'Butterfly' by Mary Thompson

‘Come on with me, Auntie, please,’ says my niece, her words drowned out by the screech of seagulls.

‘I threw up the last time I went on a ride.’

‘But my dad has just died,’ she says.

So ten minutes later we’re up there whizzing round and round, and I see flashes of sea and neon and the metallic pink of my sister’s jacket, and taste cappuccino and strawberry ice cream in my mouth.

I think back to the last time we were in Brighton; how we shoved our heads through a photo stand-in featuring 1920’s characters clad in stripy swimsuits and a slogan saying, ‘Brighton up your Day,’ and how we got fish and chips in that restaurant in Regency Square and a gull swept down, its mammoth wings embracing the whole table and how my niece screamed when it disappeared with her battered cod, and how, down in the Lanes we found a woman in sparkly jewellery with soulful eyes painting children’s faces, and how my niece pulled at my hand and said, ‘Auntie, can I have mine done too?’ And how my sister and I watched the hypnotic movement of the lady’s slender brush as she painted swirly lines of pink, teal and white all over my niece’s tiny face and how she giggled as she gazed into the lady’s chipped mirror and shrieked, ‘I’m a butterfly, I’m a butterfly!’

And I remind her of this as we’re marooned there above the pier, our feet dangling in the air.

‘I don’t remember any of that,’ she says.

‘It was only ten years ago,’ I say, ‘but I guess you were too young.’

‘I guess so,’ she says, gazing out across the sea. Then as we begin to move, she says, ‘but I wish I could remember.’