by Murray Bail
God knows, it had been a near thing. The Colonel had been worried there for a while. There'd been some kind of balls-up. He'd have to look into it. The Colonel himself had anxiously followed the original route in the hiccupping Vauxhall. The thought of the PM driving through those narrow side streets without an escort produced in Light—when it dawned on him—palpitations and uncontrollable flatulence.
As a measure of respect Light invited Shadbolt out to his place on Black Mountain. No one else had been there before. A mountain owned by the government: from a distance, the breast of a woman lying on her back, cast in a bedroom shadow of undergrowth, or a young Aboriginal woman resting, not yet speared by the ornate transmission tower. Peculiar rumours concerning Light's life-style (‘Seems that…’) circulated the way smoke rose near the summit at dusk and weekends.
Shadbolt slogged his way up through humming light timber, his jug-ears and mechanic's elbows giving alarm to sudden spectrums of parrots, sprays of insects and small horizontally swerving birds like handfuls of thrown dirt. Following Light's diagram he left the track through two blackened trunks arched into a huge horse's collar to a clearing where Light, squatting over a fire, nodded acknowledgement. The tent, the campfire, the billy boiling, and above all, the Colonel's solitary leanness, hypnotised Shadbolt.
With a nod he indicated a kero tin for a seat and shared his meal of red meat, single tomato, slices of white bread. Light ate with his fingers, an old India hand.
Everybody had a theory, everybody around Shadbolt had made up their minds about subjects. It gave clarity to their appearance. Certain people resembled hard metal. So Shadbolt felt when alone with the Colonel and his leanness.
Conscious of this he strained to listen to his words. The cries of startled birds subsided by then.
‘There are two sides to me,’ said Light pouring black tea for Shadbolt, ‘I am natural and artificial, lucky and unlucky. I'm hard and there's a part of me somewhere that's soft. I am always right and I have been known to be wrong. There is a yes and a no. The other day I had my tea leaves read by an old tart—forget her name—famous old tart—in Adelaide—and she came out with the same thing. With you, she said, I see bright light and men darkness. That sounds to me like the story of my life.’
Shadbolt shifted on the kero tin.
The Colonel had a bung eye, the left and nearest, which explained his habit of offering at a fixed angle one cheek side on, producing the outline of Australia. It had also given him a cold remoteness. Whereas he wasn't so bad after all.
‘There are two sides to every story. I've had an interesting life and a very dull life. I could sit here telling you stories for months, but I'll tell you the first that comes into my head.’
Already in the space of a few minutes Shadbolt's knowledge had broadened in bright straight lines; and as Light kept talking he felt the words directed to him and him alone, even though the Colonel seemed to speak to the world at large, represented there in the clearing by the earth, trees and sky. Vaguely, Shadbolt saw that knowledge was limitless; it was endlessly self-generating. At the same time all knowledge seemed to be at a distance, almost out of reach.
‘Most of my life has been lived in a tent. Before the war I was a surveyor. Covered most of the interior of this empty country in white pegs and invisible lines. They're still there, if you know where to look. I contracted to the old pastoral companies, local governments, the corporations with London offices looking for base metals. I was in the Middle East for most of the war, the Western Desert and then Burma. Offhand, I can't think of more than a few weeks when I've had carpet under my feet.’
Middle East? Isn't that Tobruk? Shadbolt wondered if he'd come across McBee—Corporal Frank McBee.
‘War is the ideal combination of opposites. You've got boredom alternating with sudden extreme excitement. These opposites act as magnetic poles to most men I know. You can't beat a lifetime condensed in a few days or hours. I had a good war. Palestine is a sister landscape to ours. Whenever they asked in the army about religion I'd put down “theodolite”.’
Shadbolt nodded vigorously to show he'd got the joke.
‘And there was some truth in that. I won't say I worshipped surveying, but I felt a keenness working with good men, making my own way over the contours of the earth and so on. And I liked the idea of placing on record the existence of the land, mathematically. But a life of living in and out of tents had turned me bone-dry. I felt I could snap in two out there at the middle of the day in the middle of nowhere. A man'd suddenly find himself hoping for something—anything—that wasn't rocks or trigonometry. You'd get a craving for music or lollies, or a woman's softness. That sort of thing.’
The Colonel poured more tea for both. By telling stories people make themselves more attractive.
‘I'd gone back, you see—the war's finished—to surveying a cattle station in the Territory. Nobody for miles. Red sandhills. Salt-bush. Just me and an assistant like you, only half your size, skinny, weak as piss. I imagine he had opted for the bush to avoid the agony of talking to people. After the incident I'm relating, where do you think he ended up? From the wide-open spaces, the bright light and complete silence he took a job in a dark box without any elbow room, a projectionist in an Adelaide picture theatre.
‘Our job out there was to establish the original boundaries between two properties. In the thirties, after a drought, one of the cattle kings had merged them. Now this man never married. He always stayed in the saddle. By all accounts a hard, secretive man, but not without his attractions. He died in 1944 in a stereotype fashion—in agony and covered in flies after being kicked while shoeing a horse—and the word soon went around that the property, which still had the original homesteads, had been left to two bastard daughters, one black, or rather, light-black, and the other one white.
‘Everybody up there knew these girls, except me. They'd grown up together on one of the stations, never suspecting they were sisters.’
In the trees a crow took the cue and croaked out a lament. The colonel swirled the dregs of his tea.
‘The first one I saw was one morning looking through the theodolite. I thought I was seeing things. Walking towards me—this is the middle of nowhere—was a young woman in a cotton dress. She came straight up and stopped a few inches in front of me. As a kind of joke I'd kept my eye on the lens until all I could see were some red petals, out of focus, just above her belly-button.
‘When I raised my head she was laughing. She was small, like a schoolgirl. One side of her hair had been peroxided blonde, the other was dark brown. It gave her’—the Colonel coughed—‘a paradoxical air. She wasn't shy and yet she talked a lot. I don't think she had met a man up there who looked at her when he spoke. The following afternoon I told my idiot assistant to make himself scarce, and the girl and I spent a pleasant hour together mucking around in my tent.
‘That night I turned in, as usual, early. I've always been a light sleeper. When I opened my eyes the tent flap was open. Something moved on my left, darker than the shadows. I made out her face. By jove, if it wasn't the second one! She lay alongside, resting on her elbow, watching me. I touched her nose. She opened her mouth. But she never once said a word. Every night she appeared like a shadow, while her other half who never stopped talking came during the day.’
‘Is that the…?’ Shadbolt nodded at the tent.
The Colonel went on curtly.
‘It was paradise. For a while there I saw everything in clear terms I don't think I've experienced since. The logical, mathematical side of my life was counterbalanced by the irrational, physical side. Crazy pair of bitches! It never entered my head to ask if each knew what the other was up to. I tried to treat them equally the way I was dividing their property down the middle; but I soon found myself in hot water. They were like night and day. The night-one had a tongue all right, but never said a word, and I knew her face and body mostly by touch, while the other consisted of nothing but words—she was a good sport, but allowed
herself to be seen in the harshest light. One was passive, you see, and the other possessive.’
The crows were at it again and Shadbolt squatting Aboriginal fashion waved flies from his nose.
The Colonel seemed to be talking to himself.
‘Difficult country up there. A creek-bed, trees and of course a range of whacking great sandhills can shift positions from one day to the next. I may have lost my objectivity. I was in this strange situation of keeping my eye glued on the theodolite, sticking to the truth, independent of the situation changing around me. The peroxide blonde, determined little bitch, began throwing tantrums and whatnot, and getting in the way. I was getting tired of her. It must have showed. In the morning while I'd be giving directions through the glass she'd make a point of marching up and frigging around with my idiot-assistant holding the white stick. It wasn't long before he, poor sap, went around drooling, and turned sour on me.’
Light looked around for more tea.
‘It was the damnedest thing. The one who operated in darkness, who I probably wouldn't recognise in daylight, who never spoke…I can see it was her passiveness that became possessive. She always arrived like the night itself, knowing I'd be waiting. I couldn't get her out of my mind. I could see the danger. Her shadow covered my thoughts.
‘I think the crazy half-sister must have got wind of it. My boy may have even spilt the beans, I don't know. He'd jacked up over being told to buzz off every afternoon. Instead of stringing the job out I decided to work flat out, to finish it. For days then we worked right through, the boy barely exchanging a word. I didn't even go back to camp after lunch. I didn't see the little blonde. Funny thing was, the other one didn't come into the tent on those last nights.’
Shadbolt's face began aching from his level of participation.
‘I finished the job, feeling pleased. I packed most of the gear. I told the boy we'd be leaving first thing in the morning.
‘So there were only a few more hours to go. But something felt unfinished. I wondered whether I'd be paid a final visit that night. I read till late, waiting. Nothing happened. I must have been half asleep then, when the tent flap darkened. Before I could open my mouth a .22 went off, then a pain like a needle in one eye. All I saw was a shadow. It could have been my usual shadow-woman, or the half-blonde, or even my assistant. I couldn't see. The shot was aimed to wing me in the leg, or scare the living daylights out of me, God only knows. The theodolite beside my head shattered, and a little diamond of light sliced through this eye here.’
Later, taking the ritual piss together under the stars, Shadbolt felt free to ask, ‘There's no Mrs Light now?’
He shook his head.
‘This'll do me.’
The Colonel ate and slept against the curve of the earth. It supplied heat and both broad and minute detail. The earth accommodated him.
‘I haven't been back, never. Now bugger off, I've got work to do.’
The country had so many impractical jokers, the typists of crank letters, the callers from public telephone booths whispering red herrings through handkerchiefs, and so on, so many ratbags with time and space on their hands who'd do anything for a bet or to kid somebody, to liven things up, offering no discernible pattern, so that when the Colonel's men weren't running along the streets or stepping out from behind potted palms they spent much of their time checking out false alarms.
Nobody took anything seriously. ‘This government's a joke!’ being the regular, scribbled complaint. And Shadbolt sometimes wondered why it should be. The threats themselves caused little disruption, at best a raised eyebrow or a laugh; occasionally a slight change in itinerary often on the spur of the moment for no apparent reason, anyway. With so much open space, even in the capital cities, and the way the heat in summer seemed to come between objects and people, expanding the distances still further, even the most precise promise of a violent act had no focus at all.
A corner of the Nissen hut had been sandbagged off for opening brown parcels ticking with Smith alarm clocks addressed to the PM, and there was a table set out for tasting food sent in from all corners of the country, marmalades mostly, laced with enough sugar to kill a horse, after a weekly magazine for women revealed the PM (full colour shot in piped dressing gown at breakfast) as an addict of Frank Cooper's Oxford. Handwriting, typewriter faces and postmarks were casually examined and tossed to one side. And because nothing actually happened—no threat had ever ‘eventuated’—the Colonel's men treated this side of their work as a joke, reading out in Jarman accents the most demented threats of strife, real bloody strife. ‘The PM has nothing to smile about. I'll wipe it off his face.’ Or, ‘It's curtains for Amen.’ And on butcher's paper from the bush: ‘If that poofter sets foot in our town for the jubilee celebrations…’
Privately, Shadbolt marvelled at the force of feelings generated. People sure went to a lot of trouble…dripping daggers and bolts of lightning were handpainted on some envelopes. Trying to imagine them he could only picture a few untidy figures, out of focus. Occasionally an unusual threat would cause Stan Still or Rust reading it to pause. Something about R. G. Amen not having a single original thought in his head. ‘Everything he says and the way he looks comes from somewhere else. It's about time he was kicked upstairs, once and for all.’
‘Let me see,’ Shadbolt had reached across.
‘That's a knife-carrier,’ Irving breathed over his shoulder. ‘We get those freaks back home. Put it to one side.’
Scissored from a fashion magazine the words had Shadbolt almost shake his head.
To Shadbolt's surprise he found the other bodyguards treated everything as a joke. It was common for them to sign messages with a swastika or a hammer and sickle. Stan Still and Rust used their walkie-talkies to pass on race results. And at the bus stop and in the nearby beef sandwich shop, and during workouts at the gym, they complained loudly about their itineraries and rosters, dropping famous surnames. To impress barmaids they showed their pistols, sliding back the breech, and told stories about the PM stumbling about under the weather again…In Canberra where secrets were released like pigeons the Colonel used the old racehorse-owner's trick to drum in the importance of silence. ‘If you let three people in on a secret, how many people have you told?’ He raised three fingers. ‘One hundred and eleven.’ He stared at his team. (And what he saw: Stan Still trimming his nails with his Swiss army knife, Rust yawning, Jimmy shivering under his horse blanket; only Polaroid, on loan from Washington, nodded in a sort of approving way, and the solemn head of Shadbolt there, immobile with respect.)
At least Irving Polaroid appeared to resist the general amateur informality. He kept to himself and kept his nose clean, which implied to Shadbolt he knew more than anyone else. He seemed slightly foreign: just a shade here and there in the smoothness of skin and haircut. He used some sort of talcum powder. When Shadbolt pointed to his engraved fraternity ring, which featured an eagle tearing the eyes out of a wild bear, Polaroid shifted the chewing gum in his mouth and said ‘Free Speech’, as if everybody knew. And although they spent much time together on the streets and in foyers, Shadbolt found him simply too pale, remote. He didn't even have stories to tell. Between shifts he whispered into his tape recorder, and then lay on his bed in boxer undershorts, reading a paperback, his shirt neatly on a hanger among the souvenirs, photographic equipment and electrical goods. Shadbolt concluded the American wanted to be back home where the weirdos, assassins and assailants, and their intended public victims, were clearly defined. There was something happening every day back in the States. Whereas in Australia…
In Adelaide, Vern Hartnett stumbled.
There was a right and a wrong, nothing else. He believed that; it became his strength, the inner at harmony with the outer. He had erected a life around it, a world of factual matter, always verifiable.
Vern left everything else out. Nothing in between that which was ‘black and white’ (Vern's early use of the term) was allowed. And now he found himself in the wro
ng.
The facts and figures (and commas, hyphens, caps—) carefully assembled and preserved throughout his fifty-thereabout years, such a compression of swirling knowledge-particles, no longer matched, or only partly matched, their images and the sequence of images, even though he sometimes felt sure they did. The world at arm's length stippled into a blur. It became mostly mirage. At a loss, Vern bumped against other people (trod on toes), stumbled against dogs and mudguards, his own furniture and precious assumptions.
Only a few things could be verified. These he held onto, and tried to work out the rest.
Gradually he was moved sideways on the newspaper until he was no longer on the page. He retired prematurely to his house among the shadows in the Hills, ‘overlooking’ the city. An extra-gentleness enveloped him, itself a form of blurring.
As a tribute to Hartnett's years of loyal service, which had ruined a perfectly good pair of blue-green eyes, the Advertiser management presented him with a brass clock encased in mulga, and following a tip-off from the malicious typesetters the editor sent out an up-and-coming young feature writer to interview him among his statues. Years later in a paddy-field in South-East Asia this reporter would drown wide-eyed in his own blood; in Vern Hartnett's backyard he looked more like a surveyor in his moleskins as he jotted down Vern's identification of each figure and what exactly made them so special. Vern sounded Irish when he claimed that statues were a sign of a healthy society. He called them ‘touchstones’. Passing his hands over the eyes, lips and torsos of these far-sighted men, he drew from their strength a strange contentment. He conversed with them and asked questions, addressing them formally, with respect. Recently he had come to a difficult decision. It occupied his mind for months; he had every reason to string it out, embroidering the problem. During the casting of McBee's tram, so many lumps of molten bronze had spilt over Vern had managed to pick up enough dirt-cheap to cast one more exemplary figure. There was standing room between Nicholas Jensen and Light. After much soul-searching and involvement of his best-friends Wheel-right and Flies, who read out entries in encyclopaedias and proposed their own candidates—Kurt Schwitters, who had immortalised tram tickets, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill (quickly discarded for local reasons)—he narrowed the list down to Benjamin Franklin, Epicurus and a late runner, Roger Bacon for his dubious achievements in optics.
