Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  The reporter was tolerant. Even Vern noticed he was amazingly good at nodding. He asked about next of kin and the loneliness of old age. Readers are interested in the human-interest angle. And the photograph did the rest.

  Many readers chewing on their morning toast recognised in Vern Hartnett, 56, the spectre of isolation; but it had the harshest impact on Shadbolt casually picking up the paper from the pile waiting for the Prime Minister. The photo ran across four columns. In a crumpled white shirt buttoned at the throat Vern stood pale among his pantheon, one hand resting on the bare shoulder of Epicurus (Polish artist's impression of), already jaundiced on account of the poor-quality bronze. The softness of Vern against the inflexible bronzes, the contrast between light and dark, made the photo compelling enough. But Shadbolt stared at Vern's expression. Milk-eyed and mouth open searching for the camera, and missing it by several degrees, Vern appeared as a fish out of water; his pale head and shoulders seemed to propel out from the page. He was innocent. He really didn't understand why he was being photographed. The Australian love for the oddball-character has bedevilled the newspapers, its art and literature. Sparrows and magpies intersected the late morning shadows, and the viticultural slope rose steeply, enclosing the yard, darker than Shadbolt remembered.

  On the same day a joint letter from Gordon Wheelright and Flies explained the situation, enclosing the feature article, ‘to put you in the picture’.

  Shadbolt didn't know what to say or do. Looking at the picture he felt something missing in himself. He saw Vein's decency; and he became aware of parts of his own decency. He always wanted to help. He imagined Vern now at home. And there was no one, except Harriet, he could tell about tins.

  He wrote to Vern. A letter slightly longer than usual. He made no mention of Vern's ‘loss of perception’, but enclosed a decent money order. Things were going well in Canberra, he was always on the go. Depending on the PM's plans he'd be getting over—underlined—to Adelaide soon.

  This is Australia, mid-1963…Women had stopped wearing Mondrian dresses. The vague portents of social discord were given voice by chaotic all-over fabric designs and a general slackening of discipline in the length of hems and the V of necklines. One step leading to another, until finally the women took to wearing voluminous dresses with high waislines; they appeared as a mass of walking pregnancies, as if predictably an entire empire had fallen.

  By then the neat little English saloons, namely the Morris Minors, Austins and Flies' Wolseley, which personified modesty and Methodism, were in the minority, and motorbikes and sidecars with their nicotine-coloured windows had turned into air-cooled curiosities pointed at by shrill children.

  Water finding its own level, the streets had become infested with the horizontal glidings of chrome-laden roadhogs, fully imported from the US of A, their lilac, silver or rose madder tail fins assuming truly imperial proportions. To match their animal aerodynamics these V/8s of optimism were given names to unlock daydreams of cloudless skies and phenomenal virility: Mustang, Falcon, Thunderbird, Rocket. Panting at the lights their huge exhaust pipes dribbled like fat penises; whenever Shadbolt saw the word Detroit he saw a tailpipe.

  Smaller versions were turned out by the local subsidiaries in the thousands, less powerful hybrids, not half as flash, the way a young hopeful man imitates the flamboyant neckties and speech of a successful brother, somehow missing the original essence. Bridges all over the country had to be widened. Garages lengthened. A free-marketeer such as Frank McBee saw the tidal shift in expectations begin in the metronomic arcing of his showroom doors. He was onto something here. He had a nose for mass appetites, a fifth sense. He could see people had an eye for two-tone colours and were tired of changing gears by hand. Many more women were beginning to drive. There was a run on white-walled tyres. Soft suspensions and the democratic bench seats spoke of the good life available to all. It was Frank McBee who'd suggested to GM they bring out a family station wagon.

  Wherever the eye fell the changes in the fabric could be seen. From the pulpits a connection was drawn to the nation's ‘moral fibre’. Every day Wheelright and Flies were picking up extravagant adjectives, the filtered butts and coloured plastics and what-not, all part of the tidal action. Except for the Hills and the parched parklands in summer, khaki had disappeared along with the trams. The colour actually made some people sick. At Vern's optometrist and the progressive barbers and dental surgeons, Reader's Digest and Life replaced the traditional battered copies of Punch.

  After his visit to the camp Shadbolt often turned up without invitation. He enjoyed being with the Colonel. Together they had this ability to sit for hours on end staring at the fire or their palms, without a word; Shadbolt accepted silence just as he did any one of Light's true-life stories, or the retelling of the one about the half-sisters (‘It was the damnedest thing…’). At intervals words came out as boots stepping on branches, and those that followed fell with a special, isolated gravity.

  One morning, a Saturday, late November, Shadbolt was helping the Colonel decoke the Vauxhall among the trees. The spanners made clinking sounds against the metal. Otherwise the stringybarks and scribbly gums angled with dry twigs and the hum of the bush insulated them from the rest of the world. Faintly, a muffled car horn and then a truck with a whining diff managed to penetrate. Even so the city below sounded unnaturally quiet.

  Certain barriers had broken down between Light and his underling. It was made tangible and exaggerated by leaning shoulder-to-shoulder with their arms inside an engine. Each gave the other instructions.

  They were straining undoing a rusted nut. ‘Do you have a woman?’ the Colonel suddenly asked. And before Shadbolt could answer: ‘That's right, I was forgetting.’

  The Colonel went over to his tent to find some music. He had this weakness for the marches of Elgar.

  ‘Crikey,’ Shadbolt heard him say. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he shouted, adjusting a wireless held together by fencing wire, hardly helping the static.

  As Shadbolt lifted out the manifold and dripping carburettor he saw the map of Europe reflected in trees and clouds on the windscreen.

  ‘Kennedy's dead. They've shot the President.’

  Struggling with the fat legs of the manifold Shadbolt couldn't give the news his full attention. ‘That's no good,’ he said through his teeth.

  The Colonel was always being reminded of his divided loyalties: he looked down now at one pearly white hand, the other black with grease. If life itself was as straightforward…Engine parts lay scattered on the tarp draping the bonnet of the disabled Vauxhall. At a time when he was needed in the capital he found himself marooned on the mountain.

  ‘I'm going to have to walk it,’ he bit his bottom lip.

  The powers-that-be would need reassuring. With Irving Polaroid, the ‘exchange American’, holding the fort, God knows what sort of state-of-emergency measures he'd be pushing through.

  The epoch of paranoia reached the shores of Australia, as in the outer edges of a magnetic field. Faint spectre of dread took the form of a series of rippled streetscapes without colour. People went around in a state of shock. And then, to think, before anyone could catch their breath the pale suspect with the Chinese Christian name has—another screened image—life blasted out of him in an inrush of pain by some nightclub owner, hunched shoulders, wearing the respectable Stetson of a businessman. There it was: proof first tiling in the morning. Who's going to be next? For a few days there was the feeling anything could happen. The structure on which the continuation of the world was based had been broken, leaving a gap.

  From the bush capital where the town plan radiated stability or instability in strong or weak waves the shock of the killings was digested and recycled in acceptable local form. The old values of continuity and place were reasserted the way a large man settles in a comfortable armchair and hears the springs creak. Visually, it encouraged a collective pursing of lips. Individual acts became suspect. At the same time crowds were not to be trusted. It was ar
ound then, in 1963, that ‘Eh?’ with its associations of non-commitment and not-knowing became Shadbolt's answer to just about everything.

  The PM's bulk stood out before people's eyes, his eyebrows speaking of experience and wisdom, draped in reassuring merino cloth. Deliberately he slowed his movements down.

  Eight days after the assassination the Prime Minister's coalition of dunk- and look-alikes was re-elected with an increased majority. And a few months later, in 1964, sensing this general instinct for stability, R. G. Amen switched from the American Cadillac and all its associations with the irrational, and went about in a sedate new Bentley, also black, where he should have been all along. (And the Cadillac? Knocked down to a resourceful beekeeper who used it to transport hives, something of an aerial electorate in miniature, swarming around a Queen and secret ballot boxes.)

  Originally Shadbolt's size had appeared a disadvantage. Polaroid kept saying he'd stick out in a crowd; no doubt about it. But—local knowledge!—his height was counterbalanced by the expressionless helpful head and his assorted antipodean knuckles and elbows, so archetypal, quintessentially factual, that Shadbolt standing in the street, or even running, became virtually invisible.

  Wearing regulation sunglasses in the shape of emu eggs, which transformed the most innocent street scene into a twilight of intrigue, and equipment of his own choosing, Dunlop sandshoes in need of a clean, Shadbolt ran alongside the longest-running Prime Minister, one eye scanning ahead and the other covering the footpath and rooftops. He was on the street, rain or shine, public holidays included; and if the PM indulged his love of oratory in the greenery of a garden fete, or impulsively allowed himself to be mobbed inside a town hall, Shadbolt stood to one side, searching the crowd like an auctioneer for the slightest giveaway movement.

  That was how he appeared in the background of newsreels, out of focus, and how Vern and Harriet spotted his apparition, cropped at the shoulder, in the papers.

  In the mechanical tone peculiar to the business Shadbolt ‘had settled into stride’. He got the job done, no mucking about.

  Irving Polaroid was impressed; and that was something. Ever since the wounds self-inflicted by his nation the American's opinions were accorded special deference. Nothing like the Dallas assassination had happened on Australian soil, not even the spearing of Captain Cook, and although Polaroid had been asleep in a corrugated-iron shed in Canberra at the time, vestiges of the experience had obviously entered him. Bodyguarding in the US had since become a highly skilled, horizontally mobile profession, offering opportunities to be seen to be alert, pokerfaced and broadshouldered. There was talk of colleges, Harvard and Austin or somewhere, offering bachelor degree courses on the subject. When Polaroid made his deep-throated recommendations into his tape recorder or wrote memos with a transparent ballpoint—the first to be seen in Australia—government bodies in Canberra sat up and paid attention. Colonel Light anyway concentrated on general reconnaissance, his specially, and the basically amateurish obsession of training the dingoes, said in the bush to be untrainable; he was always mucking about in the dusty kennels with Jimmy—keeping aloof from the day-to-day operations.

  The techniques of ‘cluster’ protection with its derivation from ‘Custer’ had been perfected during the big vice-Presidential tours of Latin America, and Polaroid, who was always receiving highly classified advice from Washington, adapted it to Australian conditions. And when the PM in the immaculate Bentley drove along the streets with the entourage running alongside in ‘cluster’ formation, Jimmy and his pack of dingoes bringing up the rear, Irving Polaroid couldn't believe it when pedestrians and other drivers barely looked twice—at their own Prime Minister. Some even made a point of averting their eyes from what they considered to be a load of melodramatic rubbish. On the job Shadbolt found that pedestrians stepped aside as if he was merely running for a bus, and more than once after knocking an old lady over and squatting to pick up the contents of her handbag—reproducing anthropological images of Wheelright and gentle Flies—was told, ‘Go on, dear, get going. You'll be late for work.’ At traffic lights a bod would sidle up and ask for directions or the time or a match, and although talking was strictly forbidden Shadbolt would shout back instructions as they began moving, barking his shins against stationary fenders and bumper bars. He was good-natured, would always give someone a hand. When the motorcade did attract attention it was smart alecks whistling or calling out wisecracks from taxis and building sites, or in Sydney, jokers outside hotels kneeling down giving salaams to the British Bentley passing—that kind of tiling—and kids suddenly running alongside with their kelpies and idiotic grinning. Everything was a joke. And Polaroid shook his head; he couldn't get over it.

  Otherwise nothing much happened, no sign of trouble; everything remained horizontal.

  There was a lot of waiting around in their line of work. The PM took little notice of the split-second itineraries devised by Polaroid and given the nod by the Colonel. It was up to them to follow him. As with Bradman, the master batsman, he always had time on his side. ‘The PM,’ explained an assistant without cracking a smile, ‘is not a morning person. What are you staring at?’

  Shadbolt saw a red face in the torch beam in the stalls of the Epic Theatre, caught with his pants down. Now he had a plum in his mouth and wore a rose.

  That was years ago.

  ‘Nothing, nothing…’

  Having trouble with his laces he put his foot on the bumper and double-knotted a bow.

  Sometimes while on the run Shadbolt felt compelled to glance inside the Bentley to see if the lanigerous leader was still alive. Between cigars it was difficult to tell. And after a good lunch the PM practised Sid Hoadley's old trick of looking down with his eyes shielded, whereas Shadbolt could see he was asleep with his mouth wide open. Along the bumpy arteries near the nation's airports, and once over the incredible wet tram tracks of Melbourne, his four chins vibrated to a frightening extent; it sometimes seemed to Shadbolt they were escorting a disintegrating statue.

  Successful and botched assassination attempts were meanwhile taking place every other day—everywhere but Australia.

  ‘But that's good, isn't it?’ Shadbolt said seriously.

  ‘Don't be stupid!’ Polaroid turned on him. Shadbolt had his plus-points but just then he could have punched the blank face, hard.

  ‘That's what's got me beat about you people here. Through negative thinking you think most things are positive. You all here wouldn't know real trouble if you tripped over it. What you've got here is only how you think trouble should be. It's like everything else. You haven't experienced it, no sir.’

  Whole days were taken up with the black Bentley driven around in circles with the nation's flag waving on the bonnet, and the full cluster of perspiring escorts running alongside, even though the PM was in Melbourne dining at the club. It was one of Polaroid's ideas: to act as a decoy, to break habits, keep everyone in trim. And when at last rumours circulated in near and far circles that R. G. Amen would be stepping aside, so many pretenders went about in dark suits and silver neckties, smiling and nodding and waving, their faces anxiously hoping to be PM, it became difficult to find the real one, especially on night-shift in the half dark.

  It certainly didn't make Shadbolt's job any easier. And then there were the flying visits from friendly Heads of Government (HOGs). In the sixties these began to pick up following the increased reliability of aeroplane jet engines.

  They flocked down during the Northern Hemisphere winter or when things got too hot at home, responding to long-forgotten invitations, the long journey, crossing Greenwich and Capricorn to the olfactory shape of paleness basking in its wide-openness, the longitude and latitude of innocence, where they knew a red tongue of welcome would be laid out on a patch of reinforced concrete, monarchs and generals scoring a fanfare of brass and kettledrums. Quite a traffic of visiting important persons built up; some came to lecture the new Prime Minister, and when three or four arrived simultaneously du
e to an intersection of circumstances—a record rice harvest somewhere freeing one dignitary, a successful election landslide (not many casualties) somewhere else—state-run Boeings circled like flies above the tin airport of Canberra, stretching protocol and the committees of handshakers to the limit.

  Every courtesy was extended to the Heads of Government, never mind their recent histories. (Why, some of them had stains on their hands and couldn't remove screams from their ears, the way a mechanic goes to bed with grease under his nails, while certain Latins with the pencil moustache had come simply to smuggle out merino breeders, while others…) That was the law laid down by the government, as interpreted by the Colonel, adept at turning a blind eye; and Shadbolt had little trouble following it.

  So many autocrats came and went during the mid-sixties Light and his crew scarcely had any rest; even the experiments with the dingoes had to be suspended. Shadbolt seemed to never stop running. No sooner did his body begin to go cold than he had to start up again. To the anxious foreigners he stood out head and shoulders from the rest; some of them had never seen anyone like him. Panting and perspiring like a horse the huge no-nonsense shape was always there, blinking in the rain, or during heat waves when the roads melted, half-blocking out the sun, the only one still running at the end. And more than once he single-handedly held back protesters who'd broken through the barriers, shouting in languages he didn't understand. At the finish of their grand tour it was the tradition for the leaders to shake hands on the tarmac with the Prime Minister's representative, and in short mechanical steps go around shaking every hand in sight. Reaching Shadbolt, assigned to guard their exposed backs for the last few seconds in Australia, they paused and looking up at Mt Lofty enquired politely after his family (‘Yes, sir. They're all OK.’), or made a friendly crack about his height to indicate their gratitude, before snapping their manicured fingers at their underlings crowding behind.