Wake In Fright by Kenneth Cook Page B

the time now?’ His own watch had stopped.
    ‘About four o’clock.’
    ‘Hell!’ Grant did his best to stand up briskly.’Well, thanks for your hospitality. I’d better be getting along.’ He’d said that somewhere before recently…of course…at Hynes’s.
    ‘You’ve got nowhere to go, so you might as well stay here.’
    ‘But I can’t stay here indefinitely.’ He felt a need to explain himself. You see I’m the schoolteacher at Tiboonda and I lost my…’
    ‘Yes. I heard all that crap last night. I don’t believe a word of it.’
    ‘You don’t?’
    ‘No.’ Tydon was carelessly contemptuous.
    ‘But…why not?’
    ‘I saw you at the Game on Friday night.’
    ‘Ah…’
    ‘What did you want to lie about it for?’
    ‘Well, a man feels a bit of a fool…’
    ‘Better men than you have been made fools of at the Game.’
    Grant could see and hear Tydon clearly for the first time now and he didn’t like him much. He had very bad teeth.
    ‘No doubt. But in any case I can’t stay in your…cabin indefinitely, can I?’
    ‘It’s not my cabin. Belongs to the mines. I’ve just been living in it for five years.’
    ‘Yes, well anyway…’
    ‘You might as well stay here as try to sponge on men like Tim Hynes.’
    There was not much to say to that, so Grant sat there and looked out of the small window of the kitchen. The plain dwindling away to dancing heat haze made him turn his head hurriedly.
    He had to say something to Tydon, he supposed, so he said:
    ‘You’ve lived here for five years?’
    Tydon reacted as though he had been waiting for the question.
    ‘If it will satisfy your curiosity about me,’ he said, although Grant was not aware of having expressed any particular curiosity about him, ‘I am a doctor of medicine and an alcoholic.’
    Grant did not care, and could not see what that had to do with the length of time he had been living in the hut, but Tydon went on:
    ‘I came to Bundanyabba seven years ago because it is probably the only place in Australia where I could practise medicine without the fact that I was an alcoholic preventing people coming to me.
    ‘I discovered in one month flat that I could live and drink as much as I liked without working at anything, provided I remained what the locals term a “character”.’
    Grant said ‘Hmm,’ and hoped the monologue had come to an end. It hadn’t.
    ‘I remained a character. I live in this hut. I obtain all my meals free from my many friends who also provide me with my requirements in beer, which, with some self-control, is the only alcohol I allow myself.’
    That was probably all a lie, including the part about being a doctor, thought Grant, but what the hell? Who was he to worry about people lying, anyway? Just the same, he did not like Tydon.
    Tydon was again drinking flat beer, and Grant suspected now that it was flat because it was the remnants of open bottles from the night before which Tydon had scavenged.
    ‘And you get along without money altogether?’ he asked, because Tydon obviously expected some reaction to his self-revelation.
    ‘Not quite—I have a couple of pounds from a war pension; but it’s possible to live on The Yabba without money, provided you conform.’
    Was this wretched man suggesting that he, John Grant, should ‘conform’, should adopt the same wretched life as Tydon?
    At that, it might be the solution to the next six weeks.
    But not here, not in this oven of a hut. And damn it, he had to get out of Bundanyabba after that episode last night, apart from anything else.
    Tydon opened the refrigerator to get more beer and Grant saw a number of partly empty bottles on the lower shelf.
    The pain in his head had settled down to a gnawing ache that he did not think he could stand for long.
    ‘You wouldn’t have an A.P.C., would you?’ he asked.
    ‘No,’ said Tydon, ‘but I’ve got something a lot better.’
    He pulled a tin out of his pocket, opened it and took out one of a number of large