Tim Winton - The Turning

In the old days, when they were kids, they played together off and on, the way you do when there are plenty of kids about and you find yourself falling in with someone for an hour or so. Cockleshell was bigger then and much more lively. With the meatworks and the whaling station still operating, the string of houses along the shore here was full. It seemed that there were kids everywhere and they ran in a loose mob, roaming the bush and the estuarine flats in search of entertainment. Their hamlet had its own sign out on the bay road back then. Cockle Shoal. But then as now people called the place Cockleshell and that’s what Brakey knows it as.

He wonders how long he should wait. His mother gets anxious. All week she’s been testy because he’s come home long after dark. She spends most of her time feeling abandoned or preparing to be so and it’s wearing him out. He crouches there a few more minutes, persecuted by midges and mosquitoes, and when there’s no sign of Agnes coming back his way, he gives up and heads home. In the moonless dark, he feels his way with bare feet on the sand track and puts an arm out to fend off lurking branches. In a couple of minutes he sees the house lights, his place and hers. At this angle they’re close enough to be a single glow but by the time he’s clear of the peppermint grove they’re distinct. Two weatherboard houses. Church music from the Larwood place, the smell of frying onions from his.

Inside his mother is silent at the stove. Her face is shut down. It’s nothing new. The table’s set. He washes his hands and, newly protected by his thoughts, settles himself into the silence she’s prepared for him. He already knows what his mother thinks. To her, the world is a treacherous place. Nothing lasts. People cheat. They leave. They just up and go. Sooner or later they all bolt and you’re left on your own, and the look of reproach she gives him now is but a variation on her whole demeanour, the assumption in every glance, every sigh, every mute chink of cutlery, is that he too will leave her high and dry, just as the old man did three years ago. He’s fifteen and it’s old news. He feels sorry for her, protective still, but he’s had a gutful. He wants her to get over it but he senses that it’s beyond her.

Don’t worry about the dishes, she says when they finish eating.

It’s orright.

I said leave them.

He shrugs and goes to his room. Through the louvres he can still hear the holy roller music from the Larwoods’. In the old days it was only ever screaming that you heard. The sound of breaking glass, the thud of feet on the floorboards. Eric Larwood, smashed out of his head, lurching from room to room. Some mornings Mrs Larwood hung the washing out with shaking hands, her bruises plain from Brakey’s place. There were times when she came across the rough grass at night with a sobbing trail of kids in tow, and they bedded down in the lounge while Brakey’s old man got his trousers on and went over to pacify the mad bugger.

The Larwoods were Poms. In the early days, when they were more migrants than locals, their whiny accent was stronger. Their house smelled of piss and fags and kero as though they never opened the windows, as if it was winter all year. It’s been a long time since Brakey was inside that house. He wonders if the Larwood kids still wet the bed. He tries to imagine Agnes Larwood as a bedwetter. He doesn’t even know the colour of her eyes; she’s always looking down or sideways. Brownish, at a guess. He wonders if she still has that Larwood smell of cigarette smoke and bacon and kero. He can’t recall the last time he was close enough to tell.

Old Eric was shop steward at the meatworks. Now the union’s collapsed and the meatworks is gone, and he’s nobody. He’s quiet nowadays. It’s been years since he’s been on a rampage of the sort that anybody else can hear. Brakey’s mother used to have a lot to say about the Larwoods but when Agnes’s big sister Margaret took off at sixteen she did nothing more than sigh knowingly, as though this was merely confirmation of all her suspicions.

Brakey lies all evening on his bed. The TV murmurs through the wall. Church music wafts across the yard. He thinks of the two houses as becalmed, subdued, as though the life is mostly gone from them. He imagines the Larwoods sitting around in silence with only the strange chuckle of the kero heater between them when the music gives out.

He neglects his homework and falls asleep reading about Spartacus and six thousand crucifixions.

At the bus stop next morning, in the shade of the red flowering gum, he feels her looking at him. She’s a few feet away, separate from her little brothers and the snooty little private schoolers from round the yacht club, and she looks up scowling from her book again to drill him with her gaze. Brown. Her eyes are brown. He looks away as the bus creaks in off the bay road and the small crowd stirs. They climb aboard.

Brakey, she says so close behind him that he grunts in startled surprise. Brakey, what’re you doing?

What? I’m on the bus.

This week. At night. Why’re you following me around?

He half turns to her. She smells milky. Her teeth are grownup teeth. There’s sun in the short spikes of her hair.

It’s bugging me, she says.

He licks his lips, considers denying it. Even plans to ignore her now that, across the aisle, a couple of heads have turned their way.

Sorry, he croaks.

Did you do your maths?

Nah.

Bugger. Thought you might—

Agnes doesn’t finish because the next stop is up and Brakey’s mate Slater is getting on. She sits back — he feels her retract — as Slater slouches down the aisle. Slater is a sex maniac. He blew up his mother’s vacuum cleaner in the kind of experiment that a sane person would never have thought of. Half the school still calls him the Electrolux Man. He knows all kinds of stuff about porn but girls are a total mystery to him. Slater is fun sometimes but he is not a bloke to confide in. Agnes Larwood will have to be a secret. At school she’s not a complete tragic, but she’s not exactly popular either. Brakey knows he’ll have to be careful.

School happens in a kind of fog. He doesn’t really take anything in, not even the fact that Agnes sits two rows from him in maths. Nor does he see anything unusual in the cops turning up during English and taking Brad Benson out and not returning him to class.

It was that man from the bank, says his mother. He jumped off at the Big Hole. Everyone’s talking about it.

Brad Benson’s dad?

Found his car and his shoes. Still looking for the body.

Hell, he says, standing there on the verandah with the orange juice sweating in his hand. Cicadas chip away at the warm afternoon air.

They all run away in the end, says his mother, going inside and letting the screen door slap to.

Hot with sudden anger, Brakey throws the juice, glass and all, out onto the unmowed grass and slopes off. One day, he thinks. One day I’ll be one of em, Mum, and you’ll be happy.

He walks aimlessly up the bay and after the best part of two hours he finds himself, hot and dry-mouthed, heading back past the yacht club with the sun low on the hills behind him, his outbound footprints heading at him all the way along the shore. He sees that the marks from his heels are deep and the big toe of his left foot drags a gouge at every step. A few small boats are out. He sees old Percy the commercial netter in his long dory, head down over his oars. Some kids are sailing out past the flats but there’s not much breeze. He hears clunks and shouts and laughter across the water. On the sand at his feet, left by the outgoing tide, blowfish and jellies glisten in death. He kicks them aside spitefully. He’s tired now but wild still and pent up.