Wake In Fright (16 page)

In the night the train rocked along the single track, over the plain, under the stars past the yellow squares of light in the windows of homesteads. It rocked and swayed and rattled and set up a lulling rhythm of sound and motion which the singers caught and blended with the rhythm of their song.

They sang; for a song, once learned, takes a long time to die in the west:

‘There is a heart that’s made for you,

A heart that needs your love divine,

A heart that could be strong and true,

If only you would say you’re mine.

If we should part my heart would break,

Oh say that this will never be.

Oh darling please, your promise make,

That you’ll belong to only me.’

The floors of the train were littered with scraps of paper and food, and every now and then a bottle shot out of a window, kept pace with the train for a few seconds, then dropped unbroken on to the dust of the plain.

For reasons known only to himself the driver would sound the steam whistle and the melancholy wail would stretch out over the darkened land, and kangaroos and cattle and foxes and dingoes would raise their heads enquiringly before going about their business.

John Grant sat, travelling backwards, in a window seat, looking out into the night.

He was smoking, and every now and then he would take the cigarette from his mouth and raise his hand to his forehead feeling a fresh scar in his closely cropped hair.

He looked with satisfaction at the glass in the window. Lately he had developed a deep affection for the normal, simple trappings of being alive. Wood, and paint, and smells, and the feel of cloth, and the taste of food, and the comfort of cigarettes, and glass—now glass was a wonderful thing…

…Glass was the first thing he had seen when he recovered
consciousness in hospital. A glass syringe, a huge glass syringe in the hand of a nurse. And he was on a sort of trolley in a white room without any windows.

The nurse pushed him so that he rolled over and his buttocks were exposed—he seemed to be wearing something like a white nightgown which stretched only to his waist, no, it had been rolled up.

The nurse plunged the needle of the syringe into his buttock and pushed the plunger. Grant saw about a quarter of a pint of clear fluid expressed from the syringe into his flesh.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Oh, you’re awake?’ said the nurse. She was about thirty and rather plain.

‘What is that stuff?’

‘Anti-gas gangrene.’

Suddenly Grant was aware that a huge pain surrounded his head. It had been there all the time but it had been so great he had not noticed it. It was a shocking pain.

And he wasn’t dead at all.

He lay his head back.

‘How bad am I?’ he said.

‘I couldn’t say,’ said the nurse. ‘You’d better ask the doctor. Not very bad I’d say; a bit of concussion.’

Grant raised his hand to his head and encountered a bandage.

‘How did it happen?’ asked the nurse.

Was it possible she did not know? Was it possible that no one knew he was now that most ludicrous of all beings, the unsuccessful suicide?

‘I’m not sure,’ said Grant, and the nurse seemed satisfied with that.

She pushed the trolley out of the room into a corridor, into a lift, into another corridor and into a smaller room. Gently she tumbled him off the trolley on to a bed.The room was quite bare apart from the bed and a small wooden chest.

She pulled a sheet over him and asked: ‘Would you like something to eat?’

‘Yes, please. I think so, and something to drink, and, nurse? I have the most frightful pain in my head.’

‘Well, what do you expect?’

She went out and shut the door after her. He heard the lock turn. He braced his head against the pain and looked around the room: only one small window, high on the rear wall.

So they knew it was attempted suicide after all…Now, sitting in the train, listening almost with affection to the singers, it seemed incredible that he had tried to shatter his
own brains. But it had been different back there under the tree that night.

One of the men opposite mutely offered him a swig from a whisky bottle he had almost emptied in the past half-hour. Grant shook his head and said: ‘No thanks.’ The man scowled at him and drank the whisky himself.

That shirt the fellow was wearing looked like part of a police uniform…

…The last time he had seen a shirt like that was in the hospital. The doctor had just seen him. A tall, well-dressed fellow, the doctor had been, wearing a white flower in his buttonhole.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked in a pleasant, rich voice.

‘Not bad. I’ve got a hell of a pain in my head. Are you the doctor?’

‘Yes, one of them.’

‘What happened?’

‘I think you’d know that better than I would.’

Grant realised he should have been embarrassed at that, but he didn’t care much.

‘No, I mean where did the bullet hit me?’

‘Top of the forehead. It cut a chunk out of your skull. You’ve got a dose of concussion, but you’ll be all right.’

‘Have I had an operation?’

‘No, I just cleaned you up.’

‘How did I get here?’

‘The police brought you here.’

‘How long will I be here?’

‘That depends—where do you live?’

‘Sydney.’

‘Well you won’t be able to travel for a month, maybe longer.’

‘Oh.’ Still that was not so bad. In fact, it more or less solved things for him.That was funny really, the bullet had not been utterly misspent.

‘There’s a policeman outside to see you. Do you feel up to talking to him?’

‘Oh yes, I suppose I’ll have to.’

‘You don’t have to immediately, you know. I can put him off for a while.’ The doctor was really a kind man.

‘Thanks very much, but it doesn’t matter. I might as well get it over with.’

‘I wouldn’t worry too much. They’re pretty tolerant of this sort of thing in Bundanyabba. I’ll send him in.’

Grant knew the policeman would be Crawford. It was.

‘Hello, John,’ he said, looking rather foolish.

‘Greetings,’ said Grant, and waited.

‘Don’t like to bother you, John, but there’s a kind of
formality when a gunshot wound is admitted to the hospital, you understand.’

‘Surely,’ said Grant. ‘Don’t worry, go ahead and ask what you want.’

‘Well,’ said Crawford, almost shaking with embarrassment, ‘it’s like this: I thought, so as not to tire you like, I’d write out a statement of what probably happened and you could sign it like, if it was all right. How’s that?’

‘Fine by me.’ What happened to people convicted of attempting suicide? Weren’t they sent to lunatic asylums?

Crawford pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Grant.

With some effort he held it up with one hand and read: ‘The gunshot wound to my head was the result of an accident. I was returning from a shooting trip and carrying my .22 rifle. I stopped to rest in a park off Randon Street, and believing the rifle to be unloaded I dropped it to the ground butt first. It exploded and that is all I remember.’

Grant looked up at Crawford and smiled.

‘That’d be about it wouldn’t it, John?’ said Crawford, looking at his feet.

‘Sure, that’s about it.Thanks, mate.’

‘Could you manage to sign it, do you think, John?’

Grant signed the paper with Crawford’s pen.

‘Thanks, John. We won’t need to bother you any more. Be seeing you around.’ And Crawford left as hurriedly as possible…

…The temperature inside the carriage rose steadily as the journey progressed, and the sweat rolled down the passengers’ faces in drops, flickering and shaking with the motion of the train.

Grant lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out of the window to be whipped to nothing by the rushing air. The heat was making him ill, he’d become unaccustomed to it while he was in hospital. Hospitalisation had proved not unpleasant as it had happened, lying there in the coolness induced by air-conditioning, on clean sheets, with the clean aseptic pain in his head eliminating subjective thought. It had been quite pleasant really, a period to be looked back on as one of non-disturbance, except for one day, when he had been there about a fortnight…

…They would not let him out of bed, and his room was always kept locked. He supposed that was because they thought he might try to commit suicide again. It did not matter, he was quite content to just lie there.

An electric bell with a push-button in the wall just to the right of his head enabled him to summon a nurse when necessary.

One push meant he needed a urine bottle, two meant a bedpan, three meant a general call to be answered when convenient and four meant an emergency call.

Grant had suffered a great deal with the first two in his early days in hospital but he became resigned.

On this day, reconciled after some debate to the necessity, he pushed the button twice.

The nurses were quite prompt and it was only a couple of minutes before he heard the lock turn in the door. A nurse came in carrying the detested vessel decently shrouded in a white cloth.

Grant pulled himself into a sitting position, his face the careful blank he employed on these occasions.

Then he looked at the nurse’s face.

It was Janette Hynes.

For one second his soul shrieked at the impossibility of this, the last humiliation, but then he realised that that was only the way he thought he ought to feel. In fact, it didn’t matter, it was only happening to John Grant.

Just the same, he would if necessary suffer internal injury rather than use that particular pan.

Janette said: ‘Hullo, I heard you were here.’

‘Yes,’ said Grant, ‘I’m here.’

She stood by the bed, still holding the pan, probably as
embarrassed as he was, thought Grant, but she didn’t show it.

There didn’t seem much to say that could be said, but somebody had to say something.

‘Sorry about that call,’ said Grant, ‘I meant to push three times. Just wanted some more water whenever anybody was passing.’

Janette looked at the water jug by his bed. Grant looked at it. It was almost full.

Janette put the pan on the bed.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I’m only a nurse here.’And she went out.

Grant used the pan eventually, there was nothing else he could do. And Janette came back and took it away…

…The sadness of the plains at night was for some reason much more apparent from the inside of a moving train, thought Grant. Perhaps it was because of the people singing; the thread of melancholy which ran through even the most boisterous of their songs was something that was part of them, possibly born of this very sadness of the plains. All his memories of Bundanyabba and the people he had met there were tinged now with this plaintive, suppressed misery.

They had all been sad; Crawford, the policeman, the people at the Two-up Game,Tim Hynes and his daughter,Tydon and the miners, the people who had given him lifts.

Even the almoner at the hospital had left him with an impression of sadness, he didn’t know why…

…They had given him back his suitcases and taken him to the almoner’s office where he had been presented with a bill for twenty-four pounds.

‘I can’t possibly pay this for a while,’ Grant said.

‘I couldn’t care less,’ said the almoner amiably. ‘Whenever you can manage it.’

‘Thanks,’ said Grant, ‘I’ll pay it in about two months.’

‘You’re a schoolteacher, aren’t you?’ said the almoner. ‘Sit down for a moment, why don’t you?’

Grant sat down.

‘Cigarette?’

Now that was a thought.There had been no real hope of cigarettes in the hospital and he had almost forgotten about them.

‘Thanks.’ The first intake of smoke was delicious, but it made him dizzy.

‘This is a damn silly question,’ said the almoner,’but you’re feeling quite all right now, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Quite all right, thanks.’

‘I mean…’

‘Oh, I see.’ Of course it would be the almoner’s job to see that Grant did not immediately go and undo all the hospital’s
work by successfully blowing his brains out.

‘Quite all right in that line, thanks. I was just broke and feeling sorry for myself. It’s all over now.’

‘Quite sure?’

Grant thought a moment.

‘Reasonably sure. As sure as one can be about these things.’ He smiled.

The almoner smiled back.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘What are your plans now?’

‘I haven’t got any.’

‘Got any money?’

‘No.’ How many conversations of this sort did the almoner go through with frustrated suicides?

‘We’ve got a sort of fund here to deal with things like this, you know,’ said the almoner, ‘I could let you have a loan of twenty pounds.’

‘That’s an extraordinary thing, surely?’

‘Not really. The Rotary Club keeps it up. There’s quite a need for it. Could you use the loan?’

Grant wondered whether the offer was extended to any indigent patient of the hospital, or only to would-be suicides.

‘Yes. I could, thanks.’

The almoner gave him the money, and he signed a form promising to pay it back within six months if he could.

‘That’s fixed that,’ said the almoner, ‘I’ll let you get away…’

…The train stopped, as western trains will do, miles from anywhere, for some reason known only to the driver. The sudden ending of motion and the violent drop in the noise level had a curious lulling effect. Even the singers were quiet and everybody looked out into the silent night. Grant recognised it as one of those moments he would always be able to reach. Another one had been when he walked out of the hospital earlier that day…

Leaving the air-conditioning and meeting the heat once more was very much like starting life all over again. He stood on the hospital steps realising how suspended and unreal his life had been in hospital. With nothing to do, with people bringing him his food, making his bed, even attending to his bathing, he had entered into that trance-like state that comes to people removed from any serious independent action, like prisoners in jail or ‘other ranks’ in the armed services.