by Murray Bail
Next morning the papers told a different story: ‘NOVEL DEBATE OVER TRANSPORT.’ There the straining teeth of the Minister and the gritty defender from Adelaide, facing each other across the bonnet like book-ends, had been screened into vote-catching smiles.
The humiliation, the pain! Never would Hoadley be the same.
The body-blow to his self-esteem administered in broad daylight had left him in a weakened state (prematurely dazed, exhausted).
Now after lunch when they went cruising he nodded off, and Shadbolt found himself staring in the mirror at a tear-shaped stalactite stretching from the corner of the Minister's mouth, like the piece of cut-glass from the chandelier he had once found on the carpet of the Epic Theatre. If they did happen to see a likely pickup or one of his loyal constituents Hoadley slid down below the seat, or fiddled with his papers the way an invalid displays a loss of appetite. This, from the man who literally licked his lips after lunch, raring to go: a man of large appetites, a gourmet of love, who had devoted his best years to serving the needs of others. In the old days—that is, the day before yesterday—he hardly stopped talking from the moment he bounded into the back seat, even if it was mostly to himself. For Shadbolt it had been like listening to the radio while driving, except that he gave dutiful nods and encouraging glances back in the mirror. Now the boss clammed up, as if he couldn't bear the sound of his own voice.
Shadbolt's ambitions were never high, and so he remained level, always more or less the same. With his horizontalism went an unusual degree of obedience; Shadbolt had little else to do. He believed his Minister's setback was only temporary. Naturally men who have a sharper clarity than their immediate surroundings suffer the occasional fall. Things can't be as bad as they seem, tomorrow's another day; where do we go from here? He made extra efforts, to give his Minister a hand. But Hoadley couldn't bear for the moment displays of automatic loyalty. Hoadley had become formal. ‘You stick to what you know, which is the streets. I don't want to hear any more garbage,’ being one nasal response. So Shadbolt drove around in circles. The Minister had entered a bewildering trough of pessimism which coincided with the nation's economic trough.
The sudden loss of will-power. Loss of ‘spark’. It transmitted to the streets. Other government drivers gave Shadbolt the old nudge-nudge, oink-oink. The word went around that Hoadley's elbows, key instruments in the mastery of Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior, had collapsed under the strain.
Could this be true? In Canberra half-truths were always doing the rounds. Sensing a weakness Hoadley was subjected to the savage scepticism of opposition senators and the gutter press. Rumours began circulating of a splitting up of his portfolio, although anybody could see the parts were interdependent. The load was too much for the elbows of one man, it was said, when only a few weeks ago there had been talk of adding Transport to his responsibilities.
Unable or unwilling to satisfy the needs of his constituents Hoadley kept a lower and lower profile until he could no longer be seen in the back of his limousine. His ‘disappearance’ caused a build-up in local anxiety levels, much handkerchief-twisting, back-biting and telephone ringing, a backlog of clamouring supplicants. Their frustrations reached an almost intolerable pressure-point, until a subsidence occurred, most accepting the new circumstances, their fate, which seemed to be one of poetic neglect, the shape of themselves blurred by the heat and openess of the long days, framed by flyscreens. The most fragile ones (wife of the—) persevered. The continuing absence of Hoadley only made them suspicious: lying in wait—misunderstanding feeding on itself—cajoling, threatening. Hoadley's instructions to Shadbolt were to steer clear of uncertain streets and suddenly accelerate past certain tennis courts and parked cars; but it didn't stop him being recognised and appealed to, as when Miss Kilmartin, who apparently had no idea of the trouble she had caused, tailed Shadbolt into the Gymnasium for Men. ‘Tell him he can't do tins to me,’ she screeched among the sweating bodybuilders, and the Asian student Shadbolt caught leaving calligraphic ultimatums on his windscreen.
The once-powerful Minister had become so weakened he appealed to Shadbolt for help. Or rather, Shadbolt took it upon himself to protect him. Casually, he reduced the diet of daily newspapers. They only made Hoadley unhappy. He fobbed off the lobbyists and the bridge-opening committees who were normally met with open arms; he made vague promises to the three under-secretaries who went through him to reach the Minister. The human loudspeaker had lost his voice. For a physical build-up Shadbolt suggested a course in the gym. Instead, Hoadley over-indulged his epicurean instincts, always nibbling a pastry or digging into an imported pate, gluttony said to be a measure of pessimism. Only when wiping his chops did he appear contented. At the front door one morning, as Hoadley went out like a zombie to the car, Shadbolt whispered to his wife, ‘Look after Sid. We're worried about him.’ But she hurriedly began talking wide-eyed about the latest in love and adventure of some film, another African Queen. Looking at her, Shadbolt blinked. For a second he became conscious of his own uncomplicated strength.
To restore the Minister's optimism he steered him away from the circles of Canberra. In the backwater of Manly the boss could keep his head down and work on his elbow strength, encircled by the Egyptian arms and lap up the whispered compliments, which went hand in hand with commerce. In this way statues of once-powerful figures are repaired by loving hands and restored to their pedestals.
From Harriet's place on the hill, where the faded houses across the park stood out as washed-up angles of wood and glass, Shadbolt tried to imagine the process taking place. At night the park appeared as a dark void, a permanent blank in his understanding, while the lights along the foreshore offered only glimmers of incomplete knowledge. Behind him among cushions Harriet sat watching him. He didn't know what to think about her…Sometimes he actually felt a stronger affection, tantamount to love, for Hoadley and the sheer force of his words and actions; he looked upon McBee with greater completeness than he did Harriet.
Harriet was passive. Contented with his presence she hardly spoke a word. Some days he found her trousers, always neatly ironed men's trousers, irritating. And he hardly knew what to say or do, except be there, usually standing, his big head almost scraping the ceiling, which is partly why she often felt like shocking him or physically shaking the log out of his wits. Eventually his straight lines intersected her arching crescents, and for a moment Shadbolt forgot his power.
In Canberra Frank McBee became even larger than life.
Power had gone to his head. His colour resembled the fabulous pink tail light of the first GM-produced Australian car; the body expanded; his autocratic mannerisms and chosen accessories (bowtie, Piramido, mulga stick—) evoked in people feelings of respect and affection. ‘Ar, Frank's all right. He's got guts…’ Even with his war wound, or perhaps because of it, he appeared to be everywhere at once.
When McBee spoke in public, images of power poured from his mouth the way petrol spurts from the tank of an over-filled car. He had become addicted—or more addicted—to metallic words, such as torque and chassis (‘the tried and proven chassis of our society’), ‘manifold opportunities’, ‘the headlights of prosperity’. He managed to work in the ‘importance of differentials’, the ‘viscosity of public opinion’, the ‘gudgeon pin of the family unit’, the ‘valve springs of fiscal restraint’. Expectations should be ‘carburetted’. On the other hand it was time to ‘stamp firmly on the brakes’. Parts of the country were bogged down in a ‘sump of dark despair’, but he, Frank McBee, promised to get this country moving again, i.e., ‘running again on all cylinders’.
Whenever it crossed their minds women imagined Shadbolt's age might be around thirty-five. Men who saw the figure in uniform might have said forty. (Both wrong: Hoadley's loyal driver was now approaching thirty.) All those afternoons of hot wind on the back of Frank McBee's motorbike, the pedalling up Magill Road to Vern's place in the hills, and men several years of straining in the half-dark to pinpoin
t troublemakers in the Epic Theatre, and now perpetually squinting through the windscreen of the Commonwealth car for house numbers, one eye out for constituents darting in front of the bonnet in their desperation, and on country dirt tracks the usual rabbits, kangaroos and emus—these environmental factors had coarsened his neck and introduced wandering lines to his forehead; not lines of conflict, or the invisible lines of paranoia which governed his tram-conductor father, but clear lines of memory-retrieval. Shadbolt always seemed to be focused on something a hundred yards away. It gave him an unusual expression of…impassive alertness. Over the last few years the acceleration of his photographic memory deepened the expression. And what with his strength and silence, especially his silence, he appeared to be much older than thirty.
He had reached the stage (age) when people he had known almost as neighbours had become public figures, replacing or temporarily joining those whose images he had grown to recognise but not to know.
The proofs kept coming. Never a week without another brown package, a food parcel from Adelaide. In case he missed the point Vern still circled the relevant photographs in blue pencil. Not only mugshots of Mr Frank McBee, MP, scratching himself like Napoleon at state functions, and the tall escort Colgate-smiling at his elbow, who happened to be his sister; Shadbolt's own mother began making appearances too. His photographic memory almost let him down here. She had shrivelled into a wee figure with a gay smile and wore extravagant glasses infested with stars.
Below in bold was an excruciating caption loaded with execrable puns and laboured innuendo (the sub-editor's art will always flourish with special vigour in the small towns):
TEA SORCERY
What does the wife, of busy (tee hee!) big, businessman MP do when he's away—embroiled, in Canberra's, corridors of power? Makes cups of tea, that's what!
‘If only people could make a living out of their pet pastimes,’ said pert Mrs. MacBee pouring another cuppa, ‘they'd become happy.’
[Paragraph missing here.]
Mrs McBee's Tea Shop, in case you've developed the thirst, is on Magill Road, next door to the Odeon. It has sky-blue walls and offers an excellent variety of sultana buns. Mrs MacBee is well-known for reading tea leaves. This she'll do for a silver coin.
When Shadbolt checked the Minister's copy of the Advertiser he saw the missing lines and misplaced commas were still uncorrected.
Later, another photo showed her reading the tea leaves of a disconsolate football team (‘down in their’—quote, unquote—‘cups’), and every other Thursday her star-spangled face smiled out from a four-by-two advertisement.
Soon afterwards, Wheelright and Flies made their joint appearance.
Shadbolt was driving Hoadley back from Manly. Out of gratitude the Minister was beginning to speak again. Crossing the Harbour Bridge his ginger hand holding Saturday's Advertiser shoved past Shadbolt's head.
‘Look at these two jokers. What d'you make of them? Maybe that's what I should do? Get out of the blasted rat race and start doing my own thing. They look as happy as Larry.’
Under the heading ‘Local History, it's All Rubbish’ the two good-friends were photographed in Wheelright's garage. Behind them on home-made shelves was a vast system of shoeboxes containing card indexes and various found-objects dogtagged as evidence. Driving with one hand Shadbolt recognised the seaweed-encrusted Polish coffee percolator they'd found together on the semicircular beach, and in the foreground the mudguard of Flies' car (So, Les still has the old Wolseley…). The pair Shad-bolt had known as ordinary modest men had the relaxed bearing of folk heroes.
Holding a clipboard Wheelright faced the camera with pedantic solemnity, a bloodhound in Wellingtons. His nose had been halftoned into a stubborn edifice, a plasticine of sniffing shadows. It controlled his face; Shadbolt hadn't noticed it before. His personality came out through it. It seemed to tilt his whole body forward. And Les Flies, although retired, wore his frail tram-driver trousers, and as a consequence looked as pale as a ghost. To everything his friend said in the article Les agreed.
History consisted ‘not so much of facts as artefacts’. Ordinary everyday objects are discarded or swept away by events. Each one tells a story, part of the broad pattern. Ferreting in a box Les held up the last Adelaide tram ticket. By tracing discarded artefacts, charting their journeys, and reading them as signs, the dynamics of a society can be measured. God, there was enough here on this small corner of the earth (Adelaide, South Austrylia) to occupy them for the rest of their days. It was Wheelright's ambition ‘to drop dead on the job, which means I'll probably land in the gutter.’ Alongside him Les Flies nodded. A consuming obsession evidently makes a person's life easier.
Les Flies recalled for readers his days and nights on the trams, as if they had been scrapped several hundred years back. Trams were predictable, they engendered reliability. He still saw himself as a stop-go person and always on time. ‘It gets in your blood and stays there.’ Speaking of blood: he had only one fatality on his tram, and that was after a stroppy conductor tangled with some Yanks during the war.
The sub-editor labelled Wheelright and Flies ‘archaeological magpies’. In the caption Shadbolt saw their names had been transposed, and he stumbled across more and more misprints. ‘Lies’ for Les, and ‘residue’ for residence.
It diminished the seriousness of the two men. It implied their methods and results were faulty. Proof of a clearer, more factual kind was needed.
He folded the paper in the glovebox. Whenever he looked at it he felt touched by all that remained, their earnestness, and what appeared to be their contentment.
Shadbolt rested his jaw on the steering wheel. In fine weather he leaned against a front mudguard or squatted in the gutter. Over Canberra a solitary cloud, wild-headed but horizontal along its base, would form in the morning and stay in the one spot all day. Other times the sky became all blotting paper, staining here and there with pale blue ink, or there'd be clouds entirely filling the sky, a dome of floss, bulging under pressure. Canberra was the place for tremendous gatherings. Often after another hot day thin clouds dragged across the lower sky, leaving bits of themselves behind. By early evening they'd pile above the horizon, skeins of wool washed and drying, their grey undersides gradually staining the pink of galah and lurid waratah. Agricultural skies: the haphazard arrangement altered throughout the day the way sheep moving among discarded implements and fallen trees form an inevitable design in a paddock, and so demonstrated above the lines of Canberra the randomness of true harmony.
Shadbolt's photographic memory went ahead and assembled from the chiaroscuro of clouds faces of people he had seen in repetitions of lightly inked proofs. Interesting how many times Einstein and Henry Lawson appeared, the texture of clouds evidently suited their hair, and when a couple of crows momentarily supplied the eyebrows below some snowy cumulus the PM himself appeared, looking down on his land. It was so common Shadbolt didn't take much notice.
By then—late '62—Shadbolt was back on the road with the Minister again. Hoadley had managed to haul himself up from the rock-bottom, and salvaged much of his former powers; that's to say, he found his tongue again.
It happened in stages. First, he seemed to want to say to Shadbolt everything that came into his head. A cleansing process; it also allowed him to practise his verbal rhythms. This was followed by a deliberate policy of seeking out people he'd been avoiding, and talking loudly to them, including the PM, the gutter press, and even the strutting war-horse Frank McBee; sometimes Shadbolt had to skid to a halt so the Minister could leap out, button-holing by mistake a startled stranger. With everybody he appeared extra attentive, listening earnestly, asking after the family, slapping them on the shoulder-blades.
Power returned to his elbows through a fresh body of loyal constituents. Gradually, he became larger than life again.
And yet Hoadley never returned to his former level. For all his fresh attentions his eyes clouded; he wasn't really listening. In itself this wasn't u
nusual. Anyone pressing the flesh has to move right along; but the Minister was no longer engagingly shameless about it. When the boss stopped talking Shadbolt noticed an occasional embarrassed look, and another, more worrying, of bewilderment.
There were other troubles. Television sets had spread across the land as rapidly as the myxomatosis plague back in the fifties. By the time Hoadley had suffered his public downfall his chain of happy-ending theatres with their creaking seats and primitive toilet facilities had already experienced a serious downturn. Alex Screech's failure at the Epic should have been a warning. Relying as always on his native optimism, which women found so attractive, Hoadley had turned a blind eye. Besides, as a Minister of an energetic young country he had his hands full running an arduous portfolio. Just when Hoadley was coming out of his decline and looking good the firm's public accountant, in keeping with the perversity of his profession, revealed the damage in black-and-white: from a position of perpetual cashflow Hoadley's theatres had become inland seas of empty seats; several urban locations even reported a full month of screening the latest epic from Hollywood to nobody but the yawning usherettes. As well—as though this wasn't serious enough—Hoadley's public address system had fallen on hard times…because Austrylia was becoming more sophisticated. Unless they were race-callers speakers in public no longer felt they had to shout to make themselves heard. And anyway (the accountant figured) the traditional alfresco audience who kept the bush picnic going now preferred to sit comfortably indoors, staring at the Tube. The decline in the loudspeaker business paralleled the fall in picture theatre receipts.
‘It's a mug's game,’ Hoadley said, running his fingers through his hair. ‘Never get your body and soul tangled up in showbiz.’ (‘No fear,’ Shadbolt thought to himself. ‘Look what happened to Alex Screech.’)
And yet Hoadley seemed to put those problems out of his mind. A preoccupation with revenge kept him off-balance. Shadbolt could see it in the rear-view mirror. Instead of getting down to perusing the morning papers, or working on his files, he stared at the ashtray in front of him, tapping the ballpoint on his teeth.
