Holden's Performance (16 page)

Combing her hair the naked usherette had turned slightly. These nipples, Holden swallowed, looked nothing like the ones fitted at various points on cars.

‘Here's an interesting fact! You'll notice from this angle a woman's breast is comma-shaped. Why are they shaped like a comma? Everything in the world is connected to words. And the breasts of women, over the ages, have inspired words one after the other, strings of adjectives mostly.' Vern mumbled, ‘That's the only reason I can think of.'

Shadbolt stared with his mouth open at the pale expanse: how the body before him was weighted and balanced differently to those of men seen only the other day on the semicircular beach. Faintly now he understood the function of high-heeled shoes. She had a snub nose and wide nostrils. Combing her hair she appeared to be smiling.

Tissue, muscle, glands, ducts and other technical terms went over Shadbolt's head. He wasn't listening.

The wand briefly touched on the navel.

Vern then pointed to the narrow waist and the wide hips.

‘We now enter the most unusual region. I don't think there can be any dispute about this. It's the distinguishing mark of the opposite sex. You know quite well what you and I have between our legs. Something solid. But here you'll notice there's nothing, at least nothing on the surface. This makes women…difficult to understand. You never know exactly where you stand with them.' An embarrassed laugh. Hoarsely he said, ‘The spitting image of Tasmania.'

Shadbolt could not take his eyes off the powerful tangle which nevertheless revealed so little of itself. Wielding the ruler Vern had launched into the reproduction process: ‘There's a hole so narrow you can't see it. The male enters there, like so. Unfortunately, we don't have the woman's young friend here tonight…'

Shadbolt was amazed at the casual way she remained naked for so long.

‘The woman's legs are like parenthesis,' the proofreader went on. There was the pudenda, the vagina, the cervix. And yet to Shadbolt, as he listened, the words seemed to describe something altogether separate. The softness remained untouched. As he stared and tried to work this out he felt the lump in his throat move down to his trousers.

From that moment on Shadbolt had an inordinate, irrational respect for women, all women, everywhere. When the light suddenly went out he felt stranded. He kept seeing the usherette although she was no longer there.

Removing his raincoat Vern said there were plenty of other facts of life he hadn't covered. They nodded, almost grimly. It would have to wait until next Friday night. Everyone agreed.

So Holden developed.

‘He's making a big name for himself, all right.'

‘One of these days I'm afraid he's going to come a cropper,' Vern squinted up too. ‘He's never had his feet properly on the ground.'

‘With so many airlines in the future, the sky isn't going to be big enough,' Wheelright predicted.

Angles of chance, lines of force…

The early fifties in Adelaide would long be remembered for the daily displays of sky-writing. It was all started by…Frank McBee. He figured it would be at least another ten years before every home had its television receiver. In the meantime, he had this hankering need to direct audio-visual messages to a captive population. The sky became his screen. There was this former flight sergeant with a toothbrush moustache and only one leg. Funny little chap. He only felt at home at high altitudes; down at earth he'd suffered a succession of broken marriages. McBee had slapped him on the back and bought him a drink to ease the pain at a bar near the aerodrome where the ashtrays were made out of pistons. ‘I say, old boy, spelling's not my strong point,' was brushed aside. McBee shelled out for the conversion of a consumptive Tiger Moth. Within weeks the daredevil pilot became a household name, the precursor to the conventional TV star.

A clear sky was the first requirement. And no wind. Otherwise, a person's name or the brand-name of a washing machine could surreptitiously drift into that of the competitor's or, as once happened over the Easter weekend, Latin obscenities. Each morning the sky-writer phoned the Weather Bureau. Often Wheelright himself took the calls. ‘He sounded shy, surprisingly for that kind of maniac.'

The plane's petrol engine could be heard faintly rising and falling as it printed
QUALITY USED CARS
three miles wide followed by McBee's extroverted signature. Everybody in Adelaide enjoyed reading the white writing. Frank McBee wasn't so crass as to advertise himself only. Important sporting results were announced, and the first the population knew of Stalin's death, and the incredible conquest of Everest, in 1953, was when they gazed up and saw the ecstatic adjectives in the sky, courtesy F. McBee. Traffic came to a standstill, pedestrians kept colliding with each other. Which is why the infamous law banning any writing above the sacred geometry of Adelaide was rushed through by the ruling party, supported by the press and the small shopkeeping class.

Vern, the proofreader, stared critically now as the pilot shot an enormous javelin on McBee's behalf through a pulsating aerial heart, and alongside it lazily wrote ‘F. McB' and—no, no!—misspelt the single syllable Christian-name of Shadbolt's mother. That hour happened to be the anniversary of the moment the unknown corporal had opened the flyscreen door of the widow's house. ‘There's a man of true feeling for you.' Motorists and women hanging out the washing smiled: it could only be Frank McBee. And it did his business no harm at all.

Because he had taken to chewing gum McBee now had the lackadaisical look of someone permanently grinning. That's how he appeared the following morning, on the front page: ‘
CAR DEALER FLIPS OVER SWEETHEART
'.

Seated in front in the open cockpit the moustachioed pilot sheepishly wore the leather helmet and a necklace of war-disposal goggles, and looked slightly away.

No prizes for guessing who tipped off the waiting photographers.

‘You boys ever been in one of these fresh-air machines? It's like a motorbike that leaves the ground. You should have felt my guts turn turtle as we did the old loop and barrel-rolls. It felt the same—yes, sir, it was the same feeling in the pit of my stomach— as when I first set eyes on the lady of my life. And you can quote me on that.'

While the subject of Frank McBee acquired a special clarity to the population it became more confusing to Shadbolt.

Ever since he had seen with his own two eyes the facts of life he looked at Karen differently; he actually wondered how she shared the small house with Frank McBee. ‘He's the most active man in the Southern Hemisphere,' their mother had answered a reporter through the screen door. ‘He's always on the move. I'm in the dark. I never know what he's up to from one day to the next, or what's on his mind.' Mmmm.

Shadbolt noticed how his sister had grown tall and longlegged: and her legs kept scissoring violently as she sat on chairs or leaned against fenders under the street light. Some of McBee's restlessness had rubbed off. But when he casually asked questions about him Karen became dismissive. Her brother noticed too how she liked to hang around his car-maniac friends, the only girl there, and as they repeated their tall stories of speed and close shaves, she watched their lips with exaggerated interest, laughing and widening her eyes at just the right moment. When she wrist-wresded with one in particular, a lanky mechanic sporting nicotine on an index finger, Shadbolt to one side remained stone-faced.

Late at night he drove the Wolseley through the deserted streets to the gaping Hills, the little car responding well under his carbuncular wrists, now sprouting windswept hairs, while behind him on the slippery leather a talkative girl in a humid skirt submitted to the hectic experiments of one or sometimes two of his mechanically minded friends, their muffled breathing and rustlings, snapping of elastic, sending the barometric lump in his throat down once again to his trousers. Hedges, intersections, painted fence posts. It was here while acting as chauffeur that Shadbolt first saw his sister bare chested. She was with the elongated mechanic. A passing tram strobed the back seat, and Shadbolt involuntarily glancing in the mirror saw her smeared face as she sat up, blouse open and peeled off the shoulders. Her body had the startled luminosity of a person caught by an usherette's torch; only, with such an expanse of paleness it seemed as if his sister was a light source herself.

Shadbolt kept his eye on the road as his thoughts rushed back to the usherette. The fuller nudity of the older woman eclipsed his sister's part-nakedness, her tentative breasts made fragile by car shadows. And when he glanced in the mirror to double-check she had disappeared again.

The Wolseley may have looked like any other car travelling along the road, Shadbolt thought, but there was plenty going on inside. He changed back to second. Elsewhere in the world, copulation, birth, marriage, death, and other educations, take place on the streets. While in Adelaide auto-eroticism…

With his newly acquired facts of life Shadbolt kept meeting the usherette in the mouth of the cul-de-sac, where there was no escape, or bumping into her at the tram stop. Since regularly seeing her at the window his distance from her had unaccountably, uncomfortably, shortened to mere arm's length.

She had a way of examining his face, and then abruptly turning away. Shadbolt put this down to her job, where an usherette, after checking someone into their seat, automatically looks back up the aisle for other waiting patrons. She had freckled skin, and slightly soiled piping on her uniform. Close up, parts of her face demanded his attention. But he kept seeing her naked. Every Friday night he made sure he was home and seated in his darkened room, waiting for her.

He was in his…twentieth year.

It was the age of mobility, and that was all right by him.

Over and above the trundle of trams and the swish of locally assembled cars, and the first experimental 2-stroke lawnmower starting up, even he with his jug-ears had trouble distinguishing between the irregular explosions from the Hills, quarrymen loosening ‘metal' for the expansion of roads, and the sound-barrier being invisibly broken by the Sabre jets of the Australian Air Force.

It was a day of deceptive clarity, a Saturday. The sky he noted as Molsheim Blue, perfect for sky-writing. Walking towards the Hills he was mulling over Vern's short-sightedness. Only the night before he'd pointed to the usherette's breast as she painted her nails, and named it navel, until Wheelright corrected by repeatedly clearing his throat.

He reached the Maid'n' Magpie where the streets formed a star. Later, attempting a reconstruction of the accident, he found it difficult, as with any hiccup of history, to establish the exact sequence.

Crossing into Magill Road he'd waved at flies near his nose. At that moment Flies happened to be passing and mistakenly slowed the tram. Frank McBee was converging then on the AJS. He too mistakenly acknowledged Shadbolt's wave. And whether it was taking his eyes off the road or surprise at his own response, McBee suddenly lost all control. The front tyre became channelled by the irrefutable tramline and before Shadbolt on the footpath could open his mouth he read his mother's initials written across the sky in a violent gold flourish. In nothing but cotton shirt and war-disposal shorts—only pansies wore helmets and leathers in the fifties—McBee landed underneath the machine and slid across the intersection of misunderstandings without letting go of the handlebars, a sign of avarice, and in that brief journey over asphalt, iron and oil exchanged one personality for another, the way a snake sheds its skin in summer.

As his handlebar moustache was torn off the chewing gum fell permanently out of his mouth. People wondered if he'd suffered any brain damage. He lost several inches in the crash. The hair never grew again on his head, and his jaw was wired into a permanent jutting position. From that day he spoke in measured sentences, and lost all interest in strangers.

Frank McBee switched from his daily draughts of Cooper's to stiff brandy-sodas. Overnight he became stout and round. He appeared in sober suits cut by the city's finest tailor, and in a reincarnation of his indelible one-upmanship leaned heavily on his mulga walking stick, and was never seen or photographed without the bow tie and the Havana double corona, which he now employed to torpedo the doubts and innuendos of rivals, bankers and investigative journalists, Shadbolt's mother, and anybody else approaching within arm's length. He became pink, sometimes florid. His formidable energies were now channelled towards greener pastures, not a patch of khaki in sight.

In the space of six months he sold the car-wrecking business, the secondhand car yards, the freehold blocks at Parafield. He counted his shekels, made the right noises, and landed a General Motors dealership.

How did McBee pull that—? In those days it was a licence to print banknotes the exact colour of greener pastures. GM and its carefully selected dealers couldn't keep up with demand in the post-war years. After slapping down a healthy deposit a lucky man might wait another twelve months before taking delivery of the car designed and built for the local conditions—that is, specially engineered to take account of the never-ending distances and the dust, the heat and the incessant potholes, the mirages, the kangaroos which were known to collide into the grilles at night, and all the bushflies and galah feathers which clogged up the imported radiators. GM made sure their product had reliability. They also attached the gear lever to the steering column, and introduced democratic bench front seats—shrewd move. Anybody and everybody felt they could slide across and drive.

Every night McBee drove home a different coloured car. He'd moved his reluctant de facto and daughter out of their small house with the battered screen door into a mansion on the other side of town which featured a mansard roof and too many bedrooms. Most of their plywood furniture he'd tossed on the rubbish tip (using company trucks), replacing it with imitation English antiques. And his name now appeared in sloping serifs on the letterheads, business cards, adverts and calendars; serifs slanted even in royal blue neon across his plate-glass windows. Vern who knew about these tilings pointed out that in the old days ‘McBee' had always been in heavy sans, which is easier to read.