Solar system planets down the spine

Mr Pryce has finally hung the orrery in the Methodist hall, and the planets go down the back wall on fine wire, smallest at the top and largest in the middle where the light from the high window falls. Saturn is the one everybody stops at, with its ring tipped the way the real one is tipped, so the children think someone careless has bent it and nobody has bothered to fix it.

I have been given the job of dusting them on Thursdays. Jupiter is the worst, all those brown and tan bands gone the colour of weak tea, and I go over them with a soft brush and the tin of Brasso Mrs Hale keeps under the stage. Mars is painted the rusty orange of a bus shelter in February. Pluto is grey and no bigger than a pea, and Mr Pryce says it may not count as a planet at all by the time these children are grown, which seems a poor thing to tell anyone about the edge of anything.

On Thursday the baker's boy, Dennis Ash, asked whether the wire ran right through each of them. I told him it only hangs from them, and he looked at me as if I had lied. After he had gone I stood under the row for a long while, trying to decide which one I would have been, and found I did not want to be any of them. I wanted to be the wire.

I left the back door open so the lamps from the Co-op window could reach the wall. When I locked up, Saturn was still turning very slightly on its line, the way it does for a while after someone has walked beneath it.

Your loving sister, Joan