The laundry on Isonville abutted a wall at the rear of the big house, probing into a corner of the shrubbery that was rarely ever warmed by the sun. Low-roofed, cramped, chilly all year round. No one thought to move or modernise it, or even to clear the shrubbery—it was the laundry. A dented copper, massive cement troughs, iron taps poised like complicated birds, a washing machine that yew-yawed through the hours. In a heatwave, that’s where you found Dad, home from crisscrossing the countryside in the Stock & Station car, flat on his back on the glassy floor, Kippy in the crook of his arm, hat tipped over his face, maybe half a bottle of beer nearby. Anna and Hugo stretched out with him. All right for some, Aunt Lorna said, arriving to fetch her washing, to wheel it back through the dust to her house on the other side of the creek, sheets and trousers piled in a cane basket half the size of a bathtub, perched on a spindly, waggle-wheeled trolley. Silly cow, why doesn’t she bring the car around? Because she wants to rub it in, that’s why. She’d love to be living where we’re living. When Mrs Mac had a puncture on the sunken road, Anna watched the Kelly children watching them stranded there. All those children, Mrs Mac said. All that washing. They watched Mrs Kelly advance massively upon a line of flapping sheets and then, in a quick, curious, delicate swoon, press the fabric to her nose and overheated cheek. Poor woman, dust always blowing in from the road. Anna finished primary school and went away to her mother’s old school in the city, knowing how to rinse out her things by hand. But she saw at once that it would not do to be seen rinsing your things out by hand where everyone could see you—it admitted too much, it marked you out as somehow lower class, an unloved, furtive figure bent over a porcelain sink in a bathroom where rich girls thronged by the hundred. Anna lasted exactly one week and then she ran home. There was no washing machine in the Hammersmith house. Everyone in London uses the local laundromat, Anna wrote, in her first letter home. She was there to put Lockie’s death, put time itself, behind her, but the present intruded: It’s as if I’ve had to learn a set of new skills, a whole new routine, revolving around a tiny roomful of washers and dryers crammed between a corner pub and a fish and chip shop. There are seven of us living here and when a few loads have mounted up we scrounge for coins, head down the street, fill two or three machines to the brim and go next door for a pint, except I have halves. An Adelaide QC restored the old schoolmaster’s residence on the sunken road, used it as a weekender for many years, then offered it for rent. It was a small, stone, coldish house, but better than anything else on offer in the district, and the rent was cheap. Anna, Sam and the children had only been there for a year when Michael was killed. He was gone from them, yet for a long time he seemed to linger nearby, always slipping away at the edge of sight. Everything Anna did reminded her that he’d been a part of her life. She might walk across the laundry floor with Rebecca’s little bundle and think: There’s not enough here for a load. Sam might plunge-snort his face and hands into a sink of water before coming to the table and she’d almost, almost, hear Michael’s glee: Do it again, Daddy. Isonville and Showalter Park were both visible from the kitchen window. Anna’s mother liked to visit, always choosing the chair that allowed her to look out upon those distant chimneys and treetops. It was an unfocussed gaze, all the focus in her mind, not her eyes: I never told you this, dear, but Kitch and Lorna had the gall to offer us the overseer’s house when your grandpa died. They couldn’t wait for us to move out. It was indecent. A clink of china, Anna pushing away her cup and saucer: You, too? Mum, when Sam fell out with his father they also offered it to us. Mother and daughter sipped their tea, elbows on the table, staring along the years. Mum, why didn’t you challenge the will? Oh no, I couldn’t do that, lawyers, a court hearing, couldn’t air our dirty washing in public. Rebecca came in from the bus, dropped her homework on the table and walked on heavy legs to the bathroom. Anna read misery and discomfort in her daughter’s stiff back: Has your period come, sweetheart? Give me your pants to wash. No, Mum, I want to do it, and Anna heard a tiny note of elation: At last. Anna whispered to her mother: Her first one. Rebecca is still small and reed-thin, a wisp in the orchestra’s string section, a speck on the stage. Her lover, Meg, intends to get pregnant sometime in the next few years. Apparently Meg has a friend who will donate his sperm. Meg and Rebecca have announced this defiantly, expecting opposition, but really, they should know better. Besides, Anna is too distracted by the image of that man knocking on their door with a syringe in his hand to object: the Brunswick Green door closing swiftly in his face, Meg assuming the missionary position on the hallway carpet, Rebecca depressing the plunger, the claggy swiftness of the whole deal. The image grows large in Anna’s imagination, and, just for a moment, until reason takes over, her skin crawls and she wants to wash her hands. She will visit the house in North Adelaide, edge past the Nappie Wash bin next to the change-table, bend to kiss her granddaughter’s damp cheek: Lovely to see you, my poppet. Especially lovely given that the locals back home think Anna is washing her hands of them, those things she’s been saying in the Chronicle.