The Turning

PICADOR

for Ken Kelso

T. S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’

Contents

Big World

Abbreviation

Aquifer

Damaged Goods

Small Mercies

On Her Knees

Cockleshell

The Turning

Sand

Family

Long, Clear View

Reunion

Commission

Fog

Boner McPharlin’s Moll

Immunity

Defender

A
FTER 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.

I’m laughing. I’m kicking the dash. That ache is still there inside me but this is the best I’ve felt since the news about the exams. For once I’m not faking it. I look
across at Biggie. His huge, unlovely face is creased with merriment. I just know I’ll never be able to tell him about the hopes I had for myself and for a little while I don’t care
about any of it; I’m almost as happy as him. Biggie’s results were even worse than mine – he really fried – but he didn’t have his heart set on doing well; he
couldn’t give a rat’s ring. For him, our bombing out is a huge joke. In his head he’s always seen himself at the meatworks or the cannery until he inherits the salmon-netting
licence from his old man. He’s content, he belongs. His outlook drives my mother wild with frustration but in a way I envy him. My mother calls us Lenny and George. She teaches English; she
thinks that’s funny. She’s trying to wean me off Biggie Botson. In fact she’s got a program all mapped out to get me back on track, to take the year again and re-sit the exams.
But I’ve blown all that off now. Biggie’s not the brightest crayon in the box but he’s the most loyal person I know. He’s the real deal and you can’t say that about
many people.

My mother won’t chase me up; she’s kind of preoccupied. She’s in love with the deputy principal. He’s married. He uses the school office to sell Amway. Both of them
believe that Civics should be reintroduced as a compulsory course.

We get out into rolling pasture and granite country and then wheat-lands where the ground is freshly torn up in the hope of rain. The VW shakes like a boiling billy and we’ve finally woken
up to ourselves and sheepishly dragged our beanies off. The windows are down and the hot wind rips through our hair.

Biggie must have secrets. Everyone dreams of things in private. There must be stuff he doesn’t tell me. I know about the floggings he and his mum get, but I don’t know what he wants
deep down. He won’t say. But then I don’t say either. I never tell him about the Skeleton Coast in Africa where ships come aground on surf beaches and lie there broken-bellied until the
dunes bury them. And the picture I have of myself in a café on the Piazza San Marco leaving a tip so big that the waiter inhales his moustache. Dreams of the big world beyond. Manila.
Monterey. Places in books. In all these years I never let on. But then Biggie’s never there in the picture with me. In those daydreams he doesn’t figure, and maybe I’m guilty
about that.

After a while we pull over for a leak. The sunlight is creamy up here. Standing at the roadside with it roasting my back and arms through the heavy shirt, I don’t care that picking guavas
and papaya doesn’t pay much more than hosing the floor of an abattoir. If it’s outside in the sun, that’s fine by me. We’ll be growing things, not killing them. We’ll
move with the seasons. We’ll be free.

Mum thinks Biggie’s an oaf, that he’s holding me back. She doesn’t know that without Biggie there’d be nothing left of me to hold back. It sounds weak, but he saved my
life.

We didn’t meet until the second week of high school. I was new in town and right from the start a kid called Tony Macoli became fixated on me. He was very short with a rodent’s big
eyes and narrow teeth. He sat behind me every class he could and whispered weird threats under the uncomprehending gaze of the teachers, especially my mother. He liked to jab me in the back with
the point of his compass and lob spitballs into my hair. He trod on my feet in passing and gleefully broke my pencils. I’d never been a brawler but I was confident that I could knock him
down. Trouble was, my parents were new to the school – this was before the old man pissed off – and I didn’t want to make trouble. I already sensed their mutual misery and I felt
responsible somehow. So I put up with it. I hadn’t even spoken to Tony Macoli. I was shocked by the hatred in his wan little face. I couldn’t imagine how I’d put him out so
thoroughly. It seemed that my very existence offended him.

The little bastard kept at me but I didn’t touch him. After a week I didn’t even react. I wasn’t scared. It wasn’t passive resistance or anything. I just got all weird
and listless. I reckon I was depressed. But the less I responded the more Tony Macoli paid out on me.

On the second Monday of term I was shoved into a hedge, tripped in the corridor so that my books sprayed across the linoleum, and had my fingers slammed in a desk – all this before morning
recess. Each little coup brought out Macoli’s wheezy little laugh. It rocked his body and tilted his head back on his neck so that the whites of his eyes showed. At morning recess I was
wiping mud from my pants while he gave in to that convulsive laugh. The wind blew his tie over his left shoulder and my pulse felt shallow, as though I was only barely alive. As I got wearily back
to my feet, a shambling figure passed me and I saw the flash of a fist. One second Tony Macoli was laughing himself sick, and the next his nose was pointed over his shoulder in the same direction
as his windblown tie. Blood spurted, Macoli went down and I can still hear the sweet melon sound of his head hitting the path. Macoli went to the district hospital and Biggie Botson began two
weeks’ suspension.