by Murray Bail
She was about to cry, which happened lately, for no apparent reason. Still he didn't move. He didn't know what to say. Something in him prevented him getting—feeling—close to her. It had always been like that. It was partly because he didn't talk or think much through his tongue. He had lost his use of it.
Whenever he called he found no one else there. This Harriet was always alone, curved over the angled board, a conflict of lines, illuminated by the lamp. She had small shoes. Other people found her difficult.
And because now he had decided it would be his last visit Shadbolt transferred this knowledge, prematurely to her; and so he was surprised, alarmed even, at what appeared to be her recklessness.
He opened his eyes to find her face an inch from his nose, something she did when they were fooling around. She always had warm breath as if she'd been eating honey, which he usually found attractive. This time she asked softly, ‘Think. Why don't you make up your own mind for once in your life? Why are you doing this to me?’
‘What do you mean?’ Shadbolt gave a start.
‘Never mind.’
Harriet's legs twisted away in a flapping tail, and lines pulled her face down to one side, widening her eyes.
He was patient and quiet, always. She knew he watched her.
‘I'm sorry,’ she suddenly lost control. ‘I don't know why. I don't know what I mean.’ She blew her nose. ‘Stay here tonight?’
Shadbolt looked faraway. His feet had been thudding along the uneven streets from the airport. It was a strange mechanical way to make a living. He didn't know what else to do. He nodded, ‘You know me.’
The Americans who made the flying visits were as lean and as clean-cut as Polaroid. They wore the short-sleeved shirt fitted with special clips for ballpoints and sunglasses, and had perfected a technique of conversing without moving their lips. There was a lot of exchange going on, co-operation between allies; a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. They flew in for a day or two whenever they liked, even when there was no state visit. Among his own kind Irving became almost excited, showing them around, and did his best to answer their questions without moving his lips.
Rust and Stan Still looked on with sarcastic interest. They didn't make a special effort.
And for different reasons Shadbolt didn't feel the need to impress them. The Americans weren't so crash-hot. Shaking the hand of one—Hank, Harv or Scott—he felt the hand begin squeezing hard, evidently one of their tests, and maintaining eye-contact, Shadbolt returned the pressure, and as the man suddenly hunched his shoulders and gasped he matched the dark-suited bodyguard crawling over the boot of the President's accelerating Lincoln. ‘Dallas,’ Shadbolt let go. ‘You were there.’
Flicking his bruised hand as if he'd received a burn the man turned to Polaroid, ‘Who told him?’
‘What did I tell you?’ Irving smiled.
Similar miracles were being performed by Shadbolt's mother with tea leaves.
Narrowing his eyes the American returned to Shadbolt, ‘You tell me.’
Shadbolt shrugged. For more than a year Life's, sequence of the assassination had been pinned up over the washbasin in the dormitory, and almost every day he'd looked up and seen the figure.
Outside the pattern was similar. There was this problem of low numbers, Australia's population, and all concentrated on one side of the continent—the factor which had once guaranteed the growth of Hoadley & Son loudspeakers—and because Shadbolt kept moving horizontally while everybody else remained more or less in place he kept bumping into people he had seen somewhere else.
Sharing the running-board of the King of Siam's Cadillac with Polaroid, Shadbolt, to fill in time, had identified in quick succession the American ambassador behind sunglasses laughing with Frank McBee there in the GM dealer's Buick (‘Now what were they—?’), Mrs Joy Shoulders down from the country, the jockey-looking driver who'd taken his job in the car pool, the lucky Lithuanian who'd won a big lottery, and a defrocked pervert of Catholic schoolgirls released on bail whose mugshot had appeared in the papers on Tuesday. Alongside the car in traffic and pushing through flag-waving crowds Polaroid kept smiling and frowning at his elbow, ‘Say, how do you do that? That's pretty amazing.’ To amuse Irving, and for nothing better to say, Shadbolt went on and in the space of twenty minutes reeled off half a dozen more faces, including the perspiring geography teacher from Broken Hill sitting on a suitcase outside Canberra's jerrybuilt airport, and another of Hoadley's still-loyal constituents, Miss Hilda Somebody from McKinley Street, and the leonine features of the physical fitness man from Manly, a mobile demonstration of his photographic memory all the more impressive for its matter-of-factness, as he did it partly running backwards, although none identified was a known radical or possible agitator.
Often Shadbolt had noticed Polaroid with a group of Americans looking at him and nodding. In the street jogging in cluster formation he'd see one on a corner or leaning out from behind a eucalypt with a stopwatch. They stood out with added clarity from the up-and-coming local men trying out the Windsor knot and a boyish cleanliness, doing their best to generate a kind of mechanical expansiveness.
There were so many lookalikes on that side of Australia. The place hadn't settled down. It wasn't itself, not yet. Alex Screech had explained that on stage one day. A good many faces still didn't know which way to turn, which way to look. In addition, new faces straight out of newsreels from other parts of the world were constantly arriving and squinting into the glare, trying to get the right expression. It was a matter of filling in the blanks. A number of cabinet Ministers, lawyers and graziers settled on the comforts of the salt-and-pepper moustache and the old-boy's tie and what-not, combing their silver locks straight back to look like your average Westminster Minister or some florid fogy in the know from the City; a surprising number turning red in the face in the late sixties. Why, there were wives in Canberra and still more in marvellous Melbourne who had opted for the spitting image of Her Majesty the Queen, forgetting the straight lines of their jaws, and the sunset spreading from their lips. Bowties were tried experimentally with pleasant crinkles around the eyes. For a while the crewcut took off like wildfire. Getting onto middle age some men tried out the languid sentence and arm movement which wasn't at all the same as being naturally relaxed.
On the run Shadbolt had to work overtime making the transference of associations. The imported props of cigar, V for victory sign, walking stick and pink complexion always had to be removed from a pugnacious shortlegged man to establish the original Frank McBee. Moving about in casual clothing formerly famous faces unscreened into wrinkled, almost anonymous faces. Or else they had been ironed out, into nothing at all. It took Shadbolt a good second or two of blinking to attach their surnames. Polaroid or the Colonel sometimes called through the walkie-talkies for Shadbolt to make an identification, someone they couldn't place. A clue might be a mnemonic of nostrils like the apertures in the modernist air terminal architecture he'd later see in America. On the lawns outside the Department of Agriculture he saw the sallow projectionist with the erratic political opinions sauntering along with both hands in his pockets, and reported it without feeling to the Colonel, always alert to any ‘intelligence’. (‘What man is that? The Epic Theatre? Tell the others.’)
In the horizontally mobile late-sixties people began spilling out like peas from their four-door cars to inspect the shadowless circles and monuments of Canberra, their capital. And in constantly coming across faces which naturally all came from the recent and distant past Shadbolt appeared to be standing still when he was actually running, breathing through his clenched teeth.
Near the Bureau of Statistics he saw a balding car maniac from his youth, yanking and shouting at his grubby offspring, all with eyelashes dipped in beer froth, and lagging behind in a package tour the metalwork teacher with startling white hair, instantly sending Shadbolt back to the streets of Adelaide, the old Hills in camouflage browns, lazy days, the backwards and forwards metal of cars, and their dark
house of creaking floorboards in the street of box hedges and jacaranda; and as he kept going through the unfolding official scenery he felt his legs thicken and slow. He set his jaw quite firmly past nondescript faces repeated from previous crowds, or a man remembered for an unusual scar, barely giving them a glance, and then on a pedestrian crossing he suddenly had to avoid a mannish woman in a wheelchair who immediately began nagging him as the one who had planted herself in front of him in an Adelaide cemetery, at least trying to understand him, as pigeons flew home in premature victory formation.
He was running around Vernon Circle doing it nicely—Black Mountain on left, lunch hour crowd, the PM seated a few paces away with some bloodshot Commonwealth leader in a kepi—when at a glance his photographic memory identified beneath the shade of the hat laden with varnished fruit someone he'd almost forgotten, or rather, only saw through the vagaries of swaying curtains, darkness and perfume. That was her, the usherette-neighbour from Adelaide: no longer a redhead and now losing her precision. Then she was gone. Or rather had passed. It was enough to repeat her paleness framed by the sash-window. A lesson in geography; his wonderment which had never left him and which had eventually led him to Harriet. No one else. And he returned to a position behind his distant best-friends, Les Flies and Wheelright wearing shorts, crouching over rubbish and mother-of-pearl in the gutters: the declared exactness of their absorption at odds with the usherette's casual nakedness, at odds with his own blankness. He was conscious of his blankness. Regularly he found himself looking over their shoulders, even after they had died—suddenly, within a week of each other. As he kept going the thin features of his own mother with the motor-cycle initials became as blurred as the telegraph poles, almost indecipherable. He remembered one morning outside Parliament House McBee had said, ‘I don't know what's got into your mother. Whew, she's up in the clouds.’
As in the streets the people he knew remained distant, out of reach to Shadbolt. There was vagueness on his part. With an engine, or tackling a job, at least he knew the approach. Otherwise he never had much to say; he saw little point. He realised this. It even baffled him. His own personality didn't interest him. That was one of the things Harriet had hissed at him.
At the same time he took little notice of what went on around him. Difficult to decide between one thing and the other; his mind often remained a blank.
The future stretched ahead in light and shade, interrupted by trees, intersections, other objects. There was congestion, emptiness. The impression of moving forward in time had built up gradually.
He was approaching the mid-point in his life. Looking around he didn't know what else to do. He kept going, in various stages of exhaustion. Frank McBee's face triggered a slow-motion shuffle of alloy aeroplane noses, of car wrecks and somersaulting AJS at the intersection, the world of dismantled objects, which in turn rapidly scissored into overlapping patterns by the fingers of Harriet. He kept seeing her in shadow, and wondered how he should have treated her. Moments of their time together passed. Frank McBee appeared through the flyscreen door as the original khaki corporal, composed as many small parts, waiting, and again, as a nobody, lying on his bed in his underpants, a younger man blowing smoke rings to the oppressively low ceiling. And jogging in his sandshoes alongside the Bentley Shadbolt would give a bit of a smile. Light caught him at it on the job on Anzac Parade and pointed his arm and forefinger out from the Vauxhall. Funny about Frank. Typical! How from the neon of commercialism he had perfected the knack of superimposing himself onto someone else's motorcade, gaining a visual advantage at someone's expense. From McBee he'd first heard the phrase, ‘Never give a sucker an even break.’ The last time Shadbolt saw him in public was standing solemnly behind the new single-syllable PM on a podium at Griffith. They waved flies from their flaming noses in tandem. There any resemblance ended. The inexperienced PM faced the wind, a mouth wide open in a crescent of innocence, biting chunks from the sky. Close enough to be in frame Frank McBee wore the dark suit and waistcoat, although it must have been ninety in the shade, while the horizon line of his mouth maintained the bulldog glare. Something about the familiar figure—McBee—missed out. He might have been dropped down from the sky. And as Shadbolt watched he saw signs of the original larrikinism, Frank McBee's Achilles heel. He could never quite toe the fine. Is there room in a sophisticated, modern world for brazen informality, the semi-rural ratbag? Catching sight of the bodyguard, Frank McBee slowly raised his hands in surrender and winked, a signal of his limitation, setting loose a proletariat grinning in Shadbolt, making the PM falter and reveal still more of his teeth, as parts of the audience couldn't help laughing.
On the streets, in the front of crowds, the mechanical shape of Shadbolt moved forward with such regularity and multiplied further in all directions, in newspapers and on the screen, people barely noticed him. Shadbolt was part of a congestion of images. He was always there, in the corner of the eye; he'd always help out. That's what he was there for. And native generosity spread out in his elbows, nape and knuckles—his hooded eyes: a forward-moving gauntness.
He could keep running for years; and because he spent half his time running time itself speeded up.
Karen… there in the back seat of a Minister's car (the driver squatting like an Aborigine in the shade, tracing patterns with a stick, as he himself had countless times), and one afternoon she opened a former beauty-queen eye and saw him. Whenever they met on the street she spoke in such a lighthearted, shrugging manner; squinting away, shielding her eyes. His sister didn't stick to the one subject. And he was never much help. He could never think of what to say. It didn't matter that she was his sister. The last time they saw each other he looked over his shoulder as he passed: there on a side street near the War Memorial, casually wheeling a pusher with twins. This would have been late '64. He couldn't stop, not there and then. The Colonel had this theory of relativity, whereby the lines of force radiating from the exhibits in the glass cabinets in the War Memorial would surely activate an adjacent use of firearms or explosives, especially when a Croatian in fatigues or some dubious under-secretary from the Low Countries was under escort.
Strange that Shadbolt took so little notice of the household names seated in the flesh at his elbow. After stepping aside, R. G. Amen left his large shadow lying in front of his successor, who kept tripping up. The new Prime Minister of Australia had lubra-lips and hair combed back like surf in full moonlight, and called Shadbolt by his first name. He was the outdoor type. But to avoid the shadow he began sitting against the window of the official car, resting his jaw on his clenched fist to look like Rodin's Thinker, a pose which might have impressed the electorate, except that an oval of paleness left by a scuba mask divided his tan, giving him a genial startled look, as if someone was checking on his qualifications with a torch. Here was an elected leader of a nation who practised holding his breath for two minutes in cabinet meetings or underwater in the bath, and the first time Shadbolt saw his face turn purple in the car he followed the textbook procedure by shouting for paramedics into the walkie-talkie and tapping on the window.
‘What we have on our hands,’ said Light scratching his Cape York nose, ‘is a PM who follows manly pursuits. The PM is keen on the physical sensations…as a means of taking his mind off the burdens of leadership. That's his business, except that it's our business too.’
The team underwent a crash-course in sprinting through sand and swimming underwater, and the motions of applying artificial respiration. With his experience of world famous surf at Manly Shadbolt found it easy.
Shadbolt's broad shoulders and hooded eyebrows streamlined into the epitome of steadiness as he looked past the other bodyguards, simply getting on with the job. Rust and Stan Still didn't take it seriously, could never be relied upon, and Jimmy kept to himself—his amazing gift for tracking footprints over asphalt had never been used. And even Shadbolt began to think nothing would happen to the PM. Nothing much had happened so far in Australia anyway.
&
nbsp; Only Irving Polaroid, cracking his knuckles with impatience to return to Washington, made a point of twanging a bit of shop talk; evidently he wanted to involve Shadbolt. Their work entailed plenty of giving one another the nod in heavy traffic or from behind palm fronds in VIP lounges, a good deal of leaning against black fenders (mudguards!) at all hours, or else squatting in the shade and crawling on all fours behind hedges; they covered each other and shared stale sandwiches on the run and truly terrible coffee from paper cups. Polaroid observed Shad-bolt's stamina at close quarters. He was impressed. Others now knew of this mythical figure stuck down there in the Southern Hemisphere with qualities of self-reliance that far exceeded the international norm. ‘He's so ordinary he's extraordinary.’ Polaroid mentioned his extra height—in the trade it reduced the angles of chance. He appreciated Shadbolt's many small acts of selflessness. At the same time he was impressed at how he kept his mouth shut. Never complained. They didn't have much to say to each other, but sensing the American's respect Shadbolt accepted his company the way he accepted his chewing gum.
A single woman had detached herself from the crowd and tried to speak to Shadbolt on the run, tugging at his sleeve in passing and, failing that, hobbled for a few paces along the foot-path, trying to keep up with him. Shadbolt had to brush her aside and the Colonel watching gave a slight nod of approval. Other times when Shadbolt thought the coast was clear she cut in on a motorcade in the black Mayflower, its neat bodywork a distinct anachronism. (‘Get that crazy tart out of there, now!’—Light through a walkie-talkie. And to himself, ‘I've seen that one somewhere before.’) Shadbolt tried discouraging with his eyes. ‘I couldn't help it, I can't stop now, there's nothing I can do.’ As he kept going he tried to put on a stern, immovable expression, but only became more embarrassed, confused.
