Endless love script on a finger

You asked if I'm still on the wire. I am, in the yard behind the depot, twelve feet up with nobody to catch me but Joss, who holds the guy-line and counts under his breath like a man at bingo. He's been mending the spangled costumes in the evenings, bent over Peg's old machine, and he has stopped pretending the thread doesn't matter. On the inside of the wagon door, where the paint is cracking, he has written endless love in the same curly hand as our handbills. Peg put it there the summer they married, a joke she said the rain would wash off before the wagon did. The rain hasn't won yet.

Saturday's audience was eleven people and a dog that wouldn't leave the second row. When Hallam read out the Skegness dates like a sentence from a judge, Joss got up, folded the last jacket over his arm and told him he was taking the machine to Hull, to a tailor on Anlaby Road who needs somebody with steady hands. He asked if I'd come. I said I'd think about it. I haven't stopped thinking since.

So tonight I chalked my feet in the yard, the way I did when I was nine, and walked the wire to the far pole with the lamp swinging behind me and nothing under me but cold grass. Halfway across I stopped and looked at the wagon door, at those two curly words catching the light, and I understood I'd been waiting for a net that was never coming. I finished the walk. Put the kettle on, Ruth. I'll be on the first bus, and I'll bring the spangles.