Bodies were hidden from view and so Anna imagined them. From a sketchy beginning—Hugo’s description of a pale, loose, globish bottom briefly glimpsed when Grandfather Ison undressed in the light leaking through the bedroom door from the hallway, pom pom pomming as though he hoped he were not being observed by the little boy in the corner bed—Anna constructed the old man’s thick legs, padded grey back, drum-tight, hanging, hairy stomach, thin white arms abruptly sun-browned from wrist to fingertip, and a generalised dark accumulation at the mid-point of his body. She saw her mother once, full length from the rear, towelling herself dry in the ladies’ bathroom along the corridor from their rooms at the Delmonte Hotel. She registered these things before her mother shyly dragged a satiny flowered robe over her dampness: streaked, mottled pink skin, a wet shoulder blade missed by the towel, knobbly bones revealed along the bent-over spine, a referred jelly shake of thigh and buttock as one dried foot and then the other landed solidly upon the squelchy floor tiles. She only ever saw her father’s torso. It was broad, vulnerably stippled with freckles and moles, moving minutely as he scraped a cut-throat razor over his whiskers in the mornings. Hugo’s body was about as relevant to Anna as her own. The children enticed their cousins to the old school at a bend in the sunken road and ordered them to strip, squat open-legged for inspection, urinate, defecate, Anna cool and curious, Hugo bow-shouldered and shivering, the bobbing eye of his finger-thin stem like an extra, eager spy at the proceedings in the cobwebby ruin. Anna found little privacy in the boarding house of her mother’s old grammar school. Bodies, morning, noon and night—in the showers, in the changing rooms, in the narrow shared territory between each pair of iron cots. Convinced that her breasts were too small, the thatch at her groin too sparse, her cleft as featureless as a little girl’s, she shut herself in a lavatory cubicle and perched upon the closed lid with a mirror. Suddenly there were footsteps inside the bathroom and the sounds of shouted laughter, flushing water, doors and singing, then silence, then another burst. Anna breathed shallowly, encouraged into a sense of hidden sin and power, and watched her fingers. Wonderfully, she saw herself grow and open. She was reminded of unfolding flowerheads and rock-pool anemones, the dewiness on their bracketing lips. She decided: Not different, just a variation. She ran away home, and within three or four years they were calling her experienced, loose with her body. Exaggerated, unfair, but Anna learned to live with it. One thing that she wanted, apart from love, was to see a boy stand unselfconsciously naked in the sunlight. The boy who could do that would be one she could love, and who would love her. But all Anna got was the darkness of the back roads and the impatient clankle, slap and zip of unbelting jeans. Nothing to see and nothing worth looking at—not until Lockie made love to her in long grass on the Razorback. Anna’s English tutor took her to his house in Unley. The people there smiled in a sleepy dope haze, elbow-propped on cushions on the floor, and waved her in. The tutor rested the back of his head on Anna’s thigh and stared glitteringly up at her. He was putting it on, trying to look demoniacal. Anna watched closely when a new joint went around: handle gingerly, draw back in hyperventilating huffs, snatch away from the mouth, hold in for several seconds, then release. She applied the yellow body paint to the tutor’s chest and stomach. Another woman there decorated his cheeks and forehead with broad strokes of red and blue. A third striped him green and gold from his hips to the blades of his feet and threaded gold glitter foil in the tangled hair between his legs. That left his genitals unpainted, a sad bunch of cold-shrunken lumps. The three women seemed to sober simultaneously, to draw back from him. He said plaintively: Anna, won’t you finish me? Anna thought guiltily of Lockie, of his beauty. She didn’t know that Lockie had followed her to the house. In the morning he confronted her: Two-timer. He said: You’re drifting away from me. Then he was gone to the war and she had no word from him for months, only a card describing the sun-shot South China Sea. She evoked his body in her mind’s eye. In her worst moments, parts of him were torn away under the impact of landmines and sniping bullets. The son Anna gave birth to five years later was part of her cure. First the crown of his head, playing hide and seek with her in an angled mirror, and to get to that point she cried out, moaned and huffed, for almost twelve hours, sometimes directing unregretted snarls upon the nurses whose ministering hands had become a torment. Finally she pushed, and at last she saw all of him, gliding out of her in a heaven-sent rush. Sam leaned close to her and articulated carefully, as if she were deaf or feeble-minded: He’s perfect! A perfect little body. Well done! They called him Michael, an old Ison name. Anna often caught herself beaming at him entranced—his arms and legs stirring the air, his edible fatness. Sometimes it seemed a pity to clothe him, although he did look fine in clothes, in baby clothes, toddler clothes, the shorts, shirt and sandals he wore on his first day at school. She kept these things for some time after the accident, until Sam told her not to be morbid. When he said: Pass them on to Maxine’s kid, Anna wondered: Does he ever think before he says anything? And so her body abhorred his. Sam rarely wanted her anyway, but, whenever he closed in, she grew agitated, her trunk and limbs hunting for a way out before freezing finally, waiting for his touch. She wondered: Does my body bear the mark of my loss? People stare at me on the street—do they know from gossip or does my body betray me? Rebecca and Meg like to shower together, soak in a hot bath together, the door open so that they can draw Anna into their conversations. Anna is accustomed to it. Meg, she’s noticed, is big-boned, swaggering and strong-looking, her body apt to wrap itself around little Rebecca and never let go. It seems to Anna that, for Meg, lesbianism is a sexual expression; for Rebecca, political. When Anna sees Sam naked now it’s when he’s tossing his workclothes on the laundry floor and stepping into the back-porch shower stall. He’s getting paunchy, more and more like his father every day. She wonders what else stirs him now, apart from his dream for the 150th Jubilee. She supposes that he will grow old and begin to shrink, as will they all. Anna will visit her mother in the retirement home behind the Pandowie Hospital and one day happen to see the old woman dart with a giggle from the bathroom to the gown behind the bedroom door, and be struck by how youthful the naked body may seem, even after eighty-four years of gravity.