The Turning

3

3

It had been the members of the local fire squad who would talk about it at the pub in the months following the incident at the Yates home. The pub talk that immediately ensued afterward, often kicking off with, "By Jesus, you hear about what happened at Ben and Beth's house the other night?” lasted months, but by the second week no one had needed informing. Most people had been there.

A swarm of gossip, common enough for the circumstance, evolved seemingly overnight in Wilton, and by the end of the week everyone knew what Ben Yates had barely been able to bring himself to articulate that night on the back step: that the boy on the red bike with the single training wheel, the boy with the large head and troublesome smile who came across so polite and yet seemed to harbour such problematic inner demons, was really something of a bad omen.

From then on the towns-people paid close attention to what he got up to. People who drove by and saw him riding along the footpath with his backpack slung over his shoulders would religiously report back to their friends, neighbours and fellow drinkers.

“Seen young Kyle Yates getting ‘round on that bike.”

“What’s he got in that bag you reckon?”

“Probably matches.”

“His old man should have fuckin’ kicked his ass good that night he lit that fire!”

Residents would eye-ball him from their utes or watch him from their garden beds as they turned the soil. What could he be doing? Before long it was common knowledge that Lynette Rose had banned him from the pool, and in Wilton that was about all there was for kids his age to do. Perhaps the main reason they felt the urge to talk about him was so they could speculate on what he might do next. There was something of a very real though mostly hushed fear in the community about that, as people considered what might happen if he went to play with a cigarette lighter in the forest next time as opposed to his backyard or in the sprawl of grassland out at the common. Down there, nobody would know there was trouble until it was too late. They had gotten lucky the first time.

Talk about Kyle Yates at the pub or on the main street seemed to naturally swell into a running commentary about how kids were allowed to get away with just about anything. You couldn’t hit the kids anymore. Couldn’t give them a flogging even though they were yours and they were living under your roof. Couldn’t so much as hit your dog for barking without someone kicking up a stink. Of course, there were others who defended the boy, one of them being Marilyn Spencer. Whenever the subject had come up in her vicinity, following Sunday morning church or down the main street getting milk and bread, she would tell people to stop gossiping and causing fuss, that the kid wasn’t stupid, he had gotten a hell of a scare and would probably resent the sight of flame for the rest of his life. Marilyn was in her eighties and well respected in town, and those who had once been something of reckless children themselves when she had been a teacher at Wilton Public had kept their opinions to themselves around her.

A month or so after the drama had settled the best it could (it had a way of reappearing like sentiment from a broken vacuum cleaner), people began reporting to others that they had seen him down at the Wilton Garbage tip, sifting through rubbish, and thus they speculated that the boy had a burglar’s streak in him as well as an arsonists. Someone got it in their head that maybe he was trying to sell things on eBay. Kids these days knew all about eBay and how to make money on the internet. The tip’s caretaker, Matt Wilcox started getting asked on a regular basis what the boy was doing but Matt barely paid any attention to the comings and goings of everyday people. He just did what he was paid for, minding the tip gate and burning the garbage in the pit when it needed doing. All that mattered to him was that the pay-check was waiting for him down at the council offices in Leeton every Friday. He knew that no one could stop the kid from being out there anyway, except his parents of course, though he reckoned that they, like every other parent having to endure the endless school holiday period, were just happy to have him out of the house on the weekends. The Wilton tip, unlike other small towns, was still regarded as a free service until further amendment by the Shire Council. People could still dump and take what they wanted, just the way it had been run for almost fifty years. It was yet to be used as a service for creating revenue and although the council had tried several times to change this in court, a loophole in the law had prevented them thus far.

So Kyle visited the tip and the town’s folk minded him. Everyone had their eyes on the boy when, in the month leading up to Christmas, they should have had their eyes turned to the skies, the way that Matt Wilcox had on many stoned nights. Because something was happening. Something was watching them with the keen interest of a cat eyeing the hole in the wall from which a mouse appears. And soon enough it would be meeting the people of Wilton before they even knew it themselves.