Holden's Performance (11 page)

‘What is it you want? What's gotten into you?'

Shaking her head she sniffled, ‘I don't know.'

The throttling shadows on the wall above may have grossly exaggerated; yes, but—

‘She doesn't know,' the flight sergeant intercepted.

‘I'll tell you what,' McBee straightened and revealed all of Holden's mother. ‘Tell you what I'm going to do.'

She raised her head in partial hope. It was then they saw Holden almost together,

‘What are you doing?' she stared. ‘My God, what's that he's got?'

The flight sergeant stuka-dived under the table, his DSO and Bar forming a brief rainbow.

‘Put that thing away!' Holden's mother shouted. ‘I'll brain you.'

McBee restrained her with a slight head movement.

Stepping forward he held out his hand and laughed, ‘That's my rifle. Come on, boy.'

But Holden followed him in an arc. That did it: daylight of release widened between his mother and him.

And yet her face contorted, ‘What are you doing this to me for?'

From under the table came the cramped voice, ‘Tell him someone could get killed…'

McBee had not taken his eyes off Holden. Now the former corporal stiffened, his face, neck and shoulders expanded into a sterner remote force.

‘Atten-shun!' He went cross-eyed with the effort. ‘Pre—zent…ARMS!'

McBee turned from Holden with contempt. Phew! The airman crawled out from under the table, lucky to be alive. ‘A fat lot of good you were,' McBee said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘You RAAF types are all the bloody same.'

Mrs Shadbolt pushed forward; Holden had never seen eyes so wide.

Without a word she slapped him hard across the face.

In the congested kitchen the never-before-heard blaze of noise reverberated, and it was that as much as the loosely held war rifle which threw Holden backwards. The weapon fell from his hands. But too late for the copper bullet to alter its busy trajectory through local history: first collapsing the nearest table leg, before driving the smallest of McBee's toes clean through the pine floorboards (where it gradually decomposed into opal and dust), cartwheeling McBee backwards in a spurt of blood, upsetting the cotton reels in the mending basket, then ricocheting off the concrete back step, shattering louvres and exploding the myth of the flyscreen door, perforating two perfect piss-holes in the corrugated tank, and so touched upon the cardinal points of the South Australian house, deflating the front tyre of McBee's motorbike and clipping the wing of the Medleys' notorious Black Orpington.

McBee lay on the lino, clutching his foot. Pale and trembling he raised himself, and steadying against the sideboard, aimed a tremendous boot at Holden's behind with his undamaged size 8, corporal punishment, the force of which sent him sprawling again and torpedoed the bewildered boy through the doorway into the arms of his sister, Karen.

Those were the days when the appearance on the streets of a new car attracted curious crowds. No sooner had one pulled into the kerb and the driver casually stepped out hurdling the door if it was a roadster—than men would be drawn from across the street, from passing trams, men from all walks, and couldn't-be-less-interested wives would turn in mid-sentence to find themselves temporarily abandoned, as if the latest in cars had magnets fitted under their fenders and bonnets, exerting an irresistible pull within a short radius, causing in the process jaws to drop, eyes to glaze and hands to thrust deep in the pockets of trousers. Within minutes it would be two or three deep around the car. From splayed legs underneath came muffled reports to the nodding bystanders on the type of front suspension, depth of sump and other specifications, and just about everyone perfected the technique of craning in through the side window to read the instruments, briefly experiencing amid the odour of genuine leather the technical sensation of a framed view of the road, without once laying a finger on the duco.

Parallels with the lunch-hour crowds which also surrounded the excavations for Adelaide's first skyscrapers are superficial; for those men were merely ‘filling in time'. Car crowds were knowledgeable, definitely. They had statisticians and ‘car maniacs' among them. As they stood there letting the aesthetic and mechanical details sink in, an alert, concentrated hunger distracted their faces: mix, socio-biological of course, of mechanical appraisal, envy, power-lust.

Those same men (hands in pockets, eyes glazed) who might have been all at sea in judging the right shade of curtains, who would not bother looking twice at Drysdale's
Woman in Landscape
hanging in the local museum, had an almost instinctive feel for the proper rise and fall of mudguards, the proportions of a radiator grille, angle of windscreen, the right or wrong quantity and placement of chrome (always a sore point that), and so on; and they wore this innate knowledge with the usual quiet certitude of the connoisseur.

The magnetism of cars was not restricted to the fully imported experience of Jaguars, Bristols, Lancias. It was more widespread than that. The first locally manufactured product from GM in 1948, which featured six cylinders in line and a pink tail light, was accorded front-page treatment in the
Advertiser
. No wonder its grille had been pre-set in a wide grin of victory. Each successive model proved a crowd-stopper, causing minor traffic jams, at least for the first few weeks, and scored page one regularly into the sixties, the American PR-man's dream, only retreating onto page four in the seventies. And year after year the population voted in a slow-moving Premier for the state who chauffeured himself into the office and whose surname was a play on (i.e., a subliminal reminder of) a mass-produced American car: enough to activate every man's dream for modernity and stability; no accident that he eventually shattered the world record for the longest serving parliamentary leader in the entire British Empire.

The town plan of Adelaide, the remoteness and emptiness of the old continent itself, and the post-war prosperity fuelled by the occasional copies of
Life
and
Saturday Evening Post
lying opened on the benches in barbers' shops (boy, those Americans always looked happy): yes, these undoubtedly encouraged a car-culture. It entered all aspects of daily life, from all directions, replacing, or rather, emotionally interfering with, the invasion of khaki grasses, for the metallic spread of cars never managed to replace the cancer of the grasses, not entirely.

As for the post-war reconstruction, its gathering momentum could be measured aurally by the narrowing interval between the explosions from the roadmaker's quarry visible in the Hills from any point in the city. Another, possibly more accurate index: the number of side-valve British motorcycles equipped with sidecars and eyesore canvas-and-celluloid hoods declined in inverse ratio to the increasing number of blessed prams, pushers and strollers, each fitted with a canvas canopy, once again on a smaller scale. There also appeared to be fewer war-surplus trousers, belts, shirts and boots seen on weekends in front gardens; all things wear out, needless to say. Only the trams retained their original shape.

Of Vern's two best-friends, Les Flies wore his tram-driver's black trousers which featured the vertical maroon piping normally associated with the trousers of bandleaders, whether he was on the job or not, while their joint friend, Gordon Wheel-right, went about in shorts even in thunderstorms or at midnight or in the middle of winter. Arriving at Vern's house together they were an odd pair, visually diametrically opposed, not only in the region of legs.

It goes to show how names can slip out of sync: with their respective occupations and preoccupations Plies and Wheelright should have swapped surnames. (Then what? Would anything have changed? Wearing a tag like Flies or Wheelright it is possible.) Wheelright was an Adelaide nose specialist. His spare-time preoccupation, he was well-known for it. His listed occupation though was Weather Forecaster. A man cultivates a hobby, especially when the value of his profession is open to doubt, and, in the case of weather forecasting in those days, ridicule. Wheelright had a litmus nose for rubbish, for flotsam. A student of the streets—his term—he could ‘read'—his term again—the tempo and condition of a given city by its gutters, and a secondary, more surreptitious source, the contents of its municipal rubbish bins. A city's central nervous condition was revealed by the quantity and degree of angle in stubbed cigarette butts; all right, an obvious example.

The centre of gravity had a way of shifting from one sector of the city to the next. To everyone's amazement it had happened almost overnight during the war when those hordes of rest-and-recreation Americans rejuvenated certain alleyways, cafes and street comers of a dying quarter of Adelaide. Wheelright had read the shift long before the Tramways Department decided to put in extra stops. Now the post-war reconstruction suggested a glacial shift, possibly towards the south. Whenever it rained, information accumulated on one side of town half a mile away was deposited at Wheelright's feet by the perfectly straight gutters. By standing at the right intersection with notebook, pencil and stopwatch he could ‘read' the points of localised activity occurring at various parts of the city. The length of mother-of-pearl oil slicks testified to reduced numbers of parked motorcycles to the west. There were virtually no dogs in the south and inner city. He picked up his first ballpoint pen in Hindley Street in 1954, and the declining worth of the halfpenny began to show in its increasing deposits on the footpaths. Toadfish-looking contraceptives washed up along the western perimeter were duly noted. A glance on the ground outside the Odeons told Wheelright of the decline in Ealing comedies, just as his gutter-count of the patronage of trams tallied with Flies'. His absorption in the signs on the ground was Aboriginal, although the ground here was dead flat and well and truly asphalted, an absorption which left him with perpetually barked shins. It was Wheelright who taught Holden to use his eyes. Actually confessed to the dumbfounded boy that he, Gordon Wheelright, could live very happily and know what was going on in the world if he had a device which prevented him from lifting his eyes more than a foot off the ground. Certainly his gutter, footpath and rubbish-bin findings were more accurate than his official weather forecasting.

Wheelright was said to be married, but no one ever remembered seeing a wife.

His best-friend Flies exchanged information with him, for he saw the world framed daily by the window of the tram. Like Wheelright he was intensely local. But he understood that any patterns revealed within the perimeters of Adelaide stood as examples of all human life. All the movements between the cradle and the grave, and even before the cradle, passed before him; only a matter of keeping the eyes open.

Pale from his years of being carried all day across the rigid lines of the city, the most conspicuous feature of Flies was his low forehead. Sometimes it seemed Les had no forehead at all.

Unlike Wheelright, and their best-friend Vern Hartnett, he was not obsessive; was not tormented; held no theories; was not driven. His view of the world allowed everything. And his best-friend Wheelright was constantly picking up his unfinished sentences.

From late 1948, or to be mechanically precise, 29 November 1948, through all of 1949, young Holden suffered from carbuncles. The painful eruptions placed strain on his already famous expressionlessness.

‘Your body is trying to tell you something,' Wheelright pointed out, downcast. Les Flies agreed.

The new cars produced excitement-fevers in the boy. Every other day another longer, lower, more glittering model made its appearance and instantly overheated his adolescent nervous system, sweating palms gripping the handlebars being a symptom.

This could have produced the carbuncles.

But what of other factors? The first volcanic eruption coincided with his traumatic flight from home when he pedalled distractedly up Magill Road with a lump in his throat. As he dismounted in the cul-de-sac the lump transferred to a throbbing pain in his neck which almost made him cry out. It felt like a spreading, disconcerted blush. In the first few weeks at his uncle's place he noticed other outbursts, and for a long time there would always be a carbuncle glowing somewhere under his clothing, like a small tail light. Only his pale face escaped, remaining as smooth as soap.

Concerned for the boy, Vern and his best-friends Wheelright and Flies ransacked the medical dictionaries, encyclopaedias and handbooks before calling in the finest in local medical opinion—a carbuncle specialist in North Terrace who drove an Armstrong Siddeley—although no one said what they knew, or half suspected, which was that the body's normal defence mechanisms were reacting against Vern's special diet.

What did Holden's early growth consist of? Words, words: a flawed, grey-and-white view of the world.

It was more than a match for his mother's tasteless technicolour sandwiches.

His uncle had picked up the idea proofreading. It had to come from words. It was pure and simple theory. And its origins were not American, like most theories after the war, but British from their long experience in the down-trodden maize economies of the tropics. That's right. Vern became one of the first white men in the Southern Hemisphere to believe sincerely that a daily intake of roughage aided digestion, facilitated bowel movements, cleared the brain, abolished night starvation, cut down the chances of cancer of the lower intestine and bowel, eased the splitting head- and ear-aches; in other words, it surpassed the fine-print claims on more than a dozen patent medicine bottles. And like all late-in-life converts (Adelaide had plenty of them in other fields), Vern Hartnett swallowed the medicine with all the rigour of a zealot; he even contemplated casting a statue to the unknown discoverer of the fibrous diet.

If his uncle had a weakness, Shadbolt reflected many years later, it had been this.

With a daily supply of galley proofs from the
Advertiser
, Vern had plenty of roughage at hand. Whistling or breathing through his teeth he pulverised the fibrous newsprint until his veins stood out. He then mixed it with their breakfast cereals: the words, half-tone photographs and post-war growth advertisements all went in. To be on the safe side he included it wherever possible in their evening meal too. It blended well with mashed potatoes; you could hardly taste it with icecream. Newsprint consisted of 90 per cent water anyway, Vern informed the starving boy. Once the habit had formed Holden spread it on bread with dripping when he came home from school.