Trigger Warning

She poured me another cup of tea. ‘It was such a long time ago, dear. Your father told me all about it once. But he didn’t tell the story immediately. He only told me when we were married. He said I ought to know. We were on our honeymoon. We went to a little Spanish fishing village. These days it’s a big tourist town, but back then, nobody had ever heard of it. What was it called? Oh yes. Torremolinos.’

‘Can I see it again? The statue?’

‘No, dear.’

‘You put it away?’

‘I threw it away,’ said my mother, coldly. Then, as if to stop me from rummaging in the rubbish, ‘The bin-men already came this morning.’

We said nothing, then.

She sipped her tea.

‘You’ll never guess who I met last week. Your old schoolteacher. Mrs Brooks? We met in Safeways. She and I went off to have coffee in the Bookshop because I was hoping to talk to her about joining the town carnival committee. But it was closed. We had to go to the Olde Tea Shoppe instead. It was quite an adventure.’

Orange

(Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire.)

EYES ONLY.

Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.

Seventeen on June the ninth.

The last five years. Before that we lived in Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, Cardiff (Wales).

I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us any more. The divorce was pretty bad and Mum wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get shot of him.

An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin™, and started the Stuffed Muffin chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of stuffed muffins for every meal, especially because Mum used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Dinner Christmas Stuffed Muffin was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin chain about five years ago, to start work on My Mum’s Coloured Bubbles (not actually ™ yet).

Two. My sister, Nerys, who was just fifteen, and my brother, Pryderi, twelve.

Several times a day.

No.

Through the Internet. Probably on eBay.

She’s been buying colours and dyes from all over the world ever since she decided that the world was crying out for brightly coloured Day-Glo bubbles. The kind you can blow, with bubble mixture.

It’s not really a laboratory. I mean, she calls it that, but really it’s just the garage. Only she took some of the Stuffed Muffins™ money and converted it, so it has sinks and bathtubs and Bunsen burners and things, and tiles on the walls and the floor to make it easier to clean.

I don’t know. Nerys used to be pretty normal. When she turned thirteen she started reading these magazines and putting pictures of these strange bimbo women up on her wall like Britney Spears and so on. Sorry if anyone reading this is a Britney fan ;) but I just don’t get it. The whole orange thing didn’t start until last year.

Artificial tanning creams. You couldn’t go near her for hours after she put it on. And she’d never give it time to dry after she smeared it on her skin, so it would come off on her sheets and on the fridge door and in the shower leaving smears of orange everywhere. Her friends would wear it too, but they never put it on like she did. I mean, she’d slather on the cream, with no attempt to look even human-coloured, and she thought she looked great. She did the tanning salon thing once, but I don’t think she liked it, because she never went back.

Tangerine Girl. The Oompa-Loompa. Carrot-top. Go-Mango. Orangina.

Not very well. But she didn’t seem to care, really. I mean, this is a girl who said that she couldn’t see the point of science or maths because she was going to be a pole dancer as soon as she left school. I said, nobody’s going to pay to see you in the altogether, and she said how do you know? and I told her that I saw the little QuickTime films she’d made of herself dancing nuddy and left in the camera and she screamed and said give me that, and I told her I’d wiped them. But honestly, I don’t think she was ever going to be the next Bettie Page or whoever. She’s a sort of squarish shape, for a start.

German measles, mumps, and I think Pryderi had chicken-pox when he was staying in Melbourne with the grandparents.

In a small pot. It looked a bit like a jam jar, I suppose.

I don’t think so. Nothing that looked like a warning label anyway. But there was a return address. It came from abroad, and the return address was in some kind of foreign lettering.

You have to understand that Mum had been buying colours and dyes from all over the world for five years. The thing with the Day-Glo bubbles is not that someone can blow glowing coloured bubbles, it’s that they don’t pop and leave splashes of dye all over everything. Mum says that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. So, no.