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She sniffs a little laugh. ‘Helen used to say we were like sisters. She had the notion that my mum was going to adopt her too. I remember lying in our bunk beds – half dread, half excitement at the idea. I felt a bit hemmed in by her, right?’
‘So, I take it she didn’t become your sister?’
‘No, she ended up back with her family. I felt let down and relieved at the same time. Taught me not to trust that kind of closeness. There was Martin though, when I was in my teens. He’s the lad who sorted me with the bike. Nearest to a proper brother, I suppose.’
‘What about your birth parents?’ I decide to push it.
Instant tension. ‘I told you, they’re both dead.’ She lifts her stick, the end crimson. She bangs it on the sand, sending sparks.
‘You met your father before he died, isn’t it?’
Silence. I light the spliff again.
‘What about your mother?’ Hope I sound gentle.
She stiffens, takes a breath, and holds it. I look up at my exhaled smoke joining the thin wisps from the fire. The stars are coming through now in the deepening blue of the sky, though it’s still amazingly light on the horizon.
‘She died when I was in foster care, right? That’s when I was adopted.’ She looks hard at me with those big heavy-hooded eyes. Daring me to know how to react?
Which I don’t. ‘Fucking hell, I’m sorry Jez.’
She shrugs, ‘I never knew her, right?’ She reaches for the last of the spliff. ‘Ken, my father, told me a bit about her when I met him.’
‘So, I mean, how did you even meet him? Did you like know he was dying?’
‘Not when I first turned up. He thought I was the district nurse.’ She sniffs that little laugh again. ‘I’d borrowed my mum’s navy raincoat, maybe that was it?’
She tells a story of how the nurses showed up before she’d been able to explain to her dad who she was. Big kafuffle and confusion: it was their first visit and all. Turned out he had terminal cancer and a few weeks to live.
‘So…long story short, I moved in and looked after him until he died.’ She blurts, like a confession.
‘Just like that?’ I say, literally stunned at the whole idea.
‘Not quite. I visited a few times. Then I found him collapsed on the stairs – that’s when I decided to stay for the duration.’
‘Wow, that is so hard core. Sorry, it’s just, not exactly an everyday story.’
She smiles through the firelight at me, her face softens with it.
‘Tell me about it! But there was really no-one else. He’d discharged himself from hospital, refused to have anything to do with social services. He was a mardy old bugger, but I kind of took to him. Maybe I get that stubborn independence from him, not from Al, my adoptive dad. Perhaps it’s all genetic after all?’
‘Genetics don’t mean shit.’ I tense up as I say this.
‘Could’ve fooled me,’ she retorts.
I let this go, as in I’m more interested in her story right now. ‘Did he have any other kids, then?’
‘Yeah, he called them the Proper Kids…?’
‘Proper Kids? As if!’
‘Whatever, they’re grown-up and weren’t interested. His wife left him years ago. So, he had no-one, and I had nowt else to do.’
‘So, you were literally there when he died?’ I form a death-bed picture like from one of Gran’s costume dramas: all white lace coverlets and darkened rooms. Probably not?
‘Yes,’ she says quietly.
I take a drink and hand her the bottle. Stare into the fire and pick out a clutch of blinking goblins with fat square heads.
