Wake In Fright (12 page)

He half opened his eyes, looked around until he found the direction of the city and began to walk, head down, doggedly, grasping the rifle in one hand, not thinking.

It was only about half a mile to the first houses, and it did not take as long as Grant thought it did for him to walk there. Not once did he look back to Tydon’s hut.

He plodded down the street, between the houses, not caring whether anyone thought his appearance strange.

A slight breeze was blowing, and the dust from the waste heaps beside the mines swirled knee-deep along the streets, like a drifting, shifting, low-lying cloud.

Grant’s face was taut and dry. People never seem to sweat while they’re in the sun of the west; the beads of moisture dry up as they ooze through the skin.

The dust caked on Grant’s lips. His mouth was an arid gap
in his head. Once he almost thought of Robyn, but she did not really exist any more; there was nothing but his pain and the heat and the dust eddying around his knees and the necessity to get to Sydney.

He stopped, transferred the rifle to his left hand and felt in the fob pocket of his trousers. Slowly he drew out his money; the crinkled ten-shilling note, the two-shilling piece, the sixpence and the penny.

Clutching the money in his hand he began to walk again.

In the main street people looked at him, unshaven, befouled, his clothes darkened with blood. People shifted about him almost on the outskirts of his consciousness. He walked straight along the footpath and people melted away in front of him.

Then one did not melt away.

Grant stopped, his nose almost against a uniform shirt. He raised his eyes. There was a face under a peaked cap. It was a policeman.

‘Look here, John, you can’t go carrying a rifle through the street like that.’

The policeman seemed to know him.

He brought his eyes to bear on the face. Yes. He knew the policeman too. It was the one he had met the first night in Bundanyabba, so long ago.

He tried to say something, but he only croaked.

‘Here, show us it, son.’ The rifle was plucked from his hands. The policeman was doing something to it.Then he pressed it back into Grant’s hands in two pieces, the stock and the barrel.

‘There, that’s all right now, put this in your pocket.’The policeman gave Grant something small and hard. He looked at it. It was the rifle bolt.

‘What’s the matter with you, John?’

Grant reached down into himself and brought out:’Been shooting.’

That made everything clear to the policeman.

‘Ah! Bit hungover, eh?’

Grant allowed his head to drop, then raised it again. Surely the policeman knew that meant ‘yes’. He didn’t have to speak, did he?

‘You need a hair of the dog, mate—come on.’

The furtive cunning that Grant now knew in himself turned in the void of his mind and he managed to almost grin as he said: ‘Sorry, mate, but I’m out of cash at the moment.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ said the policeman, as Grant had known he would. ‘Come on.’

There’s nowhere in Bundanyabba that’s far from a hotel, and Grant had just time to slip his money back into his fob
pocket before he was again leaning on a bar, his foot rising automatically, feeling for the footrail.

The relief he knew he would find in beer stimulated him in prospect and he tried to drag the policeman’s name out of his memory. Not that it mattered much: ‘mate’ would do.

‘Couple of schooners, Joyce,’ said the policeman,’me mate’s in a bad way.’

‘He looks it,’ said Joyce, whom Grant could not see because he did not turn his eyes from the bar.

The policeman said something then that seemed to require an answer; but Grant could not absorb it.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he said,’I’m feeling a bit crook. I don’t get you.’

The policeman laughed.

‘You must have done a lot of shooting.’

The beer came. Nausea and thirst warred briefly in Grant; and thirst won, thirst and the need for something that would make his body something he could bear to be with.

His fingers were shaking as he curled them around the cold wet glass. He brought it to his face and breathed the coldness from the froth-crowned liquid.

Then he absorbed the beer into his racked frame, quickly to kill the nausea, then slowly to feel it caressing through his body, sending soft broken waves of coolness out from his stomach. Then it was all gone.

‘Better?’ said the policeman.

‘Better,’ said Grant. ‘Thanks…Jock.’

‘Have another?’

‘Oh… I don’t really like to…I…’

‘Ah bulsh, you can buy me a few next time you see me. Two more thanks, Joyce.’

Grant felt terribly weak standing waiting for the next beer. It was probably quite some time since he had eaten; he could not remember when. He was not too sure what day it was, but he thought it was Monday. He didn’t much care what time it was.

‘I thought you were pulling out of The Yabba on Saturday?’

‘Yes. I was.’ But that had been in another world, another life.

‘What went wrong?’

‘Oh, I…got involved.’ He wasn’t up to talking yet, nor to thinking, and if that beer did not come quickly he would probably fall at the policeman’s feet.

It came and Grant drank it quickly, without pausing. There was no pleasure in this; this was for sheer survival.

The policeman said something to him again, but he did not know what it was.

‘Jock, you’ve damn near saved my life. How about
completing the job by giving me a cigarette?’

While he was rolling the cigarette Joyce came up and said ‘Same again, boys?’ and Grant absentmindedly ignored her so the two schooners reappeared filled. The policeman was getting it free, anyway.

Half the third schooner, then Grant got a light from the policeman and let the smoke roll around his mouth, up behind his nose, then took it down into his lungs. It made him feel a little ill, but a man’s metabolism could be balanced by beer and tobacco whether he liked them much or not.

Clarity descended upon Grant, but he knew that it would not last an hour unless he became drunk, and he would not become drunk.

‘Jock, where could I get a shower?’

‘Well… at your pub, I suppose.’

‘I’m not in a pub.’

‘Wherever you’re staying then.’

‘I’m not staying anywhere.’

‘I don’t get you, mate.’

‘Look, Jock, I’m in a mess. I’m broke. I want to get back to Sydney, and before I go I want to have a shower and clean myself up a bit. Can you help me?’

The policeman looked at him, wondering, then said,’Ah, yes, I can help you, John. Hey, Joyce!’And when Joyce came
up:‘Can my mate here have a shower upstairs?’

Joyce looked at Grant a moment, doubtfully, but then, because the policeman had asked, ‘Oh, yes. That’s all right, I suppose. Long as he doesn’t mess the place up.’

‘I won’t.’ Grant looked away from the barmaid’s face and saw his suitcases standing against the wall.

‘Oh!’ he said, ‘they’re mine.’

Joyce and the policeman looked at the suitcases, then at each other, then at Grant.

‘Are they?’ said Joyce.

‘Yes. I must have left them here yesterday…no, not yesterday… the other day.’

‘They’ve been here since Saturday.’

God! what day was it?

‘That’s it. I was in here drinking with a man.Tim, his name was. Do you know Tim?’

The barmaid looked at the policeman.

‘I don’t know any Tim,’ she said.’Anyway, I wasn’t on, on Saturday.’

The policeman said:’Anyhow, if John here says they’re his, they’re his.What’s in them, John?’

‘Books in that one and clothes in the other.’

The policeman went over and tried the lock on one of the cases. It came open.

‘Books,’ said the policeman, re-locked the case and came back to the bar. ‘Didn’t doubt you, of course, John.’

Grant did not care. He finished his beer.

‘Thanks a lot, Jock. I’ll get up and take that shower now. Be seeing you.’

He picked up the cases and the dismantled rifle and walked towards the door leading to what seemed to be the residential section of the hotel. He stopped and looked back. The policeman and the barmaid were both looking at him.

‘Where are the bathrooms?’ he said.

‘Out the door, up the stairs and turn left.’ Joyce was obviously regretting having given Grant permission to use the bathroom. She turned enquiringly to the policeman as Grant left the bar.

In the bathroom he stripped off his clothes and turned his head in disgust at the smell of his own body.

The hot water tap gave him a drizzle of lukewarm water, and he stood under it, scraping his skin with a fragment of soap he found on the side of the bath. It was hard to raise a lather with the water that came from the Bundanyabba mains.

He turned on the cold tap, and the temperature of the water lowered very slightly, but he stood under it for several minutes, hoping for some refreshment from it.

He did not have a towel so he shaved standing naked in
front of the mirror allowing the water to drain off his body. He cut himself three times with the razor and almost cried when he saw the blood, not with pain, with helplessness.

Then he dressed himself in clean underclothes, socks, shirt, trousers, shoes and even added a tie. His other clothes he jammed in a bundle in a corner of his suitcase. His money he put in his fob pocket.

He combed his hair and looked at himself. He was all right except for his face; it was bloated and grey and his lips were trembling. Tears seemed to be forming in his eyes.

‘My God, Grant, you’re in a bad way.’

The policeman had left the bar when Grant came back with his suitcases and his rifle, and the barmaid looked at him without speaking.

‘If I follow the main road out I get on to the eastern road, don’t I?’ said Grant.

‘The eastern road?’

‘The road that leads to the east, to the coast.’ Every word was a job of work.

Grant walked out of the hotel. The footpath was still almost hidden by the drifting dust. He looked along the glaring length of the street and his resolution evaporated. He went back into the hotel.

‘Is there a bus that goes out that way?’

‘Which way?’

‘Out to the eastern road.’

‘The 416 goes out there.’ She spoke as though that were something any fool would know.

‘Where do I get it?’

‘At the bus stop.’

Oh God, this dreary woman.

‘Yes, but where is the bus stop?’

‘Just outside the door.’

Did she have to speak as though he were an idiot or worse; still, he was, wasn’t he?

‘Thanks. Could I have six boxes of matches please?’

‘It’ll cost a shilling.’

‘That’s all right.’

Grant thought he heard her mutter: ‘I thought you were broke,’ as she turned away to get the matches.

She held out her hand for the money before she gave him the matches.

‘And a bottle of beer please.’

The beer cost three and sixpence. He had eight and a penny left.

In a shop near the hotel he bought a meat pie for a shilling and packed it, in its brown paper bag, in the case with his clothes along with the beer and the matches.

He still felt frail and leaden in one, but the change of clothes had removed some of his sense of degradation. And as yet he did not have to try very hard to stop his mind prying back into what had happened over the past few days.

The bus took him to the outskirts of the city on the western side, near the sewage treatment works. The fare was one and sixpence.

He paid the driver and stepped down from the bus on to the road and found that the glare had almost gone; dusk was setting in. That meant it must have been about seven o’clock. Where was his watch, anyway?

He waited on the roadside until the bus had turned round and headed back to the city, trying to remember what his intention had been. It had seemed fairly clear back in the hotel.

The sewage treatment works was the only building near, and he couldn’t see any people about. A ditch had been dug along the side of the road for some purpose or another and a sort of rampart of earth had been thrown up. Grant clambered over it with his cases and his rifle and slid down into the ditch.

From a suitcase he took a travelling rug which someone had given him once and he’d never used before. He spread it on the ground and sat down.

Taking the bottle of beer out of the case he looked at it, and wondered how to open it. Hadn’t he seen someone opening bottles with their teeth? He couldn’t do that. He took out his penny and worked on the top with it, levering it off a piece at a time. It took a long while and once or twice he thought he was going to cry with the sheer effort. But it came off at last.

He drank half the beer fairly quickly, it was already warm, and then unwrapped the pie and took a bite.The pastry was yellow and dry and the meat was a glutinous brown mess. He chewed on the mouthful but could not swallow it and eventually spat it out, wrapped the remains in the brown paper bag, drank the rest of the beer and lay down.

It was almost quite dark and the stars were breaking through the purple of the sky, building up into an immense curved blanket that lay over him, quite intimately.

He wondered whether he would be able to sleep. He could feel nerves throughout his body twitching and pulling and every few moments he would start as though he had been frightened.

Strange, he thought, that he did not particularly want a cigarette. Cigarettes were round and white and they made your mouth taste foul if you smoked too many. His mouth tasted foul now. Robyn had a wonderfully shaped mouth. She
wore a white skirt at tennis. He was about to serve and he stood poised on the baseline. He tossed the ball into the air, swung his racquet in a perfect movement and sent the ball sizzling over the net in an unplayable shot to win the game. His opponent did not even have time to move. A great big man, he must have been thirty feet tall and terribly broad, was towering over the nets. He was dressed in tennis shorts and a fawn sleeveless pullover.Was it fawn or yellow? You didn’t dream in colour.

And then he was completely asleep and the stars moved across the sky on their prescribed courses and the little animals of the night snuffled around him and then scuttled away, alarmed at his heavy breathing and restless movements.