Anna was trying to understand: Grandfather Ison and Great Aunt Beulah are brother and sister? She grew restless and meditative on her father’s lap, her brows drawn together, as all human patterning realigned and rearranged itself in her head. She herself was a sister, with a brother. She began to sense that she was not unparalleled and unprecedented in the world, that the people around her were not there simply because she stood at the centre but were caught in webs of their own. She wanted to know more. There was plenty to know. Grandfather Ison had five sisters, in fact. Anna came eventually to understand that Grandpa-and-his-sisters was a story full of trouble and strife, but she wasn’t interested in the quality of the links between them just now, only the type. It would be fun to have a sister. We’ll see, her mother said. Who’s your sister? Anna wanted to know. I haven’t got one; I’ve got a brother, your Uncle Kitchener. Again Anna frowned, absorbing this new tie. She twisted back her head, stared up at the underside of her father’s jaw: Have you got a sister or a brother? He had not. He also was motherless, his mother taken by a shark when he was a baby. Peter! You’ll give the child nightmares! Able to go no farther than Grandfather Tolley in her contemplation of her father’s line, Anna turned back to the Isons. She stared at her little brother. Hugo was stretched cheek-down on the hearthrug, running a tiny, wheel-less metal truck across the toe cap of their father’s leather slipper. She rearranged the players. She imagined that Hugo was her Uncle Kitch, a small boy ready for bed. Her mother, sitting in the club chair on the other side of the flames, became Grandmother Ison. Her father, murmuring into the hair at the back of her neck, became Grandfather Ison, and Anna herself, the child in his lap, became Eleanor Ison, a little girl ready for bed. Anna wanted to know why—since her mother and Uncle Kitch had grown up together in this house—did Uncle Kitch now live in the overseer’s house across the creek? Because I was the first to get married, and when you kids came along we needed the extra space. But Uncle Kitch is married with kids now, so won’t he need extra space too? He certainly will, Anna’s father replied. Anna’s father often said one thing and you heard other things behind it. Four years later, Kitchener inherited Isonville and moved his family into Beulah’s half of the house. His rift with his sister, his hungry presence on the other side of the dividing door, drove Anna and Hugo into taking long bicycle rides through the back country or to their mother’s old school on the sunken road. They felt free and venturesome. Then one day their cousins begged to come along with them. They were twin girls, with thin, straining, overwashed print cotton frocks on their sturdy frames and identical expressions of envy and glum anxiety on their faces. They had no thoughts of their own and understood nothing. Outside the schoolhouse, Anna and Hugo dismounted from their bikes and watched the sisters wobble toward them through the tossed-aside blue gravel at the road’s edge, flushed and damp, afraid of missing out. A lazy kind of badness crept in Anna’s blood. She infected Hugo with it. They took the twins through the gap in the crumbling wall and seduced them out of their hot dresses and bike-seat wrinkled pants as though they had been rehearsing this for all of their lives. Dazed, overheated, always wanting more, the twins dogged Anna and Hugo through the summer. There was always Maxine in Anna’s life, but she wanted a sister. She learned at first hand that a friend may be treacherous, a friend may reject you. She fell out with Maxine and had no one until Lockie Kelly came along. When she first met his family she came home to tell of it with the light of their careless, raucous, even-handed love still burning in her eyes: He’s got four brothers, two sisters, endless cousins. But, like a slap in the face, her father said: The Pope promises them extra points in the afterlife if they breed up big. Anna flared: So how do you explain Grandpa Ison and all his sisters? Anna’s father couldn’t explain it. He didn’t bother to try. He turned the page and smiled a smile of wisdom and secret intelligence that made Anna burn. At least she didn’t have a falling-out with Hugo over the six-forty acres. She had no right to expect half of that poor, stony country: it was too small; he’d worked hard ever since he left school; she’d seen enough heartache and strife between her mother and Uncle Kitch. Sometimes Anna wonders how things might have been between Michael and Rebecca if Michael had lived. Should she and Sam have had another baby? I begged you, Mum, remember? I was so lonely by myself. Anna tries to remember. Maybe Rebecca would have been happier, less on her guard if she’d had a brother or a sister to love and care for through her young years. Anna will draw closer to Hugo and her mother. They will be all she has left of her own young life. She will return to Pandowie every few months and see that nothing changes, even as everything changes: the unvarying beat of the town and her family there as the old certainties crumble.