Tim Winton - The Turning

So what did he say? said Daisy, passing the child to Gail while she hoisted a leg of lamb from the fridge.

Nothing, actually, said Gail, looking down at the boy who watched her sombrely. It was all a bit. . civilized.

Well, I’m sure it hurts like fuck. I know it does.

What did you do?

I smashed his model plane collection.

Did you. . did you catch him or did he confess?

He came clean. I always hated those planes.

He spent all last year pining for dead people. His parents. Kids he knew at school. Some girl with a birthmark he loved. He left me behind.

So it was revenge?

No, it was an accident, a mistake.

And now you’re even?

Seems vile to think so.

Oh, look, he’s taken up arms.

Gail looked out at the scene on the lawn. Vic in his ear-muffs. Fenn crouched behind the awkward-looking tripod. The things wheeling out across the evening sky and Vic’s body pivoting smoothly. The small spattering disintegrations as he hit both. Fenn hooted.

He’s good, said Daisy.

Of course he’s good, said Gail, oblivious to the child tugging at her top.

Vic cleared the breech of each barrel and sniffed the old reek of cordite. His hands trembled a little. He stepped back with elaborate care and took up two more cartridges.

You mind? he asked Fenn.

Blast away, Maestro.

The little girl, Keira, looked at him with renewed interest.

Funny, he said. In all those years I never fired a shotgun.

You’re a natural.

Vic wondered what that could possibly mean. As a boy he’d used rifles. Before the age of sixteen the state had trained him to shoot four kinds of automatic weapon and assemble a.762 self-loading-rifle in the dark. Until the school rules changed he’d fired at human outlines, targets with hearts. They were grooming him for war without the slightest inkling of the turmoil inside him. They didn’t know that he sat by the window with his father’s.22, sat there with it loaded and cocked, waiting for something to happen. He was only a breath away from something hideous. He was a ticking bomb. And when the old man ran away and took the rifle with him the fever broke. He’d never touched a weapon since.

Pull!

He led but did not fire. He thought of the boy lurking behind the curtain. The skeet hummed off into the twilight. It was important to know he could resist the urge.

Again? called Fenn.

Yeah, said Vic. Pull.

He hit both targets and felt his face crease into a smile that tested every scab. This was different. It was strangely untroubling in its pointlessness. Fenn was right. Nothing got hurt.

He stood there firing until Keira went inside and the smell of roasting lamb wafted across the grass. He blasted away, pull after pull after pull, until he was covered in sweat and they were out of ammo and he realized that darkness had fallen around him and he was happy.

Some of these stories have appeared before:

‘Abbreviation’ in The Bulletin

‘Aquifer’ in Granta, The Australian Women’s Weekly and The Beacon Best of 2001 (ed. Junot Diaz)

‘Cockleshell’ in The Australian Women’s Weekly, Prospect and The Harvard Review

‘Commission’ in Harper’s

‘Family’ in Meanjin and (as ‘Leaper’) in Tracks

‘Small Mercies’ in Heat

‘Damaged Goods’ in The Threepenny Review.

The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of these publications.

Excerpt from ‘Ash Wednesday’ from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted with permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton published by

Shambhala Publications, Massachusetts © 1965 by the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the proprietor.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material reproduced in this text. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

Special thanks to Denise, whose help made this book possible.

‘Beneath the immediate-impact surface robustness, these stories are threaded through with subtleties and oblique connections. For their masterly skills of organization and perception to be fully appreciated, they need to be read more than once. But Winton’s writing — vigorous, vivid, precise — is so good that you’d want to do that anyway’

Sunday Times

‘Vivid, elegiac and humorous, told in a relaxed prose that frequently strikes sparks. Unusually, I think, they bridge the gulf between short story and novel’

Daily Telegraph

‘Winton is a poet of baffled souls. . Always a writer of crystalline prose, his lines of sinewy leanness achieve such clarity here that it seems one is reading line after line of perfect music. His unbounded humanity and his sympathy for his characters descend on them like grace as they struggle to salvage their lives. To read him is to be reminded not just of the possibilities of fiction but of the human heart’

The Times

‘Winton has not only captured the tragic significance and the sheer wonder of one man’s difficult adolescence but of a town and, by extension, a whole country. Winton’s Cloudstreet is commonly considered the Great Australian Novel. “Big World”, which opens The Turning , could well be the great Australian short story’

List

‘In The Turning , Tim Winton returns to the short-story format after a series of novels, and a triumphant return it is. . A raw and urgent book, brimming with danger. . But there is nevertheless plenty of beauty in these haunting, finely written tales’

Literary Review

‘Tim Winton’s latest offering is a thrilling bundle of contradictions: a novel masquerading as a collection of short stories, an optimistic wallow in the doldrums of middle age. Full of violence and despair, it is also tender and poetic. . Enough to make first-time readers seek out Mr Winton’s earlier work and old hands re-read him all over again’

The Economist

‘Because of Winton’s huge talent for atmospheric storytelling The Turning is potent and compelling’

Financial Times

‘A vividly imagined and poetically executed piece of work, intense, lyrical and moving. Even with two Booker-nominated novels to his credit, Winton is a writer who continues to improve with each piece of work he publishes. . it’s no exaggeration to compare Winton’s achievement in conjuring landscape, its magnificence and hefty, threatening presence, to Hardy’s accomplishment in fashioning his Wessex or Emily Brontë her Yorkshire moors’

Independent on Sunday

‘Luminous. . impressive. . The novel gracefully peels away masks to reveal its characters’ vaulting ambitions, crippling insecurities and submerged traumas’

Time Out

‘Captivating. . The beauty of Winton’s work lies not in the hope to which some characters awaken, but in his skill at making grief palpable to readers who may be unscathed by the agonies that his characters suffer. . His stories artfully clarify life’s abrupt turns, but it is his prose that makes this work exceptional with its liveliness and flow’

Observer

TIM WINTON was born in Perth in 1960. He is the author of over fifteen books, including novels, a collection of stories, non-fiction and books for children. His first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian /Vogel Award. Cloudstreet won the Banjo Award and the Miles Franklin Award in Australia and the Deo Gloria Prize in England, and has been successfully adapted for the theatre. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for The Riders (1995) and Dirt Music (2002).