Wake In Fright (13 page)

Grant woke at dawn feeling wonderfully refreshed, until he moved. Then he realised that he was very weak and shaky. Still it was so much better than yesterday.

He was enormously hungry and when he unfolded the meat pie he found it was not so bad after all. But the yellow pastry was hard to take without something to drink. He was shockingly thirsty.

He finished the pie, packed the rug in the suitcase and forced the pieces of the rifle in too. He picked up the empty beer bottle, rummaged around until he found the top and clambered up on to the road.

It must have been about half past five and the sun was tossing hot waves on to the plain, preparing the way for the full tide of heat which would rise with the day.

Grant left his cases by the side of the ditch and went over to the sewage treatment works with his beer bottle. There did not seem to be anybody about, so he filled the bottle from a water tap, took a long drink, filled it again and jammed the top on.

The first car to come past was a big black Buick, and it rushed by spraying him with dust, his hand lifted foolishly.

Ten minutes later a utility came along and drew up as he gestured towards the east.

‘I’m only going to Yindee, mate,’ said the driver, a thin, stringy man with a very brown face and a much chewed cigarette butt attached to his lower lip.

‘That would be a help, thanks.’

‘Throw your bags in the back.’

Grant took his water bottle with him into the cabin of the utility because he was not too sure about the top. He sat with it between his knees as the utility jerked forward and began bouncing through the mist of dust which still hung around the road to mark the passing of the Buick.

‘Where are you heading, mate?’ asked the driver.

‘Going to Sydney.’

The driver said nothing for a time, his eyes squinting against the white glare of the road.

‘That’s a long way, mate,’ he said at length. ‘Gonna hitch all the way.’

‘I hope so.’

‘You’ll have your work cut out once you get out from Yelonda. Still, I suppose you’ll make it. There’s always a truck or two goes past in a week.You might be lucky and get a run through to the coast.’

‘I hope so.’

They were silent, the driver with his thoughts on whatever the smaller farmers of the west think about, and Grant trying hard not to remember the last time he came along this road.

A truck or two a week the driver had said. And this was Tuesday, he supposed. He was fairly sure it was Tuesday, but he didn’t like to ask.

The driver spat the stained cigarette butt out of the window and with considerable dexterity rolled another cigarette, keeping the car steadily on the road the while. He passed the pouch to Grant.

‘Smoke?’

‘Thanks.’ Grant had been trying to forget the dry brittle ache in the mouth and throat that a heavy smoker experiences when deprived of tobacco for any period.

He rolled a generous cigarette and lit it.

The smoke made him feel a little dizzy and sick but he took it down deep into his lungs and let it out slowly.

The sweat was running freely down his face now and his clothes were damp. He felt distinctly more healthy than he had since he had first met Tim Hynes, except that he seemed terribly nervous. His body was constantly taut and he found himself taking deep breaths, trying to relax, but not succeeding.

He was quite clear-headed, but his thoughts came very quickly, in little repetitive bursts.

And he didn’t like himself.

‘Your best bet,’ said the driver, ‘would be to hang around the pubs at Yelonda. You’ll probably find a truck going through from there.’

‘Thanks, I’ll try that.’The devil he’d try that. He’d wait on the road and if necessary die on the blasted road before he’d go into a pub again.

‘How come you’re hitchhiking to Sydney?’

‘Broke,’ said Grant.

‘But it only costs a few quid in the train, mate.’

‘I’m broker than that.’

A pause. The utility swayed in the soft dust of the road. The sun was high now and the pastel colours of morning had dried up; there was just white glare.

‘Haven’t you got any money at all?’

‘About five bob,’ said Grant, cheerfully. Now that he was definitely on his way to Sydney the fact that he had no money did not seem to be quite such a tragedy.

The driver looked at him long enough to endanger the utility. He swerved back on to the road.

‘How far you come?’

‘Just from The Yabba.’

Another pause. The driver contemplated the white road intently.

‘You’re gonna be mighty hungry before you get to Sydney.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got a rifle. I’ll pick up some game.

‘Hmm.’

The driver did not speak again until they were pulling up at the Yindee Hotel. Then he said:’I’ll be dropping you a mile up the road. Come, and I’ll buy you a drink.’

‘No thanks,’ said Grant, too abruptly.

‘My shout,’ said the driver.

‘No thanks, I’m off it,’ said Grant.

‘Well I’m going to have one,’ said the driver, a little annoyed, and stopped the utility outside the hotel.

By the time Grant had hauled his bags out of the back of the vehicle the driver’s spate of ill-humour had dissipated.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘I’ll buy you a drink.You’ll need it.’

‘Thanks all the same,’ said Grant,’but I’m off it.Thanks for the ride.’

He picked up his cases and began walking east.

The driver looked after him as though he thought he was insane.

‘And to bloody hell with you,’ he said, and went into the hotel for his drink.

Grant, wilting under the sun, walked a couple of hundred yards up the road until he came to a desiccated gum tree which offered a pretence of shade.

He sat down on one of his cases and looked westward along the road. There was no suggestion of the tight swirl of dust which would have meant a vehicle, only the drifting cloud the utility had raised, settling gently back on the plain.

He prised the top off his bottle and drank some of the warm water. It was probably about noon, and he wondered again what had happened to his watch.

Off to the right was a line of scrub indicating the course of a creek. It would undoubtedly be dry, but he might pick up a rabbit there. Food was an absolute necessity, so he had better take the risk of losing a lift and see what he could find.

He carried his cases a few yards away from the road and took out the pieces of the rifle. The mechanism puzzled him briefly then he laid the barrel in the butt groove and screwed
in the holding pin. Then he slipped the bolt into the breech, cocked it and heard it click home when he pulled the trigger.

There were plenty of cartridges in the pockets of his safari jacket. He took out a handful, shuddering at the feel of the blood-stiffened cloth, and placed one in the breech, leaving the rifle uncocked.

The creek bed was only a hundred yards or so away and he walked quickly across, his feet breaking the sparse and brittle blades of dead grass.

This was not wise, walking out here in the sun; God send he saw a rabbit or some sort of game reasonably soon.

He saw one almost immediately on the opposite side of the creek, sitting up looking at him, its ears erect and quivering.

Dropping to one knee Grant cocked the rifle and raised it to his shoulder. One eye closed, the other squinting against the glare, he tried to line the rabbit up in the sights, but they swayed and jumped and he realised he could not keep his hands still enough.

He lay down and the grass stalks pricked his body through his clothes, but he could hold the rabbit in the rifle sights. It was still bolt upright, its ears moving gently.

Holding his breath, he squeezed the trigger.

The report was slight, lost in the echoless plains, and the
rabbit leaped high in the air and fell over backwards.

Grant stood up quickly; and blackness swamped out of his chest towards his head, but stopped and receded. He had better keep out of the sun, he thought; he should have a hat of some sort.

The creek bed was dry, as he had supposed, and quite shallow, and he crossed it to pick up his rabbit.

It was rotten with myxomatosis.

He held it, wondering whether he could salvage anything from the carcass, then threw it away with a twinge of disgust.

He could feel his confidence draining away as he looked along the creek bed, red on the sides where the underlying clay had been exposed and white with thick dust on the bottom.

But having come so far he might as well walk a few yards more, and he jumped down and began to follow the path of dust which traced out the course the water took when it ran for a week once a year, if times were good.

His feet made no sound in the dust and he came upon a second rabbit around the first bend. It was only twenty feet away and seemed too surprised to move.

Even with his shaking hands he could not miss and he raised the rifle to his shoulder, lined up on the rabbit’s head and squeezed the trigger.

The bolt clicked home, but there was no report. He had forgotten to reload.

Grant had done quite a deal of shooting, and he stood motionless for a moment, then slowly lowered the rifle, drew back the bolt, ejected the spent cartridge, inserted a live one, cocked the rifle, and raised it again, all without startling the rabbit.

Then he shot it through the head.

It was lean, but had no visible trace of disease about its body. Grant carried it by the back legs across to his suitcases and then moved under the tree again.

There was still no sign of a vehicle on the road; the utility had gone from in front of the hotel now. He must have missed hearing it while he was in the creek-bed.

He took his razor from the suitcase and extracted the blade. Holding the rabbit on the ground he slit the skin around the neck and peeled it off the body like a glove. Another slit and he emptied the entrails on to the ground.

Immediately swarms of blowflies descended and Grant moved a few yards away to hack off the rabbit’s head. But the leaden beat of the sun sent him back under the scant shade of the tree so he tossed a few handfuls of dust over the skin and the entrails to discourage the blowflies and flung the head well away.

He had no trouble lighting a fire because the tree bark, dead grass and a few dead branches had long since been emptied of any vestige of moisture.

As the fire died down he dropped the rabbit into the centre of it. He did not expect to enjoy it, anyway. All he wanted was food with at least the semblance of being cooked.

When it began to char he pulled it out of the fire and broke it in half. One half he wrapped in an old shirt and stuffed into his suitcase. The other he began to gnaw, squatting by the empty road.

The meat was still half raw, lean and stringy and would have been unpalatable even if it had been allowed to hang. But he chewed through it, wishing only that he had thought to provide himself with salt. That would not have cost much. He might buy some in the next town since he proposed to live like this for some time.

Some time—how long was some time? There was really nothing to indicate that he would ever stop living like this, except that he would eventually run out of bullets.

He cleaned the bones of the rabbit conscientiously and sat down with his back against the trunk of the tree looking down the road towards Bundanyabba.

Despair settled on him like a fog as the day wore on and the colours that Aborigines like to paint appeared on the
plains when the sun sank down towards the horizon.

He sat there, longing for a cigarette, trying to stave off the nagging hopeless anxiety of the hysteric; desperately trying not to think of the past or the future.

Several times he took swigs from the bottle of now almost hot water. He thought of going back to the hotel to fill it, but he was afraid he might buy cigarettes if he saw them in front of him, or beer.

He’d come forty miles in one day and he had hundreds of miles to go. He would take a month on the journey if he maintained this rate. A month on the road with five or six shillings in his pocket. And it might be longer.

And when he got to Sydney? But he would not think about that. Anything that happened there must of necessity be better than being in Bundanyabba.

A spiral of dust in the purple dimness underlying the flaring orange of the sunset, and he began to take the rifle apart. It wouldn’t do to beg a ride brandishing a rifle. He packed the pieces in a suitcase along with the now empty bottle and waited, wondering whether the car, truck, utility, whatever it was, would turn off on some improbable excuse for a side-road and disappear, a fading swirl of dust in the gathering darkness.

In any case it was almost certain to stop at the hotel. He doubted whether there was a driver within five hundred miles
of Bundanyabba who could navigate his vehicle past a hotel without stopping.

Soon he could see that it was a truck, bouncing fast along the pitted road. The fact that it was a truck meant nothing. Many of the small landholders kept quite large trucks to take their produce to Bundanyabba and they used them as cars at other times. The only vehicles that would be going any great distance would probably be semitrailers. Still, another fifty miles would be something.

From the time he first saw it, twenty minutes passed before the truck reached the hotel. It didn’t stop there.

Grant started flagging it when it was still fifty yards away. The driver slowed down and Grant could see him peering out at him. Even in the west a man gives a little thought to whether or not he should pick up a stranger by the road at nightfall. But Grant looked all right and the driver stopped.

Grant walked over and put his head up to the offside window of the driver’s cabin.

‘Could I get a lift as far as you’re going?’ he said.

‘Where you going, mate?’ said the driver, a round-faced, unshaven man of about thirty-five.

‘Sydney, eventually,’ said Grant, apologetically.

‘I’m only going as far as Yelonda, mate.’

‘That’d be a help.’

Again the driver pondered, keeping his eyes steadily on Grant. Then, apparently reaching some conclusion:’All right, hop in.’