The Turning

“Right then I can’t imagine an end to the quiet. The horizon fades. Everything looks impossibly far off. In two hours I’ll hear Biggie and Meg in his sleeping bag and she’ll cry out like a bird and become so beautiful, so desirable […] In a week Biggie and Meg will blow me off in Broome and I’ll be on the bus south for a second chance at the exams. In a year Biggie will be dead in a mining accident […] I’ll grow up and have a family of my own […] All of it unimaginable.” 

The move into the future tense here allows this story to present two concurrent scenes: the narrator standing there reveling in the moment, unaware that the burning van is the beginning of the end of his adventure, and also the narrator moving into the future and growing up with the tragedy that is coming. What is unimaginable to the young narrator is plain to the reader.

“He hadn’t hurt her, he knew that much, but he sensed she was in some kind of pain, something important that was out of his reach, the way everything is when you’re just a stupid kid and all the talk is over your head.”

In this moment, Vic Lang has just experienced a key coming-of-age moment—his first sexual encounter—but he is still too young to really understand the adult complexities of Melanie’s inner life. Melanie’s vacation is a break from hard, dispiriting work on the farm, while Vic lives a relatively promising life, has just moved to a new town, and he doesn’t have the emotional maturity to really grasp her disappointment. This will become a recurring motif of Vic’s stories, as he is repeatedly affected, sometimes in grave ways, by situations that are both out of his control and impossible for him to understand.

“Seeing the Joneses out on the street, the only people I recognized from the old days, just confirmed what I’ve thought since Alan Mannering circled me as his own, pointed me out with his jagged paling and left, that the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over.”

A key element of this story is the narrator’s initial belief about the significance of time’s passage, but on returning home, the narrator starts to see that even though so much has changed, he is irredeemably linked to his past and, importantly, his guilt.