Four Grand in the Hole

5 star hotels breed a special strain of Stockholm Syndrome that preys on seasoned business travellers. Outside work hours they don’t venture out from their hotel room, their luxurious prison cell. The standard cells like an overfurnished cell inhabited by a tranny serving life for murder. She who has spent many years resourcefully redecorating her cell with the random spoils of her lot. The suites on the executive floors are more like the type of cell that Mike Tyson occupied. Either way, give in to this syndrome and Room Service becomes your bitch. The Wake-up Service becomes your Vinegar Tits.

So I often go out to restaurants by myself.

[Cue violins.]

I don't often feel like a loser ... only when I' m been relegated to a table near the toilet; or overlooked by the wait staff. It only lasts about 10 minutes though, as I've either gotten used to the toilet trail or complained the other problem away.

I’d still rather sit at the bottom of the restaurant food chain than be rotting in the tranny cell. I don’t mind eating alone but I hate the boredom of being alone. So I always ensure there is a book, laptop, document or phone to keep me company.

This brings me to last night. I was sitting at a bad table in a great reastaurant, working on my laptop until the meal arrived. When it did, I put the laptop aside and started shoveling red wine and satay into myself. I no longer had a free hand (cave man that I am) and was left to my own thoughts. This time my thoughts wandered to my grandparents. All of them.

I don’t think about them very often but I haven’t forgotten them.

Resurrecting them all together like this made me feel both sad and warm. Possibly it was the wine (sad) or the chilli (warm) but I think it was me.

They're all long dead by now.

These grandparents were always going to die on me, of course. It was their lot. I remember being a kid and looking at my grandparents with a mixture of love and suspicion. I think they looked at me the same way but the years would have taught them not to think about it like that.

But even as a toddler I somehow understood that they were … well … kind of on their way out.

Ours was a friendship with an expiry date. The date wasn’t disclosed but its terms and conditions were clear. They would be going first. Both of us knew It. And neither would have wanted it otherwise.

So here we were, co-conspirators staring across at each other from opposite ends of life’s chronology.

As far as I was concerned though, these were not normal people . They were a breed of grey-haired humans with unironed skin. I imagined them hearing our car pullling into the driveway, causing them to quickly crawl from of their laundry basket and out the back door to wave hello. No time to iron.

This cult was brimming with kindness and stories, of course. Its members had a patient yet confident view on most topics, whether they chose to share it or not ... and they functioned and participated in life ... all the while slowly and knowingly being drawn to their deaths.

They talked about themselves as children and I would think to myself” ‘How could this old person have once been a child, like me?’ I accepted their childhood stories but could not completely commit to them. I believed them in same way that I believed the universe was infinite – it has to be true but it doesn't seem quite right.

Sometimes their story would crop up from nowhere and be told so naturally and easily that I suspected a rehearsal or script was involved. I being very young and trying discretely (mid story) to spot some hidden cue cards. My eyes … narrowing, disobedient and beady … darting sideways in the hunt for clues. This predated the stage when I wondered whether all the people around me were paid actors and part of some elaborate hoax. I’d forgotten all about this until I read a book a few years back where someone described having these same childhood theories.

Back to the dead people.

I didn’t go to the first 3 of their funerals. For two of them I was overseas. For the other one I had to play in a tennis tournament in Wollongong. Spent the admission money (and the afternoon) playing pinball at a parlour in Wollongong, in my tennis whites. During that afternoon, and the months following, I wondered about my consequences from Heaven. The fact that I didn’t believe in heaven was irrelevant. I wondered if she could see me smoking, or swearing, or wagging school and what she would think. Mind, it didn’t stop me doing them. Just made me wonder.

Back to the dead people.

I enjoyed taking time to remember them, collectively and individually. These are the four people who are responsible for my DNA, even though I don't think I turned out to be much like any of of them. However, if I lay down and allowed each of them to reclaim their own part back out of me, maybe there would be nothing left?

These are the four people who made me. Maybe they are all still inside me. Maybe I am their Sybil – without the bedwetting or carnal outbursts. I prefer to think of it more like Charlie Bucket’s house … with four dormant old people sharing the one bed, occasionally interrupting.

Maybe I don’t miss them because I still have them.

[Cue Gene Wilder]

Later on I sat down and tried to remember things about each of them and will post each of them separately. Most of you can stop reading now. Go away and think about your own grandparents (the ones you knew) for 15 minutes. You won't be disappointed.

The First Grandfather.

I don’t know why we called him Grandfather. No other name was ever suggested. It certainly wasn’t considered posh and nor was he. He wasn't a Pop though. A Pop is something which springs out of a box,.

I knew him the least out of all the grandparents and spent less time with him than the others. But I also remember being constantly curious about what he was up to. If there was a group of people, it was usually him whose movements I chose to track. His unlikely stalker.

When I hear the word farm I think of him. I have never thought of him as a farmer. I have always thought of him as a farm.

Very short and very thin. His hair was extremely white and thick with no evidence of pattern baldness. Lucky duck.

The reason I thought lungs were two huge sacks which get filled with air. He’s only got one lung, they said. The other was taken out years before, they said. Cancer, they said. Amazing fitness for a man with one lung, they said. How could an old man like that let us in through the front gate and then run up the hill beside our car as we drove to the house, they said.

Referred to the pigs as his “piggies” and was very fond of them even though he killed and ate them. A strange relationship. He used to brew this pig slop on the fire in the loungeroom. It would be cooking all day and all night. You could smell it on arrival and it made you feel a bit hungry. Look inside the pot and it didn’t look like anything. It smelt of bacon - actually not really bacon; more like ham hock - and I used to wonder whether he was feeding them their own. They didn't have a choice though - much like a porcine version of the Rugby team's tragedy in the Andes.

When he was a postman in the 1930’s he earned £4 per week.

As long as I remember he slept in the enclosed verandah of the house. When we came to visit, Pete and I would sleep (and fight) there and he was sent back to the marital bed. He once came to intervene in our fight while I was stabbing Pete in the forehead, a heinous (but non-veinous) attempt at lead poisoning.

Reheating Grandma’s cooking (uninspired frozen meals) long after she died. 3 years long.

Calling Grandma “Mother”.

Probably not a good farmer because he had decent land and no money.

A recovering alcoholic who never admitted the problem. This is how I learned that true alcoholics are often skinny. Beer only puts on weight to the hobbyists. The stalwarts stay rail thin.

Always off doing something, but not often around the house.

Us going “into town” to put on bets for him at TAB for him. Returning back to the farm to see him in the verandah, listening astutely to the “wireless” as it played in the Verandah or elsewhere. The radio playing in the verandah. Only horse races.

He owned shares in a horse - a trotter which I think sucked up lots of time and money but never won a race. He looked like a thinner, poorer version of Tommy Smith

Once everyone went down to Melbourne for a horse race he was associated to. We didn’t get to go, but I remember thinking how glamorous it was for the adults to be going interstate for a function. I remember Cheesel packing her gold, black and white slack suit.

Most of his children hated him deep down for what he used to be, but still looked after him to the end.

Seeing his eyes well up with tears when the colour TV was unveiled during their 50th wedding anniversary. I thought at the time that Grandma was genuninely surprised but that he already knew that something was a-brewin'.

Whenever a foreigner asks me whether we have different accents or dialogues in Australia, I use him as an example. The last time I saw him. We dropped in for a visit in the middle of the afternoon. He was still in his pyjamas and in bed.– a stopover on my way to Perth – I couldn’t understand a lot of what he said except for the part where he told me not to marry a coon “like Bob Hawke’s son did”. And I never did. Can’t say the same for him.

Being a world-class shot with a 22 rifle. Hitting ducks in mid flight, right in the neck. I think that this was a fluke but it was repackaged as a rare skill.

He knew his rabbits. How to kill, how to spot miximetosis, how to skin one quicker and better than anyone, how to cook them (with bay leaves). He would tell us – ernestly – that Kentucky Fried Chicken would occasionally use rabbit and not chicken. He could tell.

Used “Tricia”.

Was “unbeatable” at tennis via a particularly fierce back spin that made the ball hardly bounce. Never saw any evidence of it and never understood how it could be done but used to practice ... my ticket to Wimbledon.

Retained the outdoor “drop” dunny years longer than they needed to. It was a lonely walk out there at night to that infested little shed and I can still recall the stench of human excrement that it exuded.

As a younger man he would come home drunk and use the same whip on his children that he used on his dogs. Looking at him now, you couldn’t believe he was a cruel father. But I believe he was because some of this behaviour weaved its way down the family tree and into my childhood.

Did he put rope around his pants to keep them up? I think so.

I think that education and opportunity would have created an entirely different person.