The Turning (19 page)

I didn’t mean it, said Frank. It was an accident.

His brother rolled over. A fat red moon emerged from behind the highest, farthest dune. Frank felt sand in his shorts. His undies sagged, full and bulky with it, the way they were the day he
pooped his pants at school. He remembered the way he had to wide-leg it to the toilets. With all the kids laughing. And how he locked himself inside to wait for his mother. How Max came in and said
he’d kill him if he didn’t stop bawling and clean himself up. You’re adopted, he said, they found you on the tip, in a kennel. The day went on forever and their mother never
came.

Max, I didn’t know how to do it.

Aw, shut up, said his brother.

It was an accident.

Orright, it was an accident. Let’s dig.

Dig what? said Frank carefully. He was surprised at how fast Max was forgiving him and a little uneasy at how suddenly the moon had appeared.

A hole, dickhead. A tunnel. Like in the movies. An escape tunnel. We can come back to it, hide stuff.

Okay, said Frank, picturing it.

Over here, said Max. This bit’s kind of wet and hard.

In the strange light of the moon they dug into the side of the bare white hill, just bored right in like dogs. They didn’t speak. Frank was spurred on by the intensity of Max’s work.
He dragged away what Max scooped back between his legs and after a while all you could see was Max’s feet sticking out of the side of the dune.

Funny, said Max, wriggling his way back out. It’s quiet in there. You can’t hear anythin.

Can I try?

Nah, you’re too small.

Aw, Max! Please?

I dunno. Orright. Just a quick go. We gotta go deeper.

Frank wasted no time in case Max changed his mind. He wormed his way into the dark hole and was interested at how warm it was inside. There was an odd mineral smell but no sound, only his
breathing. He lay there with his hand outstretched to touch the curved wall. Then he heard a hiss behind him. A bit of dry sand spilled against his feet from outside. There was a squeak and then
more squeaks. It was Max walking around out there. He was climbing up the dune. No, he was stomping on it. Frank felt a thud overhead.

Max?

Frank got up on his elbows. There was another thud. A warm clod hit him in the back of the neck. Something fell in the dark ahead and a gust of air rose against his face. He scrambled backwards
and was halfway out when it all came down on his head with a whoof and pinned him flat like the weight of a whole team piling in, going stacks-on-the-mill. All his breath rushed out and sand
pressed warm into his eyes and ears and rammed against his tight-shut lips. Then his legs began to twitch; they flailed as though they didn’t even belong to him. They writhed and churned in
loose sand. His feet were free. His knees dug in so that his whole body could twist. Then he got an arm free and pushed up hard. The great heavy crust parted around his neck and he was out, on his
feet, running blind and gulping in sobs of air and choking grit until he fell coughing, crying, alone on the sand.

Frank bawled until his eyes washed clear enough to see the blurry moon. He saw the dunes all around him holding up the edges of the sky. Everything was white and woolly. Even his feet and arms
were ghostly. He got up and ran. His feet chuffed in powdery sand. He was the only sound in the world.

He reached a crest and saw the dark plane of the sea flecked with moonlight. His chest hurt. It felt like he’d swallowed the earth but he didn’t stop running.

When he saw the lantern he spilled down onto the beach, holding everything in. The men stood in the light with their rods and in their midst Max stood with a mulloway across his back, silver as
a prince’s cape, glistening from arm to arm, still wet and trembling. Their father turned with the gaff in his hand. The smile left his face. Frank wide-legged it towards them, apologizing
all the way.

Chuang Tzu

A
FTER THE SHIT FINALLY DIED DOWN
Leaper chucked his board and wetsuit into the old HK and buggered off to White Point. It was four in the morning and
he was still half pissed but there was no one out in the street, not even the dogged sportswriter who’d been camped outside in his Sigma since Sunday, so he went while he had the chance. He
took it easy through the sleeping burbs and then as pony farms and market gardens gave way to the blankness of bush he began to relax a little. But the feeling only lasted a few minutes as fatigue
overtook him and roos started appearing at the edge of the road so frequently and abruptly that he pulled over into a pine plantation, climbed into the back and slept in the jumble of stuff
he’d tossed there in his haste.

He woke, shivering, barely two hours later. It was full daylight and a winter mist hung in the trees. He climbed into the front. The image in the rear-view mirror startled him.

Jesus, he muttered. I thought you were dead.

The face scowling back at him was so closed, so drawn and bitter, that it might easily have been the old man’s. Leaper felt flattened. He thought about driving back to the city but there
was no food left in the house and the place was a stinking mire of bottles and pizza boxes. Back there the phone line was out of the wall and beneath a midden of dirty dishes and malarial sinkwater
the mobile would be cactus by now. He couldn’t bear to be there again. He’d left the TV on its back, wide-eyed and out of commission, like a kinghit wingman. Wherever you walked in the
house there was a sinister crackle of newspaper underfoot, his season like a carpet, photos of him flying above the pack with the wind in his cheeks and his fingers splayed for the ball. Others of
him with his hands on his hips, his head down, the coach in his face, all fingerpointing and gob spray, with the howling crowd at their backs, and in every room, though stained and wrinkled or even
plain screwed up, there was that picture they printed and reprinted for days, with the back page headlines, the one of him walking, solitary, up the players’ race with the game still in
progress over his shoulder and the look of complete blankness on his face.

No, he wasn’t going back to that. But this morning White Point didn’t seem such a great idea either. What had he been thinking of? Family? Jesus, there was only Max, his brother, and
a sister-in-law he’d never met, nieces he’d only heard about.

Leaper sat there a minute. He knew a surf would do him good. And right now, more or less sober for the first time in days, he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

Two hours later he crested the ridge and looked down on the great train of dunes and the winter sea and the hamlet in the narrow margin between them. He was stiff and hungry
but as he coasted through the main drag, low in his seat, he resisted the urge to pull in to the bakery or the servo for breakfast. Fibro houses and shopfronts rolled by. He stole a glance at the
old baitshop that still bore his father’s name and drove on down to the beach where the sand was white and hard-packed and the lagoon bristled with crayboats nodding and twisting at their
moorings.

At the outer reefs that formed the anchorage, lines of whitewater spilled landward with the rumbling, far-off noise of heavy traffic. Leaper drove around the beach to the wide spit of the point
itself. A spray of terns rose in his path. He wound down the window to breathe in the salt smell. Even in the weak June light the glare off the sand was enough to make him wince.

There was nobody else parked on the point but out on the reef he could see the white flare of a board wake on a distant wave. When he pulled up he clawed the binoculars from the glovebox to
watch the surfer carve lines across the smooth face until the swell hit the deep water of the channel where wave and rider subsided into the sea.

Leaper got out and stretched against the old station wagon. He was sore and lightheaded. The land breeze was cool at his back, and when he turned to put his face into it he saw the water tower
from the caravan park rising bigheaded from behind the scrubby dune. It gave him a strange pang to see it again. He’d grown up in the shadows of its trestle legs. As boys, in that van park in
the lee of the sandhills, the tower loomed over Max and him; its faded red tank was a bloodshot eye that never closed. From anywhere in town or from miles out at sea it was clearly visible, the
home beacon. From what he could gather, Max still lived over there with his missus and kids on the same site and maybe even the same van the old man dragged up in the sixties. Perhaps he’d go
over and visit. Maybe they’d put him up for a bit until he got himself sorted out. Before he got that far he needed to feel his muscles burn. He didn’t want to run. He wanted the
privacy of the sea.

He flipped up the rear window and dragged out his dusty board and laid it on the sand while he rooted around for the wetsuit. He didn’t know if it was the cold or fatigue or simple nerves
that caused him to shake so much but he had trouble getting the wetty on, and when he finally did he realized that he needed a piss, and because he was leery of sharks out on the reef and too cold
to haul the suit off again, he just stood there and let go where he was. The hot flush down his legs brought an unexpected twinge of shame, a flash of the schoolyard that he buried in the business
of waxing the board.

From where he knelt Leaper noticed that an osprey had built a nest on the water tower. It was new to him but the bird’s guano-plastered wall of sticks was so well established that he
suddenly sensed how long he’d been gone, just how many years stood between him and the boy he was when he learnt to play football on this very sandflat. Barefoot and bare-backed, he was the
youngest of a feral mob of kids who roamed the town on their treddlies, haunted the jetty and played marathon games of footy with the sea and dunes as boundaries and only piled shirts for
goalposts. Back then, the sandcrusted ball tore skin off his feet without him even feeling it. He ducked and weaved through the big kids and hung on the shoulders of grown men who laughed and said
that he had springs in his feet. He was a natural. He had no idea that he was a freak. He only knew that Max hated it and he was late to the party on that front too. Leaper was so innocent that
White Pointers thought he was dim, and looking back he wondered if maybe they were right.

With the board under his arm, Leaper jogged the few steps to the water and plunged in with a shout. For the first few moments he just put his head down and paddled to distract himself from the
cold but after a few minutes he was comfortable enough to enjoy the dappled seagrass, the green sandy holes passing beneath him, the rhythm and repetition of the stroke, and the easy grace of his
own body. There was something beautifully mindless in a long paddle or run or swim, a spaciousness he embroidered with whatever silly ditty came to mind to keep time. After the giddy relief from
training, the muscles of his arms and back felt hungry for it again.

When he reached the inside reef he sat on his board a moment to find the passage through the limestone and coral. Whitewater pounded across the shelf and the gap was narrow. When he was through
he began the business of duckdiving under broken waves until he reached the channel. There was a lot of water moving out here. He was five hundred yards from shore. The swell seemed to be picking
up. He returned to the jittery feeling he had before he hit the water.

As he paddled, a lone surfer dropped down the face of a big, reeling right-hander with the kind of confidence that marked him out as a local. He jammed a turn hard up towards the falling lip and
then seemed to hang in the wave’s churning guts for a few seconds before a rush of trapped air spat him out. Leaper sat up in the channel to watch the rider come on in short, brutal signature
turns until he slewed off the wave to settle in the quiet water beside him.

Thought I’d find you here, said Leaper with a grin he hadn’t expected.

Well, I’ll be fucked, said the other man without warmth.

How’s it goin, Max?

Don’t need a walkin frame yet.

So I see.

Long time since
that
board saw any saltwater.

Leaper nodded. A wetsuit did little to hide the fact that Max had stacked on some pudding, yet he still had his big deckie shoulders and his neck was like a straining-post. Max’s hair was
buzz-cut and he’d grown a biker beard that gave him a fearsome look and blurred his resemblance to the old man. Nobody would mistake Max for one of the friendly hippies who’d taught
them to surf here in their early teens. His big brother looked savage and battleworn. There were pulpy scars on his eyebrows and a fresh dint in his forehead.

They sat there in the calm a few moments, turning their feet in the light-shafted water with the reef shadowy beneath them. Max regarded him with that sour, doubtful look of his.

So what’s the story?

Leaper shrugged. I haven’t been back for a while.

Christ, you haven’t been anywhere for a while, from what I hear. The paper’s full of it. They sack you?

I walked.

Fucksake.

Leaper smiled, but the skin felt tight on his face.

Frank Leaper. The White Point jack-in-the-box. A two-season wonder.

So it seems.

Jesus Christ.

Both brothers sensed the fresh set of waves that trundled in toward them. They swung around and paddled seaward in a response that was automatic. After the years they’d spent out here on
the reef their sudden animation was instinctive; their bodies thought for them. Several big waves broke outside. They took them on the head, duckdiving with their boards to escape the worst of the
impact. Leaper relished the sluicing concussion across his back; he loved the way the force of the water prised his eyelids apart and raked through his hair like a gale. He surfaced from each
explosion of turbulence and paddled hard and fast, his limbs and ligaments lulled into some kind of boyhood recognition, until he reached the calm deep beyond the break and sat up blowing a little.
He was lightheaded and gripey with hunger but he felt unaccountably content, even at the prospect of dealing with Max.