A Never Ending Echo
Gathering up our drinks, and a few extra bottles of wine, there was no alternative now but for us all to climb the stairs and wait till Maria’s bedside reading lulled Kooka into sleep. Then, one by one, everyone could ever so quietly tiptoe into the room and sit down on the floor around the walls outside the bedside pool of light so that if Kooka woke up he wouldn’t see them. Any doubts I had about this invasion en masse of Kooka’s dreaming space were dismissed by the overwhelming destiny of the moment. I felt sure that the tranny broadcasts had gone beyond the privacy of an old man’s retrospecting heart. Surely now this was a history we all had a share in.
There was only one difficult matter I wanted to clear up first, and that was Givva Way. Well, he wasn’t called Givva Way for nothing. I felt sure that if Givva was allowed into The Sewing Room to listen to the dreams, he was bound to find a way to ruin everything. Either he’d drop a glass or trip over or even shout out some contrary piece of nonsense from where he was sitting against the wall. He might even just take it upon himself to wake Kooka up and protect him from the eavesdroppers. Either way he would, as he always did, find a way to put his foot in it, and we couldn’t run the risk.
Taking him aside as everyone went off to have a final leak before what could be a long night, I told him I didn’t want him upstairs with the rest of us. Naturally enough, he was outraged. After pleading with me for a while but getting nowhere, he threatened to stand outside in the backyard and throw stones at the Sewing Room window. ‘That’ll sure wake him up,’ he said triumphantly.
He had me stymied. It seemed the lesser risk now was to let him come. But I made him swear, on the ghost of all the great bands that had played in Mangowak in the 1970s, that he wouldn’t act up. He agreed, solemnly, then smiling like a winner went off through the sunroom for a last piss on Duchamp.
We assembled at the bottom of the staircase like a select group of novitiates waiting to be inducted into a sacred form of knowledge. I suppose the only difference between us and a group of novitiates was that we were all, except for Dylan and Dougie and their mother, pretty bloody drunk. I noticed that Joan was keeping himself way back and away from The Blonde Maria, who already had one foot on the stairs and was about to lead us up. I also noticed that Oscar had produced an iPod out of his pocket to which he was busily fixing a little black microphone. I placed my palm over the light from the iPod screen and said, ‘No, Ossie. I don’t think that’d be wise.’
Oscar looked surprised for a moment but then nodded his head sagaciously, saying, ‘Oh, of course, Uncle Noely, sorry. It might affect the reception.’
As quietly as fourteen people in various states of inebriation could, we began to climb the hotel stairs, with The Blonde Maria up front and myself right behind her. On the erstwhile ironbark my grandfather had used to build the staircase all those years ago the twenty-eight feet of our drunken party played all kinds of creaking bung notes as we ascended.
When we reached the top, it was quiet on the creek, with just a light breeze rustling in the wallpaper willows. For a moment we all paused, milling about near the banister rail, partly no doubt to prepare ourselves for what was to come and partly because of the mercurial watery light of the old hallway globes.
From The Lazy Tenor’s room there wasn’t a sound as one by one we stepped gingerly out among the carpet ducks and platypi. I went first, with Maria, Ash Bowen and Oscar just beside me, Oscar still with his bass plectrum between his teeth. Nan Burns followed, with Jen, Big Joan and the two boys. My brother Jim, Darren Traherne and Dave Buckley came next, with Veronica and Givva Way following. As I looked back over my shoulder, I saw Darren thrusting his nose in the air, as if sniffing for fish swimming past on the current downstream. And behind him Givva Way was peering with concern down at his shoes, as if they were being ruined by the imaginary waters of our very own indoor creek.
Before the hotel had begun, none of them could ever have expected to have seen what they’d seen, heard what they’d heard, and been exposed to so many unlikely experiences. The pleasures had been immense, the surprises had been incessant, and now this unwitting education was having the desired effect. A hush came over the crowd as we approached the Sewing Room door, and I sensed that even the doubters were thinking again. No one said a word. I was sure they understood now, perhaps for the first time, that anything was possible in The Grand Hotel.
It was an exciting moment, with us all full of anticipation, but it was always in the back of my mind that Greg Beer might turn up when we least expected it. As we arrived at the door, Maria carefully clicked the waggly old doorknob and the two of us went inside, leaving the others to wait, just as we’d planned. We stepped into The Sewing Room to find Kooka in high spirits, though a little miffed that we were both so late.
‘By the sound of it it’s been a big night down there,’ the old fella said. ‘I was beginning to think you’d forgotten all about me.’
Maria sat down in the wicker chair and opened the book on her lap. Kooka for the moment couldn’t keep his eyes off her cleavage. Not only was her lilac undergarment very low-cut but it was also made of a lightly elasticised silk so that her nipples were pert and prominent. I saw the old man swallow hard with pleasure as she began to read George Santayana from where we’d left off the previous night.
As Maria read, Kooka closed his eyes so as not to be distracted by her dishevelled beauty. As a consequence it wasn’t at all long before he raised his hand for the nightly instalment to finish. It was late after all; the old fella was obviously very tired.
Of course we were very thankful for this, not only because of the others waiting at the Sewing Room door but also because, in her now-drunken state, Maria was having great trouble reading without slurring the words. As she gratefully closed the pages of George Santayana, I slowly leant across her to the bedside table and switched the tranny on.
Three commentators were discussing the long-forgotten sketchbooks of the Australian artist Jean Gullyside. Two of them were gushing about her position in the ‘outsider art’ and ‘brute art’ movements while the other one was dismissing the Gullyside sketchbooks as ‘purely psychiatric’. Now this was the first discussion I’d heard on the radio for months that interested me, but I couldn’t believe the timing. I was suddenly caught between not wanting Kooka to fall asleep and send the tranny into static and, of course, wanting him to very much.
For better or worse, however, I could see Kooka showing the telltale signs of sleepiness where he lay under the crocheted rug. Our plan was that when (or if, as we still couldn’t be absolutely sure that the broadcasts would continue) the static began, we would use it as sound cover to let everyone quietly file into the room. We just had to bank on the fact that the static would last long enough for this to be achieved.
As I say, I was torn, as on the tranny the two commentators went deeper and deeper into their appreciation of Jean Gullyside’s work, the sceptical third commentator out in the cold. Eventually, as the discussion turned to the possibility of staging an exhibition called Scrawl, devoted purely to Australian works done in coloured pencil, old Kooka finally crossed over and the tranny spluttered before going completely silent.
Maria and I looked at each other, concerned. All we could hear were the frogs in the night, and beyond that the hiss and occasional crash of the ocean down at the rivermouth. There were no Plinth bells, and looking up to the tiny window high in the western wall it was blank, with no bogong moth trying to get in to the light, just bare cold glass and the unpainted sheoak sill.
We sat frozen in our chairs and waited to see what would happen. On the pillow Kooka’s closed eyes had narrowed his brow into a furrow. It was a look of concentration, even though he was asleep, as if the dreaming kookaburra on the branch had once again spotted his prey. Eventually his face relaxed into a deep pleasured smile as someone out in the hallway bumped lightly against the door. At that very moment the tranny burst back into life; well, into the raucous half life of oceanic static anyway.
Carefully I got off my chair and tiptoed to the door. This was the moment we’d all been waiting for. Turning the knob, I found my friends just as I’d left them, waiting patiently and attentively, proving that it doesn’t always take a bucket of cold water to sober people up. Between them they had drunk a lot of Dancing Brolgas and a lot of Black Velvets that night, but no one had the giggles and no one was throwing up. It was only The Blonde Maria back on the wicker chair next to Kooka’s bed who was showing signs of being a little worse for wear.
First Nan then Darren stepped up and quietly entered the room. Under directions they stuck close to the eastern wall, well away from the pool of light, before rounding the northeast corner and lowering themselves to sit on the floor under the inland window. Carefully then Joan Sutherland and his dairy family came in, Dylan and Dougie obviously enraptured by the late-night adventure; I winked at them all as they stepped past me in the doorway. They turned right along the eastern wall in the same direction as Nan and Darren. Finally came Ash and Dave, Jim, Oscar, Givva and Veronica, again under my directions. These six entered the open Sewing Room door and headed the other way, to the left along the eastern wall, towards the ocean window where the lump of Kooka’s boxed-up archive sat inert and shadowy in the dark. I watched as the silhouettes of Ash and Dave crossed in front of the ocean window before they sat down with their backs against the boxes of the archive. Jim and Oscar followed them and sat under the window while Givva and Veronica sat on either side of the southeastern corner of the room.
Thankfully the static continued as I gently closed the door on the creek and made my way back to my chair. Kooka’s sleep had not been disturbed and the knot of pleasure on his face seemed if anything to have deepened since I had got up to let everyone in.
Minutes passed. Still the static reigned, and I feared it would be the two Sutherland boys sitting with their parents on the wall behind me and to my right who would grow impatient first. They were only kids after all.
I needn’t have worried. What followed next most definitely kept their interest. As the shape of Kooka’s mouth opened into a perfect O, the static ceased on the tranny, to be replaced by the solitary pleasure of Tom String.
He was obviously out in the bush because the first sounds we heard were the ratcheting and sawing of nearby wattlebirds in the trees. Then the charismatic song of a dusky woodswallow and the flow of a river nearby. And then Tom String’s voice, in a tone Maria and I had not heard before, groaning with pleasure. We could hear a bright rhythmic sound too, of liquid and skin squelching, and it became clear that we were listening to him masturbating.
Immediately I was wondering what everyone in the darkness against the walls was making of it, and in particular I could sense Jen Sutherland’s disapproval that her boys were in the room. Tom String’s groans became more fervent, until they turned from just sounds of sexual pleasure into words of pure devotion. ‘Aw, missus ... they’re like raspberries ... so pink and right. Can I juice them, here, in my teeth, like this? ... oh yes ... and feel here, put your lovely lady’s hand on big Tom String ... oh yairs ... oh, my sweet missus ... Joan ... and slip ’em off ... oh missus, that’s right ... look at that ... it’s you, oh ... how do ya do? ... let me ... touch ... oh ... oh ... your arse, your lilywhite arse ... oh yes, and there it is ... oh, like silk, like a silk purse ... can you feel that? ... oh yairs ... the full ... yes it’s good ... and you ... you’re good ... I love ... oh ... Joan ... aw...’ere ... oh ... oh, missus! ... missus! oh, fark, fark, oh faark,aw ... yairs ... I love ... oaaah.’
With a huge exhalation Tom String arrived at his destination and his voice descended into a soft vulnerable whimpering. His ecstasy stilled. In front of us Kooka hadn’t moved but the O shape of his mouth had closed and the look of intense pleasure had exchanged itself for the usual impervious peace of a sleeping face.
Maria looked over at me, her eyes bright with surprise, as if to say, ‘We weren’t expecting that!’
She was right; we weren’t. The half Aboriginal ex-stone-cracker’s love for a barrister’s widow was a love played out alone, and it ended in a sound almost like sobbing. My heart couldn’t help but go out to him.
In the deep stillness after Tom String’s whimpering finally ceased, a crow called from somewhere out in the day, a slow lazy raarkthat echoed in the air, followed by another raark, and eventually, after almost a minute of silence, another. Then, from below where Tom sat, came a sound I’d heard before. It was unmistakable: the rough bark of the brolga – first once; then twice; and then it made a fibrillating kind of clucking sound. I shivered, realising in a flash where Tom String was: on the ironstone rise above his upstream brewer’s camp, where months ago I had found myself laughing for joy at the wondrous dancing brolga. But before I had a chance to dwell on the implications of this, other human voices began to be heard, and the light tinkling of metal. Then a bell, yes, unmistakably a bicycle bell.