When the First Eighteen played at home, cars and utes by the dozen parked snout first around the oval’s perimeter rail like stubby spokes on a huge hub, like beasts crouched at a waterhole. Anna and Hugo stood on the front seat of the Stock & Station Holden, bumping their behinds on the seat-back. Their mother sat next to them, lost in a book propped open on the steering wheel. When the horns sounded the children stiffened, searching among the men streaming onto the field for their father, who wore the purple and gold of the town, the number 12 stitched to his back. But Pandowie lost the toss, obliging them to kick against the wind, and so the children’s father, stationed on the flank at the far end of the field, looked tiny, unused, disappointing. That changed at quarter-time. Suddenly he was right there in front of them, ceaselessly patrolling and dashing, sometimes climbing the sky with a leap-twist, riding the backs of slower men to snatch the ball. The children could scarcely breathe. They clambered out of the car, leaned on the rotting white rail, straining to touch. The men were massive, thunderous. The damp earth rumbled under them and the children heard the vicious punch and slap of bone against bone. They feared for their father. At half-time he trotted to the car to gulp water from an enamel cup. The spell broke. Anna recoiled from him: so much taut, white, mud-splashed, damp-hairy flesh; his cyclonic breathing; the spray of sweat and snot from his hot, elated, angry, heaving face. Another man leaned to ruffle her hair, enveloping her in a stupefying animal fug: Your dad’s a wild man, missy. The children’s mother played tennis in the summer months. Again Anna noticed that dislocating transformation. Her mother, dressed in tennis whites, wasn’t as huge, snorting and destructive as her father in his black shorts and black sprigged boots, but she did seem larger, powered by strong, quivering, naked thighs. Anna reached out her fingers to the tracery of red and blue veins, the dimpled, follicular flesh, but did not touch. Then, fully dressed, they were her parents again, smaller and more accessible. The long skipping rope rose, arced, dropped, snickered on the schoolyard asphalt, rose again, dropped again, in a hypnotising, metronomic beat. Anna and Maxine, face to face outside the ring, began to nod, then rock and sway minutely, finding a sympathetic pulse-beat in their veins. Together they stepped into the blur and began to skip, a tidy, efficient, one-two of their feet, their skirts breathing around their knees, Anna’s plait knocking gently against her spine. Without warning they clapped palms, twirled one hundred and eighty degrees, twirled again, clapped again. Anna felt buoyant and weightless, attached to the earth only by her need to rebound from it. It was known in the family that Hugo was clumsy, a dreamer. He tripped on his laces. He gazed beyond the school grounds as balls trundled past his dreamy legs. But he tried. He might come home and say: Dad, I got eight kicks today, which Anna knew to mean: Dad, I didn’t cry today. At the end of her first year at the university, Anna said no to blazered Americans selling encyclopaedias and caught the train home to Pandowie. She slid easily back into Lockie’s sinewy arms, but was not so certain how old friends would receive her. Her year away, her ticking mind, were a burden here in the wheat and wool country. I’m available if you need me, she told the tennis captain. That was on Monday. On Thursday she drove into Pandowie and checked ‘the board’, a glass-fronted public-notices cabinet bolted to the outside wall of her grandfather’s shop: Last week’s results, next week’s teams, premiership table. She had not been picked. That meant one of two things: there were plenty of better players available, or she was being told that she could not expect to step willy-nilly back across the barrier she had set up when she left the district. Anna waited. Two weeks later, her name was there, Pandowie vs Wirrabara. She drove to a dusty crossroads on a baking plain. The tarry court surfaces jellied under the hot soles of her sandshoes, while panting sheep watched the play from the poor shade of half-a-dozen pepper trees. Across the road was a tiny Methodist church, set behind a stonewall fence in the corner of a crop of unharvested wheat and star thistles. In the four hours that Anna was there that afternoon, three lonely cars shuddered by in roiling clouds of dust, spinning small stones like missiles against wheel arches and into the powdery roadside grassheads, and she knew that nothing had changed. She lost interest. When Rebecca was old enough for Saturday sport and week-night practice, Sam was the one to drive her there and back. He was not a peaceful guardian. If Becky revealed a torn knee or diminishing ardour, his ambition for her grew more pronounced. He pounded the sidelines, snarling: Get in there, Beck. He arrived home, swollen with outrage: Some brat’s mother had a go at Becky today. When Rebecca finally quit in favour of the cello, Sam mooned about, full of unfocussed energy and rage, so Anna steered him toward the bowling club. He seemed to sigh with relief—the wobbling, measured pace of the heavy fat clumsy balls on the grassy links, an opportunity to bitch and yarn with friends and strangers, the anticipation leading to the Association Championships every March. He is the club president this year. He holds great expectations for the Year 2000 Jubilee Tournament and has posted invitations to championship teams and individuals from all over the Commonwealth. Anna stares at the exotic postage stamps on the replies that have begun to arrive at the house, and often catches herself thinking that Michael would have enjoyed fixing them in his albums. Sometimes Maxine, decked out in her whites, urges Anna to join. Anna shakes her head. Her argument is that the local clubs don’t need her, they need kids who will stay on in the district. She writes: Young people are traditionally the driving force behind our sport and social clubs but there is nothing to keep them here, and so we are suffering a tragic loss of youth leadership. The closest that Anna will get to sport in the years to come will consist of listening to Rebecca’s good-natured objections to watching Meg play soccer on run-down ovals in distant suburbs on squally Saturday afternoons. All the devotion and energy of Anna’s ageing neighbours to bowls, organised walks and winter swimming will fail to move Anna, who will walk at her own pace, and die in her own good time.