Blue ink and watercolour wave

The man from Margate came on Tuesday with his van and his tape measure, and he wanted the sea cloth. Not the poles or the ladder or the old Bedford, just the wave, thirty foot of it, hung behind the high platform since before you were born. He said it would look nice on a pub wall. I told him Dad painted it with a yard brush and a tin of Indian ink he kept for the posters, and he laughed as if I'd made that up.

The spatter is the part I keep thinking about. Dad flicked the brush at the crest every time he was pleased with a curl, so the top of the wave is freckled with black dots, and the blue washes run into each other where the rain got in that winter at Boston Fair. Mum's ledger says we lost a fortnight to the damp, and he painted the spray over the mildew instead of starting again. That was the kind of man he was.

Last night I unpegged the cloth and folded it on the trestle by the light of the generator. It smelt of sawdust and wet canvas. When I held the curl up against the lamp, the ink lines looked like something moving under the water, and for a moment the whole tent felt like the bottom of a harbour.

I'm not selling it. I'm taking it to winter quarters in your van, rolled round the old pole, and when the rest of us have packed up you can hang it in your flat where there is a proper wall. Bring the tin of brushes too.

Love, Ruth