Watercolour hand and face design with flowers

The lock at Hopwood has been closed three days and the water in the cut has gone the colour of stewed tea, so Mr Okafor and I are tied up under the willows with nothing to do but wait for the lock-keeper to stop shouting at the ducks. I have taken to drawing in the evenings. The paper is cheap and soaks up the water-colours in a way I cannot control, so every page comes out blurred at the edges, like something remembered rather than seen.

Yesterday I painted a hand lifted up beside a face with its eyes shut, and a spray of marigolds across the crown like a crown of its own. Your mother would say it is morbid. I think it is only a woman listening to the river. You can hear the whole valley at night if you keep still: the bargemen's dogs, the pump house, the slow knock of the hull against the piling. I shut my own eyes to hear it properly and then I lose my nerve and open them, and the amber paint always catches the lamp so that the picture looks back at me.

Mr Okafor says the barge will be sold in spring, and I have not told him I am glad. I had thought I would hate leaving the cut, but the truth is I am tired of being the one who always knows where the next lock is. I have written the name we gave the boat on the inside of my wrist in biro, the way you used to write telephone numbers on your hand before you had a book. It has rubbed nearly off. Come up in April if you can. I will show you the picture properly, and you can tell me whether the lettering on the knuckles says what I meant it to say.

Love, Bea