4

IN MAY 1999, around the time my grandmother turned eighty, a few months before she died, I was fired from a nannying job. The parents of my four-year-old charge sat me down at the dining room table one afternoon and told me that their daughter and I seemed to have a personality clash. It wasn’t my fault, they told me – these things sometimes happened. They didn’t mention the time I had left their daughter in the car alone while I went to buy cigarettes. I didn’t mention the time their daughter had made up a role play in which I, the evil nanny, sent her mother to work so I could play with her. They paid me until the end of the week and offered to give me a reference. I wouldn’t need it. That was my last ever nannying job.

A month later, still unemployed and sliding into depression, I drove north from Sydney to my aunt’s home in Mapleton. I loved that house, with its two-storey cedar cottage, its pot-belly stove and spiral staircase. I loved the view. From her garden you could see the entire Sunshine Coast, and beyond – all the way to Fraser Island in the north, Bribie Island in the south. You could see the Maroochy River winding its way through cane fields to the sea, the treeless hump of Mount Coolum, the Mooloolaba high-rises shining white, and the hazy blue of the Pacific stretching out into infinity.

I would go there for weeks at a time when I was in between jobs or relationships, in between lives. I was often in between back then, forever restless. When I was there, looking out at that view, I never wanted to be elsewhere. And I would allow my Auntie Jean to mother me when I was in need of being cared for by someone who was not my mother, but the next best thing.

The day after I arrived in Mapleton, I spent the day with my grandmother at Nambour General Hospital, waiting for the ambulance that would take her to a smaller community facility in Maleny, further up the range. She was pleased to be leaving. She said that the nurses there had been cruel to her, that they were jealous. I looked at her frail form and wondered: jealous of what? I could see no evidence of cruelty. While we waited for the ambulance, the on-duty nurse asked my grandmother about her hobbies, an attempt to pass the time. Nanny was typically dismissive. She’d been too sick to have hobbies, hadn’t she, and before that she’d been too busy with household chores and gardening. She’d employed a local woman to do her housework, and as far as I knew, she hadn’t gardened in years.

She should have been going into a nursing home, but until that point, despite Jean’s persistence, she’d refused to sign the application forms. Now she was out of time – the hospital needed her bed. Why wouldn’t she sign the forms? Was it denial or stubbornness or a refusal to admit that the only place with any appeal – a private nursing home on Mount Coolum that she fondly called The Rock – cost too much and had a waiting list so long she’d likely die before she got in? Was it a very specific resistance, aimed at my aunt, her eldest daughter, who had by virtue of proximity become her primary carer? I’m not sure. But that day, when it was already too late, she did finally sign the forms, nominating the home in Mount Coolum.

The next weekend my mother flew up from Sydney to join us. While Nanny lay dying and dreaming of The Rock, we let ourselves in to her Nambour home and started cleaning out her fridge and deep freeze. We held a competition for who could find the food that was most out of date. When we found the caviar that had expired in 1986, we thought we’d hit the jackpot. Then we found the rum balls that had gone off in 1983. She’d lived in the house for less than ten years, yet had food that been out of date for more than fifteen. The freezer was stocked full to overflowing with discounted meat she’d bought on Saturdays as the supermarkets were about to close.

I played records, selecting them at random: Hammond Sound Party, Background Moods from the Movies and Dubussy’s La Boîte à joujoux, a ballet about a war inside a toy box. As the sound of marching soldiers filled the room, I sifted through her things. She’d collected ephemera most of her life, particularly towards the end, often talking grandly and mysteriously about a project she’d been working on, so I hoped I might find something of meaning, or a copy of her will, or even her solicitor’s name. She’d been tight-lipped on both. ‘That’s my business,’ she snapped when anyone asked.

I did not find her will, but I did find a book of mine on her bookshelf: The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. I’d first read The Passion two years before, during a three-day sojourn in a crofter’s cottage on the isle of Berneray, part of the Outer Hebrides, the archipelago that cusps the north-west coast of Scotland. I was taking a break from London. I was in love with someone there, or thought I was. I hated London. There was never enough space, never enough sky. I loved the farawayness of the Outer Hebrides. I loved The Passion. I read it sitting on a bench in the late-summer sunshine, and at night, or when the wind came up, by the fire inside the cottage. I’d say I devoured the book, except ‘devoured’ isn’t the right word. I read it by osmosis, in between games of cards and conspiratorial conversations and wandering the island’s western shore, where I watched seals sun themselves on basalt rocks that had been there for three billion years, and picked mushrooms I later cooked and planned to eat, but threw away when I was warned they might be toxic.

That day in my grandmother’s house, I flicked through the pages of the book, reading passages – some at will, some at random – until I came to the final section: ‘The Rock’. In The Passion, The Rock is not a nursing home; it is San Servolo, an island prison for the insane. Henri has killed a man and cut out his heart. When Villanelle tells him he’ll be sent to the madhouse on the island, he says: ‘The one you showed me? The one that stares over the lagoon and catches the light?’ He wonders what it will be like to live in one place again. Later, when he has the chance to escape, he refuses to leave. He won’t leave because Villanelle, whom he loves, doesn’t love him. So he sees out his days in a small bare room, tending to his garden and gazing out across the lagoon towards the lights of Venice. ‘Why would I want to get out?’ he asks. ‘I have a room, a garden, company and time for myself. Aren’t these the things people ask for?’

For its first thousand years San Servolo was a place of refuge and respite, a monastery occupied by Benedictine monks and, later, nuns. In the seventeenth century, they were joined by more Benedictine nuns, as well as Dominicans and Franciscans, who had fled Crete after the Ottoman invasion. The nuns lived there at the beneficence of the Venetian faithful, giving thanks to the Lord and the blessed Virgin at each morning mass and vespers, until the end of their days. In 1716, the last two living nuns were removed and the convent converted to a military hospital. When Ludovico Manin, the last doge of Venice, died in 1802, he bequeathed a share of his fortune to care for the city’s lunatics, and from that time until 1978, San Servolo was an asylum. It is now a university and conference centre. You can stay on the island in refurbished, air-conditioned rooms with internet access. You can visit the Museum of Madness and wonder what it might have been like to live there, as a monk or a nun or a recovering soldier. As a person who had been labelled insane.

I haven’t been to San Servolo, but I understand the pull of the monastic, of uncluttered days that stretch into months and years, a life unsullied by intimacy and bolstered by routine. I was raised a Catholic, suckled on stories of saints and mystical rituals. As the kind of child who believed in magic too deeply for my own good, these left a lasting impression. The saints, and the nuns and brothers who taught us, spoke of being called, of seeing signs or hearing voices and knowing, without a doubt, what God wanted them to do. How do you know if you’ve been called, we asked, full of fear and hope and wonder. What does God look like, sound like, smell like? What would he say? We cannot know; the calling is different for everyone. God manifests in myriad ways. Be patient. Have faith, follow your own path.

My family was not devout. My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father but still thought of herself as Presbyterian. In practice she was agnostic; she rarely went to mass. My father only dragged us to church most Sundays – ignoring our pleading and cajoling and feigned illnesses – because he considered it his duty. We knew this because when the rest of the congregation lined up to receive the Eucharist from the priest – the crisp, round waver Catholics believe represents the body of Christ – he stayed in his seat. He would tell us he hadn’t been to confession recently, that he didn’t have the time. He never made the time, not even after we had received our Holy Communion. The reason for this remains a mystery. As his lone seated form became so familiar as to be normal, I stopped wondering what sins he might have committed, and whether they might be beyond God’s forgiveness. We would chant the rites in solemn monotone, and sing the hymns we knew, sitting and standing and kneeling in unison with the rest of the congregation. Time has never passed so slowly.

In 1984, at age eleven, I received the sacrament of confirmation – a reaffirmation of baptism, a final initiation into the Catholic faith. We were asked to choose a saint – someone to look up to and emulate – who would guide us on our spiritual journey. Their name would be added to our own at a ceremony held on Pentecost Sunday, the day that commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles and other faithful.

My friends and I were on the cusp of adolescence, preoccupied with Judy Blume books and Sweet Valley High, and knowing who had kissed whom on the stairwell outside the gym. A confirmation name was an aesthetic choice as much as it was a spiritual one. Frances, Anne and Clare were all popular; they rolled easily off the tongue. If your family took their catechism seriously, Catherine of Siena and Thérèse of Lisieux may have ranked highly. Saint Bernadette, whom we had come to know through Jennifer Jones’s Academy Award–winning performance in The Song of Bernadette, whose visions of Mary seemed as real to us as they had to her, was our school’s patron. Bernadette was most popular of all.

I chose Joan.

I did not choose Joan for its acoustics: my middle name is Jane, and those two similar-sounding words have an odd staccato effect when strung together. I chose Joan because it was not a common choice. I chose Joan because the Maid of Orleans, despite her servile title, was different to all the other female saints. She did not suffer lifelong sickness like Bernadette. She was not a sacred virgin like Mary and Agnes and Agatha. She did not self-harm like Teresa of Ávila. She did not marry a pagan and give birth to a saint, like Monica of Hippo. Joan was a renegade. Joan left her home at seventeen and travelled by horse to Orleans, dressed in men’s clothing. She told everyone she met along the way that she, a young girl, had been chosen by God to lead France to victory against the English.

I chose my grandmother’s name. And while I don’t remember now whether I chose her name on purpose, knowing what I know now – about her life, and the choices that she did and didn’t make – it feels like prescience.

I don’t know how The Passion wound up on my grandmother’s bookshelf, whether I’d left it behind by accident or whether I’d loaned it to her. I imagine it was the latter, that it had been a callow act of generosity from a twenty-something granddaughter to an almost eighty-year-old grandmother: here, read this book, and be enlightened like I was. Feel something like I did. Of course, I wasn’t at all enlightened, I only thought I was. As for feeling? I was numb. And I never thought to ask what stories my grandmother might be able to tell me, what I could learn from her.

I doubt that she ever read The Passion. One day, when I was visiting her at the hospital in Maleny, I discovered a collection of essays, one of those Harvard Classics hardbacks, in the hospital library. I suggested that I read Thoreau’s ‘Walking’ to her. I had not read the essay, but as a wannabe writer I knew that it was the kind of substantive, seminal work I ought to have read. It also seemed like the kind of meditative, worthy work that someone who was dying ought to read, as opposed to the Harlequin romances she seemed to prefer. My grandmother, unsurprisingly, would not have it. ‘I don’t like Melissa’s taste in books,’ she said to someone else, as though I wasn’t there. I kept that book. It has survived countless moves, to sit on I don’t know how many bookshelves. I haven’t read it yet.

I stayed with Auntie Jean for a week or so, and visited my grandmother often. I sat in a chair by her bed, reading, intermittently lifting my head to gaze at the fields outside, or to watch her while she slept. She slept a lot but it wasn’t soundly. Her body had to work overtime just to breathe through the fluid filling her lungs. Her skin fell in folds where flesh used to be. When she did wake, she would gossip and complain and play us off against each other. ‘I suppose Jean will come up for a stickybeak,’ she said to me the day she arrived in her new room, the room where we all knew she’d die. As though her daughter was motivated by curiosity, not duty or love. One day she demanded I help her to the shower, then changed her mind midway through. She wanted Jean and only Jean.

There was no shortage of visitors. My cousin Stacy came with her girlfriend. My sister visited with her boyfriend and their dog, a young blue heeler, who chased cows in the paddock outside her window. On those days the mood was festive; the winter sun shone through the window and set everything aglow. We laughed often, and often at my grandmother’s expense. Still, I longed for her spirit to suddenly soften, for her to have the kind of epiphany that dying people in movies had. She never did. When I said goodbye I knew it was for the last time.