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that.’
    She had had her face slapped for her pains. It always surprised Sara how fast her mother’s scarlet-tipped hands could move. Her figure had thickened with middle age but she still carried a trace of the bold attractiveness she had owned in her youth, with her strong features and the dark hair an unlikely shade of blonde. Standing thwarted in the empty street, Sara reflected that she had never found a single thing that she shared with her mother – neither looks, colouring, nor taste. The woman was as complete a stranger to her still as somebody plucked randomly from the far side of the earth. But there was no time now to remedy that, supposing she ever could. The man had driven off, but if he knew where her mother had lived, what would he unearth next? With the hair prickling on her neck, Sara slid into her car and drove away.
    By the Sunday she was gone.
    Mildura had seemed a haven at first – a warm one, it was true, but she no longer felt hunted. When the eight weeks of her tenure were up, Sara decided, she would apply for another regional posting. She need never return to Adelaide, for the Commonwealth Employment Agency was nationwide. The idea was strangely liberating – and yet it was shattered to a million bits the following Friday afternoon when she had spotted her stalker amid the throng of shoppers in the street where she worked.
    Something had changed in the night. Sara lifted her head from the pillow as the steady background
dom dom
of the diesel motor slowed and died. She held her breath waiting for the fan to cease turning then relaxed as it continued. Of course! What had Beth said? They had a solar rig and battery bank – so now, presumably, the power was coming from the batteries that were charged by the array of solar panels she had glimpsed earlier. Sam had said he would show her how it all worked tomorrow. Her thoughts turned to the children, to Becky’s ambition and energy, and Sam’s quiet reserve. She had envisaged little horrors, spoilt and unruly. They seemed like good kids, she thought, yawning deeply.
    Sara’s eyelids fluttered and fell, and the intermittent splash of the mill carried her into a dream of two children digging in a shallow creek, like the one they had crossed in the horse paddock. They were building an underground cubby but the dry sand kept caving it in.
Bum! Bum! Bum!
the boy swore angrily. In the dream his face was hidden under a large-brimmed hat. Was he Sam? The sky dazz­led when she looked up, and the glitter of gum leaves twisting against the glare made her eyes water. There was so much they could do.
Bum!
she yelled, flinging herself into a somersault, and the boy laughed, temper forgotten, and stood on his head.
    Eyelids twitching, the sleeping Sara smiled, her breaths coming soft against the pillow.

5
    Sara woke with a feeling of wellbeing and lay for a moment considering the fragments of a dream that faded even as she reached for it. Roger had wanted children, but she had not felt ready for them. They had married when she was nineteen, having known each other for less than six months, and divorced two years later when she had come to see that her feelings for him sprang not from love but from dependence. She had never told him much about her childhood – her excuse being that she remembered so little of it – only that she and her mother, Stella, didn’t get on. She had said nothing of the loneliness of knowing herself unwanted, of the deep desire for something that was missing from her life. She had feared her father until he vanished into the hospital, subsequently to die – from what, she never knew. And Roger had known nothing of how, despite her best efforts as a child, she had signally failed to win anything beyond a hard stare from her mother and a dismissive
Go on, go outside and play
.
    Throughout her brief marriage she had secretly blamed her lack of desire for a baby on her own unhappy experience.