These were its chief colours: gold, pink, khaki, black. By Christmas Day the mid-north was cast in gold: golden hills rolling away to the north, buttery gold stubble by the acre, dusty gold grain-spills at the paddock gates, dead gold grass on the uncultivated land, forearm hair bleached gold in the sun. Then wind, drought and time wore away the gold, and it was a pink country, the pinkness of dirt and dust and skin revealed to the open air. The sheep carried dusty pink fleeces upon their backs and tracked busy pink paths to water troughs, shade-trees, hand-scattered hay. Grandfather Ison went pink in the sun, his cheeks pink with roast dinners and white bread. Anna’s father went brown in the sun, a sinewy, olive-hued man, except when he tipped back his hat. A startling band of naked pink forehead, creased a little in worry: Aren’t you seeing a bit too much of that boy? One day Lockie led Anna along a stony path on the Razorback. Wild goats hoof-rattled in panic ahead of them. They came to a declivity hidden from the road and protected from the winds. Lockie took her onto a granite shelf, past a gnarled tree, to a crumbling hole in the side of the hill. She peered in, on her hands and knees, Lockie comfortably at her side. Can’t you see it? Rock art. Anna concentrated. A stencilled ochre hand, ochre stick-men hunting a kangaroo, an ochre moon face. Overcome, she retreated with Lockie into the warm grass. Propped on one elbow, burrs caught in his hair, his hand on her breastbone: I love the way you go all pink here and here. By late May, the crops and wild grasses were shooting, young and green, trembling in the wind—except that the district was never entirely green, for the damp earth was too dark, the chlorophyll too deep, the licheny hillside rocks and tree clumps too shadowy on the distant hills. Khaki, Anna decided, musing aboard the bone-shaking Bitter Wash school bus. The driver dropped a gear to negotiate the switchback bends of the sunken road. Anna’s face was inches from pink rockface; no sun penetrated; the gearbox howled. Then they were emerging onto the flatlands, where the Showalter Park lucerne sat as dark as camouflage, and the sun blazed into the dusty bus again, lighting the gold stripes on Anna’s tunic. She looked at Lockie, seated opposite her, and caught him gazing at her gold-banded purple thighs. Lockie’s eyes were green at certain times, in certain lights. Otherwise they were grey-green or greeny brown. Honey flecks danced in them. Anna rode the train to Pandowie before Easter in her third year away at the university, dreaming, attempting to re-create his face. She had not seen him for many months. He’d had his hair cropped close to his scalp and gone willingly away to war, but now she wanted him back again, and recalling him in her mind’s eye was a start. But it was hopeless; he would not stay fixed. She looked out. Piebald hills behind the town, pale dead grass patched with ash from last summer’s bushfire. The Razorback was in shadow, its black slope as wickedly jagged as sharks’ teeth. The train slowed for the level crossing outside the town. First the silver grille, then the black snout, then the windshield and black roof of the Showalters’ Bentley. The train rumbled past. Anna could not see if Wesley was at the wheel, or old Mrs Showalter herself. A black Bentley to match their black hearts, so Grandfather Tolley liked to say. And a Bentley, note, not a Rolls. A Rolls would be too flashy. Anna felt a sudden blessed release as Michael slid from her body. He looked stretched and squashed, clotted-red, slippery, spilling out of her with a rush of fluid onto a waterproof sheet. They said two things: It’s a boy! He’s a red head! Anna amended that. Auburn, she said. He gets it from me, and I got it from my Grandmother Tolley. Anna dressed Michael in shades of green and blue, matching and offsetting his blue eyes and auburn hair. His favourite colour was blue. Anna and Sam buried him in his best blue shirt, his head nestled on his tiny eggshell-blue pillow, the casket lined with royal blue silk. These were not decisions that Sam could make. Anna made them alone. For a time in her late teens, Rebecca wore black jeans, black tops, black capes. Black hair framed her small white face, and she emphasised all that she said with her white hands, hands cut off at the wrist by black cuffs. Sometimes she wore lipstick the colour of a blackening plum. Christ Almighty, sweetheart. You’re going to be wearing black soon enough when you join an orchestra—why do you want to wear it now? Rebecca, dark and sly: Your basic separatist black, Dad. The Showalters got rid of the black Bentley and bought twin black Mercedes saloons. They gutted the big house and lined it with polished hardwood and Carrera marble, one massive black slab of it under the front door. They sank millions into the sperm-bank scheme, promising investors they’d be out of the red by the end of their second year of operation. Bless their black hearts, Anna says now. The collapse has turned Sam’s hair grey. Only the prospect of the town’s 150th Jubilee at the turn of the century is enough to keep him going, she sometimes thinks. Anna will stick it out with him. She will watch her history of the town spill from her printer, the black sentences accumulating, spidering across the page. She will help her mother choose a new lounge-suite fabric, a muted tartan pattern this time, mild reds and greens. Sniff: If your Dad were alive it would have been our silver wedding anniversary last Wednesday. Oh, Mum, I’m sorry, I forgot. Anna will ask herself: What, exactly is the colour of the sea today? She’ll stand still, intent, telling herself to identify what is there, not what custom tells her is there. As much silver and grey as blue and green, she’ll decide. Her granddaughter will confound shoppers and kindergarten mothers. Hesitant fingers pinching her red overalls and green top: A boy or a girl? Auburn hair, though. No doubting that. Almost as if she were a Tolley.