The Mangowak Ode
As soon as I got home, I went straight to the barn and made two phone calls. Firstly I called Rennie but found that the call was diverted and that Lee answered instead. That flummoxed me. I asked her if I could speak to Rennie but she said he was down in the signal-hut doing a spot of butchering. She said he’d taken his mobile with him, but occasionally he lost reception out there on the spur – that must’ve been why the call was diverted back to the house. I said okay and then rummaged madly around in my mind for what message to leave. I didn’t want to give anything away to Lee but I was buggered if I was gonna ring that bastard’s farm ever again. I mean, how cocky was he? Telling me to call as soon as I got home and then pissing off to that signal-hut knowing there was a chance his phone would lose reception! He obviously thought there was no way a little wimp like me was gonna say no to his threats. Either that or he was already so enraged by my obstinacy that he had to let off a bit of steam by cleavering a few more innocent lambs.
Eventually I told Lee to tell Rennie that the Beer, with a capital B, was staying put in Mangowak. Not knowing if she knew the exact details of Rennie’s plan, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind writing the message down word for word, complete with the ‘capital B’ part. I said it was a little joke of mine and that Rennie would find it funny. I told her he’d probably piss himself laughing, in fact.
Lee was cheery, and her voice over the phone sounded not so much sexy as just plain young. Without the tight jeans and the mascara, you could’ve mistaken her for some Facebook-addicted gopi girl. Now I understood what Rennie was up against: it wasn’t me who was ‘pure as the driven snow’, as he had put it; it was Lee. And something in him, in some deep, almost forgotten, uncriminalised part of himself, needed that. Desperately. Otherwise his own life was irredeemable and, as he had said, he might just take to himself with his own cleaver down in the fog-shrouded, blood-spattered signal-hut. Having delivered the message, my only chance was that he’d do that to himself before he’d bother doing it to yours truly.
Lee wrote down the message and thanked me; she said Rennie could do with a laugh. I said bye and accepted her offer to come out and visit them again soon. She was keen, she was befriending me – what could I say? She’d find out the real picture soon enough.
The next call I made was to Joan Sutherland. Once again the phone rang and rang before diverting to another line. Joan, Jen and the kids were on their way back from mass at St Catherine’s Convent, and I’d got him on his mobile. ‘I want you back at work,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t slept for days and it’s all too much.’
There was a pause on the other end of the line, just the sound of the Sutherland twin-cab whooshing down the road. ‘Yeah. But, Noel, I dunno if...’
‘Aw come on, Joan,’ I interrupted. ‘You’ve been off for weeks. Just forget her would ya? You’re a happily married man. And if you don’t get back into the cot with Jen, I bloody well will!’
‘Sorry, Noel, what was that? I think we just lost reception there for a tick.’
In the barn I looked into the rafters and thanked the Lord. Until that very moment I’d had no idea I even felt that way about Joan’s wife.
I took a deep breath. It seemed the whole grand edifice of so-called reality was unravelling right before my eyes. ‘I said you don’t have to worry about Maria. She hasn’t been downstairs once since the garden party. You won’t even clap eyes on her. And plus, it’s time you just got over it, mate. I need you.’
The voice on the other end of the line was nervous but chastened now. I was appealing to his better instincts, more precisely to his old fashioned country loyalty. ‘Okay, Noely, when do you want me?’
‘Today,’ I said. ‘Before the doors open.’
Now I could hear Joan running it all by Jen in the passenger seat. Then he said, ‘Alright, mate, I’ll be there.’ At which point the reception dropped out for good.
I put down the phone and decided to take a shower. I stripped out of my sweat and tear stained clothes and under the hot jet of the barn shower found myself thinking of Kooka and his tranny full of magic. Now that The Grand Hotel was under siege from all sides, how could I possibly take it seriously? Surely someone was having a lend. But how? And then again, if things were going to come apart at the seams all I wanted was one more chance, at least one more night, with those dream broadcasts, with that magic. Unlike the rest of us Kooka had sloughed off his worldly skin of cares and worries. His tormented mother and his beautiful wife were now no more or less than ministering angels of the distant heavens. He had become a pure vessel for us, a giver, a mystery solver, a transmitter of the place. In a world so clogged with carnage and doubt and stupidity, this was as rare as gold. And I, being inextricably me, desperately wanted more of it.
Eventually getting out of the shower, I put my purple dress shirt on, with its embroidered chest and collar and its starched cuffs with the crimson cloth cufflinks still in them. This was the shirt I always wore for special occasions – for weddings, baptisms, special birthdays, exhibition openings, boat launchings and the like – and I could think of no more special occasion than the last hurrah of The Grand Hotel.
After dressing, I stepped out of the big double doors, steeled myself, and began to cross the yard. There was work to do, glasses to wash, soft drinks to top up, a menu to organise. In short there was a hotel to run, perhaps for the very last time. The whole thing, upstairs and down, may well have been a fraud, but I resolved that if nothing else I would make this send-off a fair-dinkum hoot.
When I got into the bar, I found Veronica already in there, swabbing the benches and cleaning the glass of the fridge-doors, but with sliced discs of cucumber stuck all over her face. It was an old trick of her Lebanese grandmother’s, she said, to keep the complexion fresh, but it reminded me immediately of the surreal masks worn by our Dada heroes on stage back in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire. ‘It’s right up there with Hugo Ball’s Piano-Hat,’ I told her, smiling.
‘Oh leave me alone would you?’ she said. ‘We’ve gotta get this done, and if you make me laugh all the cucumber will fall off.’
‘Okay, then. I’ll be back down to help as soon as I’ve fixed up Duchamp.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Coz I’ve got a bone to pick with you, Noel.’
I left her to it and went out through the sunroom to organise the day’s pissoir recording. As I went, I looked to my left out the louvre windows, half anticipating the sight of Greg Beer’s police four-wheel drive rolling up to break the dream. Although the worn grass of the driveway under the pines was empty, the very thought of the sergeant took the spring out of my step. I grimaced, then caught my reflection in the glass. I looked younger than I felt. Taking courage from this, I pushed my chest out like a riverflat kangaroo and kept on going.
Glancing into The Horse Room on my way to the stairs, I spied the old Grundig on the long bench where The Lazy Tenor had left it the night before. I went in to pick it up to take it upstairs to record Kooka for the day’s Duchamp, but before I did that I rewound it a little and pressed ‘play’. Amidst the clinking of glasses, burping, the sound of Frankie trilling in his cage and the clicking of pool balls on the table, there was The Lazy Tenor’s sonorous voice, clear and strong: ‘So anyway, as soon as I got in the sedan beside her my mate hit the button on the hoist and up we went. In more ways than one, I might add.’
I hadn’t realised The Lazy Tenor had begun to repeat the same stories. He’d been at the hotel so long he had run out of material – that one about him and the chemist girl up on the garage hoist was one of the first instalments of ‘The Tradesman’s Entrance’ we’d ever been treated to. It wasn’t funny the first time, let alone having to hear it again. I fast-forwarded straight past it and as soon as the green and red EQ meters went still pushed ‘stop’, picked up the Grundig, and continued on up the stairs.
When I got to the top, the wide hallway seemed dusty and dry, the ducks still and flat in the weave of the carpet. How depressing! Ridiculously I scuffed at the floor with the bottom of my shoe, attempting to bring the creek back to life. And then I heard voices from behind the door of The Lazy Tenor’s room. He and Maria were having a blue. I froze on the spot, with the nauseous feeling I always get when overhearing an argument. Their voices were harsh, his violent and booming, hers sarcastic and shrill. Quickly I stepped out from the staircase and hurried on down the hall.
I found Kooka sitting up in bed, happy as a velvet crab in a February rockpool. The dappled light from the pines outside the window was brocading his crocheted lap and legs. Seeing the Grundig under my arm, he rubbed his hands together and said, ‘That time is it, Noel?’
I put on a brave face, no doubt assisted by the relief of being back in congenial company. ‘It certainly is, Kooka. I’ve got a little ripper for you today. It’s a poem actually, by a woman from a long time ago.’
Before I had a chance to take the poem from my pocket, however, Kooka put one of his big square-fingered tradesman’s hands up and shook his head. ‘No, young man,’ he said. ‘I’ve been your happy parrot for long enough. Now it’s my turn to have a go.’
‘What do you mean, Kooka?’ I asked.
‘Well, I’ve spruiked all that stuff for you over the last few months and now I’ve taken the time up here on me Pat Malone to have a go at my own piece for the pissoir. It’s a poem too, first one I ever wrote.’
Kooka squirrelled around under the bedclothes for a bit until he produced a scrappy piece of paper that looked like it had been torn out of an old invoice book. Waving it proudly in the air, he said, ‘Now hit the red button on the old Grundig, Noel, and give us a bit of shoosh, would you?’
I placed the Grundig beside the tranny on the bedside table, hit ‘record’ and walked away from the bed and over to the inland window.
The old fella cleared his throat, paused, then announced, in a resonant voice chocked with gravitas, the title of the poem. ‘The Mangowak Ode,’ he intoned, with his trademark warble, ‘by Young John Nugent.’
Looking out the window at the pines, I raised an eyebrow and smiled. What followed became the very last tape-loop we played through Duchamp the Talking Pissoir.
I waited by the window until I was absolutely certain Kooka had finished. It was safe to say he was no Lord Tennyson but I was very moved regardless. I turned around to find him staring in my direction, eager for a reaction.
‘Geez, Kooka,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘You liked it, Noel?’ he asked, his bird-face creasing with pleasure.
‘I did,’ I told him, walking back towards his bedside to press ‘stop’ on the Grundig.
The old man exhaled with pleasure. ‘Yairs, well I don’t rightly know what came over me. Never written a poem before. I’ve always been one for hard facts. But I just woke up this morning with the sky all rosy out over the ocean and the words in my head – the lot. All I had to do was write it down, like a flippin’ secretary taking dictation.’
‘What a shame,’ I joked. ‘You can’t take any credit for it then.’
Kooka snorted loudly. ‘You’re a bloody card, son, you really are. I’m past carin’ about stuff like that.’
As I picked up the Grundig to take the poem downstairs, I touched Kooka lightly on the shoulder. ‘It’s a real beauty, old fella. Everyone’s gonna love it. You might even have to come down yourself for a piss.’
He shook his head. ‘No, no, there’ll be no need for that, son. Maria’ll empty my pan before she starts out on our novel later on.’
With my heart replenished, I stepped out of The Sewing Room into the hallway to find that once again the creek had come to life. The black ducks swam jauntily along beside me as I headed for the stairs, and this time from The Lazy Tenor’s room there was not a sound.