Holden's Performance (42 page)

The techniques of ‘cluster' protection with its derivation from ‘Custer' had been perfected during the big vice-Presidential tours of Latin America, and Polaroid, who was always receiving highly classified advice from Washington, adapted it to Australian conditions. And when the PM in the immaculate Bentley drove along the streets with the entourage running alongside in ‘cluster' formation, Jimmy and his pack of dingoes bringing up the rear, Irving Polaroid couldn't believe it when pedestrians and other drivers barely looked twice—at their own Prime Minister. Some even made a point of averting their eyes from what they considered to be a load of melodramatic rubbish. On the job Shadbolt found that pedestrians stepped aside as if he was merely running for a bus, and more than once after knocking an old lady over and squatting to pick up the contents of her handbag—reproducing anthropological images of Wheelright and gentle Flies—was told, ‘Go on, dear, get going. You'll be late for work.' At traffic lights a bod would sidle up and ask for directions or the time or a match, and although talking was strictly forbidden Shadbolt would shout back instructions as they began moving, barking his shins against stationary fenders and bumper bars. He was good-natured, would always give someone a hand. When the motorcade did attract attention it was smart alecks whistling or calling out wisecracks from taxis and building sites, or in Sydney, jokers outside hotels kneeling down giving salaams to the British Bentley passing—that kind of tiling—and kids suddenly running alongside with their kelpies and idiotic grinning. Everything was a joke. And Polaroid shook his head; he couldn't get over it.

Otherwise nothing much happened, no sign of trouble; everything remained horizontal.

There was a lot of waiting around in their line of work. The PM took little notice of the split-second itineraries devised by Polaroid and given the nod by the Colonel. It was up to them to follow him. As with Bradman, the master batsman, he always had time on his side. ‘The PM,' explained an assistant without cracking a smile, ‘is not a morning person. What are you staring at?'

Shadbolt saw a red face in the torch beam in the stalls of the Epic Theatre, caught with his pants down. Now he had a plum in his mouth and wore a rose.

That was years ago.

‘Nothing, nothing…'

Having trouble with his laces he put his foot on the bumper and double-knotted a bow.

Sometimes while on the run Shadbolt felt compelled to glance inside the Bentley to see if the lanigerous leader was still alive. Between cigars it was difficult to tell. And after a good lunch the PM practised Sid Hoadley's old trick of looking down with his eyes shielded, whereas Shadbolt could see he was asleep with his mouth wide open. Along the bumpy arteries near the nation's airports, and once over the incredible wet tram tracks of Melbourne, his four chins vibrated to a frightening extent; it sometimes seemed to Shadbolt they were escorting a disintegrating statue.

Successful and botched assassination attempts were meanwhile taking place every other day—everywhere but Australia.

‘But that's good, isn't it?' Shadbolt said seriously.

‘Don't be stupid!' Polaroid turned on him. Shadbolt had his plus-points but just then he could have punched the blank face, hard.

‘That's what's got me beat about you people here. Through negative thinking you think most things are positive. You all here wouldn't know real trouble if you tripped over it. What you've got here is only how you think trouble should be. It's like everything else. You haven't experienced it, no sir.'

Whole days were taken up with the black Bentley driven around in circles with the nation's flag waving on the bonnet, and the full cluster of perspiring escorts running alongside, even though the PM was in Melbourne dining at the club. It was one of Polaroid's ideas: to act as a decoy, to break habits, keep everyone in trim. And when at last rumours circulated in near and far circles that R. G. Amen would be stepping aside, so many pretenders went about in dark suits and silver neckties, smiling and nodding and waving, their faces anxiously hoping to be PM, it became difficult to find the real one, especially on night-shift in the half dark.

It certainly didn't make Shadbolt's job any easier. And then there were the flying visits from friendly Heads of Government (HOGs). In the sixties these began to pick up following the increased reliability of aeroplane jet engines.

They flocked down during the Northern Hemisphere winter or when things got too hot at home, responding to long-forgotten invitations, the long journey, crossing Greenwich and Capricorn to the olfactory shape of paleness basking in its wide-openness, the longitude and latitude of innocence, where they knew a red tongue of welcome would be laid out on a patch of reinforced concrete, monarchs and generals scoring a fanfare of brass and kettledrums. Quite a traffic of visiting important persons built up; some came to lecture the new Prime Minister, and when three or four arrived simultaneously due to an intersection of circumstances—a record rice harvest somewhere freeing one dignitary, a successful election landslide (not many casualties) somewhere else—state-run Boeings circled like flies above the tin airport of Canberra, stretching protocol and the committees of handshakers to the limit.

Every courtesy was extended to the Heads of Government, never mind their recent histories. (Why, some of them had stains on their hands and couldn't remove screams from their ears, the way a mechanic goes to bed with grease under his nails, while certain Latins with the pencil moustache had come simply to smuggle out merino breeders, while others…) That was the law laid down by the government, as interpreted by the Colonel, adept at turning a blind eye; and Shadbolt had little trouble following it.

So many autocrats came and went during the mid-sixties Light and his crew scarcely had any rest; even the experiments with the dingoes had to be suspended. Shadbolt seemed to never stop running. No sooner did his body begin to go cold than he had to start up again. To the anxious foreigners he stood out head and shoulders from the rest; some of them had never seen anyone like him. Panting and perspiring like a horse the huge no-nonsense shape was always there, blinking in the rain, or during heat waves when the roads melted, half-blocking out the sun, the only one still running at the end. And more than once he single-handedly held back protesters who'd broken through the barriers, shouting in languages he didn't understand. At the finish of their grand tour it was the tradition for the leaders to shake hands on the tarmac with the Prime Minister's representative, and in short mechanical steps go around shaking every hand in sight. Reaching Shadbolt, assigned to guard their exposed backs for the last few seconds in Australia, they paused and looking up at Mt Lofty enquired politely after his family (‘Yes, sir. They're all OK.'), or made a friendly crack about his height to indicate their gratitude, before snapping their manicured fingers at their underlings crowding behind.

In this way Shadbolt acquired an extensive collection of fountain pens, monogrammed spoons, ashtrays and native fauna carved in sandalwood. He was given wooden bowls, spears and plastic replicas of state monuments. These he distributed to Polaroid who eagerly added them to the stratigraphic metals encrusting his bed. The astrological charts from India were posted off without explanation to his mother, and the East African tea-towels screen-printed with charging elephants he left with Harriet, and another set to Karen, whom he happened to see in the street. All he kept for himself were the autographed photographs, quite a pile of those, and a thermometer set in soapstone, presented personally by a bewildered Eskimo leader, a really nice little bloke. These Shadbolt put with his birth certificate and the handtinted photographs of his grandfather in Egypt in a shoebox at the bottom of the metal wardrobe.

Beginning in the mid-sixties…it became the practice to join forces with visiting bodyguards, the fly-by-night Mexies and tough little Filipinos and north-east Asians, who never used a deodorant and introduced an extra dimension in inscrutability. Light and his men often found themselves in a subordinate position—taking orders from the Japs, the Yanks setting up their radio gear and field-hospital in the dormitory—and Stan Still, for one, didn't like it.

‘What does Einstein here say?' he asked.

Shadbolt gave his standard, ‘Eh?'

Without moving a muscle it could mean any number of things. He hadn't thought about the problem. He went along as before, getting on with the job.

Did the US Secretary of State or his sidekick visit Australia late 1964? It was from the crewcut Americans Shadbolt learnt the technique of running backwards while whispering into a walkie-talkie—not as easy as it looks—and how to spot the pallor of an ex-prisoner and the perspiration of the about-to-be assassin. Polaroid introduced him to these crack Americans, and he saw them talking together, watching him.

Standing on special running-boards manufactured by the Mercedes Benz company or General Motors, Shadbolt became a reincarnation of his father working his way along the outside of trams. His position though was more unpredictable. There were no regular stops. The aim was to escort the Head of Government in profile in a steady sliding motion, the way a coin is passed before a sceptical crowd, yet rapid enough to foil a sniper on a rooftop aiming to intersect his hairline sights. If congestion developed up ahead, if traffic lights happened to turn amber, if a cadet policeman fainted in front, any sign of delay—it could be a trick—the limousine accelerated, hitting 50 or 60 to avoid a standstill situation, with Shadbolt's huge dishevelled figure hanging on, wind bulging his eyelids and hair, a rate of knots the Adelaide trams never reached.

An autocrat instinctively feels at home in a black limousine.

These were supplied from a central car pool in Australia, but in the busy season there were not always enough black ones to go around. Sometimes they were just ordinary Ford models. The wealthiest industrial powers and their famine-infested client states at the opposite end of the scale indulged in the imperial luxury of freighting in their own custom-built Lincolns, Daimlers, Mercedes, and were driven at a special low speed along the avenues, motorcycle escort fore and aft.

The funereal pace of the processions matched the appearance of the specially elongated limousines. With large areas of glass some even had the miniature white curtains. And like hearses they were driven by motionless men in discreet uniforms. Everybody also knew the glass and the body panels were proofed against bullets, and so a monarch, president or PM slowly passing appeared to be giving a mobile demonstration of their transcendence over death, for there they were sitting up in a hearse and waving, their faces simplified by fame, ‘See I'm alive, and I'm moving. I'm existing through all time.' For the same reason the pale autocrat is given flowers and instinctively favours dark clothing. Up front the police on polished motorbikes cleared a path into the future, while a full complement of stone-faced bodyguards on either side increased the illusion: by searching the crowd with their eyes they distanced the leader further from the crowd. And in their wake stumbled the retinue of foodtasters, hairdressers, quacks, confidential advisers, personal photographers, money changers and protocol specialists.

‘Eh?'

It continued to be Shadbolt's answer (up to late '65). The others sitting around a bed took it to mean ‘No.'

That was about all he could come out with flat on his back at the end of the day, his elbow forming a V across his eyes. Otherwise he really appreciated the call for a card game or sharing a schooner, even if it meant looking on, to one side. Normally—and everybody knew—he'd do anything for anybody, anytime.

Amazing what a few years of running and squinting into the sun along with all the untold gallons of moisture lost could do to a body. The effort had left him with an enlarged jaw and nose. He remained tall but gauntness had taken over, which made him plainer still, leaving his basic honesty, a form of solemn clumsiness, exposed as bones.

Exhausted, he lay in the Nissen hut emitting body heat and flatulence, his mind ticking over (blood flooding the map of Shadbolt's brain). It always took a while for the perspective of the never-ending streets to fade, and the steady pounding of his feet, the faces passing left and right, the tilt of buildings as he turned a corner…the trouble with exhaustion…and these days he was always on call…until at a late hour the murmurings and the wireless static died down from the other beds, and the moonlight on the corrugated ceiling slowly intersected into the shadows of Harriet's hypnotic hip, giving a pearly lustre to the cold iron, and further along there the pubic corners and armpits adjoining what appeared to be her raised knee. He couldn't think straight. The figure he knew twisted in his mind, a difficult comfort. Her sudden indifference towards him and everybody else confused him. She was always a series of intricate promises, unfolding, near and far, and he missed her. Whenever possible he wangled Sydney assignments: usually the exhausting run in from the airport on the uneven first-settlement surfaces. It attracted little attention from the others, for he raised his hand for just about everything. He didn't know what else to do with his time.

The beds were fixed points of reference in the sea of semiconsciousness: horizontal planes from where each man could travel out, and return to, from the outside. A bed's function was altered and accumulated by every one of them. It became armchair, desk, table, bar, safe, gambling-strip and daydreaming place; islands of tranquillity, of wall-less privacy, always there, in the iron and concrete dormitory.

On this Sunday morning, late, Shadbolt removed his elbow from his eyes and more out of habit than interest reached down and picked up the latest news of world events, air-mailed by Vern. Which is how he saw—and sat up in bed—the final superimposed image of Sid Hoadley before he too faded from the public eye (finishing in a single paragraph several years later, when Shadbolt wasn't around to see it: a matter-of-fact mention of an epicurean's final stroke on a footbridge in Canberra, mourned by veiled women; and barely a mention of the skills he'd applied to Commerce, Home Affairs and the Interior).