Lipstick quote in script lettering

Nell Garrow had walked the high wire for eleven seasons when she stopped dead in the middle of it, forty feet over the sawdust at Scarborough, with four hundred folk gaping up and a gull caught in the tent flap. She couldn't go forward. She couldn't go back. Her hands shook so hard the balancing pole sang.

Down below stood old Vi Pemberton, who ran the candy stall and had buried two husbands and a performing bear. Vi didn't shout. She reached into her apron, pulled out a tube of lipstick the colour of a boiled sweet, and held it up like a lantern. "Put on some lipstick," she called, loud enough for the back row, "and pull yourself together, girl."

The crowd laughed, and that laugh did more for Nell than any safety net could. She took one breath, then another, and walked the last stretch as if the wire were a Sunday promenade.

That night she came to Vi's caravan with her mouth painted wide and a grin you could spot from the car park. She pressed a kiss to the old woman's cheek and left a perfect red print on the lace collar. Vi never washed that collar. It hangs in the Pemberton van to this day, and every new performer who arrives gets handed a tube and told, quite plainly, that the wire will still be there tomorrow.