Sun tattoo on a wrist with hair ties

The dodgems are shut for the rain and I am sitting on an upturned crate behind the candyfloss van, writing this on the back of a raffle book because I have no paper left. You will laugh, but Mr Pascoe finally let me repaint the sun on the big wheel. Forty years it has been a blank yellow disc with the paint peeling off in strips, and this year I took the little brush and went round every ray by hand, one at a time, in cream so pale it looks like the light has got into the wood.

Sunny Dyer came up to watch and said the rays looked like they were moving. I told her it was the wind. She tied three of her hair ties around her wrist, the yellow one, the green sparkly one and the leopard one she swears is the only lucky thing she owns, and she went off to sell tickets with her arm held up like she was waving at the sky.

Here is what I did not tell her. Pascoe's father painted the first sun in 1961, the summer the wheel came over from Margate, and he used the last of the cream that was meant for the church hall. Nobody ever asked what it was for. I keep thinking about that when the rain stops and the light comes slanting through the stalls, and every wet ray on the gondola catches fire at once.

Come down before the season ends. I will leave the lower gondola unlocked.

Love, Iris