We are the only people left in the dining room besides the waiters. They push cartloads of dirty dishes back into the steam-filled industrial kitchens. I watch Grandma blink away this old sadness.

‘Is this the valley where my uncle lives?’ I ask. ‘Where we’re planning to visit?’

She nods. ‘They say it now only takes three hours to drive there from Sydney. I don’t think we’ll find Blackie though.’ She smiles.

‘Maybe her grandpups,’ I say. ‘Or her great-grandpups. Remember Pip, that dog you had when I was a girl?’

‘With the black-and-white face? The owner left her at the clinic when he learned she was blind in one eye.’

‘She ate bananas.’

Grandma laughs now, her face a frond of wrinkles. ‘She was a funny dog.’

‘Remember how scared I was of her at first, because she’d put her paws on my shoulders and lick my face?’

‘I do, and I remember how, by the end of the visit, I’d find you curled in her bed with her in the early morning. You would make me promise not to tell your mother.’

I stand, for there is a man with caramel skin, an apron and checked pants hovering behind us and I can see that he needs us to leave. I feel lightheaded but blink the dizziness away, offering my arm to Grandma.

‘What are your plans for the morning?’ I ask her.

‘It’s made me tired, remembering. I might lie down for a spell.’

‘Will you tell me about Sydney later?’

‘Of course, my love.’

I walk her back to our cabin and then go to explore the many layers of the ship—the restaurants, the gym at the bow, the spa and bars and hundreds of closed cabin doors. All of it man-made, artificial, and so different from what Grandma’s been speaking of: the land, the animals and birds, the work which suited her, which felt right. I feel the same when I am on the wards, finding veins, adjusting cannulas, shifting a patient to place a bedpan beneath. I feel like I know this work of bodies, as though my hands were made for it. If only the other parts of life came so easily, were so simple to achieve.

I think of Grandma in her single-room schoolhouse and I think of myself in school, always trying to please, collecting ribbons at races, in spelling bees, folders filled with certificates and awards. I was desperate for any recognition. Mom always told me that life was different for me than it was for her generation. They’d fought for the freedoms we had: girls weren’t expected to just be teachers or nurses anymore. I could be anything: lawyer, scientist, astronaut, president. I thought that meant I had to be everything. Dad loved to say that second place is the first loser.