The Turning by Tim Winton Read Free Book Online Page B

wet.
    Next day was Saturday. I got down to the swamp early in order to have the raft to myself a while and had only pulled it from its nest of reeds when Alan Mannering appeared beside me. He never
said a word. I actually cannot remember that boy ever uttering a word meant for me. He lived over the road for ten years. He all but walked me home from school for five of those, poking me from
behind, sometimes peppering my calves with gravel. I was in his house once, I remember the airless indoor smell. But he never spoke to me at any time.
    Alan Mannering lifted the jarrah picket he’d ripped from someone’s fence and pressed the point of it into my chest. I tried to bat it away but he managed to twist it into my shirt
and catch the flesh beneath so that I yielded a few steps. He stepped toward me casually, his downy legs graceful.
    You’re shit, I said, surprising myself.
    Alan Mannering smiled. I saw cavities in his teeth and a hot rush of gratitude burned my cheeks, my fingertips. Somehow the glimpse of his teeth made it bearable to see him drag our FJ Holden
roof to the water and pole out into the shimmering distance without even a growl of triumph, let alone a word. I lifted my tee-shirt to inspect the little graze on my chest and when I looked up
again he was in trouble.
    When he went down, sliding sideways like a banking aircraft out there in the ruffled shimmer of the swamp’s eye, I really didn’t think that my smug feeling, my satisfied pity about
his English teeth, had caused the capsize. He didn’t come up. I never even hated him, though I’d never called anyone shit before. After the water settled back and shook itself smooth
again like hung washing, there wasn’t a movement. No sign.
    I went home and said nothing.
    Police dragged the swamp, found the car roof but no body. Across the road the Mannerings’ lawn grew long and cries louder than any mower drifted over day and night.
    That Christmas we drove the Falcon across the Nullarbor Plain to visit the Eastern States which is what we still call the remainder of Australia. The old man sealed the doors with masking tape
and the four of us sat for days breathing white dust. The limestone road was marked only with blown tyres and blown roos. Near the South Australian border we stopped at the great blowhole that runs
all the way to the distant sea. Its rising gorge made me queasy. I thought of things sucked in, of all that surging, sucking water beneath the crust of the wide brown land.
    Back home, though they did not find his body, I knew that Alan Mannering was in the swamp. I thought of him silent, fair, awful, encased in the black cake-mix of sediment down there.
    The next year, come winter, the night air was musky with smoke and sparks hung in the sky like eyes. Bulldozers towing great chains and steel balls mowed down tuart trees and banksias.
    I learned to spell aquifer.
    Three doors up, Wally Burniston came home drunk night after night. His wife Beryl locked him out and if he couldn’t smash his way in he lay bawling on the verandah until he passed out.
Some school mornings I passed his place and saw him lying there beside the delivered milk, his greasy rocker’s haircut awry, his mouth open, shoes gone.
    New streets appeared even while the bush burned. In the phone box, which stank of cigarettes, I listened to the man from 1194 and knew that he was making the time up as he went along.
    I saw the rainbow mist of the market garden sprinklers and felt uneasy. I thought of Alan Mannering in that mist. He’d have been liquid long ago. I was eleven now, I knew this sort of
thing.
    As our neighbourhood became a suburb, and the bush was heaved back even further on itself, there was talk of using the swamp for landfill, making it a dump so that in time it could be reclaimed.
But the market gardeners were furious. Their water came from the swamp, after all. Water was no longer cheap.
    The van Gelders divorced. Wally Burniston was taken somewhere, I