Abstract black full sleeve on arm

The wall of the Sea Lane chapel is finished, and I am writing from the scaffold with size still under my nails, so forgive the smudges. Mr Achterberg wanted the lettering gold on black for the new lifeboat house, but the damp came up through the render on Tuesday and the whole field went to bloom. Where I'd laid the gilt, the black bled out in long fingers, and the paint would not stay in its lines. I stood there with a brush in each hand, half cursing, half laughing, until the foreman asked whether I meant to paint the wall or admire it.

So I did what Father taught us in the yard. I let the brush run. I flicked it at the plaster with the back of my wrist, dragged the loaded bristles down until they ran out of ink in ropes, and let each drip find its own way to the kerb. Some of them I thought ruined the job. By four o'clock the light had come round the harbour and caught a smear of rose madder I'd washed on by accident near the top, and it looked as if the sky had been underneath the whole time, waiting to be let through.

Mr Achterberg came at five with his spectacles on his nose and said nothing for a long while. Then he asked me to keep the splashes and drop the lettering altogether. He said the boats need something they can't read, something that looks like weather. I have been paid double and told to go home, but I am not going home yet. There's a bare patch of brick under the second window that wants one more stroke before the tide.

Write soon. Tell Mam I have eaten.

Yours, Tom