I flick the Zippo and stoop, holding the flame to the lint ball until it ignites, then coax it along with a gentle stream of breath until a car comes barrelling up the driveway. A tinted-windowed Mustang blasting some schlock rock song, probably in an attempt to drown out the car’s multiple rumbles of age and failure. It’s Peggy, driving one of “The Twins,” which is what she proudly calls the couple of crappy “classic” cars she took from Skroink in their divorce.

Except it’s not Peggy.

The woman emerging from the driver’s side is skeletally thin. Or at least, most of her is. Other parts seem to be out­landishly large. Her tiny, deeply bronzed frame is tightly wrapped in a lime-green sarong, which can’t contain her wildly gigantic boobs. Big, round, leopard print–framed sunglasses crouch precariously on the tip of her elfin nose. Her twig-thin wrists and neck are weighted with layer upon layer of enormous red, yellow, and blue wooden beads, while on her head, dozens of thick platinum dreadlocks spring from beneath a zebra-print scarf.

Tendrils of blue smoke curl from the outrageously large blunt she sparks as she ambles across the yard toward me. I almost don’t notice a spell of the squirrelly vision coming on. At first, I mistake the mirage of lights and colours for shades of sunset in the sky. Mama and I used to play a game at sunset and sunrise, where we’d each have to pick a colour from the ones we saw arching and flaring along the horizon. My eyes always found the patches where the cool blue of the ether met the warm glow of the sun, creating streaks of baby blue and bright pink tinged with wisps of an otherworldly violet. My brain has now plucked from my memory and conjured around this woman the impossibly real shade of sky-blue pink, which moves with her like a peacock’s trippy plumage as she prances toward me on stupidly high platform sandals.

“F’eyed known there was a bomb fire, ida brung some bleedin’ marchmellows.”

It’s Char.

Behind the giant glasses, beneath the platinum blonde dreadlocks and oversized bangles, and through a very bizarre and very fake quasi-British accent, it is Char. Because nobody else calls them bomb fires. Or marchmellows. The grammar though, that’s Mr. Hillier’s fault. He taught a whole generation of kids from Down North that it was “bring, brang, and brung.”

“Bollocks! Hang on!” Char shrieks in my ear just as her twiggy arms coil around me in a hug. Mashing out the cherry of her mega-joint on the heel of her clunky shoe and stuffing the remainder into a fold of the zebra scarf, she boings back to the car, jettisons the driver’s seat forward and wriggles into the back. When she emerges moments later, she’s got one tit hanging out the top of her shrink-wrap sarong. Latched on to that tit is a tiny, squirming, naked baby. A tiny, squirming, naked, deep-brown-skinned baby with a giant orange afro.