Red rose on a thigh

The big top came down on Tuesday in a wind off the Fens, and we lost half the rigging before the last matinee was done. Dad sat on an upturned crate in the mud and watched the canvas go as if it were a stranger's house burning. Mrs Okafor's ponies have gone to a farm near Ely, and the clowns are taking shifts at a garden centre in Huntingdon. I still have the rose you sent from Brighton, pressed flat in the biscuit tin, though it has darkened to the colour of old brick.

I walked out last night to the field where the ring used to stand. Someone has left a bottle of cider and a fold of programmes that still say Hartley's Grand Revue in gold. The posters have gone soft with rain. I stood on the patch of sawdust that never washes out and remembered what Daria used to say about the flyer: the letting go happens in the head long before the hands move. I think Dad let go before anybody asked him to.

Under the caravan step I found a cardboard box of Mum's costume scraps, and in it a crimson silk rosette, the sort she pinned to her hat for the Christmas parade. It is folded tight, its centre tucked in on itself like a bud that never opened. I have pinned it inside my coat, over the place where my heart keeps time.

Tell the others that if the fields dry out in spring, we might put up a small tent of a thing and sell tickets to whoever still wants to see a rose in a field. Write soon, and tell me the sea is as grey as you promised.

Your sister, Nell