Small wing tattoo on an ankle

You will think I have lost my wits, but the dance hall on the pier has a new floor, sanded so pale it looks like wet slate, and on opening night Mr Hollis made everyone take their shoes off to admire it. I kept mine on. I was too busy watching the mirror ball turn and thinking of the wing you drew on my wrist the summer before you went to Leeds, the feathers stacked like the shingles on the boathouse roof, shaded light at the tip and darkening to the join.

Arthur Penrose asked me to dance during the third waltz. He mends the ferry ropes and smells of tar and oranges, and he counted the steps under his breath the way Father used to count hymns. Halfway round he stopped, reached into his coat and gave me a grey feather he had found on the slipway that morning. He said a gull that had lost one could still fly, only lopsided, and that he had thought of me. I did not know what to say, so I put it inside my glove and we went on dancing as though nothing had happened, which of course everything had.

The lights failed at half past ten. The band kept playing by the glow from the sea windows, and in that grey half-light nobody could see whose feet were whose. We danced until the caretaker came in with his torch and shouted for us to go home. I walked the long way along the rail with the feather in my glove and it did not feel lopsided at all.

I am enclosing it now, pressed flat between two pages of this letter. Keep it safe for me, and do not draw anything on it.

Love, June