Holden's Performance (37 page)

S
hadbolt had become so associated with Sid Hoadley people couldn't disconnect them in their minds, and when Shadbolt was replaced by a visual and oral opposite from the ranks, a Tasmanian no taller than an apprentice jockey, and with a jockey's foul tongue and prematurely wrinkled face, people didn't actually see him—they looked clean through and past him. All day he stubbornly sat in the underground garage waiting for the Minister's call; and because Mr Hoadley never turned up, had disappeared, the little man whose eyes barely made it over the steering wheel, even with the help of pneumatic cushions, simply ceased to exist. The car remained motionless in its designated spot, slowly leaking cigarette smoke from the doors, the cracked voice automatically calling out to anyone passing, like one of Hoadley & Sons' defective speakers. The other drivers, and the mechanics especially, discovered they had enjoyed the solid presence of Shadbolt, and to his surprise they greeted him loudly and with real affection whenever they passed in the street.

Too large to be handed down his old uniform hung askew in the wardrobe for several weeks, and he wore the necktie several times out of habit, before he stuffed the struggling arms and legs into the rubbish bin. A different kind of anonymity was required in the new job.

‘You were born for this line of work. Everything you've done since has prepared you for it. You'll go far,' the Colonel prophesied with more truth than Shadbolt imagined.

In all his years in the game Shadbolt stood out as his finest recruit. The Colonel could hardly believe his luck.

A glance at his specifications showed how he was made for the local conditions. Light had always been impressed with the strong body, and Shadbolt's unusual ability to idle all day in the one spot in the sun. Stamina, reliability, economy, no mucking about (no frills) were the qualities needed in a young country, a place existing in the consciousness as largely a blank—Shadbolt saw the sand-coloured interior form on the carpet of the Epic Theatre—where liberty is so vast it verged on nothingness.

The Colonel proceeded to build on the strong points, playing down the weaknesses. He ignored features such as Shadbolt's honesty and his khaki eyes, which he considered irrelevant to the task. ‘It's time you put your accumulated knowledge to work.' That was his angle. ‘It's bursting to get out. You're ready to explode, I can tell. The grain of sand in the oyster and all that. You've acquired so much. It's a matter of pointing you in the right direction.'

Colonel Light was something of a philosopher. He tried to see everything in an ‘objective light'. He also read old verse in the Everyman's editions, and as Shadbolt discovered later was a closet water-colourist. They went for rapid walks together. He woke Shadbolt at all hours. He tested his reflexes. He put a stopwatch on his man sprinting around the velodrome, twenty-four laps on an empty stomach. He dropped Shadbolt off blindfolded in one of Canberra's curving side streets and told him to get back to base in sixty minutes. Stuff like that. Another difficult test was to hide behind one of the obelisks near Parliament House and with the Colonel's opera glasses identify each arriving and departing Minister. Trickier still was to run backwards through a crowded shopping centre, keeping pace with the Colonel's slowly passing two-tone Vauxhall. When Shadbolt least expected it—outside the gym at night, or leaving the lavatory—light flashed mugshots of VIPs and terrorists from the newspapers; Shadbolt had to make the distinction. The locations of all the embassies and legations, their front and side entrances and swimming pools were memorised. And in the footsteps of Vern, Mrs Younghusband and the epicurean Hoadley, the Colonel advised on the most healthy diet.

While carefully supervising Shadbolt, Light managed at the same time to keep him at arm's length; and conscious of this gap, the way a dog is held within a leash, Shadbolt worked even harder to please. He looked up to him. The Colonel was impressive all right. Here was a man as tough as leather who didn't put a foot wrong. And it wasn't long—less than a fortnight—before Light's face and way of choosing words replaced the missing Minister's. At that moment of intersection, Colonel Light, who had the knack of looking at Shadbolt while looking in another direction, judged the time right for him to meet the others.

In fact, where was Sid Hoadley? The question slightly troubled Shadbolt. Nothing serious: though enough to tackle the Colonel the morning they drove out to the barracks.

The Colonel tugged at his driving gloves. ‘My information is that he's been moved sideways, pending.'

Someone else had accepted the demands of the portfolio.

‘Anyway, I shouldn't worry about him. A man like Senator Hoadley can look after himself. And you're going to find yourself run off your feet here.'

Such imprecision went with the so-called industrial suburb—car yards, warehouses, ultralight industry—which had been townplanned behind a hill near the sewerage works, so as not to spoil the sacred geometry of the nation's capital. They passed a red sea of telephone booms; a space and another paddock filled to the perimeter with olive-green filing cabinets; followed by one tangled in balls of oxidised wire, like rust-coloured wool.

‘He used to call me “Mudguards”,' Shadbolt said, half to himself. And for the second time in a month the drought broke across the Colonel's face.

‘“Mudguards”?' he chortled. ‘That's not bad!' Dabbing his eyes he glanced at Shadbolt. ‘You've come a long way, my boy. From “Mudguards” to bodyguard. At least it's not a sideways movement.'

He left out orphan, consumer of news, star-gazer, comforter to cripples. Shadbolt could have added mechanic, bouncer, posh-car driver; his father had broken his neck falling off a tram; all his life he had inhabited linoleum bedrooms; and now they pulled up with a squeak outside a silver-frosted Nissen hut, the type normally commandeered by youth clubs.

Colonel Light remained seated. He looked straight ahead.

‘You're replacing Rice, one of our best men. There was a balls-up at Foreign Affairs. Somehow these things happen. A famine in Africa. People dropping like flies. Our people there get it into their heads to shoot off a cable:
SEND RICE URGENT
. We weren't to know. Foreign aid can be anything from tractors to stethoscopes. Ed flew out the next day in a Hercules. Nothing's been heard of him since, poor devil.'

Still blinking, Shadbolt followed the Colonel into the hut. Three men lounging around on charpoys stood to attention.

‘Where's Rust?' Light barked.

Rust hobbled out from the bathroom down the end, zipping up his corduroys. He joined the others in the line-up.

In Canberra, people congregating in threes and fours always appeared to be in uniform, even in the gym; so Shadbolt initially was taken aback by the team's discordant informality. But in that semicircular hut which would echo frozen limbs in winter, and be even worse in summer, rows of beds there as in a POW camp, dartboard and scattered copies of
Man
magazine—Shadbolt's first impressions—stood four of the most alert men in the Southern Hemisphere. Trained to see to it as unobtrusively as possible that no physical harm would ever befall the prime minister of the day, they were an elite corps, ruthless, anonymous types with lightning reflexes, and now joined by Shadbolt, huge and expressionless, making an unfortunate five. Except in matters of clothing Light had schooled these men along the lines of the Westminster system: the old cold-shower, shaving-with-a-cracked-mirror routine; to serve whoever was in power, rain or shine. The further they were from the centre of Empire such notions became either diluted, or in Light's case, an over-literal extension.

‘Rust is equipment officer, among other things. He'll fit you out. I suppose you might say he's a quartermaster—not all there. Right, Rust?'

‘Yes, sir!'

Pudgy red-eyed Rust winked. He barely came up to Shadbolt's shoulder. Shadbolt recognised the face from the edge of a recent crowd.

Light pointed to the next one, ‘I believe you two have met before.'

Bloke with the black patent-leather hair. Exceptionally thin: a sheet of cardboard side-on. It made him difficult to see, even at arm's length. It meant that at three o'clock he didn't cast a shadow; a valuable plus. Watching Shadbolt now he allowed a sliding eye-movement of acknowledgement.

‘Granted, he gets full marks for camouflage. And he can pass through a crowd like a dose of Laxettes. Take a look at him; now you see him, now you don't. His speciality is small arms. What concerns me more are a man's disadvantages.'

Staring at the skinny figure Shadbolt tried to imagine what they were. They'd have to be pretty bad for the Colonel to go broadcasting to the world at large. Then just as their hands went forward, introduced by the Colonel, the other one froze in midair at the sound of his name, ‘Stan Still.'

‘There you go again!' Light threw up his arms in disgust. ‘Now you see what I'm up against,' he said to Shadbolt. ‘In this business I need a name like, I don't know—a hole in the head.' [Orig. military term, first introduced to Australia by William Light.]

Stan Still could be only employed sparingly. In the sudden flux of a big crowd situation, where commands had to be shouted out, he had frozen on more than one occasion, when he should have fought his way forward, and during the colonial pandemonium of the last Royal Visit, had turned and moved in recognition when ordered to ‘stand still!'

Digesting the complexities of the new job Shadbolt turned to the next man, and for a second was not sure if he had ever seen him before. If he had the face was so clean and nondescript, so unexceptional, it had left no impression. He was pale and like a Mormon, he wore a short sleeve shirt and narrow tie.

‘This is Irving Polaroid, an American adviser, on loan. All the way from Virginia. Right, Irving?'

Smiling, Polaroid's lips rolled back; he seemed to say ‘cheese'.

‘You're welcome,' he shook Shadbolt's hand.

And—what's this?—he kept shaking it, and maintaining eye-contact, began squeezing, faint ice-cracking sounds coming from Shadbolt's hand, forcing him to apply his own pressure, steady and severe, with his tremendous mechanic's grip.

‘Irving's here to give us a hand,' the Colonel was saying, ‘in surveillance techniques. Fingerprinting is his forte. And the Americans, through our friend here, give us advance warning of any unwanted visitors.'

‘Shhh,' Polaroid smiled through his teeth, ‘walls have ears.'

‘Rubbish. This is Austrylia, not the US of A. Nothing's going to happen here. That's the blasted trouble.'

Shadbolt let go, and Polaroid nodded, impressed, as he tucked his damaged hand under his armpit.

In making himself at home in the dormitory Polaroid had counter-balanced his anonymity by allowing his possessions to accumulate in a coral growth around his bed—coffee-making machine, miniature whisky bottles, the latest in German camera gear, a boomerang, gramophone, Steuben glass, the tape recorder in a fancy case, shrunken head from his previous post, an electric shaver, Budweiser ashtrays and assorted hairbrushes and souvenirs—an eyecatching backwater of goods (some still in boxes) from all over the world which caused Shadbolt to suddenly see the logic in Wheelright's painstaking researches.

‘We're pleased to have Irving on board. He comes from a country that's fighting it out for Number One on the assassination league table. I'm told the streets over there are littered with spent cartridges and blood. We might learn something from his experiences.'

He waited for Shadbolt at the last man.

‘Jimmy Carbon,' Light pointed with his chin.

It took several seconds to adjust to the dark, before Shadbolt could make out a hand stirring from a bundle of clothing.

‘Stand to attention, Jimmy,' the Colonel murmured. ‘Mr Shadbolt here is replacing Ed Rice—who went walkabout. Jimmy,' he glanced at Shadbolt, ‘is a half-blood from the Territory. Doesn't like the big smoke. Can't say I blame him. But by Jove we can use him. He can track a suspect's footprints across bare concrete and over granite steps and bitumen, you name it. Not bad either at handling dogs.'

A master at making himself scarce Jimmy Carbon could put himself into the shade just by moving his head a few inches. He wore an old coat over a football jumper.

‘You'd like to be out on walkabout yourself, eh Jimmy?' Light shouted to make him feel one of them.

And Shadbolt drawn in stood grinning down at Jimmy. All he could see in the face was distance: in the eyes and in the flattened nose, the wide cheeks and forehead. Such distance, almost indifference. Only when Shadbolt looked down and up from the empty bottles sticking out from under the bed, while Light went on about the need for extra-vigilance, did the face consider his and almost smile.

Light told Shadbolt to get to know their faces and names in his sleep, ‘if not your life, the PM's might depend on it'. At the entrance to the tunnel he paused, briefly diffused by natural light, before he slammed the door and was gone.

Shadbolt blinked. No one said a word. The bed blankets were dark grey as the galvanised walls, and with the concrete floor almost grey, the semicircular interior had the blurred tones of a photograph. Shadbolt didn't mind; to him everything felt light and different. The smell, for example, was a mix of cold metal, wet towels and the competing waves of hair oil from Jimmy and the not so smooth American. Shadbolt's bed was between them. On the floor he found a box of Redhead matches with the bare shoulder biro-ed into a penis, and feature articles torn out from magazines on how to live longer.

The equipment officer came over and sat down.

‘Ed didn't have any next-of-kin. His belongings fitted into a couple of brown paper bags. All he had after forty-odd years on earth. I shoved them into the incinerator. What are you looking at? I say, don't think we're nothing but a pack of bludgers. We were out late last night, and are sitting around stuffed, recharging for the next job.'