Tim Winton - The Turning

Right then I can’t imagine an end to the quiet. The horizon fades. Everything looks impossibly far off. In two hours I’ll hear Biggie and Meg in his sleeping bag and she’ll cry out like a bird and become so beautiful, so desirable in the total dark that I’ll begin to cry. In a week Biggie and Meg will blow me off in Broome and I’ll be on the bus south for a second chance at the exams. In a year Biggie will be dead in a mining accident in the Pilbara and I’ll be reading Robert Louis Stevenson at his funeral while his relatives shuffle and mutter with contempt. Meg won’t show. I’ll grow up and have a family of my own and see Briony Nevis, tired and lined in a supermarket queue, and wonder what all the fuss was about. And one night I’ll turn on the TV to discover the fact that Tony Macoli, the little man with the nose that could sniff round corners, is Australia’s richest merchant banker. All of it unimaginable. Right now, standing with Biggie on the salt lake at sunset, each of us still in our southern-boy uniform of boots, jeans and flannel shirt, I don’t care what happens beyond this moment. In the hot northern dusk, the world suddenly gets big around us, so big we just give in and watch.

IT WAS DARK when the Langs rolled into White Point and nobody had anything to say. They were hours late and everyone knew why but with Nanna in the Jeep nobody was game to say a thing. Vic squirmed in his seat and sighed again, despite himself.

You must have worms, said his grandmother sternly.

I always bring my own bait, he said.

Vic, said his mother with a note of warning.

Sorry, he mumbled.

But he wasn’t sorry. If the others hadn’t kept them waiting half the afternoon they’d be there by now. They’d be set up on the beach with a fire going. It was the usual Uncle Ernie balls-up. When they arrived at his place at noon all Vic’s girl-cousins were packed and ready in the Land Rover out on the hot street, their faces as red as their hair, while their parents were inside having a blue. The Landy’s motor was running, the dinghy was hitched to it with the rods and mattresses and eskies strapped aboard in a bristling pile, but Ernie and Cleo were still in the house with the door locked. When Vic’s old man banged on the window, nothing happened. He rattled the door, rang the bell. He got Vic’s cousins out of the vehicle and sat them in the shade. They were the sorriest-looking bunch of girls you’d ever see, freckly as all get-out, with needle teeth and big nostrils. He’d seen carpet sharks prettier than them. Uncle Ernie was a ginger banty-rooster of a bloke and Auntie Cleo let everyone know she was too good for him. She was blonde. She had the looks of an old-timey movie star gone to fat. She had cleavage that damn-near made an echo when she spoke.

Everybody sat out in the street until Vic’s baby sister began to scream in the heat and his grandmother yanked the keys from Ernie’s idling Landy and opened the front door of the house herself. Ernie and Cleo came out pushing and shoving and swearing like sailors and all the wobbegong cousins began to bawl and then Ernie’s Land Rover wouldn’t start because it had overheated chugging out there in the street for God knows how long, and there was more bitching and backbiting while they waited for it to cool, but Nanna wouldn’t hear a word against her favoured son.

So here they were now in the hot night, the Jeep and the Landy winding down the hill to White Point. The streets were empty. They drove on through to where the road ended and the white dunes banked up like a snowfield in the moonlight. Not that Vic had ever seen snow; it’s just how he imagined it going on white forever.

They climbed into the dunes, motors grinding and whinnying. Vic rode the rolls and jerks and tried not to think about food. When the going was smooth the rumble of the diffs lulled him close to sleep and several times he stirred to see that Uncle Ernie was bogged to the axles and Vic had to get out with his father and grandmother to dig or set a tow rope.

It’s the boat he’s pulling, said Nanna, in defence of Ernie’s driving. It’s the load and all those kids.

Vic’s mother pressed her lips together in the bright moonlight and nursed his baby sister. She knew as well as Vic that Ernie was careless, that he approached every hill in top gear, that his tyres were pumped too hard.

Nanna directed vehicle recovery. She rode out on the side step and talked through the open window, barking the kind of instructions that only a non-driver could give. After a long time they came into saltbush country and down into firm tracks that were steady going. The red eyes of the boat trailer up ahead mesmerized Vic until he slept again. When he woke they were down on wide, white beach that was as hard as a highway. For miles they drove fast and easy until they came to a spit where several campfires burned already.

Vic put up poles and ropes and tarps with the rest of them and ate cold roast lamb and potatoes in a stupor of fatigue. He fell onto a mattress and wound himself in a sheet and slept with the surf roaring all around him. He woke in the night, certain the sea had overrun them, but it was only the cool breeze rolling over him in waves and he slept on dreamless.

At first light the wind off the land was already hot and it smelt of saltbush and desert. When Vic woke, his grandmother was frying eggs over a driftwood fire. His father and uncle had the dinghy at the water’s edge and were loading it with big cane craypots. Vic sat at the trestle table beneath the billowing tarp and ate eggs and drank tea from an enamel cup. The girls were only just stirring now and the other women were still asleep. The men came and ate breakfast and when they were finished Vic helped them push the boat into the shorebreak and jumped in when the outboard fired.

Ernie throttled them out into calm water and Vic looked back at the other cluster of tents and tarps not far from their own camp. He saw a truck and a tractor and a striped tent big as a circus marquee. The sun was low on the rolling dunes and he felt tired and strangely old. Today was the last day of the year. He wished there’d been room for a mate on this trip, someone to see 1973 in with, but the only spare seat had gone to Nanna; these days there was no escaping her. And now that the wind was rifling through his hair and the aluminium hull thrummed underfoot, he began to wish that it was his father at the tiller and not his uncle, because Ernie steered a boat as nonchalantly as he drove. The more confident Ernie was the less cause there was for anyone else to feel safe. But it was Ernie’s boat not his father’s. They didn’t have a boat, couldn’t afford one. Vic smiled gamely at the old man, reading the amusement in his raised eyebrows, and held on as they pounded out towards the reef. Beneath him the water flashed by, white, green, blue, yellow. When they got out over the mottled deep, swells rolled in smooth and oily while Vic’s old man baited the pots with beef hocks and Ernie uncoiled ropes and floats. They tipped the craypots into sandy green holes and left the ropes snaking on the surface.

Back on the beach the carrot-top cousins squealed for a ride in the boat.

While they were tootled around the shallows Vic went up to the makeshift shelter between vehicles and saw that his mother was up. He rocked his baby sister while his mum ate breakfast and listened to Auntie Cleo talk about fingernails and cuticles. Vic’s Auntie wasn’t really a Cleo; she botted the name from the magazine with the horoscopes and male centrefolds. Her real name was Cloris. She bored his mum stupid. Vic’s mum did her best to hide it from him but he knew it well enough. She must have been tired this morning because at one moment during Cleo’s prattling monologue, at the very instant that Nanna happened to look their way, she rolled her eyes at him as if to say give me strength . Cleo didn’t notice but Nanna’s mouth was like a knife edge.