Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  At his own expense Light had published two pamphlets, The Art of Seeing without Being Seen, accompanied by his own watercolour sketches, and Phrenology of an Assassin with its dubious diagrams of skull measurements and an interesting footnote on assassin's etymological link with hashish. Light wanted them digested down to the last florid adjective. No problem for Shadbolt. Throughout the training he found it both necessary and simple to block everything else from his mind. He enjoyed many of the tests. Identifying the silhouettes of known radicals flashed onto a screen, as in aircraft spotting, was a breeze for Shadbolt; same too pointing to the possible psychopaths in a football crowd, magnified on the screen. And even Irving Polaroid had to ask himself if he had come across anyone in the Northern Hemisphere who could assemble with his eyes shut recognisable faces from Identikits. Shadbolt's one lapse occurred while listening to Light's tape recordings of explosions, the idea being to distinguish between paramilitary, industrial, ceremonial cannon and British motorcycle. A stick of gelignite exploded from a safe distance reminded Shadbolt of the lazy afternoon blastings at the caramel-coloured quarry in the Hills overlooking his youth, and amid the twig-snaps of rifle fire and the splintering of Molotov cocktails of the Colonel's recording, he pictured the flat streets of Adelaide laid out in the haze, and wondered what Vern just then was up to—saw the perpetually talking face—and how his best-friends Wheelright and Les flies—their shadowed eye-sockets—were going.

  Light booted him on the ankle.

  ‘I was just thinking…’ Shadbolt started.

  ‘Leave the thinking to me. You're here to perform. Thinking is only going to throw a spanner in the works. You're not going to have time for second thoughts. Follow me and no frigging about.’

  With a varnished ruler the Colonel pointed at the town plans of Canberra and the other main cities. Directions of motorcades were traced. Escape routes discussed: cul-de-sacs, deep culverts and high walls registered. Local knowledge was put to good use. Anyone could raise their hand. The way the others interrupted and loudly argued with Light surprised Shadbolt.

  He enjoyed being part of a group, though to one side, and keeping to himself. It was a new experience for him. And the Colonel had been right: he was born to this line of work. Everything had led up to it. The pattern and direction of streets ran in his blood. And he felt a naturalness in the accumulation of factual knowledge; it was natural too that the men whose screened images had become established out there should be protected. It all made sense. There was a job to do. He learnt how to give autograph hunters the brush-off. He threw himself into the techniques of bringing down an assailant in a rugby tackle; how then to twist his/her arm without breaking it; and the proven way to hold back a) ecstatic crowd b) ugly crowd. And when Stan Still, the expert with the small arms, finally faced Shadbolt full on to make himself seen, and passed the .38 in the tan shoulder holster to the Colonel, who slowly, reverently, handed it butt first to Shadbolt, he accepted it casually, without any of the heavy breathing or the awestruck lump in the throat. Only later examining it as he would a car part did he notice it was coated in rust and the cartridges green with patina.

  His first operation was set down for a Sunday morning at Sydney's airport. An African leader called what's-his-name—Shadbolt never forgot a face but had trouble with names—Uno!—arrived for a state visit. To show once and for all to the world at large that he had nothing against a jet-black man from Africa, Prime Minister R. G. Amen gave orders for the red carpet to be rolled out, and wearing his most sombre suit waited out under the blazing sun and greeted the man warmly (shook his hand), as he stepped onto Australia, the soil often kissed by returning expatriates and every bit as ancient as Africa's, even if it was covered there in twelve inches of concrete. Flashbulbs were still used in the early sixties, and squirming entablatures were formed by skinny operators supporting heavy movie cameras.

  R. G. Amen bracketed his lips into an indulgent smile, although he was unable to control one eyebrow rising. He never had much time for the press. Taking Uno's elbow like a long-lost friend he steered him towards his own car, and gave him a lift to the poshest hotel in town.

  A police escort had trouble kick-starting his BSA and eventually manoeuvred to the front.

  From behind a pole Light gave the nod and Shadbolt began running alongside. That was the plan. After x number of minutes Stan Still would take over when the scenery turned industrial; Jimmy Carbon with several of the dingoes would then do the run through the back streets of Redfern.

  Touching the Cadillac's nascent tail-fin with his fingertips to keep at arm's length, and staring ahead and left and right for the slightest sign of funny business (adjectives on placards, glint of weapon—) Shadbolt settled into stride. The PM was squashed sideways against the door. In his efforts to display camaraderie he'd clean forgotten Uno's broadbeamed wife number three with the crocodile-skin handbag, who never left her husband's side, and the strain of sharing the one seat showed through the glass, as if the PM was smiling underwater.

  It was a hot day. The asphalt bled into the shadows. The poles were splintered dry. Rectangular artist's impressions of foreign sunsets, and larger-than-life manly men with golden hair smiling across the bonnet of the latest locally designed Ford: peeling and pissed upon, at least blocking out the weeds and the backs of brown houses. It all overlapped and gradually unfolded and receded in shimmer and vibration. This would be the future pattern. The die-cast V beneath the artificial coat-of-arms on the Cadillac's bow appeared to part any obstructions. Rusty scrap-yards and factory walls in urgent need of capital injection.

  Oblivious of the pedestrians Shadbolt continued, his feet beating a regular rhythm, and his mind circled and dwelt upon a confusing incident at the terminal. Waiting for Uno's jet Shadbolt had spotted a familiar figure, chatting up a ground hostess; already the girl was receptive, doodling on the counter.

  For a second Sid Hoadley appeared not to recognise him.

  ‘How's it going?’ Shadbolt had to ask, and louder than normal. It was a real surprise.

  ‘Who told you?’ Hoadley glanced the other way.

  ‘I haven't seen you around,’ Shadbolt continued loudly. ‘I've got this other job, not in the car pool now. Everything OK?’ To one side among the luggage Mrs Hoadley stood caressing a toy koala like a child.

  ‘Listen,’ Hoadley took Shadbolt's elbow, ‘this is supposed to be hush-hush. But I can tell you. I wouldn't breathe a word to anyone else, but I'll tell you. This country's too small for me. I've always felt that. You know how I operate. The place where a man stands on earth has to correspond to his natural energies.’ His eyes weren't focusing on Shadbolt's face. ‘Basically, I see my role as one of bridge-building. Always have. Know what I mean? I was in line for Foreign Affairs before the shit hit the fan. Now I've been handed a new assignment. A sort of consolation prize. But I don't see it that way. It's a challenge. It's to do with spheres of influence. All that kind of thing. You'll read about it in the papers tomorrow.’ In Shadbolt's ear he whispered, ‘Ambassador to Egypt.’

  Shadbolt saw his grandfather with an army bucket in each hand, squinting at the Western Desert which looked like the beach.

  ‘I know the subject like the back of my hand. I'm looking forward to this. I see it as a challenge,’ Hoadley was saying to himself. ‘I've got a few ideas up my sleeve.’

  Already he rehearsed the two-handed clasp as perfected by Arab princes and Republican vice-Presidents.

  ‘It's bloody nice of you to come out all this way. I sure as hell appreciate it.’

  Shadbolt must have passed Stan Still…Or he could have been standing still and Shadbolt hadn't seen him. He had kept pace with the spongy limousine even when the driver had played silly-buggers by almost imperceptibly accelerating. And about here Jimmy Carbon should have taken over. The streets had narrowed into channels of slate and flaking brown and identical houses, where shadows folded out from the window-sills and doors: terraces laced in wrought iron encrusted with pain
t layers, and triangular corner shops collaged with pre-war brand names; streets subdividing into still narrower and shorter versions of themselves.

  Glancing over his shoulder there was no sign of the Colonel in the Vauxhall. Several times he barked his shins against the Cadillac bumpers as it suddenly stopped, the breasts of a brassy woman, and although never one to complain Shadbolt began to ask himself whether this was the best possible route. He was getting the stitch. The streets narrowed further, or the driver was being smart again, forcing Shadbolt to switch to the footpath, where he had to use his hands to avoid pedestrians or colliding with dented rubbish bins. This was hardly the best place in town to show a distinguished visitor. The car had to stop and reverse to let a garbage truck pass. It allowed Shadbolt a minute to get back his breath.

  As he kept on he pictured Hoadley again, Hoadley leaving everything behind, and he felt a sense of loss. The street ahead stretched to a shimmering vanishing point, and people and objects he was familiar with seemed to be out of reach or reduced. He strained to keep up. The car was getting away. Breathing through his mouth and grimacing he kept glancing in all directions for trouble, as instructed, even though no one had looked twice at the PM going past. By then his singlet, nylon shirt and socks were sopping wet, the shoulder holster a burden across his chest, a blister grew and punctured on one heel.

  The last few blocks took an age. Somehow Shadbolt hung on. Noticing his condition in the mirror the driver slowed down a bit.

  He made it to the hotel in the empty quarter of the city, seeing double; saw the PM usher his guest safely into the lift; and stumbling around the potted palms in the foyer collapsed on a sofa, one shoelace undone.

  ‘Phew,’ he shook his head at the bod in uniform.

  Pleased at the job well done he took him to be a kindred spirit, not reading anything into the trim of the silver moustache.

  ‘Is there anyone you're waiting for? Because if there isn't…’

  The concierge had to ask again, more firmly.

  The foyer had recently been refurbished in the latest cool style, those international turquoises woven with lime, and Shad-bolt stood out as large-knuckled and angular, radiating noticeable heat-loss and a certain untidiness, a spent engine, breathing deeply in.

  Raising one hand Shadbolt nodded with his eyes shut. He understood. No offence. The man had his job. He'd seen this man somewhere before…As he left he tried to fit the face, and Irving Polaroid stepped out from behind a potted umbrella tree, pasty-faced and bland, every bit the workaholic Yank out on a trip from a huge smoggy city, but he signalled not to be recognised. Apparently doing undercover work.

  Shadbolt slid into the front of the nearest taxi, cracking his knee on the meter, and without realising it, irritated the driver by settling into a kind of clumsy dumbness. They crossed the Bridge in silence. The spars of the soaring cage slashed their cheeks in flickering newsreel greys. Still breathing heavily Shadbolt tried placing the long face of the concierge who did a good job policing the decorums of…nomadic luxury. Shadbolt kept seeing the nose in close-up, then three-quarters side on; and it became a triangular cone of plasticine, slapped onto the face, not really belonging there. And he saw other unsolicited noses, in rapid succession, torn upwards, twisted or flattened, Wheelright's and Flies', and Vern's set above his teeth, full on splayed like the Moreton Bay fig, growing hairs in the dark holes, tea cosies, question marks in three-dimension, small mountains of dented flesh—his photographic memory turned cinematographic. And still he couldn't place the face.

  There's nothing more disgusting than the nose. They don't belong on the face. They serve a function, ‘the rudder of the face’, but they ruin a face.

  Looked at closely noses tend to look false. They're easily broken. They shouldn't be there, not on the face. There's been a mistake. People have simply grown used to seeing them on others, everybody has come to accept the dripping, the bleeding and the itching, the attempt at public strangulation with a cloth or the fifth finger. In that sense the ridiculous protruding things have retreated, visually. A nose is a blur. And yet—or due to this optical illusion—it's central to the harmony of the face. A nose can be uplifting. The eye is drawn first to the nose, not the eyes as popular myth would have it. The nose is litmus to temperatures, flies and intemperance. It's the organ that denotes stupidity, stubbornness, fastidiousness; and because by nature isolated the nose measures those qualities with clarity.

  At Manly, Shadbolt waved flies from his face. Loosening his tie he looked down at his hands and feet; he nodded off to the sounds of the surf and the traffic which passed in waves like the sea.

  Shadbolt hadn't seen Harriet since Hoadley's mechanical breakdown; at two-ish he went there, avoiding the Epic Theatre. Wearing the same bottle-green cardigan she looked up from the drawing board and down again, as if, instead of several months, he had been gone only an hour.

  Such wordlessness matched his matter-of-factness; and he wondered if that was how it should have been.

  As he boiled the kettle he considered ways to begin talking. He didn't know what expression to put on his face. He'd mention his new job, how he'd run alongside the PM all the way in from the airport. He could say something about the Colonel. They had an American and a real Aboriginal in the team. While he rehearsed these openings Harriet crept up in a series of corkscrew motions, supporting herself along the curves of Chesterfields and cane, and suddenly locked her arms around his waist, the old trick of trying to squeeze his breath out (he was meant to cough and turn magenta), and without turning he strayed his hands down to the globe of her hips and twisted legs. To her it felt absent-minded; she drew away.

  ‘Samson's had his hair cut. Let's see.’

  The shape of his skull showed through from the epic run, his ears, jaw and barometric Adam's apple bulging to the fore.

  He felt tired and dirty.

  One hand returned to her Southern Hemisphere hip.

  ‘What is it you like about me? Why do you turn up?’ she wanted to ask. A rectangle of sunlight had set some of the cushions ablaze. The cream paint around the window now looked faded. Suddenly she wanted to pummel him with her fists, scratch his face if necessary, into softness, some sort of all-encompassing response. Whereas Shadbolt admired and pitied her. She was small, a swollen midget. For the rest of his life he could have hung around all day helping her get through. He wanted no harm to come. She had linear strength and a strength of will; but isolated she had grown smaller. To others she might have been peculiar.

  Partly to dispel pity she grabbed him through his secret service trousers. It allowed him to undo with enlarged fingers the buttons of her cardigan, blinking when, a promise fulfilled, the paleness of a complete breast fell out, brushing his hand.

  ‘Hey, what have we here?’ she laughed.

  ‘That's nothing,’ Shadbolt muttered.

  The .38 in the shoulder holster: he unbuckled it and dropped it among the cushions.

  Close up he watched her face widen. It concentrated into obliviousness. Her muscular curves fought against the rigidity of his lines, opposed and yet merging with them. Among faces in crowds were those with fantasies of being recognised or spoken to by the famous figure slowly passing. With their eyes concentrating, an expression of expectant softness washed over them. It was then—at the most unwanted moment—he saw the blackheads on the concierge's bulbous nose stippled into the face which had turned to him in a crowd years ago, in George Street, the face shining and distracted with gratification after seeing with his own eyes Her Royal Majesty, barely ten paces away.

  ‘My dear's worn out, isn't he?’

  She stroked the back of his head. They protected each other.

  It offered an opening to explain how the new job was twenty-four hours a day. Phrases spoken by the Colonel came to mind, word for word; but as Shadbolt opened his mouth Harriet began one of her question-answer conversations that made him squirm.

  ‘You've never said my name, have you?’

&nb
sp; ‘What, Harriet?’ he asked mechanically.

  ‘That's what I mean,’ she rolled her eyes.

  ‘You're not as tough as you make out,’ Shadbolt gave a kind of laugh-shout. ‘But you stay as you are,’ he squeezed her tight. ‘You're all right.’

  It was the best he could do. He could never understand her. Whenever he saw her name he saw a pale curvature of the spine, a nose twisted and upturned. Insistence and fragility combined in her. Harriet was easily dissatisfied. He'd never met anyone more dissatisfied. Her thoughts ran everywhere. As he described his new job she listened without apparent interest.

  ‘Anyway, if I end up in Sydney again, and you never know with my line of work, I wouldn't mind ending up here.’

  He meant the many-layered softnesses, the bowls, cushions and neat kitchen; her shadowed presence. It was this solemnity that irritated her; she and he never reached a level of seriousness; but then she always saw and was grateful for his goodness. ‘If you don't mind. You know what I mean,’ he was saying.

  Of course the Colonel…hemming and ha-ahhing he could not have been happier. A stern test of endurance and matter-of-factness over and above the national norm—all qualities demanded of a born bodyguard—and his man had passed with flying colours.

  In praising Shadbolt he patted himself on the back.

  ‘They don't make them like you nowadays.’

  According to the Colonel, Shadbolt was the ‘iron-man we've been waiting for.’ His feat would enter the mythology of the trade, and in early days mythology was important for any trade. Light kept punching the palm of one hand. ‘Did my boy throw in the towel? You bet he didn't.’

  The only black mark was Shadbolt's shrug, ‘I don't think anyone took any notice. No one looked twice.’

  ‘Come off it,’ said Light sharply, ‘that's our Prime Minister you're talking about.’