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Authors: Murray Bail

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BOOK: Holden's Performance
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Holden, born 1933, barely had time to know him; and unlike his grandfather in photographic puttees, who'd acquired over the years miniature Lawrence of Arabia status, there was not a single extant image of his father available for inspection; not one in the world. A battle had broken out over names. His mother nurtured certain airs or disappointments. ‘Holden' was not nearly so well known in those days. Actually, it was so unusual Reg thought it sounded pansy. But the mother stood firm. Birth had been a blurry experience of release, yet natural enough at the same time for her to maintain her administrative position. Through his teeth Reg hissed All right (‘Have it your own way'), so long as ‘Lance' could appear in the middle, a protuberance. And in another atavistic leap, Holden inherited the large smooth jaws and a kind of uncommercial patience from his grandfather's favourite gelding, Hempire. (The chaps had pulled on an engraved hookah one afternoon after galloping into Port Said.) Early on the boy was often found standing alone under the trellis, blinking. Unusually large hands also implied patience, and future strength, and a forelock—not his
fetlock
—kept falling over his eyes, which is how he developed the habit of constantly throwing his head back.

Another battle blew up over the Christian-naming of Holden's sister. Holden vaguely remembered it. His father had proposed Carmel, possibly for its erotic qualities, its vague to-do with Egypt and ‘camel'. His father shouted. He was always shouting. He was under a strain. Again, Holden's mother won but after a compromise during the horizontal rush along the hospital corridor. They called her Karen. A tall, clean name.

The wonder was how the Shadbolts, both small people, could produce such gargantuan offspring. Holden's big head split his mother's body. Hydrocephalus was feared but it wasn't long before the rest of him caught up. At ten he weighed as much as his mother; at eleven he was almost as tall as his bow-legged father; and so from the very beginning he became accustomed to people looking at him and whispering. With Karen, jaws, arms, legs and teeth were long; and she had large gullible eyes.

The Second World War. Adelaide emptied of able-bodied men, a ghost town, yet Reg Shadbolt managed to hang onto his job as a conscientious conductor on the trams. Although a large percentage of his day was ‘outdoors', for in the rush hour he often had to work his way along the running board, his face remained pale and strangely unlined. It was the fault of the trams. With his body and soul carried hourly over the iron lines of the city, the way a magnet is stroked, the straight and the narrow had entered his metabolism even more than other Adelaideans. He seemed tormented, worried over trifles, suffered terrible headaches. The human instinct evidently is to meander more like the pneumatic buses which were introduced in the late fifties.

Reg Shadbolt was a strict teetotaller, a card-carrying Rechabite, and for good measure, couldn't stand the willowy stench in his nostrils of cigarette smoke, every night cursing his smoke-laden trousers as he draped mem on the slippery hanger in the wardrobe. To him a public smoker showed inconsideration to others. It was a filthy, unnecessary habit. Shadbolt was never known to swear, but he had the wowser's short temper.

Adelaide had been invaded by Americans who'd landed like paratroopers and wandered the city in search parties. Blue-eyed baby-boys ear-marked for the islands: they spoke loudly and constantly, cheeks bulging and shining with prosperity and tons of lung-coloured gum. Extremes were suddenly introduced to the city. No one before had encountered such minutely cropped hair on a person; such buck teeth on another; toadfish faces puffed from all that saxophone blowing; a young Virginian so tall and so poker-faced; so many yellow-headed pimples on another, who didn't seem to mind at all; and the outlandish tattoos of snakes and swords entwined around mothers—who could do that to their own skin? Above all, the startling presence of completely black men, ‘negroes', strangely urbanised the way they sauntered about in threes and fours; and certainly never before such wholesale irreverence, such casual confidence, in ones so young. Without warning they littered the defenceless city with new words, ephemeral slogans and card games, and a narrow range of in-vogue hand signals and quips, all as fresh as the soft cigarette packs they left behind on tables or in ashtrays and gutters— Holden scored a perfect Camel pack. MPs whipped out their whacking great Colt 45s to show the gells. There was grog, silver tips galore. A small symmetrical city is defenceless under such a barrage. An aerial view would show the invaders strolling across the town plan, a random swarming, a crossing of the parallel lines, jaywalking, holding back the traffic with a healthy hand. Haw, haw: hijacking taxis and trams.

It was Shadbolt's luck to have a mob on his tram on a Saturday night, 1944: all negroes, and the negroes were jitter-bugging. They had been boozing, were red-eyed and perspiring, and Shadbolt almost choked on the fumes from their large-diameter cigarettes. And now they began playing blackjack on his tram.

‘All right, that's enough. That'll do. There are other paying passengers here.'

‘Shucks, man. What is this?'

Negotiation, Anglo-Saxon compromise seemed possible, essential even. They were allies, all in the same boat. Shadbolt tapped with his forefinger the shoulder of the nearest squatting on the corduroyed floor.

‘Boy oh boy…'

They sighed in unison. They'd had that sort of crap before.

‘We don't do that sort of thing here—' Shadbolt had almost finished saying.

The shorn head had faced him, unsmiling.

Shadbolt stared. He seemed to make a tremendous effort to understand. This man had wide, unusually wide, liver-coloured nostrils, and a flat expression in his eyes. One of his friends let out a neigh-laugh. The man had inhaled—watch this—and still gazing at pale Shadbolt blew the lungful in his face.

Rocking through the night without brakes, it was the last tram heading for the Hackney terminus. The varnished seats and the overhead straps seemed to sway more, the lights flickered, as Shadbolt swung his conductor's bag as heavy as a bookmaker's against the black face. Almost simultaneously a terrific blow shattered his temple and nose; and Shadbolt couldn't help himself. He was falling into the air of the wind and night, his arms waving. Before he could properly explain or shout he embraced a circular steel pole, the darkness was split by a searing blue light, pain, ebbing pain, seeping into darkness, contained and slowly final complete blackness, the way a tram enters its depot at night, and switches off.

Duplications and intersections increase out of hand naturally—during conflict on a grand scale. Winston Churchill's cigar and fingers prematurely signalling victory beckoned the fall of V-2 rockets on London; the recurrence of 8 in the logistics of the war resembled its appearance in the periodic table of chemical elements; and on the morning of 14 October, 1944 (wasn't that the day Field Marshal Rommel ‘died'? Which also happened to be General Eisenhower's birthday?) on the morning of 14 October, Holden's voice began to break.

The boy was standing to attention under an immense Southern Hemisphere sky, a little wind stirring his hair. He tried to say hello to somebody, found he couldn't, and wondered if it might have been grief. Such was the recent accelerating growth in the boy's nose, jawbone and chin, an elastic adjustment had been forced on the rest of his skin, and seemed to lift his trousers, exposing an orphan's ankles.

A circle shuffled into shape, about eight paces across. Everybody knew where to stand.

It was the earliest ceremony for one who would become a master of ceremonies.

Holden concentrated on holding onto his mother.

From the woman next door she'd hastily accepted a crocheted shawl and hoisted it over her head. By itself it would have been all right; but in tandem with her high heels it encouraged the slightest shift in her centre of gravity, a cargo of barrels on a ship, and Holden was forced to keep planting his legs apart, the way his father did on trams. Swaying and tilting—and half-listening to the Minister's intonation—Holden surveyed the circumference of faces nodding slightly and smiling, or just plain gazing at him and his mother. As a way of focusing he went over their birthmarks and individual characteristics, and counted their accessories, the wire-framed specs, tiepins (in those days), opal brooch, a dead fox, elastic suspenders and watch-chains. The men had their hats placed over their privates like tea cosies. Holden saw the broad hands of these decent people, even their bootish-looking shoes. Behind them, several ordinary objects, such as the spade angled against a headstone, assumed a glaring, matter-of-fact clarity. Everything was unusual, yet at the same time perfectly normal.

‘Man that is born of woman—'

Pigeons had exploded, starlings, sparrows and other small fish were yanked up and hurled into mid-distance. The leaves on the Jacarandas began shivering. The preacher studiously went on reading, the surgical collar—and here a prime function of his costume asserted itself—preventing him from wavering. A squadron of eardrumming monsters barely cleared the wall and the trees, four Avro Ansons escorted by three clapped-out Wirraways, all trailing hyperactive shadows, jerking and plunging over the magpie verticals of the cemetery, pausing around the mouth of the Methodist Minister, so that instead of words in vain it looked as if he let out swarms of leisurely flapping bats. It took several minutes before the roar died into a dot and words returned. Low-altitude flights were common during the war. Designed to show the flag. Part of the psychological war. ‘Where possible,' ran a mimeographed order, ‘avoid flying over the sea.' But here, as always, they only demonstrated to a windy population the pitiful defences of the island-continent.

The circle broke up into slowly revolving satellites, and Holden suddenly began wrestling with his mother.

‘The worms there, look! It's soil like we've got at home. But oh Lord, he was the gentlest of men. When he was young. You should have seen him. Before you were bom. He turned sour with everything under the sun, myself included. I don't know why. I told him, goodness, hundreds of times. I did my best.'

‘Yes,' Holden managed to croak.

The only man who had not replaced his hat was the bald old codger and now he was leaning back, laughing. A woman stepped in front of Holden, blocking his view. The local climate had draped cobwebs all over her face and throat, and she had the fox slung over her shoulder. ‘I'm your Auntie Dais.' At her elbow stood a purple man grinning ear to ear.

‘I remember you when you were this high. Look at him now, Jim. Unless my eyes are deceiving, he's almost past you.'

As she paused the incisions above her lip, deposited by uncertainties, radiated into the art-deco sunrise cotterpinned to the hats of all the AIF.

‘Has his tongue fallen out?' she bent forward.

His uncle's chief language was a system of winking and backslapping.

‘Chin up, boy!'

The ingenious geometry of the cemetery allowed everybody to stamp their feet and rub their hands with a sense of well-being. The little asphalt streets with their ‘intersections', and the gravel plots raked and displaying names, and the geraniums in humble jars, resembled a tiny rectilinear city, so that even to Holden still a boy the dead underfoot felt like dwarfs. And standing there Holden felt he could look over and beyond the heads of these grown-up people and into the shadowless streets and avenues outside, an illusion increased by his inability just then to speak.

People were leading his mother towards the cars. He knew them by name and engine capacity. Little Morrises, Austin Sevens, Prefect and Hillman, models of caution, as their names implied, products of a nation of small roads; the obligatory Model A on wire spokes stood out, ungainly and yet designed to traverse a wide country, while idling at the front was the dusty hearse, a custom-built Hudson missing a back hubcap. The motorbike equipped with sidecar shaped like a boat belonged to his Uncle Jim and Dais. Outside, another single-cylinder machine coughed several times before producing a long straight line of diminishing sound. And then his sister, Karen, oblivious of him and everybody else, started bawling as a cluster of second cousins began tugging her away from the hole.

That was how the crowd dissolved.

Holden shuffled forward several paces. A lumpen clumsiness spread from his limbs, blurring his vision and all distinctions, a moral condition—a know-nothingness—which he would increasingly find himself struggling against.

Gazing at the mullock—mining terms had penetrated the South Austrylian tongue—‘Get that mullock out of here!'—he was about to turn when a synthetic brown curtained his right eye. More like a miner than a mourner a skinny man scrambled alongside. To keep his balance he began swaying and nodding; and craning further forward, as if he'd spotted something, he drew Holden with him.

‘What do they do with the box? They leave it in the ground, I suppose. Do you think they'd leave it? With those brass handles fitted? They don't come cheap. What do you think? They've done a corker job. What sort of wood's that? Pine, it looks like a pine. They give it a good cut and polish. See the knots? How much did this funeral cost? Thirty-five, forty? Is that young Karen with your mother there? She's growing fast. Tall timber. You must be Holden. Where'd they get that name? I'll shake your hand. Is that six foot deep? Not on your life! I'm five-five and a half. How old is your sister? No, that's not six foot. I'm on your mother's side, your Uncle Vern. Call me Vern. That's my name. What's the temperature today? It's been the hottest October since 1923. Fahrenheit. It's hard to spell. Do you know where the name comes from? The man who invented the thermometer. Another German. Excuse me, is that a crow? Scavengers. Who's that buried over there? The iron cross. Let's have a look. Oxidisation. Where does all this granite come from? It doesn't grow on trees. How is your mother taking it? It came as a shock.'

BOOK: Holden's Performance
10.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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