by Gregory Day
‘He didn’t mind the winds?’ I asked, gesturing for her to sit down for a cup of tea with me at the table.
‘No, not at all,’ she declared. ‘I put him on the shelf in the window on the southeast side and he’d just sing away every morning. Wouldn’t you, Frankie? And then in the afternoons I’d let him out for a while and he’d fly around a bit and shit on my work. I had to have a special Frankie-rag always at hand, just in case the cack dried and left a stain. Apart from that he was perfect company, Noel.’
I looked at Frankie in the cage where Veronica had placed it on the table and he did look a picture of health. His orange feathers had a real lustre. In a burst of self-pity I thought that both he and Pippy had perhaps been happier without me while I was away.
Veronica Khouri and I had originally met years before at art school in Melbourne. She was half Lebanese and half Argentinian, an exotic, precocious and heavily politicised star of that art school scene, whereas I was a little more inconspicuous, though I did have my moments. We didn’t set eyes on each other for years afterwards, until her wealthy father bought Ron McCoy’s land up on the Mangowak cliff opposite the Two Pointer Rocks. After that I’d bump into her every now and again when she was around but one day, a couple of years after old Ron died, she told me she was moving into town permanently. Well, this was quite a surprise. I’d followed her career over the years since we’d graduated – she had become a sculptor of some note internationally – but then, as we had stood chatting in the general store, she said she’d had enough of the travel and especially the art industry bullshit and just wanted somewhere quiet to live and work. Her father, Dom, who worshipped the ground his only daughter walked on, had agreed to build her a studio among the vegetable gardens and fruit trees he’d planted on the site of the McCoys’ old house.
At the time this was a piece of news I found disconcerting, because it required me to knit together two disparate, and up until then entirely separate, threads of my life. On the one hand there was my artistic self, and my own private imaginings, which on a day-to-day level I kept pretty much contained within the confines of my barn, where I worked. On the other hand there was the quiet, almost nondescript life I led in my home town, where I preferred to shelter that artistic self behind a more homely persona. The news that Veronica, who’d been a provocative and even intimidating presence in those earlier days at art school, and with whom back then I’d shared a passionate love of Dada and the Surrealists, was moving into my provincial little realm, and setting up creative camp on the McCoys’ old cliff, would require an interesting series of readjustments.
As I poured the tea, Veronica said her mother had seen me pass in front of their house the previous day on my way back into town along the clifftop track. She’d said I was carrying a bunch of coloured balloons. Briefly we talked about where I’d been in my time away but I kept the details hazy. I told her that I’d found the balloons on the beach but said nothing of the Reverse Pinocchio and even less about the brolga.
Then I changed the subject and we talked about how her work was progressing. She had constructed a transparent lifesized human body out of Perspex, which she was painstakingly filling with a collection of what she called ‘three-dimensional techno-biographical influences’. To me it sounded like a twenty-first-century version of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings, but in 3D. I was interested. I pressed her on it but got the feeling she wanted to keep her own details hazy as well. Fair enough. But then she surprised me by coming straight out and asking if I had agreed to open my house to the public as The Grand Hotel.
It seemed that Kooka’s bright idea had already been floated widely in the town while I was away. It also appeared that everyone was in favour of it. Veronica said that at first when she was told she couldn’t quite imagine me taking it on, but she was so outraged by the Wathaurong Heights development that she decided to offer any help she could.
And so, she wondered, what did I think about it all? Was I keen?
I answered with a diverting giggle and assured her that it could never happen. She must have picked up some other layer in my voice, however, because typically, in her hot-blooded way, she pounced. She demanded to know my specific objections and then, one by one, started dismissing them. To my protests that I was a hopeless businessman she assured me that Gene Sutherland’s wife, Jen, had agreed to look after the books. To my confident objection that the house was not fit to be resuscitated to occupational-health-and-safety standards she said that my brother Jim had already had a shire building inspector suss it out and that, providing certain considerations were taken care of, the house had been deemed fundamentally solid and given the potential thumbs up.
‘Phew,’ I said. ‘It seems a committee has already been set up without me. I feel ambushed.’
All the reservations I’d expressed so far, both to Kooka and now to Veronica, were of a practical nature, but it was to my more overriding objections, such as how my quiet life would be ruined and how the beloved house my grandfather had built would be plastered with huge signs advertising beer and skittles, my block mangled for car parking, etc. – in short how the whole hard-won atmosphere of my life would be ruined – that Veronica countered with her most convincing argument. Kooka had wooed me pretty well in his archive, with tales of continuing the independent traditions of his beloved old Grand Hotel, but it was only when Veronica reminded me of the freedom virus that I began to see the whole thing as perhaps being already written in the stars.
Becoming increasingly annoyed with my deflections and objections, Veronica said, ‘You don’t have to be a meathead about it, Noel. No one’s looking for a pub like any other! Remember Kurt Schwitters, remember Hugo Ball, remember Dada and the freedom virus? Well that’s it. Let’s get infected. Isn’t it possible to please the likes of Kooka and Givva Way and the other drunkards, and do something that’s interesting as well? No one can be pissed off with you about it coz without you there’d be no pub in the town. C’mon, Noel, just see it as one big work of art.’
I said nothing. I just tucked into my omelette and jokingly rolled my eyes. A hotel as a work of art in little ol’ Mangowak? It was about as unlikely as an indoor creek. But Veronica’s mention of the Dada freedom virus had actually struck a chord. It was coincidentally just after the era of the original Grand Hotel in Mangowak when the Dada artists on the other side of the world had responded to the hellish capitalist machinery of the First World War by setting their own selves free. Free from the so-called rationalism that had produced such an in-your-face nightmare, and free from adding to the plush pile of comfortable art that seemed to serve no other purpose than to amuse the upper-class technicians of the disaster. Rather than picking up the usual instruments and singing some harmoniously predictable dirge of despair, the Dadaists had broken open European culture with an axe blow. They had declared their own war on meaning itself, and had taken the piss out of absolutely everything, particularly art. They had turned their backs on ‘quality’ and ‘tradition’ in favour of nonsense and relentless liberation. They called this burst springtime pod Dada, anti-art, the freedom virus. It was vivid, absurd, profoundly meaningless. No one had ever seen anything like it. And nothing in the art world had ever been the same since.
My own slow transformation out in the clefts and overhangs seemed suddenly to have been heading all the while to this point. A hundred years after the original festivities of Dada were unleashed, I’d been completely floored, not only by our human savaging of the planet on a global scale but also by the surreal appropriations that were happening in the tiny little realm of my home town. I’d stumbled off into the bush like a zombie until, with the vision of the brolga, I realised I could return, but only with a light step and a heart reconfigured for laughter. I had come back not knowing where this new attitude would lead, and not needing to know either, only to find that, lo and behold, my friends and loved ones had somehow already divined an unlikely solution on my behalf: The Grand Hotel.
From down at the
rivermouth I could hear the Plinth bells beginning to chime in the sea breeze. I sipped my tea. It would be my pub after all, on the site of the old Grand Hotel and in my grandfather’s house. I could do what I liked. There were no rules about what beer you had to serve, what pictures you had to have on the walls, and surely it wasn’t compulsory that every publican turn into a pot-bellied Sky-channel addict!
As I chewed on my omelette, a spicy burst of Vietnamese mint exploded in my mouth. My brain started to buzz with excitement. My skin began to tingle. Two definite symptoms of the freedom virus. But I said nothing. Across the table Veronica was peering at me ferociously, in a vain attempt to read my mind.
Eventually I looked across at her and winked. I put down my knife and fork, leant across the table and unhitched Frankie’s birdcage door. He flew straight out and joyfully began to circle the golden cypress ceiling of what would shortly become the main bar of The Grand Hotel.
The Fire Still Burns
After Veronica left, I spent the rest of the day moving about the house, in quite a welter of excitement as I tried to imagine the details of its transformation. The house had many rooms, both upstairs and down, small pokey rooms for the most part, built by my grandfather back in the days when northern hemisphere architecture still ruled Australian houses. Upstairs, though, my mum’s old sewing room was the major exception, with its high pitched ceiling and large windows facing both north and south.
Originally the room was intended as a study for my papa when he retired from the meteorological station, but as he never did retire the room was never finished. Its floor was never polished, its walls never plastered, the pitched ceiling remained unlined and it still had that lovely astringent smell of open raw timber. Eventually, when we were kids, Mum took it over as a place to sew at night. Climbing the stairs and entering the room in the middle of the afternoon, listening to the familiar warpy music of my feet on its timbers, in my mind I’d already assigned that one cavernous and unfinished space to Kooka and his archive.
By nightfall I found myself still sitting on the wicker chair by the single bed in The Sewing Room, quite dumbstruck by the realisation that Kooka’s idea of continuing in the tradition of the original Grand Hotel and Veronica’s notion of reviving the Dada freedom virus were not entirely incompatible. This wasn’t so much a case of opposites attracting as the desire for freedom to unify all things. As a result my brain started flooding with ideas for the new establishment, ideas which I would only realise later were completely and unwittingly at the service of that freedom. Duchamp the Talking Urinal, which turned out to be the first great hit of The Grand Hotel, was among the initial deluge of inspirations I had while sitting up there in The Sewing Room, but as the ideas kept coming I quickly realised that the logistics of everything would have to be discussed, that I would need a lot of canny practical help to bring it all to fruition. By the time I went back down the stairs and out to the barn after dark, I’d decided to call the first of a series of meetings to get the ball rolling.
I was plain exhausted from all the excitement but as soon as my head hit the pillow the bells on the Plinths down at the rivermouth began clanging away in the southerly and I couldn’t sleep. Oscar had obviously gone out on the tear and forgotten to tie them down. The ding-dong-clackety-clang travelled across the sedge and tea tree and right on up the riverflat. Were the bells ringing for the end of the world? I wasn’t sure. But I did know there was no way anyone could sleep with the racket.
Eventually I put on some clothes, climbed out of my loft and walked to the rivermouth with a surfboard, rope, and occy straps, intending to tie the bells down myself. When I got to the water, however, Givva Way was already halfway across to the bells in his canoe. I stood watching in the moonlight as Givva climbed up onto each of the three Plinths and manhandled the bells. When finally he’d paddled from Plinth to Plinth and the last bell had fallen silent, the whole riverflat seemed to let out one huge sigh of relief.
I couldn’t help but giggle as curly-headed Givva, with paint flakes in his hair from the long days swabbing housesides, cursed and swore and plashed his paddle back towards the shore. When he finally got to the bank, I could see he was still in his pyjamas. He noticed me standing there with the surfboard under my arm and grunted. I said g’day and he let out a kind of ‘Bah!’ sound. Then, as he dragged his black canoe up out of the riversludge towards its hiding place in the bearded heath, he looked at me and said, ‘Fuckin’ world’s gone mad, Noel. Fuckin’ cunts.’ Then he stormed off the beach, stumbled across the road and disappeared into his front garden.
It was too good an opportunity to miss. First thing the next morning I grabbed some charcoal from the open fire and made a sketch of Givva grappling with the bells on the inlet in his pyjamas. Around the base of the glowing Plinths I added piranhas snapping and agitating the water. In the sky great vultures loomed and swooped below the moon. I photocopied it eight times at the post office and sent them out as invitations to a meeting regarding ‘THE REAWAKENING OF THE GRAND HOTEL (THE FIRE STILL BURNS!)’. I sent them to my brother Jim and Oscar, Veronica Khouri, Nan Burns, Darren Traherne, Ash Bowen, Kooka, and my old mate from the banks of the Barroworn, Gene Sutherland.
A Village Atmosphere
On the day of that first meeting the weather was fine and it soon became apparent that everyone’s real concern was to welcome me back and to ply me with questions and taunt me with absurd speculations about what I’d been up to while I’d been away. Ash Bowen, who when he’s not tiptoeing around his bush block in an apiarist’s suit is quite the cultural connoisseur, reckoned I’d taken some cushy flat in Melbourne and hung out with the art crowd. And that I was too embarrassed to admit it. Nan Burns, my oldest friend going way back, who to this day likes to think of me as innocent, wide-eyed and idealistic, reckoned I might have gone away to work in one of Steve Waugh’s orphanages in India. My brother Jim and Oscar were prepared to believe just about anything when it came to my flights of fancy, and Darren Traherne only wanted to know how the shotgun I’d borrowed from him before I went stood up to the rigours of my exile.
‘Bloody well,’ I told Darren. ‘I spent many a night on a cleft or under an overhang oiling that gun, wiping it, kissing it and bowing to it, terrified that you’d shoot me with it if I brought it back in bad nick.’
Big Gene Sutherland was the only one present who was certain he knew what I’d been up to. He let out a huge dairyman’s laugh as each person uttered his or her speculation, slapped his big thighs as I tried to explain where I’d actually been, and then asked me for the name of the child.
‘C’mon, Noel,’ he said, as I looked at him nonplussed. ‘You’ve always been a dark horse. Where’re you hiding the bird and what’re you calling the kid?’
Nan scoffed. ‘What are you on about, Gene? You reckon he’s been sheltered by the Sisters of Mercy or something? What a load of old fashioned crap. We all know Noel can’t get a root.’
Gene burst into loud laughter again, his big Otway dewlaps shaking. And so it went, for the next half hour, with everyone seated on the pews around the living-room table and me pouring wine and handing around stubbies of beer while providing plenty of clownish fodder for the jokes. Finally I had to draw their attention to the purpose of the meeting. I cleared my throat loudly, like a councillor, and began with a grin.
‘In my time away with the art crowd,’ I said, ‘reflecting on the possibilities for creative expression in the new century, and in the months I spent working with the sick, the homeless, the poor and unloved in India, and, of course, through the invaluable insights and maturity I have gathered since conceiving and then having my first child, I have come to the conclusion, which you may have all already realised a long time ago, that God’s a comedian. I used to think he was airbrushed and perfect, then I thought he was drunk and negligent, then of course I considered the possibility that he didn’t exist at all – but you know in my time away I just couldn’t come to terms with any of those ideas. Eventually,
with the wise counsel of some very accepting and good-humoured animal friends, I decided he could very well exist, but only if he was a jokester. Because how else can we explain the goings on around us? The indoor creek, Wathaurong Heights, and now of course the Plinths and the bells, eh?’
‘What about the meteorological station?’ interrupted Darren Traherne. ‘That’s pretty sick.’
‘What about it?’ I said.
‘What, are you fuckin’ blind or something, Noel? They painted the chimneys red.’
I went straight to the double doors leading onto the verandah, stepped out and had a look. Sure enough, up there on the cliff the old white limestone chimneys of the meteorological station were painted a bright Noddy-from-Enid-Blyton red.
I returned inside. ‘Well that’s pretty cheery,’ I said.
‘Yeah, you can’t have white chimneys, mate. They get dirty,’ said big Gene, with another hearty laugh.
Kooka piped up. ‘Funny how they used the local stone to put the Plinths in, to give the place a maritime feel in the year of the bloomin’ ship, but when it comes to the met station it isn’t good enough for ’em. They reckoned the red lent much more of a village atmosphere.’
‘A village atmosphere,’ repeated my brother Jim.
‘Yeah, a village atmosphere,’ said Kooka.
As I began to outline my ideas for the hotel, everyone except Veronica was raising their eyebrows and shaking their heads in disbelief. I made it clear from the outset, however, that absolutely everyone would be welcome at The Grand and that the Dada-style shenanigans would never interfere with the genuine hospitality. I told them also that although I was ready to give over the house as The Grand Hotel, I didn’t want to renovate it, that it had to stay as close as possible to how it presently was, how my papa built it. Sure we’d need to put in a coolroom, a bigger dunny, and turn the kitchen into a bar, but it wouldn’t be tarted up, not in the least. In fact I suggested we go the other way: keep it unfashionably dark, like some nineteenth-century hole in the wall, with its ocean-facing windows boarded up, and that we keep the same furniture, right down to the daggy cane chairs and the laminated brown timber tabletops that had always been in the house. I kept reminding them that as we were running the only hotel in town, we could pretty much do as we liked. I also announced that there was a sweet logic to the idea that for once the economic principle of demand and supply was gonna unleash a crazed originality.