Phoenix tattoo across shoulder and upper arm

The rain has not let up since Tuesday, and the stalls on Gerrard Lane have pulled their awnings down to the gutters. I am writing this under the counter of Mr Pang's fish shop, where he lets me sit out of the wet with the lamp lit, because something happened yesterday that I cannot tell properly to anyone here. A man came in with two old silk screens rolled under his arm. He wanted them gone for the price of a kettle. Mr Pang laughed at him, then stopped laughing, because the screen on top showed a bird rising out of smoke, its wings opened wide enough to fill the whole frame, its tail trailing green as bamboo and blue as the harbour in August.

The man said his grandmother had painted it the winter the warehouse burned down on the quay. She used the last of her turquoise pigment and a red she had mixed from crushed lacquer, and she never explained why the bird had no face, only a crest of orange flame and a long feathered throat that curled back over the shoulder like a question. He said she kept it folded in a drawer for forty years and would not let anyone hang it. Her funeral was on Friday, and he had decided, standing in the rain with the screens getting heavier, that a bird should not be carried around by a man who could not look at it.

Mr Pang paid him in coins from the till. I watched the man count them twice and then tuck them away without a word, as though he had been waiting all week for someone to take the weight off him. Afterwards Mr Pang propped the screen against the back wall, above the ice boxes, where the lamp catches the feathers. The clouds in the corner have gone almost black with age, and the bird seems to lean out of them, wings lifting a little more each time the door opens.

Come in the spring, when the rain stops. I want you to see it before the damp takes the red.