by Gregory Day
I had to take a few deep breaths before re-entering the meeting. I felt caught. I knew exactly where Veronica was coming from but I also felt she was missing the point. The deepest of all the ironies that the Dada movement embodied was that they scoffed at any slavish adherence to Art with a capital A, or Politics with a capital P, while simultaneously being famous for a riotous display of both. Veronica seemed to have remembered all the Dada postures but this one, which was surely the solid andevershifting ground that gave Dada its incomparable cock-a-hoop freedom. As much as I was looking forward to participating in the Tuesday Wellbeing Nights, it would be impossibly boring of me now to just ignore the wishes and enthusiasms of the rest of those involved in the hotel in the name of either Art or Politics.
I went back into the meeting without breathing a word of her complaint – I just said she’d gone home because she wasn’t feeling well – but when the possibility of a competition to name the local winds was brought up later that night in the bar it immediately captured everyone’s imagination. Then, when the stoneskimming comp was mentioned, it wasn’t long before the whole bar was getting quite carried away, even to the extent that someone joked that Mangowak could be the host of the first ever World Stoneskimming Championships! People sipped at their Dancing Brolgas and were seduced by the preposterous scale of such an idea, which was of course soon scotched by a brief scoot around the internet on the big Happy Hour screen, where we found a plethora of websites devoted not only to world stoneskimming championship events but also to the sophisticated physics of the art. Despite this blow to our hope that Mangowak had finally found its very own niche of global significance, everyone was full of praise for the hotel committee in coming up with such great ideas.
In the following days and weeks not a breath of wind coursed through our valley unnoticed and more and more people could be seen down on the beach practising their skimming techniques in readiness for the comp. It seemed pretty clear I’d made a promise to Veronica that I couldn’t really keep.
It was as I lay in my loft later on the night of this meeting, trying to clear my mind of all my cares and worries by counting imaginary brolgas leaping over the fences on the riverflat, that I heard a resounding crash in the night as Big Joan Sutherland fell down off the drainpipe of the second storey of The Grand Hotel.
I rushed on some clothes and went out to find the big fella lying splayed across the yard like a truly unsuccessful dog on heat. Wincing in pain, he bleated to me that he had lost his hotel key. I didn’t need to ask why he hadn’t come and knocked on the barn door to borrow my key. Quite obviously he had gone home after stumps to check on Jen and the kids and then come back to rendezvous with The Blonde Maria.
When he had hit the ground, still clinging to the downpipe, the crash he made was so loud it could well have been heard in the previous century. From the upstairs rooms of the hotel, however, there was absolutely no reaction. The windows were silent, inscrutably so, with no breeze to even flutter the curtains. At this stage we had a jetlagged university student from Rotterdam staying in Room Two, who perhaps understandably was either too shy or too sleepy to peer down. But I had to wonder what particular cocktail of The Blonde Maria’s affections was distracting the other rooms from noticing Joan’s fall. Was she still sitting in the wicker chair beside Kooka, reading him to sleep from The World of Carrick’s Cove, or was she at the other end of the hallway in The Lazy Tenor’s room, her recently pleasured body sprawled across his naked frame as she tenderly whispered her plan for world musical domination into his ear?
Down on the ground Joan was very, very sore – in fact he hadn’t moved a limb as yet. I knelt down beside him and asked if he was okay. He said he thought so but that his arm hurt. I asked him which arm and he simply said, ‘My tap-arm.’
‘Oh great,’ I replied, with a thick lashing of sarcasm. ‘That’s all I need. A barman who can’t pour drinks. Are you out of your mind?’
‘Well, thanks for the sympathy, Noel.’
The dim starless night over the hotel yard was suddenly lit up as Sergeant Greg Beer’s police four-wheel drive pulled into the driveway. For a moment the ice-blue tinge of his high-beam headlights revealed more than just the Blossfeldt pattern of blackwood trees on my eastern boundary. I saw clearly and in a piercing instant that The Grand Hotel had in fact become much more than I’d bargained for, and more perhaps than I could adequately handle.
Greg Beer switched off his engine and headlights. He got out of his car and shut and locked his driver’s door with a pneumatic squish and an electronic pop. He took a torch off his hip and shone it in our direction. ‘Is everything alright here, Noel?’ he said. ‘I’ve had a report.’
‘What kind of report?’
‘Of a loud crash from your premises. What’s happened to Mr Sutherland here?’
‘Oh, he’s just had a little accident,’ I said. ‘He misplaced his key and was attempting to find another way into the building.’
‘And he fell?’
‘Yes, he fell.’
Greg Beer stood right over us now and shone his halogen torchlight straight into Joan’s face.
‘Aw, shit. Turn that thing off would ya, Greg?’ Joan complained. ‘You tryin’ to blind me or somethin’?’
Greg Beer clicked off his torch. Then he clicked it on again, this time pointing it at the wall of the hotel. As the light thoroughly frisked the building, he continued his investigation. ‘Any broken bones?’
‘Nah. Well, maybe my arm,’ Joan replied.
‘Can you get up? Can you walk?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Do you want to lay charges, Noel?’
‘I’m sorry?’ I said.
The policeman’s torchlight scanned the upper storey of the hotel, obviously looking not just for signs of the accident but for anything at all incriminating he might find. I dreaded what he would see as the light moved from right to left towards The Blonde Maria’s and The Lazy Tenor’s rooms.
‘Well this does qualify as a breaking-and-entering offence,’ the sergeant said, without taking his eyes off the torch beam.
‘Oh, come off it. Joan works here. He just lost his key that’s all.’
‘Well it’s up to you, Noel. But there’s been a lot of this kind of thing happening in Mangowak of late. Breaking and entering. I’m determined to stamp it out.’
‘I see. Well that’s very worrying. It’s not like back when we were kids, eh, Greg?’ I ventured.
‘What do you mean by that, Noel?’
‘There was never any break-ins back then was there?’
Greg Beer clicked off his torch again and swung around to face me. It was true, when we were growing up in Mangowak there weren’t any robberies or vandalism at all, apart from the occasional celebratory Monday night sinking of a weekender’s boat in the river. But that was just us kids on a bit of a lark. No, my comment was referring to the fact that Greg Beer’s mother, Meryl, had been the one real exception to the rule. It wasn’t that she was a kleptomaniac or anything, but from time to time she felt the overwhelming need to let herself into vacant beach-houses in the town, put her feet up on the couches and polish off the drinks cabinet. Those were the days before we had our own policeman in Mangowak, and if it wasn’t for the sympathy and understanding extended to Meryl Beer and her kids by Sergeant Ted ‘Prickly’ Moses, the policeman in Minapre, she would have been put in the clink as a repeat offender and her son and daughter would have been placed in an orphanage. Even as it was, on a couple of occasions she had to sober up overnight in the Minapre lock-up, and Greg and his sister Lurline were given to the sisters in St Catherine’s convent in the hills out the back of town.
Admittedly this was a low blow I’d delivered to the sergeant, but I felt it was justified. There was no criminal offence occurring here, just an everyday case of male sexual passion gone wrong. And surely the police didn’t have to know about that.
As I stood up from kneeling beside Joan, who himself sat up for the first time si
nce the fall and leant on the elbow of his unbroken left arm, Sergeant Greg Beer glared at us both with a thinly disguised loathing. He fixed his torch back into its position on his hip and straightened his uniform pullover.
‘I’ll leave you gentlemen to it then,’ he said officiously, before striding back across the yard towards his car.
I called after him. ‘But Sergeant. If Joan’s arm is broken, someone will have to see to it. You couldn’t drive him over to the Minapre Hospital to have it checked out could you?’
Despite the late hour this request was of course well within the bounds of what could be expected from a small town policeman. Knowing that Greg Beer was such a stickler for protocol, I couldn’t see how he would refuse.
Amazingly, however, he did refuse, such was his fury at my reference to his mum’s criminal habits of days gone by.
‘You’ve got a car, Noel. You can drive him,’ he said bluntly.
‘But I...’
There were to be no ‘buts’. I watched helplessly as Greg Beer hit the central-locking button on his key ring. The slotting sound of his car doors opening signalled his resolve. He got in behind the steering wheel. But just as he was about to start the car, something behind Joan and I seemed suddenly to distract his attention. With his hand poised on the key in his ignition, he stared up at the second storey of the hotel. By the light in the cabin of his car we saw his mouth drop open and his face go all slack.
As Joan nursed his arm on the ground at my feet, I turned around and looked up. There was now a light glowing from The Lazy Tenor’s room. It was a weird glow, with what could only be described as a wasabi-coloured tinge to it. Subsequently I discovered the glow came as a result of The Blonde Maria draping her bra over the bald bedside lamp.
She stood at the window, surrounded by the wasabi glow, a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The Blonde Maria. She was naked from the waist up, her full breasts on display to the evening. On her head was my father’s favourite fishing beanie, pulled tight over her ears. She must’ve dug it out from the cupboard in The Lazy Tenor’s room.
Looking up from the yard, the vision of her was unsettling, spectral. It could almost have been a ghost if it wasn’t for the potent charge of her sexuality.
Just as quickly as she appeared, The Blonde Maria disappeared from the window back into the room, leaving myself and the sergeant with the heady after-image of her glory in the wasabi light. After a few silent moments Greg Beer collected himself and started the car. Uncharacteristically forgetting to turn on his headlights, and without so much as a glance in my direction, he backed out under cover of the pine trees and drove away into the night.
I spent the hours until dawn in the Emergency Department of the Minapre Hospital, as Joan had his fractured tap-arm set and plastered. As he finally came out of the surgery room around 5.30 am, I could hear Minapre’s famously steak-indulged kookaburras laughing in the trees all around the building.
Joan walked over with his arm in its fresh sling. I pulled a pen out of my coat pocket, held it high in the air, and said, ‘May I?’
He grinned his old grin. ‘I dunno, Noel. I don’t think it’s dry enough yet.’
But I was determined. I’d been planning it while I was waiting. I gently pulled back the cotton sling from the plaster-cast on his arm and began my inscription.
In blue biro I drew a heart with an arrow crossing through it diagonally. At the top of the arrow I wrote the name JOAN and at the bottom below the arrow point I wrote JEN. Then I brushed the mushy wet plaster off the tip of my pen, replaced it in my coat pocket, stood back and looked at him.
He inspected what I had written. Looking up at me sheepishly, he said, ‘I do, Noel. I do love her.’
‘Well stop trying to be Spiderman scaling buildings in the middle of the night and start showing it.’
‘But, Noel, Maria ... she’s so...’
‘Stop it!’ I said, raising my voice. ‘Don’t you see? This is a warning. You’ve gotta cut it out.’
Joan frowned, then nodded his head towards the laughing kookaburras beyond the automatic doors. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
Watching the Gannets
As always that morning there were things I had to do: cleaning, banking, ordering, etc., but all I really felt like doing was diving into the ocean. What with the initial excitement and then the various dramas in the hotel, I hadn’t had a swim for what seemed like weeks. So I put on a pair of swimming shorts in my barn, selected my favourite fiddleback staff from the bundle in the corner near the big doors, and stepped out from under the pine trees to head down to the waves.
As I walked across the flat and began the climb up to the cliff above Horseshoe Cove, I was so bowed down with cares and worries I could’ve had a butterfly saying prayers on my nose and wouldn’t have noticed. By the time I reached the top and laid eyes on the water below, my tears fell like rain that had been tangled up in my own personal bluestone-coloured cloud for weeks.
The tears fell as I walked along the clifftop track towards Squeaky Beach. Before long my shirt was drenched from the familiar salty giant-sized droplets. It was becoming clear that to laugh properly, fully, you first of all had to know how to really cry. Well, you can see that in a child. What baby is born laughing after all? No, first we cry, then we laugh. But a child doesn’t feel wooden, like I had when I left for the clefts and overhangs. And it’s from that wooden unfeeling source, that terrifying place where nothing matters anymore, where you could quite easily hack off your own arm for kindling, that my new kind of laughter had been born. This was the laughter from the depths of the human well, the laughter of full surrender, of tragedy ripened rather than left unripe, the laughter that comes up in the bucket along with the pitch black of the darkness below.
In the midst of the hotel’s shenanigans perhaps it was too easy to forget that the darkness was always there, slowly turning like a planet unto itself, just underneath the light, fuelling every bright joke and cackle. Well, the dramatic implications of recent events had certainly reminded me. Despite our self-assurances, our artistic platitudes and social certainties, we were all actually caught in our lives between reality on the one hand and fantasy on the other. Why else would a country boy with a beautiful wife who he loved, and two sons who he’d die for, put everything at risk for the sake of an exotic young bohemian who could take or leave him like a day at the races? And why would a beautiful young singer, with genuine artistic talent and a timeless gift for entertaining the troops, retreat into her shell, refuse to sing, and devote herself to a frankly dubious character to whom she was just another in a long line of notable conquests? Sure, Louis Daley had a miracle voice, but did he seem to care about it that much? Not from what I could tell. He sang in the mornings as habitually as he pulled on his pants, and he seemed to care much more about getting his pants off again, at the first available opportunity, than he did about a singing career that would make him a household name.
And just because I could see all this clearly, it didn’t mean that I myself was immune. The irony for me, of course, was that amidst the mundane burdens, the surreal realisations and unforeseen complications of running the pub, The Lazy Tenor’s singing was a deeply therapeutic way to start the day. Without fail it reassured me, despite Veronica’s despair, that great beauty was still possible in this life, that we could still soar above the rucks of ugliness, even this late in the human story. That confidence alone, which I could rely upon for as long as The Lazy Tenor remained a lodger, was by itself almost worth all the anguish. So where was my own border between reality and fantasy? Frankly, I didn’t know, and perhaps, after my charmed encounter with the brolga, the brolga that everyone assured me couldn’t possibly exist, I didn’t care to. All I knew was that The Lazy Tenor’s singing was a privilege, and not only for the rich.
By the time I was approaching the track down to Squeaky Beach, my tears were satisfactorily spent and there was a spring in my step at the prospect of the swim. As I
walked, I began to notice the little flowers in the undergrowth all around me: the wine-dark peas, the running postmans, the everlasting daisies and the fringe lilies. Before she died, Mum always liked to say that to notice the little flowers in the bush around Mangowak is to know your mind and heart are clear. They seemed to vanish, to disappear in the face of tension, or muddle-headedness, or madness, but of course they were always there, the little flowers, each in their own right season. It was only the looker who could go missing, Mum always told us; it was only the looker who would wander off into gloom and blindness. Not the little flowers.
I descended the Squeaky Beach steps and arrived on the sand to find no one else around. I stripped off and ran through the white breakers before plunging deep into the clear green water between the sets.
My instincts had been right. A walk and now a swim was doing me the world of good. I could feel my spirit shedding its burdens, my cells reawakening, the tawdry sexual life of the upstairs rooms of the hotel, and the worry over Veronica’s dissatisfaction, being replaced by a purer saltwater sensation.
The swell was solid, with waves peeling off the reef at about three feet. I was surprised no one was out there surfing but didn’t dwell on it. I took pleasure in the fact that for the moment it was all mine to enjoy.
For half an hour or so I bodysurfed, riding high with head and shoulders out above the tumbling white water. The massage of the surf relaxed my body, and afterwards I stood peacefully in the marbled slack between the waves, diving under each one as it came along.
I was sufficiently unwound now to allow everyday tasks to re-enter my mind. I dived and stroked in the underhum of the water and began to make a list of the things that needed ordering for The Grand.
A new delivery of The Dancing Brolga Ale from Rennie Vigata ... ten one-kilo pats of butter from the Pollsmere farm at Gellibrand ... two dozen seven-ounce glasses and one dozen five-ounce ponies from Stewart Cellars in Melbourne ... three tonnes of white box from Mologa for the fire ... two twenty-can boxes of Portuguese olive oil from Odysseus in Minapre ... a new set of tablecloths, which Nan had told me were on sale at Dimmeys in Colac ... a new back-up USB cable for the screen in the bar. Jim had also asked me to order bass guitar strings for Oscar on the hotel letterhead – apparently they cost the earth. What on earth the hotel was doing buying musical equipment for The Barrels was beyond me, but as I swam in the silky life-giving waters at Squeaky Beach I hardly cared.
