Quote tattoos on the forearm

Our wagon was the last of the old green ones, lettered with gold that had faded to the colour of weak tea. Every winter I touched up the letters, and every winter Pell said there was no money for paint. My sister Nell had gone to Blackpool with the performing dogs. The rest had scattered to council flats and a caravan park outside Rhyl, and the postcards stopped coming by Easter.

Pip, the little girl who rode the grey pony, found me on the step with a tin of size and a brush. She asked where we would live now, and I said we would live where we always had, which was wherever the wagons stopped. She frowned at the panel I was working on and read it aloud, slowly, the way she read everything. 'Home is where your heart is.' Then she said it was a daft thing to paint on a wagon that would never stay anywhere long enough to find out.

I dipped the brush and did the second line in the thin hand Father used for the ticket board: You have no idea what you have to look forward to. I told her the wagon would go to a scrapyard in Bristol and rot in the rain, and that paint outlasts the people who ordered it. She didn't look up. She was already writing her own name in the corner, the way the old ones did.