Swirling bird and leaf vine line design

The big top came down in Carlisle on Tuesday, folded like a wet sheet, and Mr Varga cried into the sawdust while the ringmaster counted the takings twice. I am writing from the back of the lorry because there is nowhere else left to write.

You asked about the swallow act. Ivy still flies it, though there are only two of them now, Pim and the Dutch girl, and the net beneath them sags where the cable was patched with baling twine. Last Thursday, in an empty hall in Penrith, they took the drop anyway. Ivy caught Pim by the wrist at the top of the swing and the whole rig groaned like a ship's timber. Nobody clapped. Pim laughed so hard she missed the next pass and we all pretended not to see.

Afterwards Ivy brought me the old trunk and lifted out the tailcoat the swallows used to wear, stitched with long curling lines of green silk. Vines ran down the sleeves and ended in little pointed leaves, and the bird itself was worked across the back in one unbroken line, its tail forked like a pair of scissors. The designer had drawn every curl on a single sheet so the seamstress wouldn't have to guess. Ivy had kept the sketch folded inside the lining all these years. She asked if I knew anyone who could still read a pattern like that.

I said I'd ask. I haven't. I've been sitting here with the sketch on my knee, following the bird's tail with my thumb from the first loop to the last, and wondering whether the lines were meant to end or simply to stop where the paper ran out. Ivy is off to Lisbon in the spring, where a man with a tent has promised her a winter's work. I think she'll go. Burn this if it embarrasses you.

Love, Tomas