Holden's Performance (6 page)

Standing out against the turbulent growth of the Hills, the stony clarity of their vision seemed beyond dispute. These were men with their feet well and truly on the ground. No room for Leichhardt, the Burke and Wills of this world, nor Rasputin nor Isaac Newton. No dreamers. Look at McAdam! No politicians and no women.

And Hartnett shepherded and protected them. After careful deliberation he occasionally added another; it took years to select a candidate. There was only so much space. Economic factors also kept the numbers down.

‘Just by looking you can imagine…' Holden squinted.

‘There's no imagining.'

But seeing the boy's confusion he smiled, treating him as an equal, ‘Who would you erect a statue to, if you had a backyard? Perhaps I know the man?'

Holden, who never tired of moving among the outstanding figures, now found his mind completely blank.

‘I don't think I'd be allowed…'

Blinking he pictured Corporal McBee in uniform.

‘What about a soldier?' Holden suggested.

The one he had in mind stood before him as a solid force, someone different, even when horizontal on a bed, releasing cigarette smoke to the ceiling where it flattened into architectures, minarets spreading into dream-cities of cupolas. The corporal was a man who seemed to be making up his mind; biding his time.

Confusion crossed Hartnett's face. ‘A soldier did you say?'

Holden had told him about the boarder. Surely the boy didn't mean—?

‘Don't be deceived by the uniform! Take it away from a soldier and what have you got?'

But that was the point. Holden could never entirely agree with his uncle. More active than the larrikin soldier, always on the move, always after something, his uncle seemed unhappier. This fully grown man could be found in the kitchen pressing his thumbs to his temples, and staring at the floor, waving his hand blindly for silence. At first Holden thought he might be straining to recall some fresh fact or other, such as the inventor of linoleum or the History of Floorboards, and he obediently looked down at his feet too. But a migraine was no joke if the proofreader was about to set off to work, checking the spelling and veracity in general of the entire edition of next morning's
Advertiser
.

Although always attentive Vern Hartnett avoided the boy's face. Their eyes hardly ever met. Whenever he explained or posed a question it was as if he was addressing the city laid out below, barely moving there in the heat haze, the city in abstract.

He was the most short-sighted man Holden was ever to meet.

There was something else about Adelaide, or rather the environs, which entered the mind; and it entered in the same manner it trespassed on the geometry of the city itself.

Beginning with the Hills in summer which rose up behind like a pair of agricultural trousers bent slightly at the knee, the country penetrated the city like no other city. A natural creepage of colourlessness breached the town plan, indenting and serrating the perimeter, at the same time vaulting deep into the most established suburbs of immaculate box-hedges, green lawns and culverts, and deposited vacant blocks of swaying chaff-coloured grass, one in every other street. The Dutch had better luck keeping out the sea. Whole tracts of land here had the country look. Colonel Light had surrounded the city centre with a band of open space mysteriously called ‘parklands', and not even concrete benches and drinking fountains could soften it. Dust storms blew up there in the height of summer and small grass-fires started. Elsewhere, it appeared in its most contained form as a parched oval. Badly tended footpaths and lawn tennis courts reverted to ‘the country' in a matter of weeks.

Everywhere a person looked the ragged edge of naturalness trespassed.

In the battle for people's minds it at first seemed to be an antidote to the streets…that habit-inducing pattern constantly underlined and repeated by the trams. But the stain of non-colouring spoke of the interior which, in southern Australia and the Northern Territory, was desolation. It was the struggle—and for what?—of the dry tangled bush and desiccated trees and the brave facade of the boulders that gave the country, unlike the deserts of dreams, its persistent melancholia. Within cooee of the town hall, blasted crows made their parched calls. What other city…? And the faces of the most optimistic smiling women in Adelaide eventually resembled the country itself: ravined, curiously wheat-coloured.

If Holden and Karen were never quite sure how to approach the soldier, they expected their mother to treat him casually, as an equal.

But she had scarcely any time to compose herself. He was always there, such a mass of pleated khaki, expanding and contracting, a nest of possible suffocating power. One minute he lay stretched out on his bed, and next he was following in her footsteps, alert to her smallest reactions, and telling lies to no one but her. That's a soldier for you. She didn't know how to look at him, how to behave, an awkwardness entered her movements and dress, she spoke too hurriedly, knitting her brows; and since part of him seemed to be everywhere at once it became hard to keep him out of her mind. Whenever he left the house she felt his eyes following her. It became empty without him.

Mrs Shadbolt felt more at ease when, stopping in his tracks, he expounded his plans for the near future. It was more like thinking aloud, and she listened and contributed sagely, for she had a practical mind, though the plans themselves were unspecific, only abstract commitments to future energy.

‘There'll be plenty of work after this war. There's going to be a ton of opportunity. The public works, the manufacturing industries. People will have to eat and wear clothes and listen to a wireless. It's starting from scratch all over again. It's from the ground floor up. It's reconstruction of a complete society. Just a matter of choosing the right area of concern. Most of the troops, poor buggers, are going to be landing back shell-shocked and with their brains in a sling. They won't know which way to turn. There's still going to be time for fun and games. Plenty of that. As a matter of fact, women will want to begin conceiving again. That's only natural, the force of nature. Baby carriages might be something to get into. I don't know, I'm still thinking about it.'

Casual allusions that she might be included in his plans— ‘What you've got to do, sweetheart, and right away, is find a man with nous—know what I mean?—not just any pain in the bum—and get your hands on him. That's my advice'—such allusions were passed over lightly, to her consternation. It was often like that. Frank McBee had the gift of the gab; he could talk the leg off a chair; he should have been a preacher or in ‘retailing' (Hartnett's opinion). He laid down an intricate carpet of sweet-talk and off-the-cuff promises, none of which she quite believed, but which made her laugh. By laughing she exposed her throat.

He was by turn accessible and elusive. His nature was restless. You never knew what he'd do or say next, especially after a few glasses. Coming in late and thinking she'd be annoyed he crawled in under the table. He demeaned himself in front of her, a sign of true power. Other perfectly normal occasions he crawled in under the table just for fun, grabbing one of her half-unsuspecting ankles. Holden had never seen their mother shrieking before.

And never before so distracted. She seemed at once happy and unhappy. Even with the soldier there beside her she became increasingly pensive, as if she had problems. A few words from him were enough to lift her head and open her face.

She took little notice of them; her children might as well not have been there. And the ginger-haired soldier spoke to her openly, urgently, in front of them; even whispered for minutes on end, his eyes fixed on hers. After drinking he shouted about his lack of luck. ‘I can't budge her,' he confided to Holden. ‘She's like the Ayers Rock.' He invited them to share his misery. Even their mother laughed when he rested his cheek on the table. ‘Where did I go wrong? I might as well be out with the boys.' Tobruk and Leningrad happened to be the contemporary symbols of resistance, in that order; but to McBee they represented a wasteland. ‘My timid Mrs Tobruk' he began calling her, dropping Ayers Rock, and ‘poor little defenceless Madame Leningrad, look what's happening to you'. When her face went vacant with despair he didn't let up. ‘I'm more dangerous than what's-his-name—you know who I mean, Adolf Hitler. Watch out! He's a lamb compared to me.'

It was then March, 1945. While Allied foot-soldiers received French kisses and drank from outstretched bottles without breaking step—the irrevocable march of history—and open-necked American generals in democratic jeeps gave the royal nod and wave, and were garlanded with peonies, and old men and boys emerged south of the Rhine with their hands raised, Mrs Shadbolt in the house in Adelaide continued to withstand the siege. If McBee disappeared for days on end he returned with grinning, dogged design. ‘I haven't forgotten you.' He kept advancing, retreating. Operating mostly at night he reverted to normal during the day. She didn't know when he'd turn up next. His were classic guerilla tactics, amongst the world's first.

American nylons were offered under the kitchen's naked bulb. He touched a possible weakness here. ‘I've had no luck with my hands,' he said with apparent disinterest. ‘Try these instead. Imagine them as my hands. Listen, what's got into you?'

From their room Holden and Karen could follow every word of McBee's advance. It became so constant, rising and falling nightly like rain on the roof that soon they took no notice of it. Lying awake at night they produced a rival murmuring, Karen doing most of the talking. In the dark she spoke about her school friends, describing in rapid details their beliefs, annoying faults, good points, where they lived; and Holden easily pictured his sister, lips pursing at the invisible ceiling, thinking of something else to add.

Holden's thoughts turned to the far-distant war. It was really odd—strange—having a live soldier in the house. Where was the war? (Where was the soldier?) An autumn sunset, where the horizon glowed in the bright fading orange of a great city on fire, and a single illuminated cloud above it had the quilted form of a stricken airship, made him wonder, almost ask, if that was ‘the war'. He climbed to the top of the trellis. It could have been Japan or Germany burning it was so far out to sea. Uncertainties made him inconsistent at home and at school. By then uncertainty had accelerated in the features of just about everybody, a general mood of incompletion, possible euphoria, relaxation, even in his teachers and others at school. It seemed only Karen and their Uncle Vern were oblivious to the closing days of the war.

At the split second when Mrs Shadbolt succumbed with the shriek of a mandrake the lights in the surrounding houses came on, car horns and crow-eating klaxons sounded, tram bells travelled along Magill Road ringing, somebody celebrated with a dented bugle. Crackers and sky-rockets, which had been banned because of their similarity to distress signals, were ignited at flash-points all over the city. The city's searchlights intersected at dizzy altitudes, and bitch kelpies, crowing roosters and the European animals in the zoo were deceived into thinking it was dawn. Neighbours came out and banged on the Shadbolts' front door. They shouted, they sang. And the Czech bachelor at the end of the street began shaving off his five-year-old beard.

Holden and Karen had been woken by their mother's unconditional surrender. As her muscular laughter continued from the bedroom, and still no lights, they went outside in their matching dressing gowns where the Roach sisters were doing cartwheels and a stranger was climbing a telegraph pole balancing a glass on his forehead. It was official. It was true. On his cement-rendered verandah opposite, George Merino had rigged up his plywood wireless with the pale green dial shaped like a fan, and at every sombre re-announcement of the long-awaited news people began hiphip-hurraying.

In the morning people still clasped each other and sank to their knees in prayer, and complete strangers rested their chins on the shoulders of others to read the best news they'd ever had, headlined in 120-point sans, OK'd by the city's leading proofreader, Vern Hartnett, and at nine on the dot the squadron of Avro Ansons reappeared, this time trailing an extra six ailing Wirraways and approaching from the opposite direction, as if they were returning from a victorious mission.

Never had Adelaide experienced such brotherhood. For a whole night and day it resembled a jungli Spanish or French colony, except the British and British-American flags flapped from every available pole, bonnet and masthead.

All through the morning and that afternoon Karen kept tip-toeing to their mother's room where a khaki triangle of McBee's army trousers showed under the door. She whispered to Holden, ‘They still haven't got up.'

When McBee finally emerged they rushed in. She was sitting up filing her nails.

‘Have you children eaten?'

By the time McBee in flannel pyjamas returned to his place beside her the bedroom had filled with neighbours, mostly women and their children. Everybody felt so happy on 14 May they stood around the bed not really looking at the couple.

Holden heard his mother ask, ‘Did you hear the news, Frank?'

‘You don't say? What did I tell you?' Catching the boy's eye he winked. ‘A moral victory. And not before time.' Raising two fingers he parted them, a pair of pale thighs. ‘A victory over adversity. It's a night I'll personally never forget. We ought to be out celebrating.'

‘Don't be rude,' she murmured, but smiled, glancing up at the other women.

Holden had never before heard ‘Frank' in his mother's voice, and standing alongside Karen he waited to be called or at least recognised.

But everybody was talking at once. Their mother and her soldier did not appear to be listening to anybody. The room was crowded with mouths and movement, so much insistent flesh, and words happily repeated and wasted. Holden felt quite calm in the crush. Watching their mother he realised he had never seen her as soft and controlled. Conscious of her newly acquired position she turned to Frank, ‘See if there's any tea.'