Holden's Performance (19 page)

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.

‘I know what you're thinking! Everybody says the same. That men are cowards, soldiers most of all. But you didn't know my husband. He was a man of his word, my father said that. In February 1919 he appeared in Cairo. I became Mrs Younghusband in a Christian church. I never saw my family again. We took the train to Alexandria next morning to catch a boat to Sydney. I felt happy and yet sad.'

Shadbolt shifted his feet and looked down at the floor.

‘In Egypt, you must know we are a poor country. There are never enough trains. On this day of days we could hardly squeeze in. Allan pushed me in, and hung on outside. We became more and more separated, and young men began touching me with their legs and eyes. It was so awful you wouldn't believe. Rounding a curve there was a cry. People began turning around and looking at me. “Help me!” I cried out. The train had stopped. Allan was no longer there. With others I ran back along the track.

‘I saw him on the rocks, his coloured hair. The sunlight made him pale. I touched him, I scratched him. I was surrounded by Egyptians. I, the only woman. An old man pushed forward and took my husband's hand. He wiped away the blood. I noticed the little finger had been torn off. The old man then stood up and said in a loud voice—and I believed him—“The birth line and the planets intersect at 90 degrees. This man's death was foreordained.”

‘My husband was swallowed up by Egypt, and I came on to Australia—to see this country that had given him red hair. Besides, I had nowhere else to go. I had addresses of Allan's army friends in Adelaide. You said you came from Adelaide? I can tell you their names. But I stayed put here against the sea, turning my back on the desert. I have never travelled across to Adelaide, and not once back to Egypt. Never. Oh, how I suffered with homesickness! That's what you call it, isn't it? I think of my family, they must all be buried now. I hardly ever leave this house. People come to me. The vegetables and meat are delivered. Now you've come here. What's your name? I mind my own business, that's one thing I've learnt. But I must have people around me. How old are you?' Before Shadbolt could open his mouth she smiled and rested her chin on her hands, ‘I'm old enough to be your mother.'

Taken aback by outpourings of frankness, Shadbolt tried hard to remain nonplussed, but succeeded only in looking confused, so he twisted around to see the rest of the dining room.

Flanked by heavy drapes like the flaps of an open tent, a Federation window let in a slit of light stained by panels of crimson and Islamic blue. It cast feathery shadows on the canvas-coloured walls. There were cane tables and potted palms. And deposited on shelves and in brass trays by successive waves of nostalgia were objects Shadbolt took some time to recognise: namely, examples of cracked Venetian glass, sandblasted musical boxes, bits of driftwood and fishing net, silk scarf unfurling like a turban around a bamboo hatstand; and standing among them, plastic Eiffel Towers and Empire States, brass vases engraved with hieroglyphics from Egypt—all trapped, or rather, coming to rest at different levels the way objects settled on a beach or found their way to the accommodating crescent of this woman's cleavage.

‘Reminds me,' Shadbolt simultaneously frowned and cracked a smile, ‘of someone I knew in Adelaide. He's doing research on any stuff like this he can find. He was trying to establish a pattern to it all, based on science.'

‘Some of my guests send me things. There's a bottle of sand from the Sahara Desert if you want to see it.'

Mrs Younghusband studied her new boarder.

Quite a contrast to the others in her establishment. As strong as a horse, for one thing. Three-quarters of his life still lay ahead of him. Nothing dribbled from the corners of his mouth. No vibrations. And tall. Praise be! Simply by raising his arm he could replace a light bulb, without ruining one of her embroidered (oasis, palm and sunset) chairs.

‘Do you have a family. And brothers and sisters? Why did you come to this place, Manly?'

Shadbolt chose the last question.

‘I don't know,' he shrugged.

And now the other guests drifted in, and the contrast between them and the wrinkle-free latest became glaring. They were short men in cardigans and carpet slippers. They took no notice of Shadbolt. Congregating around the table they were looking peeved: there was no sign of the Queensland teapot and ginger biscuits.

‘I've been talking to our latest,' Mrs Younghusband flashed her Egyptian smile. ‘Say hello to Mr Shadbolt, all the way from Adelaide.'

They turned their faces with slack stars around the mouth. Across each forehead a stack of horizontal incisions measured their years and in some cases levels of intelligence. The air turned nicotine-laden and musty: a backwater of superannuated typesetters. And then the uncontrollable rattle of cups against saucers resembled the afternoon shift of linotype machines. The stubby fingers of these men, their purple lips which had become permanently pursed: lives spent composing in hot metal the copy and sensational subheads and photo captions of the Sydney tabloids, so that they no longer knew what was real anymore.

The odd man out was a former foreign correspondent from a broadsheet, sporting the necktie of a demolished bowling club, whose handwriting, a graph of deeper habits, had become so bad, intolerably so, ‘stories' turned into ‘stones', ‘seaside' looked more like ‘suicide', ‘dust' scribbled into ‘Aust', and ‘art critic' into ‘arthritic'. A distinguished career finished early. He had been posted to Egypt in '52; at Mrs Younghusband's he felt at home.

‘But I'm off the turps now,' he whispered to Shadbolt.

Nudge nudge, oinck oinck.

‘So anyway what brings a young fella like you to our little place on the planet?'

But Shadbolt's attention was drawn to an adjacent face, a shade more purple than the others. His photographic memory clicked into place, in turn triggering a form of belated homesickness, and he couldn't help himself.

Cemetery—Avro Ansons—wife smiling through cobwebs—the dead fox draped over her shoulder.

‘How's things? The last time I saw you…'

Uncle Jim now really had the shakes. At his elbow the cheap bric-a-brac vibrated on the bamboo. Unable to focus, and out of embarrassment or anxiousness not to offend, he began giving the old bottom lip a good licking. Where was the loyal, leaning-forward wife with the aurora borealis of lines around the mouth? Shadbolt tried to recall his mother's creepy prediction found in the dregs of the poor woman's tea.

At least three words came out, a reflex action.

‘Chin up, boy!'

Everybody wanted to give advice, to tell him how to live.

If he sat down in the aquarium-verandah or lifted his fork at the table a self-contained valetudinarian at his elbow would begin croaking out small suggestions, to put him on the right track. After all, they had forty, fifty years over him.

The quality of their advice? Shadbolt would not have minded homilies on the best way to shave or the price of a box of matches in 1931. (‘When I was at your stage…') Instead he was given observations which served as parallels; and the trouble was they didn't quite ring true, reminding him of the non-sentences Vern used to point to in the proofs.

The happiest man I ever met was a woman.

There's more than one way to skin a kangaroo skin.

Look over your shoulder to move ahead.

All spoken by men fiercely, smacking their lips. Nothing of the encyclopaedic scale of Vern's general knowledge where all signs pointed to the universe consisting of an aerial construction of interconnected facts in three dimensions; or nothing even approaching the all-consuming investigations of his friends Wheelright and Les Flies, an accumulation of objects as facts.

In the first week Shadbolt made two mistakes. He sat in somebody else's chair, which was bad enough, but when he filled in a gap with a line about a friend in Adelaide who worked for a newspaper, a proofreader on the
Advertiser
, the inmates sprang to life, yelling abuse, swearing, gritting their teeth and hissing. To the inconsolable typesetters any proofreader was a pedantic pain in the neck, the very word brought back tears of frustration to their noses and eyes. ‘Know-alls' yelled out a skinny, grey one who hurtled his walking stick along the marbled lino, the letter J tangling with a pot-stand.

After that Shadbolt looked forward to striding out on his daily walks, first along the foreshore, observing pedestrians, keeping an eye out for any unusual cars, and then inland, where he collected impressions, including one of his own tremendous pent-up energy.

There was more and more of tins city. It kept spreading in all directions. He was not even at the edge of it. Such immensity and complexity gave the distant feeling that anything was possible here. The streets branched off towards separate horizons, each sunlit telegraph pole, intersection and hole in hedge marking the future possibilities.

At nine on the dot on a street at right angles to the sea the chevroned doors of the Epic Theatre opened and released a gust of disinfectant, usually as Shadbolt happened to be passing.

The foyer had wall-to-wall carpet, of deep ecclesiastical blue, and suspended from the centre of the ceiling a chandelier twice as large as the one Shadbolt knew from the Regent. The Epic Theatre was nothing less than a moving newspaper. ‘All the News that's Fit to Screen!' And, ‘See! See! See! Non-stop Stories from Four Corners of the Hemispheres.' Programme announcements were displayed in glass showcases. Dramatic photo-montages they stopped him in his tracks: the enlarged grainy face there of a Soviet defector and his plumpish wife about to swoon on a Darwin tarmac, juxtaposed with the ecstatic exhaustion of the first four-minute miler. It was enough to bring the old lump back to his throat.

At the end of the second week Shadbolt obeyed an orthogonal impulse and ventured into the theatre, a few paces which altered the course of his life.

Barely had he settled when a man paused in the aisle. ‘Sorry, pal. Your block's in the way. You'll have to sit at the back.'

‘Right.' Shadbolt sat down again. Large single digits appeared on the rippling curtains, forcing them to part. Instead of laryngitic lion, two kookaburras began splitting their sides: in this thinly populated country bad news was not meant to be taken seriously. A battleship ploughed through heavy seas. Motor cyclist scrambling up hill somersaulted head over heels.

The show opened with martial music under a newsreader's urgent, clipped voice. Whenever this V.O. on long-term contract paused for breath the music moved in, maintaining the momentum of manufactured breathlessness.

Oh, no—here we go again!—the fall of the French government. Next, another wreckage of a Comet (‘Aviation authorities have expressed…')—Ike and Winnie seated in open-air armchairs—ho hum, another blinding H-bomb—a Colonel Nasser is made Premier of Mrs Younghusband's Egypt—boffins in London pointed with HB pencils to a link between fags and cancers of the lung—fashion parade of fur coats made out of skin from kangaroos (each model pointedly placing one foot angled forward)—Prime Minister Amen's coalition of ironic eyebrows posing on steps in Canberra (British-built shoes planted wide apart)—the young Royal couple beginning their Commonwealth tour.