Script quote on a forearm

She carried it up on deck in the grey light and pressed it flat against the rail while the wind tried to take it. Below her the engine thudded on, and a bosun was swearing at a loose lashing somewhere forward. Her father had signed on as a ship's carpenter the spring the Hull mill closed, and for a year he had written to her mother every fortnight from ports she could barely pronounce. Those letters had stopped at Montevideo. This one had never been posted.

The purser would want it burned, or handed over, or left where it lay. Instead Hettie folded it along its old creases, found a pencil stub in her apron pocket, and wrote beneath her father's line in her own careful hand: I have read this. I am going to find out what you meant to cross out.

At Valparaíso she walked the harbour wall for three days, asking every carpenter she passed for a man called Tom Rowe. On the fourth morning a stevedore with sawdust in his beard looked at the paper, then at her, and tapped the ink with a blunt thumb. Whatever you were going to say, he told her, he never got round to saying it. She sat down on a bollard and read the line again, slower this time, until the sun came off the water and she could see it clearly.