Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  ‘Spread out,’ Wheelright kept urging, ‘and keep your eyes open.’

  But Holden soon became lax. These objects were the same as the daily contents of the Advertiser. They'd leapt from the pages, disintegrated, and now lay dumped at his feet in 3-D. He stubbed his toe on them; cut his fingers on Venetian glass and a Polish coffee percolator: a pawnbroker's collection of everyday objects.

  Among the cargo of torpedoed kettledrums and lightning conductors it became necessary to isolate matador capes from the cardboard suitcase Holden had originally seen clutched by a boy much smaller than him and frightened (would never forget his ghetto cap and black socks, nor the cardboard suitcase) and isolate them from the South Australian muscat bottles and the imported fountain pens, displayed in local advertisements. Drosometers and boxes of alphonins were identified by Vern. Lapilla-encrusted hookah and dancing pumps, sardine tins from Norwegian waters.

  There was so much material here Wheelright would have to come back.

  ‘We've only seen the tip of the iceberg,’ he cried in a hoarse voice.

  By mid-afternoon even Vern had lost interest in the naming of objects. He joined Flies near the water. Wheelright had called Shadbolt over for help; and the boy found the weather forecaster so engrossed he had become kindly. He pointed to a mystery object. Successive tides had flung one of those nets normally suspended on the portside of troop-ships over the corroded remains of a twin-cylinder motorbike. Holden had little trouble identifying it as a Panther. (‘I might have known…’ Wheelright jotted in his book.)

  When Holden looked up again he saw Les had dropped his tram driver's trousers and was waist deep in blue-green, and his uncle wading in too, buttocks whiter than the sand.

  The boy ambled over but squatted down. As he stole glances at their bodies shame about his own projected shape turned his thoughts inwards. He fumbled with his toes. During the war, photos had appeared in the Advertiser of diggers buggerising around in a khaki waterhole in New Guinea, soaping themselves and grinning at the camera, wearing nothing but their slouch hats. Fair enough: for months they'd been struggling and slithering through the jungle, Japs everywhere. But here on a Saturday afternoon in South Austrylia there seemed to be something indecent about men revealing their nakedness, revealing it so nonchalantly it seemed to be deliberate. Wild horses wouldn't get him stripping off and walking towards the water. No fear! Clothing felt especially precious to him there and then. Even as he ignored his uncle—‘Don't be a pica!’—Gordon Wheelright belted past, the grey thing floating on its hinge; in he went, belly-flopping.

  It was here when Vern came out and stood alongside, his teeth dripping and refracting light, and proceeded to towel himself with his shirt that the mysteries of mechanical reproduction were explained. Holden had simply asked a question: anything to avert the nakedness at his elbow. To his alarm Vern dropped the shirt to launch into the facts of a subject he knew inside-out.

  The pictures you see in the newspaper (that was the question): each one is re-photographed through a glass screen onto a sensitised printing plate. The screen has been ruled like graph paper, Hartnett's description, ‘a grazier's shirt’, Wheelright's shouted interjection.

  Holden conjured up their old flyscreen door.

  The screen interrupts the light rays of the projected image, breaking them up, so a photo of the Prime Minister, say, registers on the printing plate as a pattern of dots.

  Holden's mechanical mind saw it in a flash. Large dots reproduce the dark areas, as Amen's eyebrows and pinstriped suit. They carry more ink. The smaller dots in all their graduations reproduce forehead, teeth, silvery hair and sky.

  The chosen person is broken into particles and reassembled by the eye. That's how it's done. A coming-together of various shades and shadows which form an impression. There are more shadows in an ink-printed photograph than in real life.

  The magnesium flash of the American Graflex cameras added a gleam of alertness to the darkest eyes. Still it didn't quite explain…

  ‘The secret is in the screen,’ his naked uncle almost answered. ‘Otherwise’—he sucked through his teeth—‘how on earth could you print a man's true feelings? His thoughts as about to be expressed? His misdeeds? Moments of triumph?’

  The halo of dazzling sunlight revealed the indentations in Vern's skull and made his teeth grasslike, and with a wreath of seagulls above his head, activated by waving hands, it really did look as if he'd outlined something of real importance. Fully grown-up men had a way of devoting all their opinions to a single subject. Holden had seen it in the deliberate fixations of Frank McBee. Whereas, leaning back on his elbows, avoiding a carbuncle or two, he didn't feel drawn to a single anything, nothing, not yet; except cars of course. Generally his mind remained a blank. And he almost burst out laughing with fondness for his stark naked uncle addressing the sun and the sand in all his distracted intensity.

  Often Holden would look back on this afternoon of gradually lengthening shadows. An adult casualness had descended on the beach: in the desultory words and the gaps which had been allowed to open naturally between the figures. Les had squatted nearby. Together they waited respectfully for Gordon to complete his preliminary findings. Young Shadbolt then had decided to explain the logic of internal combustion, how an ordinary car engine works. The spark ignited the petrol/ air mixture pushing the piston down on its connecting rod, in turn turning the crankshaft, twisting the tailshaft back to the rear wheels. Entering the final, exhaust phase Shadbolt had faltered. Keep your eyes and ears open, boy! Les had begun a separate conversation. Never had he produced so many words. This alone was enough for them to sit up and take notice.

  ‘It's happened to me only the once,’ Les was saying, ‘I was heading back to the depot one night in the Number Ten, not much traffic. This was during the war. The Yanks were in town. Halfway down Magill Road…I almost drove over a negro bloke standing on his head in the middle of the line. Well, I didn't mind. A few of his friends came out of the shadows, hee-hawing. They thought it was a great joke. As I got going I could hear the racket they were making inside.

  ‘I'm blowed if I can remember my conductor's name. I was thinking of him only the other day…funny little bod. Well, he couldn't handle it. Part of you has to be the diplomat in that job. He got into a fracas with those negroes when he should have left them alone. Maybe he made a crack about their colour? I'm blowed if I know.

  ‘I only knew something had happened when I stopped. I had no conductor. The tram was empty with the lights still blazing…a ghost tram. They found him near the Rosella factory, lying in the gutter.’ Flies paused again, and Vern had the word ‘concussion’ on the tip of his tongue but wisely held back. ‘Poor devil, his head was split down the middle the way you crack open a coconut. There was an inquest. The army brass got involved. Nothing I could tell them.’

  Flies squinted at the bent figure of Wheelright still fossicking along the semicircle.

  ‘When you're driving a tram…a heaviness comes through the soles of your feet. It's so strong all around you and under you it feels like you're part of a terrific weight rolling downhill. It's difficult to stop. There's no steering wheel. The bell's not worth a cracker. Everything's been arranged in front of you in advance. Things are largely beyond your control. You notice them out of the comer of your eye. Whatever happens is decided by your moment of departure.’

  Vern put his hand on Holden's shoulder, ‘Better see if Gordon wants any help. Quickly.’

  Not noticing, Les Flies went off, the geometry of trams in his blood.

  ‘If I'd left the depot a split second earlier, or a split second later, the skull of my conductor, forget-his-name, would have missed the pole by a good foot or more. Because I hadn't, a meeting with that solid thing in his path became inevitable.’

  The usherette's house was painted the colour of indecent dreams, a doll's house pink, and petticoated with crepe, a foreground of quadrants and sunflowers, with an optimistic beer-coloured doormat there to w
elcome a young on-again, off-again admirer, who also worked in the dark at the Regent, the pale projectionist. All around—except on Vern's side—the land was overrun by nettles, Scotch thistles, humming insects, and a flock of daggy merinos that roamed apparently ownerless. In Adelaide a cul-de-sac still had a novelty value. On Sunday afternoons when Salvation Army bands marched up and down in straight lines motorists were drawn into the stem of the wine glass in their new Australian-made cars, and nosed up to Hartnett's or the usherette's gate to turn around, happily experiencing the simple detour sensation of a ‘dead end’. They did that, scattering the sheep, even though the Hills directly behind were being carved up into uneven streets because of the terrain, and given extraordinary names. SKYE was one designated suburb, it being closest to heaven—written in white-painted rocks on the slopes, visible from the city centre.

  One afternoon Holden pedalled up to find the merino sheep gone, vamoose, and new Bennett-brick houses in various stages of completion lining the cul-de-sac. And when Karen visited and was shown the view, what was left of it, she expressed no surprise: barely gave their surroundings a glance. The spread of new suburbs paralleled her own growth. Her brother sat there on the sofa gaping. Close up, her features had smoothed. In the space of a few months the length of her chin had been arrested by the endlessness of her legs. And her expression had reached a level of solemnity, almost to the point of self-consciousness. Wearing white knitted gloves she hypnotised the fully grown men by talking very firmly as she removed them, one finger at a time.

  ‘We could see the blue of St Vincent's Gulf before,’ Vern gestured half-heartedly. And his two best-friends nodded in unison.

  ‘The cars in town,’ Holden tripped over himself, ‘I could see with my own two eyes. And the people waiting for the lights along North Terrace. On a clear day you could count the flies on their faces and necks.’ Holden became conscious of his erupting flesh. ‘I picked out your house, its red roof. You could see that palm tree across the road with the homing pigeons…’

  ‘You're sweet,’ Karen smiled sadly. She turned to the others. ‘Isn't he sweet?’

  ‘He's got plurry good eyesight,’ Wheelright conceded.

  ‘I'll say,’ Les Flies agreed.

  A single woman hadn't set foot in the house for years, if at all, but over the years Vern had consumed more ideals of local beauty than anyone. With Karen's perfume still lingering on the lounge he gave his considered opinion.

  ‘She's an Austrylian beauty, if ever there was one. She's going to be. You watch. And I don't know where she gets it from. It comes from the bone structure of ancestors, and the state's climate. The rainfall, and so on. Not from her father, certainly not from our Holden here.’

  And Flies, who had seen tons of beauties pass in front of his tram: ‘She's turned out well.’

  To Holden's surprise they showed little concern about the encirclement of buildings. Both Les and Gordon Wheelright—who was up to his neck in his latest findings—began taking most of their meals in the house. One vantage point had been exchanged for another.

  Holden saw the redheaded usherette in uniform and high heels bending over in the garden before the afternoon matinee, and sometimes passed her as she ran out from the dead end, intent on catching a tram; one hand formed a salute as she held onto the little fife-player's cap worn by all the usherettes at the Regent.

  The way Vern and the others pooled these sightings and other scraps of information (colour of dressing gown, bottles near rubbish bin…) over their cocoa, reminded him of his own family's consuming interest in the soldier McBee, his mother especially. No one thought much of the projectionist. He had the troglodyte's classical stoop and pallor. His clothes loosely fitted as if he'd dressed in the dark. ‘He slinks around here like a tomcat,’ said Les Flies. ‘I wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole,’ Wheel-right frowned. Olde English terms had also entered the local vocab…It was sometimes noted the dirty projectionist had stayed the night next door. ‘He must have missed the last tram,’ Holden said brightly. Sometimes they heard the couple arguing. And occasionally Holden noticed him at other parts of the city, miles away, walking alone. Years later when shown the curious statistics that the majority of arrested anarchists gave as their professions, projectionist or ‘film technician’, he surprised his peers by not being surprised at all.

  With only one exit from the cul-de-sac meeting the furtive young man became unavoidable, and although Shadbolt avoided the eyes of the usherette that could see in the dark, he soon became on nodding acquaintance with the projectionist, who had a long but pleasant face, and close up, astonishing blue-green eyes.

  ‘Your friend Mr McBee—it doesn't have an a—is in hot water again.’ The deadly proofreaders’ pencil prescribed an arc (slightly exaggerated) reminding Holden of the birds with sharpened beaks he had seen on the Murray.

  ‘Profession, “automobile dealer”. He's going to break his neck if he doesn't watch his step. Then what will your poor mother do?’

  Booked under the influence while riding a motorcycle; riding on footpath; blap-blapping with defective silencer; going through a red light (more than once); speeding; overtaking a tram on wrong side; overtaking stationary tram; overtaking Premier Play-ford while standing on seat and making disrespectful finger gesture. And the latest to hit the subheadlines: caught redhanded wheel-spinning his initials in the gravel around the sacred statue of Colonel Light at four in the morning. And abused the law when apprehended with electric torches.

  ‘Because he's Mr Frank McBee,’ Wheelright underlined the ‘mister’, ‘I suppose he'll get off scot-free.’

  ‘He cut in front of me the other day,’ said Les, ‘riding no hands. He scared the living daylights out of me.’

  A motorcyclist transgressing the rigid lines of the city was enough to drive a tram-driver mad.

  Picturing it Holden couldn't help grinning.

  Others too vaguely recognised in McBee's recklessness a last-ditch stand against the debilitating laws of the city.

  ‘He's getting worse,’ Karen told them one day. ‘He can't sit still for a minute. He throws his money away—to anyone who comes to the door. He's been seen with other women. He's got confidential secretaries. His voice is getting louder. He slaps me on the bottom when I walk past. Our mother,’ she turned to Holden, ‘doesn't know what to do. They're not married yet. He says, “Ask me about it tomorrow.” I don't suppose they ever will. He's a wild man. They're often yelling at each other. And yet he's still good to us. In a way, he's very nice. I guess I like him a lot. Don't you, really?’

  ‘He's what's called a yahoo,’ Les said.

  Holden didn't know what to think. He looked at his uncle.

  ‘Mr McBee's got advertisements on himself.’ Wheelright's opinion. ‘Why doesn't he take things easy?’

  ‘He must be unhappy,’ said Vern. And Holden agreed.

  His image appeared constantly in the papers. If it wasn't the lackadaisical mugshot after another of his traffic offences it would be there leaping out from the full-page ads for his used-car yards, beaming or pulling faces (e.g., cross-eyed and tongue hanging out: ‘Only an idiot would sell qwality cars at these crrrazy prices!’) As a way to be everywhere at once McBee sponsored a bewildering number of sporting events, such as solo world record or reliability attempts, usually to do with an engine and four wheels, though not always. Congratulating the exhausted victor, their hands clasped across the trophy the size of a funeral urn, the generous sponsor with the larrikin features gazed wistfully at the camera.

  In summer he wore a knotted handkerchief on his head. His name became synonymous with perspiration and hard work, aphrodisiac moustache, good humour, opportunism (in the best sense!), perspicuity, pride in being Austrylian, loyalty, good honest value when it came to a used car.

  And still—although his features were almost better known than the Premier's or Prime Minister Amen's—a dissatisfaction showed. It surfaced in the eyes and around the mouth. It registered too in his congr
atulatory speeches which tended to trail off, and in the horse-laugh and the unnecessary back-slapping. Holden recognised it, just as Karen complained of his restlessness. And in turn it made people watch Frank McBee all the more.

  Holden Shadbolt had shot up like a rocket from Woomera, Wheelright's phrase, and reaching its ceiling, exploded auxiliary growths in sudden arcing trajectories; shirt and fly buttons cartwheeled away from the main body at various stages, bum-fluff sprouted from lips and chin and armpits, big toes bursting through the saddle-stitching of his locally made shoes.

  Beneath his weight the hollow frame of Mercury suffered metal fatigue. He gave the bike away.

  Size then remained more or less static. It had reached its optimum form. Modifications were constantly evolving, but in details so subtle and gradual they showed mostly as alterations to symmetry. His face became more adult. His neck thickened, eyebrows became conspicuously hooded, a few straight lines added here and there.

  Those shadeless Australian afternoons. Without his bike Shadbolt covered long distances on foot. He didn't seem to mind at all. Vern had taught him the futility of complaining about things beyond your control, such as the daily weather. And in a continent obsessed by climate, Shadbolt's apparent indifference contributed to his reliability. He walked through the famous grasshopper plague (summer 1952), which clogged up the steaming radiators and windscreens of cars, stuffed motorbikes, and almost blotted out the sun there for a minute. It went on for days. And he would always remember the Black Thursday or Friday when the entire length of the Hills behind the city caught alight, a near-biblical lesson, and sent down a rain of grey ash on the streets. Walking home meant heading towards the flames. He then felt like a striding giant—able simply to stretch out an arm and plug the leaking dyke holding back a molten inferno. In the event all he did was hose the smouldering gutters of the usherette's house next door.