Orders from the House

Wet and burnt would pretty much cover a first impression of the Glamis Private Hospital on Montpellier street. An advertising brochure minted in the 80’s (judging from the boxy Lancer and Civic parked up in the crepuscular cover shot) boasts that ‘for added safety the Hospital is equipped with an automatic fire sprinkler system’ and, as one ventures deeper into the day-glo gloom, you have to hand it to both elements: they did their thing. Then there is the proliferation of tagging (or, according to the manual: ‘Glamis is decorated throughout in shades of soft peach and green’) and insulation, as though some giant puppy has taken the whole building in its maw and yanked the stuffing out, or a D train carriage loaded with pink bats has derailed and exploded all over the lobby. But no, none of the ‘terminally ill or those requiring psychogeriatric care’ were in fact tasked with also cramming being burned to death into their baskets of current riches, nor was the fancy sprinkler ever deployed; the interior rethink was the work of teen arsonists long after the Thane had shut up shop and loaded the station wagon for Cawdor. Of course, Macbeth didn’t get a flasher castle with his self-wrought title - he just redaubed his own pad in blood and became death right where he was. A similar process seems to have taken place here at the hospital, except no one has died (yet), just the building. Oh, except everybody. Everybody died, that is why they were there in the first place. So the kids lit the fires that took out half of the roof and the rain did the rest: burnt, and wet.

It is difficult to say how the GPH lost its market niche: there still seems to be a fairly sizeable demographic of the terminally ill and the psychogeriatric wandering around the place, and they can’t all be fresh off the cruise ships that keep parking up adjacent to Chick’s Hotel. Going bust in the death market would seem to be a gross case of asset mismanagement. Or perhaps that was the point: urban legend has it that the reeking ruin is owned by an offshore investor who continues to operate the ‘hospital’ as a money laundering operation. In any case, the city council protests its powerlessness to simply take a wrecking ball to what remains, despite the gaping elevator shafts, teetering beams and Damoclean chandeliers lying in wait to claim the city’s youth on their misspent Sunday afternoons.

Living right next door, obtaining my copy of the 40 year old brochure was no harder than clearing my own letterbox, and in fact its pristine condition puts to shame the sodden sheaf of bills which that leaking receptacle often gifts me. It was right there on the counter at reception, seemingly eerily immune to the teen revelers’ penchant for immediately returning any found object to a scattered sum of its parts. The document gives pause to the instinctual urge to reach for ‘desecrated’ as an advance on simply wet and burnt. Because you wouldn’t want to overplay the sacredness of the establishment in its operational heyday. Amongst Martin Amis’s many immortal (is that the right word here?) coinages are those with which he documents the violence and murder undertaken by the despots and tyrants (Hitler, Hoss, Stalin, Hussein) he has icily interrogated in his fiction and non fiction: ‘warm work’ and, unforgettably, ‘wet work’ respectively. My little book about the Glamis Private Hospital suggests possibly ‘cold work’ or ‘grey work’ as the standard operating procedures. So, starting with the establishing shot, we learn that ‘it is situated in a pleasant woodland setting and has an atmosphere of space and light’, which sounds great until one recalls Duncan’s enthusiastic ‘this castle hath a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses’ on final approach to Macbeth’s chamber of horrors. And look how that turned out. Elsewhere, the literature boasts the provision of ‘a small noticeboard for display of favourite photos, cards or grandchildren’s artwork,’ a promise that ‘where residents share accommodation, considerable thought is given to placement so that the occupants are compatible’ and, presumably if the occupants are incompatible (or, possibly, simply psychogeriatric) a ‘very efficient bell system, should urgent assistance be required at any time.’ On the bright side, breakfast in bed is part of the package, although residents are ‘encouraged’ to get up for lunch to benefit from ‘the companionable atmosphere of a social group’. You can go out, ‘health permitting’ and ‘a wheelchair can be borrowed for the duration of the outing’. Foodwise, there is a ‘wonderful cook’ who is apparently well versed in the dark arts of ‘pureed diets’. The photographs are equally informative. A nurse bringing a brimming beaker of sherry to an old dear, her tray table unstowed on her lay-z-boy, the foot of the bed from which she has presumably journeyed for this happy hour a couple of feet away. At least she is smiling, and hasn’t been pressured to put her teeth in for marketing purposes. In the next shot, a threadbare retired English teacher type perches on what appears to be a piece of outdoor furniture in his cell beside the grey and silent face of an equally antique television set.To be fair, he is having a go at the paper. In neither image is there any evidence of the ‘small noticeboard’. So I wouldn’t quite stretch to desecrated. Anyway, the cold, or grey work is long finished here.

It was precisely for this reason, to prevent a large concern from succumbing to the elements and falling into ruin, that Jack Torrance was employed as the winter caretaker at the Overlook hotel in Colorado (not to be confused with Timberline Lodge in Oregon or Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire). Important work for sure, but invariably, and despite one’s best intentions, you find yourself drinking alone, or thinking alone, or thinking about drinking alone or firing your band and making a record alone. In common with Jack, Lloyd, the (dead) bartender has proved a surprisingly fecund apparition to me over the years. The song ‘Dry Land’ (if you play this backwards, you can faintly hear Jack Nicholson saying ‘I’d give my goddamn soul for a glass of beer’) on Dark Winning begins as follows:

Little slow tonight
Lloyd, I’ve seen better service
In bars that were really sets
Just assembled for the cameras

The song even ‘takes place’, if this is what songs do, in what must surely be the South Island’s prime candidate for Overlook status: The Hermitage at Mt Cook. The abrupt cessation of paying guests in Covid times looked set to enforce just this scenario, with the entire operation shut down, redundancies offered and (and here I speculate) a skeleton crew of one (together with his small family) retained to look after the boiler, heating the different wings of the hotel on a rotating basis…Fortunately, the hotel has swung back into life since. Fortunately, because it seems to be the repository of some formative memories from my youth:

Kid at the Hermitage
Cigarette machine in the lobby
In thrall to the lighted brands
Wishing for some coins to play with

Not that you would find a cigarette machine there, or anywhere, anymore. And if you did, you wouldn’t need coins, you would need notes - and lots of them.

Having had a little mutter to himself and to Lloyd in the Colorado Lounge on his first mad visit, Jack then returns to find Joe Turkel ably supported by a resplendent cast of extras miming conversations. It is here that he is informed: ‘No charge for you, Mr Torrance. Your money’s no good here. Orders from the House.’ I can honestly say that this is not a problem which I have ever encountered, my money having been perfectly acceptable in any drinking establishment in which I have tried, and succeeded in, parting with it. Jack is a little more churlish than I would have been in his situation: ‘I’m the kind of guy who likes to know who’s buying their drinks, Lloyd.’ But really, potential savings aside (you’re only going to go and put them into the cigarette machine in the lobby anyway), wouldn’t some of those Orders from the House be nice? Just so it wasn’t all up to you. No blame for you, Mr Spittle, Your agency’s no good here. Orders from the House. Being one of the thousand odd lab rats in the fabled Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (I think I have a song called Ghost of the DMHDS, or something similar, perhaps in recognition of the fact that we are getting well down into the 900s now, what with eating the poison and spinning ourselves to death in our wheels), I am aware that there has been a bit of a quest for the old nature versus nurture grail, with differing opinions as to which N will be engraved on the silverware when it is finally found. I suspect it is likely to be both, or neither. It is most likely an Erebus type deal: there was nothing wrong with the plane, there was nothing wrong with how it was piloted. They just put the wrong stuff in. It was the Orders from the House. Or, we could walk down ‘a narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds,’ where Marlowe climbs ‘an ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert’ and meets two women, ‘knitting black wool’, and receives his orders for a mission that will lead him to face a man who is most certainly running his own bar: Kurtz. And when the day shift has gone home, and maybe the high tech bell system isn’t working, or maybe you couldn’t reach the buzzer in time, when you are alone and ‘the horror’ comes, there will be a morning, a day, and more days you will never see and someone will tell someone you used to love what they think they might want to hear.

So it made sense to be recording this album in a former hotel. The eight songs are rooms, if you will, each inhabited by various ghosts. What else are we but a collection of empty rooms? And if we are lucky we can remember who stayed here, once.