Dotwork tree and olive circle on the ribs

The night train lost its heating somewhere past Ealing, so I sat with my coat buttoned to the throat and read your last letter three times over. You wrote that the lime trees on Calder Row had been cut down for the new tram line, and that the stumps looked like the knuckles of a fist. I keep thinking about that. The tree you planted outside the flat in Hollis Street, the one you swore would outlive both of us, has become a stick with three leaves on it, and I am told the council is already measuring the pavement for a bench.

I have taken a room above a dye shop near the canal. At four each morning the vats are drained and the water runs green into the basin, and the colour of it is so close to the old olive oil tin on your windowsill that I stood at the glass for a long time before I could go down and buy bread. The landlady, Mrs Okafor, says the city was all fields once and that the buildings only grew up around the single oak that refused to fall. She says it still stands behind the gasworks if you know which fence to climb.

I went looking on Sunday, through the mud and the barbed wire. The oak was there, black against a sky the colour of wet slate, its crown made of nothing but gaps where the birds had been. Under it someone had left a flat stone, and on the stone sat a single green-glazed bead, the size of a pea. I have kept it in my pocket since. I am sending you half of the day, which is all I can manage in an envelope.

Write back to the dye shop address. Mrs Okafor will hold anything that arrives.

Yours, always, Tobias