Wake In Fright (7 page)

‘Are you a member of the Buffalo lodge?’

‘No. Never heard of it.’

‘Not a Mason and not a Buff,’ Hynes was nonplussed; then, as if in comprehension: ‘You’d be a Roman Catholic then?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Not that that’d be much help to you, anyway. Well what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And you’re not a Buff?’

‘No. I’m not a Buff.’

‘Poor old John. Two more beers, miss!’

Grant did not bother to protest. He was beginning to feel withdrawn and his chagrin over his losses was turning to sadness. He was not used to heavy drinking after a light breakfast of pawpaw.

He drank with Hynes throughout the morning and talked of Bundanyabba, of Hynes’s work—he had something to do with one of the mines it appeared—of Hynes’s two beautiful daughters, and, later in the morning, of Hynes’s wonderful wife.

At first Grant kept trying to bring the conversation around to his chances of getting work in Bundanyabba, but that only set Hynes off on the imponderability of Grant’s not being a Buff, and Grant couldn’t stand it. So Grant, who soon didn’t care much anyway, just gave himself up to drinking.

And then, when Hynes was off buying some bottled beer to take home, Grant found himself leaning sombrely on the bar thinking of Robyn with deep melancholy.

Robyn spoke with a mellow, full voice and when she spoke her mouth moved a little shyly, a little boldly. Her eyes were grey and clear. There was a suggestion of oriental gravity in her fair, wide face, but the gravity disintegrated and crumbled away when she smiled. Her profile was calm and Grecian, her body soft and strong.

‘We’d better be getting home for dinner.’

Grant realised he had been smiling gently at the bar, and he felt his thoughts falling and bumping against one another as he rearranged them and turned to face Hynes, whose arms were full of bottled beer wrapped in brown paper.

‘I can hardly land in on your wife for dinner.’ Grant spoke slowly.

‘’Course you can. She’s used to it.’

‘Yes. But to be perfectly frank, old man, I’ve had a little too much to drink and I hardly like to visit a stranger’s home…’

‘There’s no strangers in TheYabba, man, come along now.’

It was almost one o’clock.They had been drinking for three hours and Hynes weaved as he led the way out of the bar. Grant walked straight, but slowly, very aware that he was holding himself together. Hynes opened the back door of a large Ford car and put the beer on the rear seat.

‘Hop in,’ he said to Grant and went around to the driver’s side.

Grant fumbled with the doorhandle, but got in all right.

The car had been standing in the sun for hours and the temperature inside made him gasp.

But he had the drunkard’s detachment and observed his own discomfort from afar.

Soon, he thought distantly, the future would have to be faced, but for the moment he was a man who lived life as he found it.

They drove to the outskirts of the city, past the Catholic Cathedral that looked too substantial and permanent for Bundanyabba.

Hynes’s home was a low, wide weatherboard bungalow with an attempt at a front garden.

Hynes led the way across the wide front veranda, pushed open the front door and went into a dark hallway which gave a promise of coolness that was not fulfilled, because it wasn’t cool anywhere in Bundanyabba in December.

‘Go in and sit down,’ he said to Grant, pushing him into a side room. ‘I’ll tell the wife we’re here.’

Grant was in a darkened sitting room, hung with heavy curtains, thickly carpeted.

The taste, he thought, is no doubt deplorable, but the comfort is enormous, and he sat down in a deep armchair, leather upholstery and wooden arms.

As his eyes became accustomed to the dimness he found himself doing small mental gymnastics, reluctantly abandoning his notion that the room must be over-furnished. It was quite pleasant.

He reached for a cigarette, found it was his last, and took one instead from an ornamental box on a coffee table.

He lit it and leaned back, inhaling. This at any rate was better than wandering up and down the streets, and when he felt a little more sober he would look seriously at the question of finding work.

After all, he was not completely ruined. He had only to
find some way of getting a few pounds together and he might even yet manage a couple of weeks in Sydney. And if he didn’t, well it was only another year in Tiboonda.

Another year in Tiboonda…let that go any way…better not think too brainsickly just now.

A tall, solemn girl came into the room and said:

‘Daddy will be in in a few minutes.’

Grant stood up suddenly, and, realising as he did it that it was a shade too courtly, bowed slightly and said:

‘How do you do?’

‘Fine—how are you?’And Grant knew by the way she said it that she realised he was two-thirds drunk.

She sat down in a chair opposite him.

‘I really must apologise for landing in on you like this.Your father more or less insisted.’

‘He usually does.’ And Grant felt that this had happened many times before, and he was just another shabby incident to be borne with tolerance.

She was very slim, but her body suggested a full roundness and the dark floral frock she was wearing clung to her as she moved. Her hair was long and dark, and her eyes were very big. So was her mouth, but not too big for her face. Grant had not known that there were girls like this in the west. They had all seemed lumpy, sweaty creatures with bad complexions.

He realised that he was standing staring at her and he sat down quickly, making a business of ashing his cigarette.

‘My name’s John Grant,’ he said, regretting his boorishness as he spoke.

She smiled formally and let him wait a little before she said: ‘I’m Janette Hynes.’

They both fell silent and the girl stretched back, resting her head on the upholstery of the chair and extending her arms until her fingertips rested on her knees. It was an expression of her reaction to the heat or the boredom of Grant’s presence, or both.

Grant wished he was either more drunk or more sober, but as he was he just could not meet the situation, and he sat silent, looking desperately at the cigarette he was smoking.

They remained like that for about three minutes and then Hynes came in with two large glasses of beer.

‘A quick one before dinner,’ he said.

Grant took the glass and again made some show of protesting against coming for a meal; but Hynes talked him down loudly, and while that was going on Janette quietly left the room.

Hynes recognised her departure in no way other than by sitting down in the chair she had left. He, too, was inclined to be silent, and Grant suspected that Mrs Hynes might not
have been so docile as her husband had anticipated.

Grant wondered about the appearance of the woman, who, together with this odd little man, had produced Janette. She must have been a late child, unless Mrs Hynes were much younger than Hynes.

‘Your daughter works in The Yabba,Tim?’

‘She’s a nurse.’

‘She’s your younger daughter is she?’

‘Yeah. The other girl’s thirty.’ Hynes did not seem as enthusiastic now about his daughter as he had been in the hotel.

Janette put her head around the door to say: ‘Mother wants you to come to dinner now.’

Hynes and Grant finished their beer quickly and went out through the hall towards the back of the house.

In the dining room Mrs Hynes was putting the last touches to the table and she looked up pleasantly enough as Hynes ushered Grant in. She was a square-shaped woman, younger than Hynes, but not much.

She brushed aside Grant’s apologies and sat him down at the table where some quite good cutlery was arranged meticulously on a great expanse of white starched tablecloth.

Janette sat at one end of the table, her mother at the other, Hynes and Grant on either side. The other daughter was not in evidence.

Hynes talked continuously through dinner. Mrs Hynes laughed politely sometimes, said ‘My, My!’ at appropriate points and displayed absolutely no interest in either Grant or Hynes. Janette said nothing. Grant gained the impression that Hynes was recognised as the head of the family and that his wishes were more or less law, but that nobody thought much of him. He had encountered similar situations in other western families.

The meal was the standard outback dinner of steak and potatoes with unidentifiable tinned vegetables. But it was well prepared and Grant, his appetite inflamed by beer, ate it so readily that it was not until Mrs Hynes said ‘Would you like some more, Mr Grant?’ that he realised he was scraping up the gravy.

‘No. No thank you. Quite an excellent dinner, thank you,’ he muttered, avoiding looking at Janette.

They ate some sort of custard tart for dessert, and Hynes immediately took Grant back into the sitting room with a couple of bottles of beer while Janette and her mother cleared away the table.

Grant felt more in possession of himself after the meal and determined not to drink any more. But he took one glass from Hynes, just to hold on to, and helped himself to another cigarette from the box on the table.

‘Well,’ he said to Hynes, ‘I suppose I’d better be getting along soon.’

‘Getting along? Where to?’

‘Well I…well…I suppose I should be looking for work.’

‘You won’t find work on a Saturday.’

‘No, probably not, but I…well…’

‘Oh drink your beer, man, and enjoy yourself—why don’t you?’

‘Yes, but you see I’ve really got to do something.’

‘We’ll think about that later; now drink your beer, man, and stop worrying.’

The house vibrated as heavy feet thumped on the veranda. Hynes, his face brightening, called: ‘Come in, men, come in!’

Two huge men, about thirty, in open-necked shirts, loomed in the doorway.

‘G’day, Tim,’ they said, and ‘G’day, John,’ when they were introduced to Grant.

Hynes went hurrying out to get more glasses, and Grant knew a few moments’ awful anticipation until one of the men at last said: ‘New to The Yabba, John?’

But Hynes came back before he had to go through it all again.

Hynes and his two friends fell to simultaneous speaking, exchanging the clumsy insults that pass for repartee in the west.
Apart from a few minor variations in feature, the newcomers appeared almost identical, even to the patches of thick curly hair that appeared between their throats and their shirts.

One day, thought Grant, he would make a fortune by manufacturing those for sale, like dickies.

The two men were apparently miners who worked with Hynes. One was named Dick and the other Joe; and despite all appearances it seemed they were not brothers, nor even remotely related.

Whenever Grant had thought of miners at all he had thought of them as grimy people, who emerged from the ground like moles, except that they would blink and shake their heads, and who probably spoke with Welsh accents. These two were very well-scrubbed specimens, who spoke with the nasal twang developed by people unable to open their mouths too wide because of dust.

Grant found himself allowing his glass to be refilled, and then, surprised to find it empty, filled once more. Hynes seemed to have forgotten him and was engrossed in a conversation, largely incomprehensible to Grant, revolving around a pack of greyhounds the two miners owned jointly.

‘Do you race the dogs?’ Grant ventured once.

Dick looked at him as though surprised that he was still there.

‘What else?’ he said, and turned back to Hynes.

Grant gave his attention to his cigarette again, wondering, blearily now, how best to make his escape—and then where to escape to. But there was no real answer, so he just sat.

After a while he let his eyes close, and the voices became a constant unbroken drone. A warm drone, like bees, very big bees, on a hot, very hot, day.

Sinking, sinking, gently sinking, just enough awareness to know that it was pleasant to go down, down, blurry warmth, heavy heavy limbs at rest, the sense of flowing out, draining out, sinking slowly down without fear.

‘You’ll spill that beer if you don’t sit up straight.’

Janette was sitting on a stool near his chair.

Grant shook his head and worked his jaw muscles, struggling to dissipate the fog that gripped his mind and body. It went slowly, reluctantly, painfully.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘fell asleep.’

Hynes and his friends were still talking earnestly about dogs, and didn’t seem to have noticed.

Janette offered no help. She just sat there, impassive, unexpectant.

Grant took a huge swallow of beer from his glass and attempted a smile. It didn’t work because his face wasn’t responding properly.

But damn it all, there was a limit to the humiliation he could stand.

He pushed himself to his feet and said, a little too loudly: ‘I’ll be moving off,Tim, thanks for your hospitality.’

The three men broke off their conversation and looked at him. The young men’s faces were blank, but Hynes’s was perplexed, he didn’t quite know what to do about Grant. Obviously he was tempted to let him go and forget about him. For a moment Grant thought he was going to do just that, and he began to wish he had not suggested it…back to the streets of Bundanyabba.

‘Where would you be going, man?’

The question was not answerable and Grant floundered, muttering inarticulately, knowing and glad that Hynes was going to insist that he stay.

Hynes advanced on him with a bottle of beer.

‘You just hang around for a while,’ he said, filling Grant’s glass, ‘we’ve got to see about fixing you up with a job.’

Grant was sure by now that Hynes had no means or intention of finding him work, but it was better really to shelve things for a while longer. There was no point in staggering off half drunk.

‘Sit down and talk to Janette,’ said Hynes. ‘Can’t you content yourself with a pretty girl for an hour or two?’ Hynes
went back to his friends, leaving the statement like a lump of something faintly distasteful between Grant and Janette, something not to be adverted to, but something of which both were unduly aware.