Animal eye with savanna scene on forearm

The 4.40 from Carlisle came in forty minutes late last night, and in the goods yard behind the signal box stood a crate with the cat in it. Mr Hollis from the travelling menagerie swore it was a leopard, though to me it looked like a shadow with a bad temper. The lads wouldn't go near it. Being on nights, I took the bucket of water out myself, because somebody had to and nobody else was daft enough.

I crouched by the slats with my lamp, and the cat turned its head and looked at me with one eye, the pupil a black slit down the middle of the gold. In that gold I could see a whole country, small as a pea. There was a ridge with an elephant walking along it, a few bare thorn trees, and a pale sun sinking over grass taller than a man. I thought of the painted backdrop Mr Hollis keeps folded in the van, the one with the waterhole that's always half peeled off at the corners. This was better than paint. This was real grass in a real evening, and the cat had carried it about in its head all the way from wherever it was born.

I talked to it for the length of a cup of tea. I told it about the signal lamps, the 5.10 to Leeds that always runs early, and how the gulls fight over the chip paper on platform two. When the 1.20 went through, the cat lifted its head towards the window, and the light from the carriages slid across its eye like a train going over a bridge. It didn't blink once.

I've asked Hollis to leave the crate door open a crack on the next run, so it can see the sky before they take it south. He says it won't come out, and he may be right. I've drawn the eye for you on the back of a spare timetable, with the elephant as best I could manage. Keep it somewhere dry.

Your loving sister, Nell