The Turning

Part 1: Kyle and the Old Man

1

To the eyes and ears of the Wilton community, Kyle Yates was a thoughtless, disaster-prone little boy who hadn't been reared in the way of most kids his age living in the sticks.

“Mum and Dad don’t spend any bloody time with him, both go to work when the school holidays are on and that’s why he gets on that bike, hooning ‘round looking for stuff to flog or break,” the bar-maid of the Wilton Hotel, Janie Gillespie, would promptly say as she’d pour the men another round here and there. They’d nod or shake their heads in quiet agreement, some eying the window as though to spot the kid passing by at that moment.

Though the town despised him, they tended to keep their thoughts to themselves and certainly away from the ears of Kyle’s father who happened to be well-liked as the local, qualified butcher. Ben Yates was famous for having something of a temper and life-long locals were mindful of it. Hating on a man’s son was like hating on the man himself, and they all knew to steer the conversation towards the cricket or the football whenever he was in the pub for his weekly bout of beers.

Despite that people viewed him as an all-around top bloke and the master of meat and muscle, Ben Yates's business in Bilolea, a town half an hour north of Wilton, had become difficult to maintain in the years nearing his fiftieth. It hadn't been terribly lucrative following the ten-year drought, and even now maintaining local produce was a nightmare. The local farmers, those noble folk who had fought the dust and heat to provide him with stock to buy, had begun to diminish. The shop’s accounts had become a deep, dank pit from which money was constantly being drained, and the subject of selling it had come up again and again between he and his wife Beth over the years.

Beth worked in the administration department at Wilton Primary from Monday to Wednesday, with the occasional Thursday thrown in where needed. The money wasn't excellent but going into the job all those years before, she had thought it wouldn't be too bad considering that she was its sole operator. There was no need for more staff; her paperwork was always done by midday and then it was on to answering phones and tending to kids holed up in sick-bay or touching up some edits in the school gazette.

Kyle was closer to her than he was to Ben and she supposed it was because she had always been willing to defend him when he screwed up, or when one of the nosy town snobs would asked whether her son had lit any good fires lately. Sometimes she really resented the town’s people for their sarcasm and gossip, but there were good people amongst them too and she had to remind herself of that.

Kyle was Beth's world, and although she was very protective of him, she was well aware that his behaviour was troubling. She had always believed that he would grow out of it, but since the fire, she had begun to wonder. There was still something undeniably reckless in the kid, and it plagued her thoughts occasionally when there was little work to be done in the office and the only sound was the ticking of the clock on the wall. She wondered, often in earnest, what sort of man he would grow into.

Her meagre income at the school had begun to plague her and Ben. Wilton offered very little in terms of employment but she knew that in the nearby towns there was usually work. A Woolworths was planned to be opened in nearby Tormon the following year and the union heads had decided to raise the worker's income at the rice mill there to almost double what she was making in administration. The problem was, millwork could be tough and she had been working in an office environment for such a long time. She wondered with real unease whether she could adapt and then she would think with bitter resentment that if Ben's business got any worse and the interest on their belongings crept any higher, she might have to.

Except it made her anxious to think of what would happen if she left Kyle with a babysitter on the nights that she would have to work. Since last year, hiring babysitters had practically been ruled out of her mind.

Sometimes she wondered whether her son might be disturbed or lacking some mental capacity. Occasionally she had thought of checking him in to see a doctor or a psychiatrist, and when she had mentioned this to Ben he had waved her off, telling her that he would simply outgrow it.

But he was twelve now and he hadn't. There were always broken windows or slingshots, antics like riding on the back of the dog like he was some wild bronco or trouble in the classroom. The teachers were constantly bombarding her with new updates and amid it all was the same underlining complaint: Kyle is easily distracted from class work and disruptive to others.

Then the fire of last year had occurred, something Ben had a liking of bringing up as though his answer to parental intuition was to constantly shun the boy with guilt. Sometimes she thought Ben didn't love him as much as she did, but then again it had always been difficult to know how Ben felt about a lot of things. He had his mind full, what with the expenses of running the butcher shop and problems he was having with his back. He had never directly told her how bad things were but she knew, from the invoices and bank statements, that the sun had gone behind a storm cloud and there it remained until things got better or worse. Sometimes she thought it was the stress associated with his parents that led to her sons behaviour, or at least that was how she had felt before Kyle had tried to burn their house to the ground.