We sat on the beach wall and kicked our legs. A group of Afghani boys played soccer and families sat eating their Christmas lunches on the sand. Our conversation meandered a little bit here and a little bit there, coming to rest on men (as conversations between women sometimes do). I traded my heart for hers and when I’d finished speaking she told me about Lester.

The father of her two eldest boys, Lester was her soul mate, she said, her only regret. The only man she could see herself spending the rest of her life with (we had both already agreed that we were probably far too fond of our own company to ever be really good at tying ourselves to someone else).

As her story wandered here and there, she interspersed it with her trademark cackle.

‘Do you know that the day my Mother met Lester she pulled him aside and said I was a drug addict and I was a prostitute? And not to be trusted. The day she met him.’

‘And what did he say to that? Mind your own business?’

‘He was actually a client of mine, that’s how I met him. He spent his life’s savings on me, booking me. And then when that was all gone he say’s ‘Now I’m broke you better come out for lunch with me’.

‘It was a true romance.’

‘Yeah but we never talked or anything. And he was lousy in bed too then (laughs)… He was shorter than me, and bowlegged. Badly. Looked like he’d just got off a bloody horse. Never talked or anything during that time. So I don’t know what attracted me or vice versa.’

‘So the love of your life had bowlegs?’

‘Yeah, badly. It got worse if we stayed up all night fucking (laughs), he used to waddle more. So every time I see someone bowlegged and they waddle I think, ‘oh you’ve been up fucking all night…’

She threw her head back and laughed then, and she was beautiful. But she really did love Lester, I could see it in her eyes which were misty with nostalgia; old pain in sharp relief against the backdrop of happy families enjoying their Christmas festivities on the beach.

‘What happened with you two?’

‘He died. He committed suicide.’

Lester killed himself with no warning and turned her life upside down. He’d left her in the cruellest way and she folded with the pain of it all. She threw herself into a failed relationship with a much older man who was playing happy families with her while quietly fathering children on the side. When that relationship came crashing down she went back to working and was raped, eventually losing her children as she flailed through trauma heaped on heartbreak.

The ice-cream van pulled up and we turned to watch the kids rush to it. I saw her smile at them as they ran past, and asked her about her kids. A mother to four, a grandmother to three, but in contact with none. She relayed their names and ages, and showed me a photo of one on her phone. Now it was just her, sitting with me on Christmas Day, laughing about the bowlegged love of her life. She rubbed her eyes and complained that the wind must have irritated them.

We swung our legs up and wandered home.