The Turning

4

4

Although the gossip and the speculation were for the most part wildly inaccurate, it was true that he had begun visiting the tip quite often.

It was the first week of the school holiday period and already Kyle was bored. He had decided to try making things to pass the time; what had begun with paper aeroplanes (which his father had taught him to make a few nights ago) had now advanced to paper masks, paper-mâché balloons, miniature cities made out of tissue boxes and toilet rolls and cubby houses made out pillows, blankets and sofa cushions. His mother didn't mind, encouraged it even, but Ben thought it was a pain in the arse to have to come home from the shop, grab a beer and go to sit down in front of the telly to find his son had nicked all the cushions and rearranged the furniture. There wasn't a damn thing he could say about it because, as Beth liked to remind him, he was being constructive. Perhaps it was finally the turning point they had been hoping for.

Recently, the interest in cubby houses had given way to forts and soon enough he had realised that the best way to go about it would be to make them out of cardboard. He wanted to make one containing elaborate tunnels and miniature chambers with various entrance and exit points, small hubs and corridors, even secret passages if he could manage it. He needed plenty of boxes for this, though, and since all he could manage to muster up at home were toilet rolls, he had thought the tip would suit his needs perfectly.

At first, neither of his parents had known that he was spending time out there until they had asked him where the junk was coming from; an old car battery here, a dirty cardboard box that had once housed a brand new Plasma TV there. He had told them, reluctantly, but Ben had already known by that point; Matt Wilcox had told him the Sunday last as he had been hurling their own rubbish into the hole in the ground, that his boy had been coming and going. Beth had had kittens at first, listing the one thousand ways for him to have an accident or even kill himself in amongst all the rusted, broken trash that was home to snakes and spiders. But then Ben had taken her aside and had cockily told her that it was all right because he was being constructive. Then he had smiled and had gone off into the house to watch a rerun of MASH while Beth had inspected some of the artefacts the boy had hauled from the dump, fuming over her husband. At twelve, he was no longer a baby, and she had had to persuade herself that a fraction of what Ben had taunted her with was right. He was old enough to do what he wanted and he had a lot of energy he needed to use up.

At first, the tip was to him like one of the Seven Wonders of the World. He would take the turnoff from Giles Street and onto the Biloela Road for about a kay before turning off again onto the rugged, beaten dirt track that would lead him first to the tip and, should he keep following it, the Wilton Town Cemetery. This track, the earth forever beaten and pulverised to fine powder by all the passing trucks, was notorious for bindies and Kyle took it steadily, sticking to the centre of the road. From here, the local dump was only a kay from the Biloela Road and situated in amongst the wild bush terrain of the Pleasant Hills State forest. Despite the high, chain-link security fence that surrounded it, the tip was only ever shut and locked at night. Beyond the fence was the pit at the centre of the sprawl of junk, a huge crater filled with garbage of all varieties. If anyone had asked the locals who had dug the pit, no one would have been able to say for sure as the site was considered present before the establishment of the town. Some speculated that it might have been the remains of a mine at one time, but as of then, no one had ever bothered to research the matter too thoroughly.

From an aerial point of view, the tip was separated into three rings, the first being where all the bags of rubbish and recycling had been left to burn or corrode. Some people tended to just dump it on the edge of the crater for Matt to boot into the hole (always with a frown and a shake of the head). Heaped and scattered around the outer edges of the pit was the second ring of junk: the old furniture, fridges, desks, washing machines, bed frames, broken dog houses, broken vacuum cleaners. There was glass here too, broken and intact, old windscreens had been dumped and old house doors with windows. Kyle was always wary of this section as it was where Matt had told him snakes had been spotted. He supposed they liked to hide in and around the furniture, only to venture out when the sun was hanging at noon and they needed to warm their scales. Scattered about the outskirts of this were the old vehicles and farm machinery, the more interesting relics in Kyle's opinion. Cars from all eras were scattered here, varying from Morris Minors and Buick's, Camry's and Road-masters. Their colours had frayed and their bonnets were rusted, their engines disemboweled and removed for spare parts long ago. Interwoven into the fabric of this disenchanting museum of scrap-metal were the header-combs, the tractors, the piles of broken brick, scrap timber with nails poking from the ends, old car batteries, mountains of tractor tires and hills of concrete dust, gravel, cracker-dust, red earth and blue granite. There was the ancient farm machinery from a time when drovers had used the horse and cart. Some of it was old enough to belong in museums, though would never be salvageable enough to be allowed inclusion. Washing machines, worn truck tires, tractor tires, broken furniture, beer bottles and cans, broken bricks and thousands and thousands of shattered flecks of glass glinting with deadly vibrancy under the November sun.

Matt Wilcox was thirty-three years old. He was a thin, Maori lad with shaggy black hair and only a few teeth left to smile with. He worked Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, from ten till six pm and was normally stationed to one side of the tip entrance, sitting in his beat-up second hand Hyundai, stoned and playing games on his phone. He'd smoke a joint when there was no one around, and then cigarettes while he waited for the larger trucks with their heavy loads of town garbage to come lumbering up the dirt road, a high billowing red cloud rising from behind. But mostly there were days when the tip stood open and nobody showed at all and it was those days when he’d be as high as a kite by the end of it.

When Kyle started turning up on Friday afternoons and occasionally on Sundays, Matt was immediately curious to know what the boy was up to, not because he was a part of Wilton’s elite gossip squad but because it occurred to him that the tip was not as exciting as the local cricket pitch or the swimming pool. Matt had a soft spot for Kyle and he knew full-well what some people thought of him. He himself wasn’t regarded as much of an upstanding citizen; the local drug runner was his unspoken title, something that was perhaps meant to incite shame but instead reminded him of what a bunch of hypocrites they were. After all, half of them had brought m*******a off him at one time or another.

Kyle would walk his bike over to Matt's beat-up wagon and Matt would wind down the window to greet him, his eyes pink and dazed though his broken-toothed grin amiable and good-natured. Even during the hotter months, he could be seen wearing a big black beanie that had a way of poking up on top. He would always ask Kyle how school was, how the girls were treating him and more importantly the teachers, and Kyle would laugh and tell Matt he had no crushes and of course, Matt would shake his head, grin widening and he'd call the kid a snake in the grass or a fly on heat. Kyle had no idea what either of those expressions meant but was happy to go along. He thought Matt was cool in a sort of backward way, perhaps because Matt was the only person who spoke to him like an adult and not a child. They'd talk about the weather, football and occasionally cricket though Kyle never watched it, citing his father's favourite claim that watching the cricket was like watching paint dry.

It was Thursday afternoon and the wind was blowing a hot, disenchanting drone when Kyle wandered over to the car to find Matt with his shirt off and splashing cold, melting ice water onto his face and back from an esky on the passenger seat. In the esky were half a dozen cans of coke, with two Bundaberg Rums lying on the bottom like stowaways. Later, he’d sip those idly during the final hour of his shift while he went about putting out the tip fire and locking the gate as the sun slipped beyond the backdrop. The time of the annual heatwave that ran through most of December had finally settled in. It never seemed to bother the locals much but Matt practically died each summer. He had never gotten completely used to it since moving to Wilton seven years ago.

He glanced over and peered at the boy, a cigarette clamped between his lips. Kyle let his bike thump to the ground and wandered over.

“I hope you never own a horse, mate,” Matt said.

“Hey Matt,” the kid said. Matt reached an arm through the window and they shook.

“How are yer,” said Matt. He had the radio on and was listening to the test match series.

“Listening to paint dry now?” Kyle said with a grin.

“Aw come off it, its Shri Lanka and Australia.”

“What are you doing Mattie, having bath?”

"It's hot, bro," Matt said. He grabbed his shirt off the back seat, slipped his smouldering cigarette butt into the opening of a coke can in the cupholder, and dabbed at his dripping face. Kyle watched, fascinated by the bloke's tattoos. More than once he had thought of asking what they meant but it seemed rude to do that.

“You look tired, did they make you stay out here again last night?” said Kyle. Matt turned the radio down a fraction.

“They don’t make me sit out here all night, mate, just the day.”

Kyle frowned.

“But you said the other day you were out ‘here the other night, watching the lights in the sky.”

“Nah, at home I was. And I think they’re aeroplanes now. That’d be the only reason I keep seeing them every night. Must be a route or somethin’ that goes through here. What brings you here today? Treasure?”

"Any boxes?" Kyle said, one eye squeezed tight against the sun. His head seemed oversized with his helmet on and heavy as though his neck were supporting a bowling ball. Matt shrugged, shook his head.

“Nah, sorry boss. We burn ‘em all. What sort you after? Cardboard, hey?”

“Yeah,” Kyle muttered, gazing at the fence. “You don’t know where I might be able to get some do ya?”

Matt considered the question, lighting another fag and resting both arms on the unwound door.

“Why don’t you go try the shop?” Matt said. The Shop was Wilton’s one and only grocery store, a small, paint flaking building on Giles Street that was run by a man named Barry Davis. Barry had made it abundantly clear that he was not a fan of Kyle, so Kyle tended to stay away.

“Your old man should be able to bring some home,” Matt went on. “Shouldn’t he? Him being a butcher and that.”

Kyle shook his head.

“Nah, dad crushes his. Gets money for selling it to recycling.”

"Well, try the shop. I reckon Barry would have some hangin' around. Whaddya makin' this time anyway?"

“A fort,” Kyle said. Matt snorted and spat at the dirt.

“Fort making. That takes me back to when I was a kid. Tell you what mate, two things you never wanna do: leave school and leave home. It don’t work out.”

“I hate school,” Kyle said, grinning but Matt shrugged.

“There’s worse,” he said, thoughtfully. “How big a fort you thinking of making, must gonna be big if you’re looking for cardboard.”

The kid shrugged. “Whatever I can get would be good. But there were some other things I was gonna make with ‘em too. Maybe some boats I can sink or-“

“-or a bomb you can put under Lynette Roses’ arse,” Matt said, pronouncing his S’s with a whistle between his gums. Kyle burst out laughing and Matt chuckled along with him.

“Sorry I can’t help you much there at the moment but I tell you what, if I get any I’ll put ‘em to one side for ya,” he said. He got out of the car and slammed the door only to have it fall open again behind him. He was slightly unsteady on his feet, a combination of drugs and the heat making him disorientated.

“Better go light up this pile of s**t. Check out the grocer, Davis will have something,” he said. Kyle nodded, thanking Matt who gave the boy a laid-back salute and watched as he hoisted his bike out of the dirt. Matt walked on through the tip entrance, his image soon joining the wavering mirage.

Soon the thick stench of burning plastic began to fill the air as Matt set about lighting the garbage for the ritual midday burning. He was a little later than normal today but it made no difference to him. The smell of smoke soon reminded Kyle of last year and he peddled hard, shaking his head. Would he ever forget? Would they?