Blue cloud sleeve on an arm

The bus gave up at a place called Coyle Junction, which is a petrol pump, a water tank and one wind-bent tamarisk, so I have been sitting in its shade for three hours writing to you on the back of a timetable. The driver says the part will come on Thursday. Nobody believes him, including the goats.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon counting clouds, which I had not done since we lay on the cricket pitch at Hollins End. Out here there are none for days, and then one arrives like a rumour, piling up over the ridge in flat blue slabs before tearing open so the light comes through in pieces. Their shadows walk across the sand faster than a man can run. I tried to draw one in my notebook and gave up. The blue never came out right. It always looked watered down.

Aziz, who drives the water lorry, says the clouds belong to the old road, the one the government paved and then abandoned, and that if you whistle at the right one it will drop enough rain to fill a bucket. I did not whistle. I did let him give me a lift to the next town with the goats, which is how I come to be writing this from a stranger's porch instead of the tamarisk. His daughter wants to be a pilot. She showed me a map with every cloud she has ever seen marked in red biro.

I have decided I am not going home until I have seen a cloud cover the whole sky from edge to edge, the way they do over the sea. Aziz says that happens in March, so I will stay for March. Tell Mum the bus was late, not me. Keep the cricket bat oiled. The next cloud is coming in over the ridge now, and I can feel the air turn cool on my hands. Love, Nell.