Whenever Anna’s mother and her dressmaking friends settled down to sew and gossip, the supple nouns and verbs of a coexistent language floated there in the room with them: fittings, patterns, sizes, measuring tape, buttons, cotton reels, balls of wool, leftover material, sewing-machine burr, pins-in-the-mouth murmurs, the clack of needles, and the eyes-narrowed, calculated final assessment of a dress, a pullover, a blouse. Anna stood on a kitchen chair and they turned her around and around, tucking and pinning. Everything has to be red with Anna at the moment, her mother said. When the dress was ready, Anna raced to the other end of the house. Mrs Mac leaned her rump on the sink and said: Aren’t you the pretty one? With a huge, hammering heart, Anna glanced down and slowly, slowly, smoothed the cloth over her thighs. My party frock, she said, and in the mirror the skirt frothed about her knees, concealing, revealing, concealing. Auntie Beulah? she said, swishing inches from her great aunt’s tartan rug. She said it again: Auntie Beulah? Like my new dress? But the old woman’s watery eyes were watching her lost love and she was singing to him, so low that Anna could scarcely hear her. Mrs Mac wheeled Beulah into the sun. You mustn’t mind, dear. She’s wandering a bit these days. Anna stood and thought about that, the tips of her fingers seeking reassurance from the red cherries on the white collar. She had imagined saying to Great Aunt Beulah: See, the belt goes through here. See the buttons? See the cherries? Mum embroidered them. Then for a couple of years Anna wanted to dress only as a boy. She had a rough and tumble life and felt too skinny, too gawky, too false, to wear a dress or a skirt and blouse. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Suddenly Anna had legs and a drowsy, catch-breath appreciation of them. Her legs drew the gaze; she drew the gaze. She wore tights to school, a tanning shade of brown, with one dazzling white knee truss to reinforce the effect. She sat where Lockie could watch her during the grinding hours on the Bitter Wash school bus, perched opposite him on the sideways-facing seat above a rear-wheel arch, tormenting him by bunching the slippery purple and gold folds of her uniform about her thighs. The netball changing room was the science lab. Boys might catch Anna and Maxine there, framed in the window, slow-handed, grinning a wide-eyed O of mock dismay. Anna’s mother said: For the ninetieth time, there simply isn’t the money. It’s been a bad year and Dad wants us to make economies where we can. And so Anna blamed him, too, for letting her appear in a home-made gown at the high school ball. She could not see the quality of the cut or the fabric, or the skilled hand, only that the gown was not shop-bought. Nothing would make her beautiful, so what would make her uglier? Lashing eyes and a tongue that could cut to the bone, that’s what. When her father asked her to dance the Pride of Erin, she folded her arms and stared fiercely at the floor. Then for the next two hours she flung herself into half a dozen self-abasing back seats in the chilly car park while the band played softly inside the hall and warm shapes revolved behind the yellow windows. Anna greatly loved a black cotton jumper but it betrayed her in the end. She wore it next to her skin at lectures and whenever she went home to Pandowie. One twilight Saturday she returned to the house with chattering teeth, her arms wrapped across her chest, and met her mother’s long, unblinking, expressionless gaze as Lockie tooted goodbye outside: Anna, it might interest you to know that your jumper is inside out. For exercise, for a distraction, Anna attended dance classes in an upstairs studio along a forgotten alley behind Victoria Square. Here she flexed as though she were naked, her bare feet slapping down upon the varnished floorboards. A woman called Connie remarked, admiring her: They must have had you in mind when they invented the leotard. The dress Anna wore to the Showalter Park field day was for Chester Flood, not the field day women. At two o’clock she poured a final cup of tea, draped the apron over a fold-up chair and slipped away from the catering tent to hunt for the children. By half-past two she was soothing them to sleep on Chester’s bed: Sssh, darling, a little nap, and then we’ll go home to Daddy. She joined Chester in his sitting room. She removed her shoes. She curled her toes in the thick pile of his carpet, turned her back, lifted the hair away from the nape of her neck. They didn’t speak. Chester’s hands flicked down her back, freeing buttons one by one along her spine. The dress sighed to the floor. Suddenly Rebecca appeared in the doorway, knuckling her eyes: Mummy. Anna took her to the bathroom, then back across Chester’s long carpet to the bedroom, and when she returned to Chester’s warm arms the world had tilted a little. Did she...? I don’t think she saw anything, Anna replied. But I’ll make it into a game in the car going home, so she won’t know who she’s seen today or where she’s been. For a long time after the accident, grief and mottled legs eroded Anna’s confidence. Sam said: You’re incredible, you know that? If I mention that I like you in dresses, you assume I’m saying you look bad in pants. And all those dark colours all the time. Snap out of it. They were days of struggle. Anna’s mother came by with the old sewing machine: At least let me show you how to run up a dress. Anna made skirts, workclothes for Sam, little dresses for Rebecca. She saved hundreds of dollars that way. When Rebecca grew touchy and particular, she taught her to sew. But it was more than simply teaching Rebecca how to sew. Theirs was a relationship weighed down by complications. Anna wanted her daughter to stop settling that fatalistic gaze upon her, and she wanted her daughter to know how to fend for herself, take responsibility, pay her own way. Rebecca made dresses if she had to, but mostly she made shirts and trousers. She grew into a quick, slight, moody woman, suited to pants and jeans. If she can get away with it she wears loose black pants rather than a dress when the orchestra is playing. Rebecca and Meg don’t hide anything from Anna. For example, Meg is interested in inversions. She stages parties at which everyone must wear a dress. She likes to experiment in low-key S&M with Rebecca. It’s the marginality I like, she tells Anna, the tinge of danger, the eroticisation, the giving over of the self when I play-act and dress in chains and leather. But we don’t hurt each other, nothing like that. Anna will dress to flatter as she grows old. She will argue that she doesn’t see why she shouldn’t display some flair and style in her declining years. Old women in humdrum situations like to watch the young ones parade in their new clothes, but Anna’s attitude is: Not me, sister, not me.