The Grand Hotel Read Online Free PDF Page B

taken seriously, for people to think of him as an idler or a soak, and therefore as someone perpetually only half looking for, or otherwise outright shunning, serious work. That fact, combined with my well-cemented position in the family as the youngest child (and therefore as someone incapable of ever maturing to full adulthood), perhaps explains why Kooka, in cahoots with my elder brothers, had thought it possible that with one bright swoop of enthusiasm they could change the whole tone and calibre of my life by installing me as a novice publican in my own house. And that I would agree to this without so much as a harrumph or an objection.
    Slowly but steadily as we sat there, Kooka began to outline his scheme, how he would sell his house, which was now a millstone around his neck because of its exaggerated worth on the coastal market, and with the money raised by the sale help me fit out my house to become the town’s hotel. He himself would happily become a permanent lodger in a room upstairs, from where he could continue his history-work and quite contentedly see out his autumn years in good company. I would gain much needed full employment as the licensee of the reawakened Grand Hotel, we would both make a few quid and perform a valuable community duty by doing so. Together we could ensure that the town still had a pub, and that the pub remained authentic, not tricked up with watered beer, inflated prices and shoddy gimmicks for the tourists, so that the good folk of Mangowak could continue to relax and drink in a manner they were accustomed to.
    And so then, Kooka enquired, what did I think of the plan?
    My first impulse of course was to laugh. But as my mouth opened, Kooka held up his hand and assured me again that it was no lark, that he was fair dinkum, absolutely serious. This only made me want to laugh even harder and in the chequered gloom of his fibro archive I proceeded to do so. I chuckled and guffawed, waxed sarcastic about the ease with which I could fill a publican’s shoes, joked about how seamless the transformation of my ramshackle rabbit warren of an eighty-year-old home into a modern hotel would be, and how I’d always secretly hankered to live under the same roof as Kooka and his archive. I spoofed how I was at a loose end anyway, having just strolled back into town, and how good it was of my brothers to be on the lookout for my welfare and how perceptive they’d been to intuit my true ‘mine host’ vocation. I spoke of my innate talents for pouring a drink, the relish with which I would toss giant bikies off the premises and how, above all, I would enjoy the night-after-night tranquillity, the slow easy pace and gentle inconsequential quiet of not only living in, but also running, a hotel.
    Kooka listened to all this without batting an eyelid. He simply stared at me and waited for me to finish, almost as if I was having some kind of regular fit. When I finally stopped speaking and my chuckling dwindled away, he was still staring at me. His big brow was lowered and his eyes were doleful.
    â€˜Jim said he thought you might get your back up a bit,’ he offered at last.
    I gave him an exasperated look, which he straightaway returned with an irrepressibly broad kookaburra smile. Three hours later, due mostly to the fuel of home-made shandies and fistfuls of peanuts, we were still in there, discussing the idea.

The Freedom Virus
    That first night back in town I went to sleep in the barn thinking of the brolga, but when I woke to Pippy’s familiar yapyap the next morning all I could think about was The Grand Hotel. Kooka had painted such a picture the day before in the archive that by the time I’d left his house just before midnight, I was almost considering his proposition plausible.
    He’d told me all about The Grand Hotel of yore, how the bullock drays’d come down from Corrievale and Winchelsea, do their business on the old coast and range track, and then