Matryoshka doll and rose tattoo

The parcel came off the Riga boat on Tuesday with your handwriting smudged across the customs label, and inside it was the doll, wrapped in a page of the Shipping Gazette. Mrs Okonedo at the post office said it had been three weeks in a hold somewhere between Gdansk and here, and it still smelled of tar and salt. I have set her on the windowsill over the sink, where the gull keeps watch.

You said to open her, so I did. Red headscarf, black apron, a rose the size of a fist painted across her middle. Inside sits a smaller one, and inside that another, all the way down to a wooden pea no bigger than a button, which I nearly lost down the drain. Seven of them. You counted the seven aloud on the quay the day you left, as though one might go missing in the crossing. I thought it a joke at the time. Now I see you meant it as a promise to bring them back in order.

The rose on the apron is the same pink as the ribbon I wore to the dance hall the spring we met. Your mother would have called it vulgar. I think it is the only colour that survived the hold. Yesterday I walked out to the harbour wall and counted the masts coming in, and when the Halcyon's grey funnel finally cleared the breakwater I lifted the smallest doll so the sun caught her painted face.

Come home the right way round, my love, from the largest to the smallest. I will be waiting at the top of the stairs.