Holden's Performance by Murray Bail Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€˜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,