My mother flies, reluctantly, back to Sydney ahead of me. I tell her I have to go to the service alone. While I wait for it I wander the streets of the city by myself. I feel like an alien in it. There are too many colours and too much noise and too many smells. The concrete pavements are too hard after linoleum and rubber and snow for so long and I jar my shins. Cars drive too fast. There are too many people. Too many faces. I’ve forgotten civilisation. Keys again. Money. I leave my card in the automatic teller machine. I pick up photos and pay for them and walk outside, leaving the prints on the shop’s counter. I’m having to think how to function again in the world and I’m not doing very well.

At the service Captain Crane contains my trembling to the dark of his chest and when I weep he shields me and quietens me in his arms as though he’s calming a frightened flapping bird until I’ve stopped.

I don’t remember much about who spoke. I didn’t know any of the speakers. But I remember something that was said.

‘Let Max’s untimely death remind us all to live our lives with his passion, and to do the things we really want to do.’

I walk up to his elderly parents at the end of the service and introduce myself and in their warm bewildered greeting I can see there’s no knowledge of who I am. It’s obvious Max didn’t tell them. I feel in the hurt of it like a sea anemone that’s been prodded by a finger, all my senses and surfaces contracting. His father knows nothing of this. He introduces me to Max’s younger brother who looks mockingly, achingly like Max.

‘Keith, this is um, oh dear, I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Fin.’

‘Fin. That’s it. She was on the boat with Max. Wasn’t it lovely of her to come to the service? Thank you so much, dear.’

There’s an absolute knowing in Keith’s face.

‘Fin. It’s so good to meet you.’

He takes me aside. Without saying anything we hold each other very close and all my weeping spills out again and his does too and I sense that Keith’s lost a part of himself and he’ll never be whole again.

We go for a walk in the grounds of the Division. Keith tells me he knows all about me, but his parents don’t. He tells me Margaret and Max had never told their parents they’d separated.

‘The parents were the only people they hadn’t yet told.’

He says there are a lot of things his parents don’t know about Max, and a lot of things they will never know. He tells me Margaret has indicated that she never wants to meet me.