Free The Grand Hotel by Gregory Day

extract from the two-inchthick annual Tourism Management Manual , and I’d had Kooka read it aloud into his old Grundig recorder. In a chapter of the manual dedicated to ‘local disenchantment with tourism operations’ and ‘backstage lifestyles’, a five-stage graph called ‘The Irridex’ is shown, to illustrate the process by which aspiring tourism operators could overcome local obstacles. It was explained in the manual that the word ‘Irridex’ was simply shorthand for ‘Index of Local Irritation By Tourism’.
    In his newsreely reading voice, Kooka had recited ‘The Irridex’ into the Grundig, which Seb from Bells & Whistles then transferred onto a digital loop that was hooked up to the sensors behind the urinal surface and could conceivably run for days on end. As Seb knelt by his equipment and gave the thumbs up, myself and Gene pulled out our willies and began to piss.
    Voila! There it was:
    The Index of Local Irritation By Tourism or, put simply, THE IRRIDEX
    THE IRRIDEX Stage One – EUPHORIA
    Tourists provide good company and good monetary returns for the local community.
    THE IRRIDEX Stage Two – APATHY
    The flow becomes larger, tourists are taken for granted, interactions become formal and commercial.
    THE IRRIDEX Stage Three – IRRITATION
    Irritation is at the heart of the Irridex.
    THE IRRIDEX Stage Four – ANTAGONISM
    Social, cultural, and environmental carrying capacities of the destination are exceeded.
    THE IRRIDEX Stage Five – RESIGNATION
    Resignation sets in. Residents realise they must adapt to a drastically altered community setting.
    I’ve got to admit that right there and then you could’ve read the phone book onto the loop and it would’ve been funny, just from the crazy buzz of getting Duchamp to work. Big Gene’s eyes were popping as he pissed, and he kept shaking his head in wonder. Eventually, when we zipped up, Seb himself couldn’t resist having a go just so we could hear it again. He kept nodding and smiling as his bright-yellow stream re-triggered ‘The Irridex’. As he stepped down, he said he was quite happy with the technical quality but thought the volume of the loop could be raised. He pointed out that, given it was a unisex toilet, the loop had to be loud enough for the women to hear it clearly from the cubicles. ‘Otherwise,’ he said, with an effeminate flourish, ‘all that eloquence will just be wasted on the men.’
    That night, when the usual visitors came round to continue sampling the beers, Duchamp the Talking Urinal was a big hit. Everyone kept heading off through the sunroom to try it again, and at one stage Oscar, Nan, Veronica, Darren, Ash and his wife, Vita, were all in there drinking in the toilet, while Gene and I were alone with Frankie in the new bar, giggling and dipping our fingers into the peanuts.

No Sheep No Shenanigans No Service
    Like a good omen the flowering gum next to my barn was miraculously ablaze with red flowers when I woke up on the day of The Grand Hotel’s reopening. I went straight outside and hoisted Dad’s telescopic aluminium ladder up against the tree to pick top-branch flowers for the vases. They were iridescent, fibrous, supreme. Then I took my time over breakfast – a boiled pullet egg, abalone splashed with lemon juice and champagne – and pottered around the old place with Pippy on my last day of relative privacy.
    From the outside on that first morning nothing much looked different. We hadn’t painted the house, nor cleaned up the yard. Joe the old palomino still hovered near the disused aviary where I kept his chaff, the wire clothes line and bean trellis still ran along the apple and blackwood trees on the eastern boundary, and around the front near the hedge all we’d done was put in a few striped gymkhana wheels as beer-garden tables, and sturdy old couta boxes as seats. The only noticeable changes from