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.