Wake In Fright (11 page)

Tydon and Dick went over to look, but they couldn’t find the kangaroo either.

Grant would not leave the car.

‘Funny,’ said Dick, at last.

‘Bloody funny,’ said Joe.

Grant felt his nerves tearing.

‘You saw it go down, didn’t you?’ He wondered whether his voice was breaking.

‘Yeah. Still…things look funny in the bush at night.’ Dick spoke slowly.

‘Did you hear the noise it made?’

‘Yeah. Funny noise.’

‘Ah well!’

‘Ah well!’

Dick opened some more beer then; and because the effects of his earlier drinking were wearing off, he took a swig of whisky.

Grant refused the beer, but he took a mouthful of whisky from the bottle. He could not drink whisky neat when he was quite sober, but he had no trouble with it now. It was quite pleasant really, and very reassuring.

As they drove on, they kept passing the whisky round,
because everybody felt in need of it.

Grant huddled back in his seat, drinking whisky when it was offered to him, wondering about the kangaroo he had shot.

It didn’t matter much now, in the car; but back there, in the night, under the stars…Oh God, he wished he was not drunk again.

They came across another mob of kangaroos quite soon. There were ten or twelve with one huge animal which just stood upright and looked steadfastly at the light.

One by one in answer to the demands of the cracking rifles the kangaroos dropped to the ground, or hopped lamely off into the night; all except the big one, which never moved.

‘He’s the leader of the mob,’ said Joe, as he and Grant, side by side in the trap, pumped bullets at the kangaroo. ‘He’s hit all right too.’

Dick started the car and drove over to the kangaroo. Still it stood there.

‘Don’t waste any more bullets,’ called Dick, ‘I’ll fix him!’

The kangaroo had two red stains on the white fur of its chest. One of its arms hung loose, shattered at the shoulder joint.

Dick advanced on it, his knife in his hand.

The kangaroo turned calmly to face him.

Dick made a casual movement with his knife towards its head. It swayed back slightly, resting on its tail, but made no other movement.

Joe chuckled.

‘Y’see,’ he said, ‘the ‘roo’s trying to draw him on, rip his guts out with its hind legs if he goes in close.’

The man and the kangaroo surveyed each other in the glare of the spotlight.

The miner was grinning, amused.

The kangaroo was indifferent.

This, thought Grant, was the type of situation that titillated the Romans when they matched men against exotic beasts in the arenas.

The kangaroo was taller than the man who was now so close that it was looking down at him.

Dick jumped to one side and the kangaroo shifted ground to face him. He dodged the other way, and for a moment the tip of the kangaroo’s tail came within his reach. He grabbed it, lifting it high into the air.

Unbalanced, the kangaroo flopped about, unable to control its movements, its head bent forward, helpless, without dignity.

Still holding the tail with one hand Dick leaned forward and with his knife cut deeply into the kangaroo’s leg beneath the crutch. Then he cut the other leg, and dropped the tail.

Hamstrung, the kangaroo stood motionless, its back to the light, not moving its head.

Dick grabbed it by the snout and hacked open its throat. It shuddered and sank to the ground. Dick ripped it open, turned out the entrails, cut off the hindquarters and bore them back to the car, leaving half the kangaroo lying on the spot where it had stood and faced him a minute before.

Everybody slapped Dick on the back and they quartered the other carcasses, and all drank some more beer and drove on again, leaving the night to cover the things they left behind them.

‘Isn’t that sort of thing dangerous?’ Grant found he was speaking slowly and ponderously again.

‘No, John,’ said Joe, ‘not if you know what you’re doing.’

‘Have you ever done it?’

‘Yeah, often, nothing to it really.’

‘I’d like to have a go.’

‘Would you now?’ He leaned forward.’Eh! Dick, John here reckons he wants to have a go at a ‘roo with a knife. Will we let him?’

‘Why not?’

Tydon had turned around. Grant could not see his face; his head was a black shape against the light in front. Grant thought he was grinning.

‘Why not?’ said Tydon.

And ‘Why not?’ said Grant. On they went, plunging through the night.

They flushed the next mob by the side of the track, and the night rang with rifle fire and the biting fumes filled the car. The kangaroos died or limped away, but there was one that hopped brokenly for a few yards then stopped among the trees, clearly visible from the car.

‘That’s for you, John,’ said Joe, handing Grant his knife.

Grant took the knife and clambered out through the trap to avoid struggling with the greyhound, jumped to the ground from the roof of the car and lunged towards the kangaroo standing limply in the spotlight as though it was looking into the darkness so close at hand.

Grant could hear the men in the car cheering. A rifle went off. He didn’t know where the bullet went. He was crashing through the undergrowth, tripping, stumbling.

He might have fallen on the knife, so he held it out in front of his body, like a bayonet at charge. But that felt foolish so he pointed it towards the ground.

The kangaroo did not move.

It was not until he had almost reached it that he realised it was a very small kangaroo, no more than four feet high. It was badly wounded, and just stood, looking into the
darkness beyond the spotlight’s glare.

Grant reached it, and if he had not known the men in the car were watching he would have turned back for his rifle. He stood behind the animal, wishing it would move. Then he put a hand on its shoulder. It was furry and warm. Its chest was heaving. When he was that close the animal had two heads. Janette had had two profiles the other night.

Grant leaned back and struck at the kangaroo with his knife. The blade slit a deep gash down its back and the blood came out, a thin line on the fur, black in the spotlight. Still the kangaroo did not move.

Oh God! what was he, John Grant, schoolteacher and lover, doing out here under the contemptuous stars butchering this warm grey beast?

He leaned forward and drove the knife into the white fur on the kangaroo’s chest. The blade went in easily, deeply, but the kangaroo would not die.

Its flesh closed hard around the blade and Grant had to drag it out.

Sobbing, he drove the knife into its chest and its back again and again, and it stood there, mute, unprotesting, but it would not die.

Grant stood away for a moment, drew his hands across his eyes and heard the yells of encouragement from the car.

He put his left arm across the kangaroo’s shoulder and pulled its head back and began hacking away at its throat. In time the blood gushed out, warm on his hands, and he could feel the head pulling further and further back until at last the kangaroo shuddered terribly and fell to the ground.

Grant grabbed it by the tail and began hauling it back to the car.

And as he stumbled in front of his load he pulled down the shutters in his mind and just walked and dragged and drew the blanket of drunkenness over his being again.

Being drunk is warm and soft and there is no pain and it does not really matter about kangaroos that are shot and breathe horribly and disappear in the night, or about little kangaroos that you cut to pieces before they die.

Grant killed many kangaroos that night and once even made a disastrous attempt to eviscerate one before he was sure it was dead; and it flopped about with its entrails spilling.

Everybody laughed, and they laughed again because Grant was covered in blood and they drank all the whisky and all the beer and their shooting became wilder.

Someone fired a bullet through the roof of the car and someone else fired one through the windscreen, and everybody laughed again.

Their shouts and their laughter and their bottles and their bullets and the roar of the car’s engine and the crashing of its wheels through the scrub were their contribution to the sounds of the night. The box at the rear of the car filled and overflowed with hindquarters; scattered in an erratic pattern of their progress were the half-carcasses; and in dark glades and dry creek beds kangaroos stood with bullets in their bodies waiting to die without comment.

Dear God, but man was a powerful thing and another drink would make him feel a lot better. Grant was leaning heavily on the greyhound. It didn’t mind.

Soon after all the liquor had gone Dick turned the car back, and weaving a little, drove to the road. It did not take long because they had been driving around in a circle most of the time.

The hotel at Yindee had anticipated their return and was still open. Hotels seldom close in the west.

They all went in and drank beer, and Grant did not know who paid, or cared. Everything that had happened to him that night was being re-created in his brain in spasms, little bursts of imagined action, one after the other, very quickly; the shooting, the killing, the driving, the running, the drinking; bright images, coloured images; they said you could not think in colour. They were wrong. There’s a time when your
mind flashes colour, green, orange and fire. No, that was wrong too. That was the dawn. Incredible colours on the low horizon.

The car must be moving. Now there was another hotel.

He could not see much any more, but he was aware of people and things. They were terribly far away, near the outside of him. But he had retreated far inside, so far inside that a great margin of blackness lay between himself and the outside of his head.

But he was there, a little bright flashing light, that was the core; the darkness was the flesh and the shell was his face and the top of his head and the back of his head.

They were moving, and then he had arrived and he stayed.

Nothing for a time.

Then, Oh God! The light was bright and this could not be.Tydon. But the light went out. Then he went out.That was terrible. It should not have happened.

Nothing for a time.

Oh God! The light was bright and this could not be, again. It was all to do with being drunk because this could not, did not, happen to John Grant, schoolteacher and something. Tydon was a foul thing. But so was John Grant. Oh God, that light! But it was going out. And it went out. But what had happened before was terrible. It should not have happened.

It could not have happened. It had happened twice. And then nothing for a long time.

•

When he awoke he did not know where he was or when it was; he knew only that if he moved the pain would start.

For a time he lay secure in the calm that precedes the agonies of a hangover.

Then the tortures began to happen to him, approaching stealthily, penetrating deeply and swelling.

He was sick.

Memory struggled within him and deliberately he subdued it. But it came back.

Slowly he raised his head. He was back in Tydon’s hut.That was not really a surprise. He could see bloodstains on his arms.

Last night’s orgy flitted back to him in hideous little cameos. But he was too sick to know remorse yet.

That bare, whitish, heaving thing there? It was his chest. He raised his head a little more. He was naked. He turned his head. His clothes were in a heap on the floor. Tydon was lying on another stretcher, asleep, covered by a sheet of some sort.

Grant let his head fall back. He had so many things to
regret and so little strength to regret with. Perhaps he could sleep?

But now the arid wakefulness that comes to the drunkard was upon him and he knew he had to face a day of living.

Suddenly—what about those spasms of light in the night?

An awful sickness washed over him. What had happened to him in the night? Something appalling had happened to him, but what was it?

Driving thought and memory back, Grant sat up quickly. And the pain started flooding his mind in blinding waves.

Never mind, while his head hurt he could not think. But get out of here. Get out of here now.

He rolled his legs off the stretcher and stood up. He felt as though small leaden weights had been sewn to his intestines, his eyes, his nerve-ends. Oh God! the pain in his head.

Slowly, but not caring whether he woke Tydon, Grant dressed. His clothes were stiff with blood and they smelt.What had happened to that kangaroo that had disappeared after he had shot it? Things half remembered and terribly feared, shrieked at him; tears of mystic terror rimmed his eyes. And that blasted, damnable, bloody light in the night. What had that been? What had happened?

Careful, Grant, careful, he didn’t really want to remember.

Tydon woke up as he was lacing his shoes.

‘Going?’

‘Yes.’The word seemed to come from a long way away.

‘Where?’

‘Sydney.’The thought formed in his mind as he answered the question.

‘How?’

His jaws did not seem to be working properly and he did not answer; in any case he didn’t know.

He was not looking at Tydon, but he knew Tydon was smiling at him.

‘Want a drink before you go?’

Grant shook his head, slowly.

‘Food?’

‘No.’

He could not see very clearly and it took him a long time to tie his shoelaces.

At last he stood up and looked about him for the door of the hut.

‘Don’t forget your gun,’ said Tydon.

Grant turned and looked at him, confused. He thought Tydon looked like an emaciated rat thrusting his face out from under the sheet. Dear God, what had he done last night?

‘What gun?’

‘The boys made you a present of the gun.’Tydon nodded
towards the rifle lying on the floor near Grant’s feet.

Grant eased himself down and grasped the rifle.

Tydon was saying something else, but Grant could not understand and didn’t listen. He walked to the door, shut his eyes, opened the door and stepped out into the full light of day.

He stood outside the hut and let the door close behind him; stood with his eyes shut waiting for the first feverish attack of the heat to subside to the dull, bruising blast that would not cease until dusk.