Wake In Fright (8 page)

Or at least Grant thought they should both have been aware of it. In fact Janette smiled as he sat down again and said:

‘What do you want to work for?’

‘The usual reason, to get money.’ He looked at his watch, it was almost half past five. How long had he sat there in a stupor?

Janette was looking at him enquiringly, and, was he wrong, or was there an element of warmth about her—a certain nuance in her manner that seemed to admit him to the circle of people she might be prepared to know.

Some further elaboration of his position was obviously required, so he gave her the same version of his plight as he had given her father.

‘Still,’ she said, ‘you’ll be all right as soon as the cheque comes, won’t you?’

Grant found his glass empty every time he looked at it, and Hynes, still fretful and uncertain about his guest, kept coming across the room, filling his glass and assuring him that he would ‘fix him up’.

Hynes was very drunk, and Grant could feel himself following down the pastel sprung corridors of inebriation; his voice echoing splendidly in his own ears; his frame larger than life, expanded and buoyant; and, he was sure, an ironic smile on his lips as he mocked life and his own predicament.

Grant was a fairly good drunk, and even though he was barely aware of what he was doing, he quite adroitly managed the salad and meat dish that was served him and the other men in the dining room later that evening by a silent Mrs Hynes.

And he did not stagger as he made his way out of the room.

But there were gaps in the chain of happenings and he could not quite remember how he had moved from point to point.

His voice was full and rich and he spoke very slowly as he asked Janette why on earth she stayed in Bundanyabba.

He was out on the front veranda. Heaven only knew where the others were, but Janette was standing quite close to him, very close.

The western stars crammed the sky except where the moon blotted them out as it squandered its light in a stream cascading down to lend brief grace to the city of Bundanyabba.

Grant breathed deeply of the lukewarm air and gazed with majestic melancholy at the gleaming rooftops of the city.

‘The moonlight,’ he said. ‘Like snow upon the desert’s dusty face.’

Janette didn’t respond, so he added: ‘You know, “lighting a little hour or two”.’

Still she said nothing.

‘That’s from a poem,’ he said, a little less grandly.

‘I know.’

Was he making an ass of himself? Janette didn’t seem to think so. Janette was talking to him now. He couldn’t quite catch what she was saying, but it sounded pleasant. Janette’s voice was low and soft, and Robyn was almost two thousand miles away, and in any case Robyn was a lost cause and Janette had a peculiar beauty of her own. Janette was lovely and lithe and solemn, and Janette was very close.

‘Would you care to go for a stroll,’ he said, smiling down at her, his face, he hoped, a mask of attractive suffering.

Somehow he got the impression that his suggestion was not so much an idea of his own as a statement of her intentions. Perhaps he was very drunk after all.

Then he was standing alongside Janette in the lounge room and Janette was saying:

‘Daddy, John and I are going for a walk.’

The three men looked dully at them, and one of the miners seemed cross, but it didn’t matter because soon they were walking along the street, he was alone with Janette in the night and the moon was making even the dust beautiful.

Somewhere in the whirling recesses of his mind he knew this was all a little too easy. Janette had not been impressed with him earlier in the day. He could not remember just when he had become attached to her, but she didn’t seem to have said anything much; and there was an air of compliance now in the way she walked and the way she had let him take her hand.

Why should she comply? Who was this tall, dark girl who was walking with him now out past the limits of this barbaric city?

They turned off the road.

Who had initiated that movement? Grant held his mind hard and looked at the girl beside him. She seemed purposeful; she seemed…what did she seem?…why was she so quiet?

They were walking on hard dusty ground, wasteland between one of the mines and the city, and they threw great long shadows in the moonlight.

Grant looked again at the girl, but he felt his mind slip and his thoughts shambled off on their drunken round again.

It was very quiet out there, there was not enough vegetation for insects and their footsteps on the dust were the only sound. Grant realised they had not spoken for five minutes or more.

‘You’re very…quiet,’ he said.

‘Am I?’ Her voice was deeper, almost hoarse, and it disturbed Grant.

She didn’t say anything more and now she was walking with her head very close to Grant’s, and his eyes would not focus properly so she had two profiles.

Her eyes were glazed and her mouth was open. She was looking straight ahead, and walking quite quickly, leading him by the hand.

Grant began to suspect a great deal, and knew for certain that he ought not to be as drunk as he was. Something of the intensity that gripped the girl was cutting through to Grant as she strained forward, her body taut. She wasn’t walking, she was going somewhere.

Some instinct of caution moved him to say:

‘Won’t your father be worried if we stay out too long?’ But it sounded foolish even to his ears.

They came to a slight hollow in the ground in which a patch of low scrub had grown like a hedge with a clear section in the middle.

Grant no longer merely suspected; he knew that Janette had brought him here, and he knew why. Nobody could be that drunk.

She slipped through the scrub into the clear space and he followed her.

They stopped for a moment and stood together, two tall thin figures in the moonlight between the mine and the city.

The urgency seemed to have left her and she sank down on to the bare ground, and lay on her back, her hands clasped behind her head. Grant stood above her briefly, feeling that something required to be said, and then he sat down beside her.

Her eyes were closed and she was breathing deeply. Grant ran a hand experimentally over her face. She moved her head so that her open lips touched his fingers.

‘You know you’re very…beautiful,’ he said, but he didn’t like the sardonic smile that caught her lips as he said it. Perhaps no words were required after all.

He took out his last cigarette and lit it, and found that somehow Janette had moved so that her head was on his thigh.

He looked up at the sky and did his best to think with whatever powers still survived the alcohol. It was obvious that he was being tempted to seduce this girl, or allow himself to
be seduced by her, and he wanted things a little clearer than this. Besides, there were certain technical difficulties…

Still, she must know, so why not? He would. He would? Yes he would, why not? Yes he would.

He still felt he ought to say something, but there didn’t seem to be anything to say, or anything that would be well received anyway.

There was Robyn, Robyn’s hair was fair…but Robyn wasn’t here. Robyn was a long way away. And what was Robyn to him, anyway?

Suddenly he remembered that he had never had a woman before, and he knew that if he were more sober he would have been startled by the thought. But as it was, he just felt swept away by the inevitability of it all. The time for retreat had passed.

He was too drunk to know the compulsions of passion, but the anaesthetised impulses within him dictated his actions and he stretched out beside her, crushing his cigarette in the dust, putting an arm across her body.

They lay face to face. All Grant could see was a blur of cheeks, hair, lips and great closed eyes. He pressed closer, raised himself on an elbow and touched her throat with his hand.

They lay there for perhaps a minute, Janette breathing more and more rapidly and never once opening her eyes.

Grant kissed her, a little clumsily; but then she responded and it was strange how her lips seemed to caress his, and Ah! there at last was a flicker of passion that seemed to strike through him to her, but it didn’t last long.

A fox yapped somewhere out behind the mine and the sound served only to increase their immense isolation.

Sadness caught at Grant as he wondered what to do next. This was not quite what he had planned for himself, and what if he should sire a child out here in the barren land he hated? How the girl’s body quivered and shook. His own was passive now, and he wished that he could lose himself in desire, but all he had was a dreary certainty of his own intentions.

The fox yapped again, further away now.

Grant lay there looking at Janette, bemusedly wondering at himself and at her, and at the moonlight on the dust.

Slowly Janette moved her hand towards her throat and undid the buttons of her dress. She drew the cloth aside and Grant saw she wore nothing else.

She spread her arms out and let her head fall back, baring her breasts to the moon.

Still Grant lay there, staring at her now, longing for the fierce pleasure this should give him.

There was something more to all of it than just this, something more surely, even in the way of simple pleasure.

The fox yapped again, so far away now it could barely be heard.

Janette reached out an arm and drew Grant down across her body. Passion flickered again and he gave himself to the task in hand.

But even as her arms closed around his neck nausea gripped him, violently, incredibly.

He rolled off her body and knelt in the scrub and vomited and vomited, painfully and noisily in abject humiliation.

Sick and ashamed he turned again at last to Janette. She was standing outside the circle of scrub. Her dress was buttoned up.

‘Sorry,’ said Grant, ‘we’d better go back.’

Janette said nothing and they walked back on to the road and now the moonlight was harsh and brittle.

Grant let his drunkenness take control; he sank into it as a man will fall asleep to stop thinking.

Afterwards there were only patches of the rest of that night that he ever remembered…

—Janette brushing down his jacket before they reached the house.

—The men singing inside. They looked at him when he came in and someone had laughed.

—Janette being gone, lost somewhere between the front
gate and the sitting room where the men were singing.

—Another man at the party. ‘This is Doc Tydon,’ they had said. A sparse little man with a moustache.

—Beer being handed to him and his drinking it hurriedly, without pleasure, seeking only absence of thought and feeling.

—More beer and more beer.

—Then the beer had run out and there had been whisky.

—Then the whisky had run out and there had been some kind of liqueur, sweet and sticky.

—’How do you find The Yabba, John?’ Who the devil had asked that?

—Angry words, but who was angry with whom?

Until at last oblivion came and Grant succeeded in annihilating himself utterly, for the time being at any rate.

He was crouching in a corner of the schoolroom at Tiboonda, behind a desk and a man with a revolver was going to shoot him. The report of the revolver hurt his head and the flare of the explosion hurt his eyes.

And he was dead.

Pause.

Oblivion.

He was back in the corner, and the gunman was going to shoot him again and he knew it was for the second time. The pain in his head.The pain in his eyes. It was the fear more than anything. He was going to be killed and there was nothing he could do about it. The explosion. The flash.

And he was dead.

Pause.

Oblivion.

When he opened his eyes the light was unbearable and he shut them. But he had to open them again to see where he was.

He was lying on a stretcher. His clothes were saturated with sweat. Thirst was ploughing furrows in his throat. His head hurt and hurt and hurt.

Where the devil was he?

He stood up and swayed as pain swilled around inside his skull.

There was a door over there, and there was someone beyond that door. He could hear plates being moved.

Grant walked over and pulled open the door. It led to a sort of kitchen, and a man with his back to him was cooking something on a Primus stove.

The man turned around, sparse and little, with a moustache.

‘G’day,’ he said.

Grant had to try three times before he could form the greeting ‘G’day’.

‘I suppose you feel lousy?’ said the man.

‘Yes,’ said Grant, who thought he was going to faint, or die.

‘Like a drink?’ said the man.

‘Water,’ said Grant.

‘Beer,’ said the man.

‘Just water, thanks,’ said Grant, who felt that he would scream if he had to speak again without drinking something.

‘Yabba water’s only good for cooking,’ said the man. He went to a small kerosene refrigerator and took out a glass of beer.

‘I let it go flat,’ he said, ‘it’s better that way when you feel the way you do.’

Grant took the glass and thought he would vomit again when the sour smell of flat beer reached his nostrils. But he had to drink something and it wasn’t bad once he was halfway through.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, ‘but could you tell me who you are?’

‘Tydon,’ said the man,’Doc Tydon—you met me last night at Hynes’s place.’

Grant let that sink in. Hynes’s place last night. Memory hit him a treacherous blow. He looked down at his clothes.They were unmistakably stained. O God, but at least the thought about that could wait until the pain had gone.

‘You’d better sit down,’ said Tydon, pushing a fruit box across.

Grant sat on it. Tydon took his glass and filled it from another one out of the refrigerator.

‘I don’t think I want another one, thanks,’ said Grant.

‘Two is what you want when you look like that. Then you’d better eat.’

Grant drank half the beer submissively.

‘What am I doing here?’

‘I brought you here last night. You were stung.’

‘Stung?’

‘Hit. Blotto, blind, inebriated—call it what you like.’

‘Sorry. I’m not too clear about things yet.What happened?’

‘You just drank yourself under the table after your little episode with Janette.’

Grant felt his face sagging at that.

‘Don’t get upset. We’ve all had little episodes with Janette.’

This would all take a great deal of thinking about when he felt better, but at the moment thinking was not a very practical proposition.

‘Eat some of this,’ said Tydon, pointing at a plate he had laid out heaped with a mash of meat and vegetables.

‘Thanks very much, but I don’t feel particularly like eating.’

‘No, but you’d better eat just the same—come on.’

Grant could not argue. He pulled the box over to the table and began to eat the food with a spoon Tydon gave him. In
fact, it did make him feel better. He ate it all.

Memory struck at him again—his suitcases, where were they?

He’d left them in a hotel.Which hotel? Dear God! He had no chance of finding them again. He felt tears in his eyes and fought them back. He’d lost money, honour, virtue and now his suitcases, and the suitcases seemed the most grievous loss of all.

But damn it! He couldn’t break down and weep in front of this man Tydon.

‘That must have been quite a party last night,’ he said.

‘It’s always like that at Hynes’s on the weekend.’

‘What time did we finish?’

‘About dawn.’

‘What’s the time now?’ His own watch had stopped.

‘About four o’clock.’

‘Hell!’ Grant did his best to stand up briskly.’Well, thanks for your hospitality. I’d better be getting along.’ He’d said that somewhere before recently…of course…at Hynes’s.

‘You’ve got nowhere to go, so you might as well stay here.’

‘But I can’t stay here indefinitely.’ He felt a need to explain himself. You see I’m the schoolteacher at Tiboonda and I lost my…’

‘Yes. I heard all that crap last night. I don’t believe a word of it.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No.’ Tydon was carelessly contemptuous.

‘But…why not?’

‘I saw you at the Game on Friday night.’

‘Ah…’

‘What did you want to lie about it for?’

‘Well, a man feels a bit of a fool…’

‘Better men than you have been made fools of at the Game.’

Grant could see and hear Tydon clearly for the first time now and he didn’t like him much. He had very bad teeth.

‘No doubt. But in any case I can’t stay in your…cabin indefinitely, can I?’

‘It’s not my cabin. Belongs to the mines. I’ve just been living in it for five years.’

‘Yes, well anyway…’

‘You might as well stay here as try to sponge on men like Tim Hynes.’

There was not much to say to that, so Grant sat there and looked out of the small window of the kitchen. The plain dwindling away to dancing heat haze made him turn his head hurriedly.

He had to say something to Tydon, he supposed, so he said:

‘You’ve lived here for five years?’

Tydon reacted as though he had been waiting for the question.

‘If it will satisfy your curiosity about me,’ he said, although Grant was not aware of having expressed any particular curiosity about him, ‘I am a doctor of medicine and an alcoholic.’

Grant did not care, and could not see what that had to do with the length of time he had been living in the hut, but Tydon went on:

‘I came to Bundanyabba seven years ago because it is probably the only place in Australia where I could practise medicine without the fact that I was an alcoholic preventing people coming to me.

‘I discovered in one month flat that I could live and drink as much as I liked without working at anything, provided I remained what the locals term a “character”.’

Grant said ‘Hmm,’ and hoped the monologue had come to an end. It hadn’t.

‘I remained a character. I live in this hut. I obtain all my meals free from my many friends who also provide me with my requirements in beer, which, with some self-control, is the only alcohol I allow myself.’

That was probably all a lie, including the part about being a doctor, thought Grant, but what the hell? Who was he to worry about people lying, anyway? Just the same, he did not like Tydon.

Tydon was again drinking flat beer, and Grant suspected now that it was flat because it was the remnants of open bottles from the night before which Tydon had scavenged.

‘And you get along without money altogether?’ he asked, because Tydon obviously expected some reaction to his self-revelation.

‘Not quite—I have a couple of pounds from a war pension; but it’s possible to live on The Yabba without money, provided you conform.’

Was this wretched man suggesting that he, John Grant, should ‘conform’, should adopt the same wretched life as Tydon?

At that, it might be the solution to the next six weeks.

But not here, not in this oven of a hut. And damn it, he had to get out of Bundanyabba after that episode last night, apart from anything else.

Tydon opened the refrigerator to get more beer and Grant saw a number of partly empty bottles on the lower shelf.

The pain in his head had settled down to a gnawing ache that he did not think he could stand for long.

‘You wouldn’t have an A.P.C., would you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Tydon, ‘but I’ve got something a lot better.’

He pulled a tin out of his pocket, opened it and took out one of a number of large white pills.

‘This’ll fix your headache and pep you up a bit.’

Grant took the pill from Tydon reluctantly. He fully shared the rest of Australia’s distrust of alcoholic doctors.

‘Wash it down with beer, it’s better that way,’ said Tydon, filling Grant’s glass.

‘I…I find a lot of drugs upset me…perhaps I’ll…’

‘There’s nothing in that will hurt you,’ said Tydon with authority, ‘swallow it.’

There were few things Grant would not do rather than suffer embarrassment, and he swallowed the pill in a gulp of beer.

It had no immediate harmful effect.

Tydon rolled a cigarette from a pouch of tobacco and handed the pouch across to Grant. Grant’s mouth felt as though it was coated with soft cement but his being yearned for a cigarette, and with fumbling and slightly trembling fingers he rolled one.

If he could get through today and just take a few drinks to soothe his sick body, he would think hard tomorrow about getting work or getting to Sydney.

And for the meantime, why not stay here? But about his clothes…

‘I’ve left my suitcases in a pub somewhere, I’d better try to find them, I think,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ said Tydon,’they’ll be there tomorrow and you’ve got an appointment in half an hour.’

‘I have?’

‘Forgotten that too? You’re going ‘roo shooting with Dick and Joe.’

‘Dick and Joe?’

‘The two miners at Hynes’s last night.’ Tydon added conversationally, ‘You were lucky Joe didn’t beat you to a pulp.’

‘What did I do?’

‘Janette.’

‘Oh…I see. Actually you know, nothing happened between me and her.’ He didn’t know why he bothered to tell that to Tydon.

‘No?’

Grant didn’t feel like pursuing the point. After all it had not been his fault, or Janette’s that nothing had happened.

‘Janette,’ said Tydon, determined to discuss her, ‘is a very interesting biological case.’

‘So?’

‘If she were a man she’d have been jailed for rape two years ago.’

‘Go on. What’s all this about kangaroo shooting?’

‘You arranged to go shooting, that’s all.’

‘With a man who was going to beat me to a pulp last night?’

‘Yes. But you’ll be safe enough while Janette’s not around. Now if I ever married, Janette is just the sort of girl I’d marry. She likes sex, she likes to experiment and she likes variety.’

Grant listened in despair; he was in no condition to listen to the prurient speculations of this wretched man.

‘And she’s an intelligent girl, she’s got a good body and a pretty enough face.’

Grant thought of Janette’s face as he had seen it, sharp against the moonlight and, later, blurred and close to his. Oh Robyn, Robyn of the cool white skirts.

‘Moreover, like most of the other men who’ve met her, I know what she’s like in bed; and she’s good, damned good.’

That did not ring true to Grant. Tydon seemed to him a nasty little psychopath who had neither been a doctor nor gone to bed with Janette, even assuming that bed was a euphemism for that bare patch in the circle of scrub between the city and the mine.

‘I thought about marrying her once,’ Tydon spoke savagely
all the time, as though contemptuously quelling somebody in a bitter argument,’but I couldn’t live with any woman for long. Just the same I think I’ll bring her out here for a while again soon.’

Great, thought Grant, wonderful; but what did he do? Get up and stalk out into the sun? Stalk over the hot dust to the city? and then stalk up and down the streets until he dropped dead from heat prostration?

No, he would sit here and let Tydon tell him about his sex life, or supposed sex life, or rather supposed life—it was certainly sexy…he lost the train of the thought.

Tydon was still talking.

‘But what’s wrong with a woman taking a man when she feels like one?’

‘I…don’t really know.’

‘You don’t know because there’s nothing wrong with it, nothing. It’s a damned sensible, civilised way to behave.’

‘And yet you’d find people who’d call Janette a slut— women who’d like to act like her, and men she hasn’t given a tumble.’

‘Are you coming shooting?’

‘Yes. Sex is just like eating, or sleeping or eliminating. It’s a thing you do because you have to or because you want to. Have another drink. And yet it’s been surrounded by all the
mystery and ballyhoo of centuries for God knows what reason.’

‘Thanks.’ But that must be the last drink for today.

Tydon was sitting hunched on his box, making spasmodic little movements with his haunches as he talked so that he seemed to be twitching in pain.

Grant noticed that the ache in his head had been replaced by a sensation which was, if anything, worse—a sort of humming vibration which seemed to start at the top of his spine and spread to the top of his skull and back down again into his body.

That, he thought, was doubtless the ‘pepping-up’ that Tydon had promised.

He wished he had not taken that pill.

Tydon, twitching all the time, went on and went on about Janette, his face slipping a little each time he mentioned her name, about sex hygiene, about social disease, about conception and miscarriage and abortion and homosexuality (a lot of nonsense was talked about homosexuality, there was nothing wrong with it, although he didn’t practise it himself) and about genital organs and the effects of their size on cohabitation and about Janette and about Janette and about Janette.

Grant felt as though he had been released from dank and
noisome captivity when a car drew up outside, a horn sounded, a dog barked and a voice shouted:’Come on, Doc!’

Tydon went to the door.

Grant flinched at the block of light that fell into the room.