Tim Winton - The Turning

Down on the corner at the unlit Esso station a match flares in a panel van as you pass. It’s the wild boy, the one they call the bomber, slouched behind the wheel, just a shadow again behind a heat-ticking engine.

By morning someone else is dead. At breakfast, still in his tunic, smelling of sweat and smoke and Dettol, the old man tells about the boy found hanging in his own wardrobe. You don’t know what to say. When he gets up from the table, leaving you and your mother blinking at each other, he empties his cup into the sink. On the way to the shower he stops a moment to run his fingers through your hair that’s still tacky with spray, and you know quite suddenly and certainly that he’s had the dead boy in his arms, that he’s seen things he can’t ever explain.

At school a kind of hysteria goes through the class. Girls weep ostentatiously outside the library and kids are pulled left and right from the classroom. A teacher takes you aside to quiz you about syringes at the gym but you just blink, speechless with confusion. You must know something, she says in exasperation. You of all people. But you don’t know anything and there’s something about her look that sets you against her.

You go back to lying awake at night, wondering what you do know, listening hard again at the wall for something to explain your disquiet. They talk in whispers in the other room. It’s a kind of torture, like a dripping tap that you wish would stop, but you find yourself straining for it in anticipation. You know you’re waiting so intently for trouble that you’re making trouble happen.

The things you hear solve nothing; they’re just nasty bits of information you could have done without, specks and splashes of dirt that puddle and pool in your head, things about the parents of kids you know, news of teachers, things you aren’t meant to hear, stuff you shouldn’t be listening to. Adulteries, bashings, robberies, a trawler fire, the boy hit by the school bus, and that kid’s name over and over again, the one you still see now and then in his sheepskin coat and his Holden van. Not him. It’s always him. The old man whispers it in the kitchen. Not him, I know it, I just feel it.

The old man looks blue around the gills. Your mother’s face is closed. There’s a creamy scum at the corners of his mouth. Their tea goes cold. Your mother peels potatoes almost vengefully.

You can’t sleep at night. With the earpiece stuffed deep in your head you listen to the radio but all the chat is stupid and the music old enough to make a pensioner wince. When you read with a torch beneath the blankets the words slide and tremble on the page. Only a few weeks ago you were seized by fantasies of the girl with the strawberry birthmark and now you can summon neither face nor body at will. After school, weary and angry, you break mallee roots with a sledge and spike until your hair hangs in strings and your head hums.

Two kids drown. There’s a rollover on the coast road. A girl has her stomach pumped. On the wharf a man is bashed until his nose comes away from his face. Then a rash of overdoses, of needles, of nighttime calls. There’s no days off for the old man, no fun, no respite, no weekends away or drives out to farms to ping tins off tree stumps.

You never show up for basketball training so the team gives you the flick. When winter descends you ride to pass the short afternoons. Down in the harbour one day, wheelstanding and swooping along the wharf where the tuna boats are tied up and ice trucks parked askew, you come alongside a reeking boat when a bloke in a beanie steps out from behind a one-tonner and tells you to piss off right now if you know what’s good for you, and as you wheel around in surprise, all but tipping yourself into the drink, you see a plain, dark car ease up. Rain begins to fall. Behind the water-streaked glass, four heads. You swerve and pedal away and like a cold runnel down the back of your collar, a chill of recognition leaks into you.

Out on a lonely beach some tourists find a boy with both legs broken. It’s the bomber from school. After dinner the oldies go outside to talk. You watch them retreat from the rain into the woodshed. The dog capers about their shins. The old man hugs himself in his civvies, kicks the tin wall.

Walking home from school you have cars slide up beside you and hang at your elbow a while but you know well enough to keep tooling along as though you haven’t noticed. Some people roll the window down to ask directions. A carload of girls throws a naked Barbie doll at your feet and squeals off. And there are some who idle beside you, obscured by flaring glass, who seem merely to watch.

At the coppers’ picnic where the air is blue with barbecue smoke, the old man flips snags and chops alongside his workmates — pasty blokes in titty aprons and tracky dacks — but it’s obvious he’s not one of them. His smile is as mirthful as a baby’s wind-grin. Dragonflies hang over the river. You watch the grownups in their floppy hats and floral frocks and hopeless Keyman jeans and notice every glance and guffaw and wiped mouth. The detectives are easy to pick. Around a ute piled with ice and beer, behind their wraparound sunglasses, they laugh like kings. You carry your sister through a knot of mouthy primary schoolers and see your mother stranded amongst the wives in the shade of the rivergums. She sees you too, winks, and pulls her hair back with a nervous yank. You walk down by the river until your baby sister nestles into your shoulder and sleeps. You wonder what it’d be like to have a girl do that, a real girl like the one with the marked face, to sit by the river on a sunny winter day and doze warm-breathed on your neck.

At the end of every shift, after pulling into the drive, the old man sits in the car a while. You watch him chew antacids and flip his keychain. He’s never home on time. Your mother doesn’t mention it. You wish you knew what he was thinking, that someone’d say something.

And then comes the sudden transfer, a temporary posting a hundred miles away. When he tells you at dinner you push back your chair and barrel out into the yard, the crack of the screendoor like a gunshot in your wake. The dog bounds at you stupidly and you kick it down in tears. You stand in the woodshed and he finds you there.

You have to look after your mother, he says. I’ll be back every two weeks. Just keep away from the wharf.

Why? you ask fiercely. Why?

I don’t know, he says. Forget it. I just need you to be responsible. You’re a good boy.

Before dark he’s gone and your mother has left your dinner on the stove and gone to bed. You bathe your sister and put her down and eat your dinner cold and wipe out the high chair. In the night your mother cries quietly until the radio goes off the air.

A day later a constable comes by with a trusty from the prison farm. It’s been teed up, he says. This bloke’ll chop wood for you. Can’t leave yez in the lurch. You see the skinny cop looking your mother up and down. She hasn’t cried all day; it’s as though the night’s weeping has dried her out. She shrugs and shows the men to the woodshed.

There’s something very close to a smirk on the young cop’s face, as though he’s emboldened by your father’s absence, and you’d like to wipe it off with the axe handle.

As the cop is leaving, a truck pulls in and dumps two tons of mallee roots outside the fence and you and the prisoner look at each other a moment before your mother goes indoors and you cart the gnarled firewood by barrow and armload to the woodshed.

The trusty works unhurriedly. He’s wiry. His arms are blue with tattoos. His sideburns curve down from a puffy slick of Elvis hair.

Is this a reward, you ask, or a punishment?

This, says the trusty, is Saturday.