Rose bud with infinity stem

They took the rose at Dover. The officer, a man with a sunburnt neck and a clipboard that had seen better years, turned my bag out on the bonnet of the car and found the cutting wrapped in a damp tea towel. He held it up to the strip light the way you'd hold a letter you suspected was from an old flame. "Plant material," he said. I told him it was Mum's Albertine, which is true, and that she was ninety-one and would never forgive me, which is also true.

The loop is my fault. Before the tea towel I bent the stem round the tin of Yorkshire tea so it wouldn't snap in the boot, and it set that way, a long figure of eight with the bud at the top like a full stop nobody asked for. I thought it looked daft. Dad would have said it looked like the thing a child draws when you ask for forever. The officer didn't look at it twice.

Now the rose is in a bin in Folkestone and I'm writing this on the ferry's back bench with a biro that keeps skipping. The bud was still tight when I cut it, pink at the edges like a cheek after the cold. I keep thinking about the bit where the stem comes back round to meet itself, the two green leaves on the way down, how it never quite ends where you expect.

So here is what you do. Go to the back gate in June, take a finger's length off the Albertine, and stand it in a jar of water on the kitchen windowsill. Don't tell anyone where it came from. I'll be home by Sunday and I'll bring the tin.

Love, Pip