Tim Winton - The Turning

I’m laughing. I’m kicking the dash. That ache is still there inside me but this is the best I’ve felt since the news about the exams. For once I’m not faking it. I look across at Biggie. His huge, unlovely face is creased with merriment. I just know I’ll never be able to tell him about the hopes I had for myself and for a little while I don’t care about any of it; I’m almost as happy as him. Biggie’s results were even worse than mine — he really fried — but he didn’t have his heart set on doing well; he couldn’t give a rat’s ring. For him, our bombing out is a huge joke. In his head he’s always seen himself at the meatworks or the cannery until he inherits the salmon-netting licence from his old man. He’s content, he belongs. His outlook drives my mother wild with frustration but in a way I envy him. My mother calls us Lenny and George. She teaches English; she thinks that’s funny. She’s trying to wean me off Biggie Botson. In fact she’s got a program all mapped out to get me back on track, to take the year again and re-sit the exams. But I’ve blown all that off now. Biggie’s not the brightest crayon in the box but he’s the most loyal person I know. He’s the real deal and you can’t say that about many people.

My mother won’t chase me up; she’s kind of preoccupied. She’s in love with the deputy principal. He’s married. He uses the school office to sell Amway. Both of them believe that Civics should be reintroduced as a compulsory course.

We get out into rolling pasture and granite country and then wheat-lands where the ground is freshly torn up in the hope of rain. The VW shakes like a boiling billy and we’ve finally woken up to ourselves and sheepishly dragged our beanies off. The windows are down and the hot wind rips through our hair.

Biggie must have secrets. Everyone dreams of things in private. There must be stuff he doesn’t tell me. I know about the floggings he and his mum get, but I don’t know what he wants deep down. He won’t say. But then I don’t say either. I never tell him about the Skeleton Coast in Africa where ships come aground on surf beaches and lie there broken-bellied until the dunes bury them. And the picture I have of myself in a café on the Piazza San Marco leaving a tip so big that the waiter inhales his moustache. Dreams of the big world beyond. Manila. Monterey. Places in books. In all these years I never let on. But then Biggie’s never there in the picture with me. In those daydreams he doesn’t figure, and maybe I’m guilty about that.

After a while we pull over for a leak. The sunlight is creamy up here. Standing at the roadside with it roasting my back and arms through the heavy shirt, I don’t care that picking guavas and papaya doesn’t pay much more than hosing the floor of an abattoir. If it’s outside in the sun, that’s fine by me. We’ll be growing things, not killing them. We’ll move with the seasons. We’ll be free.

Mum thinks Biggie’s an oaf, that he’s holding me back. She doesn’t know that without Biggie there’d be nothing left of me to hold back. It sounds weak, but he saved my life.

We didn’t meet until the second week of high school. I was new in town and right from the start a kid called Tony Macoli became fixated on me. He was very short with a rodent’s big eyes and narrow teeth. He sat behind me every class he could and whispered weird threats under the uncomprehending gaze of the teachers, especially my mother. He liked to jab me in the back with the point of his compass and lob spitballs into my hair. He trod on my feet in passing and gleefully broke my pencils. I’d never been a brawler but I was confident that I could knock him down. Trouble was, my parents were new to the school — this was before the old man pissed off — and I didn’t want to make trouble. I already sensed their mutual misery and I felt responsible somehow. So I put up with it. I hadn’t even spoken to Tony Macoli. I was shocked by the hatred in his wan little face. I couldn’t imagine how I’d put him out so thoroughly. It seemed that my very existence offended him.

The little bastard kept at me but I didn’t touch him. After a week I didn’t even react. I wasn’t scared. It wasn’t passive resistance or anything. I just got all weird and listless. I reckon I was depressed. But the less I responded the more Tony Macoli paid out on me.

On the second Monday of term I was shoved into a hedge, tripped in the corridor so that my books sprayed across the linoleum, and had my fingers slammed in a desk — all this before morning recess. Each little coup brought out Macoli’s wheezy little laugh. It rocked his body and tilted his head back on his neck so that the whites of his eyes showed. At morning recess I was wiping mud from my pants while he gave in to that convulsive laugh. The wind blew his tie over his left shoulder and my pulse felt shallow, as though I was only barely alive. As I got wearily back to my feet, a shambling figure passed me and I saw the flash of a fist. One second Tony Macoli was laughing himself sick, and the next his nose was pointed over his shoulder in the same direction as his windblown tie. Blood spurted, Macoli went down and I can still hear the sweet melon sound of his head hitting the path. Macoli went to the district hospital and Biggie Botson began two weeks’ suspension.

That’s how it started. A single decisive act of violence that joined me to Biggie forever. If you believe him on the subject he acted more out of animal irritation than charity. But I felt like somebody ransomed and set free. Until that moment I was disappearing. School, home, the new town, they were all misery. If Biggie hadn’t come along I don’t know what would have become of me. Exam week, five years later, wasn’t the first time I thought of necking myself. Biggie became my mate, my constant companion, and Tony Macoli was suddenly landscape.

For a while my mother thought Biggie and me were gay. She did a big tolerance routine that dried up when she realized we weren’t poofs.

Back on the road again I’m thinking boab trees and red dirt, girls in sarongs, cold beer, parking the Vee Dub on some endless beach to sleep. And mangoes. Is there anything sexier than a mango?

I suppose we’re all wrong for each other, Biggie and me. He’s not a very introspective bloke. Sometimes he makes me restless. But we get along pretty well most of the time. We go camping a lot, hike out to all sorts of places and set up on our own. Biggie loves all the practical stuff, reading maps, trying survival techniques, learning bushcraft. I’m more into the birds and plants and stars and things. Some mornings out in the misty ranges the world looks like it means something, some simple thing just out of my reach, but there anyway. That’s why I go. And both of us dig the fact that nobody else is out there pursing their lips at us or taking a swing.

Biggie truly is a funny bugger. He can do Elvis with his belly-button — thank you very much — a toothless King sprouting manky black hairs in a face made of fat. He can fart whole sentences, a skill St Augustine admired in others. He’s not much for hygiene. His hair’s always greasy and that navel smells like toejam. He doesn’t swim. He couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket but he can find true north by instinct. On his day he’s a frightening fast bowler but most days he can’t hit the pitch for love or money. He once surfed a school bus thirty miles. He caught nineteen herring with the same single green pea and an unweighted hook. And he was the only one in the class brave enough to hold the bin for the student teacher while she puked so hard it came out her nose. His sole academic success was his essay on the demise of Led Zeppelin, but then I wrote that for him.

Friendship, I suppose, comes at a price. There have been girls I’ve disqualified myself from because of Biggie. Not everyone wants to have him tagging along everywhere, though in the days before we get our licences there are those who don’t mind walking out with us to the drive-ins. I figure we’re not glamorous but we’re entertaining in our way. Right through high school I have occasional moments, evenings, encounters with girls but no real girlfriend and mostly I don’t regret it. Except for Briony Nevis. For two years we’re sort of watching each other from a distance. Sidelong glances. She’s flat-out beautiful, long black hair like some kind of Indian. Glossy skin, dark eyes. She’s funny in a wry, hurt kind of way, and smart. In class she goads me, says I’m not as stupid as I make out. I kiss her once at a party. Well, maybe she kisses me. Hair like a satin pillowslip. Body all sprung as though she’s ready to bolt. A long, long kiss, deep and playful as a conversation. But there at the corner of my eye is Biggie alone on the smoky verandah, waiting to go home. I don’t go to him straight up. I do make him wait a fair old while but I don’t go on with Briony Nevis the way I badly want to because I know Biggie will be left behind for good. Not that I don’t think about her. Hell, I write poems to her, draw pictures of her, construct filthy elaborate fantasies she’ll never know about. But I never touch her again. Out of loyalty. Briony isn’t exactly crushed. If anything she seems amused. She sees how things are.