Wake In Fright (3 page)

He put his bags on the luggage rack, opened a window, and stretched out on a seat, with his feet poised on an armrest.

‘There is a heart that’s made for you,’ the singers were chanting,

‘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.’

And that, thought the schoolteacher, was the fate of a race of singers who had long since forgotten how to make songs.

He closed his eyes as the train began to move. The clatter of the wheels, the sound of the engine and the discordant cries of the singers formed a senseless rhythm as he drifted into the semi-coma of the train traveller.

•

The Friday Train swayed on across the plains and once every five miles or so there would be a decrepit homestead, and the train driver would sound his whistle. A ragged band of children would assemble and conscientiously wave and wave until the train was out of sight and there was no more train until Monday.

Eventually the sun relinquished its torturing hold and the plains became brown and purple and gold and then black as the sky was pierced by a million bursts of flickering light from dispassionate worlds unthinkable distances apart.The homesteads were just yellow patches of light in window frames,
but the train driver sounded his whistle just the same and, in the darkness, there were children waving just the same.

•

The schoolteacher shook himself into full consciousness as the train approached Bundanyabba.The city was a smatter of lights rather higher than the level of the plains, looking a little like the lights of a cluster of ships riding motionless on a still dark sea.

The teacher took off his sunglasses and tucked them in his breast pocket. The singers had given up now and were presumably devoting themselves to gathering their luggage and shaking off the fug of an hour or so’s dozing.

The Friday Train was rocking through the city and he looked out on the rows of weatherboard houses, built on tiny blocks of land as though there was a scarcity of space, or as though they had to huddle together to form a garrison against the loneliness of the outback.

The schoolteacher knew Bundanyabba fairly well from the two term holidays he had spent there. He had swum in the chlorinated swimming pool, attended the picture theatres, drunk the heavily preserved beer that had to be railed from the coast, and thus had exhausted the pleasures offered. He
wished there had been an aircraft flying eastwards that evening.

The train stopped with a relieved clatter as though glad it had arrived, and rather surprised that it had successfully traversed the plains once more. Grant carried his bags through the bustle on the station and handed the forward half of his return ticket to the collector. The other half he carefully stowed in his wallet against the time when he would pass through these gates again. He consciously ignored the torn scrap of cardboard’s silent statement that he had not seen the last of Tiboonda.

Outside the station several taxi drivers were waiting, touting for custom.The schoolteacher engaged one and gave him the address of the hotel to which he had written booking a room for the night.

‘New to The Yabba?’ said the taxi driver as he drove through the wide streets, lined with buildings affecting awnings supported by poles which looked as though they suffered from rickets.

‘Yes,’ said the schoolteacher.

‘Staying long?’

‘Just tonight.’

‘That’s hard luck. You ought to see a bit more of The Yabba than that.’

One would have thought, reflected the teacher, that the
driver was trying to sell a conducted tour, but he had noticed before that all the people of Bundanyabba seemed to be extremely patriotic.

‘You think it’s worth seeing?’ he said.

‘I’ll say I do. Everybody likes The Yabba. Best place in Australia.’

‘So? Why?’ He knew he was taking a risk, the determination of Bundanyabba people to deliver monologues on the virtues of the place required less encouragement than that. Still, he was only committed to listen for the length of the taxi journey.

‘Well,’ the driver was saying, ‘it’s a free and easy place. Nobody cares who you are or where you come from; as long as you’re a good bloke you’re all right. Friendly place it is. I’ve been here eight years. Came out from Sydney because I had a bad chest. Chest cleared up in six months but I wouldn’t think of leavin’The Yabba.’

The schoolteacher had also previously observed the friendly habits of the people of Bundanyabba, and found them crude and embarrassing. As for the city’s therapeutic qualities, the taxi driver looked sallow and drawn, and distinctly in need of a change to the kinder climate of the coast.

‘Try and stay a bit longer,’ urged the taxi driver as the schoolteacher paid him.

The teacher fancied he had been overcharged, but he wasn’t sure.

The girl behind the reception desk at the hotel was a faded facsimile of girls behind reception desks all over the world.

‘Have you a room for John Grant? I made a booking by letter.’

The girl picked up a large ledger without speaking and began turning over the pages. Grant put down his suitcases and stood waiting patiently enough.The girl found the page containing the night’s bookings and slowly ran a finger down the column from the top. The finger stopped halfway down the page and she looked up.

‘You only stopping the night?’

‘That’s all.’

‘You’ll have to pay now.’

‘That will be all right.’

‘Will you be wanting breakfast?’

‘Yes, please.’

‘Then it will be one pound ten.’

He took out two pound notes and gave them to her. She handed him in return a large piece of metal inscribed with the number seven and with two keys attached.

‘One’s for the front door and one’s for your room,’ said the girl in a monotone, as though she had said it many times
before, which of course she had, ‘there’s ten shillings deposit on the keys. You’ll get that back when you bring the keys back.’

‘Good, thank you.’

She lost interest in him and returned to the vacuous contemplation practised by her kind.

‘Could you tell me where room seven is, please?’

‘Up-the-steps-and-down-the-corridor-to-the-right,’ she said, as though it was all one word, without raising her eyes.

She at least was no apostle of the friendship doctrine of Bundanyabba, thought Grant.

Room number seven had an iron bedstead, an unpromising mattress, a small wardrobe, a chest of drawers and an unstable-looking table with a Bible and a jug of water on it. The Bible and the water jug looked equally ancient and unused. Grant was thirsty, but Bundanyabba water, even when not contained in jugs like that, was so heavily chlorinated and so hard with natural chemicals that he had always found that drinking it was similar in effect to taking those harsh laxatives the newspaper advertisements were always warning about.

He dropped his suitcases on the bed and went out to find a cafe where he could get something to eat and drink. It was well after ten o’clock and the doors of the hotel bars were pulled to, although not quite shut, which was the
Bundanyabba method of obeying the law that forbade the sale of liquor after ten o’clock at night and at any time on Sundays.

Grant passed a number of spotty milk-bar cafes which cropped up at fairly regular intervals, emitting uninviting odours of greasy chipped potatoes and milky coffee into the main street.

He began to feel that perhaps a couple of drinks were desirable before eating, and went into the first hotel he came to. It had batwing doors outside the main doors, like most of the hotels in Bundanyabba.These had to be pulled open and the main doors pushed open. Grant carefully pushed the main door to again, in deference to local usage.

It was hard to decide whether it was hotter inside the hotel or out in the street. The island bar was ringed with dense crowds of men and, inside, the hotelkeeper with heavy blue veins bulging from a reddened face, pulled beer with clumsy rapidity, at the same time urging two depressed and wispy barmaids to greater efforts.

‘Men wanting a drink behind you there, Jean. Just a minute, mate, and the girl will serve you. Two schooners? Right! Coming up. Four middies over here, Mary. All right, boys, just a minute and we’ll get to you. Hello there, Jack, what’re you having?’ False good fellowship struggled with satisfied
avarice to make up the expression on his hot, wet, mobile face; and it was even money which was the more successful.

The clang of the cash register rang steadily through the smoke-filled room above the clamour of fifty men all talking loudly and at once.

Knowing it was useless to hope that any of the dozens of hotels in Bundanyabba would be any less crowded, Grant threaded his way through to the bar and managed to obtain a beer from one of the women. He retreated to a corner, took out his cigarettes and found he had no matches.The effort of getting back to the bar to buy a box was too great, and he looked about for someone to ask for a light.

A uniformed policeman was leaning against the wall near him, drinking alone.

‘Could I get a light from you?’ said Grant.

‘Sure,’ said the policeman, dredging in his hip pocket. He came up with a large lighter fitted with an enormous windshield.

‘New to The Yabba?’ he asked, inevitably, holding a great stem of yellow flame to Grant’s cigarette.

Grant concentrated on lighting the cigarette without singeing his nose before answering.

‘Just dropped in for the night,’ he said eventually, ‘flying to Sydney in the morning.’

‘Ah. Come from far?’

‘Tiboonda…I’m the schoolteacher out there.’

‘Oh, the schoolteacher, eh? Let’s see, then, you’re name would be…?’

Grant let him wait a little while then said, ‘Grant.’

‘That’s right. You took over from old Murchison, didn’t you?’

‘McDonald his name was.’

‘That’s right, McDonald. Well what do you know…my name’s Jock Crawford.’ He held out a large hand.

‘John Grant,’ he said. This sort of thing always happened in Bundanyabba. Still, it wouldn’t matter just for that night. This time tomorrow night he would be in Sydney and Bundanyabba would be many miles and six weeks away.

‘Will you have a drink, John?’

‘Er—well yes, thanks.’ It still distressed him a little when people, upon being introduced to him, immediately called him by his first name. Yet everybody he had ever met in the west did just that.

A lane through the crowd formed automatically for the policeman and he was served promptly by the hotelkeeper himself. He was back in less than two minutes.

‘Do you like the Huntleigh beer, John?’

‘Yes. It seems all right. Is it my imagination or is it a bit
strong?’ It was a worn subject, but one Bundanyabba people loved.

‘It’s got a hell of a kick. You want to watch it if you’re not used to it. They have to put a lot of arsenic in it to preserve it on the way up here.’

Grant looked at the beer sceptically.

‘Arsenic?’

‘So they say.’

‘Mmm. What time do the pubs close here?’ He knew the answer, but he was curious about the police view of the trading hours.

‘When the crowd goes home. Sometimes midnight, sometimes they don’t close at all…pay nights that is, mostly.’

‘The police don’t worry about it?’

‘No. What’s the use. Long as they keep the doors shut and don’t make too much row we don’t bother about them. If we did close ‘em at ten there’d only be a lot of sly grog shops spring up.’

It struck Grant that this was a curious conversation to be having with a constable who was drinking in a hotel while in uniform. Fairly obviously the police were reasonably tolerant. There was nothing to be gained in labouring the point.

‘Yes. Well. Um. Will you have another drink?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

Grant made to take the policeman’s glass.

‘Here, give us your dough. I’ll get ‘em quicker than you.’

Grant submissively handed over a ten-shilling note and the policeman was again back in two minutes with the beer. He gave Grant his change.

‘You’ve finished work for the day?’ said Grant.

‘Just started. I’m on the hotel beat. Been on it all this week so far. It’s pretty good, y’know; I don’t pay for any of the beer I drink.’

Grant didn’t quite know how to react, so he just said: ‘Don’t you?’

‘I could get yours free too, but it’d be making it a bit thick, wouldn’t it.’

‘Yes…yes of course.’

‘We do the pubs a bit of good one way and another, y’know,’ said the policeman, by way of justification, Grant presumed.

He felt himself beginning to expand under the influence of the beer. He hadn’t eaten for ten hours. The heat in the bar was pressing less heavily upon him; the noise no longer crashed into his brain, but beat more remotely around him.

He looked into the raw, freckled face of the policeman.

‘Been in The Yabba long, Jock?’ he said, luxuriating a little in his faint irony.

‘All m’life, John.’

‘Ever think of leaving?’

‘Leaving The Yabba? Not on your life. Best little town in the world this is.’

‘Ever been anywhere else?’

‘Did three months’ training in the city. Didn’t like it.’

Grant suddenly realised his private joke was not particularly good. He drained his glass.

‘I’d better get along,’ he said, ‘haven’t eaten yet.’

‘Have another one before you go.’

‘No thanks, I won’t. It’s a bit much on an empty stomach.’

‘Go on, won’t do you any harm.’The policeman winked heavily: ‘It’s on the house.’

Why not? thought Grant. It would be hard enough to sleep on that bed, anyway. He handed his glass to the policeman who again went through his crowd-penetrating routine.

‘We’ll just have this round here and we’ll go along to the next pub. I’ve got to look in on them all tonight,’ said the policeman when he came back.

Grant wondered what the incidence was of diseased liver among members of the Bundanyabba police force.