Anna was started on sixpence a week pocket money. Then, year by year, as she grew in age and aptitude, it was increased by increments of a penny or a penny-ha’penny until finally she earned a shilling a week, two sixpences, one to spend, the other for her piggybank. This was income, not a gift. She was expected to earn it. She wiped the dishes, collected the eggs, swept the back porch, unsnagged the family’s grass-seedy socks and chopped kindling for the kitchen stove. As she progressed to more difficult jobs, Hugo came in behind her, wiping, sweeping, chopping. They had cows on the six-forty acres. Anna was expected to drive them into the milking stalls when she came home from school, pull up a three-legged stool to the ballooning flank of the most patient cud-chewing cow, and strip the milk from teats that to her were like coarse-skinned, waggly dicks on a bloated sac. But her Tolley fingers proved to be useless, and so her father replaced her on the stool. She worked for Grandfather Tolley all through her high school years, every Saturday morning between eight o’clock and midday. Again she swept, but she also took inventory, restocked the shelves, and waited on customers. One day Mrs Morehead, the piano teacher, came tight-lipped and hotly tense into the shop, settled her account, and was never seen again. Her old man was caught with his fingers in the Council till, Grandfather Tolley explained. Anna froze. She drew her cloaked fear and guilt around her, waited until his back was turned, and replaced the two florins that she had pocketed from the cash register—one in her left pocket, the other in her right, so that they wouldn’t clink. She kept her eyes open for shoplifters after that, even though Grandfather Tolley did not list shoplifting as one of his burdens. His burdens were freight charges, tardy payers, non payers, the lure of the bigger towns, and the contemptuous indifference of the Showalters to their massive monthly bill. They let it run up to five hundred quid, he said, then act like they’re doing me a favour when they eventually pay it. If jokers came in asking for a left-handed hammer, Anna cut them dead. If little old ladies said: My, haven’t you grown, or: Your mum and dad must be very proud of you, dear, Anna withered them with a stare. Then she left to study in the city and Grandfather Tolley took Chester Flood under his wing, paying Chester a weekly wage to help in the shop and putting him through a course in accounting. So there was no work for Anna in the shop when she came home during the sixty-seven drought, and work, but no income, on the six-forty acres: Sweetie, we’re struggling this year. Anna blinked awake. She seemed to hear her father for the first time. She stopped dreaming and grew up a little. She returned to the university in February, when only distracted thesis writers, lost Africans and cleaners were about, and secured a job for herself in the library basement for ten hours a week. Ten hours to think in, for the work was not demanding. Ten hours to stew in, all those boys dying in that foreign war. When she applied for her first job in London, the bookshop manager in the Kings Road said: Restless tribes of colonials, then cocked his head as though another fine phrase might find its way into his mouth. He winked: So I know you’ll soon be moving on, love, but you colonials work well, I’ll give you that. Few people could live on what the man paid her. Anna was expected to be aggressive with the customers, to sell plenty so that she could top up her income with bonuses. Her legs and feet ached. Shoplifting gangs made snap raids on the expensive art folios, and she encountered chiselled bluebloods—The Lady or The Hon. printed on their rubber cheques—who behaved as though the air around her were tainted. But she was finding her return ticket, here, away from her past life. Lockie and her heartache receded. She was able to stand back, assess herself, move on to other things. She moved on to marriage and children and hidden sweatshop labour. She discovered that Sam was paid a poor, thin, grudging allowance and herself nothing at all. I tend to the battery hens, she argued. I collect, pack and weigh eggs every day. Shouldn’t I be paid something? It’s all for the family, Sam’s father replied. Sort of like a little communist system, Anna observed, and saw by his splutter and redness that her father-in-law was a fool and she could always silence him. Then father and son fell out and suddenly Anna and Sam knew what it meant to need money to pay the rent. At least the old system had cushioned them from some of the blows of life. When Anna first started working at the Chronicle, young mothers looked at her side-on, as if making a list of everything that marked her: A tart at school; fancied herself for going to university; her boyfriend was that Kelly who got himself killed; she came back from overseas with her tail between her legs; married into a family of religious nuts; and now she’s forced to go out to work. Money in dribs and drabs, for all of Anna’s life, except one day her father died and left her twenty thousand—and Anna lost the lot. Sam has been advised that the bank is forcing a sale and will appoint a manager. Anna observes, in her weekly column: Losing a farm also means losing a home, a way of life, a whole social framework. She should feel more sorry for herself, but can’t forget the local kids, who leave school year after year, full of eager hope—except there is nothing to hope for in Pandowie. One or two boys have wrapped their cars around the only roadside tree in miles and it’s clear to everyone that they are swelling a hidden statistic. Teenage mothers push sullen prams up and down the aisles of Tolley’s Four Square Store and if they lift an item here and there, Anna’s mother turns a blind eye. She has put a notice in the front window: Buy your kid a job, shop local, shop Pandowie. Anna writes: We must think laterally. It’s no good finding jobs for our young people in time-honoured occupations. With tourists renting the miners’ cottages in Paxton Square, and King William Street farmers snatching up our farms, now is the time to think about jobs in tourism, cottage crafts and organic farming. When she moves to the city, Anna will place small advertisements in magazines: Typing Done. She will be paid by the hour to invigilate at end-of-year exams. Anna will accept an old-age pension, a grateful government’s reward for all that she has contributed to the nation, but keep to herself the conviction that she hadn’t always been a worthy or a deserving citizen.