early.’
‘You mean Veronica?’
‘That’s it, that’s the one. They were callin’ her Ronnie. Nice lookin’, bit exotic. Not that I’m here to shag. Nuh, I’m here to write – I’ve told you that.’
‘Yeah, “The Tradesman’s Entrance”.’
At the mention of his book The Lazy Tenor’s face opened like a child’s. It was the first signal I had that he wasn’t completely cocksure.
‘That’s right! You remembered!’ he cried.
‘Well, I could hardly forget.’
‘Nah, I suppose not. Great title isn’t it? Titles are important you know. They gotta sound good. Otherwise you’re stuffed. That’s why the Italians write the best operas, mate. The language just sounds so grouse. Virtually everything rhymes you know. La Traviata, Il Trovatore, Rigoletto, Otello ...I mean “The Tradesman’s Entrance” doesn’t sound as good as that but it’s funny you know, like a punchline to a joke.’
‘You don’t reckon it’s a bit off?’
‘What do ya mean “off”? Like too dirty or somethin’?’
‘Well, yeah.’
He wiped a polyester cuff across his brow. ‘Oh geez,’ he said, in a mildly depressed tone. ‘I didn’t pick you for an uptight prick. You are the publican here aren’t ya?’ He nodded towards Duchamp. ‘You obviously don’t mind a bit of a laugh, hey? So, what the fuck?’
I giggled through my nose; it’s all I could do. Without going right back through the history of the oppression of women and dragging out the worthy clichés about the objectification of the female body, there was nothing I could say. He had me stumped. Plus, I was cornered by my sheer amazement at what this bloke entailed. By the pure and natural qualities of both his singing and his boorishness. He was nothing if not well and truly alive. If I was ever gonna try to rein him in, I’d have to take a few deep breaths first. But now wasn’t the time, I decided. No, I certainly wasn’t up to it there and then. And besides, I was having too much fun.
The Little-Girl Voice
I didn’t see The Lazy Tenor for the rest of the day, but at 5pm sharp he was standing at the bar, leaning on his elbow with a glass in his hand, his jaw jutting out and a sociable twinkle in his eye.
First he started talking to Joan Sutherland behind the bar, but instead of small-talking his way towards familiarity or exchanging pleasantries in order to establish a healthy and indefatigable drinker-to-barman relationship, he launched straight into describing his own purpose in life, which, as he said, was once to ‘shag anything that moved’ and now was simply to tell people about it by writing his upstairs masterpiece.
But of course, after Jen and the boys had had to go home early the night before, Big Joan was not as genial as he normally would’ve been. In fact, declaring his ground straightaway, he suggested to The Lazy Tenor that The Horse Room might be a more suitable place for the retelling of his exploits. ‘Plus,’ said Joan, ‘tonight for Happy Hour we’re reverting to Noel’s old favourite, live-streaming Vatican Radio from Italy. I think you and the Pope might be at cross purposes.’
On hearing this information The Lazy Tenor beamed, just like he had when he’d heard the ‘Drunken Seals’ loop on Duchamp. It seemed that the crazier the pub was the more he liked it. When Guido the Tourist and a friend walked in during Happy Hour, I watched closely for their reactions. As they ordered their drinks from Joan, they had Pope Benedict on one side, whining away at his digital angelus, and The Lazy Tenor on the other side, describing ‘shoehorning a salesgirl in a back room at Northland’. I don’t know quite whether you would call the scenario Dada but it was certainly uproarious, contradictory and atypical, as the look on the faces of the two out-of-towners showed as they took their drinks and sat down at a table.
Once again Veronica was aghast at The Lazy Tenor’s narratives. She kept glaring at me as she moved about the hotel, picking up dirty glasses and plates and emptying ashtrays. She had a point, of course. It wasn’t as if The Lazy Tenor’s exploits made for brilliant entertainment – most of the tales were told purely to the advantage of his own sexual prowess and for that they lacked both charm and imagination. The thing was, though, he very seldom actually swore. His language was too euphemistic to be foul, and therefore it required a certain amount of interpretation along the way. Because of this it seemed almost possible that children could’ve stayed in the bar after all, as he spoke of the ‘hairy magnet’ and the ‘shoehorn’. In the end, however, it’s always too difficult to tell just how much your average nine-or ten-year-old does understand about sex. And so, for that reason alone, with The Lazy Tenor as a Happy Hour fixture I feared that the public bar of The Grand Hotel was about to become like a typical Australian public bar of old, full of men and men alone, all clutching their beers for dear life as over in the lounge, or outside in the beer garden, or back at home, their wives and kids left them alone to their shickered shadow life. Any inkling of such a scene in a hotel of mine had to be stopped. We had both a tradition and a new charter to uphold, a tradition going back to the original Grand Hotel, of true and open hospitality in Mangowak, and a new charter that called for a different type of open slather, for the spreading of the freedom virus and a new knockabout rendition of the end of the world.
This of course was where the problems lay. On the one hand, yes, an eight-year-old could no longer pour beer in the bar with The Lazy Tenor in full swing
but, on the other hand, the very idea of such a wildcard turning up to stay was very much in the spirit of our charter. Struck by the dilemma, I poured myself a Dancing Brolga and sat quietly on one of the old church pews at the big table to ruminate. ‘If only he wasn’t so boorish,’ I was thinking, when Oscar stepped through from the sunroom looking for me.
The kid had a worried look on his face and sat down beside me on the pew. He whispered up close, ‘What the hell have you done to The Blonde Maria?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, she’s up in her room, still in a dressing gown and refusing to come down and sing. And people keep on coming up to me wanting to know when we’re starting. They’re sick of listening to bozo over there.’
He pointed in the direction of The Lazy Tenor, who was midstream with his hands out wide, re-enacting another scenario for Kooka, the Grundig, Givva Way, and a frustrated Joan Sutherland behind the bar.
‘Well why won’t she come down?’ I asked Oscar.
‘She won’t say. She’s totally different all of a sudden. She’s talking in a little-girl voice like Marilyn Monroe and drinking ouzo out of the bottle. And she won’t budge.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, shit, Uncle Noel. Me and Dad and the boys are ready to roll, and believe you me if we don’t play something soon that bloke over there at the bar’s gonna get lynched.’
I frowned and drained the rest of my beer. ‘I’ll go and have a word with her,’ I said, getting up off the pew.
I stomped upstairs, giving The Blonde Maria plenty of footfall by way of a warning that I was coming. At the top of the stairs, however, I found the platypus and black ducks floating happily in the hallway carpet and the willows of the old unrevegetated wallpaper rustling blithely above me. The air was soothing, cool and quiet after the dynamics of the bar.
After knocking gently, I entered the room to find her sitting, just as Oscar had described, on a chair by the window table in her dressing gown. Looking up at me, she smiled meekly.
In front of her on the table was a bottle of ouzo, a packet of Peter Stuyvesants, and a half finished jigsaw of the Bavarian Alps. I pulled up a chair and sat beside her, facing the pine trees out the window. She bowed her head but said nothing.
I don’t know why I didn’t come straight to the point. I just sensed that the situation was suddenly very delicate and that our previously bawdy chanteuse had now to be treated with kid gloves. Idly I started flicking through the pieces of the jigsaw, looking for the solid block of pale blue that the jigsaw lid showed the alpine light was reflecting in the window of the mountain hut.
The Blonde Maria took a swig from the ouzo bottle and silently the two of us looked at the little hut in the foothills, dwarfed by the great Bavarian mountains behind. The Blonde Maria lit a cigarette. She offered me one by pushing the pack towards me, but I declined.
‘So what is it?’ I asked gently. ‘They’re all expecting you down there.’
In a tiny tremulous little voice she replied, ‘I know.’
I frowned. She was in a very strange state.
‘So what’s wrong, Maria? Why won’t you get dressed and come down? Jim and Oscar and the band are itching to start.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, again in the frail little-girl voice.
‘Well you must have some idea.’
She shook her head, with an ashamed look on her face.
I leant back on my chair and stared out at the pine trees. ‘The thing is, Maria ... you can tell me what’s on your mind, whatever it is that’s troubling you. I can take it.’
She took a drag on her smoke and looked sheepish again, but apart from that nothing, just silence.
Out in the hallway now I almost thought I could hear the river lapping at the door.
‘Look,’ I said, a bit more firmly. ‘If you don’t come down and sing, The Connotations are gonna become The Barrels again. They’ll bore everyone senseless.’ I laughed, to make light of things. ‘And someone will bop The Lazy Tenor right on the nose. Probably Joan Sutherland I reckon.’
At this apparently innocuous remark the ouzo-swilling jigsaw player just crumpled in her dressing gown. She began sobbing uncontrollably.
I got the shock of my life. What the hell was going on? Instinctively I put my arm around her, comforting her, while trying to nut it out.
She sobbed and sobbed, her body rocking to and fro on the chair. Finally, and still in the little-girl voice, she said, ‘I’d like the night off, Noel, please, if that’s okay. I need the night off.’
Her pain was so demonstrative and her voice so fey and eerie that I had no hesitation. ‘Okay, Maria,’ I said. ‘That’s absolutely fine. Take the night off. You’ve been going hard haven’t you? You’ve been a trooper. I’ll tell Jim and the boys to go back to the stuff they were doing before you showed up. Who knows, we might even get The Lazy Tenor to sing. Did I tell you how come he’s called The Lazy Tenor?’
With this question she started sobbing uncontrollably again and didn’t answer. I rubbed her back and cooed. ‘There there,’ I said. ‘Calm down. It’s alright. You’re just tired. Why don’t you get into bed?’
Ten minutes later I left her still in the chair, having settled down a bit after I changed the subject back to the jigsaw. I told her I’d pop back up later in the evening to check that she was alright and that I’d even bring her a plate of Nan’s mushroom moussaka, which was on the menu that night. The Blonde Maria nodded and smiled at me weakly. For the moment there was nothing more I could do. I clicked her door shut and headed back down the stairs.
Kooka Falls Off His Perch
When I got back downstairs, a row had erupted, but not the one I was expecting. The seemingly innocuous Italian tourist Guido had turned up with a T-shirt that had ‘Skinheads D’Italia’ written on it, and when someone had asked him about it all hell had broken loose. Guido had gone on a long and obscure political tirade about the glacial inadequacies of democratic processes in the climate-change era and the can-do powers of neo-fascism.
It seemed Skinheads D’Italia was a far-right cult who worshipped at the shrine of Mussolini. Guido had obviously had quite a few Dancing Brolgas, and his normally sociable and gregarious personality had warped into a defiant stance. Challenged by a cluster of locals on the philosophy of the Skinheads D’Italia cult, he grew increasingly arrogant. As Ash Bowen started accusing him of anti-Semitism, Guido took a patronising tone, dismissing not the Jewish peoples but rather Australia and Australians as the idiot children of the global village. ‘Yoo are sheltaired. To yoo laiff iz a plything,’ he was saying, as I made my way behind the bar to stand beside Joan. ‘But, een Yoorope we mast faize ther chairlengerz. We mast be ztrong end see ther sityooaijen en howl eet ken be kyewered.’
Of course neo-fascism was one thing but saying that Australians were irrelevant innocents was another. People really started to get their backs up, and the more riled they became the more supercilious Guido’s smile of certainty became. Even The Lazy Tenor interrupted his own monologues to tell Guido to ‘put a sock in it’. Well, that was a turn-up. Eventually Veronica and Ash Bowen engaged Guido in some serious analysis of the Skinheads D’Italia platform and the three of them went over to the pews to argue it out.
The bar was quite full by this stage, and noisy as all get-out. What with The Lazy Tenor still bar-slapping about his exploits to a small but appreciative crowd and the declarations of Guido raising the room temperature, and of course with Jim, Oscar, and the rest of The Barrels impatiently tuning up and noodling on their instruments, not to mention Pope Benedict’s whining incantations from the speakers at the bar, the scene was quite chaotic.
I poured myself a Loosener and went over to tell Jim that The Blonde Maria wasn’t coming down. He was demoralised by the news. I tried to cheer him up. ‘Come on,’ I cajoled, ‘it’s only one night. You played plenty of gigs before she ever showed up.’
‘Yeah, but we had no idea what it was to play great live music then,’ J
im declared. ‘She’s showed us, Noely. She’s raised the bar. We can’t go back to Top Catand Morning of the Earth now. It just feels backward.’
I rolled my eyes. That was all I needed. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘If you guys don’t start up, everyone’ll be stuck with either bozo at the bar or the Nazi in the corner. You wouldn’t want that would ya?’
Jim peered over at The Lazy Tenor and then across at where Guido was gesticulating at Veronica and Ash. He shook his head slowly. But he said nothing. Eventually he just blurted, ‘It’s a fuckin’ mess, Noel,’ stood up and began putting his guitar back into its case.
‘Hey, wait a minute,’ I said, alarmed. ‘Don’t put that away yet. I’m relying on you.’
Jim swung back around angrily and brought his face up close to mine. Our noses were nearly touching as he pulled big-brother rank over me.
‘Now you listen here, kid,’ he said. ‘Don’t you dare lay that trip on me. You’re the one who’s dragged everyone into this weirdo freakshow you’re calling a hotel. What do you reckon Mum and Dad would say about this place? Hey?’
I wiped the spittle of my elder brother off my cheeks and scoffed. ‘What, and you haven’t been having a good time? Don’t give me that.’
At which point Jim pushed me in the chest. But just as we were ready to have our first fist fight in many a long year, a loud resounding CRACK was heard from across the room. Jim and I forgot our disagreement and looked over to see old Kooka falling from his bentwood bar stool onto the hard wooden floor.
Everyone stopped their conversations and immediately hurried to Kooka’s aid. The old bloke with the bronzed bull head was lying pale and crumpled in his slacks and white singlet on the floor. His mouth was pursed and his eyes pinched, closed tight in pain. Veronica and Joan leant over him and checked his pulse and breathing. He was still alive but his complexion was ghostly white and he looked to be in some degree of discomfort. What was going on? Had the stool collapsed under him, or was he having a heart attack?
