Bicycle, heart and flowers with DAD banner on thigh

Ted Marsh rode a black roadster round the ring of the Fenwick Travelling Circus for thirty-one summers. Old Ma Dorrit painted flowers on its handlebars the year he joined, orange petals edged with teal and green, the sort of bloom you'd find on a fairground ride or a sailor's chest. She painted a red heart on the ring curtain behind him so every child in the front row thought it was meant for them. He never fell off. Not once in thirty-one years, not even the night the lion got into the costume box.

The trouble came with the new motorway and the council men with their clipboards. Crowds thinned to a few dozen on a wet Saturday, then to nobody at all in the fields outside Hartlow. The animals went to sanctuaries, the band went to the pub, and Ted's daughter Marion, who had sold tickets from a card table since she could count, sat in the cold with her ledger and did sums that never came out right.

On the last night the big top sagged under a wind off the marsh and only forty people came to watch it fall. Ted rode anyway. Marion had painted a strip of tin from the old wagon, and it read DAD in careful grey letters, screwed to the crossbar so the children could read it from the back row. He went round three times, slow as a funeral, and the front wheel never once wobbled.

Marion kept the tin. It hangs above the kettle in her caravan now, with a dent where the bicycle hit the ring post, and every morning she taps it on her way past, as if to check he is still there.