The Turning

2

2

It was dreadfully ironic that Beth and Ben had ducked down to the Wilton Club for a town meeting about preventing bushfires on the night that their house had almost burned down.

Debbie Inglis, a high school girl whose parents had also been at the meeting that night, had agreed to watch Kyle while they had gone. Debbie had been seventeen and studying for her HSC at Leeton High. She had been short and round, with dark, greasy hair and an array of pimples covering her chin and jaw. Debbie had chronic sleep apnea and asthma that worsened during the summer months what with all the dust in the air blowing over from the grain silos, and so her mouth was constantly parted, emitting wheezy gasps like the tired squeaks from a dogs old, rubber chew toy. In the years since commencing her higher school certificate, Debbie's eyes had likened to that of a whales; lined and bagged, a touch of sadness here and there for all the times spent in front of a keyboard instead of partying with her eighteen-year-old friends. She had vowed never to go to uni if it was anything like her HSC. As far as she was concerned that had been traumatic enough. Unfortunately though, Debbie hadn’t know the meaning of traumatic until she had babysat for Kyle Yates. She would be the first and the last hired help to sit for the kid.

Of course, Kyle had been a little more than annoyed when his parents had ducked out without him. After finding no fun in Debbie, who had plonked herself down in Ben’s old recliner to go over some Advanced Maths questions on her laptop, he had trundled off to his room at the far back of the house where his window served a good view of the town common. Staring out at the blank, early evening sky, the sprawl of yard and the town common beyond the house that seeming to veer on forever, an idea had struck him.

He had waited half an hour before creeping back into the lounge room. Debbie’s head had been craned back, her eyes closed and her mouth gaping and drooling, the asthma puffer gripped in one pudgy hand. She had been snoring loudly, a sound like water circling down a drain.

Just before his parents had left, Kyle had gone through his mother's handbag and had found the keys to the steel cupboard under the laundry tub. In a house with a kid who was borderline insane, both Ben and Beth had believed it to be better safe than sorry to have such places locked. He knew that going through his mothers handbag was worthy of a smack, but he justified it by telling himself that he wasn't interested in his mother's money. He had just needed to get her keys because the laundry cupboard was where the matches and candles were kept and what if there was a blackout?

After unlocking the steel door and rummaging through the cans, cursing them when they rattled, he found what he was after standing towards the back. He had eyed the skull and crossbones label with intrigue, had picked it up and had darted out of the room.

Taking the bottle of methylated spirits hadn't been the hard part. That had been finding matches, all of which were either hidden from him or put up high out of reach. After a long and fruitless search, Kyle had recalled seeing a cigarette lighter in the glove compartment of his father's ute.

He’d planned to start the fire in the backyard and sit around it, maybe roast marshmallows or grill some of the roast chicken left in the fridge. He was positive that he was able to do it-he had watched his dad light fires hundreds of times in the winter. The only difference, of course, was that he used newspaper and fire-lighters, occasionally with a splash of diesel to get it kicked up. Kyle had seen no reason why diesel would be any different from methylated spirits; after all, there had been a picture of a flame on the bottle.

So he collected a few sticks and dried grass, built it up into an impressive tee-pee and had then poured the entire bottle on top. For a moment the fumes had made him woozy. Sage had sat there on his hind-quarters, tongue lapping, watching on eagerly. The blue heeler was well accustomed to Ben's backyard campfires and had enjoyed sitting around with them as they had listened to the Dance party hits segment on 2RG.

But that had been in the winter. Anybody who lives or has lived in this part of the world knows that lighting a fire during summer was insane. The idea of fire in the dry heat of the Australian bush is enough to spark fear into the hardest of men's hearts, and the grass in the Yates's backyard that evening had been dry, wild and plentiful. When the kid had lit the sticks, the fire had whooshed to life, climbing up and then outwards with so much fury that he had been lucky to save his eyebrows. Unlike his father, who he thought as stupid for lighting his bonfires so far from the back door, he had built his about five meters from the kitchen window.

At first, he was happy with his efforts but soon began to notice how the fire was burning outwards, catching the grass and eating it away like saliva on fairy-floss. Embers were beginning to spin and drift into the night as though reaching for the moon. A breeze had blown, hot and arid, carrying them spiralling towards the house where they drifted into the gutters that Ben had been promising Beth for weeks he would get around to cleaning out. This was when Kyle had begun to eye the length of hose by the back door nervously, still telling himself that everything was fine, that the grass would stop and even out soon enough. He had heard the sound of crackling coming from his right and when he had looked up the gutters had been on fire.

Only then did the panic, which had been gnawing, finally break out. It had taken seconds for the entire guttering to go up. He was paralysed with terror, at the prospect of what he had done and all he seemed to be able to do was stand there and watch, utterly helpless. He contemplated simply running, abandoning the scene and fleeing into the bush that ran along the edge of the town common at the back of the property. The thought of Debbie Inglis had stopped him from doing this. He could practically see her in his mind, snoring, oblivious to what was happening around her.

Snapping him from his entranced state of terror, the door had opened and Debbie had been screaming, her words lost and jangled beneath the roar of the flame. Then she was lunging for the hose, hair dancing wildly in the powerful updraft. Shaking, tears streaming down her face and cursing his name, she had plucked the hose from the burning, singled vegetation and had spun the knob. With one hand holding the hose, water splashing uselessly into a puddle on the ground, her face red and no longer distinguishable beneath her smudged and blackened make-up, she had roared at him to go call triple zero. And he had. Somehow he had managed to do it with the composure of an artist at work.

It was lucky that there had still been one firefighter, Nan Stuart, at the Wilton barracks that night. He had been fiddling around searching for some evacuation procedure documents that were needed at the meeting when the call, first made to Tormon and from there to the Wilton Firefighting Barracks, had come through. Several trucks from the Tormon station had been dispatched but it would take twenty minutes for them to reach Wilton. Nan had taken the barrack's only fire truck out in a spray of dust and gravel, narrowly missing old Marilyn Spencer's little white civic as it had trundled home from the club meeting. By some miracle, Debbie had managed to water the blaze down to a few scattered licks of flame by the time Nan had arrived. The gutters were smouldering and for the most part, she hadn't been able to reach high enough the extinguish them completely. He had told her to contact Ben and Beth Yates immediately at the meeting, and because most people had been at the town hall while the local member for the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area had preached about the importance of farmers notifying authorities about hazard reduction burns, Ben had interrupted the meeting with his cries for help. More than half of the 73 residents present had raced to the Yates house, hoping to be of some assistance, because each had known that if not immediately contained there was a very real possibility that on such a hot November night, the town would burn. It wouldn’t be the first time. It had happened once during the late 1800's not long after the railway line had been established, and once in 1988 when a controlled burn on a nearby farming property had spread to the Pleasant Hills State Forest, killing 23 people. Many old-timers remembered the '88 blaze vividly and for those still around who had fought it, they remembered a lot more. Like the smell of burning human flesh wafting out from the forest, and the screams that returned during early hour nightmares for years after.

For many hours after the fire had been contained and established as no longer a threat, Kyle had remained hidden in the stretch of bush at the back of the common, watching the lights roll back and forth as the fire engines from Tormon had left as well as the locals who had helped. It was not they who he had been worried about. In the dark, he had been picking out the shadows of his parents in amongst the people crisscrossing the various sections of the yard. Kyle had stayed out there long after everyone had gone home and after his mother had gone to bed. His father had stayed up a while, drinking beer and sitting on the back step, peering at the blackened ruined of his yard and occasionally getting up on a ladder to inspect the roof. It was also a good thing for Kyle that his father was a drinker because, by the time he had finished his last can, he had been too drunk and too frazzled to hand out the punishment he had stalked about, promising his son earlier, belt at hand and spittle flying from his lips.

And Beth had followed her husband like an upset child, begging Ben not to hurt him, to calm down for the love of Christ calm down.

“I’m locking the f*****g door and he can sleep out here!” Ben had roared back at her.

“Don’t be so stupid!” she had wailed, staring at him in disbelief and Ben had never thought he could have found his wife as disgusting to him as she had at that moment.

The fire was the benchmark of all the little terrors he had spread so far, the lesser known being the incident at the swimming pool some weeks back when Kyle had taken to deliberately dive-bombing kids and on one occasion had knocked a girl out. It had taken the pool supervisor, Lynette Rose, almost twenty minutes to revive her before the ambulance had arrived, the mother screaming at Kyle, and yet his own mother had been screaming back, defending him not out of anger and estrangement but out of pure fear. Fear that he had finally gone too far, fear that he was never going to be able to turn around from this.

And now there was this, the charred remains of the yard, still smoking dully.

Ben had glared at her, unbelieving and had said, “This is your fault. You f*****g protect him all the time and now look!”

"I do NOT!" she cried, knowing all too well that he was at least partially right. He had sneered at her, had waved a hand in frustrated finality, taking a beer from the fridge and darting off into the living room to cool down. And five beers later he had been cool and sitting on the back step, wondering where his boy was. He had told himself that he just wanted to talk to him but the truth was he hadn't known what he might have done if the kid had happened along while his knight in shining armour had lain asleep in bed. Sitting there, the kid nowhere to be seen, he had thought about what he had said to her last before she had wandered down the hall, exhausted from the tears and terror of that day.

“If you don’t stop he’ll end up spending time in Gaol or Juvie. That’s what happens to kids like that, they grow up thinking they’re invincible. Is that what you want? Our son locked up?”
He had wondered how accurate that statement was as he’d sipped from the can, peering up at the night sky. He had hoped that he was wrong. He was not the sort of man who was afraid to admit when he was wrong, it was just that when he felt strongly about something he got edgy and dominant about the issue. He had hoped that his wife was right, that it really was just a phase, a terrible, crazy phase the boy was going through. All kids went through phases, the terrible twos, for instance, and he supposed that at his age Kyle was probably dealing with the onset of puberty and taking it just a little worse than most.

Except it wasn't just that; he'd always been that way. With foreboding, he had thought whether he and Beth and brought the kid up right, whether all this was because he and Beth had forgotten some crucial part about raising kids, like when the baker fails to add the brown sugar to a cake or when a truck driver forgets to press in the clutch before changing gear.

Or when the father forgets to spank his son now and then.

He had Beth to blame for that though. He had wanted to, several times, but she hadn't let him because Kyle was their pride and joy, their beautiful boy, good-natured and polite.Their bloody brilliant son, and they're only son nonetheless. What if things had been different and he hadn't gotten the vasectomy those years back. How many kids would they have had, and more importantly, would they have come out differently to Kyle?

He had eventually carried these thoughts off to bed with him, weaving and stumbling about the house before slipping awkwardly in beside his wife. Despite the drink, he had stayed awake until he had heard the faintest rattle of a doorknob and the creak of light feet making their way up the corridor, and he had closed his eyes and had sighed while Beth had stifled the sobs she had been trying desperately to hold back so that Kyle wouldn't hear. Pressed against the edge of the bed, practically cowering and hogging the blanket and peering out the window as though through distorted lenses, she had wondered the same things that her husband had, while the old thoughts she herself had had since he had been a baby in the pram, haunted her as they'd always done.