Snowflakes with blue and purple wash on ribs

Harrow Court had nine blocks of lifts that worked on a good day and a stairwell that smelled of wet coats. The winter the snow came in November and never left, old Mrs Okonedo on the fourteenth floor said the flats were full of paper. Her grandson Kit had cut snowflakes from the back of his school folders, fold after fold, and stuck them on every window facing the car park. Nobody asked him to. He just could not stop.

One night the power failed and the lift stuck between seven and eight. Kit sat on the floor of the cage with a torch in his teeth and counted the flakes he had stuck inside the door. Eleven purple ones, he said, six blue, and one that was only lines, because he had cut it wrong and would not throw it away. That was the one, Mrs Okonedo always said, that carried them all down. Its arms were open and nothing was filled in, so whatever colour came up the stairwell could pass straight through it.

When the engineer came up at four in the morning the lift was empty. The uncoloured flake lay on the floor, damp, with a scuff of trainer across one arm. Kit had gone down the stairs, counting. Mrs Okonedo kept that flake in her coat for thirty years, and some of the colour is still in it, if you hold it up to the light.

So that is why nobody on the fourteenth floor throws out a bit of paper. Now, who wants the ginger biscuits?