The pictures came to town because Grandfather Tolley suffered. He stared from his shop verandah at the sharkfin Razorback, and suffered. In spring, when the flowering grasses tossed and surged in the wind like whitecaps on the sea, he remembered his wife and he suffered. Your grandmother liked a good film, he said. She’d take herself off to the Henley Beach Odeon and forget herself for hours on end. Anna watched him on the verandah, staring out. She wondered if he was running a film through his head, grainy villains and lovers in improbable stories to drive that cruising shark away. Then one day he began to take himself off to Adelaide every so often, but he wouldn’t say why, not until he turned up with a certificate, a rented projector, and a second-hand screen fine-webbed with cracks and curling at the edges. The posters arrived on the Monday train, the film canisters on the Friday train. A display case on the wall of the Four Square Store announced: ‘Pandowie Pictures, Forthcoming Attractions’, and every week children dreamed beneath the flyspecked glass, provoked by flared nostrils, guns, surrendered white throats. But, within three years, the folding chairs proved to be too hard, the distances too great, the menfolk too weary, television too appealing, and so Grandfather Tolley closed the Pandowie Pictures and set up a lending library behind the racks of canned peaches, a place where Anna would conceal herself from the world. The winding blade of the auger took more than the tip of her father’s finger. For a while during the long year that followed, it also claimed his spirit. He asked: Why did I ever take up this game? In the chilly winds of July and August his aching fingers crept blindly for warmth deep inside the folds of his coat. The evenings around the sitting room fire were dark and long, and he was a reproach to his wife and children, a shuttered figure who stared at the coals for hours at a time through the stubby branches of that throbbing, never-warm hand. The family watched him. Anna’s mother wanted to say: Snap out of it, Pete, and she wanted to reassure him that she didn’t consider it a step down for her to be an Ison on Isonville one minute, a Tolley grubbing for a living the next. One bitter night, when they should have been a comfort to him and he to them, they left him to his discouraging fire and negotiated the mud and the washaways on the sunken road to attend a charity screening, Doris Day and Rock Hudson on a tiny fold-up patch of white in the Ladies’ Auxiliary supper room. There were husbands there but no other children, and Anna saw that her mother felt it keenly, imagining stares and whispers. The family bought a television set. It was a poor, weak, grey-faced thing in their sitting room, for power to the house came from a bank of 32-volt batteries partly charged by a wind generator, and on gusty nights, when the freelight propeller howled and shifted in the inconstant wind, the tiny screen swelled and shrank, swelled and shrank. The little towns of the northern highlands lost their drive-ins and cinemas one by one until only the Pandowie drive-in struggled from one year to the next. Blushing, steadying Lockie’s fevered head between her hands, Anna said: Please, don’t hang my pants from your aerial. She waited, her heart thudding, steeling herself. Would he laugh? Ignore her? A voice called softly in the darkness; someone in the next car shifted on creaky seat springs. Lockie mattered to her—the others hadn’t—but was it a mistake to let him know that he mattered? She didn’t really know him. She wondered what he had heard about her. They had been seen driving in, his mates had seen him with her, and all bar Chester Flood had given him the thumbs up: In like Flynn there, old son. Lockie was backlit by the screen towering above them; the speaker crackled on the window next to Anna’s ear. She turned Lockie’s head so that it caught the light: Lockie? You won’t, will you, please? There were boys out there who had made a trophy of her, all shiftiness and hunger, but she didn’t want to be his trophy. She wanted to see love suffuse his face. When Grandfather Tolley died, Anna’s parents handed the six-forty acres to Hugo. He blinked. He flexed his wings. He pulled down the rotting shed, straightened crooked fencelines, planted trees, finally scrapped the little Austin truck. A skylight and a glass wall to brighten the living area at the back of the house. A thirty-metre-high VHF/UHF antenna with booster boxes and coaxial cables to pick up the special channel. For weeks he was devoted to a series upon the American Civil War. The book was on his coffee table, next to an overflowing ashtray. Anna spotted Sunken Road in the index:
Of the fighting in Maryland, the bloodiest was at the Battle of Antietam on September 16, 1862. At one point Union troops came in behind Confederate sharpshooters stretched out upon the Sunken Road, which was to the north of Sharpsburg, and, in the words of a newspaper man from Washington, fired down on them ‘like sheep in a pen’. Thereafter the Sunken Road became known as Bloody Lane.
Sometimes Anna borrows Breaker Morant from the video library in Hugo’s shop, just to see Rebecca and Michael, who had been extras in one of the crowd scenes, a pair of small, knickerbockered, bonneted figures standing hand in hand as the troopers rode out onto the veldt and a brass band pomped away in the old rotunda outside the Bon Accord in Market Square. Sam had been hired to play a Boer guerrilla, a distant, bearded, black-coated horseman riding along a slope of the Razorback, but the director had left him on the cutting-room floor. Sam claims that Anna is obsessed, but it’s he who is obsessed, recording the deliberations and activities of the 150th Jubilee Committee with his video camera. Now and then Anna’s mother’s old voice rasps on the line: Could you tape the late film on Channel 2 for me, dear? Technology will defeat Anna too, eventually, and she’ll turn to Meg, a woman of hip-swinging flair and confidence, for advice on how to preset the tuning and the timer.