by Murray Bail
‘Well, I'll be blowed.’ And Hoadley actually placed a hand of gratitude on Shadbolt's shoulder. ‘I clean forgot about her, a nice figure of a girl. I should have made a note. I've had too much on my plate.’
Already Shadbolt was reversing back, and as they drew level Hoadley swung open the door.
‘Righto!’ he shouted out false instructions. ‘Stop here, I've found her.’
In the side-mirror Shadbolt saw the boss lean towards the startled woman and make a sweeping gesture, as if removing an invisible hat; Shadbolt had his mouth open in admiration.
‘Well, what d'you know?’ the woman squatted by the car. In her hometown she became excessively informal.
He was here to open a few bridges. ‘I'd like you to be my personal guest.’ To re-hypnotise her he studied her face with interest. Shadbolt could see this was necessary although could never manage it himself.
‘What exactly have you been doing since we last met?’
And so on.
Joy Shoulders' features were especially difficult to ‘assemble’. Covered in so many freckles she always appeared blurred as in a newspaper photograph, coming into focus only at a certain distance. But Shadbolt had plenty of occasions to demonstrate his gift. So many country women visiting Canberra had been hypnotised by Hoadley on the footpath that every other town had some walking around. In the main street of Cootamundra Shadbolt picked in a flash the frown of the English rose walking with her deaf stepmother; outside the hospital at Tamworth he isolated little Betty Gascoigne and her wineglass waist (which had originally hypnotised Hoadley) from a flock of uniform nurses; and he amazed the boss by skidding to a halt on the dust track this side of Bourke and pointing to the grazier's wife in men's trousers, standing at the mailbox cut from a 44-gallon drum— and who, recognising Hoadley (although he had trouble for a second placing her) joined him in the back seat where she straightaway began whispering rapidly and weeping on his fly-screen shoulder. Shadbolt spotted them in broad daylight, in passing cars, and side-saddle on motorbikes. He could isolate a face in a crowd, behind sunglasses, from under a hat, and in the stalls of Hoadley's picture theatres. It happened without special effort, almost before Shadbolt could blink.
‘That's quite an asset you've got going for you,’ said Hoadley thoughtfully.
‘Ar, I don't know,’ Shadbolt shrugged modestly.
In a Broken Hill saloon bar he'd grabbed—a reflex action— the profusely apologetic elbow of the blotchy geography teacher who had chucked up that day all over the theatre carpet.
The Minister sounded like Vern giving advice in Adelaide. ‘It's a matter of identifying your assets. Then you harness them. You'll find there'll always be people who want something done for them.’
He handed Shadbolt a watercress sandwich. They were parked under the proverbial gum tree, all doors flung open.
‘A man has to specialise in this day and age. If you build bridges you can't be a watchmaker. No use flogging a dead horse. Know what I mean? That's how people become unhappy. Take me, for instance, and my special gifts, whatever they might be. I just go out and build upon them. And you—if you look at yourself—are as straightforward as they come. That's what I like about you. The first time I saw you I could see you were the one for this job.’
Again Shadbolt found himself listening to the clear ideas of others. Something about himself made other, more powerful, men lay down the law with long sentences and the faraway look in their eyes. He realised as he looked back in the mirror.
Sid Hoadley was shaking his head, laughing.
‘This special ability of yours, I've never seen anything like it. An asset like that isn't all that easy to harness. The obvious job would be police work.’ He wiped his mouth with a monogrammed napkin. ‘But don't go for it. I've been meaning to tell you. You're doing a great job with me. I don't know where I'd be without you. We've got a big programme ahead of us.’ He tilted slightly to let out a fart. ‘That's better. Say, what's the time? Where's our next port of call? Where's that little black book of mine?’
In the cities his constituents were more trouble. They demanded extra time.
And in Sydney because the houses pressed against the sea in an upheaval of crooked shapes, and the narrow streets doglegged under the pressure, the numbers favoured parents and friends and roving husbands in particular putting in the unexpected appearance. Sometimes Shadbolt barely had time to give the two warning honks of the horn. Then he'd cruise around the block to intercept the Minister for Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior coming over the faded back fences in his lightweight suit, climbing or half-hurdling, depending on the urgency. It happened on consecutive afternoons with Mrs Chickens at Randwick, wife of a chirpy patent medicine rep addicted to bow ties. ‘I don't believe this!’ she gritted her little teeth. ‘He's supposed to be in Katoomba.’ Another time in Cronulla, after cutting it fine releasing himself from the arms of one of his favourites, the swimming champion with the moist blue eyes, he made his epic escape from the strapping girl's father by scrambling shoeless over the nasturtiums and palings infested with tetanus; after that a pair of brogues was always kept in the boot, along with several pairs of trousers.
Shadbolt and the boss handled the occupational hazards with professional calm. Only once did Hoadley stumble back blinking and shaking his head with incomprehension. Seems that…Well, it was that mid-morning of the terrible mix-up with the identical twins with the green close-set eyes confusingly called May and June who, for reasons of their own, happened to live in identical terrace houses in Stanmore. Hoadley had wondered why she had put up unexpected resistance; it wasn't at all like June. And in the midst of the inevitable result who should come in through the adjoining door, peeved at being stood up? Out of habit, and for conflicting reasons, they both turned on Hoadley who was there only trying to do his job. ‘You don't think you ought to apologise?’ Shadbolt was about to suggest. But the Minister had taken up an urgent file, breathing heavily from his exertions, preparing himself for the next address.
On the first visit to Sydney they had headed straight for Manly.
As they crossed the Bridge Hoadley became boisterous with optimism. Any minute now he'd be meeting up again with Mrs Younghusband, entering her humid bedroom, first getting around her petulance, before experiencing the lushness and the immensity of her interior.
Shadbolt found the texture of the beach suburb curiously preserved. The narrow houses of manganese brick among the dilapidated weatherboards appeared even clearer in outline, thicker in texture, and firmly entrenched, as were the spacings and the heights of the swaying seafront pines. Among the pedestrians and shopkeepers he recognised faces.
To Shadbolt's dismay the Minister seemed to have forgotten he had recently lived here; and when he casually mentioned it Hoadley went on in the same impatient mood.
‘Good for you. Then you'd know your way around here. Park down the end of the street. I might be some time, if past experience is anything to go on.’
He gathered strength in the Nile-like arms of Mrs Young-husband, the way a battery is restored overnight on a charger. Clearing his throat on the footpath he passed a pound note through the window to Shadbolt, and winked.
‘Have a swim, give that boofhead of yours a bit of sun, take yourself off to the pictures. We've got a heavy programme tomorrow…’
Home affairs all over the north shore; Ashfield, Bondi, drooping Lilyfield late in the afternoon.
On that first return visit, Shadbolt strolled around to the Epic Theatre. He was keen to say hello to Alex; he imagined the private enterprise proprietor in his crumpled shorts, greeting him without a word, casting the bloodshot eye on the government uniform, not all that different from the bouncer's outfit.
Across the street he stopped. A pale shadow engulfed the facade, coating the building with an unfamiliar stillness. At the doors Shadbolt found a chain padlocked through the handles, and pressing his nose against glass saw rubbish and mail scattered on the carpet, a tidal comp
osition which took him back in a rush to his friends, Wheelright and Flies. It was a so-so year for news in 1958. It showed in the stills from the newsreels: Ike about to have his heart attack, some nasty business in Jordan juxtaposed with the first beatniks and bodgies pulling faces in Melbourne, German shepherds straining at the desegregated buttocks of negroes, the first parking meters in the UK. Dog-eared, fly-specked, the images were divested of power, as if the skills of Harriet's fingers and scissors had been futile.
He waited around the steps for a while.
People didn't always behave in the way Shadbolt expected; he didn't know what to do. There was no sign of the clapped-out Citroen.
Making his way up to Kangaroo Street he had another surprise: Harriet hardly looked up when he walked in.
Curved as a black swan over the drawing board she concentrated on rendering impossible ideals of the female form for ladies' fashion advertisements, using her lips to draw out the point of the brush between inking, the old commercial artists' trick.
Shadbolt stood there blinking, his head almost scraping the tasselled light shade.
Only one new addition, he noted: on the wall near her elbow a postcard of Her Majesty mysteriously smiling with a moustache drawn on in Indian ink (the old French artist's trick).
He moved behind her. He always envied her skills.
In art there was an ideal of a woman's form—in local weight, proportion, disdain. And conscious of her own body Harriet rendered it with special force. A few strokes of the brush distorted thighs, shoulders and breasts, and enlarged the eyes. It was mostly the disdain that fitted the dream-expectations. Other women looking at her drawings somehow imagined themselves being looked at. And the rag-trade and the department stores scrambled and begged for more. People came to her.
He stared down at her neck. Still she hadn't said a word. He could see the calliper ironing her trouser leg. The distorted hips, shoulders and enlarged eyes, twisted her chin, and gave extra force to her lines: as he remembered in a rush. For no apparent reason then he felt an urge to squeeze her neck with his fingers and hands, its pale softness, and yet he knew he could never hurt her at all. He felt heavy and thick.
Harriet spoke. ‘I don't like you standing there.’
He went to the kitchen and put on the kettle.
‘You'll find ginger biscuits there by the stove.’
She kept on working.
‘I called in to see Alex,’ he said.
‘Don't talk to me about him. Your friend's up to his ears in money troubles. He's gone, shot through, no one knows to where. If I know him he'll be back.’
He felt like asking how her little car was going but decided against. There were a lot of tilings he wanted to ask. He carried the tea things away and rinsed the cups under the tap.
‘Your photo's been in the papers. It's exciting here in little old Manly following your career. Fancy you being at the centre of all that power? I can just imagine. Why is what's his name, your Minister, always smiling? Have you been talking to him about me?’
Shadbolt had to laugh.
She wore the thin pullover, V-necked, and when he turned he found it removed. That pale sedentary flesh before him, circles swollen, bulbous, solemn. Only her face remained slightly distorted.
He went over to her. First tiling in the morning he had to pick up the Minister. She understood.
‘You're hurting!’ she suddenly said.
The last surviving tram in Adelaide stood as a permanent monument to…not merely to the simplicities of days gone by when things were more straightforward… but as solid proof, if ever it was needed, of Frank McBee's acumen in the fields of power and symbolism. It became known as the McBee tram. People said, ‘Oh yes, that's Frank McBee's tram.’ It was his pet project from the start, it was he who'd footed the bill. And to many people in Adelaide it displayed the same qualities as their benefactor: accommodating up to a point, immovable, and touchy, especially in mid-summer.
The sculptor with the unpronounceable Polish name was the one Vern had always entrusted for casting the figures crowding his backyard. Such commissions on a domestic scale barely extended his elastic gifts. Casting in bronze a full-size tram in replica—down to the last nut and bolt—he had created what local connoisseurs declared to be his masterwork. In the words of the Advertiser's art critic it had the unmistakable presence of ‘all epic works of art’.
On its granite plinth in the middle of one of Adelaide's four squares it contained all previous trams and movement of trams. Parents could point it out to their children. The children were encouraged to scramble all over it, even imagine they were passengers. Inside it had the ‘leather’ straps to hang onto the way people hold onto memories. The varnished ‘wooden’ seats looked like the real tiling. The corduroy floor had a few dead tickets included in the cast. The pole projected back at the characteristic angle and—artistic touch, very Polish—merged with a three-foot strip of horizontal power line miraculously cast in mid-air. People could sit in the tram and eat sandwiches and reminisce, a meeting place for office girls in their Mondrian dresses, although it was found that on slightly warm days, or when the sun came out from the clouds, the bronze seats and handrails suddenly became untouchable.
The only other disadvantage was an aesthetic one. From the very moment it was dramatically unveiled in a fanfare from the Police Band the bronze began oxidising, a creeping patina which gradually transformed the sombre sculpture, until by the mid-sixties future generations thought that all trams were green. No one standing there clapping at the opening ceremony of course could see this, not even Frank McBee who had supplied the shonky bronze, nor the sculptor with his arms folded to one side wearing a borrowed necktie; only Wheelright with his long experience of found-objects had his doubts, but he was out on a field trip.
When Shadbolt received page-one proofs of the inauguration it was as if he was in the audience. The tremendous realism of the motionless tram appeared about to be smothered by the oceanic rising of the Adelaide Hills; and seated on the edge of his bed with his driver's cap on the pillow Shadbolt swallowed back a small lump of homesickness.
Frank McBee, MP, spoke into a silver microphone.
With his heavily inked pinstripes, and now glaring over a pair of half-moons, he appeared as a figure slightly out of sync with history, but no less effective for that. An auxiliary insert which had him on the running board raising his bronze-toned corona, in the logotype of victory, grinning as is the habit of certain over-generous benefactors, showed at least some trace-elements of his original larrikinism.
Shadbolt then turned to the audience. Among the seated women in balibuntal hats and men appearing to listen thought-fully with their heads to one side he recognised the screened features of his hyperactive boss, Hoadley, one of the invited VIPs, giving the nod to…Shadbolt bent forward and squinted…that was his sister Karen. The stipples treated her lightly. Her restlessness showed as a pale beauty floating out from the surrounding sunken eyes. In other places the stipples focused into Les Flies seated among the redundant tram drivers, and there was a dealer in alloy scrap Shadbolt had once seen confabbing with McBee at Parafield who used a moistened thumb to peel off fivers rolled in a rubber band.
With his credentials in transport permanently established Frank McBee used the occasion to announce his move to Canberra, ‘to the epicentre of power’, as he put it. ‘I don't promise you the sky, but it's going to be my job to get a better deal for the motorist.’
‘So we're going to have this fucking war hero stepping out of his Buick here with a gimpy leg. I know a bullshit artist when I see one. He's aiming for the sympathy vote. Dragging that leg around mangled at El Alamein, or wherever it was he's going to give everybody the impression, the false impression, he has inside knowledge about transport. Because of the leg people are going to assume he has special know-how to move himself around. Know what I mean?’
They were driving to the widow's place in Gawler Crescent as the Minister flipped thro
ugh the twelve newspapers he consumed every day, searching for favourable images of himself.
‘Not long ago we used to take bets to see who could find a comma out of place in this paper. It was the standing joke. A man could go for years reading the Advertiser without finding a single, solitary mistake! Whoever's checking it now should have his eyes tested.’
Hoadley kept picking up the front page, and men tossing it away.
The literals on every other line—‘Stentor’ for Senator, Hoadley deed-polled into ‘Roadley’—and the occasional misplaced full stop were irritating enough. Worse: the local hero Frank McBee had been promoted by the slipshod proofreader to Minister for Transport. There it was in black-and-white.
Senator Hoadley's performance in Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior had been impressive, and naturally he had done nothing to discourage the rumours doing the rounds he would shortly be given the added responsibility of Transport, making it four. After all, each was dependent on the other. And now this self-made, time-and-motion upstart from Adelaide who lit cigars with five-pound notes would be arriving through the back door, as it were.
Hunching his shoulders over the wheel Shadbolt gave a knowing laugh.
‘Ar, Frank's no war hero. A .303 pinged off one of his toes, that's all. It happened in our kitchen. I was there.’
He went on matter-of-fact.
‘Those service rifles have got a terrific boot. It went straight through the floorboards. It was lucky he didn't lose his foot.’
In many ways Hoadley looked after his driver. At the same time he didn't take much notice of him at all. Seems that he'd clean forgotten his connection with Frank McBee. Now he leaned forward with his powerful arms resting near Shadbolt's neck. The aroma of his freshly applied shaving lotion moistened Shadbolt's eyes.
As Shadbolt recalled the fluorescent night in Adelaide, they passed the award-winning house with the widow waiting behind the curtains, and in the mirror he noticed a look of shrewdness harden the Minister's face. Twice more they passed in an immense semicircle as Shadbolt described in photographic detail McBee's friend from the RAAF seated at the kitchen table, spitting image of Adolf H., who became the famous sky-writer, later to die in a crop-dusting accident.
