Japanese bird and cloud design on shoulder

The rain has come sideways across the fish market since Tuesday, and Mr Okada has pulled his shutter down twice because the cloud sat on the harbour wall like a lid. You'd hate it. You'd be under the awning swearing at the gutters. Yesterday I sold the last of the lacquered boxes to a man in a grey mac who wanted a bird on the lid, any bird, he didn't mind which. I told him the one he wanted was the eagle off the old screen, the one you tried to copy in biro on the back of the price list when you were nine and still believed you could draw anything.

Okada keeps that screen wrapped in a blanket behind the scales. When he unrolled it for me on Thursday, the bird came out of the dust with its feathers stacked like roof tiles, grey where the light fell and blue-black where it didn't, and its head turned back over one shoulder as if someone had called its name from the street. Under one foot, a cloud curled up in a long slow spiral, the kind you'd see painted on a bathroom wall and never think about. He told me the bird only flies in weather. He said it's the bird that comes down when the boats are late, to look for them.

I asked him whether he'd ever sold it. He laughed and said nobody had ever asked the right question. Then he gave me a stencil he'd cut from the old pattern, the wing tracing out a shape like a blade, and told me to keep it for the day I stopped pretending I was only minding the till.

I've pinned it above the till now, next to the tide timetable. The rain is running down the glass and the claw is hooked over the edge of the cloud, holding on. Come home when the weather lifts. Mum says you owe her a phone call and I owe you a cup of tea that's gone cold by now.

Love, Ruth