I loved school and I learned quickly, craving the praise I received. It was also my only chance to see my friends Evelyn and Ada. Evelyn lived near the school—her father ran the post office—and Ada was on another dairy farm along Little Forest Road. She had hands like mine, rough from milking, and the same difficulty keeping her eyes open after lunch. We stood beneath the scribbly gum together at lunch, trading pictures of film stars cut from magazines, pictures of dresses torn from mail order catalogues which we could never afford but dreamed we’d buy one day. I wanted Evelyn’s blonde hair rather than my own muddy brown, Ada’s small and perfect feet. They envied the blue of my eyes. They told me if Ellis Jones had been staring at me. Ellis was the other reason I loved school. He sat at the very back, as the eldest, and rode a motorbike from the butter factory his father owned. He was taller than my father and brothers. He lived only a mile or two from our farm and was friends with my brother Fred. I felt his eyes on me sometimes, his amber eyes, and there was a place on my waist he had held when he helped me down from my horse, a place where I imagined his handprint to be still, hot against layers of cotton and wool. Unlike the dead Thomas Ryan, Ellis and I spoke sometimes, though it was often awkward and stilted.

‘How is your mother, Sarah?’

‘Fine, thank you, Ellis, and yours?’

‘She has had a bad cough this winter but she is recovering.’

‘Oh dear.’

These conversations frustrated me; we had talked easily as children. Ellis would come with his father to inspect the dairy and he and my brothers and I fell into one of a hundred games. He taught us rude words and silly songs and kissed me when I was only eleven, behind a paperbark while we played hide- and-seek. His lips were dry and hot, the skin peeling off them like bark, and before I could ask what he was thinking Fred shouted, ‘Ready or not, here I come,’ and Ellis ran off towards the dam.

Ellis was often absent from school, and I wondered if it was his choice or his father’s. I never missed school on purpose, but I could not go if a cow was calving or the neighbour’s sheep were being shorn, or if my brothers were away, for it took three times as long to milk the cows. If my mother had a spell I could not go, for then it fell to me to clean and cook and do the washing. Oh, how I longed for school on those days.

‘What are they teaching you, anyway?’ my father said when I complained one morning. ‘You know how to read and write already.’ He was rolling tobacco from his pouch into a thin cigarette.