Orange

Mizzenwood is a town in the south of Ireland. In a garden behind a
house at the edge of the town, a woman called Tracy decided to build a
new rockery this year. She spent weeks planning it, and getting all the
stones, moss and plants she'd need. On a perfect summer's morning in
July she started work on the rockery.

A few months before this, her ten-year-old daughter, Kim, decided to
give names to the ice cubes in the freezer. It started when she called
one of them 'Icicle' and then she called another one 'Tricycle'. She
moved onto more conventional names, like Kim or April or Sunshower, but
she hated putting those ice cubes into her drinks. It always made her
sad to see them melt, so she started giving some of the ice cubes bad
names, like Stick or Hitty or Waspy. She liked to see those ones melt,
but she didn't like the idea of them melting in her drink. She liked
the idea of them melting in her brother's drink, but she stopped using
ice cubes herself.

So she had a freezer full of good guys and bad guys, and she couldn't
help wondering what they'd get up to when they were left alone. She
started coming up with stories about life in the freezer, and it became
a bit of a soap opera. There were weddings and funerals, affairs and
blackmail attempts. When Sunshower was marrying Hitty, Todd stood up in
the middle of the service and took Sunshower away with him. Hitty
promised revenge. The setting wasn't always confined to the freezer.
Sometimes the story extended to some of the cupboards in the kitchen.
And a few new non-ice-cube characters were introduced as well, like the
sugar bowl, or the brush.

One day, she was explaining the latest story line to her brother, Greg,
and there was something in the plot that meant she had to make the
claim that geese live on apricots. Greg was only nine, and he didn't
understand the story line in his sister's soap opera. He didn't
understand why she needed to make this claim, and he didn't know
anything about geese, but he wouldn't believe that geese live on
apricots. He said it was ridiculous, and Kim said, "Well what do they
eat then?"

"They eat? oranges."

"Oranges? Now that is ridiculous. Where are they going to get the
oranges?"

"Farmers give them the oranges."

"That's stupid."

Tracy took a break from her work on the rockery at three o' clock in
the afternoon. She went inside to get a drink, and she got a few ice
cubes from the freezer. She was about to put them into the glass when
she noticed something orange in one of them. She put that one back into
the freezer and put the others into her drink.

She finished the rockery at half past four, and she stood back to
admire her work. It turned out exactly as she had planned it. Kim and
Greg were very impressed. As Tracy stood there looking at it, she
noticed that her hat wasn't on her head. She looked around but she
couldn't see it anywhere. She searched the whole garden and the house
and she still couldn't find it.

That evening, they were watching a TV show in which a surgeon couldn't
find his watch after an operation, and an X-ray showed that he had left
the watch inside the patient. Tracy said, "Maybe that's what happened
to my hat. I must have left it inside the rockery."

It was just a joke, but she couldn't get that idea out of her mind. She
knew it was extremely unlikely that she dropped her hat in the rockery
and built over it (just as it was extremely unlikely that a surgeon
would drop his watch in a patient and not notice it) but she had
searched everywhere else and she still hadn't found it.

When she woke up on the following morning, she was very tempted to dig
up the rockery, even though she knew it was a stupid idea. She tried to
take her mind off the hat, so she took Kim into the front garden to
look at the daisies.

Kim always became transfixed by the daisies on the front lawn. It was
as if they had a hypnotic effect on her. When she looked at the
daisies, you could ask her any question and she'd always answer
'daisy'. If you asked her 'what is your name?' or 'where do you live?'
or 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' she'd just say
'daisy'.

Kim sat on the grass. Tracy sat on a garden seat and asked her daughter
all sorts of questions, like 'what colour is the sky?' or 'what comes
out of a tap?' and Kim always answered 'daisy'. But then Tracy said,
"Who is the Prime Minister of Switzerland?" And Kim said, "April's
father."

She'd never said anything apart from 'daisy' before, and Tracy spent an
hour trying to figure out why she answered 'April's father' to that
question. It took her mind off the hat for a while, but when she went
back inside she thought of digging up the rockery again. She knew that
she'd never be able to get that idea out of her mind until she actually
did it, so after lunch she removed the stones and dug up some of the
soil in the rockery. There was no sign of the hat, but she did find a
toy soldier.

She brought it inside, and as soon as Kim saw it she said, "Oh my God!
They found the body! Now Jake will be charged with murder. And he won't
be able to make it to April's wedding."

"April? Now who is April?"

"She's supposed to get married, but she's in a coma."

"Who's she marrying?"

"She hasn't made up her mind yet. The coma probably won't help
her."

Kim told her mother about how Greg wanted to prove that geese eat
oranges, so he put some orange paint in an ice cube. It was the only
thing he could think of doing, and he wanted to see what orange paint
would look like in an ice cube anyway. He wasn't really sure what this
proved, but when he showed it to Kim he sounded very sure that it
proved his claim about geese eating oranges. Kim told him that there
was only one way to determine whether geese eat oranges or apricots. If
April married Todd, then geese eat oranges. But if she went for Brad,
then geese eat apricots.

Greg didn't really understand the plot, so he took her word for it. Kim
knew that geese would end up eating apricots, but to make it more tense
for her brother, she said that April was in a coma in the hospital and
the only surgeon in the world who could operate on her had gone
missing. They'd just have to wait until they found the surgeon and
April came out of her coma before they'd be able to say whether geese
eat oranges or apricots.

When Kim told her mother about this, Tracy saw a parallel with the TV
show they had seen on the previous night. She had a feeling that her
missing hat might be involved in it too. She said, "Does my hat have a
part in this?"

"Yeah, the hat is playing the surgeon. I found it in the shed last
night and I thought it'd be perfect for the role."

"The shed! Of course! I left it in the shed. I don't suppose it's still
there?"

"No. It was very eager to do this role."

"Can you tell me where it's being held?"

"We'll have to wait for next week's episode."

"Right? Kim, let's go out in the garden for a little while."

They went out to the front garden and Tracy said, "Ooh look, daisies."
Kim stared at the daisies and her mother said, "You know this surgeon
who's supposed to operate on April?"

"Yes."

"The one who's played by my hat?"

"By the hat."

"Where is that surgeon being held?"

"In a hideout in the Swiss mountains."

"Very good. April's father is desperate to find the one man who can
save his daughter, and all the time he's in the country that he's the
Prime Minister of. The irony."

"Irony, yeah."

"If I wanted to find this hideout in the mountains, where would I
look?"

"In the top drawer of the filing cabinet."

"Perfect."

Tracy went to the filing cabinet and found her hat. Her mind was
completely at ease then. She was able to sit in the garden and relax,
just admiring the rockery. But then she thought about April. She
wondered who April would marry, and what would happen at the wedding.
She told herself to just wait for next week's episode, but she couldn't
get it out of her mind, so she took Kim into the front garden and said,
"Look at the daisies?"