Daruma doll with grey waves

The daruma is still on the bar at the Crown Ballroom, where you left it. Mr Okada came in on Tuesday to ask whether anyone had touched it, because he says a daruma with one eye painted is a promise, and a promise sitting on a shelf gathers dust. I told him you had painted the left eye the night the band got the Saturday booking, and that the right was still white. He said that was the correct order. Then he sat on his stool and stared at the little red fellow, scowl and beard and all, as if it had already decided he was wrong.

The dancers don't understand the waiting. They want the floor full and the lights low and the trumpet loud enough to hurt. Last Saturday a sailor from the Wilson Line asked me for a foxtrot, and I said no, which I never do. I was thinking about your hands on the brush, steady as a bus conductor's, and how you wouldn't let me watch in case I breathed on the paint.

The sea has been coming up the Humber all week, grey and frilled at the edges, and the bandstand floor smells of brine and Brylcreem. Every time the door opens the wind lifts the posters off the wall, and I think of those waves you drew around the doll, hooked and hatched, as if they were trying to climb in.

I'll paint the right eye myself when the rooms are full again. Until then the daruma keeps watch over the bottles and the bandstand, and I keep your name pinned beside the gold characters on its belly, so the wish has somewhere to sit. Come home and finish it.

Your sister, Ruth