The fairy and I sit on a wall and share a supper from the chip shop. One large battered black pudding sausage on a bed of salt and vinegar chips alongside a Styrofoam cup of curry sauce. The smell of it against the sleet wet street summons memories of cherished family laziness, of nights when mum was too tired from work to cook, so chips. The fairy has her own similar association, I’m sure.

You know in America,

I say, mouth full,

 where they make all the films, guess what they call this.

I bite another hunk of the sausage off my wooden fork and cram it in before I can swallow the last bite.

What?

Her mouth is fuller than mine somehow.

Blood sausage! In’t that weird.

She pauses, beholding the dark lump in its golden batter on the end of the little chip shop skewer,

‘As this got blood in it?

Aye I think so yeah. I think it’s like mostly blood.

Eurgh! Sausage for vampires!

And she lunges at me all ravenous like, and bites me on the neck, and curry sauce gets on my jumper, and I squirm away and jump off the wall, and she chases me around the car park below, and when she catches me we wrestle like cubs born of the asphalt, and then a fuckin’ seagull divebombs our unsupervised supper, so we call a truce and charge it like marauders. But it gets away with the black pudding, and the fairy screams up at it like the sharp-toothed thing she is, like the vampire whose sausage it was, and we are out of breath.

Shame those wings ain’t real,

I say,

 could go catch him.

Her teeth are crooked, but not sharp. The bite mark on my neck looks more like a badger’s than a vampire’s, or a fairy’s for that matter. I wonder if I’ll turn into whatever she is. Sure, she’s just a girl really, but not quite. Something more.

Fuckin’ ‘ate seagulls.

She sticks up two fingers to the thief,

Wankers.

We’re a fuckin’ ‘undred miles from the sea, what they doin’ here?

I don’t know.

And we walk towards the motorway, polishing off the last chips as we go. Kids round here fall asleep to its yawning roar the way I imagine seaside kids fall asleep to the roar of the sea.

We reach the bridge that reaches over the motorway and dare each other to drink the curry sauce. I sip cautiously but she snatches it and glugs the lot, feral thing. She has a sauce moustache, and I let her wear it without telling her for ages.

Below, trees drown in exhaust fumes and cars rush in shoals. We’d sit here a lot. This suspended spot between two nowheres, we and the illegible graffiti the only stabs of colour pinpricking the vast grey of it all.

What else is left?

She asks, and I check our list.

1)    Be a fairy ✔️

2)    Final revenge against Jodie fuckin’ Gossamer ✔️

3)    Get black pudding ✔️

4)    Finally do a kickflip

5)    Go see Mum and Dad

6)    Finish the castle

7) Find a way to stay

I don’t know how we’re going to manage number seven.

There’s dirt under our nails from the revenge on Jodie fuckin’ Gossamer. From when we dug up worms and snuck handfuls of them into Jodie’s pretty purple room and plopped a couple into each of the socks in her sock drawer. She and the other Gossamers were at church. Back door was unlocked. The fairy said nothing, but I could see in her that some long-taut coil lost its grip in her and unravelled. And all the shoulder barges in the school corridor and the changing room jeers and the black eyes and the hourly feeling of absolute worthlessness dissooooolved like they never were. Like they were someone else’s. Like those scars were drawn on and rinsed off with warm water.

I don’t think we have time for the kickflip.

I say.

Ah, yeah we do!

Not if you wanna do the rest. My board’s all the way at mine. Plus it gets dark at like five nowadays ‘n’ it’s three now.

Fuck. Alright cross it off.

I do. The next I read dry like a shopping list item.

See Mum and Dad.

The cemetery is close by. We’ve been there a lot recently.

Mm, a funner one.

There’s only one funner one.

Is it finish the castle?

Yeah.

She jumps up,

Yeah let’s do that!

and darts for the castle the way the crow flies. Away from the cemetery, past many backdrops from our conjoined childhood, now in their soggy winter dressing. Past the park, past the shopping precinct, past the working men’s club, past the building site that is day by day spilling further from the main road into field space, eating at the living land with brick the pink of an infection’s warning rings.

Do we still have all them glass bottles?

She asks in her gallop,

Probably, why?

but she doesn’t answer.

We’d collected the bottles from one spot in the woods where it looked like a party had happened twenty years ago. All the bottles and their litter companions –faded cans, silver crisp packets, little plastic baggies with some powder inside still – were all but absorbed by a moss quilt, fossils of someone else’s last day here, impervious to the mastication of time. Her plan was that if we wrote enough letters and put them in, then her parents would take us to the seaside and we could toss them in the sea. But plans change. I don’t even remember what we wrote. Expletives mostly, I imagine.

We reach the castle, there between the trees, and the bottle collection is in fact still there – a fly-tipped mess to those not in the know. A lot of mess goes purposefully unnoticed. The castle too. It meant safety to someone once, as an out-building or country rest stop in the time of coal and carriages. Now it’s four ruined little walls around nothing, furnished with an old carpet we found in the summer behind the garden shed at the bottom of the fairy’s garden.

Alright stand back a bit.

And she throws a bottle at one of the walls. It shatters evenly and fills the wet grass around it with razor green jewels. The note, already too sodden to read, waves like a siren in dangerous water. She picks up another and does it again. And again. And I get what she’s doing.

A moat!

No one will be able to take me away if we have a moat round the castle!

What’re we gunna use for a drawbridge?

I say, and she looks instinctively to the treeline.

We’ll get an emergency log in case we need to escape.

So we smash the lot. And it’s exhilarating, our twinkling frenzy, a terraforming that says to all that dare approach, stay the fuck away! And we make it fool proof, regardless of whether it’ll stop the grownups from taking her into care or not.

I love her most then, when she’s fleeting, so fleeting she’s almost see-through, like the wings on her back. But at the same time she is very much there, more real than before. Maybe because I’m aware it’ll be the last time and I’m desperate to soak up details that I would miss if I were seeing her tomorrow. Her scabbed knee, her big phlegmy cough that made her sound like a little kid, her knotty hair, uncombed since her mum and dad died.

I fetch a good long log, and we climb into the castle before smashing the last bottle, and our moat of teeth is done. No water, all alligator.

Do we live here now?

I ask.

Well, I do at least. You can come bring me blood sausage from the chippie yeah?

She says blood sausage all American-like.

Gunna gimme money for it?

Yeah course. Bring me my iPad from mine and I’ll get an online job like mum had.

Yeah deal.

We shake on it.

And… will you get me books from the library? And maybe a warm blanket and… and some biscuits… and maybe like, an umbrella in case it rains, and get my rabbit too!

And she cries a bit. Hides it well. We have a big hug.

I don’t hear any grownups, but in that moment I see them in my head arriving to take her. I wipe away the scene like shower-glass fog.

Alright.

But it is getting dark.

I look up. And she does too. What should be our last look at the sky together is ruined by bloody seagulls circling overhead!

Fuckin’ back for more!

She yells.

I’ll fuckin’ give ye’ more!

  I scream.

Hate seagulls, me.

And we spend our last night, as the sun sets November-fast, trying to kill them with little chips of castle brick. And we laugh for so long it feels like spring could spring.

And the wind blows our notes from the moat. Maybe someone will read them after all.

And the sun does set.

And I do see her again. But not for many years.