Hello Kitty in owl costume on wrist

The tug came in on the high tide, three days late and listing to port, and the first thing I saw when they winched her onto the slipway was the little white cat painted on her bow. Someone had done her in the old flat colours, a red ribbon at one ear, dressed in a brown owl hood as if she meant to go out hunting the night shift. The crew called her Pudding. Nobody I asked knew why.

Pudding nearly got the ship scrapped. The harbour council wanted the hull cut up for the cold-iron stores, and half the wardens argued that a painted cat was no reason to keep a rust bucket. Old Mr Okafor, who has tended the breakwater lamp since before either of us was born, stood up at the meeting and said the owl hood was the only sensible thing anyone had put on a ship in forty years, because owls see in the dark and the sea is mostly dark. They laughed. Then they voted to let me try.

I spent a week on her with a soft brush and a pot of primer. Salt had eaten the whiskers down to nothing, and the brown of the feathers had gone grey at the edges. Under the bow plate, where the paint had flaked, I found a scratched line of numbers and a name that wasn't Pudding at all. It was Ruth Adair, and the date was the year the first long haul left the lunar yards, which would make her older than the lamp.

On the last afternoon I mixed the red again, a shade darker than the faded bow, and painted the ribbon back the way Ruth must have done it. The council sent a boy down to watch. When the tide turned they towed her out past the breakwater, and I stood on the wall with Mr Okafor until the cat in her owl hood was only a fleck of colour on the grey. He said she'd find her way back. I think he meant the ship. I hope he meant the cat.

Write when the next supply boat comes in.

All my love, Nell