Their father came home dog-tired every evening, often after they had gone to bed, but he never failed to read them a bedtime story before sitting down to his lamb chops—by now oven-husked, in a sludge of gravy—bread and butter, sugar-steeped black tea and tinned peaches or apple crumble. He’d appear grinning at their door, lower his creaking bones on to the end of one bed or the other, and feel for a small foot beneath the covers: My darling first-born, my precious second-born. Anna and Hugo stirred, scooting upright to the heads of their beds: Read us a story. Okeydoke, and he’d page mutely through their creased, friable, cottony boardbooks, sigh, deeply dispirited, and end up spinning them a story of his own. Anna learned to read early, hungrily and well. Her books were passed on to Hugo, and from him to the Pandowie orphanage, where children like Chester Flood might read them. Anna lowered her concealing wings of hair into her mother’s childhood books—thick-papered English hockey stick and Empire stories—and dreamed her way into the colour plates. She ran about in a gym slip with flying ribboned hair, dodged spears on the frontier, grappled with swarthy spies on the running board of a touring car on a mountain pass in a small, fir-tree Balkan state. She soon left her friends behind, she left the school library behind, and began to sneak into corners with books from her mother’s bedside table. She read like a fast, hungry vacuum, sucking in dizzying, rousing, half-understood characters and notions. All that indirect talk, all that flesh made willing and weak. Her mother found her one day and halfheartedly tried to prise the book from her hands: Sweetheart, I want you to understand, life’s not like that. Not like what? Her mother’s face, pink and hesitant, grew sharp and certain at last: Loose morals. There were other clipped and pointless lessons over the years. When Anna started at the university, there were five hundred eighteen-year-olds enrolled in English 1. She floundered. She understood one thing in the books she was expected to read, her lecturers and tutors another. She felt that she must have been only half alert all those years ago, curled up with a book in a corner, or that she had somehow missed half the lines on the page. When she lay waiting through the slow months for her first child to be born, her blood beat slowly within her. Only mustard pickles and manor-house mystery novels would stir it. The mysteries were delivered by the boxload from the lending library that Grandfather Tolley had set up behind the canned peaches in the Four Square Store. Her mind would wander from time to time. She’d put a book down and ask herself: What if? What if this were Lockie’s child kicking in my belly? If Lockie had not been so cruelly taken from her, that is. She’d lost six weeks of her life when it happened, had lived six weeks of a parallel life. According to a flick-page magazine in the doctor’s waiting room, something similar had happened to Agatha Christie. Anna went very still when she read that. She felt a kind of elation, a connection in time to the heart-ached author. One day Mr Jaeger came to her with jars of relish from the stone house in the gully below and placed half a dozen slim, cheap pamphlets in her lap. Then he stepped back, struck a commanding pose against her patchwork valley view, and pointed, his finger quivering at the books, her womb: Things you should know, now that you are about to bring a young one into the world. The lines in his face were like cracks in concrete. She glanced down, saw Conspiracy and Elders of Zion among the obscured titles. Her father-in-law counted on his fingers: The family, Christianity, private enterprise, noninterference from government, insularity in world affairs. One finger bored at the baby within her: There is a nexus between communism and Jewish internationalists, did you know that? I suppose you were taught by pinkos and Jews at the varsity? The Jews, he continued, counting again, have been responsible for the Russian Revolution, most of the recent wars, organised crime, feminism. Did you know—he delicately lifted a wilting pamphlet from her lap—that Hitler was part-Jew himself? The bastard son of Baron Rothschild? His extermination policy was financed by wealthy Jewish internationalists, for devious ends. Anna manoeuvred her heavy rump to the leading edge of the chair, planted her hands upon the armrests, hauled herself to her feet. The pamphlets spilled to the floor. She kicked them flying, stumbled and swayed: Get out, get out, get out. You... are... poisoning... me. There was a time when books were an unsafe subject around Anna’s daughter. Mother, you are part of the straight hegemony. Have I read this, have I read that, dead white males, living white males. The system has colonised me; I wish to decolonise myself. Anna believed that Rebecca was unhappy. She could not say: You’ll meet someone soon, but it was what she thought. Then Rebecca bought a house. Anna helped her unpack, and the woman there in her daughter’s kitchen that first morning had clearly stayed the night. They broke for coffee. Where to begin? Anna relaxed. Let them break the ice with me. She watched the stranger obliquely. Where Becky was dark and darting, Meg was slow, tall and lazy, a blue butterfly the size of a thumbnail where her flaming hair touched one bare shoulder blade. Finally, Meg blew a wobbly smoke ring toward the ricepaper shade: Have you read, she said, naming a Chicago private eye, and Rebecca and Anna leaned forward, eyes alight. Now the three women swap books and argue that so-and-so’s latest book is not as good as her first, her most recent. One of Anna’s disappointments as her eyes grow weaker will be the limited range of large print titles in her local library. She will spend more time thinking. She will attend the monthly meetings of a reading group from time to time but come away irritated with the know-all women, the sweetness-and-light women, the women who talk only about their children.