She kicks. At the base of the wave, she kicks with all her strength. She surfaces, rolls onto her back, kicks again. Her mind is tired but her body is young and strong and her legs want her to survive, to kick angrily, repeatedly until her foot grazes sand. Then her knee, her elbow. She lies in the shallows and the sky clears above her, the rain stops. Her lungs contract and she coughs, retches, opens her eyes.

The beach is wide open before her. She vomits up saltwater, drags herself onto dry sand and retches again. At the water’s edge, metres away, she sees her canvas shoes, her towel, soaked through but untouched. A gull lands close to her feet and picks at a dead crab. She tries to stand but her legs give way. Her head is heavy against the sand and the sun hurts her eyes. She lies still, shivering, coughing. The gull considers her and struts off.

It takes three attempts to lift the towel. Her hands have no grip. She manages in the end to throw it over her shoulder. She picks her shoes up and drops them again. They are too heavy; her fingers can’t close around them. In the end she leaves them behind on the sand. At the foot of the coastal path she sits and gathers her strength. She watches the ocean for a long time.

The day is bright and calm when she reaches the top of the path, where the tea trees meet the backyards on the ocean side of Bay Street. Carol Taylor is out the back of her house, tipping the water out of her garden furniture. She stops at the sight of Isla and brings her hands to her face.

‘Isla, dear God! You didn’t swim in that, did you?’

Isla registers what she says but doesn’t reply. She can’t bear the sight of Carol, in her beige shirt and slacks. She misses Mandy, who was lively and magnetic. The sort of woman you noticed.

‘Are you right, love?’ Carol says.

Isla nods at Carol and looks straight through her to the kitchen, where Mandy used to sit at the table eating prawns dipped in vinegar, her nose peeling with sunburn. Isla knows now that Mandy disappeared from her life and nobody ever mentioned her. Her family grew around this need to forget. They worked hard at it, keeping busy, growing selfish, angry, disappointed. And beneath it all, was Mandy.

She pushes the back door open and stands on the mat. There are voices coming from the lounge room. She goes to the bathroom and picks seaweed from her hair, brushes sand from her skin. She takes a clean towel from the linen cupboard.

‘You gave it to the police?’ Her dad’s voice. ‘Did you want me locked up?’

Isla steps back into the hall, pushes the door to the lounge room open and finds her parents facing each other, her father standing, her mum on the couch. The room is a mess of coffee cups and ashtrays, fogged with smoke. On the coffee table, next to a stack of dirty plates, sits Mandy’s watch.