The Turning Read Online Free Page A

as they pounded out towards the reef. Beneath him the water flashed by, white, green, blue, yellow. When they got out over the mottled deep, swells rolled in smooth and oily while
Vic’s old man baited the pots with beef hocks and Ernie uncoiled ropes and floats. They tipped the craypots into sandy green holes and left the ropes snaking on the surface.
    Back on the beach the carrot-top cousins squealed for a ride in the boat.
    While they were tootled around the shallows Vic went up to the makeshift shelter between vehicles and saw that his mother was up. He rocked his baby sister while his mum ate breakfast and
listened to Auntie Cleo talk about fingernails and cuticles. Vic’s Auntie wasn’t really a Cleo; she botted the name from the magazine with the horoscopes and male centrefolds. Her real
name was Cloris. She bored his mum stupid. Vic’s mum did her best to hide it from him but he knew it well enough. She must have been tired this morning because at one moment during
Cleo’s prattling monologue, at the very instant that Nanna happened to look their way, she rolled her eyes at him as if to say give me strength . Cleo didn’t notice but
Nanna’s mouth was like a knife edge.
    Vic didn’t know why they were all stuck on this trip together but there was no doubt it was Nanna’s idea. She had firm ideas about family, and when she was around everybody
else’s ideas went soft.
    He wasn’t quite thirteen but Vic knew a thing or two about Uncle Ernie. The oldies kept it quiet but he knew that with Nanna Ernie had protected status. It was as though he could do no
wrong. Yet everything Ernie touched turned bad. He liked the nags. He played two-up and always knew a bloke who knew a bloke who had something or other on the highest authority. He was, therefore,
always in trouble. It wasn’t unusual to have men come knocking on the door for him as though Vic’s old man was his father and not just his brother. Less than a year ago, just after his
sister was born, Vic and his dad had to take Ernie’s truck out in the wee hours to deliver milk for him. Nobody said where Ernie was. Nanna came along of course. She read out the orders by
the light of a policeman’s torch, and Vic ran until his throat was raw. The streets were dark and still. His father drove and ran and hardly said a word all night. Vic sensed that
there’d been other nights he was spared. Now the milk round was gone in any case.
    Vic was always uneasy around his uncle. Ernie was funny. There was always a joke on the boil, something to be kept from the women, but you’d never tell him anything important about
yourself. He was always talking, never listening. One Christmas, when Vic was eight, Uncle Ernie arrived out of the blue with a brand new bike for him, a Stingray with a T-bar shift. It was redder
than Ernie’s face and seemed to please his uncle as much as him but Vic’s parents were strangely subdued. As an eight-year-old he had wondered if it was too much, too big a gift. He
suspected they were jealous or even ashamed of their own thrift. Now he suspected that the bike was hot. There’d never been any gifts since.
    Ernie, Vic realized, was a live wire, an adventurer. That was his role in the family. Vic’s father, on the other hand, was the one who tidied up after the excitement. You could see
they’d been doing it all their lives.
    Ernie and Cleo think they’re irresistible, he overheard his mother say one Easter.
    So, said his father, who gets to break the news to them?
    Vic sat around with the others as long as he could stand it but when it grew hot even beneath the shade of the tarps he unstrapped his surfboard from the roof of the Jeep and
struck off down the beach. He walked until their camp was just a solitary blot in the white distance.
    The waves were only small but he wasn’t much of a surfer yet so he didn’t mind. After the hot walk the water was delicious. He paddled out excitedly and caught a few waves but either