The Turning (30 page)

She’s . . . gone, your mum?

I come in and he’s bent down over her, hands in her, blanket across her throat, eyes round, veins screamin in her neck and she sees me not a word sees me and I’m not sayin a word,
just lookin at the sweat shine on his back and his hands in the muck and she’s dead now anyway. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, does it.

Boner gave off an acid stink. Sweat stood out on his forehead. I couldn’t make out much of what he was saying.

Sharks know, he said, they know. You see em flash? Twist into whalemeat? Jesus, they saw away. It’s in the blood, he had it, twistin all day into hot meat. And never sleep, not really.

Boner—

Sacked me for catchin bronzies off the meatworks jetty. Fuck, I didn’t steal nothin, just drove one round on the fork-lift for a laugh, to put the shits up em. Live shark, still kickin!
They went spastic, said I’m nuts, said I’m irresponsible, unreliable.

The bedrails jingled as he shook.

But I’m solid, he said. Solid as a brick shithouse. Unreliable be fucked. Why they keep callin me unreliable? I drive and drive. I don’t say a word. They know, they know. Don’t
say a fuckin word. Don’t leave me out, don’t let me go, I’m solid. I’m solid!

He began to cry then. A nurse came in and said maybe I should go.

Boner never said so much again in one spate – not to me, anyway. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, assumed it was delayed shock or infection or all the painkillers they had him
on. When I returned next day he was calmer but he seemed displeased to see me. He watched TV, was unresponsive, surly, and that’s how he remained. I had study to keep up with. The TV ruined
my concentration, so my visits grew fewer, until some weeks I hardly went at all. Then one day, after quite a gap, I arrived to find that he’d been discharged.

I didn’t see him for weeks, months. The school year ground on and I sat my exams with a war-like determination. As spring became summer I kept an eye out for Boner in town. I half expected
to hear him rumble up behind me at any moment, but there was no sign of him.

I was walking home from the library one afternoon when a van eased in to the kerb. I looked up and it wasn’t him. It was a paddy wagon. A solitary cop. He beckoned me
over. I hesitated but what could I do – I was a schoolgirl – I went.

You’re young McPharlin’s girlfriend, he said.

I recognized him. He was the nervous-looking constable from the hospital, the one who’d started hanging around after the others left. I’d seen him that winter in the local rag. He
was a hero for a while, brought an injured climber down off a peak in the ranges. But he looked ill. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin was blotchy. There was a patch of stubble on his neck that
he’d missed when shaving, and even from where I stood leaning into the window he smelt bad, a mixture of sweat and something syrupy. When I first saw him I felt safe but now I was afraid of
him.

Just his friend, I murmured.

Not from what I’ve heard.

I pressed my lips together and felt the heat in my face. I didn’t like him, didn’t trust him.

How’s his memory?

I don’t know, I said. Not too good, I think.

If he remembers, said the cop. If he wants to remember, will you tell me?

I licked my lips and glanced up the street.

I haven’t seen him, I said.

I go there and he just clams up. He doesn’t need to be afraid of me, he said. Not me. Tell him to give me the names.

I stepped away from the car.

I only need the other two, Jackie, he called. Just the two from out of town.

I walked away, kept on going. I felt him watching me all the way up the street.

Next day I hitched a ride out along the lowlands road to Boner’s place. I hadn’t been before and he’d never spoken of it directly though I’d pieced
details together over the years as to where it was. I rode over in a pig truck whose driver seemed more interested in my bare legs than the road ahead. Out amongst the swampy coastal paddocks I got
him to set me down where a doorless fridge marked a driveway.

I know you, he said, grinding the truck back into gear.

I don’t think so, I said climbing down.

I glanced up from the roadside and saw him sprawled across the wheel, chewing the inside of his cheek as he looked at me. The two-lane was empty. There wasn’t a farmhouse or human figure
in sight. My heart began to jump. I did not walk away. I remembered how vulnerable I felt the day before in town in a street of passing cars and pedestrians while the cop watched my progress all
the way uphill. I didn’t know what else to do but stand there. He looked in his mirror a moment and I stood there. He pulled away slowly and when he was a mile away I set off down the
track.

A peppermint thicket obscured the house from the road. It was a weatherboard place set a long way back in the paddocks, surrounded by sheets of tin and lumber and ruined machinery. I saw a
rooster but no dogs. I knew I had the right farm because I recognized the vehicles.

As I approached, an old man came out onto the sagging verandah in a singlet. He stood on the top step and scowled when I greeted him.

I was looking for Boner? I chirped.

Then you found him, he said, looking past me down the drive.

Oh, I stammered. I meant your son?

His name’s Gordon.

Um, is he home?

The old man jabbed a thumb sideways and went inside. I looked at the junkyard of vehicles and noticed a muddy path which took me uphill a way past open sheds stacked with spud crates and drums.
Back at the edge of the paddock, where fences gave way to peppy scrub and dunes, there was a corrugated iron hut with a rough cement porch.

Boner was startled by my arrival at his open door. He got up from his chair and limped to the threshold. Behind him the single room was squalid and chaotic. There was an oxy set on the strewn
floor and tools on the single bed. He seemed anxious about letting me in. I stepped back so he could hobble out onto the porch. In his hands was a long piece of steel with a bronzed spike at one
end.

What’re you making? I said.

This, he said.

But what is it?

Shark-sticker.

You, you spear sharks?

He shrugged.

So how are you?

Orright.

Haven’t seen you for ages, I said.

Boner turned the spear in his hands.

I hitched out, I said.

He was barefoot. It was the first time I’d seen him without his Johnny Rebs. He had hammer toes. Against the frayed hems of his jeans his feet were pasty white. We stood there a long while
until he leant the spear against the tin wall.

Wanna go fishin?

I didn’t know what to say. I lived in a harbour town all my life but I’d never had the slightest interest in fishing.

Okay, I said. Sure.

We drove out in the Valiant with two rods and a lard bucket full of tackle and bait. Boner had his boots on and a beanie pulled down over his ears. It took me a moment to see
why he’d chosen the Valiant. He didn’t say so but it was obvious that, for the moment, driving anything with a clutch was beyond him.

Out on Thunder Beach we cast for salmon and even caught a few. We stood a few yards apart with the waves clumping up and back into the deep swirling gutters in a quiet that didn’t require
talk. I watched and learnt and found to my surprise that I enjoyed the whole business. Nobody came by to disturb us. The white beach shimmered at our backs and the companionable silence between us
lasted the whole drive back into town. I didn’t tell him about the cop. Nor did I ask him again about who bashed him. I didn’t want him to shut down again. I was content just to be
there with him. It was as though we’d found new ground, a comfortable way of spending time together.

We saw each other off and on after that, mostly on weekends. These were always fishing trips; the aimless drives were behind us. We lit fires on the beach and fried whiting in a skillet. When
his legs were good enough we’d climb around the headland at Massacre Point and float crab baits off the rocks for groper. If he got a big fish on, Boner capered about precariously in his
slant-heeled boots, laughing like a troll. He never regained the truckin strut that caught my eye on the school verandah years before. Some days he could barely walk and there were times when he
simply never showed up. I knew he was persecuted by headaches. His mood could swing wildly. But there were plenty of good times when I can picture him gimping along the beach with a bucket full of
fish seeming almost blissful. No one was ever arrested over the beating. It didn’t seem to bother him and he didn’t want to talk about it.

I didn’t notice what people said about us in those days. I wasn’t even aware of the talk. I was absorbed in my own thoughts, caught up in the books I read, the plans I was
making.

During the Christmas holiday in the city, I met a boy at the movies who walked me back the long way to the dreary motel my parents favoured, and kissed me there on the steps
in the street. He came by the next morning and we took a bus to Scarborough Beach and when I got back that evening, sunburnt and salt-streaked, my parents were in a total funk.

The boy’s name was Charlie. He had shaggy blond surfer hair and puppy eyes and my father disliked him immediately. But I thought he was funny. Neither of us had cared much for
The Great
Gatsby.
Charlie had a wicked line in Mia Farrow impersonations. He could get those eyes to widen and bulge and flap until he had me in stitches. In Kings Park I let him hold my breast in his
hand and in the dark his smile was luminous.

The first time I saw Boner in the new year he was parked beside the steam cleaner at the Esso. The one-tonner’s tray was dripping and he sat low in his seat, the bill of
his cap down on his nose. I knew he’d seen me coming but he seemed anxious and reluctant to greet me. A sedan pulled up beside him – just eased in between us – and the way Boner
came to attention made me veer away across the tarmac and keep going.

The last year of school just blew by. I became a school prefect, won a History prize, featured as a vicious caricature in the lower school drama production (Mae West in a
mortar board, more or less).

Boner taught me to drive on the backroads. We fished occasionally and he showed me the gamefishing chair he’d bolted to the tray of the Land Rover so he could cast for sharks at night. His
hands shook sometimes and I wondered what pills they were that he had in those film canisters on the seat. I smoked a little dope with him and then didn’t see him for weeks at a time.

At second-term break Charlie arrived with some surfer mates in a Kombi. My mother watched me leave through the nylon lace curtains. As I showed Charlie and his two friends around town I sensed
their contempt for the place. I apologized for it, smoked their weed and directed them out along the coast road. We cruised the beaches and got stoned and ended up at Boner’s place on the
lowlands road. But nobody came out to meet us. In front of the main house stood the bloodstained one-tonner, its tray a sticky mess of spent rifle shells and flyblown hanks of bracken. When
Charlie’s mates saw the gore-slick chainsaw they wanted out. We bounced back up the drive giggling with paranoia.

In my last term I lived on coffee and Tim-Tams and worked until I felt fat and old and crazy. Charlie didn’t write or call. I remembered how short of passion I’d been with him. When
he kissed me or held my breast I was more curious than excited. I wanted more but I wouldn’t let him. I wasn’t scared or ashamed or guilty – I just wasn’t interested. There
was none of the electricity I’d once felt with Boner squeezed between my thighs as a fifteen-year-old. I felt annoyed, if anything, and Charlie’s puzzlement curdled into irritation. I
didn’t consciously compare him to Boner. Even Boner was someone I could sense in my wake. There was something shambling and hopeless about him now, something mildly embarrassing. I had got
myself a driver’s licence. I hardly saw him at all.

The final exams arrived. The school gym buzzed with flies. The papers made sense, the questions were answerable. I was prepared. The only exam where I came unstuck was French.
I knew I’d done well at the Oral but the paper seemed mischievous, the questions arch and tricksy. It shouldn’t have mattered but it made me angry and I tried way too hard to coat my
answers with a sarcasm that I didn’t have the vocab for. I wrote gobbledy-gook, made a mess of it. I came out reeling, relieved to have it all behind me, and there in the shade was Boner
parked illegally at the kerb beneath the trees.

Ride? he murmured.

Thanks, but I’m going home to bed. That was my last exam.

Good?

All except French. I was in
beaucoup
shit today.

Bo-what?

Beaucoup. It’s French. Means lots of.

I pressed my forehead against the warm sill of his door.

Made you somethin, he murmured.

I looked up and he passed me a piece of polished steel, a shark that was smooth and heavy in my hand.

Hey, it’s lovely.

Friday, he said. I’m havin a bomfire. Massacre Point. Plenty piss. Bo-coo piss. Tell ya mates.

Sure, I said. But what mates did I have?

A teacher came striding down the path.

You better go, I said.

He waited until the teacher was all but upon us before he cranked the Chev into life.

I didn’t tell anybody about Boner’s party. I felt awkward and disloyal about it but there wasn’t anybody I cared to ask. It was so unlike him to organize
something like this. He was probably doing it for me and I hated to think of him disappointed.

When I got out to Massacre Point in the old man’s precious Datsun, Boner’s fire was as big as a house. The dirt turnaround above the beach was jammed with cars and there must have
been a hundred people down there, a blur of bodies silhouetted by flames. As I made my way down in my kimono and silly gilt sandals the shadows of classmates spilled from the fire to wobble madly
across the trodden sand. I thought of the shitty things these kids had said about us. They were the same people. Fuck the lot of you, I thought. I’m his friend. His only friend. And only his
friend.