My surprised siblings glowered up at me in surprise. Emerald shook her head and Amber tch-tched but, reluctantly, they joined me at the front of the church and faced the congregation. I extracted three lipsticks from my pocket and shared them around.

‘In honour of you, Mum, the woman who taught us that everything is made better by a bit of lippy.’ I painted a red slash of colour across my lips and my sisters followed suit, laughing through their tears. ‘And because nobody wore lippy as well as you did, Ruth.’

And then I peered over my reading glasses, caught my sisters’ eyes and pretended to adjust my specs up the bridge of my nose, with a covert middle finger.

The next day we took delivery of the cremation urn. We placed Ruth on the kitchen counter and contemplated our next move.

‘So, where shall we sprinkle her ashes?’ Amber spoke first.

‘What about the designer shopping outlet? It was her favourite haunt,’ Emerald suggested.

‘The club and the pub were her favourite haunts,’ Amber corrected.

‘What about Kurnell beach?’ I said. ‘“Birthplace of a nation” . . . or, the site of Invasion Day, although it made her furious to hear us call it that. But she did love it there.’

‘It’s a good idea, but it’s illegal to scatter human remains in public places without council permission,’ Emerald countered.

‘That’s okay. We’ll just fill our pockets with Mum’s ashes, cut holes in the seams, then walk along, dropping her in instalments like the tunnel diggers at Colditz.’ I demonstrated, sauntering around the kitchen, surreptitiously shaking my pockets.

‘I think we should sprinkle her under the casuarinas. Wind blowing through casuarinas sounds like moaning, and you how she loved to moan,’ Emerald said, and we all snickered. ‘And then we’ll know where to go when we miss her.’

‘Oh, god, I laughed so hard I just had a little LBL – light bladder leakage,’ Amber uncharacteristically confided.

We laughed even more when we arrived at the beach and realised we’d forgotten our mother. She was sitting back at home on the kitchen counter. We drove back for her urn at top speed and this time strapped her into the front seat, just like old times, apart from the lack of commentary on our appalling driving/bad parenting/poor grooming/lack of lippy.

We parked among the flowering gums, then walked towards the water in the bright heat of the summer afternoon, serenaded by cicadas.

What upset me far more than the act of scattering the ashes was how they were packed. Shredded newspaper padded out the urn. I kept catching glimpses of headlines from my own local paper – the usual trite stories often penned by my own hand: ‘Seagull Steals Dentures’; ‘Drunk Falls on Face’; ‘Man’s Penis-Enlarging Vacuum Pump Stolen – Wedding Dreams Shattered’.