Free The Turning by Tim Winton

weird culture of family. When
Vic and I met we were emerging from lives of vigilance and I think we liberated each other. Which is why I don’t give up on him. We’re part of each other’s survival. But
it’s gone awry since his parents died. He’s frozen over, shut down. And there’s this unsettling reversion to thinking about Strawberry Alison, as though he’s not just
mourning his parents and his newly-remembered sister, but his whole boyhood, the gauche lad that he was. I’m always trying to convince him to come with me to the old place and face down a few
ghosts. I keep thinking we should buy a panel van and cruise the beaches for a month. But he’s not having any of it and I’m sick of waiting. I don’t feel it but, for God sake,
I’m still young. Some Fridays I’m tempted to quit him altogether. These past few weekends I’ve come close.
    His mother died of cancer. His father was there for it. Out of the blue, after twenty-something years. Two days of family and then the old man went back out bush and fell down a disused
mineshaft. I only met him the once at poor Carol’s bedside. He was so thin and proud. And sober. Like a man from another era. His dying wife was incandescent. Rage, love, forgiveness. The
feeling between them was so strong I could barely stay in the room.
    In his last year of school Vic did what all country boys did. He rode around in cars and saved for one of his own. He went to parties and got smashed on Brandovino and Blackberry Nip. Out at
salmon camps along the coast he smoked dope and lost his virginity. He felt what it was like to get a Holden airborne at a hundred miles an hour. He studied hard and thought about being a lawyer.
He looked after his mother. He heard the rumours about Strawberry Alison at university and he tried to keep an open mind.
    Word came back to town that Alison was a born-again lesbian. It was something she picked up at uni, like vegetarianism. Vic found it hard to believe. For him she was still the epitome of regular
sex, real sex, normal sex. Those long legs, her downy arms and white teeth, the swing of blonde hair and the crimson veil across her face. And yet, re-reading that old poem, he began to
wonder. Two girls in flames. What longing had he really seen in Alison’s eyes?
    At year’s end, with the final exams behind him, Vic drove out with his classmates to Massacre Point where somebody had a bonfire going and a keg open. He’d barely been there five
minutes when a little green Renault pulled up and two girls got out. One of them had black curls thick and long as a cape and the other, the one with the crewcut, might have gone unrecognized if it
hadn’t been for the birthmark vivid in the firelight as she strode up. There was a moment of suspension. Music but no talk. Kids looked across the fire at each other as if gauging the mood,
and then they all surged forward to greet Strawberry Alison. Except for Vic who was left with her girlfriend, the Italian beauty. For half an hour he drank beer and asked polite questions about
university when all he wanted to know was what it was like to make love to Alison. What did it feel like to have her cheek against yours on the pillow? The dark-haired girl was witty and gorgeous.
She made Alison finally impossible. But to his surprise he felt no envy.
    When Alison joined them he jerked like a startled horse.
    I still love your poem, he heard himself say.
    And I still love you for loving it, said Strawberry Alison.
    There was, for Vic, nothing else to say. He went home early and missed the best and worst of the party. When he woke, his mother told him that two girls had hit a tree out on the coastal
highway. The car exploded on impact and incinerated them both.
    Around noon Vic drove back out toward Massacre Point and found the big gouged marri tree on the bend and he walked out with the others across the blackened paddock and thought of the crimson
splash of flame Alison had sent forth and