False Alarm

At nine o’clock the next morning I had Sergeant Greg Beer slamming on my barn door. I’d been enjoying a long satisfying sleep after a terrific night and was rudely awoken.

I threw open the timber shutter of my loft and looked below. There was his freshly showered scalp right underneath me, the skin the colour of strawboard under fastidiously combed wet wisps of hair.

‘What do you want, Greg?’ I called down.

He stepped away from the double doors below and tilted his head back to see me. ‘Good morning, Noel. Sorry to wake you – but it is 9am.’

‘Yeah. We had a late night. You keep different hours when you’re running a pub, Sergeant.’

‘Yes. I suppose you do. But, Noel, I need you to come down and talk to me. There’s an issue I’d like to discuss.’

‘It can’t wait?’

‘No, it most certainly can’t.’

I closed the shutter and groaned. Of course Greg Beer and I had never got on, even as kids, and I could sense now that The Grand Hotel was going to be his opportunity to make my life difficult.

After climbing down my ladder, I pushed the button on the barn kettle and then flung open the double doors, letting the bright morning light hit my face.

‘Would you like a cup of tea while we chat?’ I asked him, in a friendly enough way.

It took him a moment or two to answer as his eyes absorbed the chaos of equipment in the barn behind me: half built frames and half finished pictures everywhere, scattered tubes of paint, lopsided high shelves loaded with manuals and books. There was refuse from the land and seascape covering every surface: fronds of mistletoe, switches of moonah, cereal bags full of pollen fibres, broken road signs, swan-down and heron feathers, scraps of wallaby hide, rusted farm axles, albatross mandibles, sheaves of dried sedge and clubrush, clusters of horny conebush, washed-out stacks of all the different coloured plastics the ocean offers up. The sergeant’s analytical squint betrayed the fact that the inside of my barn was helping him complete a picture he’d long ago begun to compose – of Noel Lea as a slob, as a slackarse and a madman, a dangerous variant to everything decent, clean and respectable in his home town. His distaste for what he saw warped the narrow features of his face and I couldn’t help but surmise that it all may have reminded him of his own childhood home up on Carroll Street, where chaos always reigned and stuff was always strewn around his poor mum as she sat wrestling her cask of demons at the kitchen table.

Eventually he curled up his nose at the scent of turps and sea wrack and said, ‘No, no tea for me thanks. I’ve had breakfast, Noel. I was actually wanting to have a look around your hotel. Apparently you had quite a deal of smoke in there last night and I’ve had a report that no alarms went off. You’re aware of course, Noel, that to run a hotel without smoke alarms is a serious offence – not to mention an extremely dangerous course of action. I thought you might like to show me where your alarms are, and together we could ascertain why they failed to work last night.’

Bloody smoke alarms! I should’ve known. Some pissed-off victim of Veronica’s frankincense fumigation had gone whining to the cops. Probably one of the Wathaurong Heights posse – most likely one of the suits from the shire. I flicked the kettle back off and stepped out of the barn. All I could do was feign innocence.

‘Yeah,’ I said casually to Greg Beer as we walked across the yard towards the hotel. ‘I thought it was funny they didn’t go off. There was quite a bit of smoke after all.’

The truth was that as soon as the health-and-safety inspections had been completed, I’d taken the batteries out of all the smoke alarms before we’d opened the hotel. None of them were active.

The thing with smoke alarms is that if you’re cooking with any degree of flair at all, or smoking cigarettes like it’s 1958, the bloody things go off unannounced! It’s too annoying, not to mention damaging to the eardrums. I wasn’t gonna have that nerve-tingling racket going off all the time. But now I had to explain that to Greg Beer.

As we stepped into the sunroom of the hotel, I bought myself some thinking time by opening all the louvre windows one by one, to let the fresh air in from the garden. Beside me I could feel the sergeant developing a relish for his task. He was sure he was onto something, and I knew that as far as the law went smoke alarms without batteries are just the same as no smoke alarms at all.

‘Okay then,’ Sergeant Beer said, as I ran out of louvres. ‘If you could please point out where your alarms are located, we’ll see what we can find. I presume you do have alarms installed, Noel?’

Nice try, Sergeant, I thought, but it’s not going to be that easy.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we’ve got sixteen in total. Let’s go through to the bar and see if we can solve the mystery.’

As we walked through the sunroom, I was racking my brains for a solution but needn’t have bothered. Behind the bar we found big Joan Sutherland in a pair of green cargo shorts and a flannelette shirt, standing on a stool with a plastic bag of AAA Duracell batteries hanging from his wrist. Directly above him on the ceiling the white plastic lid of the smoke alarm was hanging down.

‘Morning, Noel. Morning, Sergeant,’ Joan said, smiling broadly as he saw us. ‘Noel, I’ve just been swapping the batteries over in all the alarms. Must’ve been duds in them last night, what with all that smoke and them not going off. I got some Duracells from the store. They’re the best. Those no-name ones that were in there are next to useless.’

With his right hand he selected two batteries from the bag, clicked them into place and then closed the lid of the alarm. Then he fished out a Winfield Blue from his shirt pocket, lit it with a match and took a big drag. With his huge ruddy frame only centimetres from the device, he exhaled the blue smoke all over it. Straightaway the unbearably high pitched BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP began. Greg Beer and I dived for cover, blocking our ears.

Nonchalantly Joan unclipped the lid of the alarm and switched it off. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s more like it. So what brings you here before opening hours, Sergeant?’

Greg Beer took his hands from his ears and grimaced. He ignored the question.

‘Great minds must think alike, Joan,’ I said. ‘Greg had come round to check on our alarms after last night. He was concerned for our safety. But you’ve had the same thought. And what’s more, you’ve done something about it. Have you replaced all sixteen?’

Joan stepped down gingerly from the bentwood stool, which miraculously hadn’t folded under his frame. ‘Yep, all except the one in The Blonde Maria’s room. She’s still sleeping. I wouldn’t dare wake her after the show she put on last night. You should’ve seen it, Sergeant,’ he said, turning to Greg Beer. ‘The girl’s magnificent. Everyone who stayed after the smoke had an absolute ball!’

It was now Joan’s turn to offer Sergeant Beer a cup of tea or coffee but once again he refused. Muttering something about paperwork back at the station, he made his farewells and promptly left through the sunroom door.

I turned to Joan and positively cheered. ‘How the fuckin’ hell did you know he was here for the alarms?’

Joan shook his head from side to side in wonderment. ‘I didn’t, Noely. I was genuinely checking the bloody things. Couldn’t work out how come they hadn’t gone off. Woke up in the middle of the night worrying about it. Then I find there’s no friggin’ batteries in any of ’em! But of course I couldn’t tell the sergeant that. I twigged right away that he wasn’t here for bacon and eggs.’

‘Certainly wasn’t,’ I said. ‘Now take those bloody batteries out again, will ya? You can’t even suck a cigarette in here without the silly things going off. And you just proved it.’

Although we never had to fumigate property developers from the hotel again, if we left those batteries in the alarms they would’ve been sure to go off over the following weeks. Especially on those lucky nights when my brother Jim would agree to cook up his famous west coast bisque for the patrons. As he poured the St Agnes brandy over the charred crab and crayfish shells, the crowd in the bar, nicely sluiced on the Dancing Brolgas, would stand around in keen anticipation. And then the moment would come. With a flourish Jim would ignite the dish, which roared into flame. The crowd would hoot with excitement, all the while licking their lips at the thought of the dinner ahead. The flames would re-settle, giving off the rich aromatic smoke, and Joan Sutherland would do his nightly whip around to see how many takers there were. Who would ever want to ruin such a dramatic, oceanic, culinary moment as that with an earbashing siren from some electrical shop?