Holden's Performance (20 page)

There were the usual universals here—namely, the unshaven nail- and razorblade-chewer from Arkansas wiping his chops, the industrial chimney in Birmingham collapsing in a pile of dust and bricks—but where the local
impresario
left his stamp was in the amount of epic World War Two footage, and in sport, which consisted almost entirely of the emergence of Mercedes Benz in international motor racing.

At the end of an hour as the camera, crew and V.O. were saying farewell to the sun setting on Easter Island, a live figure unexpectedly bounced onstage, and facing the audience began talking over the film. Half-tones of trees and grass, shadows and stone heads tiger-striped his face and chest. Clearly his impatience to speak was calculated. It mysteriously combined, and even extended, the various screened images which had until then been the main influence in Shadbolt's life.

Suddenly the film finished, leaving a skinny man pinpointed in the glare of the white screen. It was the one who'd asked him to change seats. He wore shorts, his socks down around his ankles, and scratched at one elbow.

Aware now that the theatre was virtually empty Shadbolt felt the man was directing his message only to him.

‘Everything that happens in the world, that's to say, everything you see on this screen, is part of an ongoing epic. News is nothing but the relationship of man to accidental events. A person—somebody—is there at the beginning of everything, I don't care what it is. That's how news begins, and that's how it spreads. Of course, what's eventually screened is only a fraction of a larger story. Interesting word, “screen”. It's in our nature to summarise, to reduce events to human-size. And these summaries form the small parts of an endless whole. Right now, each one of us is performing in many different epics at once.

‘Are you with me? All right. Now here's the crunch. Where do you fit in the scheme of things? Where do you stand? Can you pinpoint your position in the larger story? What are you up to? Some people—most people—allow themselves to be simply taken along by events. Are you one of mem? Listen.'

He spoke of people who made news; there were a precious few who were ‘larger man life'; but he always returned to the word “epic”. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and pointed directly at Shadbolt.

‘Let's dismantle the word right here and now. What's this ‘epic' made of? Well, I say, Every Personality Is Created. If you like you can switch that around—I Can't Please Everybody. We're all individuals in a larger story. We're acting out and embroidering our time on earth, each and every one of us, in the human race.'

Screech—Alex Screech—for this was the manager, usher and public speaker rolled into one—displayed a fine sense of riming.

At the mention of ‘human race' the projector suddenly started up again, and Screech became engulfed in the silverfish of Mercedes racing cars crowding into a European hairpin. Shadows, numbers and crowds scribbled and scratched at his throat, obliterating his frail features which appeared to be fighting against overwhelming odds, the mechanical world-din drowning out the epic quality of his words, until his mouth became another rippling black square in a chequered flag.

The two kookaburras reappeared, signalling the next round of newsreels, and Shadbolt returned to the glare of the ordinary street, blinking.

Enclosed with ten-shilling notes and surplus socks and underpants Vern continued submitting proofs of selected news. Even though Shadbolt saw the same images at the Epic Theatre (e.g. lion cubs born at Adelaide zoo) he wrote back with gratitude and what was tantamount to love: I devoured your latest proofs, thanks again for the money, decent of you, how are the others?, look after yourself, keep me posted. And always the postscript: (I don't think I'll be staying here much longer).

Some of the local items he pinned onto the fibro wall in his room.

The northern light was harsh on Frank McBee. In a few weeks his stippled face became jaundiced. His face was well-known; and now look, he'd entered bootlick politics. Employing the jutting jaw, pinstripes and V for victory he cut an impressive local figure. ‘Your friend Mister McBee's a big wheel all right,' wrote Vern in an understandable lapse in syntax. When mentioning McBee he always emphasised the
Mister
.

And so shocked was Shadbolt seeing his fully grown sister, Karen, in one-piece bathers as a Miss South Australia hopeful he tossed his head and bit his Up. Even her foot angled forward, lifted from the best coaching manual, made Shadbolt feel doubtful, and as she slowly turned oriental on his wall she looked even more cheerfully innocent.

‘Of course she'll win,' her sponsor and chaperone, McBee, said to the sceptical press, ‘she's mine.'

No sign in the picture of Mrs Shadbolt, former wife of a tram conductor, rumoured to play havoc reading tea leaves.

The trams were under daily attack from McBee, the expanding GM dealer. The newspapers displayed his alternative plans. People took notice of him. From his motorcycle years McBee knew the streets of Adelaide backwards and even upside-down; tramlines intersecting into a Y had almost killed him.

Shadbolt read the proofs instead of devouring books. No word of his best-friends Wheelright and Les Flies. Not even after he'd twice asked. Often he pictured them: their application over a broad front defined them entirely.

Vern mentioned house repairs. The gutters were clogged up with leaves. No mention of the usherette who would have had the same problem next door.

Remember the one-legged sky-writer, the one with the Adolf moustache, who worked for
Mister
McBee? For a time he became a household face. Vern never forgot a name. A proofreader's pencil orbited a single paragraph: incinerated while crop-dusting in the western districts after his light plane intersected power lines blending into the khaki hills.

Shadbolt returned to the usherette, at the least expected times. A slight lapse in his photographic memory here: he recalled less of her face than its sudden connection to her nakedness.

And the way she strutted. The way, in a sense, she ignored him. Amazed by her frankness he felt foolish at having removed himself from the endless experiences she promised in the room next door.

Smutty thoughts! In broad daylight on the foreshore: what about her, the tall woman facing in the floral dress? How would she? And the one bending over a pram? Only recently she must have—. At the Mermaid Cafe there was the new waitress wincing with sunburn while outside a crippled woman struggled out of a Triumph Mayflower. He imagined the way old women would have been—looked, behaved—when young. He could not help surreptitiously appraising the Egyptian breasts. Conscious of his manliness it was about time he did something about it. He imagined the bodies of all other women glowed in the dark like the usherette's, as if illuminated by a torch. It made him restless, his voice hoarse.

As for the rest of Sydney…some cities are air-cooled like antiquated aero engines (Rome, New Delhi, Adel—), others are water-cooled like the majority of four-stroke car engines (San Fran, Venice, Sydney).

The first time Shadbolt took a bus into the city the harbour appeared to be never-ending. It filled the hollows and gaps, water finding its own level, it leaked into the corners of his eyes whichever way he turned. Deep! The lapping mass glittered and penetrated, lapping at the descending layers of terracotta houses, submerging the boards of the wooden jetties, slap-slapping sullenly at rocks, a heavy mass, narrowing the main road into an isthmus. Water everywhere. It shortened the side streets into dead ends. Shadbolt noticed it right and left and straight ahead, the road climbing to escape it, and doglegged, only to return to it at the next bend; and always he felt its cooling properties, caressing his cheeks.

From the bus he saw British saloons pulled to one side, their bonnets yawning steam as though it were a cold day in Coventry. In other cars people ate meals; they read newspapers; a radio, compass and revolving electric fan had been fitted to one; a lady sat bawling her eyes out in a bottle-green Rover; others were fast asleep; a penis rose up like an obscene gear lever; a couple laughed and laughed. Births and deaths intersected in the front seats of cars. Every few yards a navy blue mechanic stood in the sunlight chewing an apple. The epidemic of car-maniacs was merely obscured here by the omnipresence of the harbour and the variety of the terrain.

Approaching the centre the traffic came to a halt. Too many cars and motorcycles and pedestrians all heading in the one direction. For Shadbolt it briefly recalled the dark photographs of refugees in Europe, pushing prams and overloading commandeered Citroens and carts, fleeing the war. Only here in Sydney people didn't wear the black overcoat and lace-up boots. A thin man passed on stilts, some jug-eared schoolboys looked into the bus with periscopes.

He turned to a passenger, ‘Is the traffic always this crook?'

‘Don't you read the papers? It's a public holiday.'

Joining the pedestrians he allowed himself to be carried along, bumping into others, one foot in the gutter.

They swept across Sydney Harbour Bridge.

The streets in the city centre are named after British monarchs, a British prime minister, Pitt, and the various inbred brothers, uncles and even fathers of British monarchs. The oldest street is George (King George III: but wasn't he half-blind, obese and insane?), and the morning Shadbolt arrived people stood twenty to thirty deep both sides along its entire length. Policemen on pirouetting horses had a devil of a job keeping order.

Shadbolt would become a connoisseur of crowds; but not yet. This was by far the largest he'd seen. A steady hum reverberated and merged with the surrounding buildings; it tended to blur people's swaying senses. More and more people pressed from behind, and as the hour passed an anticipatory restlessness, beginning with the schoolchildren and the cripples in wheelchairs lining the front, ran back in waves like a wind or fire along grass, before stopping against solid matter, and then shifted again the other way. Standing patiently Shadbolt had no trouble looking over the heads and up the swept-clean street towards the Town Hall; and he was among the first to see the glitter of the slowly approaching black car. Almost simultaneously a murmur rushed towards him turning all heads, a murmur overlapping into a chatter of higher exclamatory voices, more like a rattle, everybody shifting forward an inch, multiplying and erupting into a clapping, a hoarse yelling and a cheering, figures swaying holding their first borns aloft, waving hankies, miniature Union Jacks or just their arms and fingers. As Shadbolt tried to remain in the one spot the torrent surged forward and back, mercury rolling across a table, pausing and stretching the elastic leading edge where policemen gritted their teeth and turned purple in the face.

Shadbolt had consumed coundess grey-and-white images of the young Queen, but as she drew level, seated well back in the open Daimler, he was hypnotised by her pinkness—she'd burn to a frazzle if she stayed in Austryha—set off by the clarity of her neck, pale blue hat and raised hand. The immaculate black coach-work threw such details into relief: cunningly clever choice in duco. By then the worker-bees surrounding him wanted to cluster around their queen, their ecstatic scribbled faces and sticky hands strained forward again, and Shadbolt found himself waving frantically too, smiling desperately for the pale face to turn in his direction, and for even a fraction of a second to acknowledge his presence. As she passed, the bod in front turned with shining amazed eyes, and his nose, an unusual bulbous nose, registered to Shadbolt as one that had enveloped a ball.

It was then he heard the voice.

‘Sheep, merino sheep! Look at you all. Grown-up people, making fools of yourselves. What are you all here for? Tell me that.'

The push around Shadbolt hesitated.

‘That's right, you're all jungli, the lot of you. Wave to the Queen! Bow and scrape. She went thataway. Follow the leader. This mania for worship. Has anyone stopped to consider?'

People began calling out and turning. It's a free country, but. Shadbolt felt the flow of the crowd dismantle into unpleasant elements. The way some grow indignant, others accept; Shadbolt glimpsed the force of the majority.

‘Why don't you pipe down? Etc. Who do you think you are? Don't go telling us what to do. So on. She's our Queen. Etc, etc. It's our Majesty you're talking about. One more word and—'

The sea lining both sides of George Street had merged and surged towards the harbour, a steady mass from behind pressing against Shadbolt, knees and arms nudging him by degrees until without meaning to he faced the alien element: a small woman with glaring eyes. The twist of her neck and mouth reminded him of the woman he'd briefly seen in Manly looking over her shoulder, trying to park a car. Carried along against her will now, her chin merged with her throat, more in anger than fear. Tons of people inched forward from behind and she began to slip from view, barely an arm's length from Shadbolt.

A face turned in mid-air, ‘Hold your horses, there's a lady here with a gammy leg.'

Shadbolt felt something soft at his feet. Planting his legs apart he forced the flow to pass either side, a gum tree or a telegraph pole stemming a flood. And still the weight from behind gathered momentum, now causing people to trip forward on tiptoe, as if George Street ran downhill to the harbour, and he noticed panic opening people's faces, women screamed for their lost shoes and children; nevertheless, Shadbolt took his time and lifted the disabled woman by her elbow.

To his surprise she hissed in his face.

‘Thank you, I can look after myself.'

‘What have you lost? I can get it.'

‘You're standing with your big foot on it.'

A wheeling movement in the crowd made her hold onto his lapels. He and she became pressed together. In contrast to the frailty of her breasts and hips he felt—what's this?—the metal of a calliper against his leg.

‘What are you staring at?'