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mind as she waited for the next event of the evening to happen, nauseated and headachy, her life falling into pieces around her, she felt intuitively without knowing what form the disaster would take.
    With gritted teeth she remembered the previous evening. That episode had included his bowling pal delivering him to the back door, and Conrad, thoroughly, sloppily drunk, unable to negotiate the steps, had tripped up them and fallen face first onto the landing. That was ten o’clock and he had spent the next hour with his head down the toilet bowl.
    Yes, those special lawn bowls days produced a significant attack of illness, especially if he happened to be the trophy winner, as was often the case. Conrad, burly and muscular, was extremely competent at any sport he decided to take up, and mans’ man as he considered himself to be, he enjoyed nothing so much as celebrating after the game.
    And the evening before when she had left the kitchen mop leaning against the house after cleaning the floors. Infuriated at the sight of the wet mop leaning on the weatherboard, he had whirled inside and hit her across the face with it. She had cowered away from him as he had slung the mop onto the floor and stalked off on his stumpy legs to open the refrigerator and collect a can of beer.
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    A nnie forced her drowsy eyes open and looked at her three children lined up at her side—Ruth, her first-born, petite, loving, excitable and busy almost to the point of hyperactivity.
    Sarah, her baby girl, blonde and cuddly, outwardly calm and contented, but quietly unsure of herself. She was bullied by her father who preferred to accuse her of being a dopy, useless thing when she failed to answer him, instead of treating her with consideration because of her partial deafness which had been medically diagnosed as the build-up of fluid in the eardrums. The condition was relieved a little by having her eardrums drained annually. Unfortunately, the little girl was forced to live with this unpleasantness brought about, in the main, by reason of her failing to be born a boy.
    In the early days of the marriage, when Annie had found she was again pregnant after giving birth to premature Ruth three months previously, Conrad had denied paternity of the child who had turned out to be Sarah. He said it could not possibly be his as they had been using a primitive form of contraception entirely unsuited to fertile young people not yet twenty. The perpetrator of the act, the father of the baby, was never named by Conrad. The supposed perpetrator went incognito all his days for many years until Conrad’s alcohol-soaked brain thought up a solution later.
    How the new mother to tiny Ruth, a three-month-old premature baby home from hospital only a matter of weeks, found the opportunity to conceive another baby to another man while living miles out in the prairie country was at that stage a mystery. But was one which Conrad’s vivid imagination would work overtime to explain before their lives were over.
    Time and again he accused her of infidelity with a mystery nameless, faceless person until she was so tired of his accusations she decided that the marriage was impossible and was over as far as she was concerned. She recalled how her grandmother used to say about  people ‘having the name of it so they might as well have the game of it.’
    Besides, she wanted only to see the tail end of him, her husband Conrad who would grin ferally at her at times before lashing out to slap or push her around.
    Annie thought that jealousy was the vilest, meanest of all the emotions and passions on the spectrum. She had never given him cause to doubt her but she was weary of his suspicions and fed up with his tantrums, his violence and his bullying. She wanted to be free. She wanted to be left alone by him to rear her little girls, then aged two and a half and one and a half, in peace and harmony.
    So tired of these repeated accusations was she that she