Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  In this way Shadbolt acquired an extensive collection of fountain pens, monogrammed spoons, ashtrays and native fauna carved in sandalwood. He was given wooden bowls, spears and plastic replicas of state monuments. These he distributed to Polaroid who eagerly added them to the stratigraphic metals encrusting his bed. The astrological charts from India were posted off without explanation to his mother, and the East African tea-towels screen-printed with charging elephants he left with Harriet, and another set to Karen, whom he happened to see in the street. All he kept for himself were the autographed photographs, quite a pile of those, and a thermometer set in soapstone, presented personally by a bewildered Eskimo leader, a really nice little bloke. These Shadbolt put with his birth certificate and the handtinted photographs of his grandfather in Egypt in a shoebox at the bottom of the metal wardrobe.

  Beginning in the mid-sixties…it became the practice to join forces with visiting bodyguards, the fly-by-night Mexies and tough little Filipinos and north-east Asians, who never used a deodorant and introduced an extra dimension in inscrutability. Light and his men often found themselves in a subordinate position—taking orders from the Japs, the Yanks setting up their radio gear and field-hospital in the dormitory—and Stan Still, for one, didn't like it.

  ‘What does Einstein here say?’ he asked.

  Shadbolt gave his standard, ‘Eh?’

  Without moving a muscle it could mean any number of things. He hadn't thought about the problem. He went along as before, getting on with the job.

  Did the US Secretary of State or his sidekick visit Australia late 1964? It was from the crewcut Americans Shadbolt learnt the technique of running backwards while whispering into a walkie-talkie—not as easy as it looks—and how to spot the pallor of an ex-prisoner and the perspiration of the about-to-be assassin. Polaroid introduced him to these crack Americans, and he saw them talking together, watching him.

  Standing on special running-boards manufactured by the Mercedes Benz company or General Motors, Shadbolt became a reincarnation of his father working his way along the outside of trams. His position though was more unpredictable. There were no regular stops. The aim was to escort the Head of Government in profile in a steady sliding motion, the way a coin is passed before a sceptical crowd, yet rapid enough to foil a sniper on a rooftop aiming to intersect his hairline sights. If congestion developed up ahead, if traffic lights happened to turn amber, if a cadet policeman fainted in front, any sign of delay—it could be a trick—the limousine accelerated, hitting 50 or 60 to avoid a standstill situation, with Shadbolt's huge dishevelled figure hanging on, wind bulging his eyelids and hair, a rate of knots the Adelaide trams never reached.

  An autocrat instinctively feels at home in a black limousine.

  These were supplied from a central car pool in Australia, but in the busy season there were not always enough black ones to go around. Sometimes they were just ordinary Ford models. The wealthiest industrial powers and their famine-infested client states at the opposite end of the scale indulged in the imperial luxury of freighting in their own custom-built Lincolns, Daimlers, Mercedes, and were driven at a special low speed along the avenues, motorcycle escort fore and aft.

  The funereal pace of the processions matched the appearance of the specially elongated limousines. With large areas of glass some even had the miniature white curtains. And like hearses they were driven by motionless men in discreet uniforms. Everybody also knew the glass and the body panels were proofed against bullets, and so a monarch, president or PM slowly passing appeared to be giving a mobile demonstration of their transcendence over death, for there they were sitting up in a hearse and waving, their faces simplified by fame, ‘See I'm alive, and I'm moving. I'm existing through all time.’ For the same reason the pale autocrat is given flowers and instinctively favours dark clothing. Up front the police on polished motorbikes cleared a path into the future, while a full complement of stone-faced bodyguards on either side increased the illusion: by searching the crowd with their eyes they distanced the leader further from the crowd. And in their wake stumbled the retinue of foodtasters, hairdressers, quacks, confidential advisers, personal photographers, money changers and protocol specialists.

  ‘Eh?’

  It continued to be Shadbolt's answer (up to late '65). The others sitting around a bed took it to mean ‘No.’

  That was about all he could come out with flat on his back at the end of the day, his elbow forming a V across his eyes. Otherwise he really appreciated the call for a card game or sharing a schooner, even if it meant looking on, to one side. Normally—and everybody knew—he'd do anything for anybody, anytime.

  Amazing what a few years of running and squinting into the sun along with all the untold gallons of moisture lost could do to a body. The effort had left him with an enlarged jaw and nose. He remained tall but gauntness had taken over, which made him plainer still, leaving his basic honesty, a form of solemn clumsiness, exposed as bones.

  Exhausted, he lay in the Nissen hut emitting body heat and flatulence, his mind ticking over (blood flooding the map of Shadbolt's brain). It always took a while for the perspective of the never-ending streets to fade, and the steady pounding of his feet, the faces passing left and right, the tilt of buildings as he turned a corner…the trouble with exhaustion…and these days he was always on call…until at a late hour the murmurings and the wireless static died down from the other beds, and the moonlight on the corrugated ceiling slowly intersected into the shadows of Harriet's hypnotic hip, giving a pearly lustre to the cold iron, and further along there the pubic corners and armpits adjoining what appeared to be her raised knee. He couldn't think straight. The figure he knew twisted in his mind, a difficult comfort. Her sudden indifference towards him and everybody else confused him. She was always a series of intricate promises, unfolding, near and far, and he missed her. Whenever possible he wangled Sydney assignments: usually the exhausting run in from the airport on the uneven first-settlement surfaces. It attracted little attention from the others, for he raised his hand for just about everything. He didn't know what else to do with his time.

  The beds were fixed points of reference in the sea of semiconsciousness: horizontal planes from where each man could travel out, and return to, from the outside. A bed's function was altered and accumulated by every one of them. It became armchair, desk, table, bar, safe, gambling-strip and daydreaming place; islands of tranquillity, of wall-less privacy, always there, in the iron and concrete dormitory.

  On this Sunday morning, late, Shadbolt removed his elbow from his eyes and more out of habit than interest reached down and picked up the latest news of world events, air-mailed by Vern. Which is how he saw—and sat up in bed—the final superimposed image of Sid Hoadley before he too faded from the public eye (finishing in a single paragraph several years later, when Shadbolt wasn't around to see it: a matter-of-fact mention of an epicurean's final stroke on a footbridge in Canberra, mourned by veiled women; and barely a mention of the skills he'd applied to Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior).

  ‘Ambassador makes splash in desert’ ran the Garamond bold in a poor use of mixed metaphor. A photograph showed him dancing the limbo with a legendary belly-dancer, perspiration patches spreading into Tasmania from both armpits of his bush shirt, as he ogled the huge artificial diamond set in her navel.

  Doesn't that rare commodity, the dignity of a nation, suffer when its representative displays a lack of dignity? Doesn't its carefully built-up image of subtlety, a nation's treading of the judicious long-view, become suspect? Shouldn't the official envoy practise a policy of‘formal informality’? Certainly nothing after midnight in the kasbah!

  But Shadbolt saw none of this. The sight of Hoadley's cheesy flash of optimism triggered a fit of appreciative grinning and eyebrow lifting, tightening the tanned skin around his skull, the phrenology of leader-worship, too plain and innocent for the fancy nightspots in town.

  A second, enlarged shot had Hoadley performing a more t
raditional task. More than most ambassadors it seems he had this obsession for building bridges—between men and women, city and country, words and action, the imagination and fact—but with hardly a drop of water in Egypt, aside from the Nile, and the concrete contractors holding their palms out for backsheesh, he promoted the ideal in a more symbolic and subtle manner, by introducing and dispensing—at no cost to the Egyptians—a dozen fully grown red kangaroos. At the ceremony under a cloudless sky Ambassador Hoadley without necktie bellowed out something along the lines of Egypt and Austrylia being ‘sister-deserts’. He tried cracking a few jokes. But there was so much space beginning there at the outskirts of Cairo, such an infinity of porous sand, his white-man's pun about ‘you might have the Suez, but at least we've got sewers’ barely carried above the whining of beggars and cacophony of car horns (not reported in the normally loyal Advertiser. his generous mental note to offer the Egyptian government a free set of Hoadley & Sons loudspeakers). With a pair of French milliner's scissors he cut the ribbon, and after a little prodding the first big reds clutch-started out of their crates onto Egyptian soil and hopped about in front of the pyramids—a startling juxtaposition which sent the camels roaring and slipping their nose pegs.

  The kangaroos cleared out to freedom, looking in vain for a blade of grass.

  Ambassador Hoadley stood beaming in the foreground, the fuzz on his chest glowing in the sun. One eye—yes, Shadbolt wasn't wrong—was fixed on a cheeky young thing in wide trousers selling postcards from a tray. Hoadley's face had puffed up, his full-blooded lips rolled back loose and moist. His smile came on too early. It showed on the page.

  The Ambassador had gone native, his white linen jacket already soiled around the lapels.

  Shadbolt then brought the photographs closer. In the background of both he noticed the same figure in black, Shadbolt's photographic memory easily penetrating the veil and powder, first identifying the wart on the nose, then the general ample shape, the proprietorial gaze.

  As became his habit lately Irving Polaroid looked over his shoulder.

  Shadbolt pointed, ‘That's my old landlady from Manly, Mrs Younghusband.’

  Polaroid took the paper and had to squint. Fossicking around he found a magnifying glass. It only made it worse.

  ‘You've got good eyes.’

  ‘I used to work for Senator Hoadley,’ Shadbolt was saying.

  ‘He was really something. Phenomenal man.’

  ‘We know him. But what's she doing there?’

  Shadbolt held out his hand, ‘Give it here when you've finished. I don't have a photograph.’

  He wanted to look at it again.

  Rust and Stan Still had been in the service for as long as anyone could remember. They were figures from the fifties. They didn't believe in what was going on now. Their faces were curiously worn, although they left Shadbolt to do most of the running.

  Out of embarrassment and because he felt he had to, Shadbolt laughed at their harshness towards foreigners, the weather and mug-politicians, and then he'd move away.

  It was difficult to make out Stan Still at the end of the dormitory; there'd only be his smoker's cough between his steady belly-aching to Rust.

  ‘His time's up soon,’ Rust nodded at Polaroid's empty bed. ‘And we'll get landed with some other tin-tank.’

  ‘The no-hopers always make a beeline for this place.’

  ‘What do you mean? You're forgetting Tarzan down there’—Rust raising his voice for Shadbolt's benefit. ‘Old Bill's right-hand man.’

  ‘I'm talking about the whole fucking country, beginning with the poor bloody convicts. We end up getting those who are at the end of the line. Take the architect who drew up this Godforsaken capital. He'd have to be a Yank who couldn't make it in his own place.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Anyone could be critical. It didn't much interest Shadbolt.

  Jimmy remained in the shadows. Sometimes he coughed, reminding everybody. Shadbolt liked Jimmy. He enjoyed sitting around with him or watching him in the kennels.

  ‘So what are you up to? How's it going?’

  To everything he said Jimmy laughed. It was a natural laugh, widening his cheeks, displaying a yellowing set of nutcrackers. And it made Shadbolt standing there begin grinning and nodding. If nobody else was around Jimmy would open a bottle of beer from under the bed.

  Loyal to the Colonel, Jimmy didn't take much notice of the others. Stan Still and Rust complained loudly about his preferential treatment. According to them the Colonel treated Jimmy ‘lightly’.

  On days off when Shadbolt reached the clearing on Black Mountain he often found Jimmy there doing odd jobs. Jimmy could make a really good beef stew.

  ‘What have you tossed in the pot today? Possum? Witchetty grub?’ If the Colonel wasn't making affectionate banter he spoke to Jimmy quietly and gently.

  The three would sit on the one log gazing at their palms or the ground. Silence seemed to be the right approach in the clearing where the colours, from dry brown to grey, sucked out any possible word.

  Shadbolt felt so contented there he wondered whether he shouldn't live like the Colonel, out in the open in the bush. Waving at some flies he almost said or blurted as much, ‘We've got all the time in the world!’ Later he made some faint car noises, gear changes, which the others seemed to find soothing.

  It was the day the Colonel cleared his throat and drew something with a stick. Shadbolt had stood up to leave.

  ‘That bit of skirt of yours in Manly, time you stopped frigging about with her.’

  ‘Ar, old Harriet. She's all right.’

  He was about to say she never wore skirts. But when he glanced up the Colonel was actually laughing, ‘No, no, no!’ Passing behind a branch the sun had clouded his face the way weather changes across a continent.

  What's her name—Harriet—was trouble. ‘We know her from way back. She's a permanent suspect. We've always been suspicious of that one. Now she's been writing letters to the PM. She's as mad as a meat axe.’ OK? Females anyway were a blasted nuisance. They introduce confusion, divide loyalties. ‘And I ought to know.’

  For the first time Light placed a hand on his shoulder, and a wad of loyalty caught in Shadbolt's throat.

  On the next visit to Sydney Shadbolt did the run in from the airport. It was late afternoon: light traffic. Peculiar to hot countries the angled shadows and heat conducted by brick, glass and earth measured time in slow decades rather than the hour, and even office girls going home in their thin cottons looked old. Dwelling on Light's ultimatum Shadbolt ran automatically, preoccupied; pulling up outside the four-star hotel near the Quay, he found Rust, Stan Still and Jimmy and the dingoes had all fallen by the wayside. It must have been the heat. Although you would have thought…Squelching in his sandshoes he alone had to muscle past the lowering and scraping concierge with the mnemonic nose, clearing a path for the head-of-state from Burma or some other humid country in an admiral's uniform, leading a troika of pomeranians, as if he owned the place.

  Shadbolt was left standing, a wreck. In the foyer other guests stepped back from his body-heat. From behind a newspaper Polaroid in his drip-dry suit gave a nod of approval. He also would have been impressed by Shadbolt's obliviousness to the surroundings.

  Outside in the hot air the clammy weight of the .38 in leather shoulder holster tilted Shadbolt to one side. For a second he wondered if he was getting too old for this line of work. He didn't notice, or didn't bother, when pedestrians tugged their children away…another country man in baggy suit who'd put away one too many. He fumbled in his side pockets for salt tablets. An hour later in Manly the familiar gables and pines failed to restore his spirits. He didn't want to see Harriet. Reaching the weather-board on the hill he became uncomfortable.

  Harriet stopped working.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘It's hot.’

  ‘I can see it's hot,’ she said sharply. He was avoiding her face.

  ‘It was hot where I was,
’ he said, loud for him.

  ‘I know, you must be exhausted.’

  They felt something for each other. Now simply respecting his presence, which broadened the rooms, not going back to her work as she did normally, she watched him.

  ‘Do you have a cold drink or something?’

  ‘You know where the fridge is…’

  With her it was he who felt like the invalid. Thick, unable to speak; something wrong with his tongue. As always she faced him full on, sharp in outline. She didn't need his help: it seemed to him. She was clear about things. Fumbling in the slippery fridge he decided there and then not to tell her. And it didn't mean going against the Colonel. He'd just not see her again, that's all. He'd steer clear of Manly. He wouldn't come to Sydney for a while. And the thought of her chatting away not knowing made him pity her. She did need him.

  ‘I hope you haven't left my fridge in a mess…’

  ‘I'm knackered,’ he said for something to say.

  Loosening his tie he could look the other way.

  ‘Sit here.’

  ‘Too hot.’

  Harriet sighed. This figure of a man who tagged along and doted on her always appeared out of focus.

  The cushions against Shadbolt's ears pleasantly acted as a pair of stockinged thighs which muffled Harriet's voice.

  ‘When you're not here, do you know what I do? I stop working and I think: I could stick a breadknife into his stomach. The one with the green handle. I could do that. And I suddenly feel like scratching your eyes. Does that frighten you? Does it make you nervous? I feel like punching your big head. You're thick! Sometimes I could—. I wonder why you bother coming here? You're not interested in me. Nothing affects you. You might as well be in China. With you it's like being with—I don't know. Are you happy? Has anything in your life made you angry?’