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down.’
    She almost missed their old life at home, where at least Louise had had a variety of people to focus on. She hesitated, then sat.
    â€˜Don’t go out in the cold at this godforsaken time.’ Louise grinned devilishly. ‘I’ve got a wild idea. Go back to bed. We’ll have a sleep-in for once and play truant today. I’m thoroughly sick and tired of school. We’ll have biscuits and tea for breakfast in our pyjamas. I’ve got a packet of shortbread creams stashed away. It’ll be fun! We could even invite Thomas if you want. Or would it be better with just us girls? Then we’ll go into town. I need a new dress. So do you, badly. We’ll go to Myers. It’ll be great.’
    â€˜I don’t like missing classes.’
    â€˜And that’s why you should. Come on. Just for this once. Don’t be so boring.’
    Louise was holding her arm, and Clarice felt her sister’s energy, her will. Her warm morning breath, sweet and sour.
    â€˜I’m going out to draw.’
    â€˜You’re so studious . You make me feel old.’
    â€˜We are old, for students.’ No one ever guessed they were twenty-seven and twenty-three. They were both young-faced.
    â€˜Speak for yourself.’ Louise leaned forward, naughty eyes flashing. ‘What are you wearing?’
    â€˜What? A jumper.’
    â€˜ My jumper.’
    â€˜Don’t be ridiculous.’ But it was, in fact, a little large on her, a little wrong, somehow. Louise’s camel-coloured jumper. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. I obviously couldn’t see what I was doing, getting dressed in the dark so the light wouldn’t wake you.’ Louise was having a wonderful time. ‘Anyway, you must have left it on my side of the dresser. You’re not going to be such a hypocrite’—maddeningly, Clarice had now started to laugh at her own hauteur—‘as to refuse me the use of your clothes?’ Louise ‘borrowed’ Clarice’s clothes very often, feigning ignorance, to get under her skin. Clarice sputtered, the sort of hysterical laughter that exhausts itself only to start again. Louise kept triggering it with her high-pitched giggles that always set other people off, making trivial situations irresistibly comical. Clarice often thought Louise’s states of extreme amusement forced, but just then, laughing, she thought, I’m sometimes too stiff with her. She noticed she was tired, a slight dizziness and irritation at the corners of her eyes. And Louise looked tired too, her merry eyes puffy and the skin of her cheek bearing the diagonal imprint of a rumpled pillow; Clarice had an uncharacteristic sensation of older-sisterly concern.
    â€˜Go back to sleep. You need more rest.’
    â€˜I do. I really need my ten hours.’ This was not laziness, Louise claimed, but biological necessity. Maybe. People were so different from one another. Still, Louise had a way of protesting, insisting on her own special rights.
    â€˜I know you do, dear. Lie down.’
    Louise lay docilely back, enjoying being mothered. If Clarice did not go quickly—she felt, without being able to explain why—she would not escape.
    It was still well before sunrise when she stationed herself on St Kilda Beach and began to sketch, blind. It was crucial to her training, this struggle to create a likeness without being able to discern in the conventional way either her subject or the marks she was making on paper. Approval and rejection suspended, the movements of the charcoal in her hand were cushioned by darkness, by the sound of the waves. Art, maybe, was this honing of instinct, a process so intimate as to be almost invisible. Nothing was more real.
    She started to make out what she was drawing, or thought she could. The pools of seawater strewn on the sand by the tide now held a white marmoreal light. The clouds were in infinite soft banks, the moment in loose parentheses. An