Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  Holden thought about that. ‘I'd better get going anyway.’

  Slowly they pedalled up Magill Road. She could visit him, if she liked. They agreed. She wanted to see exactly where he lived. Very much the lady she'd write or telephone first. Her new bike had gears.

  He was fascinated by her fluency: signs of her recent growth. As her legs formed an A astride the bar he couldn't help dunking that the slit girls were supposed to have would have widened into a hole, just as in a machine there were ‘male’ and ‘female’ parts.

  Until then he had managed to steer clear of McBee. But Adelaide being small and rectilinear there were only so many combinations in lines of force intersecting, or angles of vision briefly coinciding. The odds were further shortened by McBee's constant motion backwards and forwards; while young Shad-bolt's slow-moving mass kept more to a routine, mostly up and down, to and from school—a sitting duck. Bumping into Karen had opened his eyes. He began seeing the motorcyclist coming towards him in his entrepreneurial crouch, or his ears would pick up the AJS rattle in the most unexpected side streets, almost as if McBee was tailing him. On these occasions he'd dive into boxhedges or duck down the nearest gravel drive. He learnt to make himself scarce. He mastered the art of grabbing the rail of an accelerating tram. Anything to avoid Frank McBee. It was out of embarrassment rather than fear or guilt; throughout his life Shadbolt never suffered from guilt.

  ‘Your uncle's bending over backwards.’

  ‘Vern thinks the world of you,’ Wheelright went on.

  The boy blinked: because he agreed. They knew him well enough to accept the signal, but he scraped his feet like a draught horse, a social-something he had learnt, because he didn't know what to say next.

  They were standing among the statues in the backyard. The boy had been weeding and trimming edges. Gratitude had made him obedient. Heavy birds were landing in the hill trees. The shadows of the outstretched arms also pointed to the hour: Vern had left for the late afternoon shift.

  ‘In fact, if you don't watch out…’ Flies gave a wink.

  ‘Before you know it,’ Wheelright picked up, ‘Vern'll do a bronze of you one day.’

  ‘How would you like that?’ nodded Les.

  Young Shadbolt could only rub an eye, ‘That'd be a laugh.’

  One of the first things his uncle had done was outfit him with rubber-soled shoes in case he was struck by lightning.

  At his feet now earthworms suddenly exposed to the universe wriggled in panic: oily fingers, just amputated. Holden squashed them with his heel.

  ‘What'd you do that for?’ Flies stared down at the ground.

  ‘It's about time,’ Wheelright was looking around, ‘he did one to Churchill. He's what I call a great man. I know all about Gallipoli, but if it wasn't for him none of us'd be standing here right now. I've told Vern this a hundred times. I've said I'd even chip in for part of the casting cost. Churchill would make an impressive statue. But he's not even on the short list. Vern says he's only a mug politician. I point out the man's charisma. Those eyebrows, that cigar—my God! At least he had a clear view of the world. And what does Vern say? It's all window-dressing. What did Churchill know about truth? All Churchill used were fancy adjectives. You've heard him. I think he's got a real blind spot there with Churchill.’

  For all his enjoyment of the special vantage point of the Hills, Shadbolt never felt quite at ease. In the company of Vern and his two best-friends he felt distinctly outside their line of thinking. More often than not he became awkward. Whenever they tried to include him he felt like scratching his neck and nodding; his mind a blank.

  Inside the house his body felt out of place, not belonging, even when he caught sight of his mirror image calmly gazing back in the midst of it. Furniture and other objects stubbornly remained in unfamiliar or wrong positions. He kept bumping into them.

  Using his uncle's Zeiss lenses Shadbolt liked to lean over the front wall and look down on the city. As he focused on faraway fences and poles, the sounds all around him diminished, as if they were funnelled into the concentrated image, and he felt suffused with his private powers of observation. Early on he'd pinpointed the tram depot and the Advertiser building. The walled-in lawns spotted with magnified deckchairs and figures in slow-motion must have been the Parkside asylum. Methodically he covered every inch of the city. Here and there faces and small movements. The School of Arts and Crafts. Silent cars. Plenty of corrugated iron tanks. Sudden geraniums. Flapping from lines, brassieres and handkerchiefs. Postman on his red bike. Flags and capital letters. A horse pulled a green bread-cart. Trams, always a brown tram.

  And being so horizontally mobile Frank McBee slid across his vision. It happened more than once. McBee was on the curiously silent motorbike, and as Holden quickly followed he recognised the blonde toothpaste smile hanging on.

  Taking a fix on the palm-tree and moving a fraction right he located amongst a mist of jacaranda the unmistakeable tin roof of his old house.

  Or so he thought: the barnacled date-palm would be Mr Merino's who lived opposite. As he nodded it released a confetti of pigeons he'd never seen before. And yet the tall mast collaged there to the left belonged to what's-his-name, the radio ham, who also happened to be their talkative butcher. A process of calculation, of elimination, crafted to local knowledge, was not without its satisfactions.

  But his uncle straightened his back and simply shook his head.

  ‘You can't be sure. It's not one hundred per cent. You could never swear by it.’

  A lesson in local empiricism, and doggedly put: Vern suffered no illusions. As he detailed a few facts on the ancient history of optics and, as a matter of fact, how the short extension-ladders of the Adelaide Fire Brigade determined the stunted growth of the skyline, Shadbolt stared at the windswept forehead and the oblivious teeth and felt a flush of irritation. He even disliked the way his uncle's gaze travelled past the city itself to the distant sea, as though he took in all knowledge of the world.

  Vern broke off. ‘What's the matter? Is something wrong? What are you looking at?’

  He had seen—a small illumination—that his uncle couldn't help himself. Some things evidently go beyond your control. A person can begin to trip over themselves. Staring again at the face which had in all innocence reverted to rapid talking, he experienced a rush of simple affection, and smiled even more to himself at what he felt was contentment, or at least, gratitude.

  Their sense of isolation in the Hills was modified by the house next door. Those seemingly random lengths of four-b-two which had turned grey like everything else in the war years were suddenly morticed to verticals and horizontals of Oregon, the colour of Frank McBee's hair. Shadbolt arrived home one afternoon to find the finished walls almost touching their side fence; and when he looked out from his bedroom he faced another sash window, at barely arm's length.

  Nouns such as casements, jarrah and theodolites now issued from the intricate store behind Vern's mouth. It was Les Flies who interrupted with the softer-shaped information that their new neighbour was a war widow who had red hair and worked as an usherette at a picture theatre in Rundle Street. ‘The Regent,’ Wheelright added. Usherette, a strange profession: it caused the briefest of imaginings and swallowing among them. Not long afterwards they saw her.

  Shadbolt's diet developed his photographic memory further. Naturally many of the people and events screened into the news stayed in his mind. The Korean war had just started and the spectre of fanatical communists ‘teeming’—with ‘hordes’ it became the vogue word—teeming across the 38th parallel, which meant they were teeming on a wide front towards South Austrylia, had put the wind up Shadbolt. Victims of famines and volcanoes, captured spies and Italian racing drivers also left their mark. Winston Churchill's sagging face appeared in Adelaide more often than Clem Attlee's, even though the old Hon was no longer in power. Ernest Hemingway looked unhappy after the publication of Across the River and into the Trees. After Noel Coward he was the author whos
e face appeared most frequently in the Adelaide Advertiser. Who was the President of the United States with the silver hair and glasses? The sheer untruthfulness of his name made Shadbolt choke on his food, without knowing why.

  An exaggerated mood of instability was maintained by photographs of sky and loose projectiles. Every few months in those early years of the fifties the billowing face of destruction reared up on a terrible elongated neck, indelible image, and the subsequent turbulence in the circular sky brought down an inordinate number of Tiger Moths and prototype jet airliners. In the desert to the north of Adelaide the successful flight of a pilotless jet aircraft showed as a grainy sunspot. It looked surprisingly similar to John Cobb's body and speedboat both disintegrating above Loch Ness while setting a new water speed record. Otherwise the British sense of superiority was signified by the Landrover tilting as it negotiated mud or foreign sands.

  In Australia, Bradman had bowed out, and the army was sent in for a couple of weeks, to run the coal mines. There were the seasonal bird's-eye views of floods: impressing the country's emptiness and harshness, in case the boy had forgotten. These were always powerful images in grey-and-white.

  The new Prime Minister, R. G. Amen (all things to all men), chose for his official car an American make, a 1949 Cadillac Fleetwood seized in a customs raid, and for the first few months his florid features were superimposed on the car's elaborate fenders and nascent fins, so the various ceremonies of officialdom entered Shadbolt's subconscious via American metal and chrome. The PM had such stature across the land that when people tried to express their admiration all they would do was shake their heads and repeat his initials. ‘Ar, gee,’ they'd say. This was around the time he decided to ban the Communist Party in Australia. Shadbolt had accepted his arguments without blinking. At school he and his friends were more concerned about the Cadillac, a barge or a tank, not a car, how it didn't suit the PM with his pinstriped trousers and the plum in his mouth. Everything about him pointed to Daimler or Rolls Royce.

  Local scenes in the Advertiser instilled in Shadbolt a certain innocence. Reports of the most alarming reverses in Korea on the front page were rendered inconsequential by the adjoining photograph of a glorious spray of the first almond blossom taken in the Hills, and instead of a chubby mug-shot of Ike after his ‘landslide’ election, in 1952, the Advertiser featured the entirely different, squinting face of the city's longest-serving tram-driver on his last run, a face criss-crossed with lines, unsmiling. Unconsciously too Shadbolt swallowed the languid poses developed by the local gentry—legs dangling over armchairs, proprietary hand on the silk shoulder of hyphened grazier's daughter—for one appeared on the social pages just about every day. And there were the usual local mayors, Chamber of Commerce spokesmen and Irish-headed footballers.

  Among the quantities of faces the most frequent was the state's Premier, Thomas Playford. There he was handing out trophies to school-boy hurdlers or announcing the state's wheat harvest; always announcing something or other or shaking somebody's perspiring hand; so that Shadbolt on Magill Road instantly recognised the straight face with its sober red nose which closely resembled, and so gave added kudos to, the famous tail light of General Motors' first locally built car. (GM were later to name their poshest model the Premier. It goes to show…) Originally a cherry orchardist, though not at all cheery, Mr Playford lived in a valley at Norton's Summit, and drove himself to and from work. No motorcycle escorts. He stopped at traffic lights like anybody else, and put his hand out to turn right. After recognising the face Shadbolt always knew his unmarked car, a Ford Pilot, and when it lumbered past he watched the gradually diminishing boot, tail light and V-shaped bumper in case something happened; for example, if the Premier ran out of petrol or broke an axle Shadbolt would have rushed up, the first to offer help.

  Aware of his photographic powers Shadbolt sometimes skidded to a halt when he recognised a face in the crowd. With one foot planted in the gutter he'd stare, ransacking his brains until he'd properly ‘located’ it, showing no embarrassment at the figure he cut, although the diet had inflated his body to dugong size, so that he appeared to be astride a ludicrous dwarf's machine pedalled in circuses.

  He had to watch it. After appearing on the newspaper page a face reassembled to normal colour and fleshiness, almost like any other face. Only by looking behind the rounded surfaces could he find vestiges of the screened image. With casually powerful figures such as the Premier or Frank McBee it was reversed: their printed images had become their real appearances.

  At the crack of dawn, on 14 October, they elbowed themselves into Flies' newly acquired Wolseley, the boy in front because of his size, and left the city, for their best-friend Gordon Wheelright had suddenly expanded his horizons in flotsam research. Instead of street directories and demographic tables, Wheelright had turned to shipping routes, weather statistics from top and bottom hemispheres, local coastal charts, tidal patterns. Using Vern's em ruler, a piece of string and brass dividers, he made a faint wheezing whistle through his pursed lips.

  As for Les Flies, he could have been driving one of his rocking trams. Sitting bolt upright he took the corners wide, and at every opportunity fitted the tyres in the polished grooves of his city. With his skull touching the roof Holden felt the driver's ingrained habits entering his own system, as he nodded in motion, and vaguely smiled.

  Strata of rust-coloured rock withheld their forces as the car passed through. Rearing claws appeared to be poised above the hollow roof: many boulders had already been flung into the shattered creek beds below. And as the angle back to fixed positions along the gorge constantly widened, the occasional rocky outcrop and tessellations of red ochre stretched into faces of aboriginal forefathers, shrubbery for eyebrows, and the slash-strokes of ghost gums in shadow-drenched gullies appeared as momentary fissures, letting in light.

  They left the Hills. Out there a warm wind stroked the earth. It ruffled paddocks of wheat and allowed dark birds to float. Now with Adelaide behind them the apparent endlessness of the rest of the world was drummed into them by the longer intervals between known objects, such as distant tractor sheds, and the frantic efforts of the four-cylinder engine, which seemed to be getting nowhere: flylike saloon making little progress from the edge of continent. On either side of the road eroded channels radiated as ancient vertebrae. Abandoned walls of mud-brick and lime similarly spoke of futile effort and time.

  ‘Write down everything you see,’ Vern shouted above the striving engine, ‘so you can look back on it. There's a sparrow-hawk. That there's a stump-jump plough.’

  Crossed one of the longest rivers on earth.

  Barely two hours into the interior then, and young Shadbolt detected in the sudden loquaciousness of the others a reluctance to leave the sight of water. It was the colour of weak tea, wider than a dozen Adelaide streets, and flanked by groves of peeling river gum, a dead-loss area stuffed with the tangle of colourless sticks, bleached rubbish and leaves from the last big flood, refracting light and perspective like shattered crystal.

  The river entered the sea eighty miles south from Adelaide as the crow flies, a hundred and forty odd in the wandering Wolseley.

  Now Wheelright directed Flies rapidly left, right—no, straight ahead. ‘Isthmus,’ Vern pointed for Holden's benefit, and stubbed his finger on the window. Twice Holden had to leap out and push. On the left a flock of fidgeting water fowl quilted a lake.

  ‘The realisation came to me in the bath,’ Wheelright was telling them. ‘I was looking closely at the fingerprints of my thumb. “The future lies at our fingerprints.” I considered this. Yes, for one tiling they reveal the kind of work a man does. You can pick a bankteller or a tram conductor by his thumb. Right, Les? Looking closely at mine, I said: “Hello, dus thumb is imprinted with the same swirling lines employed in my profession of meteorology”’ (‘Isobars,’ Vern nodded vigorously) ‘and I thought that was interesting, very interesting. I saw in my thumbprint the patterns of tides and sea currents. I
n microcosm, of course. And I realised the wandering streets of the ocean must carry all kinds of information, not simply information of one city, but the entire world and its contents, the contemporary history of man. All this I saw in my thumb.’

  Upholstered in the warm car Holden blurted out, ‘That's terrific. Who else would have thought of that?’

  ‘The truth is always close at hand,’ Flies opined.

  ‘From there it was simple,’ Wheelright went on. ‘A study of charts, and taking the spin of the earth into account, suggested that many of these currents would deposit their messages in the Southern Hemisphere. In fact, along our coast.’

  Vern leaned forward from the back. ‘Where's your proof?’

  ‘According to my calculations…’

  After a few more false leads they came smack up against a sandhill—a hundred-footer, or more. They could hear the sea. Abandoned with its doors spread open, the car grew smaller, an exhausted gull from the north.

  Shading his eyes as he climbed Holden wondered if any other man had ever trudged here before.

  The bay below sparkled like an overturned wine glass. At its sunlit entrance it foamed effervescence. A parachute drifting towards the middle could have been a saturated napkin, though gently pulsating it looked more like a vast jellyfish.

  He was joined by Vern, on all fours.

  Pausing only briefly alongside them, Wheelright began sliding and half-rolling towards the water.

  Holden followed.

  Around the circumference so many layers of flotsam had been deposited by recent world history that Holden, as he watched Wheelright zigzagging with his eyes and head angled down, immediately thought of Frank McBee. If he'd discovered the secret whereabouts of all this… Gas masks lay tangled among tins of regulation jam and bully. Empty life rafts sloshed with puke and inflated toadfish. There were bales of rubbers, shattered deckchairs. Names of ships stencilled on logs and cork. Musical boxes contained angled levels of sand imprinted with anemones. In the shallows the goggles of bomb-aimers transformed into masks of channel swimmers. Wheelright picked up buckles and belts, and bits of the Bismarck, he kept counting and scribbled notes. Turbans unfurled and floated and strangled perforated helmets. The remains of river towns, wreckage from mountain-tops had found their way here: Dresden soup plates, Tudor gables embedded with sewing machines, carcases of glockenspiels. There'd be gold fillings on the bottom. Friends were mixed up with enemies. Between naming names—chopsticks, Mae West, anemometers—Vern asked unanswered questions. ‘How far is it to Japan? How long can a submarine stay under? Eight bells is four o'clock. What's a nautical knot? I'll tell you.’