Blue and pink ribbon on a foot

Morag Ferrie came in on the Thursday, the way she came in every Thursday, to sit on the stool by the buttons and tell you the weather was turning. She put her palm flat on the counter beside the spool and didn't touch it. "That's the one," she said. "Cut me a length the width of a finger, and not a stitch wider." You measured it against the brass rule and asked how long she needed. "Long enough to go round the rail of the boat twice and still have a tail for the wind."

She explained it over tea in the back room, where the kettle takes its time. Her son's boy had gone south for the winter and hadn't written, and the colours were the ones on a leaflet a clinic on the mainland had sent her, the same pair she had pinned to her coat for a year when her sister was poorly. She didn't want a speech. She wanted the swirls to count for something. You had already noticed she'd picked the length with the most curls.

On Friday you walked down to the pier with the ribbon folded in your coat pocket and tied it to the rail as the boat drew in. The wind caught the tail and lifted it straight out over the harbour, blue then pink, and held it there while the crew shouted about mooring lines. Morag watched from the bench with both hands in her lap. Then she stood, and the ribbon was lifting and falling out past the harbour wall like a gull that had forgotten how to land.