by Murray Bail
None of this seemed to interest Mrs Shadbolt. It only confirmed his unpredictability. Nonchalantly this intruder kept them off-balance. He dominated even by his absences. These absences were similar to the immense holes in his shape, in their knowledge of him. She never quite knew what he'd do or say next, or if he'd turn up, or when he'd pull any more ferocious faces, or come home shickered again. She didn't know what day it was. And yet the picture of a possible future of unreliability touched some deep awareness of her own steadfastness. Waiting for him and unable to penetrate his casualness she found herself constantly thinking of him.
On Friday nights McBee sat at the head of the table. In khaki and lacking eyelashes he chaired a select committee: leaning forward, lurching back, whispering, thumping the table, pointing to himself or at one of them, or rhetorically half closing his eyes, dribbling a sentence out into thin air, then cracking one of his jokes and winking, appealing not so much to them as to the world at large. He had a knack for rhythm and repetitions, and not a bad sense of timing: would come in handy at future public meetings. When appropriate he could administer a sharp, single handclap. All in good humour, of course. He exerted a binding influence. There was no doubt about it. In the electric glare the metal components of his uniform, his ivory teeth and orange hair, even his peeling face, became ablaze.
It was good enough for Mrs Shadbolt that her two orphaned children were happy.
Their mother's contentment showed in her relative silence. She bought a lipstick tube. For the first time she politely sipped a glass of beer. For his part, Frank McBee looked forward to the Friday nights. He usually arrived on time. His ritual of distributing presents began when he tossed their mother a pair of American nylons. ‘Put 'em on now,’ he instructed. ‘Yell out,’ he winked to them, ‘if you want a hand.’ She went away and came back. Twisting his mouth and frowning McBee stared at her altered legs with exaggerated attention until she crossed them under the table. Naturally this had to be followed, in 1944, by less intimate gifts, which is how the house had a surplus of perforated Egyptian handkerchiefs and a cylindrical brass lampshade made from an 88-mm shell. If he couldn't scrounge a bar of chocolate for Karen he presented with elaborate ceremony an English sixpence wrapped in lavatory paper. And Holden, he received what most people would consider grotesque junk but which he reverently placed as archeological specimens in a row above his bed: alloy piston out of a Spitfire, anemometer taken from a Hurricane, and a short length of plaited cord McBee swore was a German field marshal's shoelace. He told them stories. ‘Did this happen to me? Or did I hear it from somebody? It doesn't matter. This is what actually happened…’ In the middle of the stories and his improvised games Mrs Shadbolt often found him watching her; their eyes met and his mouth began working overtime. She saw how his speech ran on independently, a parallel action, while his thoughts were directed only at her. You never knew with Frank McBee. During the day, Holden testified, he barely said a word.
‘Tell us again what it's like jumping with a parachute,’ Holden asked, a Friday night.
McBee stroked his chin. He had a better idea. ‘Tonight, it's Tobruk.’
Moving the table he positioned the Shadbolts like chessmen. Karen was the warm Mediterranean Sea. To her right, against the scrubbed sink, Holden stood for Egypt, and in the foreground under constant bombardment and seige, the object of the exercise, their apprehensive mother.
McBee began reasonably, sticking to the facts.
‘The country known as Libya is nothing but sand and lumps of white rock with a handful of Arabs and camels. A land of desert plains. Tobruk was a pleasant little town on the sea, like Adelaide. Yes, we are talking here of the North African equivalent to Adelaide.’
He encircled their positions, speaking softly, and glared when Holden began grinning.
‘By April, 1941, the occupying forces had taken all of Libya, right across to Egypt. All, that is, except Tobruk. Now why did she decide to hold out? That's an interesting question. With their backs to the sea, and enemy here, and here, the defenders went about in shorts and tin hats, nothing else. Their bodies glistened with perspiration, tense with the expectation of a frontal attack. How strong were the Austrylian defences in that endless heat and emptiness? Days passed into weeks, and weeks passed into months, and still the invader refused to go away. Gradually, resistance weakened. How long can a person withstand constant night assaults and probing actions, the outflankings, the ground, aerial and propaganda attacks? Anyway,’ McBee asked loudly, rhetorically, ‘what was the point? What could possibly be the point in not giving in? One part of the defenders actually began to hope for the next attack. They wanted to surrender, give themselves up, as long as they could be seen to have struggled.’
He had quickened his pacing and Holden noticed his eyes were fixed on their mother, Tobruk.
Mrs Shadbolt knew the soldier was erratic, and began fidgeting, but was still unprepared, as she waved a fly from her face, for the sudden thrust of his arms in a pincer movement. She screamed and ran around the table. With his shirt hanging out Holden stood there gaping like a neutral Egyptian.
Running amok, McBee had his arms outstretched.
‘After so many months, resistance collapsed!’ he shouted. ‘Weakened by the constant probing actions, that's right, and the invader's diversionary tactics, she fell! It happened one night. It took place under the cover of darkness.’
Laughing, Karen screamed at her mother, ‘You're in the sea!’
Mrs Shadbolt opened her mouth and stepped back. Between her feet then she saw the huge boots of the soldier. She felt his arms squash around her which altered the fall of her breasts.
‘That's enough,’ she said sharply. ‘That'll do.’ Immediately regretting it.
He released his hold.
‘And that…was the fall of Tobruk.’ He stroked her head. ‘Never mind, Mrs Shadbolt. It's all over now. I wasn't about to hurt you.’ Again he couldn't help winking. ‘You're only a prisoner. If nothing else, I'm a supporter of the Geneva Convention. You'll be looked after. You'll probably be allowed to go free at the end of the war.’
She felt more confused than ashamed. The stares of her two big children, Holden especially, showed she had spoilt their game. She had never liked games; clumsiness easily unsettled her.
After that whenever Mrs Shadbolt felt tired or unwell McBee showed unexpected restraint. If it happened on a Friday night his consideration quietened Holden and Karen. Afterwards, he helped with the dishes. And nothing looked more incongruous in the 100-watt kitchen than a full-blooded soldier in khaki and stripes handling a tea-towel.
Some Friday nights he took them to the pictures. It meant getting dressed up and catching a tram. McBee paid for everything; but when Holden turned to him in appreciation after the newsreel he found him already asleep, one finger forming a handlebar moustache.
Vern Hartnett worked as a proofreader on the conservative broadsheet, the Advertiser, his solid brick house in the foothills had an air of revision and infallibility.
Shuttered and walled at the end of a cul-de-sac it looked down upon the corridors of the near-distant city. To one side, hard against his fence, work had halted on the bleached frame of the only other house; unfinished rectangles, up-ended beams formed triangles: difficult to tell now if it was being built or dismantled. Hartnett's house stood out and against this and the casual lack of clarity of the Hills, the background to the city's postcards, which actually began as a bumpy slope in Vern's back lawn, before rising sharply (no need for a back fence), swarming with the vagaries of blackberry and honeysuckle, the grey gullies of brittle sticks humming with insects which obscured the true shape of tilings. These slopes of southerly aspect had once been part of George Penfold's vineyards. By standing at the mouth of the cul-de-sac the original dark geometry could be perceived here and there in the pale grass, as if under water.
In those days most Adelaide people felt the Hills were ‘too far away’. Their instincts happily settled on the na
rrow coastal plain where the aerodrome and the cast-iron railway station, the race-course, School of Arts and zoo, and the sewage treatment plant had been laid out.
The Hills supplied the city with its fresh fruit and vegetables, the gravel for the orthogonal expansion of its streets, and the most tenacious proofreader for its morning newspaper. At the stroke of six, ‘gully-breezes’, so-called, came down from the Hills, a blessing in summer, for they penetrated the fly-screens and the deepest recesses of the gasping houses—air-conditioning on a grand scale, a peculiarity of Adelaide.
Holden first entered the cul-de-sac soon after receiving the bike. He'd climbed Magill Road, turning right before Bennett's Pottery; and after pressing an electric bell Vern's welcome was so matter-of-fact, as though he was already a regular, that he pedalled up several times a week, straight from school. With the arrival of the soldier the visits tapered off; but now that the corporal preferred talking to his mother in the kitchen, he began returning to the cul-de-sac again.
To Holden the house occupied a rare position. It was distant, it was ‘farther-off’. From there you could look out and across. And the fact that his uncle lived there alone and remained at home during the day were other novelties; approaching the cul-de-sac, Holden felt the thrill of the many expectations. The house faced the sun at an unexpected angle and everything inside, including the chairs and tables, was in an unusual—different for him—position. Ensconced between the walls his uncle looked away when he spoke, beginning sentences, ‘As a matter of fact…’
This man wanted to isolate tilings, to clarify them. He never stopped asking questions which in turn made Holden ask questions. His uncle could spell out and pronounce the longest Welsh word in the world. Together they looked up the origins of Mercury, the presider over roads. There was a reason for everything. He always had something to show Holden. Having so much information at his fingertips had left them blackened. He handled words. Fact-collector, establisher of facts, walking atlas and almanac; and still he kept looking out for more.
Frog-marching the bicycle-boy outside Hartnett pointed to the weathercock. Nothing could be more accurate than a weathercock. But that wasn't it. Those same Roman letters fixed on the spokes which marked the four corners of the earth spelt out (explained with a pencil and paper) his profession. Which was?
NEWS
‘So there you go. It only dawned on me yesterday morning.’
Happily Holden joined in. ‘Africa!’
‘What's that? Where?’
The boy had second thoughts. ‘Doesn't matter…’
It wasn't exactly hard and fast: just that with the sun behind his uncle, casting his face in darkness, the flaxen hemispheres of hair on either side combined with his tapering chin to form the shape of the dark continent they'd been studying at school. His teeth which generated the aerosol spray pinpointed the Victoria Falls.
Holden measured a faint smile. He could be as clever as his uncle.
It took many months to acclimatise to his uncle's world. Presented with a front-door key he taped it under the seat of his bike. Often he rode up late in the afternoon, knowing the house would be empty, and in the curtained silence moved through the rooms, inspecting and replacing personal objects. He opened cupboards and drawers, and went outside. Thinking he had memorised everything he was pleasantly startled when an unknown object or a fresh piece of information fell into his hands.
The backyard had a special attraction. Holden spent as much time there as inside the house. Life-size statues had been planted at set intervals, quite a crowd, and moving among them he felt their stern gaze, transfixing him from all angles.
Cities erect statues to their prominent citizens. In the older European cities the exemplary figures in bronze virtually outnumber their living descendants. Adelaide had its statues to English monarchs, statesmen and town-planners. Standing on municipal lawns and under evergreens, or half blocking the foot-path along North Terrace, they supplied a continuity with the past and an example to the present. ‘I've done something similar,’ Holden's uncle confided. ‘I see nothing wrong with putting another man up on a pedestal. On the contrary.’
In that sense, his backyard had the appearance of a miniature city with the buildings, streets and pedestrians removed. Nothing but the statues.
Some of the figures were immediately recognisable.
The Colonel William Light was an exact replica of the one overlooking the city at North Adelaide. The cocked hat, tight trousers and outstretched arm and finger pointing to the back door were similarly splashed with lime droppings; pigeons were attracted to Light. Nearby the coiffured head and the horizon-stare of Captain James Cook, preferred by the seagulls, transmitted the essence of his famous reliability, long before his ghost appeared on the pound note. Surveyors and navigators: Vern Hartnett looked up to them. Other figures had been specially commissioned and required explanation. The foxy features of Daguerre were sensitively caught: back bent, glancing up, pleased with himself. Nicholas Jensen with a type of Roman nose stood alongside the angular Aldus Manutius. According to Hartnett, John Loudon McAdam, as the inventor of the modern street and road, was one of the most influential men of all time. ‘His achievement is easily measured, it's there in black-and-white.’ Even his surname and life (1756–1836) possessed an inevitable symmetry.
‘I look up to these men,’ he ran his hands over some other obscure autocrat. ‘They're always there. It doesn't hurt to be reminded. I take my hat off. I shouldn't say that, I don't wear a hat. Clarity and accuracy—master them, like these blokes there, and goodness, you can name your own price. Never exceed the facts. You get what I'm driving at? If you become one half as strict…’
Standing out against the turbulent growth of the Hills, the stony clarity of their vision seemed beyond dispute. These were men with their feet well and truly on the ground. No room for Leichhardt, the Burke and Wills of this world, nor Rasputin nor Isaac Newton. No dreamers. Look at McAdam! No politicians and no women.
And Hartnett shepherded and protected them. After careful deliberation he occasionally added another; it took years to select a candidate. There was only so much space. Economic factors also kept the numbers down.
‘Just by looking you can imagine…’ Holden squinted.
‘There's no imagining.’
But seeing the boy's confusion he smiled, treating him as an equal, ‘Who would you erect a statue to, if you had a backyard? Perhaps I know the man?’
Holden, who never tired of moving among the outstanding figures, now found his mind completely blank.
‘I don't think I'd be allowed…’
Blinking he pictured Corporal McBee in uniform.
‘What about a soldier?’ Holden suggested.
The one he had in mind stood before him as a solid force, someone different, even when horizontal on a bed, releasing cigarette smoke to the ceiling where it flattened into architectures, minarets spreading into dream-cities of cupolas. The corporal was a man who seemed to be making up his mind; biding his time.
Confusion crossed Hartnett's face. ‘A soldier did you say?’
Holden had told him about the boarder. Surely the boy didn't mean—?
‘Don't be deceived by the uniform! Take it away from a soldier and what have you got?’
But that was the point. Holden could never entirely agree with his uncle. More active than the larrikin soldier, always on the move, always after something, his uncle seemed unhappier. This fully grown man could be found in the kitchen pressing his thumbs to his temples, and staring at the floor, waving his hand blindly for silence. At first Holden thought he might be straining to recall some fresh fact or other, such as the inventor of linoleum or the History of Floorboards, and he obediently looked down at his feet too. But a migraine was no joke if the proofreader was about to set off to work, checking the spelling and veracity in general of the entire edition of next morning's Advertiser.
Although always attentive Vern Hartnett avoided the boy's face. The
ir eyes hardly ever met. Whenever he explained or posed a question it was as if he was addressing the city laid out below, barely moving there in the heat haze, the city in abstract.
He was the most short-sighted man Holden was ever to meet.
There was something else about Adelaide, or rather the environs, which entered the mind; and it entered in the same manner it trespassed on the geometry of the city itself.
Beginning with the Hills in summer which rose up behind like a pair of agricultural trousers bent slightly at the knee, the country penetrated the city like no other city. A natural creepage of colourlessness breached the town plan, indenting and serrating the perimeter, at the same time vaulting deep into the most established suburbs of immaculate box-hedges, green lawns and culverts, and deposited vacant blocks of swaying chaff-coloured grass, one in every other street. The Dutch had better luck keeping out the sea. Whole tracts of land here had the country look. Colonel Light had surrounded the city centre with a band of open space mysteriously called ‘parklands’, and not even concrete benches and drinking fountains could soften it. Dust storms blew up there in the height of summer and small grass-fires started. Elsewhere, it appeared in its most contained form as a parched oval. Badly tended footpaths and lawn tennis courts reverted to ‘the country’ in a matter of weeks.
Everywhere a person looked the ragged edge of naturalness trespassed.
In the battle for people's minds it at first seemed to be an antidote to the streets…that habit-inducing pattern constantly underlined and repeated by the trams. But the stain of non-colouring spoke of the interior which, in southern Australia and the Northern Territory, was desolation. It was the struggle—and for what?—of the dry tangled bush and desiccated trees and the brave facade of the boulders that gave the country, unlike the deserts of dreams, its persistent melancholia. Within cooee of the town hall, blasted crows made their parched calls. What other city…? And the faces of the most optimistic smiling women in Adelaide eventually resembled the country itself: ravined, curiously wheat-coloured.
