Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  She had a way of examining his face, and then abruptly turning away. Shadbolt put this down to her job, where an usherette, after checking someone into their seat, automatically looks back up the aisle for other waiting patrons. She had freckled skin, and slightly soiled piping on her uniform. Close up, parts of her face demanded his attention. But he kept seeing her naked. Every Friday night he made sure he was home and seated in his darkened room, waiting for her.

  He was in his…twentieth year.

  It was the age of mobility, and that was all right by him.

  Over and above the trundle of trams and the swish of locally assembled cars, and the first experimental 2-stroke lawnmower starting up, even he with his jug-ears had trouble distinguishing between the irregular explosions from the Hills, quarrymen loosening ‘metal’ for the expansion of roads, and the sound-barrier being invisibly broken by the Sabre jets of the Australian Air Force.

  It was a day of deceptive clarity, a Saturday. The sky he noted as Molsheim Blue, perfect for sky-writing. Walking towards the Hills he was mulling over Vern's short-sightedness. Only the night before he'd pointed to the usherette's breast as she painted her nails, and named it navel, until Wheelright corrected by repeatedly clearing his throat.

  He reached the Maid’n’ Magpie where the streets formed a star. Later, attempting a reconstruction of the accident, he found it difficult, as with any hiccup of history, to establish the exact sequence.

  Crossing into Magill Road he'd waved at flies near his nose. At that moment Flies happened to be passing and mistakenly slowed the tram. Frank McBee was converging then on the AJS. He too mistakenly acknowledged Shadbolt's wave. And whether it was taking his eyes off the road or surprise at his own response, McBee suddenly lost all control. The front tyre became channelled by the irrefutable tramline and before Shadbolt on the footpath could open his mouth he read his mother's initials written across the sky in a violent gold flourish. In nothing but cotton shirt and war-disposal shorts—only pansies wore helmets and leathers in the fifties—McBee landed underneath the machine and slid across the intersection of misunderstandings without letting go of the handlebars, a sign of avarice, and in that brief journey over asphalt, iron and oil exchanged one personality for another, the way a snake sheds its skin in summer.

  As his handlebar moustache was torn off the chewing gum fell permanently out of his mouth. People wondered if he'd suffered any brain damage. He lost several inches in the crash. The hair never grew again on his head, and his jaw was wired into a permanent jutting position. From that day he spoke in measured sentences, and lost all interest in strangers.

  Frank McBee switched from his daily draughts of Cooper's to stiff brandy-sodas. Overnight he became stout and round. He appeared in sober suits cut by the city's finest tailor, and in a reincarnation of his indelible one-upmanship leaned heavily on his mulga walking stick, and was never seen or photographed without the bow tie and the Havana double corona, which he now employed to torpedo the doubts and innuendos of rivals, bankers and investigative journalists, Shadbolt's mother, and anybody else approaching within arm's length. He became pink, sometimes florid. His formidable energies were now channelled towards greener pastures, not a patch of khaki in sight.

  In the space of six months he sold the car-wrecking business, the secondhand car yards, the freehold blocks at Parafield. He counted his shekels, made the right noises, and landed a General Motors dealership.

  How did McBee pull that—? In those days it was a licence to print banknotes the exact colour of greener pastures. GM and its carefully selected dealers couldn't keep up with demand in the post-war years. After slapping down a healthy deposit a lucky man might wait another twelve months before taking delivery of the car designed and built for the local conditions—that is, specially engineered to take account of the never-ending distances and the dust, the heat and the incessant potholes, the mirages, the kangaroos which were known to collide into the grilles at night, and all the bushflies and galah feathers which clogged up the imported radiators. GM made sure their product had reliability. They also attached the gear lever to the steering column, and introduced democratic bench front seats—shrewd move. Anybody and everybody felt they could slide across and drive.

  Every night McBee drove home a different coloured car. He'd moved his reluctant de facto and daughter out of their small house with the battered screen door into a mansion on the other side of town which featured a mansard roof and too many bedrooms. Most of their plywood furniture he'd tossed on the rubbish tip (using company trucks), replacing it with imitation English antiques. And his name now appeared in sloping serifs on the letterheads, business cards, adverts and calendars; serifs slanted even in royal blue neon across his plate-glass windows. Vern who knew about these tilings pointed out that in the old days ‘McBee’ had always been in heavy sans, which is easier to read.

  The population digested the transformation with respect, tinged with regret. McBee was again everywhere at once. If his name wasn't appearing on committees and commemoration dinners his familiar screened features were seen conversing with politicians, or whispering behind his hand to beaming visiting VIPs.

  Shadbolt dreamed about McBee.

  But when McBee had offered him a plum job in the service department—just like the old days—after learning it was Shad-bolt who'd whipped out his handkerchief to staunch the fountains of blood, as he lay out-to-it on the intersection, everybody else apparently standing around gaping or retching, Shadbolt turned him down. He had other plans, although he didn't know exactly what.

  The Maserati brothers, C-type and F-head, Marelli magnetos and Amals, Webers and twin SUs, Enzo, Briggs Cunningham, Lago and Cisitalia—the names rolled off Shadbolt's tongue like the cast of a Hollywood epic on the chequered history of motoring—and yet he didn't know the name of the woman next door. In his room on Friday nights, heeling and toeing in the dark, he wandered his eyes over every cubic inch of her paleness. And couldn't fathom her out. He had seen everything and could name the bodily parts; and yet he knew nothing.

  When they met in the street it showed. His tongue became the fibrous cud of newsprint he chewed over morning, noon and night, the second tongue which interfered with speech and clear thinking.

  At last at the tram stop his knowledge of her accelerated.

  ‘Watcha up to today?’ she called out. ‘Come here and talk to me.’

  ‘I was on my way,’ he gestured down Magill Road. ‘You know…’

  On his way to help a car maniac replace a head-gasket. Nothing important. There was nothing much else to do. ‘Stand in front of me so I won't get blown off my feet,’ she instructed. ‘There's a good boy.‘

  Only the night before he had seen her through the window accompanied by the projectionist, both stripped, in an audiovisual demonstration of the facts of life, and now standing so close, parts of her uneven body brushed against him, swaying on high heels.

  ‘I thought you'd be tearing off to meet a girlfriend at the pictures.’

  ‘Me?’ Shadbolt shook his head violently. ‘No fear!’

  ‘What? He doesn't go to the pictures? But there's nothing like a good film.’

  ‘I've been a few times,’ he mumbled, catching sight of the tram.

  ‘I don't believe I've seen you at the Regent,’ she squinted up at him; lipstick on her teeth. ‘There's a film on now in Technicolor I could see every day for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Tram's coming.’

  ‘At the matinee when it's half empty I can let you in free.’

  He took his job seriously, helping her on the tram, ‘You OK now?’

  And stepping back and waving he almost collected a Dodge ute.

  Several days later he arrived in at the Regent.

  ‘Take a pew there,’ she whispered near the back row. ‘Otherwise, your head'll block the screen.’

  As she went away to usher a small party of nuns the newsreel started. Long shots of Hillary and Co forming an immense millipede aroun
d the base of a foreign mountain; hectic Australian Log Chopping Championship, Royal Easter Show; and suddenly the huge image of Frank McBee, flickering as in a dream, smiling and jabbing with cigar at his grand plan for an Adelaide without trams, which was the first Shadbolt heard about it.

  McBee's crafty features had Shadbolt smiling slightly. After all, McBee had almost been killed by a tram, and now he ran a business devoted to car ownership. Shadbolt was still adding two and two together when the tides of African Queen came on, and the usherette crept into the aisle seat beside him.

  Before long he forgot the perfumed presence at his elbow. Unshaven Bogart in his clapped-out river boat was a man after his own heart: not afraid of a bit of grease, skilled and practical, a protector of women in white dresses.

  ‘Here's the part I like best,’ she nudged.

  Jumping up and down on the bow the mechanic imitated a monkey just for the woman's amusement. In humour women evidently recognise a code of promise.

  Later, the usherette dug her nails into his arm when leeches sucked onto his chest. ‘I hate this part.’

  On the way home she leaned against his shoulder in tune with the swaying of the tram, and he found himself talking freely, and began searching around for extra tilings to say, still aware of her strangeness.

  When Frank McBee ventured on subjects outside his field he riveted people's attention with his jutting jaw and long rolling sentences which rose and fell, a majestic surf of words, tossing in figures, and never failing to come up with a sparkling vitriolic phrase or two, which people in Adelaide called ‘pearls’. The technique came straight from the scrapyard, the used-car lot, the horse-trader's telephone. On a large audience it made a powerful impression. McBee knew when to pause; when and how to repeat a special word or a phrase; and how to raise his eyebrows slyly while making a crowd, or even a roomful of journalists, piss themselves with laughter. He developed a kind of public splutter of disbelief, which his half-smiling audience came to expect, and a guttural delivery, hissing and breathing through his nostrils and filed-down teeth.

  McBee initiated debates of public interest. And although the subjects could often be sheeted back to self-interest, such as his campaign for the removal of trams, he surely did have a point— historical, socio-political, psychological—when he extolled as ‘democratic’ the bench front seat developed by General Motors, denouncing as ‘autocratic’ the individual buckets preferred by British manufacturers.

  Even before the trauma of Suez (when the whole country was proud of Prime Minister Amen's walk-on part) McBee had detected the decline in British power and influence by the static design of their heavy motorcycles. The barometer was there for all to read.

  Basically the British bikes were stolid and merely dolled up every other year with a coat of gold or powder-blue, and adorned with kinetic names such as Golden Flash or Thunderbird, even though they were heavy and unmanoeuvrable. Frank McBee never failed to raise a laugh of sorrow when he deciphered the once popular BSA as ‘Bits Stuck Anywhere’, and on the subject close to his bulging hip-pocket, pointed to the cramped bodywork and the sewing-machine motors of English saloons. ‘Speaking of sewing-machines,’ he rolled his eyes, ‘I see they've named one of their cars Singer.’

  The names given to cars tended to support McBee's case, for although chosen for their psychological colours they rather suggested that the minds of British manufacturers had remained within their own narrow worlds. Oxford, Anglia and Humber, and dog names such as Rover were pastoral examples. In a devastating analogy McBee showed how the British were exporting to the colonial market their notions of the boarding school, brand-naming their most popular model Prefect, ‘while bringing up the rear is Vanguard’.

  In the design of their ships, Royal typewriters, fountain pens, men's shoes and films (for despite his busy life McBee escorted his de facto and daughter to the Regent most Friday nights) the story was much the same.

  McBee figured this industrial entropy reflected a larger decline.

  Audiences felt a collective lump gather in their throats when he announced the sun had finally set on the Empire ‘like the lines radiating from an empty leather purse, the same lines you see etched around the pursed lips of women no longer able to bring forth into the world spritely and imaginative offspring. These,’ he thundered, ‘are difficult times.’

  He wanted to know ‘who were our friends? I'd like to know where are they now?’

  It was Frank McBee dressed in pinstripes and polka dots just like a colonial Winnie who first coined the evocative term, ‘the Bamboo Curtain’. It remains the only surviving phrase from the speech ‘Bamboo versus the Gum Tree’ that almost brought the roof down in a draughty hall in Thebarton. Shad-bolt had digested it word for word, including the close-up of McBee looking especially ferocious. Waving his walking stick he pointed to the cancer of Communism spreading ‘like red corpuscles gone mad’ only a few hours north of, ha, Austrylia, ‘this great white land of ours, a land of spreading plains’.

  McBee's GM dealership flourished.

  The correlation between industrial stasis and imperial decline detected so early in the market place by McBee proved 80 per cent true. The South Australian police department had already decided to switch from BSA motorcycles to—who would have ever imagined?—BMWs made in guilty Germany.

  And as the Empire began losing its grip it encouraged, or rather, allowed in the far-flung dominions a proliferation of walrus moustaches, nicotine-coloured brogues, dog shows and half-moon glasses, and Winnie and Anthony Eden lookalikes, which although acceptable in certain streets in Adelaide and parts of New Zealand, Rhodesia and the Bahamas, lacked the naturalness of the real thing.

  ‘You're almost twenty-one, and you're no fun.’

  Dancing in front of him the usherette gave a shove, laughed at his poker-face, and turned and poked her bum at him.

  Holden snickered slightly; he shouldn't have told her.

  With the usherette he always became conscious of his size and the simple heaviness of his limbs. Passing in front of him the twin softnesses he'd seen released a dozen times (at least) shifted beneath the fabric printed with flowers and moss. He grabbed her arm, brushing against them.

  ‘Hey!’ he said.

  She looked at him.

  Letting go he blinked. ‘Doesn't matter.’

  Now that his sister lived across town he seldom saw her, except in the social pages flash-lit alongside Frank McBee at a charity do, and so Shadbolt regularly joined the usherette in the darkened theatre, seeing the same newsreel and feature four and five times, without saying a word. He also waited for her at the tram stop.

  He couldn't account for the usherette's shifts in mood, which resembled the restlessness he'd noticed in his sister, Karen. Some afternoons she ignored him when he trooped in to his usual seat in the back row. ‘I had a husband once but you wouldn't want to know.’ And strangely enough he didn't want to know. He wasn't at all interested. There were unpleasant afternoons when she shook her head as he approached, or jumped onto the tram ahead of him, preferring to be alone. She wasn't happy. Talking to him was like talking to a telegraph pole, she'd laughed in his face. And yet in broad daylight on Magill Road she confused him by turning side on and pointing to her breasts, ‘Do you like these?’ Other times her voice came out so drowsily he could have sworn she was half asleep. When Shadbolt thought about all this he drew a blank. He didn't know what to think of the redheaded usherette.

  He began to realise: other people were more interesting than him. Other people had things to do and plenty to say and were constantly on the go, and he had little or nothing to offer; he was always the onlooker. It showed with the usherette. Shadbolt felt she merely put up with him hovering on the fringes in his dusty shoes and mechanic's hands dangling, hoping to be of use. It showed too when he returned with Vern and their two best-friends to the beach, the depository of facts, Flies' phrase, and found it stripped, a beach almost like any other, spotted with bell-tents and clumsy cri
cketers. This didn't stop the others, Wheelright in particular, stumbling about with their noses to the sand, picking up the odd oxidised buckle, pointing and explaining, drawing attention to themselves. To Wheelright, the beach removed of its contents indicated another pattern, ‘the end of an epoch’. As in collective memory, uncomfortable facts are gradually and systematically erased.

  The last Shadbolt had heard of his mother was that she'd gone deep into spiritualism, mysticism and imprecision. Photographs in the Advertiser suggested she'd developed a hypnotist's penchant for shawls and darkened eyes. His sister, Karen? She now had her beauty to look after, a beauty strengthened by impatience; and she reeled off career possibilities on her long fingers, beginning with air hostess.

  Wherever Shadbolt looked he saw a firmness in others.

  The man in the street below had his racing pigeons, the Medleys had their Methodism, others were into crystal sets and/ or cricket statistics…He saw men and women on their knees before flower-beds. Some concentrated on political sideways movements, the idea of neat grandparents, small economies. And Adelaide had the usual percentage of definitive collectors, zealots.

  While other people moved in all directions and created self-noise, the way the usherette had danced in front of him, Shadbolt went on in a straight course, without any particular direction, which is why he had a lump in his throat.

  He was left with a photographic memory, rarely used, hardly an asset (not yet), and detailed knowledge of a woman's body acquired at arm's length through a pane of glass. And cars, cars. He knew all there was to know about them; and it included the limits of adhesion.

  On nights when he wasn't tagging along with the usherette he was behind the wheel of the Wolseley or thrashing some other crate across the rectilinear city. He wasn't the only one. An aerial view would show a warping and wefting, a velocity of masses, across and straight ahead, crisscrossing, stopping at intersections, starting up again, in concert, others stopping, never-ending. At intervals two would meet accidentally at ninety-degree angles, disturbing the pattern, some congestion, while the rest continued, backwards and forwards, individual parts replaced by other units, to form a whole.