by Murray Bail
Shadbolt had removed the Wolseley's stifling silencer, and inserted in the shortened exhaust pipe a tightly rolled length of flywire, like the map of the city. The car then made a long-distance racket, agricultural and aeronautical by turns, farting out lengths of blue-orange as the foot was lifted for intersections.
The camaraderie of the car maniacs took the form of elbowing and poking fun. Shadbolt's size nines came in for it. ‘You should have been a copper, boy.’
And not entirely joking.
If they were pulled over for speeding or driving without the regulation silencer Shadbolt would step out and give the world-weary police a single nod. What followed—illuminated by headlights—was a demonstration of his main asset, which had to be his steadiness. Expressionless and unconcerned, Shadbolt would suddenly notice a part of the car, the rubber flange around a tail light, say, sometimes squatting down for closer inspection, and before long he had the men-in-blue bending forward in sympathy. They all began nodding, hands in pockets. With Shadbolt the police became matter-of-fact. They recognised a kindred spirit. One time he managed a let-off at Payneham Road after passing a tram on the wrong side, hitting over seventy. The others had pushed Shadbolt forward as the driver.
Humiliation and heroism were discovered inside the cars; and auto-eroticism, naturally: especially when Shadbolt approached the cul-de-sac at high speed, anxious not to miss a single moment of the usherette's astonishing nakedness. Strobed by his high-beam the porosity of hedges and the pale limbs of gums and guavas projected before him tantalising parts of her, soon to be revealed again, body.
Shadbolt had developed automatic reaction wrists. On this designated Friday in April a figure in flaming hair tilted out from the gutter in front of him. Only by violently swerving from her rush did he narrowly miss, and so produced an entirely different set of repercussions.
‘You should be home,’ he almost shouted. He reversed the Wolseley.
The usherette began singing.
‘Crack a smile, why don't you? Let's see your ivory.’ She stretched his mouth with her fingers. ‘There, I can see your true feelings. Not even your own mother'd recognise you.’ She squinted through one eye. ‘I think I prefer you like you was before.’
She was tiddly all right.
‘Did you miss the tram, or what?’ Shadbolt bent forward.
‘That's for me to tell and you to find out.’
Suddenly he felt like chasing her around the car as he once did with his sister; and catching her.
But she sat down and removed her shoes.
‘I could drive you home. I think I'd better.’
‘Oh, who cares?’
Grey against gun-metal the Hills rose up before them, a wave about to curl over the innocent city, lights twinkling here and there like bits of phosphorus on the crest.
‘I'm so bored.’ She lay across his lap in the car. ‘I don't know where to go. What'll happen to me? What's there to do—anywhere? Nothing has ever happened to me. Do you think I'm an interesting person?’ She punched him in the stomach. ‘And you're the same. Look at you. You're living like a zombie.’
And he began stroking her hair.
‘That's nice, keep doing that.’
As he drove he could measure her smile on his lap. The slightest bump and he felt her jaw and throat.
At the house he had to half-carry her in, she was playing dead. He stroked her hair as she tried fitting the key. Once inside—where he'd never been before—she began switching lights on and off, leading him by the hand, until he lost all sense of direction.
In a small room patterned with wattle she unbuttoned her clothes, hop-hopping on one leg, her eyes fixed on him, and smiling. Stumbling against her paleness he almost took her breath away; he wanted to lift her up in the air. Framed by the window he was guided by the usherette into darkness, stumbling here and there in his eagerness to please.
Now this is funny, Shadbolt mulled over.
Some mornings one of their friends, Wheelright or Flies, appeared and watched Vern and the boy, who was no longer a boy, chew through the quota of fibrous diet; hardly ever did their rosters coincide for them to appear together, the demands on weather-forecasting and tram-driving being especially strong first thing in the morning. And yet here they were seated on either side of Vern, and barely giving a nod when he arrived, whistling.
Shadbolt felt more animated than usual and wanted to share it by rubbing his hands and talking loudly.
But a glance showed an ageing trio staring down at their knees. So embarrassed was gentle Vern that his front teeth (‘Let's see your ivory’) kept advancing and retreating every few seconds as he simultaneously felt for his cup and concentrated on burying his nose in Monday's galleys. A flake of translucent skin had lifted on his forehead: a hinge of disappointment.
Silence itself became an embarrassment.
Les Flies scraped away from the table.
‘We missed you last night’—Wheelright—‘It's not like you.’
‘You were there?’ Shadbolt asked, chewing mechanically.
They were always there at the window Friday nights.
‘I'd better have the car this Friday,’ Les choked from behind. ‘I think I might be needing it.’
‘It says here…’ Vern frowned, trying to change the subject.
‘This Friday?’ Shadbolt repeated.
On Vern's galley he noticed a half-tone of Frank McBee beaming with the Premier, while parting the thighs of his pale fingers to form the now characteristic V.
‘I was going to tell you today,’ he said. ‘Guess what?’
Wheelright stopped pacing. The city lay stretched out below in its orderly geometry before the morning haze.
While half-reading the caption beneath McBee's screened image Shadbolt mentioned he might be driving to Sydney this coming Friday. He and a few of the chaps. (Twelve hundred miles, there and back. That's nothing for a car-full of car enthusiasts all talking at once, chain-smoking, belching and farting, wearing five o'clock shadows and air-force disposal flying suits.) Leaving Friday afternoon they'd arrive Sunday, returning on Monday when Holden would be twenty-one.
2
The Egyptian landlady—Shadbolt experiences a crush—the master of ceremonies and other epic figures—a crowning coincidence—more general knowledge—Shadbolt is learning—beauty and the beast—the hero out of his depth—brief view of the interior.
On an unfamiliar kitchen table he bent over the blue tram lines of cheap notepaper (slight lump in throat):
How's things? It's me. The place is near the beach…We got over in under two days. That's what I call moving. The Chrysler's exhaust system fell off outside Yass. It was easy to fix. Apart from that it ran like a train. Tell you what, Sydney is big. The harbour's worth a look. The streets here run all over the place. Dead ends everywhere. I saw an electric train and a man lying in the gutter. We kept getting lost driving around—had to ask. We've had a good time.
He mentioned a few memorable feeds of oysters, and continued.
Thought I'd stay on a bit and see what happens. See a bit of Australia! Relax—I'm joking! I'll see a bit of Sydney, that's all. This boarding house is run by a female, German or something. I've a room out the back. At night I can hear the surf. The others got going on Monday. I told them to drop in and say hello. Anyway, we'll see.
The way he'd simply decided on the spur of the moment to stand alone in such a sprawling city, knowing no one, not only left the others bewildered: they felt betrayed and angry. It questioned all the mucking about they'd had together. The Chrysler and its warm upholstery: might well have been a tram or a bus discharging a paying passenger. Standing on the footpath Shadbolt cast a dwarf's shadow and wore a bland expression.
Manly always had a large floating population. The place itself was deposited around the edge of an ocean, a collection of boarding houses, louvred sleepouts and outhouses which went out to sea at night, and reassembled by morning, dripping moisture and rust stains, with trai
ls of sand and salt, and seaweed in the gutters.
A certain melancholy was established by the paintwork, mostly seagull white, always in various stages of fade. And verandahs were enclosed in plate glass, and retired ladies or peroxide widows could be seen watering a cactus in a pose of holding a deep breath, increasing the illusion they were under water.
The buildings crowded around the foreshore for the best position, facing the sea, and the beach was bent into a boomerang shape (returning), obscured by the distraction of stately Norfolk pines along the foreshore, which made Manly world famous, at least in Australia.
There were not many children in Manly. People tended to arrive and settle ‘later’—after they'd grown up. It was as if they drew comfort from warming their hands near the great cyclical forces of sun, wind and sea, and the faded houses which also faced those same battering elements, and so required constant maintenance, became aspects of their original selves.
Odd-balls swept to one side appeared hopefully on the foot-paths with suitcases, male mostly, and other fragile bodies up to their necks in disappointments. Manly attracted the drifters. The feeling was a person could sort themselves out here. And it attracted retiring types. Hundreds of discarded divorcees. By international standards Manly had an extremely high density of deck chairs and false dentures.
Among the completely outnumbered males, which is where Shadbolt fits in, a conspicuous number were ageing health-and-sun freaks. Even in winter there'd be at least a dozen striding along the water's edge, slack-breasted, half bald, but displaying truly amazing near-perfect African pigments. Other silver men were decked out in permanent pressed slacks and brilliant shoes which mirrored the undersides of their volcanic noses and chins.
Traditionally, the regulars were country folk ‘down for a few weeks’. At the crack of dawn they could be seen emerging in pairs to promenade among the pines when the grey ocean must have appeared like a prime acreage of wheat, swaying and rippling in the nippy wind, and the curling rollers evoking at regular intervals the circular disintegrating advance of their combine harvesters.
So these people came and went, replaced by others, a constant tidal action.
Serving them was a smaller population of flitting-about barmaids, waitresses, apprentice hairdressers. They rose and fell with the seasons. And always there and unchanging, almost oblivious to all this, were the landladies, recognisable in the way they ignored each other, and the prominent warts positioned like black diamonds on the sides of their perspiring noses. Some wore trousers. Some, heavy beads. Some went in for flaming henna hair. (And some employed all three.) Magnificent sturdy specimens were the Manly landladies.
Aside from the surf and its avenue of indelible pines, Manly had…it had that tacked-on atmosphere, yet at the same time was more substantial. It had its own Art Gallery, cardinal's palace and sewage treatment plant; a tidal oval, Epic Theatre, ocean-arium; there was the gymnasium and a pale green park named after a pioneer aviator born in Queensland where people flew kites; and it had enough beauty parlours and pubs with the regulation wrought-iron verandahs to start a country town.
At the stroke of 3.18 on that Monday afternoon H. Shadbolt turned twenty-one, his nose angled to one side, his now-legal manliness indenting a furrow in the warm sand. From then on the confounded carbuncles subsided, and he suffered little trouble in that quarter for the rest of his life. Rattle and subsequent sigh of surf, steady warmth of sun penetrating pores of nape and shoulder blades.
When he stood up he cut quite a figure. Just by standing there he could gaze clean over other people's heads and car roofs. (He was head and shoulders above…) And with it went that archetypal expressionlessness, all jaw and sunken eyes, the original Antipodean do-it-yourself man. Only when the surface was punctured by periodic blinking did he appear uncomprehending, and gullible even.
Ensconced in the Hills in Adelaide Shadbolt had now and then digested a paragraph on Manly, usually describing a mass surf rescue or an early Sunday evening shark attack. Now the world he'd once read about stood at arm's length and beneath the soles of his feet, and he consumed it down to the smallest sunlit detail. He wanted to see everything.
There were many more people here than in Adelaide. He kept bumping into them. Their faces had been twisted and loosened by heat and isolation; a geophysical fact. Accustomed to the battering, they appeared engrossed, preserving their balance, even on a footpath. Confronted by Shadbolt recording them with his photographic memory they looked momentarily startled, before sliding their eyes off him.
Past the gymnasium, the fish n' chip shops, the Epic Theatre, and into the hinterland behind the foreshore, the buildings no longer crowded for the best position, the streets narrowed into unexpected lanes of grey palings, and dog-legged, or flooded for no apparent reason into a claypan of wide open space, the province of mongrel dogs; and retracing his steps here Shadbolt was pulled up short by the unexpected dead end, and became disoriented for the first few days by a Chinese laundry with dusty windows identical to another on another corner. The irrational town plan of Manly—of Sydney—encouraged such disorders of the mind.
An attempt at clarity was offered by Shadbolt's boarding house. A block-and-a-half back from the beach it had…superimposed on the stucco of seagull-white a mock-Tudor facade, as if a diagram of the ideal street plan had been hammered onto the walls, but poorly, for the entire system of logical lines was coming away, and banged and vibrated in the lightest breeze. Shadbolt might have unconsciously chosen it for its associations of order. In fact, it was the first boarding house in Manly he saw.
The front porch had been enclosed in glass. To twist the door bell was like making a public telephone call. And glass also enclosed the verandah, where paying guests could sit all day in muffled comfort. The right-hand side had been converted into a sleepout, fitted with opaque louvres, as had an asbestos extension behind the laundry, Shadbolt's room. The backyard was mostly concrete. Armchairs were scattered under the clothesline to catch the sun. And when the isolated figures uncoiled to escape the immense late afternoon shadow Shadbolt could not help but picture the bolt-upright figures made of sterner stuff forever standing in Vern's backyard. Against the fence, a dense outburst of ferns and fragrant frangipani and monstera cast complex shadows and shade in a compost of rotting lushness; Shadbolt had never seen anything like it in Adelaide. And large butterflies with black-and-white wings moved in and out of the dark green and shade, like idly flapping crossword puzzles. Someone had a pet galah a few houses away and the air was thick with salt.
The landlady had pencilled eyebrows like the marks left on windscreens by maladjusted wipers. On one side of her nose the occupational wart made the staring Shadbolt suddenly wonder if she was from India. She had jet black hair piled up and held in place by a comb.
But while shelling peas she spun an Egyptian yarn, and Shadbolt sat down. Verbs, place-names and peas plopping out in unison:
‘I was born on the oldest river in the world. I speak English and Arabic. I have some Jarman, French and Aussie. You may call me Mrs Younghusband.
‘How did that come about? I'll tell you. My father was a camel dealer, the most respected in all of Egypt. We lived on the Nile at El Giza. Today, thirty years later the river still puts me to sleep at night. Its colour was the same, I swear, as the trousers of your Australian soldiers. The first ones I saw were drunk on a what's-you-call-it—donkey. It was disgusting. All this talk about the powerful Australian soldier, as if it's something to be happy about. In Egypt they experienced stomach aches and all manner of illnesses. They arrived on horses. They put up tents outside the town like so many little pyramids. My father told me: on no account talk to them. Don't show your face. Horses don't mix with camels, he always said.
‘But you see, of course the armies needed camels. I remember so well the day he arrived in the compound to do business with my father. He was the quartermaster. I'd never seen such a funny little chap. So very serious. My sister couldn't help laughing. With
his orange hair we thought his head had caught on fire. And pink knees—he wore shorts. He only came up to here.’
Shadbolt could now stare openly at her crinkled cleavage. As she reached for more peas it expanded, revealing her ancient habit of storing between the perfumed mounds such items as lace handkerchiefs, paper money, notes for the milkman, receipts, keys and a propelling pencil, not to mention the many soft memories, real and imagined.
A dreamy expression clouded her eyes.
‘My husband-to-be used such funny words. To my father he said, “To beat the Turk, we're going to need your good offices.” My father asked, “What is this you call horseflesh?” For days and nights they bargained over camels. He was no match for my father. My husband-to-be's voice was slow and quiet. “You can't pull the wool over my eyes” was something he'd say to me when he was being very nice.’
Mrs Younghusband dabbed her eyes with a triangular handkerchief.
To help her out Shadbolt pursed his lips, ‘I can't say I've ever met a real Egyptian before.’
She waved her hand and returned the handkerchief to its nest.
‘He used to drive out on a green motorbike to see me. We swam in the Suez Canal. Whenever we were together he never stopped looking at me. I used to tease him. A quartermaster is only 25 per cent a man. But he said the world, and not just the seasons, is divided into fours. The water of the Nile was one of these four elements. I disobeyed my father. I could have listened all day to him talk. He held me in his hand. I should have been attending college in Cairo.
‘Allan—Allah to my ears and eyes!—returned to Sydney with the Aussies. He kissed my eyes and He promised a thousand times he'd return on the next boat.