Holden's Performance by Murray Bail Page A

pair of you. We've been sitting here. We begin tea here at six. If only your father. Be late as this again and I'll—’
    Holden sympathised. ‘I know,’ he scratched his leg.
    Glancing at Karen he saw her smiling. He wondered if they had any idea of the extent of McBee's business. His mother never enquired at the table. It seemed enough that he was fully occupied. His contentment increased her contentment. In this way she followed the social laws of post-war growth. And although up to his neck in his work McBee cheerfully managed odd jobs around the house, first rigging up a silken clothesline from the entrails of a parachute, with Holden's help, and replacing rotten gutters and the front gate post (after he'd clipped it one night). He silenced the maverick floorboard in the hall and handled live wires without wearing rubber soles.
    By early 1947 he began bombarding the faintly protesting Shadbolts with the latest in labour-saving consumer-durables; in certain crucial ways McBee was inarticulate. One Friday night the carpet-sweeper was ceremonially hurled in the manner of a loose propeller over the back fence, and replaced by the latest in cylindrical Hoovers. A barrel-shaped washing machine arrived. It inched across the floor on castors: the entire house vibrated when Mrs Shadbolt had it going. The Frigidaire with shoulders like a woman introduced a soothing belt-driven hum at all hours. Holden happened to be there when Frank McBee slipped his arm around his mother's waist and suggested they give the early cream and green Kooka stove to the Salvation Army or chuck it in the River Torrens. ‘No, I happen to be perfecly satisfied with that,’ she said, squirming out of his clutches. ‘It's not you who has to do the cooking.’ In case that wasn't clear she added, ‘Shouldn't you purchase yourself a decent pair of trousers?’
    Musical jugs, whistling kettles, a bigger and better wireless, and the telephone, arrived. Whatever his line of business it must have been doing all right.
    He began reading the Advertiser at breakfast, leaving later for work. But he still bummed around in overalls or shorts, and rode the leaking rattletrap of a motorbike.
    McBee's old room had been left as a storeroom, the bed always made (just in case), and as business expanded it took on the appearance of an office, a card table became a desk, and shoeboxes on the floor contained vital papers, though according to McBee ‘it was all stored up here’ (tapping his skull). The telephone had been installed there, and it was often difficult to find once it began ringing. Gathering dust in the corner was the rifle McBee carried the day he'd arrived at the screen door. When Holden reminded—joking—it should be turned in, McBee shook his head, ‘Nup, I'm keeping it handy for the tax inspectors. I'll shoot any of the bastards if they come.’ And he confided to his silent partner, ‘I had offered to me the other day 2000 Lee Enfields. I knocked them back.’
    In the space of six months Holden had moved from the airy world of bicycles to explosive motorcycles to the densities of dismantled propeller-driven aircraft. And now that bicycles were common, the local manufacturers were riding the boom, he felt faintly ridiculous on his androgynous machine with the different-sized wheels. It attracted all kinds of laughter at intersections. Even McBee, normally careless about appearances, and who sometimes wobbled around the front lawn on the bike, began cracking jokes. He offered to replace it. ‘And I'll donate your thing to the zoo.’
    But the creak of its pedals and the cantankerous outline reminded Holden of his angular uncle. Just about every week he pushed the triangular frame towards the Hills, out of the seat half the time, building tremendous strength in his lungs and legs, until he entered Vern's enclosed vantage point from where everything in the world suddenly appeared different and