Three hours from Isonville to the Delmonte Hotel, where inland families holidayed for the summer. On Boxing Day every year, the Tolleys powdered along the sunken road, braked at the Main North Road intersection, and emerged nose-up on the bitumen for Adelaide, a corner flap of tarpaulin sounding their progress, snapping in the wind above a roofrack top-heavy with suitcases, a beach umbrella, beach toys in a string bag. They rode high through a land of silos, sidings, sharefarmers and country towns, the railway children staring after them, and two and a half hours later were slowing for the Gepps Cross stoplights. They jerked and crawled through the baking tiled suburbs, Anna’s father tapping the temperature gauge from time to time, his ear cocked to the muttering radiator. Anna saw a seagull on a bus shelter. That was the first sign. Suddenly they were in a tunnelling street, advancing upon a sea flash at the end of it. Anna remembered the little square: clock tower, palm trees, kiosk, milkbars where proprietors whisked away the tracked-in beach sand, sparse buffalo grass, the jetty poking like a stubby finger into the sea. The breakwater, the boat basin, the winking shallows, the pale sand, the kerb outside the Delmonte, where her father angled the Stock & Station Holden, the chrome bumper resting against a salt-scummed verandah post. An airliner banked above the water. The engine ticked. Anna’s father said: Here we are again. He said it every year. Every year he said: There were no trips to the sea when I was growing up, and until she put two and two together—the shark in the shallows, Grandfather Tolley’s retreat to the dry country—Anna assumed that her father and his father had been too poor for a holiday at the beach. She looked up, shading her eyes, then grinned and waved. Two men and their wives were shouting from deckchairs, waving glasses of beer and shandy. Anna’s father saw them and he flourished an arm and bowed deeply. Her father was loved and remembered from the previous summer and all the summers before it. He was an eye-glint charmer, a man who joked and raised the stakes, whose laughter ringed the hotel for three weeks every January. Women looked at him covetously and were compelled to rest their fingers on his forearm, occasionally on his chest. And Anna saw that her mother was desired. She saw a man parade by on the baking sand later in the week, his stomach tucked painfully in, while her mother lay utterly still, her eyes possibly open behind her black lenses. When Anna felt her body begin to change, when acute cramps crippled her every thirty-one days and the doctor prescribed the Pill to control it, she became secretive and elusive, infected by a drowsy kind of appetite for the flat brown planes of the boys on the beach or in the Delmonte’s corridors. You could never find her. She missed meals. Her mother examined her lips for stubble rash and her neck for lovebites. She was on the spot when the authorities drained the boat basin and sent a line of police cadets shoulder to shoulder through the car tyres and mud. The people crowding the rail were avid for bodies—small, abducted, anus-torn—and failed to notice that the boy clasping Anna around her middle, his chin on her dreamy shoulder, had slipped three fingers inside the elastic at her waist, deep enough to brush her groin and unlock her. The Kellys had never taken their children to the coast. Lockie’s parents were too narrow, too embedded, too poor. Lockie had to wait until Anna lived at Women’s College before he saw the sea for the first time. They’d make love in her room, then head for the beach. Lockie would say: Take away these houses, give me a clifftop, and I could live here, looking out at the water. They lay face to face on broad blue towels, watching the minute workings in one another’s eyes. They were so close that Anna’s cocked hip concealed her hand inside his bathing suit. He felt hot and alive in there, still crusted from their lovemaking. Two years after Lockie was killed, Anna met Sam Jaeger. She liked him for unexpected reasons: his comforting bulk, his shyness, the way he sent up his parents’ church. The Ascensionists, he said. I wish they’d rise up and disappear. Anna didn’t love him when she married him, but she wanted to belong to the community again, she’d put her wild past behind her, and he was companionable, so surely a kind of loving would develop over the years. But love needs a generous climate. Poor Anna, poor Sam. It was quickly made plain to them that they should value frugality. Mr Jaeger told Anna: Shearers don’t need icecream. A holiday? The missus and I haven’t had a holiday in twenty-eight years and it never did us no harm. Anna put her mind to work. She talked long into the night to Sam, low and hard and coaxing, occasionally placing her cool, dry palms on his anxious cheeks: We’ll tell your parents we’re going to a friend’s wedding, somewhere at the back of beyond, we’ll be away five or six days. They’ll never know. Sam looked anxiously over his shoulder at the shadows in their bedroom. She turned his face back to hers: Sam, don’t chicken out on me now. And so they told a lie and took themselves off to the Grand in Victor Harbor and let the waters wash away the cares of their penny-pinching marriage. Anna was certain that she felt Sam’s climax one morning when the sun beat against their curtained window, and sensed that there would be a baby. When Michael was up on two legs she loved to see his tiny spine and wing-bud shoulderblades crouched absorbedly over an upended bucket in his moated, turreted sandpit. It has been many years since she saw the sea, not since the Chronicle sent her to cover the Isolated Children’s Federal Conference in Port Lincoln in 1985. But the sea is there in her head—and Lockie, sun- and water-splashed, warm, smiling and fine-boned. If he had not been taken from her, would they be together in a house on a clifftop, looking out to sea? Anna is obsessed with the notion of a house beside the sea, a flat or a unit in her declining years. She will live alone, calm and contemplative, having put many ghosts to rest inside her. She will babysit her granddaughter from time to time, turning the child’s small plump feet in the water from her garden tap to wash away the sand. She will walk twice a day, before lunch and before sundown, no matter the weather, just to remember, and wait for the end, and smell the seaweedy air, just like any old leathery retiree with a replacement hip.