Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  Polaroid breathed in his ear, ‘That little woman. What is it she wants with you? I can get rid of her, pronto.’ Shadbolt swung in midstride, ‘No!’ And a great seepage of uncertainty spread from his soles, stomach and tightened his face, and the streets turned into blurred mechanical avenues, drained of colour.

  It was like that when he thought of his life passing.

  Slowly Harriet shrank in a corkscrew motion beside and behind him, where she remained (for the rest of his life) in slightly varying sizes and degrees of twist, coming forward at unexpected intervals from the others who stood to one side claiming his attention.

  The torque generated by the inner circles of Canberra exerted a tremendous pressure on a body. Even before the Colonel had spoken to him in front of a group of Americans Shadbolt could feel the centrifugal force gathering pace, spinning him clean out of the city of obelisks, ceremonies and velodromes, the city of fluttering papers and concrete, spinning him right out of Australia altogether.

  It took all his strength to keep looking ahead and he could feel the forces of inevitability, as in the past, which went with the spin of the earth and wore out one side of his shoes.

  He kept going, automatically.

  In the back of the Bentley the PM had the Lucas reading lamp on, illuminating his bowed head, though Shadbolt noticed, as he drew level, he was studying a front page photograph of himself in scuba gear.

  The grasses on the hills had caught fire, distant eucalypts reproduced themselves in anamorphic smudges; the galahs and magpies were screeching and spiralling in for the night. At the end of the day rural shadows produce less nostalgia than the rectangles which fold out as resistance from the ledges, corners and culverts of the city or town. They were approaching the Lodge along…Adelaide Avenue. Lengthening stride Shadbolt felt like humming. It lasted barely a second. A porous nose spreading into familiar teeth, which suddenly spoke of all his valuable lessons in matter-of-factness, zoomed in and collided foreheads.

  With a yell Shadbolt rolled the bones away from the car. The Bentley accelerated—standard procedure—and Polaroid elbowed in and twisted the man's arm in the gutter, causing him to yawn.

  ‘He stepped right in front of us,’ Polaroid at his hoarsest. Here was the first sign of real trouble in Australia. ‘Jesus Christ, what's your name? What are you doing here?’

  He started going through his pockets.

  ‘It's all right,’ Shadbolt breathing heavily. ‘Leave him, he's a friend.’

  He brushed the dirt off Vern's arm.

  ‘You could have broken your neck.’

  Holding his head Shadbolt momentarily pictured the scene from a newsreel and the Hollywood endings he'd seen in any one of Hoadley's theatres, and wondered vaguely if life might really be like this…one exhausted man helping a friend, and both experiencing the difficulties of speech…it possessed all the qualities of an epic.

  Vern squinted up at Polaroid. ‘There's an American. What, mid-Western?’ Then he spotted Shadbolt's shoulder holster. ‘What's this? Weaponry? Smith and Wesson?’

  ‘For Chrissakes.’

  ‘Check out the PM,’ Shadbolt turned to Polaroid. ‘I'll look after him.’

  He had never given an instruction before: an ancient reflex action sent Polaroid off running.

  ‘I was coming to see you,’ Vern glanced around.

  He was the most short-sighted man Shadbolt had ever met.

  ‘How long have you been here? You should have told me. Where are you staying? I've been run off my feet,’ Shadbolt said by way of apology, ‘we've been flat out lately.’

  Autocrats had been flying in from all directions to shake the new PM by the hand and get down to business behind closed doors.

  His uncle nodded, ‘So this is what you do?’

  Contented, he took in all that lay at arm's length: the circular culverts of American design, the Dutch anti-fog street lighting, the durable grass from Argentina planted in the nature strips.

  Shadbolt had never bothered with annual holidays and took a week off.

  ‘I can show you around. I know this place backwards,’ he told Vern without exaggeration. ‘It's not half as confusing as it looks. What would you like to see? You name it.’

  Vern had come only to see his nephew. But what had been black and white was now grey, even at arm's length. He allowed himself to be led around in circles; Shadbolt took his elbow.

  While they were out walking Shadbolt saw Rust and Stan Still jog past escorting the black limousine, Polaroid moving backwards and forwards as if on elastic, urging them on.

  ‘That's the PM in there,’ he said casually. Vern glanced and nodded in a different direction. ‘Now I'll show you the boss.’

  Turning to spot the following Vauxhall all he saw was Jimmy with half a dozen dingoes sniffing and whining for bombers. Then he remembered the Colonel had gone to Adelaide, to reconnoitre the Prime Minister's visit.

  He took Vern to the camp on Black Mountain. Empty, the place looked forlorn. The Colonel's tent flap was shut. Treading on twigs Vern startled the birds.

  Shadbolt felt he—or they—didn't belong. And yet he didn't know where else to go.

  On the last night he shouted Vern a meal in the capital's only greasy fish 'n' chip shop. Vern had become more talkative. He asked about Mister Frank McBee. ‘It's funny,’ Shadbolt answered, ‘you don't hear much about him now.’ Rumour was he was returning to Adelaide.

  ‘You're busting to say something,’ said Vern, ‘I can see.’

  Shadbolt lowered his fork.

  ‘It's the United States. You know it's a big country. With a population of 200 million plus there has to be a lot going on. All those people, right? Heavy industry. Many different kinds of people. They're our allies. So we've been getting these Yanks coming to look us over.’ Shadbolt leaned forward. Vern was picking a bone from his teeth. ‘It's still hush-hush. But the Colonel told me the other day. He said it was done over his head. It looks as if I'm going overseas. Intergovernmental stuff. Apparently the Yanks need a hand.’

  Still busy assigning facts to all situations Vern no longer talked as much, although his lips kept moving. You can tell a garfish by the small bones. Or was it whiting? Not having eyelids a fish can't close its eyes. How does a fish sleep?

  ‘No, listen,’ Shadbolt touched his uncle's wrist. There were some things beyond his control. Actually, most things. And there was nothing much he could do about this.

  Instead he promised, gave his word—as he'd seen Hoadley do many times—he'd drop into Adelaide before he left. He wanted to. ‘It's no problem. I've hardly taken a day off in my life. I'll be there,’ he cleared his throat. ‘No worries.’

  Vern was still having trouble with the bones in the fish.

  ‘Is that OK?’ Shadbolt wanted to know. ‘What do you reckon?’

  He thought he'd seen Vern give a nod; and as his shortsighted uncle overcame his frailty by coming out with a few facts about the United States, Shadbolt, who had never really thought about the place, except for its outpouring of poor-quality cars, began looking forward to it. Nodding to himself he felt a surge of curiosity similar to happiness. Already among the shadows he tried to make out shapes of people and things.

  This problem of emptiness in vast space…it allowed extremes of simplicities and acts of God. Dry old continent, flat as a board. With few obstacles to slow down and give texture to a thought, to deeds and to speech itself, angles of chance could intersect with little interruption, without explanation; a paradise for the gambler and fatalist.

  The straight line had been introduced to superimpose some sort of order; an illusion of order. Vertical surfaces were suddenly invested with inordinate power: multiplications all over the country of the skull of Holden's father at night meeting the one and only steel pole in sight, an intersection of lines distantly related to the geometry of pigeons homing in on the heads and shoulders of the statues half-hidden in Vern's backyard, and the unhindered trajectory to the north many years later
of the transparent splinter which bisected Light's eye. The daily newspapers became throwaway catalogues of the weirdest hard-luck stories and the most ridiculous, tragic coincidences, so common they barely rated a paragraph. In Ipswich, late 1965, a postman pedalling in a whirlwind was decapitated by a sheet of corrugated iron, and Shadbolt digested a caption and photograph with ‘X marks the spot’ in the Advertiser about an otherwise ordinary pedestrian in Collins Street, singled out by chance to cushion the free-fall of an unhappy woman from a skyscraper (breaking the young man's spine; from the hospital the latest was he and she had developed a ‘relationship’). On occasions a person felt mysteriously singled out in Australia. It was advertised as a place where you took a chance.

  The angles of chance intersected with such slowness and sadness, or viciously, without warning (somersaulting McBee and AJS in broad daylight), and the population turned their heads and spoke less, or spoke suddenly, too soon. There was heavy drinking, splashes of puke, incidents of cruelty to children, and people developed this mechanical obsession for horizontal mobility, to reduce distances, to fill in space and time, in turn producing well above the world norm of collisions at intersections; and people here developed an instinct for reliability and for helping each other, Holden being a great example.

  It was a place of extremes. Every year in the interior isolated individuals died of thirst; paragraphs occasionally reported whole families gone (‘taken’). People would simply lose their way in the emptiness, stumble around in circles. People would just disappear. Every year the proverbial bushfire could be counted on to claim a few. Floods the colour of tarpaulins suffocated more—sometimes still seated in their metallic cars. Others are eaten alive by ants. There's a snake to the north said to be the most venomous on earth. And where else would a nation's perpetually smiling leader be allowed to drown in heavy surf—which hadn't happened yet, but was about to, mid-1967?

  The lines of chance intersected from immense distances, unhindered, as in speech and thought.

  It came both as a shock and no surprise that in Adelaide, under a black sky, Light, while surveying the rectilinear city took a step to the left, perhaps thinking the first heavy drops of rain were pigeons', and was struck like an unlucky golfer by lightning.

  An official came into the dormitory.

  The Colonel was found face down, one arm plaited around a pair of binoculars, the other outstretched, pointing down to the streets of Adelaide.

  To everyone's surprise Jimmy set up a wailing of lament.

  ‘These things happen,’ the official winced at the floor, then up to the ceiling. ‘Poor blighter, he never knew what hit him. The best we can say is that he died with his boots on. Something I imagine you chaps would appreciate.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Stan Still from his bed.

  There was silence as everyone recalled the Colonel's good points: his aloofness, his insistence on physical fitness, his natural ability to fold a map.

  Holden remembered the way he shared his food. His habit of narrowing his eyes and appearing thoughtful always impressed him.

  He and the Colonel had got on well together. He'd felt it. The Colonel didn't mind having him there.

  And now he'd virtually disappeared, gone.

  All Holden could do was to place his hand on Jimmy's shoulder. It would mean the end of the dingo programme.

  ‘Which one is Shadbolt?’ the man asked.

  Polaroid pointed to him.

  ‘Come with me. I've got to see you about something.’

  It was official. It had been decided.

  Holden would be sent to the United States as foreign aid. Apparently the place was tearing itself apart; the streets were crowded, dark in broad daylight and dangerous; ever since Dallas, flagburners and long-haired signwriters and posterity-crazy maniacs popped up all over the country like grassfires. ‘Anyone can be famous for three or four minutes.’ Something of the strength and reliability of Holden was urgently needed, a steadying influence, not to mention his photographic memory.

  Australia had been only too happy to help a powerful ally. Officials couldn't remember the last time it happened.

  ‘I suppose what we mean is he embodies the qualities which have put this country on the map. Very much the local product.’

  Shadbolt, Holden.

  Age 34.

  Single.

  Uncomplicated (relatively, in a sense).

  Ability to idle all day. Slight overheating.

  Stand for hours in the sun. No complaints.

  Can go all day on a meat pie.

  Strong body.

  Style: model Australian, no frills.

  Colour: light tan. Khaki eyes.

  Leanings left or right: nil.

  Size twelves.

  Smoking: beginning.

  Other comments: responsive to instructions in all weathers, all conditions. Predictable, matter-of-fact.