Radios Don’t Broadcast Dreams

By the time I had installed the loop, it was close to three o’clock and from the bar I could hear Joan Sutherland’s big laughter as he, Jen and their two boys had arrived to help prepare for the night ahead. Of course his laughter was due to Veronica’s cucumber mask, and as I walked into the bar Jen was painstakingly helping Veronica to take it off. I could see Jen biting her lip as slowly she unpeeled each disc, trying to keep herself from giggling. Veronica, however, was unamused. Seeing me walk in, she said, ‘So are you ready for our little chat now, Noel?’

‘G’day, Noel,’ Joan Sutherland said, cutting in. And then nodding over towards Veronica near the bar sink, he said, ‘Glad to see the ol’ Grand is still full of surprises.’

Once all the cucumber had been removed from Veronica’s face, the Sutherlands set about opening the pub while Veronica and I stepped out onto the verandah and down into the beer garden so she could tell me what was on her mind. We sat on the coloured gymkhana wheels and Veronica’s face was so serious that I wondered for a brief moment whether somehow she had found out about the XXXX fiasco.

‘Noel, I was talking with Givva Way up at the shop this morning and he reckons you’re starting to get beaten down by the powers that be at the shire. He reckons you’ve started to sell out.’

I made a slow blink and put on a droll face, out of pure exasperation. ‘Well, if Givva Way says it,’ I said, ‘then it must be true.’

As usual Veronica had no ear for sarcasm and continued with her Maoist-style show-trial of my moral and political worth. ‘He said that yesterday you collaborated with the shire to have the stoneskimming comp shut down.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thereby denying his son the chance for international glory anddenying Givva the chance to waste young Alex’s compo money on some ridiculous stoneskimming tour overseas.’

Veronica’s lips pursed. ‘Yes, well there’s selfish motivation in all our actions, Noel, but the point is you’ve started collaborating with the enemy.’

‘The enemy? That’s a bit strong, Ronnie. All I did was avoid a blue so as not to give Sergeant Beer another reason to shut us down.’

‘Aha!’ she said. ‘So Givva was right. You compromised.’

‘No, you’re wrong,’ I said angrily. ‘What I did was make sure the future of the hotel wasn’t compromised. That’s what I did.’

‘So are you saying now that any type of behaviour that draws the attention of the police to the pub is off limits? Is that what this means?’

‘No, not at all. Just about anything we do at the moment draws the attention of the police anyway. Opening the hotel doors draws their attention. Greg Beer’s hell-bent. You can take it from me.’

‘Okay, then. So it’s about time we started those Grand Hotel Wellbeing Nights we’d planned.’

Veronica was testing me now, seeing how much truth there was in what Givva had told her at the shop. ‘Wellbeing’ was a word that a lot of us had nailed early on as being a classic example of the Brinbeal shire’s corporate muzak. According to their signage and marketing statements, everywhere you turned in our part of the world you came face to face with your own rude health.

The fact that the term had been handed to them on a heavily invoiced platter by a consultant from Melbourne, who in their language had only ever been an excursionistin the shire – i.e. ‘a visitor who doesn’t stay the night’– and who had driven down from the city when the shire was rebadging itself a few years ago, was never mentioned. Presumably the consultant drove onto the coast road, registered the unnerving sense of space and the tart astringent air, and quickly scanned his bullet lists for the appropriate term: wellbeing.In actual fact the consultant was probably feeling something other than wellbeing at the time. Perhaps he was feeling a little anxious, a touch agoraphobic, a trifle rushed, maybe even a little bit panicky, but knew himself well enough to understand that these types of edgy feelings usually translated financially. When he arrived in Minapre, he would’ve rustled up a quick laptop precis of his proposal over a strong macchiato and once inside the meeting all the gurus around the board table would’ve nodded in agreement. The deal, and the language, would have been locked in, as if purposely to irritate those spirits of the past and present whose souls, unlike that of the consultant, will have to dwell in this shire for all eternity.

Early on, when Veronica and I had discussed what we would get up to on the weekly Wellbeing Nights, she’d been full of brilliant ideas. Since then, in her studio up on the cliff, she’d been busily making preparations. For instance, with the shire’s neurotic addiction to gardening machinery, they made sure these days that no blade of grass in any public space ever grew higher than ten centimetres. So Veronica had been patiently making what she called ‘Mocking Grass’, which was basically hundreds of unruly looking wire and paper blades of grass stitched onto sheets of green shadecloth that could be pinned into the soil on top of the shaven shire nature strips and verges. She had a vision of one morning waking up in Mangowak to see her wild Mocking Grass in all the prominent manicured spots. The point would be made and the ‘wellbeing’ of everyone in the town would be restored by having a bloody good laugh about it.

Our other ideas ranged quite widely, from a large sign at the entrance of the town depicting an oversized Robert Crumb-style rooster declaring war on insomniac weekenders from the city, to our own mock-heritage plaques that we would erect at night on popular tourist walks. These plaques would say things such as OTWAY CREEKS ARE CURRENTLY STREAMING LIVE OR CAN WALLABIES BUY REAL ESTATE? OR THE ONLY LOCALS ARE THE TREES. And not only would the humorous effect of our weekly escapades enhance the wellbeing of anyone who came across them (apart from bleary-eyed weekenders and shire officials, of course, and members of the temperance guilds and straight-out wowsers) but they would also stimulate our own wellbeing as perpetrators of the creations. Simply by going out under starlight, we would be lancing old wounds, healing old sores, cathartically curing long-held frustrations. For brief hilarious moments we would achieve a deep understanding of the term wellbeing. And no one would be any the worse off for us doing so.

The sad thing of course was that now, as Veronica raised the possibility of finally getting the Wellbeing Nights up and running, I knew that our whole audacious experiment, The Grand Hotel no less, was doomed. But I couldn’t tell her – partly because I didn’t know precisely when Greg Beer was going to pounce and also because I knew exactly how the hot-blooded Veronica would react. She’d head straight out to Poorool to confront Rennie Vigata and could get herself killed in the process. Plus I couldn’t see the point of ruining everyone’s final hours of enjoyment as the hotel descended to its close. So, as if rising to the challenge in her shining brown eyes, I agreed wholeheartedly with getting the Wellbeing Nights up and running – thereby quietening the Givva Way inspired murmurs that I’d sold out – even though I knew very well that it would all now never happen. Sheer delight instantly appeared on her cucumber-shiny face and she hugged me tightly there on the gymkhana wheels and told me how it was all gonna be great fun. ‘Yep,’ I said, ‘I’m looking forward to it too, Ronnie. The Mocking Grass alone will make the whole thing a blast.’

We could hear voices inside the bar now, as the first drinkers started arriving. It was with a sad but invisible stomach-knowledge of foreboding, and a bright and illusory mine host smile, that I walked up the verandah steps and into the bar to greet the patrons.

The crowd grew quickly, and as with Kooka’s ‘Mangowak Ode’ it was almost as if everyone intuited the significance of the day. Craig Wilson, whose ‘Gravity Feed’ film had been an entertaining contribution to Happy Hour, now approached me from across the room with the idea of us running a Grand Hotel short-film festival. With a frosty glass of ‘Dancing Brolga Ale’ in his hand he confessed how dubious he had been about my unconventional establishment at first, but now he wanted to show his appreciation of all the good times, to put something back into it. What did I think about the idea of a festival, he asked.

I put an affectionate hand on the shoulder of the ex-real-estate agent and smiled. I liked Craig, but somehow he had missed the point. How could you have a festival in The Grand Hotel when The Grand Hotel was a festival in itself? Once again feeling a mixture of guilt and wistfulness, I told him I thought a film festival was a great idea. He beamed back at me happily and began to knock around a few possibilities. I listened patiently until making the excuse that Joan looked like he needed a bit of a help behind the bar. I left Craig to it.

In actual fact Big Joan was handling things fine behind the bar, and apart from an occasional twitch of his shoulder and a few darting glances towards the doorway into the sunroom, one could’ve been mistaken for thinking he’d never clapped eyes on The Blonde Maria or that he’d ever needed to take time off work.

An hour or so later, however, when Happy Hour was bubbling along and the crowd in the bar was spilling out onto the verandah and the beer garden, The Blonde Maria did appear, dishevelled, half dressed, distraught, in the sunroom doorway, and gave Joan the shock of his life. I watched as he stepped back from the tap and valiantly tried to hold himself together. As if on cue Darren Traherne dropped the big mulloway he’d been scaling on the bench and moved seamlessly into Joan’s position, pouring Dancing Brolgas for the thirsty customers who were ordering them thick and fast, almost as if they were going out of fashion.

The Blonde Maria didn’t even notice that Big Joan was in the pub. She looked wildly around the room, with her hair in a mess, wearing only a lilac bodice with a frilly lace edge and a pair of jeans. Eventually her eyes rested on me where I was standing under the catfish skeleton on the wall, talking to Ash Bowen and Dave Buckley.

She pushed her way through the crowd. ‘Noel, he’s gone nuts!’ she cried out to me as she approached. ‘I’m scared.’

‘Who’s gone nuts?’ I said, throwing a glance over to the bar where Joan was nodding calmly while Jen spoke intently into his face.

‘That fucking big red-haired bastard, that’s who. Louis. The Lazy Tenor.’

‘The Lazy Tenor. Why? What’s wrong with him?’

‘He thinks you and I are having an affair.’

I rolled my eyes. That must’ve been what they were arguing about when I went up to record the loop with Kooka earlier on.

‘He’s crazed,’ she went on. ‘He reckons you and me are out in your barn fucking all night when we’re in The Sewing Room listening to Kooka.’

I groaned with dread, as the logic behind The Lazy Tenor’s suspicions became clear. It was true that for the last two nights we’d been up till nearly dawn together, but even so The Lazy Tenor’s reaction was a bit weird, given that he always gave the impression that as far as women went, The Blonde Maria included, he could take ’em or leave ’em.

‘Yeah, well now he wants to kill me, or you, or somebody,’ Maria said. ‘He’s so upset he didn’t even sing his aria this morning. Didn’t you notice?’

‘I was out.’

‘Well he didn’t – for the first time ever. He was too busy bawling like a baby and then smashing up the room. I don’t know what to do, Noel. He’s so out of control I’m thinking maybe we should ring the cops.’

Maria, of course, didn’t know how preposterous this suggestion was. ‘No, no, no,’ I said quickly. ‘We can’t do that. Maybe you should go out for a while, go for a walk or something. Or even better just stay down here with us all night until he calms down.’

Maria looked down at what she was wearing, as if to suggest that she wasn’t quite dressed for socialising.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘You look fine – you always do. But listen, just stay out of Joan Sutherland’s way, okay? Otherwise you’ll have to handle the problem upstairs yourself.’

The Blonde Maria looked over at Joan behind the bar, who now had his back to the room, washing the dishes. Jen, however, was looking straight at Maria and as their eyes met she had an all-knowing look.

‘I don’t think that woman likes me,’ Maria said, with a hint of the little-girl voice she had adopted during her St Thérèse of Lisieux phase.

Ash Bowen started laughing. ‘Oh really, Maria, whatever makes you think that?’ he said.

Maria let Ash’s comment fly right over her head and promptly asked me if I’d go behind the bar and fix her a drink.

‘Okay,’ I drawled, a little dubiously. ‘What’ll it be?’

The Blonde Maria broke into a beautiful glittery smile. ‘Well how about one of those ones that Joan Sweeney and the whores were drinking last night? You know, the Black Velvets.’

Ash Bowen and Dave Buckley looked at me, both with querulous grins. I waved my hand at them and said quickly, ‘Don’t worry. It’s a long story,’ before making a beeline for the bar to fix us all the drinks.

As I poured the Guinness and champagne into a jug behind the bar, I asked Joan quietly if he was alright.

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he said, with his head bent low over the sink. ‘But did she have to come down half dressed?’

When the Black Velvet had settled magnificently in its jug, I took it over to where Maria, Ash and Dave had planted themselves on the pews at the big communal table. Meanwhile Oscar had sighted Maria and wandered over to see if he could convince her to get up again and sing with the band. She hadn’t been seen in the bar during the evening for weeks, and Oscar, on behalf of The Barrels, was super-keen.

Maria, however, wasn’t having a bar of it. She was more interested in talking to Ash and Dave. They were quizzing her about who this Joan Sweeney was she had mentioned earlier, and who the hell the whores were she’d also mentioned. For a while Maria just played dumb and pretended that they must have been hearing things.

‘That’s right,’ I chimed in with support. ‘I don’t know what the two of you are on about. You’re obviously a bit distracted by Maria’s casual attire. Despite the fact that you’re spiritually enlightened.’

‘No, no,’ Dave Buckley said emphatically. ‘As comely as you do look tonight, Maria, I distinctly heard you refer to the Black Velvets here as something that was drunk last night by “Joan Sweeney and the whores”.’

‘Joan Sweeney and the Whores,’ repeated Givva Way, as he was passing the table on his way to the bar. ‘Good band name that. What do ya reckon, Maria?’

The Blonde Maria smiled up at Givva with Black Velvet foam on her upper lip.

‘Seriously, though,’ Oscar said, taking his bass plectrum out of his big white teeth. ‘Wasn’t Joan Sweeney the name of the publican of the original Grand Hotel? The one that Kooka was always on about? The one Big Joan got his nickname from?’

‘Of course!’ cried Ash Bowen and Dave Buckley in unison.

‘Yeah. But, Dave, who are the whores?’ asked Oscar. And then, with a mischievous young grin, ‘Or should I say whereare the whores?’

‘Well, you’re the muso, Ossie,’ said Ash Bowen. ‘You tell us.’

After everyone had had a chuckle at this, Dave Buckley, sporting a very fetching Black Velvet moustache himself now, said determinedly, ‘Come on, you two. Why were you referring to Joan Sweeney and whores? And what happened last night?’

‘Aw, get over it would you, Dave?’ I said. ‘Surely a spiritual fella like you has something better to meditate on.’

As Oscar wandered off to get ready to go on stage, The Blonde Maria drained the last dregs of her pot glass of Black Velvet and poured herself another. I could see a familiar little rose in her cheeks now. The alcohol was relaxing her, no doubt helping her to forget about the belligerent bloke from Blokey Hollow upstairs.

‘Wow, this is a very nice drop, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You’ve been hiding this one under a bushel, Noely.’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘If you hadn’t been holed up with your pet project upstairs for the last few weeks, you might have discovered it earlier.’

She smiled meekly. ‘You might be right,’ she said. And then, with the Black Velvet coursing happily through her veins, she pushed out her breasts proudly and said, ‘Well anyway, here’s to Mr Arvo Nuortila’s mint. Hey? What do you reckon, Noely?’

I couldn’t help but laugh. This girl had always had a loose tongue and a playful sense of humour when she got on the grog. It felt nice to have her back in the bar.

‘Okay,’ I said, raising my glass to deliberately bait Ash and Dave. ‘Here’s to the Nuortila mint.’

The two of us clinked our glasses, drinking long and deep as Ash and Dave looked on none the wiser. Maria gave a cute wink in my direction. She was beginning to look radiant.

‘Well, folks,’ I said, ‘I’ve got some tables to clear. I’ll leave you with the Black Velvets. You know where the bar is if you fancy some more. I’ll let Maria field any more questions you might have about the Nuortila mint, Joan Sweeney or the whores. I’ll guarantee you won’t get any satisfactory answers though.’

By the time The Barrels took to the stage, everyone was getting well and truly sloshed. It was the biggest crowd we’d had in the pub for a few weeks, and I was sure Greg Beer was gonna show up to shut it all down at any tick of the clock.

People kept coming up to me to comment on ‘The Mangowak Ode’, and it seemed the more pissed they were the more they liked it. Nan Burns told me she went in expecting another laugh and came out with a tear in her eye. Only Givva Way had any objections to the poem on the loop. He told me in a slurry voice that he’d come to rely on The Grand Hotel to cheer him up, not to drag him down. ‘Nah, this joint is losing the plot, Noel. You especially. And as for this band ... well, they’re alright, I suppose, but not a patch on some we used to get comin’ through town. Did I ever tell you about the time I smoked bucket bongs with Brod Smith and The Dingoes? Geez, it was unreal, just when they were at their...’

I waved my hand in the pissed house-painter’s face, not even bothering with the niceties. ‘Shut the fuck up would ya, Givva? Or I’ll show you the door.’

Givva’s jaw dropped in appalled vindication. It was as if he’d caught a ten-kilo fish on a ten-pound line. ‘Oh, so that’s it now is it? The great pub that never kicks anyone out is barring its most loyal customers! You’ve lost it, Noel, you’ve crossed over to the dark side.’

‘Yeah, whatever you reckon, Givva,’ I said, shouldering past him to make my way out to the sunroom.

Now I needed some fresh air. As ridiculous as he was, Givva had got under my collar. Maybe he was right, I thought, stepping outside into the crisp night of the backyard. Maybe the responsibilities of running the pub had changed me – all the bookwork, the restocking and ordering, having to be social every day of your life. I’d had a lot of help but still the brunt of the place was mine. It even occurred to me that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the whole thing was shut down. Otherwise it was bound to end up going straight. It was a strange fact after all that I had collaborated, as Veronica had put it, with Raelene Press to shut the stoneskimming down. I mean, who cares if the Plinths were being wrecked? If that had’ve happened back when we opened the hotel, we all would have been throwing twice as hard, me included. Maybe The Grand Hotel was just like any other institution that starts to calcify as it does what has to be done to survive over time. Of course that was the thing about the Dada greats – they did it in a blaze then got out quickly. They were elemental, a passing storm. You never saw Tristan Tzara or Hugo Ball doing Dada Classic Hits Tours down through the decades of the twentieth century. And definitely not my hero Arthur Cravan!

Standing in the driveway now with a head full of such thoughts, I figured I needed a stroll. I walked out the back, under the pines and onto the Dray Road. There was no one about, either north or south, looking up and down the road. It seemed the whole of Mangowak, but for the sick, the pious, and Sergeant Greg Beer, was in The Grand Hotel. At that moment a cheer went up inside the hotel, and as it did I raised my hand to the night sky as if in a gesture of farewell. A weight seemed to lift from my shoulders. I had surrendered. As far as I was concerned, my time as an unlikely publican was over. All that was left now was to enjoy what was left of the night.

The cheer I’d heard outside on the road was for The Blonde Maria, who with the help of a few more Black Velvets had finally agreed to get back up on stage and resume her career with The Connotations. By the time I walked back into the bar, the joint was absolutely rocking as she strutted her stuff in what suddenly seemed like the ultimate Blonde Maria sexkitten costume.

The Connotations played a blistering reunion set – ‘Stinging Snake Blues’, ‘Comb Your Kitty Cat’, ‘You Got to Give Me Some of It’, ‘Keep On Eatin’’, ‘The Best Jockey in Town’, finishing off with the Shirley Bassey classic ‘Diamonds Are Forever’. For this one my brother Jim pulled out his sunstained old trumpet and played the horn solo under the melody. Maria let her singing kick and soar above the horn. Her voice seemed to have new maturity; she was sounding better than ever. She must’ve learnt a thing or two by spending all those weeks upstairs devoting herself to The Lazy Tenor’s prodigious gift. But now, as she belted out the middle eight of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, with her whole heart and body behind the song, she was letting us know she’d been betrayed by that gift and was kissing it goodbye forever.

When the song finished, the crowd in the bar went wild. Maria raised both hands in the air before taking a deep bow. Everyone could feel that she had just got something major off her chest. Big Joan behind the bar was clapping, with a broad smile, no doubt happy that she’d just publicly dispensed with The Lazy Tenor. And like the rest of us he couldn’t help but be delighted to have her back on stage with the band.

Of course The Lazy Tenor himself was nowhere to be seen, not even in The Horse Room, which remained empty throughout that last night, as everyone was drawn in by the magnetic atmosphere of the bar. By ten o’clock a few people started to wander off home, so I cut to the chase and declared all drinks on the house. Darren and Nan both came up to me independently and asked if I’d gone stark raving mad, and I said that yeah, maybe I had, but that it had been a bumper crowd with a magnificent thirst and we’d already taken a small fortune.

‘And besides,’ I said, ‘we’re celebrating Mr Arvo and the Nuortila mint. Haven’t you heard?’

They both looked at me as if I’d just confirmed their suspicions about my sanity and wandered off in separate directions to keep clearing tables.

When the cuckoo clock above the catfish opened its tiny doors to strike ten thirty, we were half an hour past our Sunday night licence. It was as if I was laying out obvious bait for Greg Beer, daring him to come and shut down the fun. Little Dougie, the youngest of the two Sutherland boys, had got up on a stool behind the bar and taken over from his dad behind the tap. He’d been well brought up – for an eight-year-old he was pouring a pretty damn fine illegal beer. Next to him his mum and dad were busy pouring the Black Velvets, Jen on the champagne side of each jug and Joan on the Guinness side. By this stage I was getting stuck into it myself and remained unaware of the whisper going around the bar concerning The Blonde Maria’s drunken confessions about what had been taking place in The Sewing Room every night.

Before long Ash Bowen and Dave Buckley had cornered me over near the fireplace and demanded I tell them it was all lies. That put me in a dilemma. On the one hand I didn’t want to say anything because I knew their curiosity could potentially threaten whatever dream Kooka had in store for us that night, but on the other hand, given that I’d just surrendered out on the road to the night sky, it seemed as if this wider awakening to Kooka’s magic tranny was simply written above. In the end, and in the true spirit of Dada, I decided to deny nothing.

Ash and Dave were incredulous and derisive, saying it couldn’t possibly be true. I laughed and proceeded to tell them what I knew about the visual capabilities of goldfish. ‘There’s stuff all around us here that we can’t see,’ I said. ‘But meanwhile the humble goldfish can. It sees well beyond us, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. So who knows the things that are swirling about if we’d only open our hearts and minds. For supposedly spiritual men you two are pretty damn materialistic when it comes down to it.’

By eleven o’clock there were only a dozen or so of us left in the room, and Kooka’s dreams were all that anyone was discussing. Now I was afraid that with Maria still down in the bar with us it was getting too late and that Kooka may well have already fallen asleep upstairs. At the very least he’d be wondering what was going on. So I called everyone, the two Sutherland kids included, over to the pews at the communal table, and Maria and I began officially to fill them in.

First we told them about Kooka’s mother, about his wife, Mary, and how initially the dreams broadcast through the tranny were about them. Now that they’d all sampled ‘The Mangowak Ode’ on Duchamp countless times, this was at least half familiar information. Then we talked about Joan Sweeney and her publican’s lists in the waves and then about Tom String, the ride in the cart with the reef-coal, and Mr Arvo, before clearing up the mystery of the Nuortila mint. We talked about the whores of the previous night, about Cumquat May, Jadey and Rose, and how Joan Sweeney had a way of telling the authorities what they wanted to hear and then continuing with what she thought was best regardless. We even told them about Ted the Scotsman being kicked out of the hotel for talking disrespectfully to the whores, and also about Bait Belcher and Ding Dong.

By the end of our descriptions, it was clear to almost everyone that we couldn’t have made it all up. Certainly it was hard to believe but no one was point-blank sceptical anymore except for Givva Way, my brother Jim, and young Dylan Sutherland. Givva was a perpetual naysayer and perhaps his fetish for the stories of days gone by just couldn’t cope with this ultimate double-barrel hit. Jim was not quite as dismissive but was convinced that his little brother was busy pulling one god-almighty hoax; whereas Dylan was very matter of fact, as eleven-year-olds can be, saying straight out that the whole thing was impossible because ‘radios don’t broadcast dreams’.