When the newspaper is gone, I see the last thing I had on my incineration agenda. The Hall of Shame page from Mama’s photo album. I move to pitch it into the blaze, but Char snatches it out of my hand and examines it in the fire’s glow.

“Who’s that? Your grandparents?”

“Yeah, and my father.”

“Dude, you can’t burn those. Your mother will kill you.”

“Well, she’ll have to get in line. Brain tumours get first crack at me. Besides she hates those pictures. I’m doing her a favour. Exorcising some demons.”

“Exercising demons makes ’em stronger, dummy.” She peels back the plastic, tears out the pictures and stuffs them down the front of her sarong. “You’ll thank me later.”

The opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven” come ebbing out of the Mustang’s stereo. Char reignites her baseball bat of a joint, rushes over to crank the song even louder, blows a kiss at the baby monitor when she hears Daktari momentarily fuss then settle from his car seat inside the trailer, then writhes back to the bonfire. She hauls heavily on the joint and juts it toward me. I pass, swigging from my bottle of Shiraz instead.

“Some people lose their memories with these tumours, or with the treatments.” I shrug, my eyes fixed on the fire’s mesmerizing dance. “But what kind of life is it if you can’t remember your mother’s face, or who you were? Or where you put your fuckin’ pants. People are just a bunch of memories stitched together. When that starts to fall apart, what’s left?”

Char stares up into the primordial breadth of the blackened sky.

“So d’ya start doin’ Gimp again or what?”

“What? No.”

“No as in ‘yes,’ or no as in ‘not yet?’”

“Jesus, I thought we were having this philosophical conversation about memory and identity and me dying and shit,” I say.

“You were,” she laughs. “I was being stoned and staring at the sky and wondering when you were gonna start screwin’ Willy Gimp again. I’d do him if I was dying.”

“I dunno. Maybe. I’m kinda busy.”

“With what?’

“With stuff. Dying stuff. I’m trying to write something, too. A memoir, I guess, about who I was. So none of them other arseholes can go telling stories about me.”

“Well, I’d definitely do Gimp if I was dying and writing a memoir. Sex sells. Specially some bow chicka wow woaaaaw with a guy with cerebral policy. Handicapped is the new black, ya know.”

Char jumps up and moves between the fully descended darkness and the firelight in a blasphemous marriage of belly dance and one-woman mosh pit as Robert Plant’s voice howls from the car stereo, about winding roads and shadows taller than souls.

“You’re a warped horn dog. You have ADHD. You’re crazy as a bag of hammers, you’re offensive as fuck. And you dance like a stripper. Nothing has changed.”

“Actually, I am a foxy beaver. I eat Ritalin like candy. My craziness is a mute point. People being offended is their problem. And I was a stripper. In Columbia, where the putas dance like sexy raindrops!” She slithers her arms above her head, and flows close to me, cupping my face in her cool, electrified little hands. “Meanwhile, you, my sweet, brain-­tumour-infested bitch, have athazagoraphobia.”