They all felt the push and pull of the city on the coast. Grandfather Ison retired to Burnside when his daughter married the Tolley boy from Pandowie; Grandfather Tolley depended upon a distributor in Hindley Street for his weekly film canisters; books from the sandstone library on North Terrace were parcelled up for the children once a month; Stock & Station obliged the children’s father to attend head office from time to time; and the family holidayed at the Delmonte in Glenelg every January. When the children were small they were taken to see the lights of Rundle Street, where the big department stores sat like bishops and sniffed as you passed through their doors. The city had embraced neon, the merchants scribbling and stamping their businesses with it. Names stuttered and glowed in red and white behind plate glass, climbed external walls, or popped hoarsely above the heads of the country women who had come down for the sales, one arm herding their cowed children, the other locked on their shopping bags against purse-snatchers and undesirables. At night, Rundle Street swam in neon. Rubbernecks crawled along in their cars. Anna discovered that if she were to blink her eyes rapidly and sway her head, the neon stretched and yawed like molten elastic. One night she felt cut down and tossed aside as if she were nothing. A car crammed with wild children pulled up alongside the Stock & Station Holden at a traffic light, and Anna made the mistake of looking at them. Dreaming, floating, cocooned in metal and glass, she believed that she was joined to all the children in the world. But, in the crowded window opposite her, three long, livid tongues rolled out and membraned the glass, three pairs of cross-eyes looked into her brain, three mouths were prised wide and wetly open. Anna gasped and looked away, shocked, hurt, defenceless for the first time. Normally she had plenty of nerve—after all, she had roamed the back roads seeking her father and seen dead and dying lambs and the flickering tongues of tiger snakes—but no one had been unthinkingly cruel to her before. The blood rushed to her face and she was deeply ashamed. Sometimes her father drove them to a cracked brick house in Mile End. The back yard faced a railway line and the house and yard seemed to crouch and slink away from the constant iron thunder. It was never spring or autumn in that place, only scorching midsummer, and Anna sensed that the man who lived there, her father’s offsider in Borneo in 1944, had slipped in the world and had farther to slip. He had a twangy voice riddled with sullenness, a face tucked and pillowed from the beer. She played quietly in the dead grass with Hugo, while the wives struggled to find a common ground in the shade of the verandah and the men drank themselves into risky moods. A kind of raucous irony and scorn came over her father when he was drunk. He liked to drive back through leafy suburbs in search of victims, shouting insults at pedestrians who seemed too buttoned-down or too good to be true. It aroused the children. They saw surprise and offence in the receding faces as the car accelerated away, and crammed their fists in their mouths to smother their snorting laughter. Even their mother was aroused. She slapped him affectionately: Peter, you’ll get us arrested. But somehow their delight in him always spoilt the mood. He’d scowl and shut down abruptly, as though displeased that they could be so easily diverted. When she finished at the primary school, Anna was sent to her mother’s old grammar school in the city. You’ll be able to say, My mother was an old girl. The school hummed with the untroubled assumptions of caste and privilege, where wealth came second and intellect third. Black cars whispered along the bordered drives and shoe leather snapped on the polished floors. There must have been streets and houses beyond the ivied perimeter wall but Anna couldn’t see them. She was served pâté on a sliver of toast in her housemistress’s room and didn’t know what it was. Even sprawling on the grass was beyond her. She didn’t have the style for it. She was in a well-watered, green, ascendant world and seven days later she ran away from it. As the taxi downshifted for the descent through the Pandowie Hills, Anna leaned forward to peer at the wheat stubble, someone’s dust-scribbling farm ute, a sparrowhawk floating in the air currents, the meandering stonewall fences, and finally the blue-grey bends and curves of the sunken road far in the distance. There, she said, pointing her finger. When she turned eighteen she didn’t want to leave Lockie, but she couldn’t wait to leave the bush. The city, the idea of the city, excited her now. Besides, Lockie was only three hours north by road. On the day on which paint was splashed over her face and clothes and the placard wrenched from her hands outside the Raintree Corporation, Anna saw the hate-filled faces along the footpath and remembered the children who had spoilt the city lights for her, twelve years ago. She remembered the howling pack in the Pandowie train, pursuing the shearer’s son. Anna’s parents insisted on a slap-up wedding in Adelaide, in the well-bred Burnside church where Grandfather Ison was still remembered by all the old sextons and vigorous powdered widows. Anna glowed in her wedding dress. Sam looked crisp and vivid, his white shirt, his black suit and tie. But afterwards, as the big hired saloon crept away along an elm tree corridor, Sam’s hand landed on Anna’s knee and she saw how scoured and raw it was, a raw-boned bushman’s hand that was nothing like Lockie’s. She thought: Lockie and I would have had a romantic, irregular, disastrous marriage, full of lies and vows, and it would have been all I ever wanted. She wondered: What sort of children will Sam and I have? They made many trips to the city to seek a cure for Rebecca’s asthma. Their daughter had inherited, from the Isons, allergies to everything around her: animal hair, house dust, yeast, dairy foods, pollen. The specialist swung in his swivel chair high above North Terrace: Also, don’t let her get excited. Ideally you should move to the city to live. Anna gazed past his shoulder to the spires of the Cathedral, which obscured the redbrick wing of Women’s College where she’d had a room and read arguments for and against the existence of God and made love to Lockie twice a month. She didn’t speak. She went home and said to Becky: You’re getting an education. Well, Rebecca knew that anyway. Rebecca studied at the Conservatorium and bought a house of her own and suffers now only when seasonal winds blow dust and pollen from the inland across the city. Many of Anna’s contemporaries have sold out and moved to Brisbane and Perth, seeking sunshine and burgeoning economies. According to the latest census, over two thousand young people have left rural areas for the city. Anna’s twin cousins have married a pair of Adelaide suits and so the Ison name will die out when Kitch and Lorna die. When it’s time for Anna to leave she will settle for a place close to the wind-whipped sands of Henley Beach. She will find herself thinking more and more of that city woman, her grandmother, taken by a shark long before she was born.