by Murray Bail
Leaving Parafield, approaching the streets of Adelaide, McBee's reluctance to turn for home was transmitted through his back in a series of muscular contractions. A hesitancy stuttered the exhaust note. If there was a phone call to make, or someone to see somewhere, Holden waited outside on the pillion seat. But once—it was raining—McBee took Holden inside the Maid ‘n’ Magpie. The big boy sat there with his glass of lemonade, appearing not to follow the conversation, and after that always accompanied McBee into the public bar whether there was business or not.
McBee was at his most relaxed there. The enclosed noise of men blurred distinctions. A bar had an anonymous, respectful quality. Men enjoyed each other's noise. They wanted to be there, and the noise further confirmed it. They were comfortable; Holden admired their ease. And McBee became laughingly expansive.
‘We'd better go,’ Holden had to tug his sleeve.
It always took a few more minutes. Usually McBee made an exaggerated show of consulting his watch fitted with a learner hood. (Protective leather watchbands were common after the war: as if they obliterated the past and offered an open future.)
And Holden quickly knew how long they'd stayed by the rate of acceleration up Magill Road and, turning into their street, if McBee sped down the gravel footpath between the shadowed hedges and the flashing jacarandas, his chin on the petrol tank, before broadsiding to negotiate the gate.
They banged into the kitchen with extra loudness, McBee still talking and Holden half-grinning behind him. The passivity of the soft-skinned women—the familiar shape of Holden's seated mother, his sister Karen—seemed like a rebuke. Bold as brass though McBee kissed his missus on the lips and neck.
‘Here! You've got dirty paws!’
And when he trotted off she turned to Holden.
‘I know where you've been. Do you know what time it is? Why are you doing this? The pair of you. We've been sitting here. We begin tea here at six. If only your father. Be late as this again and I'll—’
Holden sympathised. ‘I know,’ he scratched his leg.
Glancing at Karen he saw her smiling. He wondered if they had any idea of the extent of McBee's business. His mother never enquired at the table. It seemed enough that he was fully occupied. His contentment increased her contentment. In this way she followed the social laws of post-war growth. And although up to his neck in his work McBee cheerfully managed odd jobs around the house, first rigging up a silken clothesline from the entrails of a parachute, with Holden's help, and replacing rotten gutters and the front gate post (after he'd clipped it one night). He silenced the maverick floorboard in the hall and handled live wires without wearing rubber soles.
By early 1947 he began bombarding the faintly protesting Shadbolts with the latest in labour-saving consumer-durables; in certain crucial ways McBee was inarticulate. One Friday night the carpet-sweeper was ceremonially hurled in the manner of a loose propeller over the back fence, and replaced by the latest in cylindrical Hoovers. A barrel-shaped washing machine arrived. It inched across the floor on castors: the entire house vibrated when Mrs Shadbolt had it going. The Frigidaire with shoulders like a woman introduced a soothing belt-driven hum at all hours. Holden happened to be there when Frank McBee slipped his arm around his mother's waist and suggested they give the early cream and green Kooka stove to the Salvation Army or chuck it in the River Torrens. ‘No, I happen to be perfecly satisfied with that,’ she said, squirming out of his clutches. ‘It's not you who has to do the cooking.’ In case that wasn't clear she added, ‘Shouldn't you purchase yourself a decent pair of trousers?’
Musical jugs, whistling kettles, a bigger and better wireless, and the telephone, arrived. Whatever his line of business it must have been doing all right.
He began reading the Advertiser at breakfast, leaving later for work. But he still bummed around in overalls or shorts, and rode the leaking rattletrap of a motorbike.
McBee's old room had been left as a storeroom, the bed always made (just in case), and as business expanded it took on the appearance of an office, a card table became a desk, and shoeboxes on the floor contained vital papers, though according to McBee ‘it was all stored up here’ (tapping his skull). The telephone had been installed there, and it was often difficult to find once it began ringing. Gathering dust in the corner was the rifle McBee carried the day he'd arrived at the screen door. When Holden reminded—joking—it should be turned in, McBee shook his head, ‘Nup, I'm keeping it handy for the tax inspectors. I'll shoot any of the bastards if they come.’ And he confided to his silent partner, ‘I had offered to me the other day 2000 Lee Enfields. I knocked them back.’
In the space of six months Holden had moved from the airy world of bicycles to explosive motorcycles to the densities of dismantled propeller-driven aircraft. And now that bicycles were common, the local manufacturers were riding the boom, he felt faintly ridiculous on his androgynous machine with the different-sized wheels. It attracted all kinds of laughter at intersections. Even McBee, normally careless about appearances, and who sometimes wobbled around the front lawn on the bike, began cracking jokes. He offered to replace it. ‘And I'll donate your thing to the zoo.’
But the creak of its pedals and the cantankerous outline reminded Holden of his angular uncle. Just about every week he pushed the triangular frame towards the Hills, out of the seat half the time, building tremendous strength in his lungs and legs, until he entered Vern's enclosed vantage point from where everything in the world suddenly appeared different and fresh. It represented a factual way of looking at things, structured on words and distance. At Vern's place Holden asked hundreds of questions. He enjoyed listening. He acquired word knowledge there. With his other friend, McBee, the friend of his mother, it was different. For hours on end they barely exchanged a word. Alongside him, Holden simply observed. He traced the logic of metals and engines, learned to appreciate the physical nature of things. It was knowledge based on equations and appearances, all within arm's reach. In this way two men who had never met competed for Holden's attention.
Holden had told his uncle all about their boarder, and his expanding business. ‘I've heard on the grapevine about him,’ Vern nodded.
This didn't surprise Holden.
Up there in the house his uncle always heard news before anyone else. Proof sheets from the next morning's, or even the next week's, Advertiser lay draped over chairs and fluttered on tables. To prove a point Vern often read something aloud, pausing to mark corrections. From the aerial and shadowy nature of proofs Vern strived to establish clarity. ‘What do you make of this? Fancy that. So the British have nationalised their coal mines?’ Or, ‘Here's interesting news. Did you know there are now 311 million people in India?’ Bradman retained the Ashes for Australia, and Joe Louis flattened another dumb opponent. Some of this news locked in type hadn't happened yet. No wonder his uncle knew everything.
On 5 February, 1947, Holden must have been among the first to hear the terrific news that gave the rest of the country (the following day) a surge of relief and national pride. Graziers, their bankers and brokers, and the average Joe in the street, lowered their newspapers in wonder: images of swirling dust and bleached ribcages receded, and with it went the vague undercurrent of perpetual foreboding.
‘I've told you how rain works,’ was how his uncle broke the story. ‘Now listen to this…’
Two brainy local scientists had been researching techniques of cloud-seeding. Their aim: to ‘stimulate’ clouds. What is a cloud? Tiny droplets of suspended water. In order to fall these have to freeze. Then in the lower altitudes they melt back again into ‘rain’. Several methods had been tried, with little success. On 5 February, over the lime wooden town of Oberon west of Sydney, the team struck pay-dirt. From a specially converted Liberator bomber they poured the bags of dry ice onto likely looking broken cumuli. ‘I've told you all about cumuli.’ In thirty minutes flat it erupted into a larger higher cloud which rained for two and a half hours solid. Local flooding was repo
rted, although ten miles from the town was dry as a bone.
‘There was so much trickling water,’ reported one of the rain scientists with a solemn grin, ‘I had to keep ducking down to the lavatory.’
The accompanying photograph had them standing at ease in front of the victorious propellers, both wearing—appropriately—sheepskin and leather jackets. They deserved a medal: this discovery could transform the yellow-red surface of the entire country.
‘It's always good to have good news,’ Vern sighed. ‘There's never enough of it.’
‘Did you say a Liberator? Let me see a sec.’
Holden studied the page-proof.
‘I know that plane. Ha ha. I've sat in the cockpit. Guess where it came from?’
He couldn't stop shaking his head.
Because, partly, it was strange experiencing the transformation of an intimate object into a printed image ready for the rest of the world to share.
On slightly deflated tyres Holden left, gathering speed down Magill Road the way mercury rolls clumsily along a table. With the wind still in his hair he entered the kitchen and straightaway began nodding knowingly at McBee.
‘What's eating him?’
‘So, that's where the Liberator went? You didn't tell me.’
The boarder turned to the others. ‘I think the boy's trying to tell me something.’
‘He's been up with his mad uncle,’ his mother explained.
Realising McBee didn't know, Holden felt even more pleased. With mechanical movements he unfolded the proof and pointed.
‘That's our Liberator, the one you had before Christmas. Some scientists are using it now to make rain. I'm not kidding. There's going to be no more droughts in the country.’
‘Where's this from?’ McBee stared. ‘Let me see.’
‘It's going in the paper tomorrow.’
McBee's lips moved as he followed the lines of type a second and men a third time.
‘It's always good to have good news,’ Holden turned to the others.
As he spoke a few drops fell on the roof. And before anyone had time to even glance at the ceiling the rain became delirious, erupting into applause, anticipating the national mood of euphoria so accurately that while it lasted—the trouble with tin roofs—nobody could hear anyone else talking.
Old bombers above the clouds altering the will of nature…the subsequent vision of merinos standing permanently knee-deep in green pastures…would capture the minds of the entire population. No more pictures of cracked cockies squinting up at the perfect Wedgwood sky, and the buckled tessellations of empty claypans and dams, spinifex cartwheeling across the paddock, or the khaki of grasses which added melancholy to the city and towns.
Holden had to leap up to fasten the clapping screen door.
When he returned he found McBee in his office shouting into the telephone.
Cupping his hand over the mouthpiece he asked, ‘You sure it's going into tomorrow's paper?’
After cracking a few tasteless jokes, and winking at Holden, options were slapped on the remaining Liberators known to be grounded in Australia. Vern rarely talked about another living person, his interests being fully committed to the more technical area of facts. Provable, collectable, renewable—facts were hard metal, energetic. They offered little in the way of unpleasantness; Vern had never fully understood the phrase ‘unpleasant facts’. Above his city he continued to construct an ever-changing yet solid grid, an antechamber of aerial numbers, surnames and nouns, which fully encompassed him, and seemed to offer support against his deprivations.
For this reason his conversation ran parallel to other people's. More a process of inferring via precedent, true stories from other places, questions mixed with well-established facts; and other people couldn't help glancing at him, trying to make sense.
If the subject of a known person cropped up he began hurriedly stroking his throat and sought refuge in the fly specks on the light bulb or the pelmet above Holden's head. Not only was a living person porous, difficult to grasp, Vern had a horror of casting aspersions.
Of Frank McBee all he said was, ‘He's an unknown quantity.’
And as for constipated clouds being bombed into activity for the good of the nation, Vern who regularly used ‘H2O’ in casual conversation could be more specific. ‘They're clutching at straws,’ he said, without even a trace of a smile.
Reading the stories set for the front page—‘Rain-boffins Fly Again’—Vern held the blue pencil aloft and began gaping in disbelief. ‘What on earth does this mean?’ He was tearing his hair out with frustration. Vern Hartnett alone could not of course stem the tide of extravagant claims, the lack of proof. Stick to questions of grammar, spelling and juxtaposed paragraphs. Especially watch out for the split infinitive. These would always be the proofreader's perimeters. And as the rain-seeding trials proceeded the mounting delirium of nouns, optimistic adjectives and numbers, and the report splashed on page three of a run on umbrellas and gumboots, became a real agony for him and surely contributed to the migraines, insomnia and failing eyesight beginning as early as 1947.
Everybody wanted to believe. That was the trouble. Rain-seeding not only erased the climatic despairs of the past and promised a verdant future, it represented a visual reversal— raining abundance—to the recent desolation of Coventry, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima and Darwin. It fitted the mood of post-war reconstruction. While Frank McBee understood this, Vern stubbornly maintained such hopes flew in the face of the facts, and suffered.
Often Holden found himself picturing his unusual uncle. There he stood, an isolated figure looking lost in the backyard among outstretched statues. In some way Holden wanted to help him. But he didn't know how. Holden could see his visits were important. If he missed a week his uncle wore the same perplexed look as when the subject of a living person cropped up. Early on, Vern had busily promised to introduce two of his oldest friends—‘you'd like them for different reasons’—and Holden, who felt drawn to older people, looked forward to it. Several times after missing a visit Holden was told, ‘If only you'd come when you said you would. My two friends were here, itching to meet you. They were sitting where you are now, until the sky went dark.’ Or ‘Guess who were here yesterday afternoon?’ So regular became the near-misses Holden virtually ceased believing even the phantom surnames of his uncle's best-friends.
As for the loaded ‘He's an unknown quantity…’
Well, yes, when Holden's thoughts turned to Frank McBee he pictured the weave of his knitted back, or else a close-up of his jaw and neck, and at other times nothing but a rapidly diminishing dot. For McBee approached the family of Shadbolts the way he handled the smoking motorbike: rushing in, making noisy contact, veering off. His sentences rattled and vibrated, and when things went quiet he glanced left and right, his teeth chattering, waiting for an opening. Cut-throat shaving had stippled his neck. He grew a handlebar moustache and developed quite a spluttering kick-start laugh.
A side of McBee remained impenetrable. He could take a sudden close interest in a person. Often did. He made the point. Intimacy was allowed the way the arms of a pillion passenger encircled his waist for the duration of a ride. In the next breath he'd be standing there distant, a dot, taking no notice of anybody, his mind somewhere else. The Shadbolts regularly experienced it: part of his ‘unknown quantity’.
During this putting of distance between himself and others the jaw and nose of McBee unconsciously solidified, and especially at sunset among his dismembered aeroplanes, he assumed the same blind stare of the well-known visionaries standing in Vern's backyard. Holden had seen it when McBee first announced himself through the flyscreen door. Holden hadn't been mistaken. The roaring success of the scrap business allowed the former corporal to leave the day-to-day operation in the hands of a few trusted mechanics, and the Shadbolts' small nineteen thirties house had become a repository for local fauna in bric-a-brac and knick-knacks, the very latest in gadgetry and the woodcarver's art. Proof of McBee's succe
ss was there for all to see.
He was generous, and yet there was his impenetrable, invisible side.
Holden had not even been considering this on a day it had been raining. The gutters were still gurgling as he rode home on the heavy old machine, now reduced to ‘MERC Y’
Each downward thrust of a pedal measured the space between the saturated telegraph poles. As Holden entered that simple regularity he began to experience an intense, private satisfaction, as if there on Magill Road in Adelaide he was in perfect tune with the universe. The entire world seemed to be laid out in clearly defined elements; water, glistening road and gutters were part of it; and almost with a laugh he imagined himself striding on the telegraph wires, a figure plunging through the sky. There was so much to see, so much to learn. Gripping the pitted handlebars he already decided how he'd enter the kitchen. He was going to burst in, rubbing his hands, talking his head off. That was the plan. To give an impression of energy. But as on other occasions an awkwardness would overrun his intentions at the last second, and he appeared extra-deadpan, suppressing his true feelings.
Lately his friend McBee had reverted to breezing in long after six. To kill time, and just for fun, Holden turned off into an unknown side street, although it had begun lightly raining.