Script quote tattoo along the side of the hip

You will laugh, but I have spent the whole week thinking about Mr Halloran and the card I wrote out for him at the crossing. He came through the lane with a tin trunk and a lorry that coughed at every bump, and he wanted a stamp on a form that would let him sell the lot to a dealer in Calais. The form did not need my opinion. He asked me, though, to write something on the back so he could keep it, so I wrote it out in my good hand, slanting the letters the way Mother taught us. Four lines. He read them aloud twice and laughed at the last.

Then he signed for eleven pounds. Eleven. I watched him count the notes under the lamp, watched his mouth go flat, and I thought about my own sentence going round in my head like a moth at a window.

He came back on Thursday. Not for the paper and not for money. The dealer had offered forty, then twenty-five, then nothing at all, because the lorry had died in the car park at Coquelles and he had walked the road with the trunk on his shoulder for two miles. He set it down on my counter and said I had been right about the form. I had not been right about anything. I had only copied it out.

I have pinned his card above the kettle, where the steam has softened the ink at the edges. Most mornings I read it while the water boils, and most mornings I am still deciding what I deserve.

Your sister, Joan