Colours

It's cold again, and according to the weather forecast there's a chance of snow. A few months ago they were saying this would be a very cold winter, but it hasn't turned out that way, and we've already got one foot in Spring. The days are getting longer again.

My cousin June took her kids, Daisy and Graham, to the park in the Autumn. They walked along the paths in the bright sun, a strong breeze blowing the leaves all around them. Daisy had a book about birds. They looked at the birds in the trees and compared them to photos in the book.

"That one looks just like the one on page ten," Graham said as he pointed at a bird.

"I don't know," Daisy said. "His eyes look slightly more sinister."

"No, it's him alright. He has that little bit of yellow."

"I don't know."

They left the park and walked along the footpaths to where the car was parked. June drove to her parents' house. My cousin Hugh was there. His fiancee, Annabel, was talking to Aunt Bridget about the weather. The news was on the TV, but the volume was low. A news reader in glasses read from a sheet of paper, a serious, monotonous voice. Annabel heard a few words of it when she looked over towards the window.

Hugh was in an attic room with June's sister, Rachel, and her friend Sarah. The room was being re-decorated, and Rachel was showing them some of the colours she was thinking of using on the walls. She had painted lots of different colour samples on one wall. "I love that grey," she said.

"It's not exactly a 'colour'," Hugh said.

"On its own it wouldn't be much of a colour, but it goes so well with the blue."

The volume was still turned down on the TV below. There was a photo of a bird behind the news reader's shoulder.

Rachel's brother, Ronan, was in the back garden with his friend Matt. They watched the leaves and confetti swirling around on the breeze.

"Is that confetti?" Matt said.

"It looks like it."

"Why would there be confetti on the breeze with the leaves?"

"That's the question to be answered alright. And there has to be an answer if you just ask some other quewstions... I'm going to solve this one just like that woman in 'Murder, She Wrote' would solve it."

June took Daisy and Graham to visit the ruins of a castle. A tour guide showed them around the place, but there wasn't much to see. "As you can see, it's basically just the ruins of a castle," the tour guide said. "And that there is just a fence, and that's a fence, and so is that, and that was a fence until someone... I don't know what they did to that." She stopped to look at a plane pass by overhead.

"Can you tell us any more about the history of the place?" June said.

"History. Yeah... There once was a sailor..."

"Is that him?" Graham said and pointed at a sailor in the field.

"I don't know."

"Will we ask him?"

"No."

Rachel, Sarah and Hugh stood in a concrete courtyard near a tall building. Sarah was wearing a light blue coat. Her make-up contained many different shades of blue. She stared straight ahead, with the sun on the side of her face. A few grey clouds passed through the sky above.

"That's not bad," Hugh said. "But it's not going to look so good in the room."

The TV was still on, but Annabel spent an hour looking at her fingers and hands against the light of the window. Then she noticed that her engagement ring was missing. She was sure she had it on earlier. She wondered how she could have lost it while she was looking at her hands all the time.

Ronan had drawn the chalk outline of a wedding cake on the concrete outside the back door. It included the outline of the tiny plastic couple on the top. It seemed like the sort of place where the woman on 'Murder, She Wrote' would start her investigations, but it didn't help Ronan. He went back inside and stood in the hall, in silence apart from the sound of the wind outside the door. He looked up at the ceiling in the shade way above, and he remembered seeing a dance in the library. He had meant to ask about that at the time, but he forgot.

He wrote a letter to the library that said: "What's with the dance?" As he wrote the address on the envelope, he could hear the sound of the television and Annabel's voice as she told him about her ring.

Rachel, Sarah and Hugh stood in an empty car park at the side of a quite road. The breeze carried the dust and the smell of perfume. They looked out over the fields. The three of them were wearing green coats. June, Daisy and Graham were there too. The kids were wearing green sun visors with the words 'Ruins of a castle' in white.

"We should have asked the sailor," Graham said.

Ronan looked out the window, throwing the chalk in the air and catching it again. His mother said to him, "Did you post that letter to the library?"

"No."

Matt smiled. There were stamps all over his face.

Ronan threw the chalk in the air again. "The ring!" he said, and forgot about catching the chalk. "Annabel said something about losing her engagement ring. And we saw confetti on the breeze. You wouldn't need to be the woman in 'Murder, She Wrote' to spot the wedding link there."

Ronan went to Annabel and told her about the confetti, the ring, the chalk outline of the wedding cake and 'Murder, She Wrote'. When he finished talking, she got the impression that he was waiting for her to respond, but she didn't know what to say. She looked around for inspiration. She picked up a sheet of paper, but it was blank. She looked at it anyway.

"Good afternoon," she said. "My diamond engagement ring has inexplicably disappeared, somewhere in the vicinity of the living room. The ring was reported missing earlier today. Its owner is said to be upset, yet hopeful of its imminent return. She appreciates all the support she's received. Efforts to find the ring have already begun. And now the weather."

Ronan's brother, Alan, had gone into town with his girlfriend, Sonia. She arrived back on her own, and Ronan told her about the engagement ring and the confetti. "And there's the chalk outline of the wedding cake too," he said. "Although I did draw that one myself."

"Yeah. I know this might sound a bit... odd. But Alan has just agreed to do a modern dance."

"He did what?" Ronan said, and a piece of chalk landed on his head.

"Y' see, he only did it to get out of a play he agreed to do. It's Shakespeare. I think he was supposed to play one of those people who jump around a lot. He agreed to do the modern dance to get out of that because he thought it would be easy to find a way out of the dance. But when I left him he was wearing a leotard."

"Forget about the confetti and the ring. This is where we've got to focus all of our attention now: forming a plan to get Alan out of the modern dance."

Ronan used a blackboard to outline his plan. He drew an escape route with the chalk. "We just need someone to distract the choreographer while we lead Alan away."

Graham hadn't been listening to what Ronan was saying, but he said, "You should ask the sailor."

"The sailor?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah well I'll bear that in mind."

"Do." Graham nodded.

But Alan had a plan to get out of the dance himself. During the rehearsal he stood at the end of a line of dancers. This was the same dance group that performed in the library. The choreographer said, "I'll need an extra special effort from you. And you, and you and you and you too. Aww, a little bunny."

Alan ran away when she went towards the bunny, but it was just a cardboard cut-out of a rabbit. He went to the costume room and put on the first clothes he could find: a police man's uniform that was way too big for him.

Rachel, Sarah, and Hugh were on a golf course. Hugh was kneeling on the green, lining up a putt, but he didn't have a ball. Rachel held the flag and Sarah stood next to her with a putter resting on her shoulder. They stood still as a cloud passed in front of the sun. Their clothes were mostly white, with many shades of red, surrounded by the dark green of the golf course.

Annabel was looking at the washing machine as it went around and around. She looked away briefly to read a business card that she found in her coat pocket, but that still said same thing it said when she looked at it ten minutes earlier: 'Gardens'.

Alan was being chased by some of the other dancers. He ran into a poetry reading, but he stopped at the door when a man at the podium pointed at him and said, "You!"

After Alan left, the poet said, "That was basically my poem." He got a round of applause.

Rachel, Sarah and Hugh stood in a park wearing tennis outfits. "White is only slightly better than grey," Hugh said. "Neither of them are exactly what you'd call colours."

"I don't know," Rachel said. "I like the white with these red and grey wrist bands."

"Yeah. Except no one would wear red and grey wrist bands with the white."

"I'm sure I saw Tracey 'Tennis' Austen wearing them once."

"Why do you call her Tracey 'Tennis' Austen?"

"To distinguish her from the Tracey Austen who works in a bookshop."

"Well we're not going to be able to ask Tracey 'Tennis' Austen what she thinks of them."

"We could ask the Tracey Austen who works in the bookshop."

Tracey was all alone in the shop, looking up at the ceiling as evening approached. When Rachel phoned, Tracey said she'd love to go and see their tennis outfits.

Ronan, Matt and Sonia were in the middle of their plan to rescue Alan when they realised he wasn't there. Sonia was trying to distract the choreographer. She said, "There are trees there, lots of lawns, gates and fences and things, annnnd..." She looked at a shopping list. "Milk. So... I don't really know any of them."

"Will ye be part of my dance?" the choreographer said.

"Ahm, okay," Sonia said. The choreographer turned around before Ronan and Matt could use the escape route.

"You'll have to take the stamps off your face," she said to Matt. "Although..."

Some members of the group were out chasing Alan, and others called to his house to see if he was there. Daisy and Graham were in the kitchen, looking at paperclips on the table.

"I like these paperclips," Daisy said. Graham nodded. "Let's re-arrange the pens."

"Okay."

They re-arranged the pens and looked at them, completely oblivious to the dancers dancing with the leaves just outside the window.

"Will we re-arrange the paper clips now?" Graham said.

"No, we'll never get them as good as that."

"Yeah."

Annabel didn't know what to say when she saw the dancers. She picked up another sheet of paper, hoping for some inspiration from that. It was the letter with the line 'What's with the dance?'. This would have been the perfect thing to say in this situation, but she couldn't say anything.

Tracey walked down a wide pavement, whistling and swinging her bag. A man on a bench said to her, "Excuse me, I fell on the street and I think I sprained my ankle. Could you call a doctor?"

"Of course." She got out her phone.

At the train station, two people waited the arrival of someone to take part in a high jump competition. One of them held a small flag with 'Someone' on it. But the man they were waiting for never got off the train. He missed the stop because he was talking to Tracey on the phone. She called his number by mistake when she tried to phone the doctor -- his number was on her phone.

"So if the fox was friendly, I suppose I would try to put a bandage around his head," he said to Tracey. "You know I'm not really a doctor, don't you?"

"Yeah. What would you do if a squirrel broke his leg?"

"I don't know. Do squirrels have legs?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know. I suppose I'd look for a bandage anyway..."

Uncle Harry looked at the dancers, and he wasn't entirely sure what to say in this situation either. He said, "I think it was Shakespeare who said..." He stopped to take a long drag from his cigarette. Annabel handed him the blank sheet of paper. He stared at that. "I've forgotten what I was going to say now."

When Tracey met Rachel, Sarah and Hugh she said, "I need someone to do a favour for me. I just got a call from some friends of mine who are on an athletics team. Their high jumper pulled out because he'd have been competing mostly against women. He thought it sounded a bit girly. He agreed to take a part in a Shakespearean play just to have an excuse to get out of it. He had a chance to do a modern dance too, but that would have been like going out of the frying pan and into the fire. And then they arranged for someone else to take his place in the high jump competition, but he missed his stop on the train. And now they really, really need someone to take part in the high jump."

While Tracey was on the phone earlier, Alan ran past her down the street. The man on the bench didn't notice anything odd about the over-sized uniform. He said to Alan, "Excuse me, Officer. Could you find a doctor for me? I think I've sprained my ankle."

"Yes, of course," Alan said. "How did you sprain your ankle?"

"It's a funny story actually. I thought I saw something on the ground, and I said to myself, is that a key..."

He continued telling his story even as the dancers dragged Alan away. When Tracey got off the phone she said, "Sorry. I called the wrong number."

"That's okay. A police man said he'd find a doctor for me."

Rachel, Sarah and Hugh were at the athletics track. They convinced Sarah to do the high jump, and Hugh was trying to explain it to her. She just stared straight ahead. "You've got to somehow try to jump backwards. It's like... you go... you've got to just jump backwards. Like, backwards."

Alan went back to the costume room to return the police man's uniform, and while he was there he came up with a plan to get all of them out of the dance. He found some cardboard cut-outs of people. He dressed one in the uniform, and he put stamps all over the face of another.

The choreographer walked in front of the line of dancers and said, "You'll be the most important part of this show. And so will you. And you and you." Then she came to the cardboard police man. "And you too." She sounded unsure about that one. She realised what was going on when she saw the cut-out with the stamps. "Do ye honestly think I'm going to be fooled by these?"

Alan, Ronan, Matt and Sonia tip-toed away while she looked at the cut-outs. The other dancers stood there for a few seconds before running away.

As they left the building, Alan said, "I've just got to find a doctor for the man I met on the street."

"We'll ask the sailor to stand in for the doctor," Ronan said.

Rachel, Sarah and Hugh arrived home wearing yellow coats. "There's no way I'm going with yellow," Rachel said.

Bridget asked Sarah how she got on with the high jump. "Someone came along and did it for me," she said.

As Annabel looked out over the garden, she noticed a bird trying to fly away with her ring. He kept dropping it and picking it up again.

"I told you there was something sinister about him," Daisy said to Graham.

Annabel wondered what to do. She took the business card out of her pocket, hoping to find some idea in that, but it still said the same thing. She looked at the blank sheet of paper again, and yet again it provided her with the inspiration she needed.

A paper airplane just missed the bird, but it was enough to frighten him. He dropped the ring and flew away. Hugh picked up the ring and put it on Annabel's finger. The breeze blew leaves and confetti around them as they kissed.

The moose's head over the fireplace looks relieved to be wearing his headphones. I know exactly how he feels. There's been too much music in the house recently, most of it produced by people who are stretching the term 'musician'. The wife's uncle played the trumpet, and her niece said, "I could do better with a jug of water." In fairness, she could too, but no one wanted to admit that.

The Highlights

The wind and rain have returned. Things are back to normal once more. Things were very far from normal there for a while. The wife's aunt was working on a painting in the garden while the place was dry. And if that wasn't bad enough, the wife was talking about putting lanterns around the garden and getting her aunt to paint that. It was probably for a bet.

My aunt Joyce inherited an old house, and her nephew, Gary, agreed to do some of the renovation with a friend of his called Chris. They started on the living room. Joyce drew a picture of how she wanted the room to look and they got to work.

They spent most of the first day scraping paint from the window frames. Gary stopped to look at the picture. He went back to the window and scraped away more of the paint, then he looked at the picture again. "We're still miles away from that," he said.

"This is stupid," Chris said. "And look, this crossword even says we're stupid."

Chris had written the words 'we're stupid' into a crossword.

They met their friend Tracey after they finished work for the day. As they were sitting on a bench in the park, another friend of theirs, Sam, went by, but he didn't stop to talk. He just walked quicker when he saw them.

Sam was trying to hide something under his jumper. He was using a fake arm to hide the fact that his real arm was under his jumper, holding whatever he was trying to hide. They knew for sure that the arm was fake when he said hello and waved with his other arm - a very exagerated wave to compensate for the lack of movement in the fake arm.

They went back to Tracey's place and tried to figure out what he could be hiding. Tracey had a book called 'How To Find Out What A Man With a Fake Arm Is Up To'. She looked through the chapter on hiding things.

Gary was convinced he was trying to hide someone else's cat. "You'd be amazed at the amount of times I've come across people trying to hide someone else's cat."

Tracey pointed at something in the book and said, "I've highlighted this bit here, where it says 'You can't hide someone else's cat under your jumper'." She had used a yellow highlight pen on that line. "I went over the words 'You can't' about ten times."

"That book could be out of date by now."

"It was only written last year."

"Just because it's in a book it doesn't mean it has to be true."

"I don't know. It makes a lot of sense to me."

"It was a cat. I'd put money on it."

"I'm having a bath," Tracey said, and she let the book slip out of her hand as she turned around and walked away.

"She's always dropping things like that after making grand pronouncements," Gary said.

"What's grand about having a bath?"

"Well she didn't need to say it."

They looked through the book, especially the notes in the margins and the passages that Tracey had highlighted. The highlighting gave Gary an idea for the room they were working on.

On the following day they finished working on the windows and Gary got to work on the drawing. He used the pen to highlight the windows in the drawing, and he erased just about everything else from it.

Tracey called around with her friend Ariel, who was an artist. Gary showed them the drawing, which was just a room with luminous yellow windows and a chair. And the room around them was just a room with recently-painted windows and a chair.

Gary hummed a song, and he moved his hands around to the tune in an attempt to give the impression that there was more than just a chair in the room. The doorbell rang. Two men were there when Gary opened the door.

"We're here for the chair," one of them said. They stepped inside and took the chair.

"Why did they do that?" Tracey said to Gary.

"They just don't like me."

The room was completely bare without the chair or Gary's humming.

"Look what I did," Chris said. He showed them the crossword where he had highlighted the words 'we're stupid'.

"Let's go to see Sam," Tracey said. "There's an easy way to get to the bottom of this fake arm thing."

Tracey told Sam that she needed a way to hide a small box. "I'd hide it under my coat," she said, "but I have no way of holding it in place. If only I could come up with some way of holding it under my coat."

"That's a tricky one alright," Sam said. "But... but maybe..." He picked up an accordion, "I don't know if this will help, but..."

He played a tune on the accordion. There was silence for a while when he finished, until Ariel said, "I'm going to add Death into the painting I'm working on at the moment."

After they left, Tracey said to Gary, "Before you ask, I've highlighted this passage in the book." She showed him the line 'You can't hide an accordion under your jumper'.

Ariel made the addition of Death to a painting of cows in a field, and she invited Sam around to her apartment to see it. "As you can see," she said, "I've painted Death with just one arm, and he's playing the accordion. He's smiling."

The two men who took Gary's chair were in the painting too. One of them was holding Death's scythe, and the other was playing the keys on the accordion that Death couldn't get to because of his missing arm.

Gary ran away when he noticed that the two men were looking at the painting too, but they were quite happy with the way they were portrayed. "I love the way you captured my hair," one of them said.

Tracey said to Sam, "How would Death only have one arm? Do you think he could be hiding it inside his robes?"

"I don't know. I'd say it's very easy to lose an arm if you're carrying a scythe around the place all the time."

The two men left, and Gary returned. They went to a pub, and then another pub. They spent the evening drinking at various places around the city, and they ended up back at Ariel's apartment.

Sam sat on the sofa with Tracey. Chris was transfixed by his shadow on the wall, and Gary just stared into space. All he could see in his mind were bright yellow words like 'You can't' and 'we're stupid'.

When Gary and Chris were working on the room on the following day, Tracey called around and said, "I think I've figured out what he had under his jumper. A friend of Ariel's was saying she saw him at the school of music once and he was trying to hide a violin. Last night when I was talking to him he was telling me all about classical music. And look at this." She showed them a book called 'Fifty-six Reasons to Hide a Violin'. "I've highlighted the important passages."

Gary read through the yellow lines in Reason Number Twenty-Two. It suggested that someone who teaches the violin would try to hide this fact and gladly play the accordion because of an inverse snobbery about classical music. There was a big yellow circle around the word 'accordion'.

They met up with Ariel, and they all went to the school of music. Tracey had her camera to take a photo of Sam with the violin. They stood in the lobby of the building, a huge room with glass walls, filled with light as the sun descended. They waited there for two hours, but there was no sign of Sam.

Tracey dropped the camera, and as she walked away she said, "I really don't care why he was using a fake arm to hide something under his jumper."

The others were about to leave too, apart from Gary. He was looking at the sky through the glass, and in his mind all he could see were bright yellow words like 'accordion', 'inverse' and 'violin'.

Chris ran away when the two men who took the chair arrived. Ariel just pulled up her hood to hide. She had made another addition to her painting. She added in speech bubbles so it looked as if the men were saying 'We're stupid', and she highlighted the words in yellow too.

Gary was too distracted by the yellow words in his mind to notice their arrival. When he finally saw them it was too late to get away.

"We just saw the painting," one of them said to Gary. "You think we're stupid, do you?"

"What are you going to do about it?" the other one said.

Gary had to give them a table to get out of that one.

When Joyce came to inspect the work, she looked back and forth between the drawing and the room around her, but her attention was mostly taken by the drawing. Gary had written the words 'Joyce's plan for the living room' on the drawing, and he highlighted the line with the yellow pen. She looked at that for a long time, and then she nodded her head.

The moose's head over the fireplace has been winning me some money recently. I've never been good at poker because I can't seem to act casual when I've got a good hand. The surprised looking hen in the painting looks less surprised than me. But there isn't anyone on the planet who can act more casual than the moose's head, so I let him play for me instead. I tried playing against him once and I nearly lost the house.

A Lecture

The shed is completely dry now, not because I've fixed the holes in the roof, but we've had so little rain recently. There are small holes in the door of the shed too, and I discovered recently that my great-grandfather once screwed a knocker to the door. He did it because he didn't want to be disturbed, but the knocker provided a very effective way of disturbing him. People used to knock at the door and run away, despite that fact that he could guess with reasonable accuracy who had knocked at the door.

My cousin Charlie was going out with a woman called Grainne who had an interest in mathematics, and she convinced him to go to a public lecture one morning. The speaker was a famous mathematician who was talking about his latest research, or that was the intention anyway. He said, "Suppose we were to..."

He looked towards the window in silence for a few seconds, then he said, "I was once painting a window frame when I got an idea, and I wrote an equation on the glass with the white paint. I left it there too. I used to just look at the white numbers, illuminated by the sun."

He tore up his notes and said, "Things were so much clearer on glass." The rest of the lecture was just him staring at the window.

Charlie and Grainne walked down a corridor after leaving the lecture hall, talking about the mathematician. They looked back when they heard footsteps behind them. A friend of theirs, Martin, ran past them, and a few seconds later, three men in dark suits ran by too.

Charlie and Grainne were both keen on a bit of excitement after the disappointment of the lecture (not that Charlie was expecting mathematics to be exciting anyway), so they ran after the men.

Martin had been in a card game with those men on the previous night. During the game he noticed they were all wearing dark suits and lots of jewellery, and he was going to say that they looked a lot like the gangsters in films, but he thought it was the sort of thing they'd hear all the time, so he said nothing.

He was convinced he was going to win when he layed down his cards. "A straight," he said.

One of the men said, "Three sevens and a baby robin." He took a tiny bird from a box and put it on the table. Martin lost.

And now they were chasing him - he guessed it was because they wanted the money. Charlie and Grainne gave up the chase at the gates of the college. They didn't know which way Martin and the men had gone.

Charlie had told Aunt Bridget about a clock he saw in a shop. He thought it was just the sort of thing she'd like, and she did, but when she got it home she couldn't get it to work. Her daughter said she'd find what was wrong. "Nicola is conducting experiments on it," Bridget told Charlie on the phone.

Nicola put on a white coat and glasses. She started reading a long computer print-out in the light of the bay window.

Charlie and Grainne went to a cafe for lunch. He mentioned that his grandmother knew someone who could read tea leaves. "She always said the same sort of things. 'The badger is in the garden again'. Tea has always looked exactly the same to me."

Grainne looked into the tea as she stirred it, and she kept looking into it as the tea went around and around. She got a shock when Charlie coughed to attract her attention. He made a mental note: she's easy to hypnotise.

"My necklace is really, really nice," she said, and she looked down at that instead of the tea.

After they left the cafe, they walked down a street, stopping at every shop window to look at the glass, especially the glass with words on it. As Charlie looked at the word 'sun' on the window of a travel agent, Grainne turned around to look at a bin at the edge of the pavement. It was a new bin. Cars went by on the street, but she took no notice.

When Charlie turned around he said, "Why are you staring at the bin?"

"I... I don't know."

"Where did those glasses come from?"

There was a pair of glasses with red frames on top of the bin. She only noticed them when Charlie mentioned them. "That's probably why I was staring at the bin," she said.

They went to see Aunt Bridget to ask about the clock. Her son, Ronan, was there too.

"Have you reached a conclusion yet, Nicola?" Bridget said.

She looked up from the print-out and shook her head.

"How are you getting on with the voice-over?" Bridget said to Charlie.

Charlie was narrating a TV documentary about a man who lives on an island. "It's going very well," he said. "I'll be going to the studio this afternoon."

"Ronan can do a very good Hitler voice."

"Charlie can do Pierre Boulez," Grainne said.

"Who's he?"

"I don't know," Grainne said. "Charlie, who is he?"

"He's a French composer and conductor," Charlie said, and he did a bit of his impression.

"Wouldn't that be much nicer than doing Hitler?" Bridget said to Ronan.
"I don't do Hitler any more. I can do Man Headlift. He's a cartoon character."

"Do that for us so."

Ronan said in a very deep voice, "Silence!"

They looked at him for a few seconds. "That was very good," his mother said. "If anything, it was even better than Pierre Boulez."

"You don't even know who Pierre Boulez is," Charlie said.

"Well that's sort of the point of impressions, that you know who they are."

"Pierre Boulez is a famous conductor and composer. That's a cartoon character who makes sheep levitate."

"Can Pierre Boulez make sheep levitate?"

"Probably not. Can Man Headlift conduct an orchestra and compose modern music?"

She turned to Ronan and said, "Can he?"

He folded his arms and said in the deep voice, "Man Headlift can do anything."

"Can you do any impressions?" Bridget said to Grainne.

"Not really. Although..." She put on the red glasses and said, "It probably makes me look like Pierre Boulez; I don't know."

"No," Charlie said.

Charlie and Grainne went to the studio where he was recording the voice-over for the documentary. The film was projected onto a screen in a dark room, and Charlie was in a glass booth at the back of the room. He was narrating a scene where the man was cutting turf. "He cuts the turf, as his father and grandfather did before him. Time has stood still on the island." Charlie paused during a shot of a bird in the clear blue sky. "The turf will be the only source of heat during the cold winter months."

The director of the film, Conor, still hadn't finished the script. "I think you're going to have to do some of that again," he said to Charlie at the end of the recording. "'Time has stood still'. I hate that bit."

He was working at an old type-writer. Next to it on the desk was a pile of papers with alternate versions of the script. Grainne asked why he didn't use a computer. "Ideas come easier with this." He took a sheet of paper from the type writer, set on fire, and then he looked for somewhere to put it. He ended up throwing it out the window.

As Charlie and Grainne were leaving, Conor said, "Michelle says to say hello."

Charlie closed the door, and Grainne said to him, "Who's Michelle?"

She was a friend of Conor's girlfriend, and she had done a voice-over for the documentary too - she recited an extract from a book. They had all gone to the pub after the recording, and Michelle told Charlie all about a hat she found. Charlie didn't mention this to Grainne because it was just the sort of thing that would make her jealous.

He was just about to tell her about Michelle when he remembered how she had been transfixed by the tea earlier. He put on the red glasses and said, "Look into my eyes. Look deep into my eyes. On the count of five..."

"Are you trying to hypnotise me?"

"No, I..."

"Who's Michelle?"

"She's just a friend of Conor's girlfriend. She did a voice-over too. That's the only time I've ever met her."

"Then why did you try to hypnotise me?"

"I didn't try to hypnotise you. I was just... I wanted to try on the glasses."

As soon as they stepped onto the street outside, Martin ran past them, and the men in suits were still following him. Charlie and Grainne followed again, but they lost Martin and the men when they had to wait for a bus to go by as they tried to cross the street.

They walked on in the direction Martin was heading. They went to the edge of the city, where the evening sun shone on the concrete apartment buildings. A group of kids with skateboards were there. A newspaper blew by on the breeze. "Let's go somewhere for dinner," Grainne said.

They went to a restaurant in the city, and then they drove to Bridget's house to see if Nicola had got to the end of the print-out.

She got to the end of it shortly after they arrived. She tapped her chin and said, "Hmmm."

"What does it suggest?" her mother said.

"There's a pen stuck in it."

"Yeah, I thought so," Bridget said.

The repair man arrived to fix the TV. He had thick glasses, and he spent most of the time eating an ice cream as he looked into the back of the TV. Bridget told him about the last repair man. "He had a 'How to fix a television' video, and he wanted to look at that, but the television wasn't working, so he couldn't. And he had to go away."

The repair man nodded. When he finished the ice cream he took out a screw driver and got to work. It only took him a few seconds. He replaced the back of the TV again and turned it on.

It worked. They were looking at a quiz show with three contestants. One of the contestants was Martin and another was one of the men in the dark suits. They didn't recognise the third contestant in between them. The host said, "Why did Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492?"

Martin buzzed in and said, "Was it because he just doesn't have the money. He just does not have the money."

"I'm sorry, that's incorrect."

The man in the suit buzzed in. "It was because he's about to have an unfortunate accident if he doesn't pay the money."

"That's incorrect too."

The contestant in the centre looked from side to side, then he looked up. After a long silence he said, "Did he just find the money? In a bag or something?"

Charlie and Grainne ran from the room and went to the car. They drove to the TV studios in the city, but before they even got there they saw Martin running away, still pursued by the three men.

Charlie parked on the street and they got out. Martin ran into an art gallery on the next street, closely followed by the men in suits. Then came Charlie and Grainne.

They looked all around the place, but there was no sign of Martin. The front of the building was glass, and they ended up staring at that. The lights from inside reflected off it. Daylight was fading outside. They looked at the reverse words on the glass.

Charlie saw Michelle walking down the street, and he was afraid she'd recognise him so he asked Grainne for the red glasses.

"What are you up to now?" she said.

"Nothing. I just thought it'd be nice to look at the window through the glasses."

"You're up to something. And don't try to hypnotise me."

"No, I... What were you saying about your necklace?"

She looked down at it and said, "Oh yeah, my necklace is really, really nice."

As Michelle walked by outside she smiled and waved at Charlie. He waved at her. Grainne kept looking down at her necklace all the time.

They left the art gallery and walked down the street. As they were walking past the entrance to a cinema they heard a noise from inside. Conor was kicking a vending machine just inside the door. His girlfriend was a model, and she was doing a photo shoot nearby. "I go along to these things because you can't trust these bloody photographers. And then he sent me off to get something to drink. You can't trust any of them."

He kicked the vending machine again. Grainne saw Martin running into a hotel across the street, and they went across. They were just in time to see the door closing on an elevator. The three men were inside. Charlie and Grainne guessed that Martin was in another elevator, so they took the third one.

The shop where Bridget got the clock was open late, so she went back there with Nicola and Ronan. She explained the problem to the shop assistant. "There's a pen stuck in it."

"Are you sure?"

Nicola held up the print-out and nodded.

Charlie and Grainne ran down a spiral stairs in the hotel. Charlie wondered if Grainne would get hypnotised. He was going to tell her to slow down, but he couldn't find the words.

"I think they went this way," Grainne said on the street outside. "I was starting to think I'd be hypnotised going around and around those stairs."

"He cuts the turf, as his father and grandfather have done before him."

"Who does?"

"Time has stood still on the island."

"What island?"

"The turf will be the only source of heat during the cold winter months."

"Aha! You've been hypnotised by the stairs. You thought you could hypnotise me, but you got hypnotised by a stairs."

"His donkey is old now, but still able to carry a full load of turf."

Charlie's narration went on as they walked down the street. They met Bridget, Ronan and Nicola, and Charlie told them about the social aspects of island life.

Martin came around the corner and ran towards them. Just like earlier, he ran past them, but this time Charlie and Grainne went with him. As they ran away, Grainne said to Bridget, "Do something to distract the men in suits."

"This sounds like a job for Man Headlift," Bridget said to Ronan.

When the men arrived they asked Bridget, Ronan and Nicola if they'd seen anyone running by. Ronan folded his arms, and his mother waited for him to do something, but he did nothing.

"I thought you said you could do anything," Bridget said to him after the men went on again.

Conor's girlfriend was posing in front of a fountain. The photographer was kneeling on the ground beneath her. When Grainne saw them she got an idea.

The men in suits went past the photo shoot a few seconds later. They didn't notice Martin and Grainne posing at either side of the model. Charlie was there too. He was still reciting Conor's script for the film. "The population of the island continues to fall. There are too many attractions on the mainland..."

The men took no notice. They walked by, and Martin was starting to think he was safe at last, but then Charlie saw Michelle walking towards them. Something in his subconscious told him there was trouble ahead. He started reciting the script from a scene about a small row boat in a storm at sea. He was almost shouting.

The men stopped and turned around. They went back, and they looked at Charlie as he continued his narration. "He's Pierre Boulez," Grainne said.

"The small boat rises and falls with the waves, at the mercy of nature's mighty force. They've come a long way since his grandfather's day when they made their boats with seaweed, but when the force of the sea..."

"They never made their boats out of seaweed," one of the men in suits said.

Charlie just repeated the line in a louder voice. "They've come a long way since his grandfather's day when they made their boats with seaweed."

"How could they make a boat out of seaweed? They might have used it to seal the gaps between the boards."

"They've come a long way since his grandfather's day when they made their boats... with seaweed."

The argument was starting to get heated. The man in the suit poked Charlie in the shoulder when he said, "You can't make a boat out of seaweed."

This was settled in the lecture hall that Charlie and Grainne had gone to in the morning. The man in the suit gave a lecture entitled 'You can't make a boat out of seaweed'. He drew equations and diagrams on the board to back up his case. After talking for forty minutes he said, "And this proves that you can't make a boat out of seaweed."

Bridget said to Nicola, "Is he right?"

Everyone looked at Nicola. She put on her glasses and looked at the print-out, which was just a jumble of paper then. She shrugged her shoulders, but they kept looking at her. She looked at the print-out again, then looked up and nodded her head slowly.

Charlie remembered the end of the film, the soaring music, the scenes of valleys and hills, wooden gates and stone walls, piles of hay in the fields, the vast ocean and the crash of the waves against the coast. He hadn't recorded the voice-over for it yet, but he'd read through the script, and he remembered bits of it then. He stood up and said, "Man has left his imprint on even the most remote corners of this planet, but here they understand how insignificant that imprint is. They respect the forces of nature, a respect born from wonder. They stand tall beneath the vast blue dome around this defiant patch of land in the ocean. The sights all around are part of their home; the birds against the golden sun, the endless shades of green, the barren ground battered by the winds from the sea, but where life refuses to die, a way of life that goes on, defiant, completely forgetting about the money Martin owes, or why I didn't want Grainne to meet Michelle, a place that's forever their home, no matter how far away they might be."

He got a standing ovation for that.

The moose's head over the fireplace is doing his best to remain expressionless. He's always like that when the wife's niece is around, and in fairness, he's very good at it too. She always says things to him in the hope of making him react, but it hasn't worked so far. She practises on the cows. She says things like, "There's a fire right behind you," but the cows just look back at her. When the moose's head fails to react she says to him, "Why can't you be more like the surprised looking hen in the painting?" It works on the dog. He once fell off the chair when she said a worm was setting up home in his kennel, but I think he was just trying to get away from her. She caught me out once too. She said, "Sting is in the drawing room with a candle stick." I said, "But we don't have a drawing room." She nodded and said 'yeah'. I asked her if she was thinking of the study and she said, "Ha! You thought Sting was in the drawing room with a candle stick."

Birds

It's raining again, but just a little bit. It's the first rain we've had in about two weeks. The lawns dried out for the first time in months. The other day the wife said something about sending something in the back porch back to the post office as she was walking out the door. I didn't catch all of what she said because I wasn't listening, and when I went to the porch all I could find were a penguin and an apple on a box. I spent a good while just looking back and forth between the two, wondering which one would go back to the post office. I settled on the penguin in the end because it wasn't alive (it was stuffed) and its head was covered in stamps. I've no idea how to explain the apple.

My cousin Gary worked in a radio station. He loved working there, despite the fact that he didn't get on with one of the DJs, Andrews. They were always doing things to impress the weather girl, Samantha. Andrews appeared on a TV show once, and on the following day he said to Gary, "Samantha said I looked like Cary Grant on TV."

"He's dead."

"You're just jealous."

"Anyone with half a brain can appear on TV. In fact, the less brains you have, the more likely you are to appear on TV. And Cary Grant doesn't have any brains at all because he's dead."

"You think anyone with half a brain can get on TV?"

"Anyone."

"I bet you couldn't get Jeff on TV."

Jeff was the karate coach who appeared on Andrews' radio show to talk about the Winter Olympics. No one was entirely sure why they got him to talk about winter sports, and Jeff was nowhere near entirlely sure of anything. Years of breaking things with his head had taken its toll. His mortal enemy was a vacuum cleaner.

Gary accepted the bet because Samantha was there, and he didn't want to look weak in her presence. He had no idea how he'd go about getting a karate coach on TV. He couldn't even think of a show where they'd need someone to talk about the Winter Olympics. Gary was delighted when Samantha said she'd help, and she was able to provide more help than anyone when she was asked to stand in for a weather forecaster on TV for two weeks.

It all went horribly wrong when the news reader on TV fell in love with Samantha. He asked her out for a meal and she said yes. Gary felt like breaking something with his head when she told him about it.

He went to see his cousin Hugh and asked for his advice on Samantha and the karate coach. Hugh said he'd need more time to think about getting Jeff on TV, but there was a simple plan to disrupt Samantha's date with the newsreader. He'd been to that restaurant before. "The chef there is amazing," Hugh said, "but he gets transfixed by moths. He'll follow the moths wherever they lead him, no matter what gets in his way. It's not really a problem anymore because they hired someone to kill the moths. But if you remove the person who kills the moths, it'll be chaos. How is the newsreader going to impress her if their first date descends into chaos."

"But how will we remove the moth-killer?"

"There are hundreds of ways you could do that."

Hugh went through a few of those ways, and they settled on the one that didn't involve kidnapping. One of Hugh's friends owned a dog who used to walk in circles around a pineapple. It had an almost hypnotic effect. As the moth-killer made his way to work through a park on the evening of Samantha's date, Gary said to him, "Look at that," and pointed at the dog walking around the pineapple.

He spent over an hour looking at the dog, who never slowed down during that time.

The owner of the restaurant was getting nervous when his moth-killer didn't show up for work. He decided to kill the moths himself, but it wasn't as easy as he thought. It looked more like a martial art when the professional did it. One of the moths made it into the kitchen when he was trying to kill another one outside the back door.

Adrian, the news reader, was sitting at a table for two with Samantha. He told her about how he was getting tired of people looking down on him for being a news reader. "Some people say it's just reading," he said.

"It's much more than just reading."

"That's what I always say. But still, it'd be nice to do something where... y' know... something I could do and say 'aha!', and they couldn't say anything then."

"What if you did reports, like going out to meet people and interview them. That could be news. You could go..." She tried to think of the best place to meet a karate coach who talks about the Winter Olympics. "You could go anywhere."

"That's not a bad idea."

There was panic amongst the kitchen staff when they saw the moth, but the chef was completely serene when he noticed it. He knocked over pots and pans, and he walked over a waiter as he followed the moth around the kitchen. When another waiter came in, the moth made its way into the dining room through the open door, and the chef followed.

The chef walked over Adrian and Samantha's table, and then he walked around in circles as the moth flew around a chandelier in the centre of the room. Adrian seemed to be transfixed by the chef. He followed the chef around the room. Samantha was much more disappointed in this behaviour than in the chaos their date descended into.

Adrian's first report outside the studio featured the chef in his kitchen. They told the chef they wanted to film him at work, but a moth appeared as soon as he started listing the ingredients he'd be using. He followed it around the kitchen, knocking over things, breaking glasses and plates. They showed five minutes of this on TV, with Adrian just looking at him all the time.

The chef was furious with his moth-killer for missing work, but when he heard about the dog and the pineapple he decided to track down the real culprits.

When Gary met him outside the radio station one evening, he was holding the leg of a piano. "You better have a very good reason why you took out my moth-killer."

Gary couldn't think of a very good reason, so he told him the truth. The chef's attitude changed when he heard it was an attempt to sabotage the news reader's date. He was furious with Adrian for making him look stupid on TV, and he promised to help Gary with any plan that involved getting Jeff on TV if there was a chance it would make Adrian look stupid.

Hugh was playing golf with a friend of his one day. His friend, Mark, had recently been elected treasurer of the golf club, and he'd found out all about the history of the place. He was telling Hugh about how a gypsy cursed the course over sixty years ago, but Hugh found it very off-putting. Mark kept pointing at things and saying, "The gypsy cursed that."

Hugh had a long putt on the tenth green, and it was heading right for the centre of the hole, but a crow landed in the ball's path and blocked it. The crow tried to fly away with the ball. "The gypsy cursed that too," Mark said.

After the game, Hugh was thinking about his fiancee, Annabel. He remembered saying to her, "What's the one thing you don't like about summer?"

"Crows."

"What about autumn?"

"Crows."

"Winter?"

"Ahm..."

"You can say crows if you want."

"Yeah, crows."

She had recently appeared on a TV ad for shampoo with an eagle on her head. That evening he asked her about the eagle and she said, "That wasn't really part of the script. He just landed there."

"Where did he come from?"

"I don't know. Birds often land on my head."

He met up with Gary to discuss their plans to get Jeff on TV, and he told him about the crows and the eagle.

"Crows landing on a woman's head would be just the sort of thing Adrian would want to film," Gary said. "We could get him to go to the golf course to film this, and Jeff could be there playing golf. The chef can come along too, and he can do whatever he needs to do to Adrian. I hope it's what he was going to do to me."

"Annabel is hardly likely to agree to this."

"She doesn't need to know. Just say you'd like to play golf with her. And what are the chances of crows actually landing on her head?"

Hugh asked her if she'd like to play golf. "I just thought it'd be good if we... spent more time together."

She liked the sound of that, even though she didn't like golf.

On the day of the game, Hugh insisted that she wear a hat. They called in to see my cousin June on the way to the course. Her daughter, Daisy, had a lemon. She held it up and said to Annabel, "My lemon likes your hat."

Annabel took the hat off as soon as they left the house, and she refused to put it back on again.

Jeff was already at the course. He was wearing plus-fours, a green sweater and a green hat. The camera crew were there too, and they seemed to know that Annabel would be the one most likely to attract the crows. They followed her around. She kept looking back at them and smiling, but she stopped suddenly when she came across a peacock in front of the clubhouse.

The peacock just stood there staring at her and she stared at it. She was used to this sort of stand-off with birds. It normally ended with the bird perching on her head. She tried to think of an alternative conclusion to the stand-off. She was eating crisps, so she offered the peacock one of them.

The peacock spread his feathers when he ate the crisp. She gave him another and he did the same again. They did this for a few minutes, until the producer realised that they were live on air in ten seconds and there was no sign of Adrian.

TV viewers saw two minutes of Annabel giving crisps to the peacock, but then she ran out of crisps, and there was another minute to go. The producer asked her to say something, but she couldn't think of anything to say.

That's when Jeff stepped in. He gave a very eloquent and coherent speech about the history of golf and this particular club, and when he finished he broke a three-iron with his head. He staggered around the place. Annabel applauded.

Then the camera focussed on Adrian, who was running away in the background, trying to fight off the crows who were attacking him. The chef was following him, transfixed by the sight. He was dressed as a golfer too, but he was still wearing his chef's hat.

Adrian never left the studio after this, but Jeff got the job as reporter. At the end of each report he broke something with his head. Samantha was very impressed with Gary for the way he won the bet. Not only had he got Jeff on TV, he got him a job as a reporter as well.

The moose's head over the fireplace looks as if he wants to say something. Some of the wife's relatives called around the other day. Her aunt said, "My hat is, aha ha ha... it's a bit..." She looked up and moved her fingers around. I told her she wasn't wearing a hat. "Hmm," she said, and tapped her chin. "Can you solve this one?" She said that to the moose's head. He looked as if he could, but he couldn't tell us one way or the other. It's very easy for him to look as if he can solve things like that, or the reason for the word written on my face, but he never has to prove that he can.