Wake In Fright (10 page)

Two beers slowed down the benzedrine-inspired drumming in his body.

Three beers and his head was clearing, and then came the need for a cigarette.

‘Anybody got a cigarette?’

‘Sorry, I don’t smoke,’ said Joe.

‘Nor do I,’ said Dick.

Tydon took out his pouch and handed it to Grant.

Grant wished he hadn’t raised the question; he would give up smoking rather than ask Tydon for another cigarette, or anything else. He hated Tydon, he realised, with a clear, hard hatred.

Still, the tobacco was good.

Joe said to the publican: ‘Give us a packet of Craven A, mate.’

The publican handed the cigarettes to Joe and Joe slapped them on the bar in front of Grant.

‘Here y’are, mate. I used to smoke, I know what it’s like to be without ‘em.’

‘Look, really—thanks very much, but…I mean…’ Grant laughed foolishly.

‘Take ‘em, John. Go on, mate, a few bob’s nothing to me.’

‘But I…’ but what could he do? ‘Well, thanks very much.’

‘Forget it.’

Tydon did not make any attempt to buy beer, and it did not seem to enter the miners’ heads that he should. They took
it in turns to order the rounds of four.

Four beers and a man’s troubles appear not as grave as they did before he had one beer. But a man could still rather regret that he had no money, and a man could feel sick at being given a packet of cigarettes.

Grant made a fairly serious attempt to buy the fifth round, but Joe, helped by Dick this time, brushed him aside.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what—as soon as I get some money you must let me take you on a bash.’ That sounded banal even as he said it.

‘That’s all right, John, don’t worry about it.’

Five beers and a man begins to rather like his companions, except for Tydon.Tydon was a rat of the first water. It was remarkable that two men like the miners would associate with him. With all their faults they were men, and Tydon was a twisted, revolting creature.

‘Have you always been a miner, Joe?’

‘No, John, only since the war. Me and Dick drifted in here together and liked it, so we stuck.’

‘What did you do before the war?’

‘Boxed.’

‘Boxed?’

‘Yeah, boxed.’

‘You mean fought professionally?’

‘Yeah. Can’t you see our noses been broken?’

‘No. I hadn’t noticed.’

‘Well they have, both of them.’

Joe and Dick were so alike to Grant that he kept confusing them. They corrected him gently and good-humouredly.

‘No, I’m Dick.’

‘No, he’s Joe.’

‘You know, I used to do a bit of boxing.’

‘Did you, eh, John? Pro?’

‘Oh no, just amateur.’

‘What class?’

‘Welter—it was a few years ago, mind you.’

‘We were light-heavy. It’s a mug’s game though, bein’ a pro.’

Seven or eight or nine beers and a man is in control of himself and his destiny, no matter how bad a hangover he had when he woke up.

To round things off Joe and Dick and Tydon had a double whisky followed quickly by another beer. Grant baulked at this, but he had a final beer, to keep them company.

Then Joe—or was it Dick?—bought a couple of dozen bottles of beer and two bottles of whisky.

‘We might need a drink before we finish.’

And so they went out into the night to shoot.

It was quite dark now and there was no moon yet. About
ten miles east of Yindee they pulled off the road along a fairly well-defined track. They were in amongst one of the large patches of scrub and scrawny trees that appear every now and then in the plain country in apparent defiance of the laws of nature.

Joe reached up and drew back a panel in the roof of the car. Then, from beneath the seat, he took out a lamp with leads attached and screwed it into a fixture, installed for the purpose, in the roof. He pushed down a switch and a wide, bright beam of light poked forward far into the black night.

All the time Dick drove at a steady forty miles an hour. He seemed to know the route quite well.

Grant could see in the beam of light pairs of coloured spots, yellow spots, blue spots, orange spots; glinting suddenly and fixedly, then flicking out. These were the eyes of the animals of the scrub, possums, sheep, foxes, dingoes, cattle, kangaroos, rabbits, rats, emus, wild cats, bandicoots, all turning their eyes into the giant white beam that pointed its way through their bush, catching a little of it and sending it back, coloured.Then they would turn their heads and bolt away and the colours would flick out.

Grant was caught in a rush of visual effects—black shadows, coloured spots, the great white beam, the cigarette of the man in the front seat, strange little glints from shiny
leaves, the heavy darkness of the scrub, all held and contained by the hovering curve of the black, black, purple black sky which only the stars could penetrate.

The stars, the western stars, so many, so bright, so close, so clean, so clear; splitting the sky in remorseless frigidity; pure stars, unemotional stars; stars in command of the night and themselves; undemanding and unforgiving; excelling in their being and forming God’s incontrovertible argument against the charge of error in creating the west.

The car stopped and Dick opened a bottle of beer with his teeth.

Grant had never seen it done before and Dick explained that the technique involved pressing down with the top teeth and levering with the lower teeth.

‘You don’t want to try it,’ he said,’if you’ve got false teeth.’

Grant’s teeth were his own and in excellent condition, but he did not want to open bottles with them.

Tydon had a drink, Dick had a drink, Joe had a drink and Grant had a drink, so the bottle was empty and they drove on.

Grant was feeling relaxed and sure of himself now and he opened the breech of his rifle to load it. There was already a shell in place. That was odd. He must have reloaded after firing at the fox. He didn’t remember.That could have been dangerous. He closed the breech again and leaned forward in the
wildly bumping car to see what the spotlight revealed.

‘Stand up and put your head out the top,’ said Joe.

Grant cautiously raised his head through the trap in the roof of the car and pulled the rifle through after him. With the night rushing past he leaned forward with his elbows on the roof and raised the rifle to cover the area lit by the spotlight. The car was rocking and bumping continuously and he could not keep the barrel pointed at the light, much less take a sight.

A hare broke in front of the car and ran forwards in the light.

Grant cocked the rifle and after several attempts to level it at the hare tried a wavering shot. There was nothing to indicate that the bullet landed anywhere near the hare and soon it veered off into the night.

Grant heard Joe’s voice rising from the darkness below in the car: ‘You’ll never hit anything but a ‘roo while we’re moving, son.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

It was very pleasant and refreshing up there, protruding from the vehicle like the commander of a tank. His companions seemed distant and he felt nearer to being alone than he had since he came to Bundanyabba.

Something was digging into his hip. He put his hand down
and felt it. Round, cool and smooth, a sharp excrescence on one side. It was the end of a rifle barrel. He pushed it aside and it fell back against his hip.

Grant bent sideways so that his head was level with the roof of the car.

‘Joe,’ he said, ‘your rifle’s more or less pointing at me.’

‘Yeah.’ Joe was polite, but not concerned.

‘You’re sure it’s not loaded?’

‘Yeah, it’s loaded.’

‘Well—ah—isn’t it a little dicey?’

‘No, it’s got a safety catch.’

‘Oh.’

Grant stood upright and looked once more along the beam of light. But he did not feel so alone now.

He tried to arrange his body so that the rifle was not pointed in a line that would pass through his entrails, his chest and his head; but he could not manage it.

He stayed there until he was confident that nobody would connect his sitting down with the fact that he was nervous of the rifle, then he came back into the car and sat down.

The greyhound had taken up his part of the seat and he had to push it aside.

‘You needn’t worry about my rifle,’ said Joe, ‘it’s safe enough.’

‘No, I didn’t. I just thought I’d come in for a bit.’

The dog was protesting amiably against being shifted and it licked his hands.

He wished they would open some more beer.

The car swung sharply to the left and stopped.The dog thrust its head out of the window and began to growl and scrabble with its back feet. Joe stood up, thrusting his head out through the trap. Tydon and Dick craned out of the windows, levelling their rifles.

Grant, who had not seen anything yet, squeezed up through the trap beside Joe, drawing his rifle after him.

They were on the edge of a small clearing. On the other side, about a hundred feet away, five kangaroos were standing poised, watching, waiting.

‘Right!’ said Joe, and fired.

Everybody fired.

The kangaroos began hopping backwards and forwards, fretful, keeping their heads turned towards the car, their eyes orange in the spotlight.

The rifles exploded irregularly, the fast staccato of the automatic Tydon was using; the slower rhythmic beat of Joe’s repeater broken with little clashes of metal as he worked the ejector; the spasmodic cracks from the single-shot weapons Grant and Dick were firing as fast as they could reload.

All the rifles were .22s and one of the small slugs was seldom sufficient to bring down a kangaroo.

But the range was so short it was impossible to miss, and as Grant’s eager fingers worked to reload he could hear the tearing thump the bullets made as they hit flesh.

And presently the kangaroos began to fall down, even in the act of dying keeping their heads turned to the great mass of light that had burst from the bush to become the last thing they would see.

Soon they were all down except one, and it, breaking at last from the hypnotic light, hopped crookedly away into the scrub.

The night seemed wonderfully silent in the moment after the firing stopped, before the motor started, while the still air was yet heavy with the smoke of gunpowder.

They drove across the clearing and all climbed out to examine the kill. The dog had to be forcibly kept in the car.

‘Couldn’t he get the one that was wounded?’ asked Grant.

‘No, we’d never get him back if we let him go in the dark,’ said Dick.

Three of the kangaroos were dead. One had its leg broken and looked at them with undisturbed eyes.

Joe smashed its head in with a branch he broke off a dead tree.

Grant was surprised that he did not feel particularly upset at the mass carnage.They were, after all, only kangaroos.

Joe and Dick each took a carcass, ripped open the belly, spilled out the intestines and sawed off the hindquarters, complete with the long muscular tails.

Grant had never seen anything quite so sudden. In one moment the kangaroos had been quite respectable corpses; in the next they were horrible bits of animals trailing their insides.

Tydon meanwhile had his own business with the carcasses, but Grant could not look at that.

The miners dumped the quarters in a large box they had built into the car in place of the boot.

Soon they were driving off again, and the grieving night closed in on the grotesque half-carcasses protruding from the heaps of entrails, waiting for the dingoes and the foxes and the crows and the ants; tomorrow there would be only bones.

‘Why only the hindquarters?’ said Grant.

‘That’s all that’s got any meat, that and the tail,’ said Joe.

‘What do you do with it?’

‘It’s for the dogs, didn’t you know?’

Grant remembered that the miners kept racing greyhounds.

‘Does this fellow race?’

‘Gawd no! He’s just a hunger. Wouldn’t bring the runners out here, wreck ‘em.’

‘How many ‘roos do you want?’

‘Many as we can carry. What we don’t use the other blokes will.’

‘You don’t eat any of the meat yourselves—the tails, I mean.’

‘Sometimes get the old woman to make soup out of’em. Don’t like it much myself, too gamey.’

Grant saw a big grey kangaroo standing by the track.

He had his rifle cocked and levelled as the car slowed down.

The kangaroo was only twenty feet away, quite still, just outside the main glare of the light, facing out into the darkness for some reason.

It didn’t seem to even notice the car, thought Grant in the moment that the car stopped, and then with fumbling haste he fired.

The bullet went home with a thud so distinct that Grant felt as though he had thrust something into the animal with his hands.

It went down suddenly, merging into the patch of scrub in which it stood.

The patch was isolated and there was no other cover for twenty yards. Grant waited to see whether the kangaroo would break out.

A horrible noise came from the scrub, a hoarse, sucking, raucous breathing.

‘Good shot,’ said Joe.

But Grant was caught, horrified by the breathing. It bubbled and choked, and it was so loud, so very loud.

‘He won’t move now,’ said Joe, ‘I’ll get him.’

Grant still did not speak. He was frightened of what was in the patch of scrub and he didn’t know why.

As Joe walked across, the breathing stopped. It did not die away, or fade, or splutter out. It just stopped.

Joe reached the patch of scrub and halted.

Grant heard him say: ‘Well I’ll be damned.’ Then he walked through the patch, it was only about six feet square.

He walked through it twice, then turned back to the car.

Grant knew what he was going to say, but he didn’t think he could bear to hear it.

‘There’s nothing there,’ said Joe, and even his voice was subdued.

‘Rubbish,’ said Dick, ‘it couldn’t have got out. Go and get it.’

‘I tell you it’s not there!’

Grant stood erect staring, his eyes stinging, his lips trembling, a strange prickle on his skin. He knew the kangaroo wasn’t there. He didn’t know how he knew, nor why it wasn’t
there! but he knew it wasn’t there. Oh God! why wasn’t it there?