The Turning Read Free Page B

the roadside and jump out to see just how much grey smoke is pouring out of the rear grille. When
Biggie and Meg join me we stand there a few moments before it dawns on us that the whole thing could blow at any moment and everything we own is inside. So we fall over each other digging our stuff
free, tossing it as far into the samphire edges of the saltpan as we can. Without an extinguisher there’s not much else we can do once we’re standing back out there in the litter of our
belongings waiting for the VW to explode. But it just smoulders and hisses a while as the sun sinks behind us. In the end, with the smoke almost gone and the wiring cooked, it’s obvious
we’re not going anywhere. We turn our attention to the sunset. Meg rolls another spliff and we share it standing there taking in the vast, shimmering pink lake that suddenly looks full of
rippling water. We don’t say anything. The sun flattens itself against the saltpan and disappears. The sky goes all acid blue and there’s just this huge silence. It’s like the
world’s stopped.
    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.

Abbreviation
    I T 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