The Grand Hotel

by Gregory Day

  ‘It is not a blind alley. The apricots were worthwhile, John. You just needed proof, so I took them away. But, dear, only for one summer, for you to credit me with it, to see me in the fruitless vacant tree, but all you saw were the empty branches and the knobbly bits on them, and the visit I paid became your hollow. Dear John, it needn’t be, and your mother agrees with me. She’s weeping. Her tears put out the fire. Oh yes, she’s still weeping alright, but the fire is out and she agrees with me about the apricots, and now ... wait, who’s that coming now?’

  Maria’s eyes would close tight, then open as she tried to make head or tail of what was being shared between John and Mary. And who wasthis coming now?

  A new sound cut across the waves, and high drama began to issue from Kooka’s transistor. There was a fire in a building, and a woman’s voice was screaming FIRE FIRE and OH MY JOHNNY BOY and then FIRE FIRE again and OH MY GOD MY JOHNNY. Taken aback by the intensity of the cries, Maria looked across at Kooka for the first time since he’d fallen asleep. His big head was still on the pillow but his jawline was twitching, and in the pool of light she could see movement behind his eyelids. Apart from that his face was quite calm.

  Maria could hear timbers falling and walls of the building collapsing, paint crackling and distant yells for help, but that was nothing compared with the distressing cries of the screaming woman. Obviously the heat was getting closer to her now, her breathing was becoming laboured, and she was coughing and gasping for air. Eventually her cries subsided into moans, and then, as if the flames took her over, her voice was gone altogether. For a brief time the only sound from the transistor was crackling flames and the shifting structure of the building, but eventually the sound of horses’ hooves and the voices of what were obviously firemen could be heard, and then the sound of a hose and the fizzing noise of flames going out.

  All at once Kooka made a sudden realignment of his head in the bed. He rolled over towards the seaward wall, and after a harsh rapid glitch from the transistor, to Maria’s astonishment the country song that had previously been on recommenced, as if it had never stopped playing.

  Maria sat stunned beside Kooka’s bed in the pool of light. She couldn’t see the whole of the old fella’s face, only his shoulder and the profile of his beak-like nose and bulbous forehead. She couldn’t fathom what had happened. She considered right there and then, and despite her new found passion for Louis Daley, leaving The Grand Hotel for good. She feared she’d become unhinged by holing herself up in her room all day and night. Was she finally, and properly, going mad?

  Later she told me she’d tried to rationalise it for a while but couldn’t get around it. Kooka’s sudden movement in the bed had definitely seemed to terminate the dousing of the fire. It was as if he was affecting what came out of his tranny.

  Eventually the drowsy country song had reached its final verse, ended with a melancholy twang and then was back-announced. But there was no mention of apricots or a house fire, just a song called ‘Sally Mae’. Nothing was said about a woman swimming with a list of things from long ago. This was a normal weekly country-music show, with no doubt a regular audience of insomniacs listening through the night.

  The Blonde Maria got up off the chair beside Kooka’s bed and immediately switched off the standard lamps. The pool of light vanished. Quietly she made her way across the floor to the seaward window and looked out. She waited in the darkness. Behind her she could still hear the tranny, but through the window now she could also hear the Plinth bells ringing down at the rivermouth. Oscar must have forgotten to tie them down again. She was thankful. The sound of them calmed her. She took a few deep breaths. She waited at the window for a long time, through four songs and the beginning of an interview with Troy Cassar-Daley. Then she quietly tiptoed out of the room.

  The Blonde Maria didn’t sleep that night and found herself just after the dawn roaming around Kooka’s old place, looking for an apricot tree. She missed it at first but after searching the back and side yards thoroughly and almost giving up, she spotted it on her way back towards the front gate. The tree was laden with fruit.

  She stood beside it, considering the possibilities. Then she spied a blue ice-cream container catching drips under an outside tap on the house wall. She walked over, tipped out the water into the long grass that had sprouted from the overflow and, walking back to the tree, began to fill the container with apricots.

  That night when she re-entered The Sewing Room with The World of Carrick’s Covein her hand, she also carried the apricots. Kooka was glad to see them. He not only recognised them as fruit from his tree but he recognised the blue ice-cream container as well.

  So they sat again in the pool of light, this time munching on the apricots. They both agreed they were delicious. Without being prompted, Kooka told The Blonde Maria how he’d had regular fruit from the tree over the years. The only exception, he said, was the summer after his wife, Mary, had died, when the tree didn’t even flower, let alone produce any apricots.

  ‘As if it was in mourning,’ The Blonde Maria remarked, wiping juice from her chin.

  Kooka just raised his eyebrows. ‘She made a famous apricot jam, my Mary,’ he said.

  Having confirmed her suspicion and that she herself hadn’t lost her marbles, The Blonde Maria was all of a sudden keen to get cracking. ‘How about I read a little more of the book, Kooka?’ she asked.

  The old man smiled. ‘Sounds like a fine idea, lassie, a fine idea.’

  Once again Kooka settled himself into the blankets, as The Blonde Maria set the blue ice-cream container of apricots down on the wooden boards of the floor between them. She opened The World of Carrick’s Coveon her lap.

  Unlike on the previous night The Blonde Maria herself was now less absorbed by the novel and more interested in arriving at that moment when Kooka would raise his hand and announce that the reading should stop, that he might sleep for a little while. To lull him towards this mood, she tried to read the text as musically as she could.

  This time, however, Kooka seemed perfectly content to listen at great length to the trials of the young boatbuilder of Carrick’s Cove. Maria began to fear that in her keenness to lull Kooka to sleep, she was actually keeping him wide awake, that her ‘beautiful story-voice’ was not as natural and settled as on previous nights, and that she’d never get to test her theory.

  Try as she might to slow her reading, to flatten its lilt, to immerse herself in its content, it seemed that Kooka was unperturbed and perfectly engaged. But then, just as the boy’s sloop in the book was finally being caulked and painted and the people of the cove were readying themselves for its launch, Kooka announced, once again in a strong, wide-awake voice, that he wouldn’t mind ‘a bit of a spell’.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll kip for a bit, Maria. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Sure, Kooka,’ The Blonde Maria replied, ‘if you’re feeling tired. I’ll sit here for a while if you like, in case you wake up in a bit and want to hear some more.’

  ‘That’s nice of you, love. Yes, I think I’ll snooze for a bit.’

  As on the previous night Kooka’s left hand then reached out automatically and clicked on his little black transistor radio where it sat on the bedside table. He slipped down deeper into the bedclothes just as the radio news was finishing and a discussion about the history of the Australian film industry began. Maria leant down to the ice-cream container, got herself an apricot, and waited.

  Out in the night, beyond the timber-scented darkness on the perimeter of the pool of light, she could no longer hear the Plinth bells from the rivermouth but rather the large branches of the two backyard pine trees brushing against the Sewing Room wall. She took a small bite from the apricot and listened as an erudite interviewee discussed the effects of tax deductibility on Australian creativity.

  And then Kooka’s dream took over.

  ‘You can just bundle it all up, love, but you can’t bundle me. Doesn’t that tell you something? Take the charts and the cabinets and th
e files, the tapes and the teaspoons and tobacco pouches, and...’

  A woman’s voice. It was Mary, from the night before. Mary and John. Mary and Kooka. Mary’s voice, Kooka’s wife. And now Kooka’s voice as well, but so much younger, a young man in love.

  ‘Oh, but look at this one, Mary. It’s you, on the badge of the spoon. See, it says it – MARY DWYER MINAPRE HOSPITAL FUND...’

  ‘It’s not me, John.’

  ‘What’s that? Look, of course it’s you.’

  ‘No it’s not, John. Am I not scattered to the winds?’

  ‘Oh, Mary, don’t say that.’

  ‘The wind I’m on. You can’t put my titties on the spoon, John. And our love ... remember the eagle over the water ... remember it gliding ... our love, John ... not a spoon.’

  Maria herself had used Kooka’s souvenir teaspoons many times since she’d arrived at the hotel. Kooka had in fact given her the WILLY COOPER BIGGEST BABY IN VICTORIA spoon to take upstairs to her room when she made such a great impression on him the day she first arrived. Now she began to join the dots as the transistor beside the bed crackled and cut away.

  For a moment, though, there was silence, just the pines brushing the outside wall, before the voices recommenced.

  ‘Remember how much putty we used, my dear John. But I’ve long forgiven you, love. I’ll take the honey over the putty. Any day. I shouldn’t have blamed you. She couldn’t resist your charms.’

  ‘But, Mary, I’m sticky with the putty. It’s in my armpits now ... I’m all stopped up with it, Mary...’

  ‘You’ve got teaspoons in your ears, John ... shire records for socks ... what’s your heart now, John, a recording?’

  ‘But it’s in my heart, Mary, all the putty, from the hardware, you’ve gone...’

  ‘I’m not gone, John. That’s why I took the apricots away...’

  ‘To find love in the hollow tree.’

  ‘We did that, John.’

  ‘I grew fur, Mary ... and then the fur grew on you and we lived in that hollow.’

  ‘As one creature, dear John.’

  Maria’s mouth was open in awe. She looked down at the apricot in her hand. It was small and blushed. Ripe. Now it seemed like a magical thing, an out-of-the-ordinary thing, a part of heaven. And then the tranny glitched again. She heard the same watery sounds of the night before. And the list again, of the swimmer in the waves.

  ‘Bronchitis Cure, The Best Test for the Chest ... eighty barrels ... wire the cooper from Corrievale for Tom String ... mounts for the new ale mirror ... fetch the grates ... bring the flowers for the rooms off the dray...’

  The swimmer dived again and in The Blonde Maria’s heart the whole Sewing Room seemed to sunder deep into the ocean hum. In her mind she even saw the salty underwater grain. And then the swimmer rose and opened out with spray into the air and sky. She gasped, then let out a little squeal of joy.

  The Blonde Maria watched Kooka intently now. His face was impassive on the pillow but once again there was movement behind his eyes.

  She stared at the tranny. Just a small black rectangular box. How could it be so?

  Then, with devastating predictability, came the roaring sound of a burning building. And once again the screaming woman. FIRE! FIRE! NO I MUST SEE MY JOHNNY. OH GOD FIRE! SOMEONE PLEASE!

  Maria had no idea who the woman was but looking over at Kooka now she could see his big brow knitting with concern. The screaming continued and then, as if by rote, there was the sound of horse’s hooves and the voices of firemen. The fire was going out; the woman’s voice had vanished.

  In the pool of light Kooka’s brow relaxed but now a single tear glittered as it slipped out of his dreaming eye. The voice of Mary came again: ‘And I will love you, doubly for your old mum, for the love she sold to send you here, to the ocean ... and I did, John ... and I did...’

  Kooka laughed. ‘But it’s overflowing now, Mary, and the blasted tap won’t stop ... it’s better off in the grass, a love like that...’

  ‘No container could hold it, John.’

  ‘It’s better off, Mary. Makes the grass grow.’

  ‘No container, John, no cabinet, no pouch...’

  ‘Mary, did you see the brolgas that Tom String bred?’

  ‘I did. And all the feathers flying...’

  Once again Kooka laughed in his dream but then he sniffed on the pillow, his body bunched up under the covers, and with an abrupt heave the old man turned over in the bed. The tranny glitched. And then, suddenly, Barry Humphries was talking about expatriate life in London in the 1960s.

  Like a Dog on Heat

  Because of the successful precedents we’d set with Duchamp the Talking Urinal, with Veronica’s frankincense fumigation, and with allowing community contributions such as the screening of ‘Nan’s Towering Inferno’ and Jim’s ‘The Dying Gardens of the Great Ocean Road’ during Happy Hour, we felt a duty among our committee to keep up the good times and the vibrant flow of ideas. So, in the days following my confrontation of Maria, and now that Kooka’s bar game about the mystery of the fire in the original Grand Hotel had been superseded by his interesting new condition, we called a committee meeting in The Horse Room where we agreed to three brand new Grand Hotel competitions.

  The first was to be a contest that would give character names to our local winds, à la the Sirocco of the Mediterranean and The Fremantle Doctor of Perth. This idea of Ash Bowen’s came from an awareness of how the devastation of the local Aboriginal people by white settlers had deprived us all of an authentic language with which to speak about the land we loved. As Ash pointed out at the meeting, the Wathaurong band in our area would surely have had names for all the various winds on the coast, but now those names were gone on the very winds they described. It therefore seemed not only worthwhile but also a good fun idea to hold a competition to come up with our own.

  The second idea at that meeting was to begin what we would call our Tuesday Wellbeing Nights, where we would venture out into the town after stumps to creatively alter shire signage in the spirit of Dada and the freedom virus. This idea was the result of a collaboration between Veronica and Darren Traherne, both of whom were almost allergic to the excessive amounts of signage implemented by the shire, small tourism operators, and various state-government bodies in our area. On many occasions over the years, when he was returning from fishing the night tides, Darren himself had gone down on bended knee under the moonlight to dismantle newly erected signs he considered superfluous, only to see them replaced in the following days by the various powers that be. For a time Darren did this so regularly that he carried a hacksaw with extra blades and a shifting spanner in his fishing bag. In the end, however, he’d given up, such was the persistence of his more organised opponents. But now Veronica was suggesting a new approach. Rather than destroy the signs, we would merely use them as the raw material for public works of art. We would tag these noble civic contributions of the Grand Hotel clientele with an obscure signature – ‘DTs’, short for ‘Dada Tourists’ – and a prize would be awarded if anyone could create a work that was so effective and popular among the population that the shire refused to take it down.

  The third competition suggested at the meeting was that we begin a Grand Hotel stoneskimming contest down among the Plinths near the rivermouth. This was Darren Traherne’s idea alone, and it immediately aroused much excitement and enthusiasm from the group. I sensed in this unbridled enthusiasm a sudden yearning among the committee for some harmless fun. Joan Sutherland, for instance, was particularly keen, no doubt wanting to pretend the adulterous and licentious world he was now inhabiting was innocent and pure after all. Perhaps not surprisingly it was only Veronica, with her intense loyalty to Art with a capital A, and her relentless desire to subvert the marketing and development of the coast, who remained lukewarm about the stoneskimming idea.

  In fact it was at this point, when it became obvious that her plan to refashion shire infrastructure was the least favourite of the three prop
osed competitions, that Veronica cracked it good and proper. For weeks now she’d been complaining to me about letting The Lazy Tenor stay in the pub, about the mainstream mediocrity of the nightly sets of The Barrels, and also about what she thought was my tendency to cater too much for what she liked to call ‘the mob’. Veronica had always been ardent, driven, and hot-blooded, and didn’t want to see her radical dream of a Dada hotel die a boring death. Calling me aside during the meeting and out onto the verandah, she began hectoring me in a frustrated and derisive voice. Eventually I held up my hand. I had enough on my plate and just wasn’t in the mood.

  So, promptly, and I must say with a touch of rich-kid snootiness, she threatened right there and then to have nothing more to do with the hotel. I was shocked, even despite her grievances, and only managed to placate her by saying we’d put the Wellbeing Nights at the top of the list. Grudgingly she accepted this olive branch but didn’t look too convinced. Saying she wasn’t going back into the meeting, she turned and stepped off the verandah to head back up the hill to her studio on the cliff. As I watched her go, I couldn’t help but feel diminished in the eyes of an artist I truly admired.