Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  Rocking through the night without brakes, it was the last tram heading for the Hackney terminus. The varnished seats and the overhead straps seemed to sway more, the lights flickered, as Shadbolt swung his conductor's bag as heavy as a bookmaker's against the black face. Almost simultaneously a terrific blow shattered his temple and nose; and Shadbolt couldn't help himself. He was falling into the air of the wind and night, his arms waving. Before he could properly explain or shout he embraced a circular steel pole, the darkness was split by a searing blue light, pain, ebbing pain, seeping into darkness, contained and slowly final complete blackness, the way a tram enters its depot at night, and switches off.

  Duplications and intersections increase out of hand naturally—during conflict on a grand scale. Winston Churchill's cigar and fingers prematurely signalling victory beckoned the fall of V-2 rockets on London; the recurrence of 8 in the logistics of the war resembled its appearance in the periodic table of chemical elements; and on the morning of 14 October, 1944 (wasn't that the day Field Marshal Rommel ‘died’? Which also happened to be General Eisenhower's birthday?) on the morning of 14 October, Holden's voice began to break.

  The boy was standing to attention under an immense Southern Hemisphere sky, a little wind stirring his hair. He tried to say hello to somebody, found he couldn't, and wondered if it might have been grief. Such was the recent accelerating growth in the boy's nose, jawbone and chin, an elastic adjustment had been forced on the rest of his skin, and seemed to lift his trousers, exposing an orphan's ankles.

  A circle shuffled into shape, about eight paces across. Everybody knew where to stand.

  It was the earliest ceremony for one who would become a master of ceremonies.

  Holden concentrated on holding onto his mother.

  From the woman next door she'd hastily accepted a crocheted shawl and hoisted it over her head. By itself it would have been all right; but in tandem with her high heels it encouraged the slightest shift in her centre of gravity, a cargo of barrels on a ship, and Holden was forced to keep planting his legs apart, the way his father did on trams. Swaying and tilting—and half-listening to the Minister's intonation—Holden surveyed the circumference of faces nodding slightly and smiling, or just plain gazing at him and his mother. As a way of focusing he went over their birthmarks and individual characteristics, and counted their accessories, the wire-framed specs, tiepins (in those days), opal brooch, a dead fox, elastic suspenders and watch-chains. The men had their hats placed over their privates like tea cosies. Holden saw the broad hands of these decent people, even their bootish-looking shoes. Behind them, several ordinary objects, such as the spade angled against a headstone, assumed a glaring, matter-of-fact clarity. Everything was unusual, yet at the same time perfectly normal.

  ‘Man that is born of woman—’

  Pigeons had exploded, starlings, sparrows and other small fish were yanked up and hurled into mid-distance. The leaves on the Jacarandas began shivering. The preacher studiously went on reading, the surgical collar—and here a prime function of his costume asserted itself—preventing him from wavering. A squadron of eardrumming monsters barely cleared the wall and the trees, four Avro Ansons escorted by three clapped-out Wirraways, all trailing hyperactive shadows, jerking and plunging over the magpie verticals of the cemetery, pausing around the mouth of the Methodist Minister, so that instead of words in vain it looked as if he let out swarms of leisurely flapping bats. It took several minutes before the roar died into a dot and words returned. Low-altitude flights were common during the war. Designed to show the flag. Part of the psychological war. ‘Where possible,’ ran a mimeographed order, ‘avoid flying over the sea.’ But here, as always, they only demonstrated to a windy population the pitiful defences of the island-continent.

  The circle broke up into slowly revolving satellites, and Holden suddenly began wrestling with his mother.

  ‘The worms there, look! It's soil like we've got at home. But oh Lord, he was the gentlest of men. When he was young. You should have seen him. Before you were bom. He turned sour with everything under the sun, myself included. I don't know why. I told him, goodness, hundreds of times. I did my best.’

  ‘Yes,’ Holden managed to croak.

  The only man who had not replaced his hat was the bald old codger and now he was leaning back, laughing. A woman stepped in front of Holden, blocking his view. The local climate had draped cobwebs all over her face and throat, and she had the fox slung over her shoulder. ‘I'm your Auntie Dais.’ At her elbow stood a purple man grinning ear to ear.

  ‘I remember you when you were this high. Look at him now, Jim. Unless my eyes are deceiving, he's almost past you.’

  As she paused the incisions above her lip, deposited by uncertainties, radiated into the art-deco sunrise cotterpinned to the hats of all the AIF.

  ‘Has his tongue fallen out?’ she bent forward.

  His uncle's chief language was a system of winking and backslapping.

  ‘Chin up, boy!’

  The ingenious geometry of the cemetery allowed everybody to stamp their feet and rub their hands with a sense of well-being. The little asphalt streets with their ‘intersections’, and the gravel plots raked and displaying names, and the geraniums in humble jars, resembled a tiny rectilinear city, so that even to Holden still a boy the dead underfoot felt like dwarfs. And standing there Holden felt he could look over and beyond the heads of these grown-up people and into the shadowless streets and avenues outside, an illusion increased by his inability just then to speak.

  People were leading his mother towards the cars. He knew them by name and engine capacity. Little Morrises, Austin Sevens, Prefect and Hillman, models of caution, as their names implied, products of a nation of small roads; the obligatory Model A on wire spokes stood out, ungainly and yet designed to traverse a wide country, while idling at the front was the dusty hearse, a custom-built Hudson missing a back hubcap. The motorbike equipped with sidecar shaped like a boat belonged to his Uncle Jim and Dais. Outside, another single-cylinder machine coughed several times before producing a long straight line of diminishing sound. And then his sister, Karen, oblivious of him and everybody else, started bawling as a cluster of second cousins began tugging her away from the hole.

  That was how the crowd dissolved.

  Holden shuffled forward several paces. A lumpen clumsiness spread from his limbs, blurring his vision and all distinctions, a moral condition—a know-nothingness—which he would increasingly find himself struggling against.

  Gazing at the mullock—mining terms had penetrated the South Austrylian tongue—‘Get that mullock out of here!’—he was about to turn when a synthetic brown curtained his right eye. More like a miner than a mourner a skinny man scrambled alongside. To keep his balance he began swaying and nodding; and craning further forward, as if he'd spotted something, he drew Holden with him.

  ‘What do they do with the box? They leave it in the ground, I suppose. Do you think they'd leave it? With those brass handles fitted? They don't come cheap. What do you think? They've done a corker job. What sort of wood's that? Pine, it looks like a pine. They give it a good cut and polish. See the knots? How much did this funeral cost? Thirty-five, forty? Is that young Karen with your mother there? She's growing fast. Tall timber. You must be Holden. Where'd they get that name? I'll shake your hand. Is that six foot deep? Not on your life! I'm five-five and a half. How old is your sister? No, that's not six foot. I'm on your mother's side, your Uncle Vern. Call me Vern. That's my name. What's the temperature today? It's been the hottest October since 1923. Fahrenheit. It's hard to spell. Do you know where the name comes from? The man who invented the thermometer. Another German. Excuse me, is that a crow? Scavengers. Who's that buried over there? The iron cross. Let's have a look. Oxidisation. Where does all this granite come from? It doesn't grow on trees. How is your mother taking it? It came as a shock.’

  The boy had been watching his uncle's teeth. The pneumatic force of his perpetual question
ing had shoved them forward to an eyecatching degree, so much so that the teeth themselves had acquired properties of alertness and curiosity, even when momentarily at rest over his bottom lip like lumps of quartz, illuminated by flashes of sunlight. When he smiled—although he didn't in the cemetery—his teeth retreated from prominence, but then a series of vertical neck muscles took over, giving him the appearance of craning even further forward. Most of his questions were left up in the air. The mania for verification can be such a nervous disorder. Other people suffer asthmas or scratch holes in their skulls, drink their own urine for moral fibre, or letter by hand the Ten Commandments or a nation's constitution on a single grain of rice. Others develop their paranoia into local or world-class leadership; not Holden, and certainly not his uncle fidgeting beside him.

  ‘Hello, what's this? An Afghani camel driver? They've buried him here? How about that? All that wool he must have carted down over the years from the Centre. Camel trains. Moslems. Over here, look at this: “Our only son, William James, lost in the Great Australian Bight. Never recovered.” There's a true story. Real sadness. How old was he?’

  But already he was moving on.

  Always on the verge of answering the questions Holden began racking his brains for scraps of general knowledge, anything, to offer in return. Several times he had to clutch at the insubstantial elbow, stopping his Uncle Vern falling headfirst into one of the freshly dug holes. In this way his mind shifted from the invisible, still vertical, shape of his father to the solidarity of words and objects.

  They were examining an overgrown grave (‘What are they? Scotch thistles? “Zoellner.” That rings a bell. Another German name?’) when a horn sounded, and was amplified by the avenues of slabs.

  For the first time his uncle faced him.

  ‘Is that your mother? I think that's your mother waving.’

  Solid granite unfurled into imperishable white roses and scrolls. Heavy urns spilt cannonballs of weather-stained grapes. Books of knowledge lay open at a blank page, marked by ribbons of stone. Fallen angels, swords and polished blankness registered as ornate feats of engineering, an industry that had found its groove.

  Realising he hadn't said a word, not even a thankyou of gratitude, Holden stopped running. His voice croaked. It would not have reached.

  Anyway the figure remained engrossed, spitting on his handkerchief now, deciphering again.

  Bicycles had been hacksawed or melted down for the war effort. The mild steel frames were ‘recycled’ into speaking tubes for submarines and as tripods for light machine-guns. Rumour had it that the joysticks of the locally assembled Mustangs were nothing more than refurbished men's handlebars. Bells reappeared all over the Pacific screwed down on the cane tables of the Officers' Mess. By October 1944 the wholesale slaughter of bicycles was halted and the survivors emerged one by one painted like hedges or trees or the sides of weatherboard houses, and those requisitioned for aerodrome duty or stored in camouflaged sheds for the Land Army were returned to their original owners. People who were not in the war cannot begin to understand…

  Several weeks after the funeral Holden arrived home one afternoon to find two bicycle machines on the back verandah. Both were ladies’—no horizontal bar—and the light frame of one painstakingly painted rose madder was overpowered by a pair of muscular men's handlebars, which had been lowered, and a sheathlike saddle sprung on commas. Along its hypotenuse MERCURY had been lettered in silver serifs. Its twin was a composition of mismatching pedals, mudguards and wheel sizes, but its gender preserved by the original chain-guard of delicate plaited cotton.

  Holden's feelings for bicycles were similar to his grandfather's affinity to horses. They embodied all that was intensive and silently inevitable. Bicycles were interesting and varied in themselves. Individual components were there to be understood, properly maintained and modified; combined they produced instantaneous movement. What with the war and the sudden taking-away of his father Holden had given up all hope of ever owning one.

  His mother pointed with her chin.

  ‘Your Uncle Vern would have done them up himself. I could never fathom him out. He's not one for chucking his money around. I haven't seen him for years. You'll have to thank him, both of you.’ She came closer. ‘Both of you listen. Holden? Now don't go getting yourselves killed.’

  The streets of Adelaide had become the domain of the fabulous, the freakish and the disabled: not only dwarfs and obese waddling men or shadowless cantilevered figures, the seven-footers, pinheads and flat-earthers, or even those lonely men with eleven fingers or harelips (somehow no good aiming a rifle), but more to the point, pale men who couldn't run, think or see straight, poor devils, and those with perforated eardrums who couldn't pick up the piston-racket of a Heinkel, even when the smiling parabolic pilot could see the whites of their eyes: figures normally outside the body politic but now the core; gentle, vague, harmless creatures. They appeared as pedestrians singly at mid-distance, occasionally passed by metal insect-machines vaguely resembling velopedes. Similar long intervals showed in the revised schedule of trams. And spaces widened on bench-seats, on grocers' shelves, on pedestrian crossings. During the war there was hardly any need for traffic lights. Young women went about as if sleepwalking. Occupying an erogenous zone of uncertainty and incompleteness they joined the ranks of the walking wounded. Their bodies had become transparent. Visible was every hair, cleft and bulge. Here and there breasts grew expectantly, pointedly full: drawn tidally towards some figure across the sea, defying history. Irrational laughter erupted without warning from the worst afflicted, at the worst possible times. In their dreams they passed through foreign walls complete with crenellations, cracks and damp shadows, and received men by the ton or singly, sometimes the pliant ghost of a familiar dead man, opening and closing themselves. A kind of suspended animation, an existence in limbo; they scarcely lived in Adelaide.

  In the short distance to Holden's school every other pedal stroke stamped out a soft statue in a front yard, Figure with Broom or Brooding Woman, wearing the same mottled dressing gown as his mother's, so that when he arrived home and found her as he left her, seated at the table, he didn't bat an eyelid. Newsreels of the day had lines of women seated at benches in munitions factories, or at long tables rolling bandages.

  The formal haphazardness of her sandwiches became a tangible by-product: Tasmanian apple pulped with mutton and bananas, spaghetti with treacle, and all indiscriminately stained with the litmus of beetroot or curry-yellow pickles, a leaking spectrum of colour the like of which Holden had never seen before or since. When Holden dropped them in the 44-gallon drum, the school bin, the thud erupted into images of his mother, shell-shocked in her dressing gown like all the rest, slicing, spreading butter diagonally, transfixed by angled planes of yellow light, as if the sun was filtered not by the back trellis of vines but the smoke of afternoon bushfires.

  For a time groups of relatives called and paid their respects.

  Holden recognised them from the funeral, although now they stood in the kitchen wearing different clothing and expressions.

  Funny family, the Shadbolts. Well, the way young Karen sat alongside her mother, the model of solicitude, and Holden there blocking the kitchen doorway, his arms folded like a eunuch. Isn't he a bit thick, dim-witted? (Holden had taken to wearing tight cyclist's shorts.) With barely a word spoken, even in greeting, visitors found themselves filling in with all kinds of repetitions and commonplaces, including weather-forecasting. The strain showed in the rate of Auntie Dais's munching and swallowing, for she wanted to be a help, while her husband Jim opted for the rural policy, which is to grin down at your serrated brogues and slowly nod your head.

  Holden watched as his mother came to life and asked to read their tea leaves, smiling sweetly but snatching the cups before they were properly drained.

  In a way it was a relief. But what did she ‘see’?

  From a few muddy calligraphies she managed to detect economic disaster areas and
astral accidents far worse than those which had recently befallen her. World War Two would finish shortly, yes, but in the same bream she saw Jim losing his drinking arm in a brick-making machine, somebody else an eye, another an eldest son in a shotgun accident, and Auntie Dais her semi-precious wedding ring under the jetty at Glenelg. Looking up at Holden, Karen bit her lip at the injustices of the world. Their mother reached out for more cups. There were acts of God nobody on earth could control, genetical, geographical, meteorological, for she had the misfortune to see the first-born of an incessantly smiling niece cursed with red hair, freckles and pale eyelashes, and the entire family of plump look-alikes stricken with diabetes and halitosis—Holden had last seen them at the funeral, standing to attention in chronological order—and someone else (name indistinguishable) completely electrocuted while sheltering under a dripping blue gum. On a scarcely less traumatic scale she announced the marriage of Holden's second cousin to a German Roman Catholic and that Uncle Milton's fly-blown delicatessen on Payneham Road would be going to the wall, and so-and-so, father of four, was seen fornicating with an office girl during the lunch hour on an unrecognisable back lawn.

  ‘What about your own?’ complained one, almost in tears.

  Her husband, the bald man, had stood up ready to go.

  ‘That's right. Take Holden there.’

  For all that remained of their home which hadn't even reached the blueprint stage was a chimney and a few charred beams.

  ‘He doesn't have a future,’ she reported, her head still bent over a cup.

  Holden didn't even blink at this piece of news. With tea rationed the future could be read only in an abbreviated form. Besides, even at his hairless age, he could see that few people were granted Histories. Among the Shadbolts crowded into the kitchen only an accident could throw one of them momentarily into prominence, as happened with his father whose colourless shape already was rapidly receding (the notion of ghosts originates from this imprecision of memory). Not to have a future made no difference to him. He was going to be like everybody else.