The Big World - Tim Winton

BIG WORLD
After five years of high school the final November arrives

and leaves as suddenly as a spring storm. Exams. Graduation.

Huge beach parties. Biggie and me, we're feverish with anticipation;

we steel ourselves for a season of pandemonium. But

after the initial celebrations, nothing really happens, not even

summer itself. Week after week an endless misting drizzle

wafts in from the sea. It beads in our hair and hangs from the

tips of our noses while we trudge around town in the vain

hope of scaring up some action. The southern sky presses

down and the beaches and bays turn the colour of dirty tin.

Somehow our crappy Saturday job at the meatworks becomes

full-time and then Christmas comes and so do the dreaded

exam results. The news is not good. A few of our classmates

pack their bags for university and shoot through. Cheryl

Button gets into Medicine. Vic Lang, the copper's kid, is dux

of the school and doesn't even stay for graduation. And suddenly

there we are, Biggie and me, heading to work every

morning in a frigid wind in the January of our new lives, still

in jeans and boots and flannel shirts, with beanies on our

heads and the horizon around our ears.

The job mostly consists of hosing blood off the floors.

Plumes of the stuff go into the harbour and old men sit in

dinghies offshore to catch herring in the slick. Some days I can

see me and Biggie out there as old codgers, anchored to the

friggin place, stuck forever. Our time at the meatworks is

supposed to be temporary. We're saving for a car, the V-8

Sandman we've been promising ourselves since we were fourteen.

Mag wheels, a lurid spray job like something off a Yes

album and a filthy great mattress in the back. A chick magnet,

that's what we want. Until now we've had a biscuit tin full of

twos and fivers but now we're making real money.

Trouble is, I can't stand it. I just know I won't last long

enough