Holden's Performance (12 page)

With such a regular fibrous language-fertilizer the growing boy would be expected never to suffer a single minute of constipation; but beginning from that very first day at Vern's he suffered blockages, often for weeks at a time. This may have contributed to the carbuncles.

Aside from the carbuncles—and they were painful enough—the diet had other, longer-lasting effects.

When young Shadbolt landed on his uncle's cement doorstep he was fourteen. In that vital growth period for testicles and intellect he began twice daily swallowing and digesting the contents of the morning newspaper, down to the last full stop. Without so much as a hiccup he took in faulty headlines, misplaced paragraphs and punctuations, the wrong choice in serifs, photographs with incorrect captions. There was always something not quite right in what he took in. For even when given corrected ‘final' proofs for the evening meal or dessert he swallowed the so-called eye-witness accounts, along with the various so-called official statements and statistics, hearsay From Our Special Correspondent, earnest conclusions and prophecies which rarely came to pass, the exaggerated dire warnings and so-called weather forecasts. Political scandals, their ‘ramifications', the editorials helplessly laying down the law, sporting and financial predictions just wide of the mark, half-tone assassins, saints and beauty queens, the unconfirmed report, hopeful signs of the wheat and wool crop, so-called reviews of novels by the local dilettanti, halftone royalty. So of course the boy developed a taste for crowds, reported births and deaths, not to mention the extravagant adverts and adverbs for everything under the sun from trusses and stockings to lonely hearts, knackered horses, fridges and ‘Australia's Own Car'. In one sitting he'd consumed the daily history and shifting minutiae of Adelaide, and the rest of Australia, and the world beyond. All was swallowed. Very little rejected. It went on for six years.

True, he acquired a large body of opinion. At school he gained top marks in geography. Shadbolt could reel off place-names and world leaders with his eyes shut, and he became the poker-faced arbiter of Bradman's statistics and the outright winners at Le Mans and their average speeds. The consumption of half-tones also sharpened his photographic memory, and naturally he absorbed the internal laws of coincidence and charisma.

But such a staple diet gave him a fragmented view of the world. Nearby or faraway happenings were summarised in brief impressions which only approximately matched the actual people or events. He developed a distant, incomplete view of women. And because each day demanded approximately the same number of words to be printed on pages the size of tea-towels it became difficult for young Shadbolt to distinguish truth from half- or quarter-truth, importance from no importance, while at the same time his attraction to men in power was reinforced by their repetitions in screened images.

He'd always ‘kept his thoughts to himself' (mother's term). Now with his twice-daily intake of short sentences and the short plain paragraphs, at intervals broken by an exclamatory subhead, he too began to speak in short clipped sentences, and often threw in a laconic word or two in summary.

A third and final influence was harder to assess.

Fact is, from an impressionable age Shadbolt began digesting local and world news before the rest of the population. In a sense he was several hours older than everybody else. Nothing therefore surprised him; he accepted everything; and beginning from those formative years a shoelace or a shirt button was left undone the way a mechanic is casual with the grease on his hands.

The supply of wounded aeroplanes dried up. Displaying the agility which would always demoralise his opposition McBee branched out into jeeps, paddocks full of surplus jeeps the colour of fibrous cow dung; and when they too dried up he moved into non-ferrous metals. He melted down truckloads of bravery and service medals. At any one of McBee's barbed-wire depots you could get ten shillings for a dead car battery.

With every Tom, Dick and Harry wanting to steer his own car and the British and American manufacturers unable to keep up with demand, let alone supply enough spare parts, McBee opened garishly painted car wrecking yards at intersections north, east, west and south of the city centre: great news for the struggling motorist. In those days an anxious beggar for a Jowett Javelin head gasket, or the seller of a badly pranged Packard, often found himself dealing with Frank McBee in person.

Negotiations took place ankle-deep in mud embedded with bolts, gaskets, cotter pins. Surrounded by rearing chassis frames and the doorless shells of smashed and dismantled saloons and cabriolets it looked like the desolate aftermath of a battle in World War Two. Leaning on his walking stick, as if wounded, McBee conducted transactions in an exceptionally loud voice. This alone intimidated anxious sellers of damaged cars, and enfeebled attempts of buyers to bargain for a crucial part; and in the same loud voice McBee cracked jokes, mocked and poked muck, switching in mid-sentence to backslapping and mateship, even resorted to rhetorical self-analysis—‘What am I doing in this rotten business? Do I have garbage for brains? The short answer is—', and so gathered around him an audience of transfixed sympathisers.

It became well known that he'd give away a valuable spare part if a buyer came up with a good sob-story, and if he became carried away with his own rhetoric and humiliated a customer, he quickly settled quietly and over generously. A known soft-touch for charities he even gave, after first loudly blaspheming, to the Church. The men he employed were all returned soldiers who'd lost a limb or one or two internal organs, and so resembled the cars they dismantled. The shell-shocked digger with a steel hook for an arm who for years sunned himself on the footpath outside the Magill Road yard, who'd taken it upon himself to nod, ‘You'll find Mr McBee in his office', was supplied with the floral armchair and regular pocket money for tobacco. By then McBee had freehold title to all his paddocks at Parafield and blocks in the city. He was making a name for himself.

In his search for meltable metals he bought into an old established linotype printer. It did a nice line in calling cards. It had the long-term contract for the printing of timetables and the pastel-tinted tickets for the trams. A real goldmine. It was McBee in Adelaide, back in 1949, who first coined the much-abused phrase ‘It's a licence to print pound notes'. (How did he muscle in on that one? The peroxide blonde on the AJS hanging onto McBee's waist, her breasts squashed against his back, happened to be the war-widow of the printer who'd tried paratrooping. McBee easily made her laugh and cry out; otherwise she was the silent partner.)

With one eye on the statistics of post-war reconstruction McBee pitched for the printing of the Adelaide telephone directory, and from now on (he announced in his loud voice) trimmings guillotined from all jobs were to be perforated and smartly packaged as confetti. A deluxe range of wedding invitations were designed, featuring serrated edges dusted with gold. All very successful, thankyou. And he began printing how-to-vote cards for both political parties.

From wrecked cars it was a short step to quality used cars. McBee set up his first yard on Anzac Highway; had to knock down a house to do it. Motorists driving home at night were blinded by the sudden artificial daylight of ‘
MCBEE'S
' in eight-foot-high letters set by more than three hundred locally produced light bulbs which also illuminated the teeth of the Buicks, de Sotos and one-lady-owner Hudsons and Vanguards.

By then McBee began placing regular ads in the
Advertiser
, and young Shadbolt digested his achievements and spreading influence without being quite aware of it. Sometimes a mouthful of food stuck in his throat. ‘Some bad news?' his uncle inquired. ‘Masticate more, keep it going.' It could have been the story with half-tone photographs of McBee and mulga walking stick opening his fourth car emporium.

For all his worldly success McBee still went around on the old AJS. It now dropped almost as much Castrol on the road as it took in petrol; the entire machine had become encrusted with rust and muck as though it had just been dredged from the sea. Yet it started first kick, had never let him down. Criss-crossing the town plan to the various outposts of his empire took no time at all, even in the rush hours among the increasing number of cars and trucks.

Besides, it had become something of a trademark. ‘There goes Frank McBee,' people would smile from the trams. At least he wasn't getting too big for his boots.

On nights he took Mrs Shadbolt and Karen out for a meal at one of the hotels he'd just get on the phone and bellow hoarsely for a taxi. Mrs Shadbolt's concession to affluence was a kangaroo-skin coat, and decked out in this, even in the height of summer, she and Karen tripped after their provider.

Several times Holden had turned by mistake into his old street. The first time his legs had pedalled almost into the drive before he realised.

No one was there. No one had seen him. The brown house had the latest in electricals and upholstered furnishings poking out of the windows and from under the front door: walls, fly-screens and tin roof bulged under the pressure. It was smaller and browner than he remembered. This was not merely the usual trick of spaciousness played by memory. Parked on the front lawn were two ex-army amphibious vehicles, known as ‘ducks', as well as a pyramid of Amal carburettors, propellers off DC3s, and serpents of exhaust systems writhing among beam axles off Ford V/8s. These greasy masses foreshortened the foreground. Otherwise the house was the same as any other in the street.

Several months later it had shrunk even smaller in his estimation. The front screendoor had exploded off its hinges.

Stacked on the verandah were large plywood letters from the alphabet; parts of McBee's name.

In identifying them Holden may have stared for too long.

Almost back to the corner he heard his name and an onrush of athletic breathing. A hand touched his shoulder like a policewoman.

His sister Karen was astride a grasshopper-green bike. It had a wire basket hooked over the handlebars. The rushed ride and the close up of him, and now the pleasure at his surprise, widened her eyes and lengthened her jaw; and space of a more fixed nature had been introduced to the rest of her body. Through the arm of her sleeveless blouse he noticed the tidal swell of her body, and he measured the twin disconcerting outlines by the damp folds of the blouse. That and the way she kept switching from laughter to earnestness gave the illusion she was older than him.

Karen kept telling him news, and asking questions; she couldn't for a second stop smiling.

Nothing had changed with their mother, except she had her hair permanently curled (‘she's still the same underneath, though').

At the mention of Frank McBee, Holden stared down at his spokes and then actually smiled as he listened. Seems that McBee wanted their mother to read tea leaves every afternoon at his car yards, a shameless gimmick for lucky customers to see if they'd crash or suffer mechanical breakdowns as they drove away—and we all know the answer to that.

‘You don't have to worry about him,' Karen whispered. ‘Honestly, he wouldn't hurt a flea. He doesn't talk about you now. Besides, he doesn't come home till late. He's a very busy man.'

Holden thought about that. ‘I'd better get going anyway.'

Slowly they pedalled up Magill Road. She could visit him, if she liked. They agreed. She wanted to see exactly where he lived. Very much the lady she'd write or telephone first. Her new bike had gears.

He was fascinated by her fluency: signs of her recent growth. As her legs formed an A astride the bar he couldn't help dunking that the slit girls were supposed to have would have widened into a hole, just as in a machine there were ‘male' and ‘female' parts.

Until then he had managed to steer clear of McBee. But Adelaide being small and rectilinear there were only so many combinations in lines of force intersecting, or angles of vision briefly coinciding. The odds were further shortened by McBee's constant motion backwards and forwards; while young Shad-bolt's slow-moving mass kept more to a routine, mostly up and down, to and from school—a sitting duck. Bumping into Karen had opened his eyes. He began seeing the motorcyclist coming towards him in his entrepreneurial crouch, or his ears would pick up the AJS rattle in the most unexpected side streets, almost as if McBee was tailing him. On these occasions he'd dive into boxhedges or duck down the nearest gravel drive. He learnt to make himself scarce. He mastered the art of grabbing the rail of an accelerating tram. Anything to avoid Frank McBee. It was out of embarrassment rather than fear or guilt; throughout his life Shadbolt never suffered from guilt.

‘Your uncle's bending over backwards.'

‘Vern thinks the world of you,' Wheelright went on.

The boy blinked: because he agreed. They knew him well enough to accept the signal, but he scraped his feet like a draught horse, a social-something he had learnt, because he didn't know what to say next.

They were standing among the statues in the backyard. The boy had been weeding and trimming edges. Gratitude had made him obedient. Heavy birds were landing in the hill trees. The shadows of the outstretched arms also pointed to the hour: Vern had left for the late afternoon shift.

‘In fact, if you don't watch out…' Flies gave a wink.

‘Before you know it,' Wheelright picked up, ‘Vern'll do a bronze of you one day.'

‘How would you like that?' nodded Les.

Young Shadbolt could only rub an eye, ‘That'd be a laugh.'

One of the first things his uncle had done was outfit him with rubber-soled shoes in case he was struck by lightning.

At his feet now earthworms suddenly exposed to the universe wriggled in panic: oily fingers, just amputated. Holden squashed them with his heel.

‘What'd you do that for?' Flies stared down at the ground.

‘It's about time,' Wheelright was looking around, ‘he did one to Churchill. He's what I call a great man. I know all about Gallipoli, but if it wasn't for him none of us'd be standing here right now. I've told Vern this a hundred times. I've said I'd even chip in for part of the casting cost. Churchill would make an impressive statue. But he's not even on the short list. Vern says he's only a mug politician. I point out the man's charisma. Those eyebrows, that cigar—my God! At least he had a clear view of the world. And what does Vern say? It's all window-dressing. What did Churchill know about truth? All Churchill used were fancy adjectives. You've heard him. I think he's got a real blind spot there with Churchill.'