Wake In Fright (6 page)

Grant stood slackly with the kip in his hand.

‘Centre’s set,’ said the controller, and the side-betting began.

Grant felt himself surrounded by money, but it all seemed a long way off except for the pile of four hundred pounds that he could touch with the toe of his shoe.

‘All set?’ called the controller.

The voices were quiet.

‘Right! Spin ’em!’

Inexpertly, Grant jerked the coins into the air.

A moment of spiritual darkness.

Then the controller called: ‘They’re split!’ and picked up the coins.

Grant did not know what this meant, and it was not until the controller was settling the coins on the kip again that he realised he had thrown one head and one tail, and that counted for nothing.

It occurred to him now that his decision to bet on heads had miscarried—as spinner he had to bet on tails. But he had no time to think about that because again the controller was ordering him to spin, and again he jerked the coins.

Two tails facing upwards from the floor—two tails—four hundred pounds; but like a harsh noise breaking through a
pleasant dream the controller was saying: ‘No throw! Bets off. No throw! Hold on to your money!’

The controller picked up the pennies and put them back on the kip in Grant’s shaking hand.

‘Throw ’em above your head, mate.’

Unnerved now, Grant jerked the pennies again. He tried to follow their flight, but lost them against the glare of the electric lamp.

Where were they?

There was a scramble at his feet, and the notes, the four hundred pounds had gone, and the controller had called heads and Grant was walking out of the ring and he hadn’t even seen the pennies fall.

A humming numbness gripped his body and he was afraid that the other gamblers would see his deterioration. The muscles of his face were so taut he felt he must be grimacing wildly, and surely his cheeks were twitching. He leaned against a wall and smoked quickly, trying to laugh at himself, cursing himself, wishing he’d never come near the place, telling himself to get out of here now, because there was still danger. With that part of his mind that was independent of physical disturbance he repeated the words: It doesn’t matter. You’ve only lost twenty-two pounds ten. You took the risk, and it didn’t come off. You realised that before you took the risk.
You are now no worse off than you would have been if you’d lost the twenty-odd pounds in the first place.

But he was not convinced. A minute before he had had two hundred pounds. Now he did not have two hundred pounds. Useless to say he had won it as quickly as he had lost it. He was dry, shaken, sickened by the anticlimax.

The absolute unconcern of those around him struck him as wantonly callous, but a little corner of humour left to him dispelled the twinge of self-pity, and he grinned as he thought of his lack of concern for the loser when he had won.

All right, Grant, he told himself, you’ve had your run. Go back to bed and forget it ever happened.

But he stayed leaning against the wall saturated in the atmosphere of money. It had been so easy to win. Just a flicker of two coins and money doubled itself, and doubled itself and doubled itself. God! but the hunger for money was a gnawing, tearing thing.

He barely recognised Crawford when he appeared and said: ‘How’s it, John, still here?’

Grant had no reserves left for social efforts.

‘Will they cash a cheque here?’ he said. No, he would not think about it, he would do it. He would do it. Act now and think about it later, but act now.

‘Yes,’ said Crawford, unsurprised. ‘How much for?’

‘One hundred and forty.’ Grant took out the cheque and showed it to Crawford.

‘That’ll be all right, I’ll fix it. You’d better sign it.’

Grant endorsed the cheque with a pen supplied by Crawford, and the policeman made his way over to the controllers, who cashed the cheque without question, carelessly doling the notes out of their pockets.

Grant barely thanked Crawford when he brought him the money.

‘Going to try the Game?’ said Crawford, but Grant had forgotten him, and he was on his way to the ringside.

His lips were working in desperation. Somewhere in his mind the irrationality of his actions was clear to him; but he was like an automaton, dominated by an idea that was almost an instruction. He was being forced forward by a decision, made, it seemed now, forever ago.

Not for Grant the tedium of trying to build a bank from a small bet. He leaned over the line of players sitting on the benches, dropped his one hundred and forty pounds and called: ‘One forty on tails.’

His voice sounded strange and removed, and despair was heavy on his shoulders, and dragging down on his stomach. He had no hope of winning, but he would not have recalled his bet even if there had been time before it was
covered by showers of notes from half a dozen different directions.

Just three minutes after he had received the money for his cheque, he had lost it.

The cry of ‘Heads!’ had no effect on him; but a moment or two later there was the dull, bruising shock of realisation. He watched blankly as the hands scraped away the money he had laid down. He kept on looking at the bare carpet where it had been, until suddenly another growth of notes flowered there, and the Game was going on.

He turned, staring, and walked out of the building, out into the night, walking rigidly, transfixed by the magnitude of his loss. What the loss meant to him was so grievous in import that he could not think about it. His mind had a small tight knot at the back, and around it whirled the destructive realisation of what he had done, but until that knot unravelled, he need not think too deeply about what was to happen now.

He went back to the hotel, stripped off his clothes, fell naked on to the bed, and stared, hot-eyed, at the ceiling until suddenly he fell asleep with the light still burning.

He thought of Robyn and the short white dress she wore at tennis; and the way a wave could curl in foam at the top and still maintain the deep, green sweep of its curving, moving shape: and then, Oh God! he was awake on an iron bed in a hotel in Bundanyabba and he had no money.

Grant rolled off the bed, looked hastily away from the grey face in the mirror and, still naked, walked to the window. He looked out without seeing the mean hotel yard and the paling fences of the backyards of the neighbouring shops. It was not long after dawn and already the smothering heat of the night had given way to the harsher, burning glare of the sun.

Grant turned and leaned his back against the paper-covered
wooden wall, trying to draw an element of coolness from it. He took the jug of water from the table and poured a little on his head, letting it trickle, lukewarm, down his body.

‘There is no point,’ he said aloud, ‘in being hopeless and helpless.’

But words did not help much to allay the mass of self-condemnation that was bursting inside him.

He sat down on the bed and looked at himself in the mirror. A dark spread of beard had appeared on his face; his hair was plastered down with the water; a little sweat had already gathered on his chest and forehead.

He attempted a smile, and saw his lips respond; but his eyes remained dull and hollow.

‘Life,’ he said, again aloud, ‘will appear brighter after break-fast.’

He lay back on the bed again, and almost succeeded in sleeping until a hotel bell indicated that it was time to shower, shave, and dress to present some sort of face to a world that had suddenly become unduly complicated.

Breakfast was surprisingly good, largely because somebody in the hotel had had the enterprise to include chilled pawpaw in the menu.That stayed thought a little, then the milky coffee and the first cigarette of the day.

The first cigarette, the first of eleven that were left in his
last packet, and all that a search of his pockets had produced was two shillings and sevenpence. He felt he should eat all the hotel offered, because at best there seemed little chance that he would eat again that day, but the heat was dragging at his being and his mouth was raw from the constant smoking last night, so he ate only the pawpaw.

He ordered a second cup of coffee and began another cigarette because eleven would not last long anyway.

There were few people in the dining room and he had a table to himself, so with the second cigarette there came the time when the situation had to be considered.

All right, now it had to be faced: what was he to do?

He had nobody he could borrow money from, certainly nobody to whom he could explain that he had lost all his money gambling.

And in any case, how much did he need to borrow? Just to stay alive until his next pay cheque was due would cost at least a hundred pounds.

If he got to Sydney there was just a chance that he could spend elongated periods with somewhat dim relatives, but what a chance with two and sevenpence to spread over six weeks.

And in any case, how to get to Sydney? The train fare one way would be about ten pounds even if he felt like facing a
forty-hour journey without any money for food. And when he arrived in Sydney would he walk with his suitcases to his uncle’s home fifteen miles out in the suburbs?

Quite apart from which, it was all academic, because he did not have ten pounds.

Could he sell anything? Only his clothes, and there did not seem much of a market for second-hand clothes in Bundanyabba. His watch was battered and old and worth a few shillings at the most, and besides he knew of nothing that approached a pawnshop in the city.

The only possibility seemed to be to find some sort of work in Bundanyabba. If he could find a job in a shop, or an office, or labouring—anything to raise the fare to Sydney.

But where to stay in the meantime? He could not get work until Monday at the earliest, and he could not stay in the hotel because the bill would come to more than he would be paid.

The contrast between what lay before him now and what he had planned the night before swept across him with physical violence, but he jammed his thoughts back to the immediate problems.

Obviously he had to get out of the hotel at once. That at least was a definite move. He went upstairs, collected his bags, glanced once around the room to make sure that he
had left nothing and went downstairs again to the reception desk.

An odd sense of gratitude caught him when the girl gave him back his ten shillings deposit on the keys. He had forgotten that. And then he looked at the small, orange-tinted note and remembered the great wads of money he had lost last night. He thrust the note into his pocket with the two and sevenpence and walked out into the street with his suitcases.

It was nine o’clock on Saturday morning.

The sun hurt his eyes more than usually, and he put his sunglasses on. He turned into the main street and walked slowly down the footpath under the dilapidated awnings, past the Town Hall with its rare and nurtured patch of green grass on the front garden.

When he came to the corner by the Post Office he turned around and walked back along the block again.

Where in the name of God was he to go?

He felt conspicuous, although there was no reason why anybody in that busy street should think anything but that he was waiting for a bus. He put his cases down by a bus stop under the shade of an awning and sat on one of them.

There must be an answer to this. He could not just wander up and down until he collapsed. Although, of course, he could do just that.

From where he was sitting he could see the great piles of mullock and waste from the mines, artificial hills within a few hundred yards of the centre of the city. When the wind blew, thick clouds of dust drifted off the mullock and fell in a blinding cloud over the streets.

Grant looked at the barren heaps of worked-out earth as possibly being where he would spend the nights for the next six weeks.

Presumably there were soup kitchens in Bundanyabba, he thought, a shade desperately.

He smoked another of his cigarettes while he sat there; then the bus came and went and Grant, convinced now that he was drawing attention, stood up again and walked the length of the shopping centre with his suitcases.

By half past nine he could feel something like nervous hysteria mounting in his throat. He had to find somewhere to put his suitcases and think for a while.

The sun had raised the shade temperature to just on a hundred degrees already, and the tar in the roadway was bubbling.

Grant felt himself exposed in no-man’s-land. There was no avenue of retreat and the enemy was invisible and unassailable. His supports had been dissipated, his arms were lost. He could not even burrow into the ground to hide.

A lone figure, not worth a burst of machine-gun fire, he seemed doomed to wander the desolate terrain until he just dropped into oblivion.

Damn it all! He couldn’t just walk up and down the street for six mortal weeks.

He turned into the bar of the nearest hotel.

There were only about thirty men in the bar, taking their first drinks after breakfast, and Grant easily found a corner to stow his suitcases.

He ordered a pony of beer—the smallest amount sold. It cost him ninepence, but it bought respite from the street. He put it down on the bar untouched, determined it would serve as an excuse to stay in the bar as long as he liked.

Eight cigarettes left, and the one he was going to smoke now meant seven left. Strange that cigarettes should be so much more desirable when the supply was strictly limited.

He leaned on the brown bar top and looked up at the rows and rows of pennies and threepences stuck to the wooden skirting above his head. It was a local custom to wet small coins with beer and stick them to the woodwork. They amounted to several pounds before they filled all the available space above the bar.Then they were taken away and the whole process began again.

It was generally supposed that the publicans gave the
money to charity, but Grant had never seen any evidence to support this supposition.

He estimated that there must have been ten or twelve pounds stuck up there, enough to get him to Sydney. However, there would no doubt be determined resistance to any move on his part to acquire the coins.

He sipped his beer prudently and rolled cigarette smoke around in his mouth, letting it trickle out slowly so that he could breathe it in again through his nose. Which, he pointed out to himself, was no advance at all towards the solution of his situation.

A little man with glasses came to the bar beside him and called for a middy of beer in what seemed to be the remnants of an Irish accent. He took off his panama hat, revealing a head almost completely bald except for small white tufts around the ears.

‘Hot!’ he said to Grant pleasantly, running a huge handkerchief over his glistening pate to support his statement.

‘Hot,’ agreed Grant, curtly.

The little man looked around the bar, but apparently saw nobody he knew and turned his attention back to Grant.

‘New to The Yabba?’

Grant shrank a little—was everybody in Bundanyabba cast in the identical conversational mould?

‘New to The Yabba,’ he said so casually as to be rude, but rudeness of this type was unknown in Bundanyabba and the little man did not recognise it.

‘Like the old place?’

At least, thought Grant, a new tack could be introduced at this point.

‘No! I think it’s bloody awful,’ and that, he hoped would stifle any further approaches.

The little man paused with his beer halfway to his mouth.

‘You don’t like The Yabba?’This was the nearest thing to heresy he had heard in many a year and he did not quite know how to deal with it.

‘No.’

The little man drank his middy without drawing breath and called for another. He seemed to ponder for a moment, then turned to Grant again and said:

‘Will you have a drink?’ It was as though Grant had done something unmentionable, but not quite sufficient to put him beyond the social pale.

‘No. I’m just toying with this one, thanks.’

‘Well drink it down and I’ll buy you another.’

This had gone far enough. Grant had no desire to cultivate this balding
émigré,
despite the nostalgic lilt in his voice.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m flat broke, and I can’t afford to drink
and I just want to drink this one slowly.’

But that was the wrong angle too.

‘What’s that got to do with it, man? I said I’d buy you a drink, I don’t want you to buy me one. Come on, drink it down now.’

The little man had begun to talk loudly and one or two other drinkers were looking at them, so Grant gave up, drained his tiny glass and put it on the bar.

‘Make it two middies, miss,’ said the little man, and soon Grant felt again in his palm the solacing curve of a ten-ounce glass full of cold beer.

‘My name’s John Grant,’ he said unwillingly.

‘Tim Hynes.’And Grant shook the proffered hand. It was hard, and for some reason quite cool. Probably from holding beer glasses, thought Grant, whose own hands were soggy with sweat.

‘And how does a young fellow like you come to be broke?’

Oh God, these relentlessly friendly people whose sheer goodwill bordered on impertinence. Still, this was Bundanyabba and he was drinking the man’s beer and, you never knew, Hynes might be able to help him find work.

‘I lost my pay cheque and I’ve got to wait a few weeks until I can get another one.’That at any rate was literally true as far as it went.

‘A few weeks?’

‘I’m the schoolteacher out at Tiboonda, and I’d just got my Christmas holiday pay.’

But truth cannot be skirted indefinitely.

‘How did you come to lose it?’

‘I don’t know. Just lost it. Might have burned it with some rubbish when I was packing.’

‘And you’ve got no money?’

‘A few shillings.’

‘And how will you get your money?’

‘Oh, I’ve written to the Department—they’ll send me another cheque sooner or later, but they’re pretty slow.’

‘You’d come to The Yabba for your holidays had you, John?’

‘Not on your life! I was on my way to Sydney.’ Grant caught the slight discrepancy. ‘I didn’t realise I’d lost my cheque until this morning.’

‘Well, and what are you going to do until your pay comes?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ Now perhaps there might be some reward for his glib fabrication.

‘Well you’d better have another beer at any rate.Two more middies, miss!’

‘Look, thanks very much, but I don’t like drinking your beer when I can’t buy any…I…’

‘Ah, think nothing of it, John. Think nothing of it. I been broke myself many a time.’

‘I was thinking I might be able to get a job here for a couple of weeks.’

‘You might too, John, you might too.Thanks, miss.’ Hynes paid from a wallet fat with notes. He turned to Grant again.

‘And how do you like teaching out at Tiboonda?’

Grant no longer wanted to get rid of Hynes, but he suffered a little sick self-loathing when he realised it.

‘It’s all right, a bit out of the way.’

‘And you don’t like The Yabba?’

‘Well, I suppose I’m a bit browned off. It’s probably all right.’ Hell’s teeth! the things a man could say when he had to.

Hynes leaned towards him and banged down his glass for emphasis.

‘Son,’ he said intensely, ‘it’s the best little town in the world!’

Grant did his best to adopt an expression suitable to the occasion, but he could not for the life of him think what that expression might be. He smiled noncommittally.

‘Everybody here certainly seems to like it,’ he said.

‘’Course they do. Now, listen to me, John.’

Grant listened, and Hynes dropped his voice.

‘Are you a Mason?’

‘No.’

‘You’re in the Buffs?’

‘In the what?’

‘In the Buffs?’

‘The Buffs?’ Grant felt bemused.

‘The Buffaloes.’

‘The Buffaloes?’ Could this go on much longer?

But Hynes was exasperated too.