Biting lips tattoo on a forearm

They kept me four hours at the crossing above the river, long enough to learn that a border stamp makes a sound like a small door closing. The officer who held my passport had a habit of pressing his mouth shut whenever he read a surname aloud, as if the letters might get out before he was ready. He did it to mine, twice. I sat on the plastic chair with my hands in my lap and said nothing, because you always said my silence was a kind of argument, and I wanted, just once, to win one.

The rain gave him an excuse to be slow. Outside, lorries idled in lines that bent back on themselves like a sum nobody could finish. A girl with a yellow rucksack was sent back for a form she had already filled in, and she bit her bottom lip so hard I thought it would bleed. I knew that look. It is what your face does when it has agreed to be quiet for everyone's sake.

When my turn came he looked at the photograph, then at me, then down at the page again. He asked why I was going to Split. I told him the truth: to take Nana's ring to the jeweller who sold her the first one, because the stone had come loose. He nodded slowly and stamped the page, and for a second his mouth opened as if he wanted to say something kind. Then he closed it, pushed the passport back across the counter, and I understood that some kindness is only a pause held between the teeth.

I am on the coach now, writing with the pen you gave me. The fields outside are shaded in long grey strokes, like someone who could not decide how dark to make the hills. I have decided. I am not going to tell you what I said to him in my head. Some things stay in the mouth, and I have kept mine shut all the way here.