I arranged for the delivery and bought a card.

‘Here,’ said the florist, handing me a pen.

I asked her to write it out for me. There was a chance, however small, that Cilla might know my handwriting.

I had considered every possible iteration of an apology: please accept my apology, sincerest, deepest, truly. Which one did I choose? I’m afraid I can’t say. What I wrote is between me and Cilla, even if I did ask the florist to sign the card with Pete’s name.

‘Your name’s Peter? How unusual,’ the florist said, amused. She tucked the point of the envelope in.

‘No. I’m not Peter.’

She gave me a knowing smile. ‘You’re not Priscilla, by any chance?’

I took the envelope from her, untucked its tip, licked along the glue and sealed it shut.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I wish.’

Powerful Owl

The first part of Maya to wash up on shore was a foot. The cop they sent to break the news arrived on our doorstep with her cap under her arm. She knocked on the flyscreen, and the mesh shimmied under her knuckles.

When we opened the door, flies came in.

Her shoes stuck to the linoleum in the kitchen. She accepted a glass of soft drink and soon its neon green transferred to her tongue.

‘You sure it’s her?’ said my mother.

‘We’re sure,’ the cop said.

‘What about Cameron? Where was he?’ I asked.

Mum shot me a look.

The cop said they were not treating the circumstances as suspicious. Maya had been seen alone on the beach that night.

My mother didn’t ask how Maya’s body had come apart the way it did. So I asked instead.

‘It’s just the tide,’ the cop said. ‘It’s natural.’

Other parts washed up over the weeks that followed. In the end Mum had to identify Maya from what they could assemble: a hand, a thigh, part of a torso with the spine hanging out.

Maya went into the furnace in a cardboard coffin.

My mother, once Maya was half a plastic container of ash, shook her straight back into the ocean she’d returned from.

‘Serves her right,’ she said.

Soon after that I decided to leave. My home town was starting to jangle my nerves. Watching the road become molten in the afternoon mirage. Wiping grit from my neck, licking salt from my upper lip. It had been years since I had noticed the dull pounding of the waves, but after Maya died it got to a point where I would lie awake unable to block out their constant, regular arrival, the wash and drag of it.