Holden's Performance

by Murray Bail

  Someone else had accepted the demands of the portfolio.

  ‘Anyway, I shouldn't worry about him. A man like Senator Hoadley can look after himself. And you're going to find yourself run off your feet here.’

  Such imprecision went with the so-called industrial suburb—car yards, warehouses, ultralight industry—which had been townplanned behind a hill near the sewerage works, so as not to spoil the sacred geometry of the nation's capital. They passed a red sea of telephone booms; a space and another paddock filled to the perimeter with olive-green filing cabinets; followed by one tangled in balls of oxidised wire, like rust-coloured wool.

  ‘He used to call me “Mudguards”,’ Shadbolt said, half to himself. And for the second time in a month the drought broke across the Colonel's face.

  ‘“Mudguards”?’ he chortled. ‘That's not bad!’ Dabbing his eyes he glanced at Shadbolt. ‘You've come a long way, my boy. From “Mudguards” to bodyguard. At least it's not a sideways movement.’

  He left out orphan, consumer of news, star-gazer, comforter to cripples. Shadbolt could have added mechanic, bouncer, posh-car driver; his father had broken his neck falling off a tram; all his life he had inhabited linoleum bedrooms; and now they pulled up with a squeak outside a silver-frosted Nissen hut, the type normally commandeered by youth clubs.

  Colonel Light remained seated. He looked straight ahead.

  ‘You're replacing Rice, one of our best men. There was a balls-up at Foreign Affairs. Somehow these things happen. A famine in Africa. People dropping like flies. Our people there get it into their heads to shoot off a cable:SEND RICE URGENT. We weren't to know. Foreign aid can be anything from tractors to stethoscopes. Ed flew out the next day in a Hercules. Nothing's been heard of him since, poor devil.’

  Still blinking, Shadbolt followed the Colonel into the hut. Three men lounging around on charpoys stood to attention.

  ‘Where's Rust?’ Light barked.

  Rust hobbled out from the bathroom down the end, zipping up his corduroys. He joined the others in the line-up.

  In Canberra, people congregating in threes and fours always appeared to be in uniform, even in the gym; so Shadbolt initially was taken aback by the team's discordant informality. But in that semicircular hut which would echo frozen limbs in winter, and be even worse in summer, rows of beds there as in a POW camp, dartboard and scattered copies of Man magazine—Shadbolt's first impressions—stood four of the most alert men in the Southern Hemisphere. Trained to see to it as unobtrusively as possible that no physical harm would ever befall the prime minister of the day, they were an elite corps, ruthless, anonymous types with lightning reflexes, and now joined by Shadbolt, huge and expressionless, making an unfortunate five. Except in matters of clothing Light had schooled these men along the lines of the Westminster system: the old cold-shower, shaving-with-a-cracked-mirror routine; to serve whoever was in power, rain or shine. The further they were from the centre of Empire such notions became either diluted, or in Light's case, an over-literal extension.

  ‘Rust is equipment officer, among other things. He'll fit you out. I suppose you might say he's a quartermaster—not all there. Right, Rust?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  Pudgy red-eyed Rust winked. He barely came up to Shadbolt's shoulder. Shadbolt recognised the face from the edge of a recent crowd.

  Light pointed to the next one, ‘I believe you two have met before.’

  Bloke with the black patent-leather hair. Exceptionally thin: a sheet of cardboard side-on. It made him difficult to see, even at arm's length. It meant that at three o'clock he didn't cast a shadow; a valuable plus. Watching Shadbolt now he allowed a sliding eye-movement of acknowledgement.

  ‘Granted, he gets full marks for camouflage. And he can pass through a crowd like a dose of Laxettes. Take a look at him; now you see him, now you don't. His speciality is small arms. What concerns me more are a man's disadvantages.’

  Staring at the skinny figure Shadbolt tried to imagine what they were. They'd have to be pretty bad for the Colonel to go broadcasting to the world at large. Then just as their hands went forward, introduced by the Colonel, the other one froze in midair at the sound of his name, ‘Stan Still.’

  ‘There you go again!’ Light threw up his arms in disgust. ‘Now you see what I'm up against,’ he said to Shadbolt. ‘In this business I need a name like, I don't know—a hole in the head.’ [Orig. military term, first introduced to Australia by William Light.]

  Stan Still could be only employed sparingly. In the sudden flux of a big crowd situation, where commands had to be shouted out, he had frozen on more than one occasion, when he should have fought his way forward, and during the colonial pandemonium of the last Royal Visit, had turned and moved in recognition when ordered to ‘stand still!’

  Digesting the complexities of the new job Shadbolt turned to the next man, and for a second was not sure if he had ever seen him before. If he had the face was so clean and nondescript, so unexceptional, it had left no impression. He was pale and like a Mormon, he wore a short sleeve shirt and narrow tie.

  ‘This is Irving Polaroid, an American adviser, on loan. All the way from Virginia. Right, Irving?’

  Smiling, Polaroid's lips rolled back; he seemed to say ‘cheese’.

  ‘You're welcome,’ he shook Shadbolt's hand.

  And—what's this?—he kept shaking it, and maintaining eye-contact, began squeezing, faint ice-cracking sounds coming from Shadbolt's hand, forcing him to apply his own pressure, steady and severe, with his tremendous mechanic's grip.

  ‘Irving's here to give us a hand,’ the Colonel was saying, ‘in surveillance techniques. Fingerprinting is his forte. And the Americans, through our friend here, give us advance warning of any unwanted visitors.’

  ‘Shhh,’ Polaroid smiled through his teeth, ‘walls have ears.’

  ‘Rubbish. This is Austrylia, not the US of A. Nothing's going to happen here. That's the blasted trouble.’

  Shadbolt let go, and Polaroid nodded, impressed, as he tucked his damaged hand under his armpit.

  In making himself at home in the dormitory Polaroid had counter-balanced his anonymity by allowing his possessions to accumulate in a coral growth around his bed—coffee-making machine, miniature whisky bottles, the latest in German camera gear, a boomerang, gramophone, Steuben glass, the tape recorder in a fancy case, shrunken head from his previous post, an electric shaver, Budweiser ashtrays and assorted hairbrushes and souvenirs—an eyecatching backwater of goods (some still in boxes) from all over the world which caused Shadbolt to suddenly see the logic in Wheelright's painstaking researches.

  ‘We're pleased to have Irving on board. He comes from a country that's fighting it out for Number One on the assassination league table. I'm told the streets over there are littered with spent cartridges and blood. We might learn something from his experiences.’

  He waited for Shadbolt at the last man.

  ‘Jimmy Carbon,’ Light pointed with his chin.

  It took several seconds to adjust to the dark, before Shadbolt could make out a hand stirring from a bundle of clothing.

  ‘Stand to attention, Jimmy,’ the Colonel murmured. ‘Mr Shadbolt here is replacing Ed Rice—who went walkabout. Jimmy,’ he glanced at Shadbolt, ‘is a half-blood from the Territory. Doesn't like the big smoke. Can't say I blame him. But by Jove we can use him. He can track a suspect's footprints across bare concrete and over granite steps and bitumen, you name it. Not bad either at handling dogs.’

  A master at making himself scarce Jimmy Carbon could put himself into the shade just by moving his head a few inches. He wore an old coat over a football jumper.

  ‘You'd like to be out on walkabout yourself, eh Jimmy?’ Light shouted to make him feel one of them.

  And Shadbolt drawn in stood grinning down at Jimmy. All he could see in the face was distance: in the eyes and in the flattened nose, the wide cheeks and forehead. Such distance, almost indifference. Only when Shadbolt looked down and up from
the empty bottles sticking out from under the bed, while Light went on about the need for extra-vigilance, did the face consider his and almost smile.

  Light told Shadbolt to get to know their faces and names in his sleep, ‘if not your life, the PM's might depend on it’. At the entrance to the tunnel he paused, briefly diffused by natural light, before he slammed the door and was gone.

  Shadbolt blinked. No one said a word. The bed blankets were dark grey as the galvanised walls, and with the concrete floor almost grey, the semicircular interior had the blurred tones of a photograph. Shadbolt didn't mind; to him everything felt light and different. The smell, for example, was a mix of cold metal, wet towels and the competing waves of hair oil from Jimmy and the not so smooth American. Shadbolt's bed was between them. On the floor he found a box of Redhead matches with the bare shoulder biro-ed into a penis, and feature articles torn out from magazines on how to live longer.

  The equipment officer came over and sat down.

  ‘Ed didn't have any next-of-kin. His belongings fitted into a couple of brown paper bags. All he had after forty-odd years on earth. I shoved them into the incinerator. What are you looking at? I say, don't think we're nothing but a pack of bludgers. We were out late last night, and are sitting around stuffed, recharging for the next job.’

  Seated on the next bed the American looked down at his feet, like a boxer between rounds.

  Seeing in Shadbolt a ready listener Rust rattled on, not looking at him, looking everywhere but. In this way he resembled some of the typesetters, suggesting to Shadbolt that something in all men of Rust's short stature and pale complexion released hurried words.

  ‘The Colonel had us keeping tabs on you for months. There was always someone on your tail. I can't say it was difficult. You never look over your shoulder. Not that you have much to hide. Do you want to know how many times you had a shit in the month of April? I have it written down somewhere. That sister of yours: I suppose you know she's been mucking around with Mister McBee? There are no secrets here. We know all about your shenanigans at Manly. We have to know these things. How did you latch onto that one? We know all about her. She's trouble. She used to be married to some joker who ran a picture theatre. The Colonel's only interested in reliability—reliability and up yours too, Jack.’

  Moving over to the metal cupboard he unlocked the door.

  ‘Has the old boy been bashing your ear? I bet he has. Christ, he's full of garbage sometimes. Bill's all right though, once you get to know him. He's got a job to do like everybody else.’

  He tossed onto the bed a belted raincoat, sunglasses, sunburn cream and a bottle of Goanna oil.

  ‘Sign a chit for these.’

  ‘What's this for?’

  Rust held up the gov. issue athletic support. ‘Did you hear that? He doesn't know what this is for.’

  Someone snorted.

  ‘You'll find out soon enough,’ the American turned away.

  Often while driving Shadbolt had passed Prime Minister Amen seated in the Cadillac, incongruous bulbous car, but which allowed him to wear a hat in the back reading The Times. Now that he thought about it Shadbolt had seen the PM plenty of times. One afternoon he'd almost tripped over him sitting on a park bench gazing at the British Embassy; another time he saw him queuing up like anybody else for an afternoon cricket match. And not once had he noticed a bodyguard nearby. The Colonel's ideas on protection were based on unobtrusiveness. Besides, as Stan Still shrugged, no point in making Australians think their PM was anyone special. ‘Who'd want to ping off a mug-politician anyway?’

  As for Irving Polaroid, whenever he saw the twelve-year-old Cadillac he said, ‘I used to drive one of them back home.’

  The arrival of Shadbolt coincided—on Polaroid's written recommendation—with a step-up in local security. Prime Minister Amen had only just scraped home in the last election, and that can lead to frustration ‘in certain’—Polaroid's term—‘quarters’. There were cranks all over the place. He pointed to Castro going berserk in Cuba, blow-ups in the Congo, President Kennedy using adjectives far too eloquently, you could never trust the Indonesians. People were having trouble these days distinguishing between a bullet and a ballot box. The periods of darkness in world history occurred in waves, as in economics, grain futures, the frequency of famines and hurricanes. World-powers inevitably suffer exhaustion and are replaced by others. Polaroid concluded by reminding that Australia was ‘no longer an island’, a point Vern would have disputed straightaway on technical grounds.

  Visiting autocrats from allied powers and others with unpronounceable names from less than friendly or tinpot powers had always been given ostentatious security treatment, akin to street theatre. To be surrounded and jostled by anxious bodyguards made them feel indispensable, and to have a picture of it screened back home never did a leader any harm. Now the same ‘cluster’ technique would be tried on the Prime Minister.

  Colonel Light made the announcement at the lookout on Mount Ainslie. Forming a semicircle Shadbolt and the other clean-shaven men looked so expressionless they appeared to be a bunch of misfits. With their complexions of concrete they blended in with the open space, and one or two almost disappeared side on or into the obscene shadow cast by the coin-operated telescope. To one side wearing wire-framed sunglasses Irving Polaroid made a point of standing casually with his hands in the pockets of his drip-dry suit, indicating he knew it all.

  From that vantage point above sea level Light had his right arm and forefinger outstretched, pointing down to the extent of the problem. There's the ground they would actually have to traverse on foot: the long shadowless avenues, the nausea-inducing orbs and crescents, and the irregular intrusion of tree cover. He indicated the distance from the Prime Minister's lodge to Parliament House, and from there to the various embassies and the fogbound aerodrome with its corrugated-iron terminal. He seemed to be confiding to Shadbolt, the totem pole standing in dusty shoes at his elbow; nobody else could have heard his words. And it provoked in Shadbolt an upsurge of loyalty which actually scraped his feet slightly.

  ‘The street is the only valid field of experience,’ the Colonel explained, a line he'd picked up somewhere (certainly not from the Everyman library). ‘You're wide open down there. You're going to be on your own. It's going to test all your reserves of endurance.’

  As he remained pointing a pigeon or a crow mistaking him for a statue dropped a whitish splash first on his head and then his arm. God knows what Polaroid must have thought! This kind of thing would only happen in the backblocks. But in other hot countries to the north it was considered a sign of good fortune. Keeping his arm outstretched, Light clicked his fingers, and Shadbolt whipped out his handkerchief and wiped the mess off.

  The Colonel had plenty on his mind. Looking down alongside him Shadbolt could see how a large horizontally moving figure in double-breasted pinstripes could pose an infinite number of catastrophe combinations; thing was of course to prevent it before anything happened. The real trouble would be when an African or Asian leader did the grand tour weighed down with medals and wives and the tribal problems back home. And what if the President of the US decided to make one of his flying visits? Even with the full back-up of the lean-looking Secret Service men with their skulls shorn to resemble the purity of mid-west wheatfields, they'd have their hands more than full. ‘We'll jump that ditch when we get to it.’ Impressed by Light's single-mindedness—still pointing down like one of Vern's statues—Shadbolt was disconcerted when he turned and saw the others strolling about and looking in the opposite direction. If anyone was at risk it was the Colonel; and Shadbolt became extra-attentive, protecting him.

  Each and every man was supposed to think-eat-sleep body-guarding, and before Shadbolt could venture on the streets he had to familiarise himself with all kinds of fancy equipment. As in any profession—printing, dentistry—special tools, often of the most ingenious simplicity, had been handed down over the years.

  Some of this equipment was i
n need of updating.

  The elastic in the typesetter's eyeshades had perished, and the walkie-talkies manufactured under licence in Sydney by Hoadley & Sons Loudspeakers had attention-waving aerials, cream ear-plugs which superimposed a deaf-mute appearance on the users, and an irritating habit of producing throat-clearing static whenever they passed a woman wearing a silk dress. The cardboard periscopes were of no use to Shadbolt, while the flesh-tinted anti-fly ointment manufactured in Western Australia to prevent the sudden hand movement had the old giveaway reek of Californian Poppy. Shadbolt found an ordinary tennis ball was used to measure inclines, and during the reconnoitre before an outdoor appearance of the PM, a high-powered telescope was disguised as a theodolite, and on the morning of the big day itself a homemade drosometer consisting of cartridges of chalk, needle-gauge and the worn heel of a plimsoll was rubbed over the moist footpaths, the stately lawns and the marble plazas. Another prop was the plywood plinth carefully handpainted to look like granite. Placed in position, a man could stand motionless in a soldier's uniform or English explorer's jodhpurs at the centre of any possible trouble spot, ready to spring—there were many different ways to skin a kangaroo. Not a bad idea; but when Shadbolt put his full weight on it, testing, testing, it splintered into chevrons of kindling.

  He examined these things as useful objects. (Pencil torch with flat batteries, Swiss ankle knives, umbrella with—.) As he turned them over in his hands a look of concentrated solemnity enlarged his nostrils and neck, verging on clumsiness.

  They had dogs out the back: not the usual German shepherds, a squad of patriotic dingoes. No one quite knew what the dogs were for. It was Jimmy Carbon's domain. Nobody went near them. Vicious beasts: straining at the ends of rusty chains their paws circumscribed a perfect circle in Canberra's hard soil. Shivering and slavering under Jimmy's spell they could sniff out a Chinese hand-grenade hidden in a carcase of merino meat. With a snap of the fingers Jimmy could put them all to sleep. It had been the Colonel's idea to fit them out to carry microphones. ‘Their full potential,’ he said with a keen look, ‘hasn't been realised yet.’