Holden's Performance (32 page)

They were driving to the widow's place in Gawler Crescent as the Minister flipped through the twelve newspapers he consumed every day, searching for favourable images of himself.

‘Not long ago we used to take bets to see who could find a comma out of place in this paper. It was the standing joke. A man could go for years reading the Advertiser without finding a single, solitary mistake! Whoever's checking it now should have his eyes tested.'

Hoadley kept picking up the front page, and men tossing it away.

The literals on every other line—‘Stentor' for Senator, Hoadley deed-polled into ‘Roadley'—and the occasional misplaced full stop were irritating enough. Worse: the local hero Frank McBee had been promoted by the slipshod proofreader to Minister for Transport. There it was in black-and-white.

Senator Hoadley's performance in Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior had been impressive, and naturally he had done nothing to discourage the rumours doing the rounds he would shortly be given the added responsibility of Transport, making it four. After all, each was dependent on the other. And now this self-made, time-and-motion upstart from Adelaide who lit cigars with five-pound notes would be arriving through the back door, as it were.

Hunching his shoulders over the wheel Shadbolt gave a knowing laugh.

‘Ar, Frank's no war hero. A .303 pinged off one of his toes, that's all. It happened in our kitchen. I was there.'

He went on matter-of-fact.

‘Those service rifles have got a terrific boot. It went straight through the floorboards. It was lucky he didn't lose his foot.'

In many ways Hoadley looked after his driver. At the same time he didn't take much notice of him at all. Seems that he'd clean forgotten his connection with Frank McBee. Now he leaned forward with his powerful arms resting near Shadbolt's neck. The aroma of his freshly applied shaving lotion moistened Shadbolt's eyes.

As Shadbolt recalled the fluorescent night in Adelaide, they passed the award-winning house with the widow waiting behind the curtains, and in the mirror he noticed a look of shrewdness harden the Minister's face. Twice more they passed in an immense semicircle as Shadbolt described in photographic detail McBee's friend from the RAAF seated at the kitchen table, spitting image of Adolf H., who became the famous sky-writer, later to die in a crop-dusting accident.

‘He had one leg, and then he lost his life,' Shadbolt reported soberly.

‘Is that so?' Hoadley nodded. ‘I may have read about him. So what happened after that?'

He wanted to hear it from all angles, and he wanted to hear it again. He merely nodded when Shadbolt, still perplexed, recalled how his mother had come down on McBee's side.

‘From that night,' Shadbolt pulled on the handbrake, ‘Frank went about with a slight limp. He's only got nine toes. Although it seems to have worsened lately,' he conceded.

Hoadley sat for a second before patting him on the cap and bounding out.

‘You've made my day,' he said.

And Shadbolt couldn't help admiring the man's resilience as he strode up the garden path, his optimism restored by the inside knowledge of McBee's Achilles heel.

The pressures on the Minister were almost too much for one man. Whenever he left the capital, even for twenty-four hours, a backlog of dissatisfaction built up among his neglected constituents, and the minute he returned he was forced to race around in circles, calming them, satisfying their needs. Sometimes he returned to the car inside ten minutes; Shadbolt knew when to keep the engine running. And accelerating away onto the next address the Minister quickly worked on his papers or put on a fresh shirt.

Waiting outside the houses—the various tastes in front doors, varieties of letterboxes and flowerbeds—Shadbolt had time to wonder how the Minister could possibly keep all his constituents happy all the time. It was difficult enough in country towns where they were reconciled to irregular appearances; but in Canberra, where he was over-extended, there were always a few who actually took his whispered words seriously, or whose happiness became entirely dependent on his presence (wife of the clerk in the—), and were temperamentally unable to handle his arbitrary absences.

But Hoadley thrived on the hectic itinerary; he appeared to feed off complications. He gained strength from the universal arms of women. The rush from one to another increased his physical and mental power. Shadbolt could see it in the mirror: he grew in size and optimism. ‘If I live to be a hundred, I'll never feel better.' And he tossed down a few salt tablets.

On the day after he returned from Adelaide Miss Kilmartin with the hornrims caused a scene. Hoadley came back to the car, biting his bottom lip.

For a few seconds he rested his elbow on Shadbolt's door. He put on his kid gloves. ‘Listen, old son, I'd like you to drive Mrs Hoadley to the reception tonight. I'll phone her. I'm having a few hysterics here, I don't know what's got into her. It needs a bit of sorting out.'

Yes, this was the reception at the New Zealand embassy. A party of their craggy mountaineers looking out of place in slip-knotted neckties had been given the OK by Hoadley some time back to venture into his territory, the interior, where it was possible to climb down—down below sea level into absolute emptiness. Their expedition had been written up in the
Advertiser
(‘Why are you doing this?' Shadbolt remembered reading. ‘Because it's not there,' answered the lookalike leader with the woman's name).

Mrs Hoadley at six hardly said a word. She sat in front. A good tiling: only an hour before Senator Hoadley had the waitress slithering out of view on the back seat, his muffled voice instructing Shadbolt to keep on driving, which he did, in circles named after the greatest Australian explorers.

The pale outline of Mrs Hoadley was illuminated by the lights of passing cars. Shadbolt wondered what she did all day. He had never seen her before, not even alongside the Minister in photographs.

Out of the corner of his eye the slit in her skirt exposed a vanishing point of thigh, a country road at night, and spilling over her knee a silver handbag twinkled as the lights of a small town.

It was she who began to speak.

‘Sidney works so hard, I sometimes worry about his health. He comes home so exhausted he falls into bed. Ever since I've known him he's been like that. Now I don't think he's ever worked so hard. And with the affairs of state on his shoulders he's been letting his business interests suffer. Sidney owns picture theatres. But Sidney hasn't shown any concern about the inroads of television. If you ask me the theatres are going to suffer. What do you think?'

‘I don't know, I haven't—'

‘People like to stay in the comfy of their own homes. You haven't seen our loungeroom, it's like a picture theatre. Sidney doesn't like me going out, even with a friend. Sidney installed my own projector. I've learnt how to operate it. I see all the latest releases. When Sidney has a night home we usually see a film.' Mrs Hoadley rubbed her nose with a finger. ‘Sometimes he stands in front of the screen and makes a speech like the manager, or he comes around with a tray, and I say,“Thankyou, a chocolate icecream, please.” He'll do anything to make me happy. What was the last film you saw?'

‘A newsreel, I think.'

She pulled a face. ‘Don't like them.'

In the dark she watched the moving scenery framed by the windscreen. As they turned into the New Zealand embassy her fingers formed stars of surprise: for a cheap publicity stunt the mountaineers were ‘arriving' for the Movietone cameras, roped together on the floodlit south face of the building.

They watched as the last man clambered into the first-floor window, and there was the sound of breaking glass.

‘Better go now, Mrs Hoadley. The show's probably starting. I'll be waiting in the car park.'

‘I don't know why Sidney asked me to go. He knows I hate official functions.'

Pouting, she looked down at her hands.

Shadbolt couldn't work her out. He had never met a woman who was happy and yet at the same time unhappy.

‘You're his friend. If we went to see
The African Queen
, afterwards you wouldn't tell Sidney, would you?'

Now he saw her pale face, although she remained looking away from him, a child.

‘It's my favourite. I could see it every day of my life. But I don't have any money. Sidney doesn't leave me any.'

‘I'll look after that,' said Shadbolt loudly. ‘Now go on, you'll be late. I'll be waiting for you here.'

Watching her walk away, the last scene in a film, he felt sorry for her; and somehow the figure—turning at the door to smile— made him ponder his own future.

In late 1959 Shadbolt saw Colonel (‘Wild Bill') Light in the flesh. The man was naked: not an ounce of superfluous flesh. Side-on his face represented his country turned on its end: lean Cape York nose, thin lips, mangled chin. In newspaper photographs he appeared in the centre of crowds, his face screened into a professional alertness, looking out for the slightest suspicious movements.

If he hadn't been born to it people would have called him Light. The best years of his life had been spent poring over street maps, and he had developed the occupational habit of pointing with his right arm outstretched. That was how Shadbolt saw him in the changing room of the gymnasium, just opened off Anzac Parade: his arm and index finger aimed horizontally at another fitness-freak standing there with his hock on light's towel.

Shadbolt had been spending so much time parked outside houses he felt his life slipping through his fingers idly tapping the steering wheel. Conscious of his flesh he decided to act. He began a body-building course; a gymnasium might also be a place to meet people. On his afternoons and evenings off he began doing strenuous press-ups and lifted bars over his head. There he regularly saw Colonel Light, although he didn't yet know his name. Even in a pair of boxer shorts he stood out as a man of far-sighted vision. Thudding over the wooden horse he maintained an air of immobile authority, which is the air of dominance, his right arm extended out of habit, and when they happened to be the only ones at work or emerged together from adjoining showers the Colonel gave no sign of recognising him; not so much as a glance in Shadbolt's direction.

It was several months later, in Manly, that he spoke to Shadbolt, officially.

Things had been going bad for Hoadley. Too generous
with
his body and soul, unable to say no, he'd finally spread himself and his optimism too thin. And there was the paperwork of his portfolio. It kept piling up. To escape the hysterical demands of Miss Kilmartin, and the wife of the clerk in the—, he headed for the irregular lines of Manly and Mrs Younghusband, the way wheat farmers used to recuperate after the harvesting.

It was hot and windy: the very conditions, according to Alex Screech, that had debilitated an entire nation. ‘It's made us too manly,' he pointed his finger at the audience of pensioners. Somebody should write a new history of the world homing in on heat and humidity. Hoadley meanwhile was telling Shadbolt how the otther day he had bought for a song a cine-projector from a run-down theatre, and its entire inland sea of spring-back seats. In his words he had made a killing Whenever they crossed a bridge Hoadley became expansive.

Shadbolt had suddenly opened his mouth to ask a question when Hoadley leaned forward.

‘My first experience with a woman was underneath the Harbour Bridge. Right about…there. A little peach of a girl. Her father used to pilot one of the flying boats. She cried afterwards and I bought her an ice-cream. She and I had been to the pictures. It was after midnight. Guess what? The other day I bumped into her at Government House. She's married to a High Court judge, I won't say who. Very la de da. You should have seen her face when I sidled up, gave her a nudge, and said,

Underneath the arches,
On the cobblestones they lay…

‘How about that?' the Minister nudged.

Shadbolt nodded to show he smiled. Nothing surprised him anymore.

Around the corner from the boarding house Shadbolt undipped the flag from the bonnet. Folding it he put it in his pocket while nodding at Hoadley's instructions. Already the Minister was undoing his tie, as if he was diving into the surf.

‘A heavy programme tomorrow,' he called over his shoulder, striding off to the landlady.

It was too early to front up at Kangaroo Street, so Shadbolt stepped into the Manly gym for men.

The walls were scuffed and chipped, the manager had a face punched in like a leper's. On the far long wall a physical fitness artist with a Polish name (Kondratieff?) had painted in lieu of fees a bambocciade mural depicting a man in leopard tights wrestling single-handed with a lion.

As usual Shadbolt was by far the tallest man in the gym. To warm up he pedalled furiously for ten miles on the exercise bike, dwarfing the defective machine which kept losing its chain. The effort induced a kind of vagueness… riding his post-war hybrid into a hot wind down Magill Road. It was about time he went back to see Vern.

With little practice Shadbolt could lift really enormous weights; and in his simple singlet and chauffeur's trousers, the antipodean head remaining more or less expressionless, his power was all the more impressive. Shadbolt had lifted to his chin the weight of a motorbike and sidecar. As he moved up to the equivalent of a small English sedan the other bodybuilders rested on their oars to watch, including the manager, face like a leper's, who thought he had seen everything. Through the strain Shadbolt attained a pleasant obliviousness. He took no notice of his surroundings and the attention of the other he-men; but as he gritted his teeth and held the weight for a second longer he saw from the corner of his eye Colonel Light fully dressed, arriving or departing, pause to watch.

In those places there is not much in the way of talk: all creaking of equipment, the grunts of self-absorption. The young bodybuilders returned to their mirrors and became rapt again in their muscles expanding before their very eyes.