Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  The sight of Alex stubbornly standing there in his shorts and downtrodden socks produced real sadness in Shadbolt; he tried hard to swallow down the lump in his throat; and when, at the prearranged signal, the defenceless figure became engulfed in grey-and-white screen images, which normally produced such an electrifying effect, it only threw his ordinariness into relief, a gaunt figure at the mercy of stronger remote imagery, and the gelatine strobing lit up the vertical faultline on his forehead, multiplying his helplessness.

  As if blinded by his predicament Screech remained squinting at the flickering light until Shadbolt hissed from the wings, ‘This way, Alex. Over here.’

  Alex came off looking worried.

  ‘I was going great guns until I saw Sid Hoadley's mug sticking out like dog's balls. I think he's come to see me.’

  He was pale, worn out, perspiring.

  ‘He must have come in to see the show,’ Shadbolt suggested.

  ‘Come off it. Sid Hoadley's a frigging cabinet Minister. He wouldn't waste his time. No, I've known Sid for bloody years. He's up to something. That bloke never does anything without a reason. He's always onto some angle or other. I'd say he's come here to hire our hall for a night.’ He began nodding, shrewdly. ‘In fact, I'll put money on it.’

  Alex returned in a few minutes, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

  ‘It's you he wants to see.’

  Shadbolt laughed and turned away.

  ‘I'm not bullshitting. Go on! He's outside in his flash government car, all smiles.’

  It was four o'clock in the afternoon. With his torch in one hand Shadbolt pushed through the doors onto the footpath.

  Several sizes too small his blue bouncer's uniform exposed his ankles and elongated shoes. Shadbolt had always been oblivious of appearances. From the footpath he squinted up and down for a second before he lunged across the street, thrusting his neck forward, his threadbare buttocks parting the slit of his coat like a curtain.

  It was the same cream-ducoed car and Commonwealth driver he'd seen outside the boarding house. Shadbolt wondered how the Minister of Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior found time in the middle of the afternoon to wait outside a picture theatre in Manly; but on the far side the passenger door was wide open, and Mr Hoadley was seated in his short sleeves, surrounded by confidential folders, papers, wire out-trays and an American dictating machine.

  The Minister lowered his fountain pen.

  ‘There you are. Thanks for giving me your time, I know you're a busy man.’

  Because of his size Shadbolt had to half-crouch, one hand resting on the gutter of the car.

  ‘That was a fine job you did the other night. I notice these things. I was impressed. I get a tremendous kick out of those gala evenings. There's nothing better than a man in my position to move among the people, to rub shoulders…you know, to see how individual citizens go about their pleasures. My portfolio, Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior, takes me everywhere. I take my constituency's affairs very seriously. You've got to put a lot of elbow grease into this job, I'm always on the road. This is a great country. Listen, don't stand out there in the sun. Take a pew, take a seat.’

  He cleared a space.

  Genuine leather. To Shadbolt's surprise he found he could stretch his legs.

  ‘Have you ever seen one of these things?’

  A cocktail cabinet in a series of walnut planes unfolded on cantilevered elbows.

  ‘Will the boss let you have a drink?’

  Without waiting for an answer he splashed out a north Queensland rum of one-twenty proof and doused it with a squirt from a syphon enclosed in a silver wire net. The exceptional diameter of the glasses spoke of power attained. Hoadley could barely wrap his ginger hand around them, and on his smallest finger a gold ring displayed the shape of the lucky country set in opal.

  ‘I've known Alex Screech since the war. He used to hit the bottle a bit those days. How is Alex? A real battler. There's a man who never throws in the towel. Always unlucky with women and business. I remember a time when Alex wanted to go into politics like the rest of us. We used to call him “Axle”—always going around in circles. It doesn't pay,’ he added mysteriously, ‘to be too singleminded.’

  Looking straight ahead the Senator appeared to be addressing a meeting of the party faithful. Even inside the car, or because of it, Sid Hoadley had an exceptionally loud voice. That Shadbolt hadn't uttered a word didn't seem to concern the Senator at all.

  To be sitting alongside a man whose image he had repeatedly digested in grey-and-white was offputting to Shadbolt. The flywire pattern of his freshly ironed shirt blurred before him. The Minister was always in the forefront of events. When at last Shadbolt lifted his eyes the stippled particles from his photographic memory focused into shaven flesh tones, a solid mass of pink and fleshy ears less than an arm's length away, breathing and emitting body heat and rude good health. Erupting from his nostrils pale tufts became transparent in the sunlight, signalling virility, and the small veins on his cheeks mapped the deplorable state of the roads, the thousands of miles of bush tracks in the interior, which came under Sid Hoadley's responsibility.

  The bright sunshine lit up the inside of the car. It was too bright. For the first time Shadbolt noticed the frayed piping of his uniform, and the dented silver torch on his lap looked secondhand, covered in scratches.

  ‘At any rate,’ the Minister half turned, ‘I'd like to offer my congratulations.’

  Shadbolt blinked.

  ‘For most of my life I've made a study of beauty, it's what you might call a hobby of mine. It began with bridges. Why is it that one set of steel girders held together with rivets pleases the eye, while another doesn't; why the proportions of a few cars and buildings catch the eye and not others; and what is it about certain women that makes them instantly beautiful to the majority? I've thought long and hard about these questions. I haven't yet found the answer. Now you take the other night. Between you and me’—Hoadley turned to Shadbolt and lowered his voice—‘because I can't go around broadcasting this, not in my position—between you and me, none of the other girls the other night came within a bull's roar of your little sister. She's a stunner, all right. As soon as I saw it I knew: the most beautiful young lady in Austrylia.’

  ‘Ah, you mean Karen,’ Shadbolt almost laughed.

  ‘“Ah,” says he. Listen to him. I don't think you understand. You're probably too close to her.’

  Frowning to look thoughtful Shadbolt became conscious of the Senator's breathing, and the faint whistle at the end of each intake: everything about him denoted measurement and power. His pauses were part of it. They spoke of calculation. There was experience there. It all went with his ruling-class shirt, his opal ring, the wide-diameter glass in his hand, amid the leathered spaciousness of the ministerial car.

  ‘I don't think,’ he now said in a slightly hoarse voice, ‘I've seen a more beautiful face in my life. She has an ideal beauty. You could plomp her down in the middle of Africa and they'd take their hats off. I've seen it occasionally, only very occasionally, in certain bridges. The right proportions of weight and line, and so on. I know, it's wrong comparing a woman with something as fixed as a bridge. A woman's beauty is constantly renewing and superseding itself, every second of the day. Your sister's not what you'd call a regular beauty—you see I keep getting back to your sister? Her features are too regular. Her beauty remains the same while constantly changing.’

  Squeezing his knees out of respect Shadbolt still had no idea why such a public man had sent for him. Remaining silent he listened to the man's breathing.

  ‘I'd like to meet your sister,’ the Senator half-turned. ‘Perhaps I could take her out to dinner? On behalf of the government. How does that sound?’

  Hadn't the Senator already met her? It was he who'd taken his time on stage solemnly adjusting the purple sash over her silken figure, and so raised a murmur from the audience.

  ‘I think she's staying at Ushers H
otel.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But it'd be better if you introduced us. Know what I mean?’

  ‘I wasn't sure I'd be seeing her…’

  ‘Your own sister?’

  Shadbolt paused.

  ‘If I did I spose I could fix it.’

  ‘Good man,’ Hoadley slapped him on the knee. Now it was all rush. He looked at his gold watch. ‘Jesus! I've got to get to that meeting with the Road Hauliers' Association. Everyone's getting bolshie these days.’ He folded up the cocktail cabinet with a bang. ‘Get onto that right away for me, there's a good man.’

  The car drove off, the Minister returning to his papers.

  When Shadbolt stepped back into the foyer Alex Screech seemed to have shrunk: such a remote, isolated figure. As soon as it was confirmed that Hoadley wasn't interested in the theatre he rested one foot up on the glass covering Australia and tugged his ear. He looked down at the empty interior. To help him Shadbolt suggested that the Minister was obviously a man with ‘many irons in the fire’. But he misjudged the boss's mood. ‘This country of ours,’ Screech cut him short, ‘has always had more than its share of bullshit artists. We could take on the world with them.’

  Every night now Shadbolt spent in the wooden house on the hill. She'd given him a key. To his amazement she'd first dangled it in front of him on a ribbon, and hooked it unexpectedly over his naked erection; her happiness took the form of flaunting an extreme naturalness. Close up, she spoke nonsense to his smiling bruised thing. She cradled it in her hand. To her it was a friend, a pet. He grew accustomed to night-words and familiar with the flora of the sofas and chairs. She gave instructions. He was the helpless one, a log. She hoisted him. From the waist down she was so useless, and yet strong. She was like a fish, an electric eel. Over her crippled curves and cries he superimposed an upbringing of straight lines. He was manly, less mechanically minded as she twisted further. Together they softened.

  Sometimes he found himself pitying her: especially when she became engrossed in her happiness. To get around this he'd let out a laugh for no reason at all. It only made Harriet stop everything and ask questions. The way she persisted, sharply; she may have suspected. If only she knew how he wanted to serve, always there, ready.

  There was the recurring problem of his awkwardness. In trying to reduce it he only became well meaning.

  Bewildering, for instance, to have her wanting to know everything there was to know about the Adelaide usherette. ‘She was next door, I kept bumping into her’—that didn't mean anything. What was she like? Why was she living alone? It was unusual for a woman to build her own house. Shadbolt realised he'd never asked these questions. And it surprised him to see her take a reflective interest in Hoadley's remarks on beauty, his ideas on symmetry. Shadbolt quickly reassured her. To him, everything about her was more interesting than his vertical sister whose perfect proportions had smiled out from the front page of the Advertiser, proofread with the usual scrupulous objectivity by Vern. Karen's beauty was ‘simple’, whereas hers—Harriet's—was severe, all arches and pronounced crescents, a twisted attraction. It implored a man—it was him—to come forward. There could be no shame with her.

  Harriet dwelt on Hoadley matter-of-factly, ‘He's so repulsive-looking…’ But then Shadbolt couldn't understand why she remained vaguely smiling.

  At leisure she inspected his size, examined every inch of him. She punched him with her fists. ‘You're so tall everything goes over your big head. But you're very nice.’

  At other times she turned on him, ‘You don't feel a thing. You don't see a thing. What's the matter with you? You're just a man, aren't you?’

  With her he had to watch his step: had never known anyone of such moods.

  Returning to the boarding house in the mornings was a return to cold flat surfaces. Parked a little way down the street the Commonwealth car had its engine idling; and in Mrs Younghusband's absence the motley typesetters dropped their aitches and left disgusted gaps in their sentences. ‘Lookee here,’ they said to him, ‘if it isn't another Errol Flynn?’ The Minister of Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior slipped out the back door by 8.30 after Shadbolt had left for the theatre, and so for many days he didn't see his landlady. He knew Sid Hoadley was also seeing Karen in the afternoons, and wondered how the Minister found the time, let alone the energy.

  The politician pays his debts. In obeying the ancient law Hoadley calculated the minimum needed. Every few weeks his driver would creep into the empty theatre cap in hand and signal the squinting bouncer, ‘Mr Hoadley would like to see you.’

  Shadbolt looked forward to these meetings. Unlike every other person he knew, the Minister was always in a jovial mood. He was so optimistic he didn't see things in front of him; even insurmountable obstacles he managed to look straight through. Always clear-skinned and bright-eyed he avoided subjects of a morbid nature. It added to the impression he was in tremendous physical shape, and accounted for—partly accounted for—his attraction to women.

  Clearing a space for Shadbolt among his papers he'd straightaway begin talking, and go on virtually non-stop sometimes for an hour or more, ranging across a broad field, touching upon the bright prospects of the nation, out of parliamentary habit, emphasising the need for hard work, reminiscing on his youth, dropping the occasional grateful reference to Shadbolt's perfectly formed sister. In the process he'd chew through five or four smoked salmon sandwiches, and open a bottle of beer, leaning forward to offer some to the exhausted driver, who the Senator preferred as a mate rather than a servant, and to Shadbolt alongside him in the back, who regretfully declined. If a heavy night was in the offing he'd swallow down two dozen Sydney rock oysters from a cardboard box, craning his speckled neck to slurp them up, revealing his gold watch and monogrammed cufflinks, an action which hypnotised Shadbolt—manifestations of the man's energies.

  Gripping his knees with his hands, the way the enamel bath was supported back at the boarding house, Shadbolt was an uncritical listener. Nodding at the right moments and smiling at the sudden colourful phrases he displayed his loyalty. If he said anything it was words of encouragement, such as ‘How do you mean?’ or ‘I see what you mean,’ or ‘Yes, that definitely makes sense Mr Hoadley.’ The successful autocrat needs multiplication of listeners, and a few minutes spent with Shadbolt rejuvenated him.

  After only, what, their fourth meeting in the sunlit car did Sid Hoadley pause in midstream, and direct a question or two at Shadbolt. Even as Shadbolt mumbled his answers he noticed the Senator only half listened, anxious to move onto the next subject, and once again he became conscious of the man's breathing, his stomach rising and falling in tune with the faint metronomic whistle from his nostrils at each intake. Such frankly visible breathing went with a powerful, seated man.

  Always dazzled by the Senator's optimism, Shadbolt found on his return the half-darkened theatre threadbare, an echo chamber of emptiness, and the efforts of the oblivious proprietor somehow futile. Even the vomit-map which had given the theatre its new identity looked academic, dry, its colour dull, made worse by the fingerprints of bad weather clouding the glass. And Alex Screech was all elbows and Adam's apple, a shadow of his former self, even when lit up on the stage; although when he stood alongside Shadbolt in the gents' and announced new plans and fresh subjects for his lectures, the old faraway look came into his eyes, and Shadbolt nodded again with pleasure.

  Sid Hoadley's loudspeaker voice had socio-economic origins.

  Forty-odd years back on the edge of a northern New South Wales river town the heavens had opened just as he was conceived on the back seat of a fogged-up Dodge: from the very beginning his vocal cords had been indoctrinated by the overhead texture and decibel measurement of the elements pouring on a concave roof. And from the moment he was born he had to compete with his barmaid mother who had the frizzy hair and a voice hoarse from yelling over the clamorous all-male din at closing time, although with her little blue-eyed Sid she became soft and attentive, at least when he was
young. From his father he inherited an artificial loudness. His father was in the business of manufacturing microphones, megaphones and loudspeaker systems. (He'd been up from Sydney signing up the local race track when he met the raucous barmaid.) The business had grown into an impressive collection of corrugated iron sheds and factories in Newcastle with showroom and offices near Sydney's airport. The Hoadley loudspeaker system dominated the market; so it was he who was indirectly responsible for the earsplitting screech which interrupted all those fetes, sports days and bush picnics in the fifties.

  When Hoadley stepped into his father's shoes he found the business curiously…static. No other word for it, he liked to explain. He diversified into the area he knew best, where all was grey and intuitive, the province of images and dreams.

  Hoadley made a killing during the war: buying up the deserted picture theatres dotted around Sydney. The value of every vertical surface near the harbour plummeted after the night in 1942 the midget submarine had slipped through the nets stretched across the entrance at Manly and blown up an innocent ferry. Then after the war he bought more theatres, and built others. He went beyond Sydney. He knew—as his father had discovered—that after dark there was nothing much to do in the country towns. By the time he met Shadbolt in 1955 Hoadley's theatres stretched across the continent, a chain of optimism, extending like billabongs into the interior of adversity, the way Sidney Kidman had assembled his line of cattle stations to keep one step ahead of the droughts. For Hoadley they provided stepping stones to power.

  Anyone buying a ticket in one of Hoadley's theatres, even if it was a converted shearing shed in the middle of nowhere, could count on Technicolor and a happy ending, most films coming direct from Hollywood. The virtues of hard work with the reward of white teeth and clean fingernails at the end of the day were screened, always prefixed by a grey-and-white newsreel showing Hoadley cutting the ribbon of another new concrete bridge, usually one in the local district. Whenever he arrived at a country town on ministerial business he never failed to hand out free tickets to the local schoolchildren; long-term investments.