by Murray Bail
‘What do you think you're doing?’
‘These are my men, understand? Use your head.’
Shadbolt must have blinked.
‘We've seen this one before. She's trouble. We're not half-wits, you know. Now vamoose, pronto. Both of you.’
Shadbolt led Harriet by the hand. The Canberra-curved body of the Mayflower touched the bumper of the Cadillac.
To cheer her up Shadbolt gave a laugh. ‘When I turned and saw you I thought: hello, here's trouble. She's going to give the PM a run for his money.’
She began to cry.
‘I saw you standing in the crowd. You wanted to see Alex? He always liked you. He was on the beach.’ She sniffled and kept biting her lip. ‘They found him there. Seaweed and lice all in his mouth,’ Harriet added.
‘What do you mean? Where?’ Shadbolt stood still. He blinked. ‘But he didn't swim. Alex hated the beach.’
His mind went blank, he felt heavy. He wondered what someone else, the Minister, McBee, or Vern even, would feel and perhaps have said.
Inside her house they protected each other. He was kind, all the time glancing at her. Curled up she choked like a drowning woman. Such privacy made him examine his own feelings. He tried hard to understand. And in picturing the always-dazed figure standing on the stage he found that even though Alex had been his friend he could have been more of a friend. He now felt merely an absence, a retreating face and bare knees, not even as clear as the blurred proofs pinned on his wall. There was nothing else, or much else.
He was sorry, but he couldn't understand more.
Mountainous seas mountainous even for Manly had invited a struggle. It would be seen as a single figure battling against misfortune. Wave after wave of the huge and unpredictable world-waves, beyond one person's control, and this pale figure there literally trying to keep his head above water, hanging in there against the odds which accumulated, allowing him no time to breathe, let alone to gather strength. It would have appeared as an epic struggle from the shore, which is how he pictured it. But in the turbulence which rendered his legs useless it became all-engulfing violence, B-grade. He couldn't open his mouth. His ending would be alone, not even observed. He was seeing himself from the beach when no one was there. It pained him to realise his struggle as futile. Then as he filled up and choked and became all water, airless, the light in his eyes became grey-white, the way he faced a film flickering over him. This softened as he rolled about in the silence. There was still a glimmer, light projected from some source, but it was too late, he was gone. He felt himself gone. Hair tangled his eyes, water filled his word-mouth.
So many men wanted to be autocrats it became hard to tell them apart.
Shadbolt knew them from the newsreels and the proofs from the Advertiser. The pathology of power affected faces the same way the world over.
A basic contradiction in their point of focus—one eye on the multitudes while focusing on the individual—had made them genuinely two-faced. Their expressions were strangely empty and yet alert. And a kind of restless hunger had coarsened their mouths and eyes. They wore highly buffed shoes and converged on the capital for the one reason.
The autocrat has to have a one-track mechanical mind and stick to it to make his mark.
The first dung was to adopt an eyecatching appendage and make it permanent. It hardly mattered what, so long as it was clearly defined: the leopard skin over the shoulder, toothbrush moustache, a daily carnation in the lapel. With a little repetition it soon appeared to embody the personality of the autocrat, just as a prancing horse or a three-pointed star became the well-known logotype of a car. Next was the choice of posture: whether to be seen as always languid (i.e. in command, on top of all situations), or aloof from the everyday or just plain genial. To be seen always hurrying was not advisable. And a distinction had to be made between indoors and out, and when and how to appear in shirt sleeves, if at all. These kinetics were anyway God-given. A man could only tone mem down or exaggerate them.
No matter how eyecatching, the visual aids were wasted if the words pouring out from the mouth were lacking in force. The pretender would then simply appear distorted, a part-autocrat. The process of transferring personal beliefs to general beliefs demanded consistent signals. Nothing could be achieved without a clear head. The multitudes were easily confused, the autocrat quickly appeared formless. The choice and delivery of words: sometimes, yes, they could certainly drag along deficiencies in a person's accessories and posture. People want to be overwhelmed by ingenious word-waves with some table thumping thrown in, or by folksiness, classical remoteness, domineering fatherliness, not to mention honey-humour-sarcasm.
From the day Frank McBee, MP, set foot in the circular capital he stood out from the others. His chosen appendages and public posture had already been screened by world history, and so possessed an immediate historical advantage. McBee arrived laden with not just one recognisable prop, such as the polka dot bowtie, but a whole battery of them. In daylight he never appeared without the watch-chain forming a cleavage across his waistcoat, mulga stick to take the weight off the old war wound, and between his raised fingers the tremendous uncircumcised cigar to attract the eye and torpedo any criticism. Short and pink with a generous belly: a Christmas tree in a pinstriped suit.
The first time he spoke he drew, for Canberra, a large crowd. Shadbolt had dropped the Minister off at Miss Kilmartin's nearby. With nothing else to do he sauntered over to the corner site and watched.
That morning a tank in one of the nation's petrol stations had exploded, blowing the whole place to smithereens, and McBee had homed in there to make a statement on transport. Standing among the blitzed bricks and still smouldering girlie calendars he grew florid with the measured force of his delivery. The only thing wrong—small point—was that his voice, made nasal by his car yards and the limitless space and the dry rocks of Australia, was at odds with his fully imported, pinstriped appearance.
‘The internal combustion engine, the thing that gets us from A to B, is something we take for granted, an iron certainty. And yet it contains a message for every one of us. We each have a life span parallel to a car engine. At this moment we are at a certain stage in the cycle.’
Half closing his eyes Shadbolt could almost hear Alex in the Epic Theatre. Momentarily he wondered about the attraction of men with overpowering, insistent words.
‘How does a car engine work? It has the same four stages as human life. I, C, P, E,’ he spelt it out to the baffled audience; catching Shadbolt's eye he winked.
‘That not-so-young codger holding up the telegraph pole— you there—perhaps you can tell us how an engine works? What does I, C, P, E stand for?’
Shadbolt scratched his nose at the old crowd-trick McBee pulled.
With his mechanical mind and schooled in the defective acronyms of Canberra he easily worked out the letters; he saw in rapid succession ‘EPIC’ assemble from the same four strokes, and grey-and-white images of the distracted figure in shorts, his friend Alex half blinded by the projector, in turn reshuffled by the cut-price Indians into ‘PICE’. And he saw the stages in his own life unfolding.
‘Intake, Compression, Power, Exhaust,’ McBee tapped his skull like the hemispherical head of an engine. ‘The moment we are born we take in knowledge and fresh air. You with me? This mixture then becomes compressed as the petrol and oxygen does in a car engine. With us knowledge is compressed by experience. It comes to a head when we enter our forties and fifties, sometimes earlier. It then explodes, or I should say, it's converted into power, power channelled into energies, the way a car needs a good stretch of road. Our power doesn't last forever. We soon suffer lack of intake, exhaustion…We're replaced by someone fresh. The cycle begins again.
‘There you have the four strokes of the internal combustion engine, and that's how our lives and the life of a nation rise and fall.’
Squatting to avoid being made an accomplice again Shadbolt felt like smacking his forehead: ‘Why d
idn't I think of that?’ The crowd had become still. Two crows flew like the PM's eyebrows across the pale sky.
‘Some people, like some engines, can be unreliable, uneconomical, noisy. You get some that require fine tuning, others are missing the spark. People begin to leak and, beg your pardon, backfire first thing in the morning. Some people, like some nations, collapse in a state of exhaustion. Now I've been in transport all my life…’
It must have been all the years of stumping about in his dusty used-car yards, and patrolling the mock-marble floors of his GM showrooms, and moving on and off political platforms which had gradually shortened his legs and widened his mouth, consolidating—in direct ratio to his increase in power—his girth and appearance of bulldog tenacity. And it must have been his hours of public-speaking outlining his pet policies, such as the abolition of trams, which had lengthened his sentences and measured his pauses.
He believed in appearances.
While Hoadley cruised the streets for disconsolate housewives weeping in parked cars, McBee searched for prams and young mothers. In his first few months in Canberra he shook off the usual disorienting dizziness and shattered with one hand behind his back the longstanding baby-kissing record, keeping track of his unit volume in bar charts pioneered by GM—or was it Henry Ford? Every other day there was a shot somewhere of Frank McBee, MP, kissing a baby. If the press lost interest he'd hire his own photographers. In parliament he always struck a patriotic chord (thumbs in lapels, looking over his half-moons). He quickly became known for his measured rhetoric. It was more than a match for R. G. Amen: except when he had the audience laughing too early and he'd get carried away, letting an occasional crudity slip out, even the dropping of aitches. He was always good for the one-liner. It was generally agreed he was ‘larger than life’. Remember the one that did the rounds of Frank McBee receiving the press stark naked and pink on the edge of his bath?
His most talked-about performance happened on a frosty morning, middle of winter, in clear view of Parliament House. It involved Hoadley. Shadbolt was there; he saw it all.
It was a difficult time in Canberra when women of various ages began darting out in front of Hoadley's car like rabbits in a plague; Shadbolt had to keep his wits about him. His lights sometimes picked them up at night: pale, distraught figures. Shad-bolt somehow admired them. Twice in the one week he narrowly avoided running over the wife of the clerk in the—, while others put up passive resistance, lying full length in front of the car at traffic lights, until the Minister for Home Affairs himself had to make personal assurances and promises, patting their wrists and nodding, sometimes leading mem sobbing into the back seat of the car. Pressure on the Minister had been angling in from all sides. Still Hoadley maintained his desire, or radier, obeyed his instinct, to satisfy every constituent, wherever they might be.
On this morning Shadbolt drove along Anzac Parade towards Miss Kilmartin's block of flats. It was an emergency. She was giving trouble again. Shadbolt kept one eye open for any figures lunging out in dressing gowns, while Hoadley, forgetful of the demanding American's ultimatum, sat forward on his seat, watching out for any stray constituents in need of care and understanding. They were in sight of Miss Kilmartin's place, opposite the only shop in Canberra selling Piramidos cigars.
‘Stop,’ Hoadley pointed.
Young woman—leaning over steering wheel—shoulders heaving. Why are they so unhappy? Shadbolt squinted. Why do women appear isolated?
Doing a U-turn he pulled up alongside, quietly, so as not to frighten her. The Senator had his window down, cufflinks flashing in the sun. His technique would be to whisper semiseriously, ‘Excuse me, are you…’ or lean out and tap his fingernails on the window, holding an embossed card, ‘SENATOR SID HOADLEY, Minister for Commerce, Home Affairs…’ Either way he wore an expression earnest and at the same time fighthearted—a difficult double. The last tiling he wanted to do was look like the law.
Suddenly, Shadbolt realised. Before he could warn the boss, ‘This is Mister McBee's Buick,’ the young woman with the familiar shoulders turned, and Shadbolt saw his sister's face bitterly projected into the future. But it only lasted a second. Recognising the smiling/frowning Senator and Shadbolt leaning forward in unison, she erased the conflict of lines and presented the symmetrical beauty of former Miss Australia, just a trifle moist and red around the eyes.
The transformation left Hoadley and Shadbolt agape for slightly different reasons.
Her brother spoke first, ‘Are you all right? Is something wrong?’
Hoadley had more experience of women crying, especially lately.
‘She's all right. Aren't you, sweetheart? Nothing a little sweet whisperings in the ear wouldn't fix.’ Out of the corner of his mouth he asked Shadbolt, ‘I've seen this one before. What's her name?’
‘You remember, from Adelaide.’
Karen took Hoadley's handkerchief and blew her nose. When Hoadley stepped out she smiled at Shadbolt.
‘You're looking better already,’ Hoadley bent over showing concern. ‘Things aren't all that bad now, are they? Park the car for a sec,’ he said to Shadbolt. ‘I'll have to do a bit of homework here.’
‘You've got that American lady waiting, don't forget,’ Shadbolt glanced around. ‘I think she's going to be peeved.’
He patted his driver's elbow. ‘Five minutes isn't going to kill anybody.’
Many a time the Minister of Optimism had said, ‘There's no rhyme or reason why any woman or child should shed a single tear in this great country of ours.’ Shadbolt saw him move in beside Karen. In restoring the softness of women with his words and wandering hands his sense of well-being expanded, and it activated others standing around him the way a speeding car produces turbulence in trees and grasses. Any lapse or gap in the progression produced a sudden deflation; Shadbolt (chin on steering wheel) had often been puzzled by that.
When he looked in the mirror again another man had joined the car, his arm welded to the door. Slowly Hoadley emerged coatless and faced Frank McBee. The last time Shadbolt had seen them together was on stage debating the embarrassments of public transport—pros and cons of. As one spoke the other had stared down at his shoes, impatient to interrupt.
Now they were at each other's throats.
In silhouette McBee's reproduction of the bulldog jaw with the bulging waistcoat, and the box of complimentary Havanas under one arm, cut an unmistakable, powerful figure.
Hoadley must have been exasperated by his rival's visual superiority. Showing no respect for history he suddenly seized the initiative, and in a formidable display of brute force, swung McBee by the wrist—swung him face down on the General Motors bonnet.
The two powerful men locked hands: tubby Frank McBee v flash Sid Hoadley. Veins never before seen came to the surface, and from each hissing mouth a series of mushroom clouds erupted in the morning air, which suggested they had lost their reason.
Karen skipped up to Shadbolt and took his arm.
‘Tell them to stop. You must.’
In the next breath she said, ‘Who's going to win?’
Picking up McBee's walking stick he stood in front of the car, and as the pendulum of forearms swung this way and that the contestants glanced at him, seeking his approval. The flyscreen shirt gave the straining arm and cufflink of Hoadley exceptional clarity. McBee's feet barely touched the ground and his Savile Row elbow seemed to half-disappear into the dark pool of the bonnet, making him look even more out of balance; but as everybody knew he had a history of fighting with his back to the wall. It would be a matter of whether the accumulation of brandies and cigars would tell against him, or whether the recent activity in home affairs had taken too much out of Hoadley.
Suddenly Karen's fingernails dug into her brother's arm.
McBee lost his grip. His feet had begun slipping. Hoadley forced his arm down in an arc. It happened so quickly he turned and winked at the crowd. Then as he repositioned for the final onslaught there was a metallic boi-innng a
nd a great dent radiated where his elbow met the bonnet. Hoadley hesitated. And like a drowning man, McBee's feet found the gutter. Someone waved the Union Jack in his face like smelling salts, and he surprised Hoadley by savagely regaining lost ground, turning back the clock. Now Hoadley looked in strife. McBee pushed his arm down, an inch at a time. An epic struggle. Hoadley looked worried, close to collapse. Glancing sideways he noticed photographers had arrived, and coinciding with the first flash put on a final display of power, drawing from all his reserves, until McBee's feet slipped again, pedalling in mid-air.
Hoadley should have finished him off there and then. Instead he glanced at the crowd for any pretty faces. He couldn't help himself.
It was then that a young woman stepped into his field of vision. The crowd went very quiet. Her obliviousness of everybody suggested she was Hoadley's wife. But the smart light-woven colours and hornrims were American, East coast, and a hurried ‘I-can-explain-everything’ look loosened Hoadley's face, all his pent-up optimism too, for Frank McBee swung his distracted opponent's arm down, swung it with such momentum against such weakened resistance, Hoadley's knuckles met the bonnet with terrific force, making another smaller dent, and Hoadley collapsed in a state of exhaustion.
Breathing heavily, Frank McBee slowly faced the world, and parted his fingers into the dihedral of victory.
The end had come so quickly it was met with silence. Shad-bolt had wanted to explain to Miss Kilmartin. ‘The Minister was engaged. As you can see. He does send his apologies. We were only a few minutes late.’ Something along those lines. But she had gone.
Shadbolt felt he should commiserate with the boss now raising himself from the ruined bonnet, ‘She's shot through,’ he reported, meaning Miss Kilmartin, and gazed away somewhere at the clouds. But still staring down at the duco Hoadley merely shook his head. On the other side people were shaking McBee's hand. Karen had her arms around his neck.
Two powerful men wrestling over her beauty-queen favours had given her cheeks a shine.