Wake In Fright by Kenneth Cook

time for retreat had passed.
    He was too drunk to know the compulsions of passion, but the anaesthetised impulses within him dictated his actions and he stretched out beside her, crushing his cigarette in the dust, putting an arm across her body.
    They lay face to face. All Grant could see was a blur of cheeks, hair, lips and great closed eyes. He pressed closer, raised himself on an elbow and touched her throat with his hand.
    They lay there for perhaps a minute, Janette breathing more and more rapidly and never once opening her eyes.
    Grant kissed her, a little clumsily; but then she responded and it was strange how her lips seemed to caress his, and Ah! there at last was a flicker of passion that seemed to strike through him to her, but it didn’t last long.
    A fox yapped somewhere out behind the mine and the sound served only to increase their immense isolation.
    Sadness caught at Grant as he wondered what to do next. This was not quite what he had planned for himself, and what if he should sire a child out here in the barren land he hated? How the girl’s body quivered and shook. His own was passive now, and he wished that he could lose himself in desire, but all he had was a dreary certainty of his own intentions.
    The fox yapped again, further away now.
    Grant lay there looking at Janette, bemusedly wondering at himself and at her, and at the moonlight on the dust.
    Slowly Janette moved her hand towards her throat and undid the buttons of her dress. She drew the cloth aside and Grant saw she wore nothing else.
    She spread her arms out and let her head fall back, baring her breasts to the moon.
    Still Grant lay there, staring at her now, longing for the fierce pleasure this should give him.
    There was something more to all of it than just this, something more surely, even in the way of simple pleasure.
    The fox yapped again, so far away now it could barely be heard.
    Janette reached out an arm and drew Grant down across her body. Passion flickered again and he gave himself to the task in hand.
    But even as her arms closed around his neck nausea gripped him, violently, incredibly.
    He rolled off her body and knelt in the scrub and vomited and vomited, painfully and noisily in abject humiliation.
    Sick and ashamed he turned again at last to Janette. She was standing outside the circle of scrub. Her dress was buttoned up.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Grant, ‘we’d better go back.’
    Janette said nothing and they walked back on to the road and now the moonlight was harsh and brittle.
    Grant let his drunkenness take control; he sank into it as a man will fall asleep to stop thinking.
    Afterwards there were only patches of the rest of that night that he ever remembered…
    —Janette brushing down his jacket before they reached the house.
    —The men singing inside. They looked at him when he came in and someone had laughed.
    —Janette being gone, lost somewhere between the frontgate and the sitting room where the men were singing.
    —Another man at the party. ‘This is Doc Tydon,’ they had said. A sparse little man with a moustache.
    —Beer being handed to him and his drinking it hurriedly, without pleasure, seeking only absence of thought and feeling.
    —More beer and more beer.
    —Then the beer had run out and there had been whisky.
    —Then the whisky had run out and there had been some kind of liqueur, sweet and sticky.
    —’How do you find The Yabba, John?’ Who the devil had asked that?
    —Angry words, but who was angry with whom?
    Until at last oblivion came and Grant succeeded in annihilating himself utterly, for the time being at any rate.

[3]

    He was crouching in a corner of the schoolroom at Tiboonda, behind a desk and a man with a revolver was going to shoot him. The report of the revolver hurt his head and the flare of the explosion hurt his eyes.
    And he was dead.
    Pause.
    Oblivion.
    He was back in the corner, and the gunman was going to shoot him again and he knew it was for the second time. The pain