Red and green flower cluster on upper back

The brush lives in a tin on the back shelf, next to the jar of teal paint that Dad mixed himself in the year the Christmas fair flooded. He made paper dahlias for that fair, flat petals with a dot of red at the centre, and he said a good bloom should look like it had been argued into existence. I still use his brush every morning to flick the beads of rain off the real stems before anyone can see them. It is soft and a little bent, and it leaves nothing behind but a cleaner shine.

A man in a yellow cagoule stopped at the stall just before nine, shaking water from his hood like a dog. He wanted something for his wife, he said, because it was their anniversary and she had gone quiet about the flat they could not afford. I pulled out the last bunch of sprigs, green leaves and little red berries, and he squinted at them and asked if they were real. I told him they were, mostly. He laughed and said his wife had asked him the same question under this very awning six years ago, when he had been too shy to buy her anything at all.

He paid in coins, damp and warm from his pocket. I wrapped the stems in brown paper and, because my hand was already moving, I dabbed one more red dot on the corner of the parcel with the tip of Dad's brush. He grinned at it as if I had given him a secret, and walked off into the rain with his hood up and the flowers held out in front of him like a lantern.