Love Yourself script on a shoulder

Old Sidney Marrow had a stall on the corner of Tallow Lane for forty years, between the eel man and the woman who sold buttons by the pound. He painted shop fascias for a living, gold leaf on glass, and when the bread shop went under he took its sign down and kept the letters in a biscuit tin. Nobody came for signs in the rain. They came for him to write their names on card, in whatever hand they fancied, for a shilling a go.

One Thursday a girl stood under the eaves with her hood up and a folded note in her fist. She didn't want a name. She wanted three words in the fine running hand from the old Pelham copybooks, and she wanted them in red ink, because her gran had always signed birthday cards in red. Sidney read the note for a long time. It was in her own cramped, shaking writing, and it said only what she wanted him to write back.

He dipped the slim nib he'd kept since his schooldays and wrote it slowly so the loops would hold in the damp. The ink ran a little at the tail of the y. He didn't fix it. When he handed the card across, she read it, folded it twice and put it in her pocket, where a thing ought to be kept if you mean it. Years on, the bread letters went to the charity shop, but the red pen stayed on his stall. He'll tell you, if you buy him a tea, that the best words are the ones written for someone who has already stood out in the rain long enough.