Crescent moon over mountains and pines

The lift was out again, so I climbed the eleven floors with the shopping and your letter folded in my coat pocket. I read it on the landing by the fire door, where the window is wide enough to show the whole estate and, past the car park, a long line of hills going blue. You asked if the moon still comes over the tower. It does. Some nights it sits right in the middle of our kitchen window, pale as a bit of cut paper, and it has a face on it if you squint, eyes shut, as if it has given up on the lot of us. I've started saying goodnight to it.

Your description of Carrow Water made me put the kettle on and then forget to drink the tea. The pines coming down to the shore, the mountains standing upside down in the lake when the wind drops. Dad drew that view on the back of a bus timetable the summer before he went, do you remember? I found it in the biscuit tin with the spare keys. I've been copying it onto the back of the council's letter about the damp, which says the block is coming down in the spring and we'll be rehoused by the autumn. Nobody has said where.

So I've drawn a diamond. Mountains along the top, the lake in the middle, pines standing in it on thin black legs, and the moon at the peak with its eyes closed, keeping watch over the rest. It isn't finished. I want the trees right first. Tell Gran I'll be on the train on Saturday, and I'll bring the tin.

Love, Jen

P.S. The lift might be working by then. Don't count on it.