Holden's Performance by Murray Bail

Author:Murray Bail
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9781921776984
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2011-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

In Adelaide people had woken up one morning to find there were no more trams. Gone too was the network of dark wires over the city which had placed a ceiling on emotions, and the steel lines which had channelled the thinking of generations. Lost was a sense of direction. The gains lay in the field of light which exaggerated the flatness of the city, and gave broad hint of the immensity of the continent and of the world beyond. People in houses without fences instinctively began erecting them.

In the vacuum, silver buses appeared: of British make, fitted with tinted windscreens for the blazing remote colonies; tremendous diesels, with their pneumatic doors opening and closing with an exasperated hiss.

From his vantage point in the Hills, Vern felt the changes but had trouble seeing them. His old friend Les Flies lost his job on the trams. Turning down an offer to manhandle one of the buses he employed another transport term, ‘I wouldn't touch one of them with a barge pole.’

Les saw his remaining function in life as helping his friend Vern with the crossword puzzle, accompanying his other friend Gordon Wheelright on his field trips, and drinking cocoa with both of them. The violent backdraughts and swirling diesel fumes of the speeding buses had completely thrown out Wheelright's researches, a lime-known casualty of the removal of the trams.

To remind the city of the electric relics it had finally discarded, the state's biggest GM dealer commissioned a sculpture of a tram, a full-size replica in bronze by an artist with a promising Polish-sounding surname, to be placed on a plinth in one of the city's four main squares.

‘Not all big wheels come as generous as Mr McBee,’ declared a grateful editorial in the Advertiser.

The announcement was made from the VIP lounge at Adelaide's sandy airport. McBee was at his most expansive; he had the local journalists doubled up over their notebooks, laughing through their noses. A stiff brandy sloshed around in McBee's hand. The other rested proprietorily on the knee of Karen, seated on his left and smiling nervously, setting off with McBee as chaperone to represent the state in the Miss Australia finals.

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