Free The Grand Hotel by Gregory Day Page B

throng crowding the bar and spilling out into the sunroom raised their glasses and began to discuss the charter, seriously debating its points and laughing at what seemed a preposterous situation, Kooka turned with a beaming face to Gene behind the bar and called, ‘A claret please, Joan.’
    It was a numinous moment, also an unwitting augury of events to come. The natural historian had forgotten where he was, or rather, in the excitement of his unlikely but bright idea being realised, of history being made and him being part of it, he’d forgotten what year we were in. For a split second time had vanished in his midst and Kooka had been back in the original Grand. Perhaps it was 1893, perhaps it was 1897; either way he was ordering his drink not from big Gene Sutherland but from Joan Sweeney.
    Veronica pounced. ‘Of course!’ she cried, turning her back from the stove full of sizzling pappadums. ‘Joan Sutherland. What could be a more fitting name for the barman of The Grand?’
    In the hubbub and noise only a few thirsty drinkers near the bar heard this exchange but it was enough to make the nickname stick. Much to his own amusement, and to the embarrassment of his two young boys, Dylan and Doug, from that day on Gene Sutherland became Joan Sutherland and The Grand Hotel had a dairy-farmer diva as its head barman. And as for Kooka, well, he couldn’t believe his luck.
    Whether it was The Grand Hotel Recommended Looseners, the talking urinal, or simply the fact that the hotel still felt and looked as relaxed as a house, things went from strength to strength on that first night. The weather was calm, and by 9pm we’d opened the boarded-up double doors and spilt out into the garden behind the tea tree hedge. We had no PA so Jim and Oscar’s ragtag band of local mates, The Barrels, who were well used to improvising at weddings and surf-club events, just played through amplifiers out on the grass and the dancing began.
    We cooked cayenne rabbit as the main course, in three huge pots on the stove behind the bar, and you wouldn’t believe how many people kept saying they hadn’t tasted rabbit for years. They thoroughly approved of the recipe and thought it went down well with the Dancing Brolgas. Speaking of which, Rennie Vigata turned up in his monstrous black Chevy van on that opening night. It looked like a cross between a vehicular version of an Anselm Kiefer painting and something straight out of Mad Max . Rennie was equally as scary and as a joke he pinned me up against the wall in the bar and dared me to charge him full price for a Laphroaig whisky on account of the fact that he’d driven to the pub and was thus ineligible for the walker’s discount.
    In the raspy baritone of a man who at some point in his past had experienced a deft karate chop to the vocal cords, he said, ‘You’re prejudicing the hills, Noel. Do you know how long it would take for me to walk here?’
    Angling his powerful bodyguard’s forearm, he held me tight in under the cuckoo clock and the catfish skeleton on the wall. One thing was for sure: he didn’t know his own strength. Surely, I thought, he would realise from past experience that I was about to choke.
    Eventually Rennie let me go with a sneering smile. I gulped in the air. There’s nothing like the fear of a premature death to inspire you and I had an inspiration right on the spot. Feigning great forethought, I explained to him (and to myself I might add) The Grand Hotel’s very own Bonafide Traveller scheme. In the old days, of course, when hotels shut with the six o’clock swill due to the wowserish early licensing laws, a bonafide traveller was allowed to drink to his heart’s content in any hotel beyond closing time. Now, as I explained to Rennie, The Grand Hotel had revived the concept but with a twist. Anyone drinking at The Grand who’d come from over fifteen kilometres away was exempt from the