Holden's Performance (29 page)

Usually a bit of mist first thing: hedges took on ragged definition, trees and empty flagpoles appeared to rear up out of nowhere.

Keeping his eyes on the damp road and simultaneously glancing down at the map on his knees, in case he was swept off course by a vicious circle, Shadbolt made his way over curving lines named after the first explorers who stumbled around in circles, and these formed a pattern with other lines named after the nation's artists and architects, the flying doctor and rural poets, characters out of fiction, opera singers and dead generals, the forgotten politicians, judges, backyard scientists, the longsighted graziers and businessmen—names assigned by a select committee with others thrown in to cover environmental factors—Waratah, London, Aboriginal myths—so that Shadbolt traversed the nation's culture rendered in material form, a ten-minute journey with plenty of dead ends, reaching by 7.30am the Minister's surprisingly ordinary bungalow in Lamington Street.

If the Minister had been up all night personally dealing with a constituent's problems, Shadbolt sometimes had to wait for half an hour or so, pacing the length of the car. When Hoadley appeared he came to casual attention and opened the door.

Hoadley sat in the front flipping through the morning papers. He consumed them as avidly as he did food, twelve newspapers a day, and when he told tales about the press or his opponents he spoke as if his mouth was full. Slowly he shook his head, half-talking to himself, ‘I could pour a bucket of good old-fashioned shit over half of these bastards, any time I liked.'

Concentrating on the road Shadbolt could only nod.

In that period of post-war growth the streets were ankle deep in manure. Everyone wanted to see the country grow. Building prosperity and therefore peace of mind and body through wheat-woolgold was the general idea; the country was run by cockies. And Hoadley for one endorsed it one hundred and ten per cent. A clean, spacious place like Canberra showed what was possible.

Hoadley's responsibilities of Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior were all under the one roof. Not far from the capital's centre, CHAI had the shadowless forecourt normally found in town hall architecture, and if reporters were waiting itching for a statement Hoadley positively leapt out of the car and took the shallow steps four at a time—something even Shadbolt had trouble doing—a display of tremendous energy, allowing the photographer gripping the Speed Graflex like a steering wheel to record an image of a government on the move. Otherwise he sauntered up, apparently deep in thought, in case any of his staff were looking down from the thousand and one windows.

Shadbolt then drove the car around the back where it was set up for the day's work: the IN and OUT trays, ministerial papers, the desk calendar with the proverbs, folders, letters to be signed, the Cabinet submissions all stacked in the back seat. Shadbolt personally checked out the dictaphone and the cocktail cabinet.

Often the department heads themselves came down and sought Shadbolt out as he sipped a cup of tea—CHAI being famous for its tea-breaks. They looked more worried than their Minister, and obedience had softened their lines; such is the nature of leadership.

‘Make sure he signs this,' they'd say, sometimes tugging Shadbolt's sleeve. ‘See that the Minister gives the OK on these. Get him to sign here. I say, do you think you can get the Minister back by four?'

When Hoadley arrived trailing secretaries and petitioners, and speaking loudly, he immediately produced expressions of attentive interest all round, for he was popular but evasive with his staff. Settling in the back seat he gave Shadbolt the nod, ‘Let's get out of here', and went forth in his capacity of Minister of Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior, ready to satisfy the needs of fifty per cent of the electorate.

Vern's handwriting had grown larger and rounder, missing the tram tracks altogether. It veered clean off the Woolworth's quarto. So bad, Shadbolt held it at arm's length. He turned the pages over. The hand of an unsteady someone, a man he once knew, and a decent man, losing his rocker?

And yet for all their ungainly appearance the words according to Vern still represented solid, pedantic precision; enough for Shadbolt to smile picturing the windswept distracted face, lumps of ivory for teeth. As always, Vern enclosed proofs and reported in machine-gun delivery the local news which didn't make it into the
Advertiser
, news of Wheelright and Flies, complaints that the cul-de-sac had now completely filled up with red brick houses facing west without verandahs, and the rise in bus fares.

The letter had been forwarded by the hieroglyphics of Mrs Younghusband, her lines as black and as sloping as the hairs stroking her arms. The contrast with Vern's could not have been more startling. Vern's scribble had been enlarged by a matter of urgency. He'd spotted Shadbolt's averted face behind a bigwig Minister, opening the door for him. He enclosed the relevant proof. For the first time Shadbolt saw himself in grey-and-white. There he was haloed in blue pencil, and above his driver's cap— to put him on the spot—a question mark. Shadbolt recognised it as the first morning he'd pulled up outside CHAI. He'd been meaning to tell Vern he'd moved to Canberra.

Out of focus his angled posture shrank into the background stipple of car, portico and idle onlookers, frozen there as grey matter, which tended to propel Hoadley's more active figure forward, Hoadley's dark suit attracting the ink and stronger definition, and a sparkle of optimism to his teeth and bulging shirt front, which is why drivers are assigned uniforms of photomechanical grey.

Something shifted inside Shadbolt: the old lump returned to his throat.

He pitied his uncle stumbling around among his statues, and he wasn't sure why. Vern—his decency—it seemed to be wasted. He lived to one side. He seemed separate from the rest of people. His work of proofreading was itself private, invisible. Shadbolt then saw his own position in Canberra. Trying to shake off vagueness he did a bit of blinking while drumming the steering wheel. He added up his experiences of the last few years. He tried to. How he had changed. What had he learnt? He had met hundreds of people…that was something. Anything else? Conscious of his heavy body, heaviness throughout, he wondered if and how in any way he had altered. It was difficult to know if he had changed at all. Through a windscreen the situation was at least clear, all laid out, he believed.

‘I'm going to call you “mudguards”,' Hoadley had said; and with not a trace of the old hoodwink and smile. Mudguards? Shadbolt soon found out why. ‘You're going to take a lot of shit on my behalf. But I trust you. What we have here is a beginning of a mutual understanding.' He inspected his fingernails and then suddenly slapped Shadbolt on the back. ‘The country needs you.'

Being a Minister's driver carried plenty of perks. In the subterranean society of the car pool it was noticeable how the chosen ones stood apart. Expressions of worldly superiority had entered their faces, plus just a touch of condescension.

They were carriers of state secrets, and knew it. With all this constant arriving at and gently accelerating away from important and even momentous events it was only natural an aura of power rubbed off on them. Why, some of the things they couldn't help overhearing…

There was also the matter of overtime at triple rates. It was rumoured that a few drivers of the most disorganised Ministers earned more than the Ministers.

It was a job for the chosen few. A man could go for twenty years and be passed over. Some went to the most extraordinary and ridiculous lengths to attract the attention of the supervisor or a Minister—a strategy which involved loss of detachment and guaranteed they would never gain selection. Certainly only mature-age drivers reached the short list, preferably bald or with a touch of judicious grey at the temples.

And now here was this character brought in from the outside, over the heads of everybody, if you could say that about somebody over six foot and a half, barely in his mid-twenties.

Shadbolt had no idea of the resentment his arrival caused. It never entered his head. He didn't notice the hard time the other drivers gave him. Even if he had it was doubtful he would have changed. He went about his work, had little to say.

Shadbolt preferred being with the mechanics.

At first they regarded him with indifference as he joined them looking under a bonnet, but he knew how to talk to them, or rather, how not to talk, merely making the brief observation as if thinking aloud. And without meaning to he revealed a mechanical mind equal to theirs, and they saw as genuine his interest in keeping his car in top condition. He also showed— rare among drivers—a willingness to get his hands dirty, a man who'd drop everything to give someone a hand: a glance at him was enough to realise that. And they welcomed him, Hoadley's sidekick, nicknamed ‘Mudguards'.

By the time he discarded the map on his knees he was enjoying himself. He could take notice of the surroundings, his contentment lengthening with the onomatopoeic purr of the eight-cylinder engine. And then the artificiality of the capital, its superimposition of circles and horizontal white on the tawny unevenness, surrounded by pornographic hills, bruised in both summer and winter, and where the immensity of the sky spoke of long days and endlessness in the interior—all this began to please him. Here the cleanliness of the kerbs matched the clarity of the air. He became observant, sharp as a tack.

If the Minister was required at the Senate the drive took only a few minutes. Hoadley's attendance record though was poor; it could hardly get worse. The Senator believed his duties lay in other directions, and with the single-mindedness which had made him such a formidable political opponent he'd hand Shad-bolt an address typed on a card, or if they'd been there before, merely mentioning the street, or ‘let's see if number 12's home.' Settling back he'd remove his coat and loosen his Windsor knot, releasing the oscillating haze of his flyscreen shirt, not an ounce of fat, his tan ears and extroverted combed hair gleaming in the sun.

At first Shadbolt had been surprised at the addresses. They were ordinary domestic houses. Following Hoadley's instructions he'd park around the corner, or shoot straight up the drive if the house was obscured by trees, such as Mrs Dodge's place in Ovens Street. The Minister enjoyed this side of his job. He threw himself into it with phenomenal enthusiasm. Seated behind the steering wheel Shadbolt twiddled his thumbs for anything from twenty minutes to five to six hours (that was the wife of the poor clerk in the Lands Department who ran after Hoadley on the footpath in piped dressing gown).

Mrs Dodge, she was the chain-smoking bride of a World War Two hero, a man who pushed a pen in the Dept of Defence and showed more concern for the Red Menace than her menstrual periods, an error Hoadley never made. In Cox Street, not far away, there was the pleasantly plump mother of two who welcomed Hoadley in a pleated tennis dress. In a block of terracotta 1940s flats already cracking around the lintels a waitress as mad as a snake fitted Hoadley in between shifts—‘the meat in the sandwich', as he put it. The hysterical violinist from Moravia who somehow reminded Shadbolt of Mrs Younghusband. There was the disorganised spouse of the time-and-motion expert on contract to CHAI who played the old trick of hiding Hoadley's trousers, and in a cream brick veneer near the War Memorial the disconsolate second—or was it third?—wife of a political opponent known to have one tentative ankle and elbow out of the closet. Some lovely Asian crumpet at the youth hostel: he stumbled out from there always with the sweat patch between his shoulder blades spreading in the shape of the Malay peninsula. At McKinley Street he returned repeatedly to number 12 to explore the sandy interior of Miss Hilda Somebody. There was an usherette from one of Hoadley's theatres, formerly of Adelaide, who hid behind the curtains. A change of shirt. To Darling Street, towards the lake still on the drawing board, and the invisible divorcee whose silvery laugh Shadbolt grew to like. And what about the straw blonde who was into weaving and always spoke in inverted commas? So many variations of domestic architecture facing the sun in the afternoons, flyscreens on the windows and doors. On Thursdays only there was Ainslie tall and la de da who let out elemental sighs in clear view of the mountain of that name. A de facto of an alcoholic journo at a dusty address a stone's throw from Parliament House welcomed Hoadley and his charm with freckled arms.

Hoadley listened to their inner-life stories. They cried on his shoulder and yet didn't seem unhappy. They used Hoadley for his warmth. Hated him leaving, hated the sight of his back. Wife of the poor clerk in the Lands Dept—. A good many introduced discreetly complicated arrangements for home visits, and so never registered in Shadbolt's photographic memory. The wife of a lighthouse keeper from Jervis Bay signalled she was ready and waiting by—Hoadley gave a chuckle, he loved them all—flashing a torch. To Shadbolt's surprise others were only too happy to show themselves. There was that peroxide widow at the window of the architect-designed house in Gawler Crescent who made a habit of coming out after an hour in a butterfly-patterned kimono with a cup of tea for Shadbolt. They bought Hoadley gifts. Neckties mostly, which unaccountably depressed the Minister. Some of them he passed on to Shadbolt. If a woman became trouble he avoided her street, but only for a few weeks. He was not doing this to cause unhappiness. (The mother and daughter decked out in silver and gold who grew to despise each other over him.) WRAACs, typists from the bush, widow with the budgerigars. Fridays at 4 were reserved for commerce with Miss Kilmartin of the hornrims, known to the government as a US intelligence plant, who saw stars and stripes whenever Hoadley touched her in a certain part. ‘If anyone leaks it's her,' Hoadley adjusted his collar and tie in the car. But he had trouble with her. Thought she owned him. For a time too there was the hypochondriac Russian touch typist who always managed an afternoon off from the embassy and during moments of most abandon hissed a word similar to ‘Pushkin', audible to Shadbolt from the footpath. And what about the good-sort Queenslander with the crocheted pillowslips, napkins and bedspreads who swore like a trooper? God, she was rough. Hoadley vowed never to visit her again but always returned.