Holden's Performance (33 page)

The Colonel was in the changing room snapping his fingers at three fit-looking men Shadbolt hadn't seen before. Hands around their ankles they were hurriedly lacing up their shoes.

Reaching his towel Shadbolt sneezed.

Colonel Light's arm moved up in an arc and aimed horizontally.

‘A man can be shot for less than that.'

Looking down Shadbolt grinned foolishly. He had blown his nose on the Australian flag.

And then Light was gone, his men tripping over themselves to keep up.

In December 1959 the nation's economy and optimism were entering a trough, although Shadbolt and everybody were only to understand that later. Shadbolt took a leisurely shower, bought some fish n' chips at the place next door, and stood on the beach. The waves came from the deep and out at sea. Wave after wave of huge and unforeseen world-waves, constantly advancing, hurried along by others, one by one rearing into a translucent yawning, turning semicircular before dumping into a thunder of self-destruction. It was regular and yet way out of control. Shadbolt paused with a lump of flake; he had never seen waves as large. The beach was empty except for some seagull figures, halfway along. For a while he watched them: specks on the continent's white edge, by turns huddled there and agitated. He sat on the sea wall and thought he should visit Vern, see how he was going in Adelaide.

At four he made his way towards Harriet's place. Around the corner from the Epic Theatre he heard the noise before he saw the crowd. Not since the Miss Australia finals had there been so many people…He began grinning. Alex would be around somewhere in khaki, putting on his act of being nonplussed.

Already a connoisseur of crowds Shadbolt noticed the people were different to the normal picture-goers, their faces and movements displaying quite different expectations, and then he saw— a portent of the leaner times—the famous electrolier lettering had been switched to form PICE, and in flashing lights below it,
EMPORIUM
. Taken over by a Gujarati family from Fiji—there they were lined up on the footpath, wearing their best saris and pencil moustaches—the theatre had been converted into the first place in Sydney to specialise in cheap Indian fabrics, everything from tea-towels to curtain material, the once-proud doors and display boxes where Harriet placed her ‘Next Attraction' montages now plastered all over with cut-price posters that glowed in the dark. And when Shadbolt saw the TV cameras and the reporters forming a pyramid on the steps, and over the corrugations of hats and craning craniums Colonel Light staring as in a newspaper photograph at the slightest suspicious movement, he realised it was about to be gala-opened by the PM himself, some kind of statesmanlike gesture to our Commonwealth neighbours to the north.

His first impulse was to run back and get the Minister. Whenever Hoadley missed out on something for days afterwards he suffered a drop in optimism; he took it all too personally.

As always Shadbolt's mind was made up for him by events. Everybody suddenly tilted in a mass towards the footpath. The black Cadillac (Fleetwood, V/8, fitted with sunshield) pulled up and double-parked, the teenage son of the pushy Gujarati merchant nudged forward to open the door and was elbowed smartly out of the way by Colonel Light, who appeared everywhere at once and had eyes in the back of his head. In the silence of expectations, a pair of crow-black eyebrows first emerged like two mobile moustaches misplaced on a pale oval of dough, which in turn vibrated and stretched out from the darkness of the upholstery, the effort of which raised one eyebrow autographically higher than the other, and now paused, the entire face revealed including multiple chins, offering a nice contrast against the limousine duco, light out of darkness, justice over evil, which is how he appeared in the nation's newspapers.

From a few paces away the grandfatherly heaviness of Prime Minister Amen impressed Shadbolt. By emerging slowly he gave an impression of the burdens of high office, but that he was getting on top of things. By contrast, Senator Hoadley simply appeared all energy, straight lines…

The PM briefly shook hands with the Indians and prepared to speak. An almost humorous clearing of the throat, the hooking of his thumbs in the lapels: and everybody including Shadbolt opened their mouths expectantly, egging him on. For everybody in the country was proud of their leader's command of English, his world-famous wit.

With a surprising amount of hum-ing and ah-ing, and a kind of gurgling at the back of the throat, the sentences unrolled as long banners of gilt lettering. Enfolded in flapping angles of woven wool the man appeared to be talking to himself; even his shrugs and asides, raising the crow-wing of one eyebrow, were for his own amusement.

‘Our good friends in Indi-ah, who, I might add, are handy with a bat as well as making impressive runs of printed cottons…'

He was just warming up, slightly smiling at his own turn of phrase out of Wisden's, when Shadbolt looking over the motionless heads saw Colonel Light nodding to one of his men; a face he recognised from the gym.

This man came towards him through the crowd with practised, unobtrusive ease. Turning slightly, Shadbolt noticed another converging at an angle. At the same time he felt a slight scuffle behind him.

‘It's him I want, I have to see him.'

One of Light's lieutenants held her arm so casually no one nearby noticed, although it twisted Harriet's cheek and jaw. The man had black patent-leather hair. Shadbolt took his wrist and bulged the man's eyes.

‘That'll do. Leave her alone.'

Everybody knew how the PM liked to encourage hecklers, confident of his barrister's repartee. What was wrong with Harriet?

The Colonel now at Shadbolt's side spoke without moving his lips.

‘Do you know this woman?'

‘What's the big idea?' He turned to Harriet. ‘What's going on?'

‘I've got to see you,' Harriet put on a smile. She looked unhappy.

‘I was on my way,' Shadbolt said ignoring the others. ‘It's just that I thought Alex might be here.'

‘Alex…' Harriet looked away.

At a signal from the Colonel's eyes the men loosened their grip.

‘We get all types,' he grimaced at her stick and legs. ‘Madam, I beg your pardon.'

Shadbolt stared at the Colonel: pale cracked eyes, dry flesh. Something funny about those eyes.

‘What do you think you're doing?'

‘These are my men, understand? Use your head.'

Shadbolt must have blinked.

‘We've seen this one before. She's trouble. We're not half-wits, you know. Now vamoose, pronto. Both of you.'

Shadbolt led Harriet by the hand. The Canberra-curved body of the Mayflower touched the bumper of the Cadillac.

To cheer her up Shadbolt gave a laugh. ‘When I turned and saw you I thought: hello, here's trouble. She's going to give the PM a run for his money.'

She began to cry.

‘I saw you standing in the crowd. You wanted to see Alex? He always liked you. He was on the beach.' She sniffled and kept biting her lip. ‘They found him there. Seaweed and lice all in his mouth,' Harriet added.

‘What do you mean? Where?' Shadbolt stood still. He blinked. ‘But he didn't swim. Alex hated the beach.'

His mind went blank, he felt heavy. He wondered what someone else, the Minister, McBee, or Vern even, would feel and perhaps have said.

Inside her house they protected each other. He was kind, all the time glancing at her. Curled up she choked like a drowning woman. Such privacy made him examine his own feelings. He tried hard to understand. And in picturing the always-dazed figure standing on the stage he found that even though Alex had been his friend he could have been more of a friend. He now felt merely an absence, a retreating face and bare knees, not even as clear as the blurred proofs pinned on his wall. There was nothing else, or much else.

He was sorry, but he couldn't understand more.

Mountainous seas mountainous even for Manly had invited a struggle. It would be seen as a single figure battling against misfortune. Wave after wave of the huge and unpredictable world-waves, beyond one person's control, and this pale figure there literally trying to keep his head above water, hanging in there against the odds which accumulated, allowing him no time to breathe, let alone to gather strength. It would have appeared as an epic struggle from the shore, which is how he pictured it. But in the turbulence which rendered his legs useless it became all-engulfing violence, B-grade. He couldn't open his mouth. His ending would be alone, not even observed. He was seeing himself from the beach when no one was there. It pained him to realise his struggle as futile. Then as he filled up and choked and became all water, airless, the light in his eyes became grey-white, the way he faced a film flickering over him. This softened as he rolled about in the silence. There was still a glimmer, light projected from some source, but it was too late, he was gone. He felt himself gone. Hair tangled his eyes, water filled his word-mouth.

So many men wanted to be autocrats it became hard to tell them apart.

Shadbolt knew them from the newsreels and the proofs from the
Advertiser
. The pathology of power affected faces the same way the world over.

A basic contradiction in their point of focus—one eye on the multitudes while focusing on the individual—had made them genuinely two-faced. Their expressions were strangely empty and yet alert. And a kind of restless hunger had coarsened their mouths and eyes. They wore highly buffed shoes and converged on the capital for the one reason.

The autocrat has to have a one-track mechanical mind and stick to it to make his mark.

The first dung was to adopt an eyecatching appendage and make it permanent. It hardly mattered what, so long as it was clearly defined: the leopard skin over the shoulder, toothbrush moustache, a daily carnation in the lapel. With a little repetition it soon appeared to embody the personality of the autocrat, just as a prancing horse or a three-pointed star became the well-known logotype of a car. Next was the choice of posture: whether to be seen as always languid (i.e. in command, on top of all situations), or aloof from the everyday or just plain genial. To be seen always hurrying was not advisable. And a distinction had to be made between indoors and out, and when and how to appear in shirt sleeves, if at all. These kinetics were anyway God-given. A man could only tone mem down or exaggerate them.

No matter how eyecatching, the visual aids were wasted if the words pouring out from the mouth were lacking in force. The pretender would then simply appear distorted, a part-autocrat. The process of transferring personal beliefs to general beliefs demanded consistent signals. Nothing could be achieved without a clear head. The multitudes were easily confused, the autocrat quickly appeared formless. The choice and delivery of words: sometimes, yes, they could certainly drag along deficiencies in a person's accessories and posture. People want to be overwhelmed by ingenious word-waves with some table thumping thrown in, or by folksiness, classical remoteness, domineering fatherliness, not to mention honey-humour-sarcasm.

From the day Frank McBee, MP, set foot in the circular capital he stood out from the others. His chosen appendages and public posture had already been screened by world history, and so possessed an immediate historical advantage. McBee arrived laden with not just one recognisable prop, such as the polka dot bowtie, but a whole battery of them. In daylight he never appeared without the watch-chain forming a cleavage across his waistcoat, mulga stick to take the weight off the old war wound, and between his raised fingers the tremendous uncircumcised cigar to attract the eye and torpedo any criticism. Short and pink with a generous belly: a Christmas tree in a pinstriped suit.

The first time he spoke he drew, for Canberra, a large crowd. Shadbolt had dropped the Minister off at Miss Kilmartin's nearby. With nothing else to do he sauntered over to the corner site and watched.

That morning a tank in one of the nation's petrol stations had exploded, blowing the whole place to smithereens, and McBee had homed in there to make a statement on transport. Standing among the blitzed bricks and still smouldering girlie calendars he grew florid with the measured force of his delivery. The only thing wrong—small point—was that his voice, made nasal by his car yards and the limitless space and the dry rocks of Australia, was at odds with his fully imported, pinstriped appearance.

‘The internal combustion engine, the thing that gets us from A to B, is something we take for granted, an
iron certainty
. And yet it contains a message for every one of us. We each have a life span parallel to a car engine. At this moment we are at a certain stage in the cycle.'

Half closing his eyes Shadbolt could almost hear Alex in the Epic Theatre. Momentarily he wondered about the attraction of men with overpowering, insistent words.

‘How does a car engine work? It has the same four stages as human life. I, C, P, E,' he spelt it out to the baffled audience; catching Shadbolt's eye he winked.

‘That not-so-young codger holding up the telegraph pole— you there—perhaps you can tell us how an engine works? What does I, C, P, E stand for?'

Shadbolt scratched his nose at the old crowd-trick McBee pulled.

With his mechanical mind and schooled in the defective acronyms of Canberra he easily worked out the letters; he saw in rapid succession ‘EPIC' assemble from the same four strokes, and grey-and-white images of the distracted figure in shorts, his friend Alex half blinded by the projector, in turn reshuffled by the cut-price Indians into ‘
PICE
'. And he saw the stages in his own life unfolding.

‘Intake, Compression, Power, Exhaust,' McBee tapped his skull like the hemispherical head of an engine. ‘The moment we are born we take in knowledge and fresh air. You with me? This mixture then becomes compressed as the petrol and oxygen does in a car engine. With us knowledge is compressed by experience. It comes to a head when we enter our forties and fifties, sometimes earlier. It then explodes, or I should say, it's converted into power, power channelled into energies, the way a car needs a good stretch of road. Our power doesn't last forever. We soon suffer lack of intake, exhaustion…We're replaced by someone fresh. The cycle begins again.