14 February

Forty-one degrees by ten o'clock. The dam is down to about a third, and you can see the old fence line Grandad put in before they raised the wall, running down into the mud like a row of broken teeth. At dinner Dad did the thing where he moves his lips a little, counting. Ewes, hay bales, dollars. Mum talked about the school bus timetable as if nothing was happening. Jack asked if we could get a pool. Nobody laughed, which was worse than if someone had told him off.

3 March

The stock agent came today in a ute cleaner than anything on this place. He and Dad leaned on the yard rail for an hour. I wasn't supposed to be listening, so I was. 'Just the old girls,' Dad kept saying. 'Just the old girls for now.' The agent nodded the way people do when they have already written the number down. Afterwards Dad walked out to the north paddock and I rode out after him and we didn't say anything; we just watched the ewes standing in the shade of the one tree out there, not even bothering to look for grass. On the way back Jack met us at the gate and asked if it was true that ants build their nests up high before rain. Mum says her grandmother swore by it. Jack has been checking the ants every afternoon. I haven't told him that the ants on the track have been building up for three weeks.

27 March

In town the girls are talking about the formal: dresses, who is going with whom, whether the hall will have air conditioning. Priya asked if I was coming and I said probably, and she looked at me like she already knew what probably means. Mrs Halloran handed back our personal essays. Mine was about swimming carnivals. She wrote 'beautifully controlled, but what are you not telling me?' in green pen at the bottom. I don't know how she can tell. I keep the paddocks out of my writing the way Mum keeps them out of her phone calls to Aunty Jen: bright voice, everything's fine, how are the kids.

19 April

The ute has had its bonnet up for four days. Dad goes to the shed after breakfast and comes back at dark and nothing on the ute is any different. Tonight Mum handed me the big torch and said, 'Just go and sit with him.' So I went. He was standing at the bench not fixing anything. He didn't look up. After a while he said, 'Hold it steady,' and I held the beam on a part of the engine he wasn't working on, and we stayed like that until the moths came. It was the longest conversation we've had in a month. On the way back to the house I could hear the sheep in the yards, the ones that are left, moving about in the dark, and the wind in the dead grass, which doesn't rustle any more. It ticks.

8 May

Clouds in the west this afternoon, proper ones, bruised underneath. Jack climbed the tank stand to watch them come and Mum didn't tell him to get down. Nobody said the word. Dad did the washing-up, which he never does, and kept turning the tap on and off, listening to it. At about seven the first drops hit the iron roof so far apart you could count them. Then you couldn't. Twelve millimetres in the gauge by nine o'clock. Not a drought-breaker, the radio will say tomorrow, and the radio will be right. But Dad went out and stood in it with his hat off and his face turned up, and Jack ran around the yard yelling about the ants, and Mum stood at the kitchen window with her hand over her mouth. I have just been down to the dam with the torch. It is still a third full. But tonight the third looked bigger.