The Turning by Tim Winton Read Free Book Online

voice was soft and full of menace, his accent broadly local as my own. Some days he threw his schoolbag up onto the verandah of his place and headed on down
to the swamp without even stopping in and I watched him go in relief and envy. Mostly I played with the Box kids across the road. There were seven or eight of them. They were Catholics and most of
them wet the bed though it was hard to say which ones because they all had the same ammonia and hot milk smell. I liked them, though they fought and cried a lot. We slipped through the bush
together where there were no straight lines. Beyond the fence there were snarls and matted tangles. We hid behind grasstrees and twisted logs and gathered burrs in our shirts and seeds in our hair.
Eventually the Boxes began to slip off to the swamp. I always pulled up short, though, and went back to dial 1194 for reassurance.
    Another Pom moved in next door. I saw him digging and stood on the fence to watch, my shadow the only greeting. I watched him dig until only his balding head showed. He winked and pointed until
I climbed down into his yard. I shuffled over to the lip of his hole and saw the wet earth beneath his sandals. A puddle began to form around his feet.
    The water table, he said in a chirpy accent. It’s high here, see. Half these fence posts are in it, you know.
    The rank, dark stink of blood and bone hung in the air. I climbed back over the fence but kept watching him dig.
    Looks dry this country, it does, but underground there’s water. Caves of it. Drilling, that’s what this country needs.
    I went indoors.
    Someone hung a snake from our jacaranda out front. It was a dugite, headless and oozing. My mother went spare.
    Across the road one night, Mr Box left his kids asleep in the Holden and went indoors with his wife. It was for a moment’s peace, my oldies said, but a moment was all they had. The station
wagon rolled across the road, bulldozed the letterbox and mowed down our roses.
    George Mannering with the long feet trimmed his buffalo grass every week with a push mower. He liked grass; it was the one thing he’d not had in England though he reminded us that English
grass was better, finer. My mother rolled her eyes. George Mannering bought a Victa power mower and I stood out front to watch his first cut. I was there when two-year-old Charlie lurched up
between his father’s legs and lost some toes in a bright pink blur. All the way back inside to my room I heard his voice above the whine of the two-stroke which sputtered alone out there
until the ambulance came.
    I forget how old I was when I gave in and went to the swamp. It felt bad to be cheating on my parents but the wild beyond the fences and the lawns and sprinklers was too much for me. By this
time I was beginning to have second thoughts about the 1194 man. My parents bought a kitchen clock which seemed to cheat with time. A minute was longer some days than others. An hour beyond the
fence travelled differently across your skin compared with an hour of television. I felt time turn off. Time wasn’t straight and neither was the man with the BBC voice. I discovered that you
could say anything you liked to him, shocking things you’d only say to prove a point, and the man never said a thing except declare the plodding time. I surrendered to the swamp without
warning. Every wrinkle, every hollow in the landscape led to the hissing maze down there. It was December, I remember. I got off my bike and stepped down into dried lupins like a man striding
through a crowd. Seed pods rattled behind me. A black swan rose from the water. I went on until the ground hardened with moisture and then went spongy with saturation. Scaly paper-barks keeled away
in trains of black shadow. Reeds bristled like venetian blinds in the breeze. Black water bled from the ground with a linoleum gleam.
    From the water’s edge you couldn’t even see our street. The crowns of tuart trees were all I saw those early years