The Adoption: Meet Lorna

Jane and Darren, the mum and dad of the family at the heart of my new novel, have three children when the story begins. The eldest is Lorna, aged thirteen.

Lorna woke at ten to eight hoping, deliciously hoping, that at last she had found a best friend. How they had talked, Kazea and she! How they had walked, too! Up and down Oxford Street, in and out of H&M, Top Shop, Gap, trying on all sorts of things, even though the sales assistants looked down their noses at them, and even though Kazea said she could spot the store detectives a mile off, and they were definitely being watched. Kazea was looking for jeans but she didn't buy any. She'd said it was more fun helping Lorna choose her T-shirt, which they'd eventually bought from a big, bazaar-type shop where they had Goth stuff and surf stuff and loads of really freaky shoes. The T-shirt was tight and pink and had a kitten on the front, and Lorna was wearing it now, all curled up in her bed, and thinking about the stuff that Kazea had said and the stuff she had said to Kazea.

The real talking and walking had begun after the shops. Kazea had led the way down Regent Street, which Lorna knew only from Monopoly but hadn't said so, and then through Piccadilly Circus, though Lorna hadn't realised this until Kazea had mentioned it later. Trafalgar Square was next and they'd both climbed up on the lions, then chased the pigeons, flapping their arms and making the tourists stare.

Tourists: sad or what?

It was in a nearby McDonalds, where they'd had milkshakes and fries and looked on in a superior fashion from their high-stool counter seats at everybody else eating death-burgers and heading, Kazea said, for only, like, guaranteeed bowel disease, that Lorna had asked Kazea about her dad.

"He's a bastard," Kazea had said.

"Oh. Why? What happened?"

"He was, like, really, really nasty to my mum."

This had begged so many more questions that lorna hadn't know where to begin or, more worryingly, how. She'd only known Kazea since September, when Kazea had started at Lorna's school..."So," Lorna had said, looking tentatively at Kazea across the globalised fast-food prducts both so thoroughly despised, "don't you see him, then? Your dad?"

"No. Not any more."

Kazea's brown eyes became quite hard.

"I don't mean to be nosy..." Lorna began, suddenly fearful.

"Oh, it's OK. He left my mum when I was ten. I used to see him a bit at first, but not any more. No way."

"What happened?"

"He was just a bastard to my mum. I don't know too much about it. He's gone back to France now and good riddance." That seemed to close the subject. But Kazea opened up another front. "Anyway, what are your parents like?" she asked.

"God, I don't know," Lorna had said, reflexively. "They're just a bit boring, really."

She knew this wasn't nearly good enough. She was intimidated by Kazea's vitriol towards her father and the sheer glamour of her lone-parent plight. She needed a grievance, a wound, something to maintain the precious empathy, which seemed fragile now. She'd reached for the first thing that came to hand. "They're just desperate to have another baby," she'd said, working a little moan into her tone. "God knows why."

"Well, yeah. How old is your little brother?"

"Six."

"And how old are your parents?"

"Forty-four. Well, my mum is already and my dad will be on Sunday."

"Forty-four? That's really pushing it!"

"Tell me about it," Lorna had agreed, surprising herself with the phrase, which she had never used before, only heard from the mouths of harder girls. Not until later, as they'd sashayed together across Hungerford Bridge, had it dawned on Lorna that she'd dug herself into a hole.

"So, do they, like, talk about having another baby?" Kazea had asked, returning to the theme out of the blue.

"Well, yeah."

This was totally untrue.

Tomorrow: meet one of Lorna's two brothers, Eliot.