Holden's Performance (41 page)

In Adelaide, Vern Hartnett stumbled.

There was a right and a wrong, nothing else. He believed that; it became his strength, the inner at harmony with the outer. He had erected a life around it, a world of factual matter, always verifiable.

Vern left everything else out. Nothing in between that which was ‘black and white' (Vern's early use of the term) was allowed. And now he found himself in the wrong.

The facts and figures (and commas, hyphens, caps—) carefully assembled and preserved throughout his fifty-thereabout years, such a compression of swirling knowledge-particles, no longer matched, or only partly matched, their images and the sequence of images, even though he sometimes felt sure they did. The world at arm's length stippled into a blur. It became mostly mirage. At a loss, Vern bumped against other people (trod on toes), stumbled against dogs and mudguards, his own furniture and precious assumptions.

Only a few things could be verified. These he held onto, and tried to work out the rest.

Gradually he was moved sideways on the newspaper until he was no longer on the page. He retired prematurely to his house among the shadows in the Hills, ‘overlooking' the city. An extra-gentleness enveloped him, itself a form of blurring.

As a tribute to Hartnett's years of loyal service, which had ruined a perfectly good pair of blue-green eyes, the
Advertiser
management presented him with a brass clock encased in mulga, and following a tip-off from the malicious typesetters the editor sent out an up-and-coming young feature writer to interview him among his statues. Years later in a paddy-field in South-East Asia this reporter would drown wide-eyed in his own blood; in Vern Hartnett's backyard he looked more like a surveyor in his moleskins as he jotted down Vern's identification of each figure and what exactly made them so special. Vern sounded Irish when he claimed that statues were a sign of a healthy society. He called them ‘touchstones'. Passing his hands over the eyes, lips and torsos of these far-sighted men, he drew from their strength a strange contentment. He conversed with them and asked questions, addressing them formally, with respect. Recently he had come to a difficult decision. It occupied his mind for months; he had every reason to string it out, embroidering the problem. During the casting of McBee's tram, so many lumps of molten bronze had spilt over Vern had managed to pick up enough dirt-cheap to cast one more exemplary figure. There was standing room between Nicholas Jensen and Light. After much soul-searching and involvement of his best-friends Wheel-right and Flies, who read out entries in encyclopaedias and proposed their own candidates—Kurt Schwitters, who had immortalised tram tickets, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill (quickly discarded for local reasons)—he narrowed the list down to Benjamin Franklin, Epicurus and a late runner, Roger Bacon for his dubious achievements in optics.

The reporter was tolerant. Even Vern noticed he was amazingly good at nodding. He asked about next of kin and the loneliness of old age. Readers are interested in the human-interest angle. And the photograph did the rest.

Many readers chewing on their morning toast recognised in Vern Hartnett, 56, the spectre of isolation; but it had the harshest impact on Shadbolt casually picking up the paper from the pile waiting for the Prime Minister. The photo ran across four columns. In a crumpled white shirt buttoned at the throat Vern stood pale among his pantheon, one hand resting on the bare shoulder of Epicurus (Polish artist's impression of), already jaundiced on account of the poor-quality bronze. The softness of Vern against the inflexible bronzes, the contrast between light and dark, made the photo compelling enough. But Shadbolt stared at Vern's expression. Milk-eyed and mouth open searching for the camera, and missing it by several degrees, Vern appeared as a fish out of water; his pale head and shoulders seemed to propel out from the page. He was innocent. He really didn't understand why he was being photographed. The Australian love for the oddball-character has bedevilled the newspapers, its art and literature. Sparrows and magpies intersected the late morning shadows, and the viticultural slope rose steeply, enclosing the yard, darker than Shadbolt remembered.

On the same day a joint letter from Gordon Wheelright and Flies explained the situation, enclosing the feature article, ‘to put you in the picture'.

Shadbolt didn't know what to say or do. Looking at the picture he felt something missing in himself. He saw Vein's decency; and he became aware of parts of his own decency. He always wanted to help. He imagined Vern now at home. And there was no one, except Harriet, he could tell about tins.

He wrote to Vern. A letter slightly longer than usual. He made no mention of Vern's ‘loss of perception', but enclosed a decent money order. Things were going well in Canberra, he was always on the go. Depending on the PM's plans he'd be getting over—underlined—to Adelaide soon.

This is Australia, mid-1963…Women had stopped wearing Mondrian dresses. The vague portents of social discord were given voice by chaotic all-over fabric designs and a general slackening of discipline in the length of hems and the V of necklines. One step leading to another, until finally the women took to wearing voluminous dresses with high waislines; they appeared as a mass of walking pregnancies, as if predictably an entire empire had fallen.

By then the neat little English saloons, namely the Morris Minors, Austins and Flies' Wolseley, which personified modesty and Methodism, were in the minority, and motorbikes and sidecars with their nicotine-coloured windows had turned into air-cooled curiosities pointed at by shrill children.

Water finding its own level, the streets had become infested with the horizontal glidings of chrome-laden roadhogs, fully imported from the US of A, their lilac, silver or rose madder tail fins assuming truly imperial proportions. To match their animal aerodynamics these V/8s of optimism were given names to unlock daydreams of cloudless skies and phenomenal virility: Mustang, Falcon, Thunderbird, Rocket. Panting at the lights their huge exhaust pipes dribbled like fat penises; whenever Shadbolt saw the word Detroit he saw a tailpipe.

Smaller versions were turned out by the local subsidiaries in the thousands, less powerful hybrids, not half as flash, the way a young hopeful man imitates the flamboyant neckties and speech of a successful brother, somehow missing the original essence. Bridges all over the country had to be widened. Garages lengthened. A free-marketeer such as Frank McBee saw the tidal shift in expectations begin in the metronomic arcing of his showroom doors. He was onto something here. He had a nose for mass appetites, a fifth sense. He could see people had an eye for two-tone colours and were tired of changing gears by hand. Many more women were beginning to drive. There was a run on white-walled tyres. Soft suspensions and the democratic bench seats spoke of the good life available to all. It was Frank McBee who'd suggested to GM they bring out a family station wagon.

Wherever the eye fell the changes in the fabric could be seen. From the pulpits a connection was drawn to the nation's ‘moral fibre'. Every day Wheelright and Flies were picking up extravagant adjectives, the filtered butts and coloured plastics and what-not, all part of the tidal action. Except for the Hills and the parched parklands in summer, khaki had disappeared along with the trams. The colour actually made some people sick. At Vern's optometrist and the progressive barbers and dental surgeons,
Reader's Digest
and
Life
replaced the traditional battered copies of
Punch
.

After his visit to the camp Shadbolt often turned up without invitation. He enjoyed being with the Colonel. Together they had this ability to sit for hours on end staring at the fire or their palms, without a word; Shadbolt accepted silence just as he did any one of Light's true-life stories, or the retelling of the one about the half-sisters (‘It was the damnedest thing…'). At intervals words came out as boots stepping on branches, and those that followed fell with a special, isolated gravity.

One morning, a Saturday, late November, Shadbolt was helping the Colonel decoke the Vauxhall among the trees. The spanners made clinking sounds against the metal. Otherwise the stringybarks and scribbly gums angled with dry twigs and the hum of the bush insulated them from the rest of the world. Faintly, a muffled car horn and then a truck with a whining diff managed to penetrate. Even so the city below sounded unnaturally quiet.

Certain barriers had broken down between Light and his underling. It was made tangible and exaggerated by leaning shoulder-to-shoulder with their arms inside an engine. Each gave the other instructions.

They were straining undoing a rusted nut. ‘Do you have a woman?' the Colonel suddenly asked. And before Shadbolt could answer: ‘That's right, I was forgetting.'

The Colonel went over to his tent to find some music. He had this weakness for the marches of Elgar.

‘Crikey,' Shadbolt heard him say. ‘Jesus Christ,' he shouted, adjusting a wireless held together by fencing wire, hardly helping the static.

As Shadbolt lifted out the manifold and dripping carburettor he saw the map of Europe reflected in trees and clouds on the windscreen.

‘Kennedy's dead. They've shot the President.'

Struggling with the fat legs of the manifold Shadbolt couldn't give the news his full attention. ‘That's no good,' he said through his teeth.

The Colonel was always being reminded of his divided loyalties: he looked down now at one pearly white hand, the other black with grease. If life itself was as straightforward…Engine parts lay scattered on the tarp draping the bonnet of the disabled Vauxhall. At a time when he was needed in the capital he found himself marooned on the mountain.

‘I'm going to have to walk it,' he bit his bottom lip.

The powers-that-be would need reassuring. With Irving Polaroid, the ‘exchange American', holding the fort, God knows what sort of state-of-emergency measures he'd be pushing through.

The epoch of paranoia reached the shores of Australia, as in the outer edges of a magnetic field. Faint spectre of dread took the form of a series of rippled streetscapes without colour. People went around in a state of shock. And then, to think, before anyone could catch their breath the pale suspect with the Chinese Christian name has—another screened image—life blasted out of him in an inrush of pain by some nightclub owner, hunched shoulders, wearing the respectable Stetson of a businessman. There it was: proof first tiling in the morning. Who's going to be next? For a few days there was the feeling anything could happen. The structure on which the continuation of the world was based had been broken, leaving a gap.

From the bush capital where the town plan radiated stability or instability in strong or weak waves the shock of the killings was digested and recycled in acceptable local form. The old values of continuity and place were reasserted the way a large man settles in a comfortable armchair and hears the springs creak. Visually, it encouraged a collective pursing of lips. Individual acts became suspect. At the same time crowds were not to be trusted. It was around then, in 1963, that ‘Eh?' with its associations of non-commitment and not-knowing became Shadbolt's answer to just about everything.

The PM's bulk stood out before people's eyes, his eyebrows speaking of experience and wisdom, draped in reassuring merino cloth. Deliberately he slowed his movements down.

Eight days after the assassination the Prime Minister's coalition of dunk- and look-alikes was re-elected with an increased majority. And a few months later, in 1964, sensing this general instinct for stability, R. G. Amen switched from the American Cadillac and all its associations with the irrational, and went about in a sedate new Bentley, also black, where he should have been all along. (And the Cadillac? Knocked down to a resourceful beekeeper who used it to transport hives, something of an aerial electorate in miniature, swarming around a Queen and secret ballot boxes.)

Originally Shadbolt's size had appeared a disadvantage. Polaroid kept saying he'd stick out in a crowd; no doubt about it. But—local knowledge!—his height was counterbalanced by the expressionless helpful head and his assorted antipodean knuckles and elbows, so archetypal, quintessentially factual, that Shadbolt standing in the street, or even running, became virtually invisible.

Wearing regulation sunglasses in the shape of emu eggs, which transformed the most innocent street scene into a twilight of intrigue, and equipment of his own choosing, Dunlop sandshoes in need of a clean, Shadbolt ran alongside the longest-running Prime Minister, one eye scanning ahead and the other covering the footpath and rooftops. He was on the street, rain or shine, public holidays included; and if the PM indulged his love of oratory in the greenery of a garden fete, or impulsively allowed himself to be mobbed inside a town hall, Shadbolt stood to one side, searching the crowd like an auctioneer for the slightest giveaway movement.

That was how he appeared in the background of newsreels, out of focus, and how Vern and Harriet spotted his apparition, cropped at the shoulder, in the papers.

In the mechanical tone peculiar to the business Shadbolt ‘had settled into stride'. He got the job done, no mucking about.

Irving Polaroid was impressed; and that was something. Ever since the wounds self-inflicted by his nation the American's opinions were accorded special deference. Nothing like the Dallas assassination had happened on Australian soil, not even the spearing of Captain Cook, and although Polaroid had been asleep in a corrugated-iron shed in Canberra at the time, vestiges of the experience had obviously entered him. Bodyguarding in the US had since become a highly skilled, horizontally mobile profession, offering opportunities to be seen to be alert, pokerfaced and broadshouldered. There was talk of colleges, Harvard and Austin or somewhere, offering bachelor degree courses on the subject. When Polaroid made his deep-throated recommendations into his tape recorder or wrote memos with a transparent ballpoint—the first to be seen in Australia—government bodies in Canberra sat up and paid attention. Colonel Light anyway concentrated on general reconnaissance, his specially, and the basically amateurish obsession of training the dingoes, said in the bush to be untrainable; he was always mucking about in the dusty kennels with Jimmy—keeping aloof from the day-to-day operations.