Orchid vine across a shoulder blade

The orchid came off the last wagon in Carlisle wrapped in a tea towel, and I have not had the heart to tell Mr Ashdown it is the only thing we own that anyone would pay for. He had it from the conjuror's widow, who could not keep it after the lion died and the tent went to the scrap man. Three blooms and a bud, roots like wet string. Nobody on the lot knows how to grow them, so I have been reading the leaflet from the garden centre by torchlight, with the torch held in my teeth.

The show is down to four acts now. The elephant went in March, and the clowns have taken to doing their routine to empty benches, reciting the lines to a bored lad selling ices. Last Thursday the wind took the big top's centre pole clean out of its socket and nobody cried except Ruby, who is nine and thinks everything is a sign. She has tied a strip of red ribbon to the orchid's stem and says it will bloom when we reach the sea.

I did not tell her the truth, which is that orchids here live on bark and air, and the pot is a rusted biscuit tin with a hole punched in the bottom. Yet this morning, when the fog lifted off the caravan park, the bud had split. One petal, pale as a peach under a lamp, pushed out towards the window, as if it had been waiting all winter for somebody to open the curtain.

Love, Mags