If Anna were to bend her head into a book or gaze into the distance, she heard things: Pete, I can feel them waiting for Auntie Beulah to go, can’t you? It’s as if they’re biding their time over there, ready to charge in with their things as soon as she’s carted out the door. Then: It’s indecent. She’s barely cold in her grave. Then: I feel just awful. I can feel them waiting for us to hurry up and get out so they can have the whole house. Anna’s mother broke off to look at the cool walls, the patterned tin ceiling: I used to love this house. Now it’s just a bad taste in my mouth. Waiting for the school bus, waiting for exam results, waiting around for something to happen. Anna’s father fastened Kippy to his chain, dropped the flap of mutton between his paws, walked across the patch of moonlight to the back door. He must know we’re here, Lockie whispered. He knows, Anna said. Lockie had parked his ute where the pine trees beside the tractor shed cast the blackest shadows. We’re asking for trouble doing it here, Lockie said, anxiety edging in. What if he comes out again? But Anna knew that her father would not come out, just as he’d not glanced their way when he crossed the yard. Reserved, respectful, he’d not embarrass her, or Lockie, no matter what else he thought. It was afterwards that she worried about. Always a waiting game, kissing Lockie goodnight, going inside, making herself a cup of cocoa, waiting for the explosions that never came: Out with that Mick again? What were you doing out there?—as if I couldn’t guess. Do you know what hour it is? Anna heard these things in her head, never in fact. Sometimes she wondered if she actively wanted her father to say something. Bracing her bare feet on the glass of the driver’s door—What must that look like from the outside, her white soles lit by a stray moonbeam?—Anna lifted her rump, helping Lockie, helping herself. She wanted him as deep as he could go. Her hands brushed automatically up and down his back. She stared into the darkness. Fifteen months later, Lockie was fighting in a foreign war. A numbing silence grew between them. She wrote, begging him to write, and in two years of waiting all she got was a postcard. Then one day he wrote to say that he was coming home, tour of duty over, and a weight lifted from her shoulders. He had survived; her luck had turned. She got out the atlas and tracked his passage home, from Nui Dat to Sydney to Adelaide to Pandowie to the Kellys’ rundown house. The hours passed. She snatched up the phone ahead of her mother: Welcome back! Yes, love to see you. Anytime. I mean it, I’d love to see you. Fine. I’ll put the kettle on. When he didn’t arrive, she wondered if he were being cruel to her, paying her back maybe. She waited stubbornly where she could not see the telephone, knowing that it would weaken her resolve. Then it rang and Anna concentrated all of her senses on her mother’s voice, the way her mother breathlessly recited the number, the way she paused, the way the words caught in her throat. Anna walked to the kitchen through a fog: Mum? What is it, what’s wrong?—and was crying before she knew why. She knew that her luck hadn’t turned after all. According to the Chronicle: It is believed that sheep drifted across the road, and, in braking to avoid them, Mr Kelly lost control of his car. The Bitter Wash Road is a deathtrap, claiming six lives since it was widened for the Redex Trial in the 1950s. One might inquire how many more will be lost before our esteemed councillors stir themselves. The advice books, the legions of mothers before her, told Anna that breastfeeding was a time of profound satisfaction for mother and child. So what was Anna doing wrong? How could she make it right? Sure, Michael was born to suck, and she loved the tidal sensations, the rush of milk to her breasts, the ebbing as he filled his little soul with her, but why didn’t their times ever coincide? Sometimes he slept for six or eight hours at a stretch, when her drum-tight breasts cried for relief at four. Should she wait for him to awake, and suffer ropy, knotted ducts, or should she cruelly snatch him up from his cot and run her nipple between the damp little bow of his lips? She was heavy, so heavy sometimes she could cry. In the rented schoolhouse on the sunken road, they waited for better times to come. They waited for years. Becky, remember when you were sixteen, seventeen, no one asked you out for months at a time? Waiting weekend after weekend for the phone to ring, stuck at home with us in front of the TV set? It broke our hearts. Coldly: That’s not how I remember it. Oh? How do you remember it then? For a start, I wasn’t waiting. It’s not as if I was desperate. Do you think I wanted to get slobbered on in the back seat of someone’s car? I had better things to do. Sam looked away from her: Okay, have it your way. No, Dad, you’re having it your way. You’re constructing an image of me that suits your needs. Anna saw her father every day at the end. Poor Missy, waiting for your old man to kick the bucket. Dad, don’t. You’re right, bad taste. But I’m waiting, Missy. I’ve had plenty of waiting in my time. They say that an army marches on its stomach—well, it rests on its hands. We played poker, two-up, you name it. Some of us devoured anything with print on it. We carved things out of shell casings, we washed our socks. Waiting, that’s what war is about. Anna thought: Was it like that for Lockie in his war, desperate to see me again? Did Grandfather Ison wait for a lucky wound in the Sunken Road Trench at Pozières ? Anna is visiting Chester again. He’s watching her carefully, in the lounge where visitors to the prison gather, and finally finds the right moment: I suppose you’ve been waiting for an explanation? Anna hasn’t been—or rather, until now she hasn’t been waiting consciously for one. I did cheat you out of your twenty thousand, he said. Not deliberately, but when Wes Showalter and your Uncle Kitch talked me into joining their Lloyds underwriting syndicate, I found myself stretched for cash, so I borrowed against my clients’ trust accounts. Then when Lloyds got hit by a rash of oilspills and earthquakes, Lloyds Names like us lost everything. I couldn’t pay you back. I’m sorry, I should have told you. Anna pats his hand: You’re telling me now. My regret is that I didn’t buy Becky a cello. Talkback idealogues will wait for society to break down and doomsday cults will wait for Machholz 2 to hit the earth. Anna? She’ll wait for the Committee to decide upon the fate of her manuscript, wait to see Sam decently into the ground, then move to a house beside the sea, where, with time, her grief and guilt might ease.