Saskia Honeyman would look back on her mother’s death and see that it had the cadence of an exquisitely orchestrated sonata. The indomitable Kiki, as everyone called her, even her three adult children, had a stroke on the first Tuesday of December, as she sat beneath a boab tree with a cluster of women she affectionately called the Yawuru girls. They’d often sat there together in the heat of the day where the shadows fell, talking and shelling nuts or threading seeds into long strands and teaching her more and more of their Yawuru words. The stroke that killed her came two days later as she lay still recovering in a hospital room with a window that gave her a meagre slice of Roebuck Bay view.

Friday the following week was Kiki’s funeral where, at low tide, hundreds of her loved ones drove to the furthest reach of Cable Beach and celebrated her departure with sand and saltbush, sea spray and barbecues sizzling to feed th slow-moving crowd. It was loud and messy, with a wildness that honoured her. Lennon, Kiki’s youngest, dragged her Viscount along the beach with his LandCruiser, like an old friend who needed to be shown the way. And people clustered on the sunny side of the well-loved caravan, found shade on the other, put their drinks in her fridge and took their kids for a pee in her toilet. There was a wedding photo taped to the cupboard door, front and centre as people stepped into the caravan: Kiki and Bear, the father of her three children, who had succumbed to prostate cancer only four years earlier. They looked younger than the parents Saskia had known, but the same. Kiki’s hair was long, threaded with flowers, and she wore a simple slip dress with a thin strand of pearls at her throat. Bear’s smile was broad, as always, although shrouded somewhat by a moustache that draped past his chin.

At dusk, camels came swaying along the ocean’s spume, their silhouettes a guard of honour against the setting sun. Everyone fell silent, a crescent of humans facing the slow approach of the grunting beasts. It could have been Kiki, Saskia imagined they were all thinking – the barefooted form at the front of the procession could easily have been her mother, leading the line of camels as she had done every tourist season for the last twenty years.

Lennon quietly picked up a stick, walked into the middle of the sickle-shaped memorial and wrote in the compacted sand, Be still. A murmur rippled out as everyone made sense of the letters embossed on the ground, the familiar words they had seen scrawled on notes stuck to Kiki’s bathroom mirror, written at the end of birthday cards, or heard whispered with a squeeze of hand when someone had shared a confidence at Kiki’s side. Saskia looked around and realised they were remembering how Kiki had brought calm. For all her wildness, her spirit had been a glassy pool that she had allowed all these people to be quieted beside. It was a beautiful moment, but as Saskia cleared up soft- drink cans and paper plates, one of the last to leave the beach, her head began to throb. She tried to be grateful for the send- off her mother would have loved to attend, but her stomach churned. Here she was, cleaning up the mess again.

‘You got this?’ It was Violet, Saskia’s sister, leaning out of her car window, her hair the same blonde as their mother’s but lopped into a straightened bob. Saskia nodded numbly, garbage bag in hand, like any good oldest sibling. Most of the crowd had already gone back to the house, except for Saskia and her daughter, Anouk, whose thin nine-year-old arms were struggling to load an esky into the back of the ute. Dane was there too, ambling mindless circles while barking into his phone, oblivious to his daughter shifting the esky onto her knee and then her hip to lever it over the ute’s tailgate.

‘I’ll see you back at the house.’ Violet waved and sped away along the darkening beach…