Winton - The turning: stories

Winton writes with rare sympathy about memory and loss, and gruff tenderness about losers and dreamers. He is a writer of supreme integrity and honesty.

Colm Tibn, author of The Master

Brooding, richly atmospheric Wintons muscular yet intuitive prose asserts the essential humanity of characters who arent convinced of themselves.

The Boston Globe

Tim Winton has an unerring ear for the cadences and mores of the working class. Regardless of how wrecked and ravaged these characters may be by the tides of memory and geographical displacement, Wintons empathy always shines through.

Los Angeles Times

These exceptionally crafted short stories focus on complex but ordinary people struggling with daily lives.

The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)

Consider reading this book through, front to back, with as few breaks as possible.

The Sunday Oregonian

Brilliant.

Kirkus Reviews

Tim Wintons stories are of a whole, seamless, sensuous, and utterly captivating.

Booklist

Winton achieves extraordinary depth with breathtaking brevitythere is no word wasted.

The Sunday Telegraph (London)

A writer of crystalline, luminous prose Wintons unbounded humanity and his sympathy for his characters descend on them like grace as they struggle to salvage their lives. To read him is to be reminded not just of the possibilities of fiction but of the human heart.

The Times (London)

Keenly sensuous intensely striking stories Wintons writing is vigorous, vivid, precise.

The Sunday Times (London)

Other books by Tim Winton

NOVELS

An Open Swimmer

Shallows

That Eye, the Sky

In the Winter Dark

Cloudstreet

The Riders

Dirt Music

STORIES

Scission

Minimum of Two

FOR YOUNGER READERS

Jesse

Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo

The Bugalugs Bum Thief

Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster

Lockie Leonard, Legend

Blueback

The Deep

NON-FICTION

Lands Edge

Down to Earth (with Richard Woldendorp)

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2004 by Tim Winton

Originally published in Australia in 2004 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2006

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Text set in Sabon

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Winton, Tim.
The turning : new stories / Tim Winton1st Scribner ed.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PR9619.3.W585T87 2005
823'.914dc22 2005044073

ISBN: 0-7432-9877-2

ISBN: 978-0-7432-7979-6 (print)

ISBN: 978-0-7432-9877-3 (eBook)

Excerpt from Ash Wednesday in Collected Poems 19091962 , copyright 1930 and renewed 1958 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted with permission of Harcourt, Inc.

Excerpt from The Need to Win by Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton, in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton , copyright 1963 by The Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., and 1977 by The Trustees of the Thomas Merton Legacy Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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for Ken Kelso

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

T. S. Eliot

ASH WEDNESDAY

The Turning

AFTER FIVE YEARS of high school the final November arrives and leaves as suddenly as a spring storm. Exams. Graduation. Huge beach parties. Biggie and me, were feverish with anticipation; we steel ourselves for a season of pandemonium. But after the initial celebrations, nothing really happens, not even summer itself. Week after week an endless misting drizzle wafts in from the sea. It beads in our hair and hangs from the tips of our noses while we trudge around town in the vain hope of scaring up some action. The southern sky presses down and the beaches and bays turn the colour of dirty tin. Somehow our crappy Saturday job at the meatworks becomes full-time and then Christmas comes and so do the dreaded exam results. The news is not good. A few of our classmates pack their bags for university and shoot through. Cheryl Button gets into Medicine. Vic Lang, the coppers kid, is dux of the school and doesnt even stay for graduation. And suddenly there we are, Biggie and me, heading to work every morning in a frigid wind in the January of our new lives, still in jeans and boots and flannel shirts, with beanies on our heads and the horizon around our ears.

The job mostly consists of hosing blood off the floors. Plumes of the stuff go into the harbour and old men sit in dinghies offshore to catch herring in the slick. Some days I can see me and Biggie out there as old codgers, anchored to the friggin place, stuck forever. Our time at the meatworks is supposed to be temporary. Were saving for a car, the V-8 Sandman weve been promising ourselves since we were fourteen. Mag wheels, a lurid spray job like something off a Yes album and a filthy great mattress in the back. A chick magnet, thats what we want. Until now weve had a biscuit tin full of twos and fivers but now were making real money.

Trouble is, I cant stand it. I just know I wont last long enough to get that car. Theres something Ive never told Biggie in all our years of being mates. That I dream of escaping, of pissing off north to find some blue sky. Unlike him Im not really from here. Its not hosing blood that shits me off its Angelus itself; Im going nuts here. Until now, out of loyalty, Ive kept it to myself, but by the beginning of February Im chipping away at our old fantasy, talking instead about sitting under a mango tree with a cold beer, walking in a shady banana plantation with a girl in a cheesecloth dress. On our long walks home I bang on about cutting our own pineapples and climbing for coconuts. Mate, I say, cant you see yourself rubbing baby oil into a girls strapless back on Cable Beach? Up north, mate, think north! I know Biggie loves this town and hes committed to the shared vision of the panel van, but I white-ant him day after day until it starts to pay off.

By the last weeks of February Biggies starting to come around. Hes talking wide open spaces now, trails to adventure, and Im like this little urger in his ear. Then one grey day he crosses the line. Weve been deputised to help pack skins. For eight hours we stand on the line fighting slippery chunks of cow hide into boxes so they can be sold as craybait. Our arms are slick with gore and pasted with orange and black beef-hairs. The smell isnt good but thats nothing compared with the feel of all those severed nostrils and lips and ears between your fingers. I dont make a sound, dont even stop for lunch, cant think about it. Im just glad all those chunks are fresh because at least my hands are warm. Beside me Biggies face gets darker and darker, and when the shift horn sounds he lurches away, his last carton half-empty. Fuck it, he says. Were outta here. That afternoon we ditch the Sandman idea and buy a Kombi from a hippy on the wharf. Two hundred bucks each.