Quote lettering on a calf

You'll laugh, but the night sister on Ward Seven has started reading aloud from that battered Tolkien of hers once the corridor goes quiet after three. Last night it was the bit about the old ranger and his tattered cloak. She reads it to the drip stands, she says, because they never interrupt.

I took the book off her at the end of my round and turned it over in my hands. Someone had written "property of Ward Seven, do not steal" on the flyleaf in biro, and someone else had crossed out steal and written borrow. I stood by the sluice with the lamp humming and thought about you out on the coast road, driving to Sunday lunches with your head full of maps.

Here is what I meant to tell you. Mr Okafor in bay three, who came in with nothing but a carrier bag and a wedding ring he'd pawned in Lewisham, watched me read the line on the cover this morning. He said he could read it upside down from his pillow, and then he recited the whole thing to me, backwards in the glass of the window, the way you'd say a prayer you'd learned as a boy. He had nothing else left to hold onto, so he had learned it by heart, one word at a time, in the dark.

I didn't correct him. I told him the lift was working again and gave him the last custard cream from my pocket. Write back soon, and tell me the coast is still there.

Love, Joe