For someone who’s nearly blind, Grandma notices things. After my bath, I come out to the kitchen with a towel around my hair, and she says, “You’ve cut your fingernails.”

“I had to. They were chipped.”

“What’d you say?”

I’m tired of shouting at her, so I don’t answer. I don’t know how I’m going to manage my wet hair without a dryer.

“Sensible girl,” she says, pushing her hand inside the body of a chicken. It’s lying in a roasting dish, a pale corpse with pimpled skin, and she’s stuffing it with a crumb-herb mixture. “Can you play a guitar?”

“No.” I unwind the towel. The heat from the wood stove is almost unbearable. It flows out of the kitchen, through the dining room and into the living area, which is already stewing in sunlight. “I had three years of piano.”

“You’ve got the hands for guitar. My hands.” She stretches her right hand, wet with chicken and breadcrumbs. Her knuckles are wrinkly and there are brown blotches on her skin, but she’s right, we have the same width of palm, same length of fingers. I don’t know if I like that or not.

“It’s so hot in here,” I say, shaking out my hair. “Can’t we open a door or window?”

“Flies.” She picks up the roasting dish and takes it to the stove.

“Your father had a guitar. Does he still play?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “He loved this place when he was young. He used to sleep in the same bunk you’re in, liked stormy nights when he could hear the sea. What he didn’t like was the trip out in the dark to the dunny. You know what he did?”

Of course I don’t know. I watch the chicken go into the oven.

“He used to stand on the back doorstep and pee over the lavender bush. We wondered why it turned brown.” She laughs as though this is some enormous joke. It doesn’t occur to her that I might find it embarrassing. She shuts the oven door, puts more wood in the firebox, and says, “You’re right. It is rather warm. Give me a hand to peel the vegetables, then we’ll go down to the beach. Tide should be out far enough to get some mussels.”

“What about the sharks?” I ask.

“Sharks? No big sharks out there.”

“Grandma, you told me last night, watch out for the sharks.”

“Did I? Heavens above, girl, you mustn’t believe all you hear, or you’ll never survive on this planet. You’ll find potatoes in that bag.”

Potatoes, pumpkin, carrots. It doesn’t take long and we escape from the heat of the kitchen. Grandma gives me a pair of old sneakers because my shoes would be ruined, she says, and I put them on although they look extremely hideous, with my toes showing through two frayed holes. But it’s just as well I have them on – the tide is now so far out that the edge of the sea is just mud with small rocks sticking up. On these rocks are masses of mussels, green and black oval shells jammed together. I should tell you now that I don’t like eating shellfish, but it is quite interesting gathering them.

I help Grandma down the beach. We have a knife and two buckets. The knife is to cut the beard on the mussel, which is the bit that holds it to the rocks. Grandma just pulls the mussels off with her hand but the shells are sharp, and my hands are still sore from scrubbing.

“Don’t take the small mussels,” she says. “And don’t take the ones with a rough blunt end to their shells. They don’t taste too good.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Don’t know,” she yells back. “I never asked them.”

The tide is still going out. Mud squelches under my feet and there are little yucky things like crabs and starfish and squishy sponges. I’ve seen them at Marine World but that’s different from treading on them.

When we have half a bucket each, I take Grandma’s bucket so she can walk back with her stick. She is very slow, poking the flat stones in front of her before she steps on them, blinking, trying to see. She really is scared of falling. I tell her to stay where she is, and I run up to the road to put down the buckets. When I get back I have both hands free to take her elbow and arm and help her up the beach. Once she’s on the road, she’s all right.

She tells me to take the mussels to the tap by the garage and wash them. I do that. They have mud on them, and some little tube-worms.

So I get them as clean as possible and take them inside. “How are you going to kill them?” I ask.

“In a pot of water.” She holds up a big saucepan.

“You’re going to drown them in fresh water?”

She laughs. “I’m going to boil them.”

I think I react, like with a shudder or something, because she laughs again. “You want me to give them an anaesthetic first?”