The Turning

19

19

Although Brett Stephens had been adamant that most of the town’s population had turned, there was still a handful who hadn’t and who indeed had not the slightest idea of what was going on.

Marilyn Spencer had thought she had heard a commotion coming from somewhere in town but had dismissed it as being the TV when she had heard the gunshots. The bloody news was the culprit, she thought, there was nothing but shouting and fighting and politics on it these days. But after a time she had begun to realise that it couldn’t be the TV because she didn’t have it on. After a moment's debate, she had gotten up from the veranda stool where she was working on a crossword and shuffled into the living room. She had a tiny flat screen that her daughter, Tracy, had gotten her last Christmas. It was small but the right size for her in this mediocre space. After seeing that the TV was off and that the window was open, she had made her way to the front door and had opened it carefully, stepping out onto the porch, listening.

She lived at the far opposite end of Giles Street from the old Commonwealth Bank building, across the road from the pub and in a house that had the look of a tiny, woodland cottage. Her garden was ambitious for the size of the property, and even at her age, she was still able to tend to her plants regularly. Only rain when it seldom came, kept her from her yard-work. Her belief was that physical activity was what kept the body going and so she tended to it as much as she could, despite the knocks and bumps she acquired on a regular basis.

She puttered along the path to her front gate and peered up the main road. It was almost thirty-seven degrees today but the heat never bothered her- she had been dealing with dry, arid Wilton summers for as long as she could remember. It was the winters that brought trouble. The bones of the old are more susceptible to the cold and she supposed that if she made it another year she would take up her daughter's suggestion of going into the Villa nursing home in Leeton. But she had, of course, been telling herself this for almost nine years. It was the thought of not being able to tend to her plants that kept her here

There was nothing about the main street that day that indicated anything out of the ordinary and she supposed with some distaste that perhaps she had imagined it. The sky had come over grey and there was the sweet smell of zinc on the air, all the warnings of an approaching thunderstorm, except she knew it wouldn’t happen. It was coming from the west and anything that came from that direction usually passed through and bawled its showers elsewhere. Though flies swarmed eagerly around her head, she did not swoop at them. Like the heat, she was used to it and a part of her reckoned that to swat was to only encourage them.

She bent low and fished a full bottle of VB from the bushes to her left. She had done this many times, it was one of the plights of having the pub standing directly across the road. Once or twice there had been an eighteenth or a twenty-first over there and the next day her garden had looked as though the party had swung by her place during the night. She had almost expected to find someone curled up asleep in her backyard.

After picking up the cans and tossing them into the recycling bin, she had crossed the road and had complained to d**k, the pub manager. He was a small man, bald and arrogant, but even he melted into a child-like form around the old lady. Especially when she had begun to describe how her yard had looked as though it had been rained on by every brewery in the country. He had shaken his head and had told her he would talk to some of the lads who had been there the previous night and whatever he had said had worked for, if only for a month. Then the odd bottle and can had started creeping back in.

She leaned against the gate and allowed her back to stretch slightly. In the stillness of the town, she heard it, not as loud as before but loud enough; gunfire. It rolled through the air like thunder, startling her and sending her blood cold. She took a step back from the gate, unsure now whether she wanted to be sticking her neck out so far.

Probably just hoons, she thought. A second gunshot made her flinch again, her hand subconsciously finding her St Christophers necklace and clutching it.

“My goodness,” she said. It occurred to her that she should call the police, even if it was a false alarm. She supposed that someone else might be doing exactly as she was, listening, perhaps already on the phone to the authorities. But then there was always the possibility that nobody except her had heard it. It was a small town after all.

Subconsciously, she waited for a third gunshot. Her legs were growing tired, her knees giving way to the arthritic pain that flared in her joints on humid days. She knew she'd have to return to the house, that she couldn't just stand out here all day. So she turned and wandered back, pausing only when she thought she had heard something. A car approaching perhaps. There had been very little activity going on in Wilton that day and it would have been a welcoming sight to see even one of those big, snaking b-double trucks that liked to roll by her house on their way to Adelaide at three am, waking her from her slumber.

But nothing came. Perhaps it had been a one-off, and why not? What had she expected?