The Turning by Tim Winton Read Free Book Online Page A

before jacarandas, flame trees, and cape lilacs found their way to
water and rose from yards like flags. I found eggs in the reeds, skinks in a fallen log, a bluetongue lizard jawing at me with its hard scales shining amidst the sighing wild oats. I sat in the hot
shade of a melaleuca in a daze.
    After that I went back alone or in the company of the Box kids or even Bruno. We dug hideouts and lit fires, came upon snakes real and imagined. I trekked to the swamp’s farthest limits
where the market gardens began. Italian men in ragged hats worked on sprinklers, lifted melons, turned the black earth. Water rose in rainbows across their land. I went home before dark, amazed
that my parents still believed me when I swore solemnly that I hadn’t been down the swamp.
    At school I learned about the wide brown land, the dry country. Summer after summer we recited the imperatives of water conservation. Sprinklers were banned in daylight hours and our parents
watered glumly by hand.
    One summer my mother announced that she’d come upon some Cape Coloureds at the nearest market garden. I thought she meant poultry of some kind. I met them on my own one day and was
confused by their accents. We threw a ball for a while, two girls and me. Their skin had a mildness about it. They didn’t seem as angry as the Joneses. The Joneses were dark and loud. Even
their laughter seemed angry. I never had much to do with any of them. I rode past their house careful not to provoke them. They gave my little brother a hiding once. I never knew why. His nose
swelled like a turnip and he nursed this grievance for the rest of his life. It made his mind up about them, he said. I kept clear. I already had Alan Mannering to worry about.
    The Joneses never went near the swamp. I heard they were frightened of the dark. Their dad worked in a mine. Bruno said vile things to them and bolted into the swamp for sanctuary. It was his
favourite game the year Americans went to the moon.
    One sunny winter day I sat in a hummock of soft weeds to stare at the tadpoles I had in my coffee jar. Billy Box said we all begin as tadpoles, that the Pope didn’t want us to waste even
one of them. I fell asleep pondering this assertion and when I woke Alan Mannering stood over me, his face without expression. I said nothing. He looked around for a moment before pulling his dick
out of his shorts and pissing over me. He didn’t wet me; he pissed around me in a huge circle. I saw sunlight in his pale stream and lay still lest I disturb his aim. When he was finished he
reeled himself back into his shorts and walked off. I emptied my tadpoles back into the lake.
    What did he want? What did he ever want from me?
    I was ten when people started dumping cars down at the swamp. Wrecks would just appear, driven in the back way from behind the market gardens, stripped or burned, left near the water on soft
ground where the dirt tracks gave out.
    Alan Mannering was the first to hack the roof off a car and use it upturned as a canoe. That’s what kids said, though Bruno claimed it was his own idea.
    I was with half a dozen Box kids when I saw Alan and Bruno out on the lake a hundred yards apart sculling along with fence pickets. Those Box kids crowded against me, straining, big and small,
to see. I can still remember the smell of them pressed in like that, their scent of warm milk and wet sheets. The two bigger boys drifted in silhouette out on the ruffled water. One of the Boxes
went back for their old man’s axe and we went to work on the scorched remains of an old FJ Holden with nasty green upholstery. One of them came upon a used condom. The entire Box posse was
horrified. I had no idea what it was and figured that you needed to be a Catholic to understand. Before dark we had our roof on the water. We kept close to shore and quickly discovered that two
passengers was all it could carry. Several Boxes went home wet. I doubt that anybody noticed. They were always