Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  It goes to show how names can slip out of sync: with their respective occupations and preoccupations Plies and Wheelright should have swapped surnames. (Then what? Would anything have changed? Wearing a tag like Flies or Wheelright it is possible.) Wheelright was an Adelaide nose specialist. His spare-time preoccupation, he was well-known for it. His listed occupation though was Weather Forecaster. A man cultivates a hobby, especially when the value of his profession is open to doubt, and, in the case of weather forecasting in those days, ridicule. Wheelright had a litmus nose for rubbish, for flotsam. A student of the streets—his term—he could ‘read’—his term again—the tempo and condition of a given city by its gutters, and a secondary, more surreptitious source, the contents of its municipal rubbish bins. A city's central nervous condition was revealed by the quantity and degree of angle in stubbed cigarette butts; all right, an obvious example.

  The centre of gravity had a way of shifting from one sector of the city to the next. To everyone's amazement it had happened almost overnight during the war when those hordes of rest-and-recreation Americans rejuvenated certain alleyways, cafes and street comers of a dying quarter of Adelaide. Wheelright had read the shift long before the Tramways Department decided to put in extra stops. Now the post-war reconstruction suggested a glacial shift, possibly towards the south. Whenever it rained, information accumulated on one side of town half a mile away was deposited at Wheelright's feet by the perfectly straight gutters. By standing at the right intersection with notebook, pencil and stopwatch he could ‘read’ the points of localised activity occurring at various parts of the city. The length of mother-of-pearl oil slicks testified to reduced numbers of parked motorcycles to the west. There were virtually no dogs in the south and inner city. He picked up his first ballpoint pen in Hindley Street in 1954, and the declining worth of the halfpenny began to show in its increasing deposits on the footpaths. Toadfish-looking contraceptives washed up along the western perimeter were duly noted. A glance on the ground outside the Odeons told Wheelright of the decline in Ealing comedies, just as his gutter-count of the patronage of trams tallied with Flies'. His absorption in the signs on the ground was Aboriginal, although the ground here was dead flat and well and truly asphalted, an absorption which left him with perpetually barked shins. It was Wheelright who taught Holden to use his eyes. Actually confessed to the dumbfounded boy that he, Gordon Wheelright, could live very happily and know what was going on in the world if he had a device which prevented him from lifting his eyes more than a foot off the ground. Certainly his gutter, footpath and rubbish-bin findings were more accurate than his official weather forecasting.

  Wheelright was said to be married, but no one ever remembered seeing a wife.

  His best-friend Flies exchanged information with him, for he saw the world framed daily by the window of the tram. Like Wheelright he was intensely local. But he understood that any patterns revealed within the perimeters of Adelaide stood as examples of all human life. All the movements between the cradle and the grave, and even before the cradle, passed before him; only a matter of keeping the eyes open.

  Pale from his years of being carried all day across the rigid lines of the city, the most conspicuous feature of Flies was his low forehead. Sometimes it seemed Les had no forehead at all.

  Unlike Wheelright, and their best-friend Vern Hartnett, he was not obsessive; was not tormented; held no theories; was not driven. His view of the world allowed everything. And his best-friend Wheelright was constantly picking up his unfinished sentences.

  From late 1948, or to be mechanically precise, 29 November 1948, through all of 1949, young Holden suffered from carbuncles. The painful eruptions placed strain on his already famous expressionlessness.

  ‘Your body is trying to tell you something,’ Wheelright pointed out, downcast. Les Flies agreed.

  The new cars produced excitement-fevers in the boy. Every other day another longer, lower, more glittering model made its appearance and instantly overheated his adolescent nervous system, sweating palms gripping the handlebars being a symptom.

  This could have produced the carbuncles.

  But what of other factors? The first volcanic eruption coincided with his traumatic flight from home when he pedalled distractedly up Magill Road with a lump in his throat. As he dismounted in the cul-de-sac the lump transferred to a throbbing pain in his neck which almost made him cry out. It felt like a spreading, disconcerted blush. In the first few weeks at his uncle's place he noticed other outbursts, and for a long time there would always be a carbuncle glowing somewhere under his clothing, like a small tail light. Only his pale face escaped, remaining as smooth as soap.

  Concerned for the boy, Vern and his best-friends Wheelright and Flies ransacked the medical dictionaries, encyclopaedias and handbooks before calling in the finest in local medical opinion—a carbuncle specialist in North Terrace who drove an Armstrong Siddeley—although no one said what they knew, or half suspected, which was that the body's normal defence mechanisms were reacting against Vern's special diet.

  What did Holden's early growth consist of? Words, words: a flawed, grey-and-white view of the world.

  It was more than a match for his mother's tasteless technicolour sandwiches.

  His uncle had picked up the idea proofreading. It had to come from words. It was pure and simple theory. And its origins were not American, like most theories after the war, but British from their long experience in the down-trodden maize economies of the tropics. That's right. Vern became one of the first white men in the Southern Hemisphere to believe sincerely that a daily intake of roughage aided digestion, facilitated bowel movements, cleared the brain, abolished night starvation, cut down the chances of cancer of the lower intestine and bowel, eased the splitting head- and ear-aches; in other words, it surpassed the fine-print claims on more than a dozen patent medicine bottles. And like all late-in-life converts (Adelaide had plenty of them in other fields), Vern Hartnett swallowed the medicine with all the rigour of a zealot; he even contemplated casting a statue to the unknown discoverer of the fibrous diet.

  If his uncle had a weakness, Shadbolt reflected many years later, it had been this.

  With a daily supply of galley proofs from the Advertiser, Vern had plenty of roughage at hand. Whistling or breathing through his teeth he pulverised the fibrous newsprint until his veins stood out. He then mixed it with their breakfast cereals: the words, half-tone photographs and post-war growth advertisements all went in. To be on the safe side he included it wherever possible in their evening meal too. It blended well with mashed potatoes; you could hardly taste it with icecream. Newsprint consisted of 90 per cent water anyway, Vern informed the starving boy. Once the habit had formed Holden spread it on bread with dripping when he came home from school.

  With such a regular fibrous language-fertilizer the growing boy would be expected never to suffer a single minute of constipation; but beginning from that very first day at Vern's he suffered blockages, often for weeks at a time. This may have contributed to the carbuncles.

  Aside from the carbuncles—and they were painful enough—the diet had other, longer-lasting effects.

  When young Shadbolt landed on his uncle's cement doorstep he was fourteen. In that vital growth period for testicles and intellect he began twice daily swallowing and digesting the contents of the morning newspaper, down to the last full stop. Without so much as a hiccup he took in faulty headlines, misplaced paragraphs and punctuations, the wrong choice in serifs, photographs with incorrect captions. There was always something not quite right in what he took in. For even when given corrected ‘final’ proofs for the evening meal or dessert he swallowed the so-called eye-witness accounts, along with the various so-called official statements and statistics, hearsay From Our Special Correspondent, earnest conclusions and prophecies which rarely came to pass, the exaggerated dire warnings and so-called weather forecasts. Political scandals, their ‘ramifications’, the editorials helplessly laying down the law, s
porting and financial predictions just wide of the mark, half-tone assassins, saints and beauty queens, the unconfirmed report, hopeful signs of the wheat and wool crop, so-called reviews of novels by the local dilettanti, halftone royalty. So of course the boy developed a taste for crowds, reported births and deaths, not to mention the extravagant adverts and adverbs for everything under the sun from trusses and stockings to lonely hearts, knackered horses, fridges and ‘Australia's Own Car’. In one sitting he'd consumed the daily history and shifting minutiae of Adelaide, and the rest of Australia, and the world beyond. All was swallowed. Very little rejected. It went on for six years.

  True, he acquired a large body of opinion. At school he gained top marks in geography. Shadbolt could reel off place-names and world leaders with his eyes shut, and he became the poker-faced arbiter of Bradman's statistics and the outright winners at Le Mans and their average speeds. The consumption of half-tones also sharpened his photographic memory, and naturally he absorbed the internal laws of coincidence and charisma.

  But such a staple diet gave him a fragmented view of the world. Nearby or faraway happenings were summarised in brief impressions which only approximately matched the actual people or events. He developed a distant, incomplete view of women. And because each day demanded approximately the same number of words to be printed on pages the size of tea-towels it became difficult for young Shadbolt to distinguish truth from half- or quarter-truth, importance from no importance, while at the same time his attraction to men in power was reinforced by their repetitions in screened images.

  He'd always ‘kept his thoughts to himself’ (mother's term). Now with his twice-daily intake of short sentences and the short plain paragraphs, at intervals broken by an exclamatory subhead, he too began to speak in short clipped sentences, and often threw in a laconic word or two in summary.

  A third and final influence was harder to assess.

  Fact is, from an impressionable age Shadbolt began digesting local and world news before the rest of the population. In a sense he was several hours older than everybody else. Nothing therefore surprised him; he accepted everything; and beginning from those formative years a shoelace or a shirt button was left undone the way a mechanic is casual with the grease on his hands.

  The supply of wounded aeroplanes dried up. Displaying the agility which would always demoralise his opposition McBee branched out into jeeps, paddocks full of surplus jeeps the colour of fibrous cow dung; and when they too dried up he moved into non-ferrous metals. He melted down truckloads of bravery and service medals. At any one of McBee's barbed-wire depots you could get ten shillings for a dead car battery.

  With every Tom, Dick and Harry wanting to steer his own car and the British and American manufacturers unable to keep up with demand, let alone supply enough spare parts, McBee opened garishly painted car wrecking yards at intersections north, east, west and south of the city centre: great news for the struggling motorist. In those days an anxious beggar for a Jowett Javelin head gasket, or the seller of a badly pranged Packard, often found himself dealing with Frank McBee in person.

  Negotiations took place ankle-deep in mud embedded with bolts, gaskets, cotter pins. Surrounded by rearing chassis frames and the doorless shells of smashed and dismantled saloons and cabriolets it looked like the desolate aftermath of a battle in World War Two. Leaning on his walking stick, as if wounded, McBee conducted transactions in an exceptionally loud voice. This alone intimidated anxious sellers of damaged cars, and enfeebled attempts of buyers to bargain for a crucial part; and in the same loud voice McBee cracked jokes, mocked and poked muck, switching in mid-sentence to backslapping and mateship, even resorted to rhetorical self-analysis—‘What am I doing in this rotten business? Do I have garbage for brains? The short answer is—’, and so gathered around him an audience of transfixed sympathisers.

  It became well known that he'd give away a valuable spare part if a buyer came up with a good sob-story, and if he became carried away with his own rhetoric and humiliated a customer, he quickly settled quietly and over generously. A known soft-touch for charities he even gave, after first loudly blaspheming, to the Church. The men he employed were all returned soldiers who'd lost a limb or one or two internal organs, and so resembled the cars they dismantled. The shell-shocked digger with a steel hook for an arm who for years sunned himself on the footpath outside the Magill Road yard, who'd taken it upon himself to nod, ‘You'll find Mr McBee in his office’, was supplied with the floral armchair and regular pocket money for tobacco. By then McBee had freehold title to all his paddocks at Parafield and blocks in the city. He was making a name for himself.

  In his search for meltable metals he bought into an old established linotype printer. It did a nice line in calling cards. It had the long-term contract for the printing of timetables and the pastel-tinted tickets for the trams. A real goldmine. It was McBee in Adelaide, back in 1949, who first coined the much-abused phrase ‘It's a licence to print pound notes’. (How did he muscle in on that one? The peroxide blonde on the AJS hanging onto McBee's waist, her breasts squashed against his back, happened to be the war-widow of the printer who'd tried paratrooping. McBee easily made her laugh and cry out; otherwise she was the silent partner.)

  With one eye on the statistics of post-war reconstruction McBee pitched for the printing of the Adelaide telephone directory, and from now on (he announced in his loud voice) trimmings guillotined from all jobs were to be perforated and smartly packaged as confetti. A deluxe range of wedding invitations were designed, featuring serrated edges dusted with gold. All very successful, thankyou. And he began printing how-to-vote cards for both political parties.

  From wrecked cars it was a short step to quality used cars. McBee set up his first yard on Anzac Highway; had to knock down a house to do it. Motorists driving home at night were blinded by the sudden artificial daylight of ‘MCBEE'S’ in eight-foot-high letters set by more than three hundred locally produced light bulbs which also illuminated the teeth of the Buicks, de Sotos and one-lady-owner Hudsons and Vanguards.

  By then McBee began placing regular ads in the Advertiser, and young Shadbolt digested his achievements and spreading influence without being quite aware of it. Sometimes a mouthful of food stuck in his throat. ‘Some bad news?’ his uncle inquired. ‘Masticate more, keep it going.’ It could have been the story with half-tone photographs of McBee and mulga walking stick opening his fourth car emporium.

  For all his worldly success McBee still went around on the old AJS. It now dropped almost as much Castrol on the road as it took in petrol; the entire machine had become encrusted with rust and muck as though it had just been dredged from the sea. Yet it started first kick, had never let him down. Criss-crossing the town plan to the various outposts of his empire took no time at all, even in the rush hours among the increasing number of cars and trucks.

  Besides, it had become something of a trademark. ‘There goes Frank McBee,’ people would smile from the trams. At least he wasn't getting too big for his boots.

  On nights he took Mrs Shadbolt and Karen out for a meal at one of the hotels he'd just get on the phone and bellow hoarsely for a taxi. Mrs Shadbolt's concession to affluence was a kangaroo-skin coat, and decked out in this, even in the height of summer, she and Karen tripped after their provider.

  Several times Holden had turned by mistake into his old street. The first time his legs had pedalled almost into the drive before he realised.

  No one was there. No one had seen him. The brown house had the latest in electricals and upholstered furnishings poking out of the windows and from under the front door: walls, fly-screens and tin roof bulged under the pressure. It was smaller and browner than he remembered. This was not merely the usual trick of spaciousness played by memory. Parked on the front lawn were two ex-army amphibious vehicles, known as ‘ducks’, as well as a pyramid of Amal carburettors, propellers off DC3s, and serpents of exhaust systems writhing among beam axles off Ford V/8s. These greasy masses foreshortene
d the foreground. Otherwise the house was the same as any other in the street.

  Several months later it had shrunk even smaller in his estimation. The front screendoor had exploded off its hinges.

  Stacked on the verandah were large plywood letters from the alphabet; parts of McBee's name.

  In identifying them Holden may have stared for too long.

  Almost back to the corner he heard his name and an onrush of athletic breathing. A hand touched his shoulder like a policewoman.

  His sister Karen was astride a grasshopper-green bike. It had a wire basket hooked over the handlebars. The rushed ride and the close up of him, and now the pleasure at his surprise, widened her eyes and lengthened her jaw; and space of a more fixed nature had been introduced to the rest of her body. Through the arm of her sleeveless blouse he noticed the tidal swell of her body, and he measured the twin disconcerting outlines by the damp folds of the blouse. That and the way she kept switching from laughter to earnestness gave the illusion she was older than him.

  Karen kept telling him news, and asking questions; she couldn't for a second stop smiling.

  Nothing had changed with their mother, except she had her hair permanently curled (‘she's still the same underneath, though’).

  At the mention of Frank McBee, Holden stared down at his spokes and then actually smiled as he listened. Seems that McBee wanted their mother to read tea leaves every afternoon at his car yards, a shameless gimmick for lucky customers to see if they'd crash or suffer mechanical breakdowns as they drove away—and we all know the answer to that.

  ‘You don't have to worry about him,’ Karen whispered. ‘Honestly, he wouldn't hurt a flea. He doesn't talk about you now. Besides, he doesn't come home till late. He's a very busy man.’