Tim Winton - The Turning

AFTER FIVE YEARS of high school the final November arrives and leaves as suddenly as a spring storm. Exams. Graduation. Huge beach parties. Biggie and me, we’re feverish with anticipation; we steel ourselves for a season of pandemonium. But after the initial celebrations, nothing really happens, not even summer itself. Week after week an endless misting drizzle wafts in from the sea. It beads in our hair and hangs from the tips of our noses while we trudge around town in the vain hope of scaring up some action. The southern sky presses down and the beaches and bays turn the colour of dirty tin. Somehow our crappy Saturday job at the meatworks becomes full-time and then Christmas comes and so do the dreaded exam results. The news is not good. A few of our classmates pack their bags for university and shoot through. Cheryl Button gets into Medicine. Vic Lang, the copper’s kid, is dux of the school and doesn’t even stay for graduation. And suddenly there we are, Biggie and me, heading to work every morning in a frigid wind in the January of our new lives, still in jeans and boots and flannel shirts, with beanies on our heads and the horizon around our ears.

The job mostly consists of hosing blood off the floors. Plumes of the stuff go into the harbour and old men sit in dinghies offshore to catch herring in the slick. Some days I can see me and Biggie out there as old codgers, anchored to the friggin place, stuck forever. Our time at the meatworks is supposed to be temporary. We’re saving for a car, the V-8 Sandman we’ve been promising ourselves since we were fourteen. Mag wheels, a lurid spray job like something off a Yes album and a filthy great mattress in the back. A chick magnet, that’s what we want. Until now we’ve had a biscuit tin full of twos and fivers but now we’re making real money.

Trouble is, I can’t stand it. I just know I won’t last long enough to get that car. There’s something I’ve never told Biggie in all our years of being mates. That I dream of escaping, of pissing off north to find some blue sky. Unlike him I’m not really from here. It’s not hosing blood that shits me off — it’s Angelus itself; I’m going nuts here. Until now, out of loyalty, I’ve kept it to myself, but by the beginning of February I’m chipping away at our old fantasy, talking instead about sitting under a mango tree with a cold beer, walking in a shady banana plantation with a girl in a cheesecloth dress. On our long walks home I bang on about cutting our own pineapples and climbing for coconuts. Mate, I say, can’t you see yourself rubbing baby oil into a girl’s strapless back on Cable Beach? Up north, mate, think north! I know Biggie loves this town and he’s committed to the shared vision of the panel van, but I white-ant him day after day until it starts to pay off.

By the last weeks of February Biggie’s starting to come around. He’s talking wide open spaces now, trails to adventure, and I’m like this little urger in his ear. Then one grey day he crosses the line. We’ve been deputised to help pack skins. For eight hours we stand on the line fighting slippery chunks of cow hide into boxes so they can be sold as craybait. Our arms are slick with gore and pasted with orange and black beef-hairs. The smell isn’t good but that’s nothing compared with the feel of all those severed nostrils and lips and ears between your fingers. I don’t make a sound, don’t even stop for lunch, can’t think about it. I’m just glad all those chunks are fresh because at least my hands are warm. Beside me Biggie’s face gets darker and darker, and when the shift horn sounds he lurches away, his last carton half-empty. Fuck it, he says. We’re outta here. That afternoon we ditch the Sandman idea and buy a Kombi from a hippy on the wharf. Two hundred bucks each.

We put in two last weeks at the meatworks and collect our pay. We fill the ancient VW with tinned food and all our camping junk and rack off without telling a soul. Monday morning everyone thinks we’re off to work as usual, but in ten minutes we’re out past the town limits going like hell. Well, going the way a 1967 Kombi will go. Our getaway vehicle is a garden shed on wheels.

It’s a mad feeling, sitting up so high like that with the road flashing under your feet. For a couple of hours we’re laughing and pointing and shoving and farting and then we settle down a bit. We go quiet and just listen to the Volkswagen’s engine threshing away behind us. I can’t believe we’ve done it. If either of us had let on to anybody these past couple of weeks we’d never have gone through with it; we’d have piked for sure. We’d be like all the other poor stranded failures who stayed in Angelus. But now we’re on the road, it’s time for second thoughts. Nothing said, but I can feel it.

The plan is to call from somewhere the other side of Perth when we’re out of reach. I want to be safe from the guilts — the old girl will crack a sad on me — but Biggie has bigger things to fear. His old man will beat the shit out of him when he finds out. We can’t change our minds now.

The longer we drive the more the sky and the bush open up. Now and then Biggie looks at me and leers. He’s got a face only a mother could love. One eye’s looking at you and the other eye’s looking for you. He’s kind of pear-shaped, but you’d be a brave bugger calling him a barge-arse. The fists on him. To be honest he’s not really my sort of bloke at all, but somehow he’s my best mate.

We buzz north through hours of good farm country. The big, neat paddocks get browner and drier all the while and the air feels thick and warm. Biggie drives. He has the habit of punctuating his sentences with jabs on the accelerator and although the gutless old Volksie doesn’t exactly give you whiplash at every flourish, it’s enough to give a bloke a headache. We wind through the remnant jarrah forest, and the sickly-looking regrowth is so rain-parched it almost crackles when you look at it.

When Perth comes into view, its dun plain shimmering with heat and distant towers ablaze with midday sun, we get all nervous and giggly, like a pair of tipsy netballers. The big city. We give each other the full Groucho Marx eyebrow routine but we’re not stopping. Biggie’s a country boy through and through. Cities confound him, he can’t see the point of them. He honestly wonders how people can live in each other’s pockets like that. He’s revolted and a little frightened at the thought. Me, I love the city, I’m from there originally. I really thought I’d be moving back this month. But I won’t, of course. Not after blowing my exams. I’m glad we’re not stopping. It’d be like having your nose rubbed in it. Failure, that is. I can’t tell Biggie this but missing out on uni really stings. When the results came I cried my eyes out. I thought about killing myself.

To get past Perth we navigate the blowsy strips of caryards and showrooms and crappy subdivisions on the outskirts. Soon we’re out the other side into vineyards and horse paddocks with the sky blue as mouthwash ahead. Then finally, open road. We’ve reached a world where it isn’t bloody raining all the time, where nobody knows us and nobody cares. There’s just us and the Love Machine. We get the giggles. We go off; we blat the horn and hoot and chuck maps and burger wrappers around the cabin. Two mad southern boys still wearing beanies in March.