Cupcake tattoo on a finger

The fair pulled into Cleethorpes on Tuesday under a sky the colour of wet newspaper, and by dusk the generator was humming and the bulbs were strung along the midway, so every stall looked as if it was sweating gold. I have the cake stall now, the one Dad used to run under the striped awning. Mrs Okafor left it to me when her hip gave out, along with a tin of cherries in syrup that has outlived two husbands, or so she claims.

Business has been slow. The lads from the dodgems want chips, not sponge. But on Thursday a little girl came up to the counter with her mother, pointed at the pink ones with a finger sticky from the candyfloss, and asked if the cherry on top was real. I told her it was the best cherry in Lincolnshire. Her mother paid for two and the girl ate hers sitting on the kerb, frosting on her chin, watching the big wheel tip its gondolas into the dark.

Yesterday a man in a paper crown bought the whole last tray for his wife's birthday and asked me to pipe her name in green. I did it badly, the G came out like a hook, and he loved it all the same. He said that was the trouble with anything made by hand. It always had a bit of wonky in it, and that was how you knew somebody had been there.

I've kept the final cherry in the tin for you. When the fair moves on to Skegness, come and see me before the caravans leave, and we'll split it on the back steps like we used to, under the bulbs, with the frying onions drifting over from the burger van.

Love, Eve