Ornamental back tattoos in black ink

The big top came down in Thetford on Tuesday and I stood in the mud watching the men fold the flies like sheets off a bed. Harrow wanted the proscenium panels in the van before the rain, so I rolled them myself. Two canvases, eleven feet each, the ones we painted the winter you left. He calls them mirror panels, though nobody in the company could tell the left from the right. You always said the feathers would look like wings once the lamps caught them, and they have, every night since, over the heads of the trapeze girls.

Harrow sold the left-hand panel to a man from Ipswich who wants it for a garden wall. The roundel with the paisley bloom in its centre, the scrolls curling off the edge like smoke. He asked me to sign it. I said the paint was already signed, in the pattern, the way we always did: a hatched band here, a spiral there, a leaf that doubled back on itself. Anyone who knew us would read it. He didn't know us. He thought the curls were decoration and paid in ten-pound notes that smelled of his car.

The right-hand panel I kept. It's under my cot now, rolled round a broom handle, and some nights I unroll the top foot and run my thumb along the stepped bands of black, the ones you took so long to get even. The feathers still look right to me when the light is low.

I've told Harrow we're finished with the ring at Thetford, and that the wagons go north in March whether or not anyone pays us. Come up before then. Bring the good brushes and the ochre tin. Stand on the other side of the stage and tell me which of those wings you painted and which one I did, because I have forgotten, and you are the only one left who wouldn't lie to me about it.

Your sister, Nell