Wake In Fright (2 page)
For Patricia
He sat at his desk, wearily watching the children file out of the room, reflecting that, this term at least, it was reasonable to assume that none of the girls was pregnant.
‘Goodbye, sir,’ said the last of the children to leave.
‘Goodbye, Mason,’ said the teacher,‘I’ll see you next term,’ and the small, shabby figure was lost in the glare of the doorway—the class was now no more than a babble of eager voices floating and fading in the heat.
The teacher looked around the empty room, which comprised the whole of the school, apart from some crude toilet facilities in the grounds. Twenty-two desks for twenty-eight pupils, boys and girls aged from five to seventeen.
Twenty-eight pupils, twenty-seven at school only because the law insisted on their being educated until they were at least fifteen, or because some desperate farmer, clawing a living from the clods of the great inland plains, thought that in education there might be for his child a little of the hope that he had abandoned.
And the twenty-eighth, young Mason—eleven years old, hungry to learn, eager, intelligent and inexplicably sensitive, but doomed to join the railway gangs as soon as he was legally old enough, because his father was a ganger.
The teacher stood up and flexed his shoulders to loosen the wet shirt from his body and began to close and lock the windows.
Through the glass he could see the plains stretching west, broken only by rare clumps of the hardy saltbush that managed to draw sustenance even here where the earth had been innocent of any trace of moisture for months. Somehow people coaxed a living from the semi-desert, somehow they ran sheep and cattle—one head every ten acres—and kept them alive while they gained enough condition to bring a few pounds in the coastal markets of Australia, but the schoolteacher could never understand how. Some people, owners of thousands of square miles, even made fortunes here by waiting for the occasional falls of rain, then bringing in herds
to feed on the carpet of green grass that appeared overnight. But now there had been no rain for almost a year, the sun had withered every living thing except the saltbush. The people had withered, their skins contracting and their eyes sinking as their stock became white bones. But they stayed in the wooden homes, because they believed the rain would fall some time.
The schoolteacher knew that somewhere not far out in the shimmering haze was the state border, marked by a broken fence, and that further out in the heat was the silent centre of Australia, the Dead Heart. He looked through the windows almost with pleasure, because tonight he would be on his way to Bundanyabba; tomorrow morning he would board an aircraft; and tomorrow night he would be in Sydney, and on Sunday he would swim in the sea. For the schoolteacher was a coastal Australian, a native of the strip of continent lying between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Dividing Range, where Nature deposited the graces she so firmly withheld from the west.
The sea, twelve hundred miles to the east, had swelled and fallen in its tides, day in and day out for a year, and he had not seen it. For twelve months he had been master of the one-teacher school at Tiboonda, twelve months with only his leave pay to carry him through the term holidays. So he had
spent them in Bundanyabba, the mining city of sixty thousand people which was the centre of life in the territory around the border. But to the schoolteacher it was just a larger variation of Tiboonda, and Tiboonda was a variation of hell.
But now the long Christmas vacation had arrived, six weeks’ leave, with six weeks’ pay.Two weeks’ pay would cover his air fare to Sydney and back, and there would be four weeks’ pay left, eked out by judicious visits to relatives. Six weeks by the sea, to just lie in the water and soak out the dust that had seeped into his being.
He finished with the windows and looked around, aware of the smell of the classroom which always seemed stronger when the children had gone. A chalky smell, an inky smell, a suggestion of body smells and stale sandwiches and brown apple cores, all mingled with the smell of the dust which, even in the room, stirred and eddied about his feet as he moved.
He picked up his briefcase and walked out into the sun. He always winced when the sun hit him. He could not pick up the trick the locals had of keeping their eyes perpetually screwed in a squint. He forced the wooden door into its sagging frame and turned the lock. Then he shook his head and fished out his sunglasses. In a year in the west he had not been able to make up his mind whether the glasses were any use or not. The glare was white with them off and grey with
them on, if glare can be grey, and the shafts of white came in at the side, like little pointed pieces of stone driving at his eyes.
He tried to keep his lids closed as much as possible as he walked across the schoolyard, past the fiction of a sapling fence that rose out of the white dust in futile protest against the possibility of stray cattle wandering into the playing area.
The road was distinguishable from the paddocks only by the deep tyre tracks in the dust, and the schoolteacher could feel his feet sinking in it as he walked.
One hundred yards from the school was the hotel, and near that the railway siding called Tiboonda Station.The three buildings made up the township of Tiboonda. All were timber and iron, all built in the monotonous, low box-form that characterises western architecture; and all were riddled with white ants and dry-rot.They stood in the plain abjectly, as though they no longer made any serious claim to constitute a township.
The schoolteacher walked slowly, trying not to raise the dust. In all directions little white clouds showed where his pupils, on foot, bicycle, and horseback, were scattering to the railway camps, farmhouses and native shanties where they lived.
For them the six weeks’ holiday meant six weeks here
where the creek bed was dry and cracked and the water to drink had to be brought from Bundanyabba by train, and all they could do was play in the dust, or perhaps tease the wild camels whose ancestors formed the inland’s transport system.
He reached the hotel and walked across the drooping veranda floor into the bar. It was shady in here, but not cool. It was never cool in Tiboonda, except at night in deep winter when the cold bit into your bones. In the winter you wished for the summer, in the summer you wished for the winter, and all the time you wished to blazes you were a thousand miles from Tiboonda. But you had two years to fill in for the Education Department, and if you left before that, you forfeited the bond your uncle had put up for you when you were fool enough to think you wanted to take up teaching for a living. And so you’d stay here for another year, unless by the grace of God you could persuade the Department to move you east before that, and God probably didn’t have that much grace to spare.
‘Schooner, Charlie,’ he said to the hotelkeeper, who emerged from his dark back room wearing, for some reason, a waistcoat over his drenched shirt.
Charlie pulled the beer.
In the remote towns of the west there are few of the amenities of civilisation; there is no sewerage, there are no
hospitals, rarely a doctor; the food is dreary and flavourless from long carrying, the water is bad; electricity is for the few who can afford their own plant, roads are mostly nonexistent; there are no theatres, no picture shows and few dance halls; and the people are saved from stark insanity by the one strong principle of progress that is ingrained for a thousand miles east, north, south and west of the Dead Heart—the beer is always cold.
The teacher let his finger curl around the beaded glass, quelling the little spurt of bitterness that rose when he saw the size of the head of froth on the beer, because, after all, it didn’t matter, and this poor devil of a hotelkeeper had to stay here and he was going east.
He drank quickly at first, swamping the dryness in his throat in a flood of beer; and then, when the glass was half empty, he drank slowly, letting the cold alcohol relax his body.
‘Will you be wanting your room when you come back?’ asked Charlie, scratching his belly through a tear in the shirt.
‘Where else would I stay?’
‘Fella before you stayed in a caravan, Jackie: thought you might want a change from the old pub too.’
The hotelkeeper was mocking him with the sneering irony that western people used on those who show no affection for their desolate territory.
‘I’ll be back here.’
‘I’ll try and keep your room for you.’ The only permanent guests Charlie ever had were the masters of the Tiboonda school.
‘Thanks.’
If by any chance the hotel were burned down would the Department have to close the school? Or would another small wooden box be hastily thrown up in the school grounds to provide the master with accommodation?
‘Having another one, Jack?’
‘Thanks.’ He pushed the glass across the stained and grooved bar top and drew a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.
It was almost two hours since he had smoked at the afternoon recess, and the tingling satisfaction supplemented the beer; he looked almost kindly upon the hotelkeeper. But he had to look away soon.
Charlie had served the second glass of beer and was leaning against the shelves of bottles that served to bolster the illusion that there were those within fifty miles of Tiboonda who would think of drinking anything but beer. He was sucking on the disintegrating remains of a handmade cigarette. Soon he spat the obscene object on to the floor.
‘Going on the four-fifteen, Jack?’
‘Yes.’ He glanced at the hotelkeeper’s fat and grimy hands and decided he did not want the rest of his beer.
‘See you in six weeks, Charlie.’
‘Sure, Jack. See you then.’ Charlie grinned without humour or goodwill, as though he knew the schoolteacher’s return to Tiboonda was something he did not want to think about.
‘Goodbye, Charlie,’ and goodbye to the stifling back room, the greasy meals prepared by Charlie’s half-caste mistress in the filthy kitchen; goodbye to the sleepless nights and the arid dawns when the soft light gave false promise of a moment’s release from the heat; goodbye to his twenty-eight pupils and their suspicious parents with shamed faces; goodbye Tiboonda, for six weeks at any rate.
He had his two suitcases packed and waiting in the bar, and he picked them up and walked across to the station.The single line swung out across the plain in a long curve, black against the dust. On the horizon he could see the small, dark cloud that could have been the first finger of a rain cloud. The cloud was almost imperceptibly running down the line, and in half an hour or so the four-fifteen would be in Tiboonda.
He wished he had stayed in the hotel a little longer because the lean-to shelter on the station offered no determined opposition to the direct beat of the sun; but it was doubtful
whether the sun was worse than Charlie in any case.
He took out his wallet, and inspected his pay cheque again. One hundred and forty pounds, six weeks’ wages and district allowance.There should be no trouble changing it to buy his ticket at the airways office, any bank would probably take a Departmental cheque once he established his identity.
There were twenty pound notes in his wallet as well, the savings from his wages for the past term. He had calculated on saving a hundred, but beer was expensive in Tiboonda, and a man felt he had either to drink or blow his brains out.
Still, he must take it a little more easily next term. ‘Next term’, the thought was like a nervous start, ‘next term’, six weeks away, another year in Tiboonda would begin again. Another year in this apology for a town, himself an outcast in a community of people who were at home in the bleak and frightening land that spread out around him now, hot, dry and careless of itself and the people who professed to own it.
Better not think about that. Better not think about anything, except the sea, draw the image across his mind like a deep shadow and pretend that it warded off the heat that seemed to thrust long, hot fingers through his skull into the living, tender cells of his brain.
In its own good time the four-fifteen arrived at Tiboonda. Its alternate name was the Friday Train, which distinguished
it from the Monday Train. The two were Tiboonda’s only transport connection with the outside world, represented by Bundanyabba, apart from the road, which could not be travelled when it rained because of the mud, nor when it was dry because of the dust which would bog cars just as hopelessly as mud would.
The Friday Train pulled a dozen freight cars and two passenger carriages. The engine was the superb type of monster that can only be found in the remoter sections of the Commonwealth, and which always reminded the teacher of the sort of thing Indians chased in American western films.
Even before the train pulled into the siding, he could hear the singing. On every slow train in the west they sing, the stockmen and the miners, the general storekeepers and the drifting workers; the Aborigines and the half-castes shyly joining in on the outskirts. And somebody always has a mouth organ, and they sing with desperate, tuneless gaiety the songs of the American hit parades which filter through the networks of the Australian Broadcasting Commission or from the static-ridden apparatus of the occasional country radio station.
Out over the desert plains, behind the roar and grind of the ancient engines, the dreary words and trite tunes of modern America caused the dingoes to cock their ears in
wonder, and deepened measurably the sadness that permeates the outback of Australia.
The singers had all congregated in the front carriage.The schoolteacher boarded the rear carriage. He didn’t want to sing. He was alone except for a middle-aged Aboriginal stockman with white hair and the stubble of a white beard. He was a full-blood, with the broad features of his people, and he stared constantly out of the window as though there might be something in the plains he had not seen before.
The schoolteacher had seen the plains, and he had made the trip to Bundanyabba before, so he knew that, for the six-hour journey ahead, the countryside would change so little there would be almost nothing to indicate that the train had moved.