Chapter 1

The sand is slick and little sprigs of seaweed worm into the webs of Fanny’s toes. Above is chaos, a choke of froth, tantrums of waves, but where Fanny is all is quiet. The water is warm until she moves and then it jolts ice-cream cool down her legs and arms. It is a soft green with swirls of mica. They jellyfish who might, an hour ago, have kept her company have since gone out with the tide. A larger wave prods her back and Fanny limps her body, lets it pass.

Fanny hadn’t meant to look for mermaids. Sissy things, Silas said. Snake ladies, tails instead of wings. What next, a fairy tea party? Sissy things, Fanny agreed. But now that she was down here and Silas was not, she might as well look around. 

Up in oxygen Thomas is close to pissing himself. He stands shivering on the beach (though he is dry above the waist) and prays for the emergence of his younger daughter. So fixedly does he picture the black cap of her hair, thick and shiny as a seal’s pelt when wet, the black eyes that swallow all light, the skin whose tendency to bronze is a source of consternation for his wife that it takes a long time for him to notice the insistent tugs at his arm. He looks down to find Silas, blue-lipped, eyes horse-wild with fright.

“You’ve got to go get her,” Silas urges, and Thomas nods. The shirt comes off, he’s knee-deep in the waves, scouting. And then the black head really does surface, and the glimpse of her eyes that Thomas catches stays him. And then she’s gone again, the water clinking like coins above her head. 

Down below, Fanny’s scouting for silver, impatient but trying not to thrash. She could have sworn it was right beyond her toes. At last she spots it and it’s not a fish at all but a bit of foil and when she pops above the surface again, she’s got it clutched in one fist. Treasure.

Hard to say how long Thomas would have stood in the wavelets, counting the bobs of her head. Six, he gets to before Mary comes barreling up, bloomers in a literal twist. Her screams are not comprehensible to Thomas, but then she shoves him forward, into the meat of an incoming wave.

Thomas had long considered himself a strong swimmer. Not a necessity in these modern times, but a leg up in a land whose table was always set for the sea. His own father had taught him on this very beach, in much the same way he had taught Silas and was now failing to teach Fanny. Toss yeh straight in, let the body take over. We’re not so far from dolphins, if yeh can believe it. Darwin’s book had come out just as his father was learning to read; a fateful coincidence, if not an entirely lucky one (for the old man had died at sea, on a fool’s errand to Madagascar, where, as the rumors went, precious gemstones were so plentiful, the locals pushed them like rocks to the side of the road). Even so, as the current yanks, he feels a lurch of selfish fear. It’s a fierce, slant-wise one, and by the third wave, Thomas is at least twenty metres from where he last saw his daughter. That’s when a piece of him gives in, assigns wash, resigns return. The rippers are more than what a man of over forty and under seventy stone knows to be safe. Surely Mary would prefer one living to none at all. But there the black head is again, and there, the piercing shrieks of Mary, and Thomas finds himself swimming upstream, unsure if he’s making progress, unsure if he’ll ever see that head again until he’s upon it and Fanny is tucked safe under one trapdoor arm.

Back on the sand, Mary wails in front of the gathered crowd. Fanny sits calm, eyes wide at the commotion — how she longs to return to the quiet of the ocean floor! — then wisens, manifests a hacking cough, a spout of seawater. 

Years later, Fanny will tell the story of how she learned to swim by almost drowning, but by then, Thomas won’t be there to catch the wink.

Chapter 2

Nearly a year after Newcastle sees Fanny, in scrubbed Sunday best, tender a shy smile to the gate attendant at McIver’s Baths. 

“Your mum coming, dearie?” The attendant applies the skeptical frown normally reserved for the health inspector and mothers shepherding boys over ten.

“She’s waiting for me,” Fanny replies, ambiguity being the way around an outright lie, for Mary, or, more specifically, Mary’s pot of still-muddy beets, is waiting for Fanny. The gate attendant nods, bares her foreteeth. 

“Go on, then.”

Fanny is ten now, and taller than Silas, who is eleven. Much taller than Shan, who, though thirteen and, in her own esteem, nearly grown, takes after Thomas, all springy limbs and slight joints liable to crack at the slightest interference. The Duracks are a small people, not helped by decades of poor harvest. It’s the MacDonoughs, Mary’s people, who grow large; yoke-shouldered, paddle-footed. Black Irish where the Duracks are Celt through and through. Of her siblings, Fanny is the blackest. Silas is dark-haired but peaky, and Shan and baby Nel burn bacon pink after a few minutes in the summer sun. In Ireland, these gradations matter. Not so in Australia, where there is only white, black, man, woman. 

Mary told Fanny that the shelf of protected sea that is now McIver’s once belonged to the Aboriginals, who swam naked. Black, man, woman. But now it is only woman and only white; the gate that opens for Fanny will not for Silas and never for Patyegorang, who must pluck the nutmegs and periwinkles she beads into bracelets from the unbound ocean. Shan’s school friend Alice Bolt had given Shan one of the bracelets for her twelfth birthday; occasionally, she allows Fanny to hold the largest nutmeg to her ear. In a quiet room, you really could hear the rush and suck of tide.

The sign at McIver’s spells out “LADIES” in navy blue capitals, and Fanny, who strains against her dresses and always ducks the comb and climbs the paperbark tree at the edge of their lot faster than any of the children who roam the alleys off of Oxford Street, reads it nervously. But there is only one lady in the changing rooms, a woman old enough to be Fanny’s grandmother. She looks as Mary did the day the mercury cracked thirty-four, when she’d stood by the well and unloaded a full bucket over her head. Feral. This woman is naked from the waste up; when she speaks to Fanny, the towel around her shoulders shifts and Fanny glimpses a slug of blue-white breast. 

“Young to be swimming, aren’t you?” she says, not giving Fanny a chance to quell before adding, “well good on you, then.” Fanny gloms to the admiration in the woman’s tone, does not confess that she is here not to swim but to watch. 

In Fanny’s private opinion, Thomas’ way, the just-do-it way, had worked, but everyone else insisted that what she’d been doing on the ocean floor was not swimming but drowning. In which case, she needed to observe what not-drowning looked like, and then see if she could follow suit. 

Fanny pauses before the stone steps that lead down to the baths. From here, the baths look wilder than she’d expected, nothing but a wall, mostly submerged, to mitigate the roiling sea. She counts five heads spread out across the water. None are turned her way, but still, she feels exposed. It is only the slap, slap of feet on wet rock behind her that propels her down. The stairs open to a narrow bulkhead and Fanny hurriest to its furthest end. She means to keep well out of the water, but the sun scorches, and before she knows it she has both feet over the bulkhead. After a minute, she knows she was wrong to have been nervous. The women at McIvers have no eyes for Fanny. It is real work to do, this business of swimming. A marvelous freedom, even bogged down by bloomers.

Fanny isolates, among the gliding heads, one that moves more swiftly than the rest. Where the rest of the heads remain above the water, this one bobs in and out of it, supported by a lunging torso that puts Fanny in mind of a jockey crouched above his horse. When the woman turns, she sees that her legs move as the others’ do, like a frog’s, while her arms scoop shallow bowls of water and then, quick, shove them away. Unconsciously, Fanny begins to make scooping motions of her own, the wind sliding through her palms. 

When she’d been in the water that last, first time, how had she moved? She remembers pulling water past her ears, in order to get at the flapping foil. Head down, feet up, and then the other way around. Mary has power in mad flashes — when Baby Maeve had toddled out into Oxford Street, Mary, who had been making up beds on the boarding home’s second floor, was out in the scrum of noonday Hopewell traffic before Fanny left the sidewalk. But most of the time, Mary’s power lies dormant; a damp towel that never quite dries. As for Thomas: there is something in him that thrashes, but thrashing is not power. This woman’s power is constant, and almost mechanical. 

Fanny’s shins have followed her feet. She could pop right in and nearly does when the woman stops and affixes her in a wide, calculating stare. She has a china doll face, perfectly oval, though her mouth is something else, a dramatic scarlett bow. Her hair, nearly as dark as Fanny’s, is coiled round and round her head and her snapping green eyes seem to drink Fanny up.

“They’ll feel a lot less silly down here,” she says, and it takes Fanny a moment to realize she’s referring to the scooping motions. Her accent is crisp, emphatic; the vowels come out longer and thinner than Fanny’s, with an elastic snap at their tails. “Effies,” Mary calls people with such voices. Fanny senses that Mary would not trust this woman, while Thomas would bequeath her his kingdom in a second, apologizing for its poverty.

“I’m not ready yet,” Fanny confesses, pretending the sunlight necessitates a visored hand. 

“Ready never comes,” the woman says, cheerfully. “How do you measure?” she asks, and when Fanny admits she’s five-five, the green eyes whirl.

“My god — a giant!” She stands up, so the water fans like tulle under her chest. She too is tall — not a giant, but occupying space like one. Even-footed, impervious to the buffeting. The accent is a dodge, Fanny thinks; this woman is more pirate queen than lady. Fearless. 

“I’m Annette,” she says, extending a hand.

“Frances,” Fanny responds, and, in reaching for it, slips off the bulwark. 

“Bully,” Annete says, clapping. Fanny scrabbles for the wall and Annette stops her.

“I don’t know how to swim, not really,” Fanny says, and finds herself shelved on Annette’s arms, face down.

Submerged, she opens her eyes. To dispel the panic, she takes in her surroundings. The water is cloudy from constant jostling, and rusty with seaweed. Seaweed softens the stones that stud the bottom, broken by the occasional cluster of barnacles. She forgets to breathe and Annette lifts her head.
“Easy,” she says, and Fanny, bristling at the lullabye sound, wriggles off the shelf. 

She’d meant to kick like Annette, but her legs jerk so, and her body plummets forward. The kick she settles on is straight, twin poles stamping the water. She corrals her arms into a version of Annette’s scooping, grabs a breath and then beaks them forward. 

It’s ungainly, this movement. She’s muddied the actions she’d set out to do beyond recognition, and embarrassment floods hot when at last her hands nip the rough wall of the other side. Cowering, she doesn’t see Annette, whose green eyes are starry-large, who’s nearly crying from astonishment, but Annette makes quick work of the distance between them. 

“My god,” she says. “My god, Frances. What you just worked out in the blink of an eye.”

Fanny has good parents. She’s not once gone to bed hungry, and since she’s outgrown Shan, most of her clothes are new. Not like Sarah Ladle who comes to school in her mother’s nightgowns or the Donovan boys, whose father once made them sleep out in the bush for laughing in church. But praise, in the Durack household, is not a gift offered lightly, not even to Shan, who is always first in class and pretty as Tatiana in Fanny’s illustrated Midsummer Night’s Dream. And so Fanny pushes Annette’s praise away, though she longs to keep it. 

“I didn’t. Work anything out. I wanted to kick like you but my legs wouldn’t go.” 

She waits for Annette to agree, or worse, to laugh, but instead finds her smiling encouragingly. 

“Let’s just try again, shall we?”

She holds onto the wall beside Fanny and kicks and Fanny, watching closely, sees that Annette’s legs draw a small-humped M and then push to a double-barreled I. M. I. M. I. 

“Now you,” Annette says, and this time, Fanny feels the water spout neat off her M-to-I feet. Annette nods, and explains about the arms. Scoop as you’re making the M, push as M becomes I. All scrunched to all extended.

Fanny nods, takes off again. The letters hold, and the tilt of her body is less severe. Still not elegant; still a pale gloss on Annette’s, but an improvement. She reaches the bulwark and waits for Annette, who, lost in her own watery beginnings, is slower to follow. 

“I learned to swim when I was around your age too, Frances. What a disaster I was at first,” Annette says, once she’s glided into the wall. Fanny doesn’t believe her but Annette insists. She’d had polio; the instructor — a walrus of a man with a full lawn of hair down his chest and arms — had carried her into the water, swished the grooved legs like a broom. And then he’d had her do the same kick Fanny had started out with, a straight one-two one-two, though her legs had flopped so viciously at the knee he’d considered putting her back in the braces. After the first lesson, she’d been so tired she’d fallen asleep in the bathhouse.

Fanny stares at pirate queen Annette, thinks of poor Henry Sackett whose legs bounce stiff as matchsticks in his little wheeled chair. Maybe there is hope for him, though with his dad gone to the mines in Mount Kembla and his mum minding the store, who could take him to the sea?

“You live close by?” Annette asks, and Fanny shakes Henry Sackett from her eyes.

“King’s Cross,” she says. Annette nods, looks pleased.

“Not too far. Listen, I’ve got to be heading home now, and tomorrow I leave for London, but I want you to promise me you’ll keep practicing.”

“London, England?” Fanny can’t help but be agog.

“That’s the one. Putting on a bit of a show. Wish me luck — I’m not sure of my reception. And please keep practicing.”

“I will,” Fanny vows. 

“I expect you’ll be beating me when I see you next,” Annette says, and there is a part of Fanny that thinks she means it.

Chapter 4

It is Old Annie Drummund who tells Fanny about the carnival. McGiver’s always holds one at the end of the season. All women and girls are welcome to participate, and their families, to spectate from the cliffs. There’s a luncheon after, with prizes for the winners. Fanny doesn’t understand what Annie means: a carnival is theatre. High dives and mermaids and men in face paint. No, Annie says, smiling, indulgent. This carnival is races. 

At home, Fanny waits until the fractional lull between dinner’s end and the recommencing of chores.

“There’s going to be a swim carnival at McGiver’s next Saturday. The kind with races. I think I’ll have a go.”

For a moment, all heads turn to Fanny. She clenches, anticipating the laughter, but it is Thomas who breaks the silence, in a faraway voice.

“I was in a race once.”

“What sort of race?” Silas asks, suspicious.

“Horses. Your da used to break them in, you know,” Mary says. Her voice, too, goes faraway, and she ruffles the head of Baby Maeve. 

“Did you win?” This from Shan, who avoids the water and has had no chance to ride a horse but knows God would speed her to the blue ribbon if called to do so.

Thomas grins at Mary and she returns it, fiercely, though with an eye on the clock. The Blodgetts will be looking after their panna cotta any moment now.

“Not even close,” Thomas says.

“Well I could win,” Fanny says, surprising herself. 

Now the heads laugh, all but Mary.

“If it’s you against the sea, my money’s on the sea m’love,” Thomas says.

Fanny boils, kicks at the table leg.

“I’ve gotten loads better.”

“Better than drowning is still bad,” Silas cackles. His skinny arms shoot above his head, flail wildly for help. Fanny reaches across the table and shoves him.

“Oy! Silas, don’t tease. Frances, don’t push. When did you say it was, this carnival?”

Fanny stops glaring at Silas to stare at her mother.

“Well?”

“Next Saturday. Starts at eleven. But I know you’ll have loads–”

“I’ll be there. Your father can mind the stove for once.”

“Shan’ll do it,” Thomas says. He’s curious to see if Fanny really has gotten better. That vertical dance she’d done in Newcastle — what would it look like, flipped horizontal?

“Anything in the service of a gold,” Shan says, dry as wiregrass. 

The morning of the carnival blooms grey and gusty. Fanny is up at six, helping peel potatoes for shepherd’s pie. Her peeler hand shakes and Shan notices.

“Nervous?” she asks, kindly.

“Not so much,” Fanny lies.

“Nerves are good. They’ll turn to energy when the time comes. You’ll see.”

At ten on the dot, all of the Duracks but Shan board the street car. Even Thomas and Silas have found themselves goaded into hurrying by Fanny’s pleading eyes. Fanny sits Baby Maeve on her lap to stop herself from pulling the rickrack off her bloomers. She wishes she had said nothing about the carnival, wishes old Annie had never told her about it, wishes there were no such things as carnivals with races. For a wicked instant she even wishes for some small incident to befall the hotel. A room fire, maybe. Nothing drastic, but enough that they’d all be forced to head back. 

Over Fanny’s head Mary and Thomas catch eyes and smile. They are used to their Fanny solid as castiron; it is endearing, really, to see the soft core. 

At the Coogee stop, Fanny springs to action. She prods Silas; tugs at Thomas’ shirt hem. When the gate guard asks if this is the family, she smiles full for once, with trembling pride. 

“That’s the bath house,” she points, hoping old Annie and her slug-like breasts are safely out of view. Milling about the bath house are various families, all dressed for a picnic, and pockets of girls up to sixteen in their bloomers, calling out to each other with a familiarity that is almost boyish in its easiness. Fanny wonders where they’ve all come from. It’s rare she sees anyone younger than Mary at McGiver’s. 

Fanny imagines herself as one of these teenagers. They swim before school — racing, some of them, on borrowed bicycles to beat the sunrise — and pass the school day secure in their knowledge of having bested a fiercer territory. After school, they don’t immediately disperse but instead head to O’Leary’s for a shared sundae, over which they talk of swimming, maybe? Of their own progress instead of boys or lessons. 

A horn and a man’s voice announcing the carnival’s imminent commencement jolts Fanny out of her daydream. Frantic, she shows her parents where to stand on the cliffs, and warns Mary, unnecessarily, to hold tight to Baby Maeve’s hand. In the bath house, she puts both legs in the same bloomer, and shoves her arm into her sleeve so quickly the stitches tear. Stupid costume, she thinks, savagely, though the costume’s not what’s changed. On knock-knees she teeters down to the baths, clumped up behind a quartet of slow-moving grans. 

“What a thing to see, this is.”

“Can you imagine you about to jump into that water? Me da would have had me head.”

“Mine would have had to get in line behind me mum. A changed land, this is.”

“And for the better.”

Fanny allows herself a small wedge of rebellious pleasure at being able to do — with parental support, no less! — what would have cost the grans their heads. The pleasure carries her down the steps and propels her through the crowds to the knot of other swimmers, who are being sorted into lines by two efficient women wearing thick silver whistles.

“Age?” 

“Ten.”

Both of the women cross their arms. 

“And I’m five,” the taller one says. 

Fanny starts.

“But I am.”

“Well today, you’re eleven,” the shorter one says, and steers Fanny into the right line. Fanny sputters. That’s not fair, she is about to say, but then she looks over at the blue-lipped ten-and-unders and sees, with sudden clarity, that she would not only beat them but do so in embarrassing fashion. She’d thought the win itself was all that mattered, but she realizes now that there would be little enjoyment in winning without some semblance of a fair field. Even among the eleven-twelves, she towers. 

When all of the swimmers have been sorted, the horn blows again, and the announcer welcomes everyone to McGiver’s fourth annual swimming carnival. Three children’s races followed by a woman’s handicap and — new this year — an underwater challenge. The crowd seems most excited by this final competition. Many of them read about the great Henry Cavill’s swim along the bottom of Bath Beach. A few had even seen it for themselves. But women are naturally delicate, prone to lightheadness and dizzy spells. The smart men think of their wives, who can heave pots and chase children and split gumtree and still have the gumption to chew the icebox man out in the middle of Church street, if need be. The others think of sheep, who will surely drown. 

Fanny’s view of the ten-and-unders is good enough to quickly ascertain that yes, the whistle woman were right to place her with the eleven-twelves. Most of the ten-and-unders opt for a mix of dog paddle and a tilt-a-wheel breastroke; one chooses to float on her back, arms loose, emitting a few whirring kicks whenever her legs drop too far below the water. A minute in, none are much closer to their destination, and several have knotted up, like ducks squabbling over a heel of bread. The announcer is sporting about the young contestants’ abilities; his voice goes high-pitched and dramatic at each right-sizing, each mini-breakaway. 

“And little Sally Dunhill is breaking away, look at her go. But can she fend off … can’t read that. Is it Avery? Avery is really giving Dunhill a run for her money. And don’t discount Anna Wellers over in the far left. She seems to have invented a new stroke entirely, and she may soon master it. But no, there goes Avery! She’s passing Dunhill! She sees the end now, no doubt about it. Will you look at that. Got an interesting little head move there, like a fighting swan, if any of you remember swans. But Dunhill won’t go down easy, she’s on Avery’s heels now. Hmm, quite literally on her heels. Now, now, that won’t do. No pulling legs, Dunhill. Well, she’s done it and now she’s in the lead again. She’s going, she’s nearly straight now. And it’s down to the finish, Dunhill, Avery, Dunhill, Avery, annnnd it’s Avery for the win! Well done indeed!”

Somehow, all the little girls are gathered up and thumped on the back and sent off to find their families and then there is nothing between Fanny and the water but the slim, freckled back of a girl who, when Fanny treads too close, turns around and hisses. “Pull my legs and you’re drowned.”
The announcer asks the crowd to quiet down, please, as he reads off the names of the eleven-and-twelves. Annette Applegate, Emma Silversmith, Pippa Shaw — a friend of Shan’s, Fanny is pretty sure. The freckled girl is Callie Hempstead. Rilla Lanesbury is the one who is almost as tall as Fanny. Fanny winces at the sound of her own name, and again at Thomas’ cheering, which boomerangs around the others’. 

It’s only when she is up on the ledge, poised for the start, that it occurs to Fanny she’s given no thought to how she’ll get into the water. A dive like that little leg-puller Dunhill had done would be neat, but could she pull it off? She’s still mulling at the horn, and leaps into the water a shot behind the others. Her feet touch the bottom and she springs forward. Scoop the bowl; push it away. Scoop the bowl; push it away. Her arms and legs feel in-sync; she is conscious of catching up to and then thrusting ahead of the swimmers on either side of her. There is the temptation to lift her head and see where she is overall, but she resists. The opposite side is growing closer and closer and just before she touches to turn, she thinks a quick Hail Mary. 

Up on the cliffs, Mary, who had been fretting, is now cheering with wild vigor. Beside her, Silas is quieter, but just as agog. Thomas laps in the excited words and watches his daughter carve a clean line like a steamboat to the finish and wishes he were close enough to see the expression on her face after she turns to look around. 

The expression is a new one: wonder brushed with a growing thrill. She has, after all, won big. She is already out of the water and walking back towards the stairs when the announcer calls second place, for Shaw. All around her people are offering congratulations, hand clasps, whistles. Is this what it’s like to be Shan? Before she has even reached the top of the stairs she is clamped in Thomas’ sinewy hug and Silas is thumping her back and Mary is beaming and teary with her own wondrous thrill: that of being utterly, deliciously surprised by the talents of a long unsung child.

On the tram heading back, Fanny gathers each fold of the day and marvels gently over it. After the excalibur bliss of the race itself, and the warm haze of its aftermath, she and Thomas had squeezed through to the front of the crowd to watch the 13-and-overs. “None so fast as you,” Thomas had proclaimed before the last head was even in the water. Still, Fanny thought he might be right. Greedily, she put herself among them and then pulled herself to the fore. The announcer was proclaiming his astonishment at her fortitude — to win not one but two races, and to win them back to back! — when Fanny found herself wrapped in a second, crushing hug. 

It was Annette, back from England in time to take the women’s handicap. “And the underwater, if they’ll have me.” 

Fanny thought England was all mist and rain, but Annette was a confusion of bronze legs and arms and a sleek bathing costume that looked, to Fanny, like freedom (and, to Thomas, like paradise and the fiery gates all in one).

“What progress you’ve made!” she cried, with genuine affection. Behind her, Silas stared slack-jawed and Thomas grinned rapt like Baby Maeve and Mary fidgeted and thought about saying, in her best no-nonsense voice, that it was time to go, but then she remembered the picnic, with its medal ceremony, and swallowed her words. This was Fanny’s day. Had it been Shan, she would have hustled them home, but Fanny? Who’s to say she’d have another?

Thomas, who didn’t take so dismal a view of Fanny’s potential days as his wife, had, in fact, had been about to suggest the family head back to the hotel — but now he thought they might as well stick around for the women’s races. He didn’t understand how a woman with breasts like Annette’s could manage to stay underwater, and wished he had another man to share this observation with, but there was only Silas, who grimaced and ducked his head.

Thomas hoped he might be able to slip down to the baths themselves, but the announcer, as his reading his mind, informed the crowd that the men were to stay at cliff level for the remainder of the carnival. So it was Fanny and Mary and Baby Maeve who got a stone’s throw view of Annette. In her handicap, Annette entered last, but her dive was so long that she was already in third when she came up for air. By the turn, she was in second, and she ended up winning the field by a margin as wide as Fanny’s. 

“You’ll be faster than she is, soon enough,” Mary said, though she was impressed despite herself. Fanny noticed the coiled spring of Annette’s dive and vowed that that would be the first thing she would practice. Maybe Annette could give her some pointers.

The underwater came soon after the handicap and Thomas got his answer. Breasts or no, Annette Kellerman was a damn mermaid. Only one other swimmer — “that’s Mrs. Harvey, the deacon’s wife!” Mary cried, rooting for her — managed two lengths. Annette did four. 

“That was two and a quarter minutes!” a woman next to Fanny shouted, brandishing her watch fob as evidence.

And then there was a ceremony, right on the cliffs. The winners stood on small podiums and received royal blue sashes and sheaves of roses. Fanny would have rather had a proper medal, the kind you could hang from your neck — but no matter. She had her photo taken for the Herald beside Annette, both of them giving victory Vs, and then Annette told the reporter that mark her words, Frances Durack would be winning all of the roses in Christendom before long. “Remember her name,” she said, and the reporter, a slim, rabbity man in luminous spectacles, assured her, quite seriously, that he would. 

They really did have to go after that — the picnic was late being set up, and a party of twenty German missionaries were expected for supper — but no matter. Fanny was overstuffed with joy; there would be enough to last for months. 

“Have a good time?” Thomas says, as Oxford Street wings into view, and when Fanny replies, solemnly, that it has been the best day of her life, he whoops again and the whole tram jumps from the strength of it. 

Chapter 5

Shan is gone. Newly fourteen. Not old enough to leave. That morning, Fanny had given her a red string bracelet interspersed with baby shells, painstakingly knotted. Fanny has blundering hands, thick fingers. The bracelet, when she’d finished it, was a child’s work, the shells unevenly spaced, the knots too large. Yet she had spent many hours on it, and it stung when Shan only smiled and slipped it back into the handkerchief in which it had been wrapped. When, after strawberry cake and the birthday song and Mary’s gift — a robin’s egg blue shirtwaist and a pretty paisley scarf (and this, Shan did pop around her neck straight away), her sister does not join Fanny in the kitchen, leaving Fanny to scrub and chop the carrots and peel the potatoes and pound the toughness out of the side of mutton by herself, Fanny assumes it’s airs, indulgence, a desire to parade up Oxford Street in her new wares. 

Shan is not there to serve supper — a task she, with her easy charm and neat appearance, her polished movements and bottomless memory, is as brilliantly suited to as Fanny is not. The German missionaries greet the younger Durack daughter cheerfully enough, but the Kidds — an elderly couple up from Adelaide for, what was it? Some medical thing. Eye surgery, perhaps? — grimace in unison as Fanny lays down their bowls, though she’s only spilled a few drops of gravy. 

After supper, Fanny attacks the drippings pan savagely, replacing it with her sister’s pert face. Only Shan can waltz off and get away with it. But when the four of them plus Baby Maeve are sitting down to their own mutton, now almost cold, Mary looks worried, and Fanny grudgingly acknowledges that it isn’t really like Shan to shirk chores or skip supper. Shan is dependable even if she has a way of letting you know there were things she’d rather be doing.

Mary has Silas run down to the McCaffees, because Shan and Paulie are thick as thieves. But Paulie has mummer’s throat and Edna Roland is at choir practice and Kate Shaw, when Silas finds her, says curtly that she hasn’t seen much of Shan lately.

“Maybe it’s a boy,” offers Thomas, when Silas returns. He remembers fourteen and the girl before Mary. Aislie Lainerd. Breath hot and bursting as an iron. Mary looks to Silas, who shakes his head.

“She hates all boys but Paulie, and him not like that.”

“Still?” Thomas is surprised.

Silas gets up, jerkily, and darts out of the kitchen and up the narrow back stairs. When he comes back down, he’s holding Through the Looking Glass, a birthday present to Shan from Paulie the year before. The book’s green binding is worn white in places from so much use. 

“She writes in this, sometimes,” Silas mumbles. Fanny, who shares a room with Shan, shakes her head, but Mary takes the volume, tight-lipped, and begins to flip through the pages. Flip, flip, flip – and then drops the book on the table, as if burnt. Thomas looks at the splayed page. His lips move; Fanny thinks he is saying “butter,” or “better.” Thomas shakes his head, slides the book to Fanny. It is the part of the story where Alice, having left Tweedledum and Tweedledee to their fighting, encounters the White Queen flying through the wood. Fanny recognized Shan’s neat bracketing around the lower half of the page. 

‘What sort of things do you remember best?’ Alice ventured to ask.

‘Oh, things that happened the week after next,’ the Queen replied in a careless tone. ‘For instance, now,’ she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on her finger as she spoke, ‘there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.’

‘Suppose he never commits the crime?’ said Alice.

‘That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?’ the Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.

And next to this, Shan had written, in very neat, miniscule letters, “Indeed!”

Fanny hates Through the Looking Glass. All those lazy riddles. Which Shan defended; not lazy, Fanny, deep. You have to really think them through. 

“I hate this book,” she says, now, scowling, and to her great relief, Mary begins to laugh, and then Thomas and Silas. Silent, shaking laughs that verge on tears. 

“Yeh don’t know what she means by it, then?” Thomas gets out, gasping, and for all the laughter Fanny senses the question is genuine.

“She’s being punished now for a crime she is going to commit,” she says.