I shrugged. ‘All of them.’

She put her head back, and then she nodded. Emily was looking at me and listening.

‘It’s a big world out there,’ her mum said. ‘Are you ready?’

I wasn’t because I shrugged my shoulders, and then I shook my head. I felt myself getting smaller, and felt ashamed that Emily could see it. There was a lump in my throat and my chin creased up. Emily looked down so I could only see the side of her face, covered in cloud. I didn’t have anything else to say, so I told her mum, ‘I don’t pick people who want me.’

Some of Emily’s sisters came jumping round the corner of the pub, chasing marbles past us along the pavement with the other girls. Her older sister stopped when she saw me, her mum nodded her to go on.

‘Go over there and play with them,’ her mum said to Emily, getting her to jump off the steps and run over. Then she turned to me and gave me the packet of crisps, ‘That’s all for you.’

I didn’t want them, so I shook my head to give them back, but she took a crisp and put it in my mouth.

‘There’s love gone into the making of you, and it’s not everyone can pick and choose,’ she said. ‘Emily’s told you we’re away?’

I nodded, and so did she.

‘She asked if I’d put it to you.’

I knew she was sending me away but I couldn’t move.

‘We only moved here for the hospital and that’s – no more.’ She stopped for a moment, and swallowed, lifting her eyes up to catch back the tears and look across at the girls. Emily flicked a marble and ran after it, throwing herself into the chase like a white cloud in a grey dress with one of her sandals flying off. She told me this would happen. She didn’t tell me when she said her dad was dead that it was still going on.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

Her mum tried to smile and shook her head, ‘A dreamer. And you could drink the stories would come out of him, to Emily and all of them sitting here as you are now. Where we are there with the drains, in that halfway house, he told them there’d been a garden with a palace out of China was good for work on the way down to the coast and he wanted to see the sea. He put me in that palace and he put the gold in my eye, do you see?’

I nodded at her eyes and let her see me looking.

‘I’m not the one now to let his name go out of the community.’