Matching sisters heart tattoos on forearms

The ward is quiet tonight apart from Mr Okafor's monitor, which keeps chirping like a dropped spoon in a sink. I have been sitting at the nurses' station with your last postcard propped against the kettle, the one with the lighthouse on it, and I keep reading the line where you said the gulls at Sumburgh sound like someone laughing at a joke they will not explain.

Mum rang at ten. She wanted to know whether you had got the parcel, and I said yes because I did not want to explain that the parcel was the thing I could not carry across the car park without setting it down twice. Inside was the good tin of shortbread and the jumper with the hole in the elbow, which I have mended with navy wool. I hope you do not mind the colour. I ran out of grey somewhere around the second sleeve.

Something happened at three. A man in bay four asked me to write his name on his arm in biro, because he was frightened of forgetting it when he woke, so I wrote it in curls the way we used to loop the S on our school bags. Afterwards I sat in the sluice room with the door shut and laughed until I cried, because you would have said I had turned a clinical record into a doodle, and you would have been right.

The sun comes up over the car park at a quarter to seven. I will be on the bus by half past, and you will be asleep on the other side of the sea, which is close enough. Write when the boat comes in and tell me which scroll you are on, and I will tell you mine. Love, Nell