Holden's Performance (3 page)

The boy had been watching his uncle's teeth. The pneumatic force of his perpetual questioning had shoved them forward to an eyecatching degree, so much so that the teeth themselves had acquired properties of alertness and curiosity, even when momentarily at rest over his bottom lip like lumps of quartz, illuminated by flashes of sunlight. When he smiled—although he didn't in the cemetery—his teeth retreated from prominence, but then a series of vertical neck muscles took over, giving him the appearance of craning even further forward. Most of his questions were left up in the air. The mania for verification can be such a nervous disorder. Other people suffer asthmas or scratch holes in their skulls, drink their own urine for moral fibre, or letter by hand the Ten Commandments or a nation's constitution on a single grain of rice. Others develop their paranoia into local or world-class leadership; not Holden, and certainly not his uncle fidgeting beside him.

‘Hello, what's this? An Afghani camel driver? They've buried him here? How about that? All that wool he must have carted down over the years from the Centre. Camel trains. Moslems. Over here, look at this: “Our only son, William James, lost in the Great Australian Bight. Never recovered.” There's a true story. Real sadness. How old was he?'

But already he was moving on.

Always on the verge of answering the questions Holden began racking his brains for scraps of general knowledge, anything, to offer in return. Several times he had to clutch at the insubstantial elbow, stopping his Uncle Vern falling headfirst into one of the freshly dug holes. In this way his mind shifted from the invisible, still vertical, shape of his father to the solidarity of words and objects.

They were examining an overgrown grave (‘What are they? Scotch thistles? “Zoellner.” That rings a bell. Another German name?') when a horn sounded, and was amplified by the avenues of slabs.

For the first time his uncle faced him.

‘Is that your mother? I think that's your mother waving.'

Solid granite unfurled into imperishable white roses and scrolls. Heavy urns spilt cannonballs of weather-stained grapes. Books of knowledge lay open at a blank page, marked by ribbons of stone. Fallen angels, swords and polished blankness registered as ornate feats of engineering, an industry that had found its groove.

Realising he hadn't said a word, not even a thankyou of gratitude, Holden stopped running. His voice croaked. It would not have reached.

Anyway the figure remained engrossed, spitting on his handkerchief now, deciphering again.

Bicycles had been hacksawed or melted down for the war effort. The mild steel frames were ‘recycled' into speaking tubes for submarines and as tripods for light machine-guns. Rumour had it that the joysticks of the locally assembled Mustangs were nothing more than refurbished men's handlebars. Bells reappeared all over the Pacific screwed down on the cane tables of the Officers' Mess. By October 1944 the wholesale slaughter of bicycles was halted and the survivors emerged one by one painted like hedges or trees or the sides of weatherboard houses, and those requisitioned for aerodrome duty or stored in camouflaged sheds for the Land Army were returned to their original owners. People who were not in the war cannot begin to understand…

Several weeks after the funeral Holden arrived home one afternoon to find two bicycle machines on the back verandah. Both were ladies'—no horizontal bar—and the light frame of one painstakingly painted rose madder was overpowered by a pair of muscular men's handlebars, which had been lowered, and a sheathlike saddle sprung on commas. Along its hypotenuse MERCURY had been lettered in silver serifs. Its twin was a composition of mismatching pedals, mudguards and wheel sizes, but its gender preserved by the original chain-guard of delicate plaited cotton.

Holden's feelings for bicycles were similar to his grandfather's affinity to horses. They embodied all that was intensive and silently inevitable. Bicycles were interesting and varied in themselves. Individual components were there to be understood, properly maintained and modified; combined they produced instantaneous movement. What with the war and the sudden taking-away of his father Holden had given up all hope of ever owning one.

His mother pointed with her chin.

‘Your Uncle Vern would have done them up himself. I could never fathom him out. He's not one for chucking his money around. I haven't seen him for years. You'll have to thank him, both of you.' She came closer. ‘Both of you listen. Holden? Now don't go getting yourselves killed.'

The streets of Adelaide had become the domain of the fabulous, the freakish and the disabled: not only dwarfs and obese waddling men or shadowless cantilevered figures, the seven-footers, pinheads and flat-earthers, or even those lonely men with eleven fingers or harelips (somehow no good aiming a rifle), but more to the point, pale men who couldn't run, think or see straight, poor devils, and those with perforated eardrums who couldn't pick up the piston-racket of a Heinkel, even when the smiling parabolic pilot could see the whites of their eyes: figures normally outside the body politic but now the core; gentle, vague, harmless creatures. They appeared as pedestrians singly at mid-distance, occasionally passed by metal insect-machines vaguely resembling velopedes. Similar long intervals showed in the revised schedule of trams. And spaces widened on bench-seats, on grocers' shelves, on pedestrian crossings. During the war there was hardly any need for traffic lights. Young women went about as if sleepwalking. Occupying an erogenous zone of uncertainty and incompleteness they joined the ranks of the walking wounded. Their bodies had become transparent. Visible was every hair, cleft and bulge. Here and there breasts grew expectantly, pointedly full: drawn tidally towards some figure across the sea, defying history. Irrational laughter erupted without warning from the worst afflicted, at the worst possible times. In their dreams they passed through foreign walls complete with crenellations, cracks and damp shadows, and received men by the ton or singly, sometimes the pliant ghost of a familiar dead man, opening and closing themselves. A kind of suspended animation, an existence in limbo; they scarcely lived in Adelaide.

In the short distance to Holden's school every other pedal stroke stamped out a soft statue in a front yard,
Figure with Broom
or
Brooding Woman
, wearing the same mottled dressing gown as his mother's, so that when he arrived home and found her as he left her, seated at the table, he didn't bat an eyelid. Newsreels of the day had lines of women seated at benches in munitions factories, or at long tables rolling bandages.

The formal haphazardness of her sandwiches became a tangible by-product: Tasmanian apple pulped with mutton and bananas, spaghetti with treacle, and all indiscriminately stained with the litmus of beetroot or curry-yellow pickles, a leaking spectrum of colour the like of which Holden had never seen before or since. When Holden dropped them in the 44-gallon drum, the school bin, the thud erupted into images of his mother, shell-shocked in her dressing gown like all the rest, slicing, spreading butter diagonally, transfixed by angled planes of yellow light, as if the sun was filtered not by the back trellis of vines but the smoke of afternoon bushfires.

For a time groups of relatives called and paid their respects.

Holden recognised them from the funeral, although now they stood in the kitchen wearing different clothing and expressions.

Funny family, the Shadbolts. Well, the way young Karen sat alongside her mother, the model of solicitude, and Holden there blocking the kitchen doorway, his arms folded like a eunuch. Isn't he a bit thick, dim-witted? (Holden had taken to wearing tight cyclist's shorts.) With barely a word spoken, even in greeting, visitors found themselves filling in with all kinds of repetitions and commonplaces, including weather-forecasting. The strain showed in the rate of Auntie Dais's munching and swallowing, for she wanted to be a help, while her husband Jim opted for the rural policy, which is to grin down at your serrated brogues and slowly nod your head.

Holden watched as his mother came to life and asked to read their tea leaves, smiling sweetly but snatching the cups before they were properly drained.

In a way it was a relief. But what did she ‘see'?

From a few muddy calligraphies she managed to detect economic disaster areas and astral accidents far worse than those which had recently befallen her. World War Two would finish shortly, yes, but in the same bream she saw Jim losing his drinking arm in a brick-making machine, somebody else an eye, another an eldest son in a shotgun accident, and Auntie Dais her semi-precious wedding ring under the jetty at Glenelg. Looking up at Holden, Karen bit her lip at the injustices of the world. Their mother reached out for more cups. There were acts of God nobody on earth could control, genetical, geographical, meteorological, for she had the misfortune to see the first-born of an incessantly smiling niece cursed with red hair, freckles and pale eyelashes, and the entire family of plump look-alikes stricken with diabetes and halitosis—Holden had last seen them at the funeral, standing to attention in chronological order—and someone else (name indistinguishable) completely electrocuted while sheltering under a dripping blue gum. On a scarcely less traumatic scale she announced the marriage of Holden's second cousin to a German Roman Catholic and that Uncle Milton's fly-blown delicatessen on Payneham Road would be going to the wall, and so-and-so, father of four, was seen fornicating with an office girl during the lunch hour on an unrecognisable back lawn.

‘What about your own?' complained one, almost in tears.

Her husband, the bald man, had stood up ready to go.

‘That's right. Take Holden there.'

For all that remained of their home which hadn't even reached the blueprint stage was a chimney and a few charred beams.

‘He doesn't have a future,' she reported, her head still bent over a cup.

Holden didn't even blink at this piece of news. With tea rationed the future could be read only in an abbreviated form. Besides, even at his hairless age, he could see that few people were granted Histories. Among the Shadbolts crowded into the kitchen only an accident could throw one of them momentarily into prominence, as happened with his father whose colourless shape already was rapidly receding (the notion of ghosts originates from this imprecision of memory). Not to have a future made no difference to him. He was going to be like everybody else.

The visits of relations soon petered out and the house returned to its stillness. Mrs Shadbolt remained indoors. While Karen worried and tried to help, Holden's interest transferred to the openness of the clearly defined streets. In any other era an androgynous machine with one wheel smaller than the other, dwarfed by an expressionless rider in shorts, would have appeared grotesque. A time of material shortages was a time of improvisations—all kinds of contraptions were allowed—and Holden only attracted attention for his resolute speed (orientalising his eyes and wind-sweeping his hair into an Italian futurist film star), and for an ostentatious cornering technique which defied the laws of gravity. It occurred in relative silence along street emptiness. He could shout into the wind and nobody could hear. Overtaking trams and British four-cylinder saloons was a breeze; Holden became enamoured of speed.

On a hot afternoon in December he came in as usual with a large patch of perspiration spreading on his shirt. The heavy canvas blinds at the back were unfurled, the house creaked like a becalmed ship. Both his mother and Karen were in the kitchen waiting for him. And this was odd: his mother was standing, not sitting, and wearing a cotton dress. Holden looked down at Karen, then back at their mother. She was young and fresh and smart again. Holden's concern that it might only be temporary introduced an aura of fragility, as if his mother's pigeon-bones might at any moment snap. Wiping the sink with her back half-turned she assumed a determined, independent air. Holden noticed her new sandals were slightly too large. The thick straps exposing her bruised heels made her look determined, yet curiously vulnerable. Karen, though, displayed complete approval by fastening an immense expectant smile upon her.

‘Now sit down, both of you.'

She still had her back to them.

‘There's something I want to tell you both.'

Folding his arms Holden remained standing.

His mother didn't seem to notice. Facing them, she fidgeted with the throat of her dress.

‘Your father didn't leave much to go on.'

Branching off at a filtered tangent she murmured something about the greys and the yellows and the browns. Seems that these represent the passing of time: khaki tones, her afternoons. ‘That blind needs repairing,' she added vaguely.

‘It's been like that for ages,' Holden stirred. ‘It was like that before Dad died.'

Ignoring him, Karen placed a hand on her mother's arm. Together they turned to him.

‘You're a big boy now,' his mother smiled. ‘Look at you.'

Fatso, Samson, Goliath and Tiny were other terms people tried. At the funeral a joker had said, ‘How's Mount Lofty today?'

Their mother confided, ‘We are three of us, all that's left in this world. We must stay glued together, blood is thicker than water—'

That sounded more like it; Holden began nodding, when a voice from outside contradicted.

‘You there Mrs Shadbolt? Anybody home?'

An apparition in ballooning khaki filled the back door, hands on hips, and as Holden squinted, the flyscreen stippled the figure, draining it of flesh tints, and focused into an exactly realised halftone of a soldier. It was like a newspaper photograph. The ruled screen—which coincided with the streets of Holden's city— magnified the standing figure, giving Holden all the time in the world to memorise it.

This was the earliest known example of Shadbolt's famous ‘photographic memory'. For the rest of his life he'd see the tightness of the chin-strap, the small-diameter eyes, which suggested a future of perspiration and overweight, two shaving snicks, the expression of…Not
exactly
a photographic memory. The dilapidated screen endowed the figure with authority out of all proportion. Unlike a snapshot of Holden's grandfather, say, where the process was only chemical, an act of preservation, this coarse-grained soldier on the verge of grinning had the appearance of being singled out, as if he had stepped forward from a major news event. He exuded the power of endlessness.