The Turning

Abbreviation

IT WAS DARK when the Langs rolled into White Point and nobody had anything to say. They were hours late and everyone knew why but with Nanna in the Jeep nobody was game to say a thing. Vic squirmed in his seat and sighed again, despite himself.

You must have worms, said his grandmother sternly.

I always bring my own bait, he said.

Vic, said his mother with a note of warning.

Sorry, he mumbled.

But he wasn’t sorry. If the others hadn’t kept them waiting half the afternoon they’d be there by now. They’d be set up on the beach with a fire going. It was the usual Uncle Ernie balls-up. When they arrived at his place at noon all Vic’s girl-cousins were packed and ready in the Land Rover out on the hot street, their faces as red as their hair, while their parents were inside having a blue. The Landy’s motor was running, the dinghy was hitched to it with the rods and mattresses and eskies strapped aboard in a bristling pile, but Ernie and Cleo were still in the house with the door locked. When Vic’s old man banged on the window, nothing happened. He rattled the door, rang the bell. He got Vic’s cousins out of the vehicle and sat them in the shade. They were the sorriest-looking bunch of girls you’d ever see, freckly as all get-out, with needle teeth and big nostrils. He’d seen carpet sharks prettier than them. Uncle Ernie was a ginger banty-rooster of a bloke and Auntie Cleo let everyone know she was too good for him. She was blonde. She had the looks of an old-timey movie star gone to fat. She had cleavage that damn-near made an echo when she spoke.

Everybody sat out in the street until Vic’s baby sister began to scream in the heat and his grandmother yanked the keys from Ernie’s idling Landy and opened the front door of the house herself. Ernie and Cleo came out pushing and shoving and swearing like sailors and all the wobbegong cousins began to bawl and then Ernie’s Land Rover wouldn’t start because it had overheated chugging out there in the street for God knows how long, and there was more bitching and backbiting while they waited for it to cool, but Nanna wouldn’t hear a word against her favoured son.

So here they were now in the hot night, the Jeep and the Landy winding down the hill to White Point. The streets were empty. They drove on through to where the road ended and the white dunes banked up like a snowfield in the moonlight. Not that Vic had ever seen snow; it’s just how he imagined it going on white forever.

They climbed into the dunes, motors grinding and whinnying. Vic rode the rolls and jerks and tried not to think about food. When the going was smooth the rumble of the diffs lulled him close to sleep and several times he stirred to see that Uncle Ernie was bogged to the axles and Vic had to get out with his father and grandmother to dig or set a tow rope.

It’s the boat he’s pulling, said Nanna, in defence of Ernie’s driving. It’s the load and all those kids.

Vic’s mother pressed her lips together in the bright moonlight and nursed his baby sister. She knew as well as Vic that Ernie was careless, that he approached every hill in top gear, that his tyres were pumped too hard.

Nanna directed vehicle recovery. She rode out on the side step and talked through the open window, barking the kind of instructions that only a non-driver could give. After a long time they came into saltbush country and down into firm tracks that were steady going. The red eyes of the boat trailer up ahead mesmerized Vic until he slept again. When he woke they were down on wide, white beach that was as hard as a highway. For miles they drove fast and easy until they came to a spit where several campfires burned already.

Vic put up poles and ropes and tarps with the rest of them and ate cold roast lamb and potatoes in a stupor of fatigue. He fell onto a mattress and wound himself in a sheet and slept with the surf roaring all around him. He woke in the night, certain the sea had overrun them, but it was only the cool breeze rolling over him in waves and he slept on dreamless.

At first light the wind off the land was already hot and it smelt of saltbush and desert. When Vic woke, his grandmother was frying eggs over a driftwood fire. His father and uncle had the dinghy at the water’s edge and were loading it with big cane craypots. Vic sat at the trestle table beneath the billowing tarp and ate eggs and drank tea from an enamel cup. The girls were only just stirring now and the other women were still asleep. The men came and ate breakfast and when they were finished Vic helped them push the boat into the shorebreak and jumped in when the outboard fired.

Ernie throttled them out into calm water and Vic looked back at the other cluster of tents and tarps not far from their own camp. He saw a truck and a tractor and a striped tent big as a circus marquee. The sun was low on the rolling dunes and he felt tired and strangely old. Today was the last day of the year. He wished there’d been room for a mate on this trip, someone to see 1973 in with, but the only spare seat had gone to Nanna; these days there was no escaping her. And now that the wind was rifling through his hair and the aluminium hull thrummed underfoot, he began to wish that it was his father at the tiller and not his uncle, because Ernie steered a boat as nonchalantly as he drove. The more confident Ernie was the less cause there was for anyone else to feel safe. But it was Ernie’s boat not his father’s. They didn’t have a boat, couldn’t afford one. Vic smiled gamely at the old man, reading the amusement in his raised eyebrows, and held on as they pounded out towards the reef. Beneath him the water flashed by, white, green, blue, yellow. When they got out over the mottled deep, swells rolled in smooth and oily while Vic’s old man baited the pots with beef hocks and Ernie uncoiled ropes and floats. They tipped the craypots into sandy green holes and left the ropes snaking on the surface.

Back on the beach the carrot-top cousins squealed for a ride in the boat.

While they were tootled around the shallows Vic went up to the makeshift shelter between vehicles and saw that his mother was up. He rocked his baby sister while his mum ate breakfast and listened to Auntie Cleo talk about fingernails and cuticles. Vic’s Auntie wasn’t really a Cleo; she botted the name from the magazine with the horoscopes and male centrefolds. Her real name was Cloris. She bored his mum stupid. Vic’s mum did her best to hide it from him but he knew it well enough. She must have been tired this morning because at one moment during Cleo’s prattling monologue, at the very instant that Nanna happened to look their way, she rolled her eyes at him as if to say give me strength. Cleo didn’t notice but Nanna’s mouth was like a knife edge.

Vic didn’t know why they were all stuck on this trip together but there was no doubt it was Nanna’s idea. She had firm ideas about family, and when she was around everybody else’s ideas went soft.

He wasn’t quite thirteen but Vic knew a thing or two about Uncle Ernie. The oldies kept it quiet but he knew that with Nanna Ernie had protected status. It was as though he could do no wrong. Yet everything Ernie touched turned bad. He liked the nags. He played two-up and always knew a bloke who knew a bloke who had something or other on the highest authority. He was, therefore, always in trouble. It wasn’t unusual to have men come knocking on the door for him as though Vic’s old man was his father and not just his brother. Less than a year ago, just after his sister was born, Vic and his dad had to take Ernie’s truck out in the wee hours to deliver milk for him. Nobody said where Ernie was. Nanna came along of course. She read out the orders by the light of a policeman’s torch, and Vic ran until his throat was raw. The streets were dark and still. His father drove and ran and hardly said a word all night. Vic sensed that there’d been other nights he was spared. Now the milk round was gone in any case.

Vic was always uneasy around his uncle. Ernie was funny. There was always a joke on the boil, something to be kept from the women, but you’d never tell him anything important about yourself. He was always talking, never listening. One Christmas, when Vic was eight, Uncle Ernie arrived out of the blue with a brand new bike for him, a Stingray with a T-bar shift. It was redder than Ernie’s face and seemed to please his uncle as much as him but Vic’s parents were strangely subdued. As an eight-year-old he had wondered if it was too much, too big a gift. He suspected they were jealous or even ashamed of their own thrift. Now he suspected that the bike was hot. There’d never been any gifts since.

Ernie, Vic realized, was a live wire, an adventurer. That was his role in the family. Vic’s father, on the other hand, was the one who tidied up after the excitement. You could see they’d been doing it all their lives.

Ernie and Cleo think they’re irresistible, he overheard his mother say one Easter.

So, said his father, who gets to break the news to them?

Vic sat around with the others as long as he could stand it but when it grew hot even beneath the shade of the tarps he unstrapped his surfboard from the roof of the Jeep and struck off down the beach. He walked until their camp was just a solitary blot in the white distance.

The waves were only small but he wasn’t much of a surfer yet so he didn’t mind. After the hot walk the water was delicious. He paddled out excitedly and caught a few waves but either nosedived or tripped over himself. He even fell off trying to sit on the thing out beyond the break; it was like riding a greased pig. But you had to laugh at yourself. With mile after mile of deserted beach stretching out behind you there was nothing to be embarrassed about. He could have surfed in the nude if he wanted. Out in the calm he dived to the bottom and saw the ripples of the sandy seabed stretching out forever. The water travelled over his skin like a breeze. He felt free and happy.

When he surfaced he was startled to realize that someone was watching him. Up on the crest of the first dune somebody sat with their arms across their knees. He couldn’t make out if it was a man or woman, boy or girl, and he hung in the water, holding his board, waiting for them to move off, but whoever it was stayed put. Vic grew a little nervous. He supposed he could lie here all day if need be; he could maybe paddle out if he felt really threatened but he didn’t get the chance because a big set came through while he had his back to the sea. The first wave sent him bum over breakfast onto the sandbar and snatched the board from his grasp, and the four monsters that followed slammed him, tumbling, along the bottom, holding him down so long that when he finally surfaced, with his shorts halfway down his legs, he gave out a pathetic squeak more embarrassing than the fact of his bare arse. He dragged up his shorts and stumbled, coughing, along the shore to where his board lay washed up.

Over on the dune the stranger clapped. It was a girl and not one of his cousins. He wanted to snatch up the board and walk back to camp then and there but he was winded and weak at the knees, so he sat on the thing with his back to the girl and did his best to ignore her. Bitch. But he felt so stupid with his head sunk between his shoulders out in the middle of an empty beach like this. He was like a turtle trying to pull its head back into its shell. He hunched over, fuming. A stream of water gushed from his nose.

Well, you didn’t see that one coming, said the girl, suddenly behind him.

Vic whirled around and a string of snot and saltwater landed on his arm. While he scrubbed at it with his knuckles, he saw the green polish on her toenails.

Sorry, she said. Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.

Vic shrugged. The sun was right behind her head; he couldn’t see her at all.

Nice in the water?

Yeah, he said. Nice.

I was wondering. If I could have a go on that thing.

She stepped over and put a toe on the board. She wore Levi’s and a tee-shirt that said Phi Zappa Krappa. There was a picture of a naked man sitting on the toilet.

Okay, he said.

You sure?

He shrugged again.

Always wanted to try, she said. And Christ, I’m so bored. You know?

Vic smiled hesitantly and wiped his nose twice — once with each hand. He got up off the board. The girl reefed off her shirt and shucked down her jeans. She dropped her mirror shades onto the little pile they made on the sand. She wore a lime-green bikini with little plastic hoops at the hips like that Bond girl. Sunlight caught the fine down on her thighs. She had brown hair that swung across her back. She had real breasts. She was older, much older than him.

Any tips? she said, hoisting the board to her hip.

Um. Don’t fall off?

She smiled kind of sideways at him and walked down to the water. He watched her go, alert to her calves and the way her bum moved. He wondered what it’d be like to have an older sister. How could you stand the sight of all that flesh without turning into some kind of sister-weirdo?

As a surfer the girl was no more a natural than he was. Her hopeless floundering came as sweet relief. When she came back she dropped the board at his feet and squeezed the water out of her hair. There was sand salted down the front of her legs. She was pretty. He didn’t know where to look.

Thought you’d come out and help me, sport, she said, grabbing up her shirt and wiping her face on it.

Sorry, he mumbled, turning away from the sight of her dabbing at her chest with the damp shirt.

What’s your name?

He told her.

From the city?

He shook his head. Not anymore, he said. We just moved down south. Angelus. It’s pretty crap.

He looked at her green-painted fingernails as she flapped the shirt. Something wasn’t right.

She sat on the sand and crossed her legs like a primary schooler or a hippy. She pulled on the mirror shades and then he saw it. There was a finger missing.

What? she said.

Sorry?

The finger?

No, he said.

Bullshit. Come on sport, own up. Here, look.

She held up her left hand. The third finger was little more than a stump.

Vic felt himself grimacing, tried to undo his face but she’d seen it.

Hay baler, she said.

Oh, he murmured, not knowing what a hay baler was. It sounded like a farm thing.

You on a farm?

Kind of. Boarding school, really.

Did it. Hurt?

Like a total bastard, she said. But, you know, all the big things hurt, the things you remember. If it doesn’t hurt it’s not important.

You really think?

She grabbed him by the ear, pinched his lobe so hard he saw spots, and the more he tried to squirm free the tighter she gripped him. It felt like his whole ear would be uprooted from his head. She was a psycho; he was stuck out here with a psycho and he had tears in his eyes now and she had her mouth on his, kissing him soft and slow until his mouth slackened, and all the time, even while her tongue slid across his teeth and he snorted like a frightened horse through his nose, she squeezed his ear without relenting until the long hot kiss was over.

She let go. He gasped.

See?

See what? he said, grabbing his ear.

You won’t forget your first real kiss.

You’re nuts!

Wrong choice of words, sport, she said, looking down at the stiffy in his shorts.

Vic hunched away from her.

Just trying to make a point, she said with a grin.

Fuck you, he said.

My mother’s worried about my wedding day. Says it’ll be awkward when my husband goes to put the ring on in front of all the dearly beloved.

Does it worry you? he asked, despite himself.

Nah. Weddings are bourgeois. Marriage is over. Who the hell wants to get married?

Your mum did.

She’s a farmer’s wife. She doesn’t know any better.

Vic looked at her hands. He was appalled and fascinated by her.

I call it my abbreviation, she said, lying back on her jeans, holding out her damaged hand like a starlet admiring the ring Rock Hudson or somebody had just bought her.

Sorry?

The finger. My abbreviation. Drives the old man spare. He can’t even look at it.

Vic couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Guilty, I spose. I was six years old. Thinks he should have been more careful.

Maybe he should have.

Nah. Wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t even an accident. I just stuck my hand in because I was curious.

Curious?

To see how it all worked.

Far out, he murmured.

And the lesson is that it all works too quickly to see, she said with a laugh. But I remember everything about that day. What everyone was wearing, all the daggy things people said in the car on the way into town. The smell of stubble, upholstery. The taste of tomato in my throat from lunch.

What’s your school like? he said.

A battery farm. A thousand girls trying to lay an egg.

How old are you? he asked, emboldened.

Sixteen. And bloody bored.

Can I see your finger? Close up, I mean?

I don’t care, she said, holding out her hand from where she lay.

The whole time they’d been speaking it wasn’t the girl’s shaved legs he was watching, not even the wedge of cloth over the mound between them, but her hand raking the sand at her side. Her knuckles were frosted with tiny white grains; he hadn’t been able to look away and now, as he shuffled over on his knees to get a closer look, he felt a flutter in his throat. She turned the hand one way and then the other for his benefit. He leaned down and blew sand from her finger and the quartzy grains settled on her belly.

She tilted her hand down the way posh ladies did on the movies when they wanted their hand kissed. Without thinking, he kissed it.

Kiss my aura, Dora.

What?

Frank Zappa. It’s a quote.

Oh.

This sun’s a bugger. I need some blockout. And I’m hungry.

She grabbed his face the way an auntie would, then let him go.

They walked back up the beach in no great hurry, talking a bit as they went. Her name was Melanie and her family had the big blitz truck and the circus tent. They were here for a few days’ break before harvesting. There was a big low in the north and they were keeping an ear on the weather reports on radio. Neighbours and cousins were with them but she was the only one her age.

We’re in the same boat, he said.

She laughed sceptically.

We’re having a bonfire, he said. For New Year’s.

Uh-huh.

He sensed that she’d grown bored with him now.

He caught sight of himself in Melanie’s mirror shades. His lips were white with sand where he’d kissed her hand. He looked like a nine-year-old.

I’m hot, he said, flushing.

Okay.

I’m gunna swim a bit.

Right.

See ya, then.

Vic’s skin all but sizzled when he hit the water. He lay there watching Melanie walk back into camp. The excitement of being with her had lapsed into a sudden sense of failure. The sea sucked at him. He tingled all over.

That afternoon Vic sat out in the dinghy catching flathead and whiting with the men. Uncle Ernie bitched about traffic fines and summonses and the tax man and Vic’s old man let it go. One of Ernie’s balls kept peeking out of his tiny shorts like a dangling gingernut and both Vic and his father struggled to keep a straight face. Now and then, in lulls in the bite, Vic rubbed the tender lobe of his ear.

When they came in at dusk the women and the wobbegong girls were in the water, splashing and screaming. Nanna had the baby on her hip, searching the water for unseen perils.

Later they lit the bonfire and while it got going they ate fish and potato salad and green beans. A big tangerine moon rose from the dunes and the breeze died out altogether. The girls rooted through the icebox for bottles of Passiona. Vic drank Cottee’s cola with his mother and felt his skin tight with sunburn. Nanna had her icewater and the other adults had beer. Soon there were empty king browns all over the trestle.

When the fire was really crackling Vic walked down to the water in search of more driftwood. Up the beach a little way, out in front of the big old army truck and the striped circus tent, there was a fire burning twenty feet high. It was a real monster. He walked up into the dunes so he could come up behind Melanie’s camp and look on without being seen.

He crouched in a bit of saltbush and gazed down on the fire and the pile of mallee roots beside the truck. There were people laughing down there, big men’s voices and squeaking kids and the titter of women. He smelled meat grilling and onions frying.

Like a peasant feast, said a familiar voice beside him.

Vic nearly cried out in fright. Melanie was tucked into another clump of saltbush, a bottle glinting in her hand.

Scared you again.

No, he lied.

Bored, too, eh?

A bit.

Want some?

What is it?

New Year’s Eve.

Very funny.

Feel like a swim?

No, said Vic. A walk maybe.

Okay, a walk.

As the moon dragged itself back into shape, they walked out into the rolling, white sandhills until they came to a valley whose wind-ribbed contours reminded Vic of the ocean floor; the fluted ripples went on forever.

Cheer me up, sport, said Melanie.

Vic told her about Ernie’s dangling gingernut and the jugs on his Auntie Cleo. He told her about his cousins, their needle teeth and wobbegong skin.

Woebegone, said Melanie.

Wobbegong. It’s a carpet shark.

I know this. Sport, I’m with you.

They sat down in a hollow to rest a moment. Melanie pulled the lid off her bottle and drank.

Happy New Year, she said, passing it to him.

Ginger, he murmured, sniffing.

Stone’s Green Ginger Wine. Made from the little ginger balls of strange uncles.

Vic laughed. He took a sip but didn’t like it. The stuff tasted like ginger beer mixed with diesel.

How’s your ear? Melanie said, reaching over and giggling as he drew away warily.

Orright, he said.

Let me see, then.

Vic didn’t trust her but he couldn’t resist the idea of her touching him. She took his earlobe tenderly and rubbed it between two fingertips.

You’ll remember that, I reckon.

Yes.

Mean old trick, she said, grabbing his chin like an auntie again.

How come you’re sad? he said with her still holding his face.

It’s nothing, sport.

You really seem sad.

New Year’s Eve.

School’s not for another month.

Not for me, sport.

Posh school, then.

No, she said. I’m not going back. A few months on the farm.

She put a finger over his mouth to stop him talking and she held him like that while she socked back another drink. He closed his lips over her finger.

Ah, she said. A kiss. But what about this one?

She held up the stub of her ring finger in the moonlight before him and Vic took her wrist and drew it to him. He felt her whole hand across his face as he took the stump into his mouth. It blotted out the sky, it blacked the glare of moonlight and tasted of salt and ginger and sugar all at once. There was no texture of a fingerprint against his tongue, just a slick smoothness that made his blood bubble.

Come here, she said. What the hell. Auld Lang Syne.

She kissed him and her mouth was soft and hungry as she bent down to reach him and he heard the bottle gurgle out into the sand where their knees had knocked it while her tongue found his and he shaped his mouth to hers. He let his hands settle on her hips, felt his head cradled in her fingers and he swam up into her, happy and awake as he’d ever been. When she broke off and kissed the top of his head he was bereft. He pressed his brow to her throat and she dug her fingers in his hair and drew up her shirt so that her breasts shone in the moonlight. She guided him down and he kissed them. They were full against his face and when he drew the nipple into his mouth she murmured and gasped and finally, confoundingly, began to cry.

It was midnight when he got back to the bonfire. The others were singing and kissing and nobody asked him where he’d been. They were Langs singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the cousins were asleep on their feet.

Vic woke in the night to the sound of puffing and moaning. Everyone was in bed now but a camp stretcher was grinding and squeaking. He felt his mother stir beside him. It was Auntie Cleo panting over there. Vic saw her legs up in the moonlight.

Oh, for God’s sake, whispered his mother.

He listened until his lap was wet and the sheet clammy around him. Ernie gave one sharp grunt, like a man who’d suddenly remembered something, and in the quiet that followed, while the sea crawled against the shore and the moon spilled through holes in the tarp overhead, Vic thought of Melanie and the strangeness of her tears and the long, silent walk back to camp. He hadn’t hurt her, he knew that much, but he sensed she was in some kind of pain, something important that was out of his reach, the way everything is when you’re just a stupid kid and all the talk is over your head. He thought of the hollow between her breasts, pressed his face to the pillow and slept.

His father woke him at dawn. The boat was already afloat in the shallows. Ernie yanked at the outboard’s starter rope.

They were out in deep water before Vic was properly awake. The water was clear; you could see sandy bottom in the green holes in the reef. Kelp rose yellow and brown from jagged lumps and fish sprayed in all directions.

When they came upon their first float, Vic’s old man gaffed it aboard and hauled on the rope. The boat wallowed between swells and tipped precariously as the pot came over the side all clicking and slapping with tails and feelers and dropping legs.

Happy New Year, said the old man, dragging crays out and dropping them into the bucket.

Shit! said Ernie. Hang on!

The engine roared and the boat surged and the old man all but fell onto Vic who saw the wave looming beyond him. The bow rose. The old man’s head was on the seat beside him, one hand gripping Vic’s leg as they speared up, freefalling from the back of the wave. They slammed back onto the water and the old man laughed but Vic could already see the next wave coming.

Go! he screamed. Go!

Ernie throttled up and the old man crawled out of a nest of rope to sit up in the bow, head swivelling. This wave was much bigger. It was beginning to break already and in its path the water was dimpled and lumpy with the contours of the reef beneath them.

The old man pointed one way. Ernie steered in the opposite direction. And just as the wave broke on their beam a few yards out, he turned the boat shoreward and tried to outrun the thing.

Vic felt the wave bear down on them, a spitting, roaring draught behind his ears, before it snatched them up and left them, for two or three seconds at most, actually surfing down the face the way he’d never dreamt possible. The motor snarling. Sea and air thundering in his head.

And then it was quiet. Bubbles danced before his face and his hands were pearly and his hair swooning all in one direction. His head hit something sharp and hard before he realized he was beneath the boat. The water was crowded with rope and lines. Something bit his leg. He was bursting and the grey shell of the boat held him under till the water pressed at his lips.

Something collared him, dragged him down and sideways. Vic felt the water against his teeth. He screamed out the last of his air and then he was up.

He’s snagged, said his father.

Except for the fading carpet of bubbles the sea was smooth again. The air was raw in his lungs. He began to cry. The old man dived and came up pulling line so Vic could move, but every time he kicked as he trod water something bit deep in his calf.

It’s a hook, said the old man. Can you swim?

Vic nodded, still bawling.

It’s okay, said the old man. Vic, son, we’re orright.

He floated and sculled the best he could with the hook and heavy line dragging on his leg. Ernie climbed onto the overturned hull, the cheeks of his arse bare to the morning sun. Together the men righted the boat and while Ernie bailed it the old man swam back with a knife to cut him free.

Then they caught the floating oars and climbed into the boat. Ernie was naked. His shorts were gone. The three of them had a jittery laugh and started bailing with their hands.

The motor was dead. It took a long time to row in against the breeze. Women and girls cried on the beach. Vic’s cousins looked uglier than something dragged from a reeking craypot. Nanna fetched Ernie some shorts.

In the shade of the tarp the women held him down while Ernie and his father pushed the big hook through his leg until the barb broke free of the skin and then they cut it off with pliers and dragged it back out. The whole time they worked, through every blast of pain, he thought of Melanie. Her finger, her swinging breasts, a puddle of sand on her belly. He didn’t give a bugger about the cousins; let them see him writhe and blubber. He was thinking of her. He was immune; nothing could touch him. And afterwards, in the long calm on the other side of the pain, when he felt spent and sleepy and silky-skinned, he let the women douse him with Mercurochrome and ply him with eggs and sugary tea, and pat his tears dry, and when they finally left off he took the barbless hook and limped up the beach to give it to her. Melanie would understand; she’d know what he meant by it.

But the blitz truck was gone and the tractor, too. A great mound of coals smouldered on the sand. Where the big tent had been there were bottles and cans and the smooth imprints of mattresses and bodies. The harvest, he thought. There must be rain on the way. He took the hook from his pocket. It looked blunt and misshapen. It shone in the sun. Vic’s leg throbbed and burned. He looked out across the sea for the first sign of cloud, for any kind of signal of a change in the weather, but the sea and the sky were as pale and blue and blank as sleep, as empty as he felt standing there on the lapping shore.