Heart padlock, key and flowers on upper arm

The rain has not let up since Tuesday, and Mr Okafor's pitch on the Saturday market has become a lake under the canvas. I am writing this on the back of a price card because my paper went to pulp in my coat. You will laugh, but I sold my first real piece of work today: a heart padlock, red as a pillar box, with a keyhole like a wink, and beside it a little gold key that Mr Okafor says his grandfather cast in Lagos. I had been polishing that key for an hour when the woman came.

She did not want the padlock. She wanted the key, and she wanted it tied with pink ribbon in a bow she made herself, fingers gone blue with cold. She said her husband had taken to locking every drawer in his workshop, so she had decided to be the one who held the spare. I did not ask whether he had lost the first key. Some things a locksmith learns to leave on the bench.

Then she asked me to hold the padlock steady while she worked the bow, and the rain ran off the brim of her hat onto the flowers I had painted on the card, blue petals with pink centres, and she laughed and said they looked like they had been dropped in marmalade. I laughed too. When she walked off towards the bus stop she left one curl of pink ribbon on the trestle table, and I have pinned it to the card above the till, where it will stay until you come and tell me what it means.