"You've got a sun allergy," the doctor said, scanning my body through the bottom of his bifocals. He told me to use a cream I could buy over the counter in the pharmacy.

But the cream did nothing. The next time, the doctor gave me a prescription ointment. Then an injection to stop the itch. I no longer had the urge to scratch, but my mottled skin didn't improve. Instead, it erupted in blisters, then raised welts that looked like corrugated burns.

"You'll need to stay indoors," the doctor said. "Especially now that the rains are over, and we'll be getting more sunshine."

"How am I supposed to do that? I work on a boat."

He shrugged. "Change jobs," he suggested. "Or move somewhere else."

I thought of Michelle. I couldn't imagine her being anywhere else but here. She was a true child of this town, just like I was. But I was growing allergic to it.

"Holy Mother of God." My grandmother crossed herself when she saw me. Her Irish brogue was still strong after spending almost half a century on the Antipodes. "What have you done to bring this on you?"

"Nothing," I said.

The milky blue of her eyes darkened behind her glasses. "This is a punishment from God," she said firmly, as if daring me to contradict her. "I knew it would come sooner or later."

My grandmother was a hard-bitten Catholic, the kind that believed they could teach the pope a thing or two. She probably could have forgiven her daughter almost anything, even marrying my father, had I been brought up "in the faith," as she called it. But my mother was not religious ; it was bred out of her, she said, by years of sneezing at incense and contracting calluses from unpolished wooden pews. She tried to make amends by giving me a proper Catholic name — Joseph — but my grandmother wasn't appeased by this gesture.

My grandmother didn't attend my parents' wedding on the beach, next to a specially built torii, among blazing torches and the drone of didgeridoos — elements of my father's heritage combined in the inimitable Broome way. A union not sanctified by the Church, she told her daughter, was little better than living in sin.

My mother just laughed. She often told me that if she had been struck dead on the spot, her own mother could have grown old comforted by the satisfaction that her view was ratified by the highest authority. As it was, my grandmother continued into old age nursing her grudge towards a town she had never taken to her heart.

My father refused to argue with his mother-in-law. Only once did he openly assert himself against her. When I was around five years old, my grandmother carted me off to her priest and asked him to baptize me there and then. The priest, knowing our family history, called up my parents to check if they had consented. My father showed up at the church door, just in time, he said, before my grandmother succeeded in browbeating the man of God into submission. With relief, the priest handed me to my father and fled.

Her plans thwarted, my grandmother drew herself up to her full height — at five feet eleven, she easily towered over my father — and harangued him, declaring that his heathen state would soon be the death of him. And of my mother. And of me.

When my parents sailed off on a fishing trip during cyclone season and never returned, my grandmother locked herself into her house for two weeks. When she emerged, her eyes were dry and riddled with bursts of blood. She grabbed me by the arm. "This would never have happened if your mother had listened to me. It's God's punishment for their sinful state."

I laughed then, and she never forgave me for it.

As my grandmother peered at the blisters on my arms and my face, I could have sworn her eyes lit up with a subconscious gratification she herself would never admit to.

"What are you using for it?" she said.

"A whole lot of different creams, but nothing helps."

"You haven't been trying any of that native rubbish, have you?"

"No." I was going to add not yet, but I didn't feel like picking a fight with her.

"Good. It's just superstitious nonsense," she grumbled as she opened a kitchen cabinet. She took out a bottle with a sticker of the Virgin Mary on the front. She held it out to me, but changed her mind and put it back into the cupboard.

She was very careful with her holy water.