“But how does she even know you?” asked Flora. “Your mother called me last night,” said Zoran. Zoran gave Jas what Dad calls a laden look, and she bit her lip so we couldn’t see the stitches they gave her at the hospital. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” demanded Flora. Tumnus in Narnia, who everybody knows was on the right side in the end, even if he did have his moments. But in the end we didn’t need to hit the burglar, because when we got to the kitchen he turned out to be Zoran, and even though we didn’t know yet that it was him, he was wearing a flowery apron and sandals and a little goatee that made him look like Mr. Jas said Dad would kill Flora if she broke the oar, and Flora said she’d remember that when her entire family had been murdered because she hadn’t been properly armed. For a family that never plays sport we have an awful lot of equipment. So we grabbed what we could, which was a cricket bat for Twig, tennis rackets for Jas and me, and the big oar Dad got in Oxford with all his boat crew’s names on it for Flora. “Just because I am the oldest,” Flora said, “does not mean I have to be the first to die.” Picture is inverted as cameraman applies the tea towel to Jasmine’s lip.įlora heard something in the kitchen this morning and said it wasn’t fair to make her go down alone. Back outdoors to close-up of Jasmine’s blood-smeared face. Picture shakes as cameraman (still Blue) plucks a tea towel from the cooker. Pan left, back to Flora turning up the volume on her iPod, then indoors to kitchen. Twig-no longer whooping-runs toward the house. Blood pours from her split lip, staining her torn pink dress. Pan right, following the sound of squealing, to where younger siblings JASMINE (8) and TWIG (10) are playing on the swing under the plane tree.

Spread around her are her iPod, her mobile, a bottle of suntan lotion, a bottle of water, and several magazines. “But I do think he’s nice.”īeing a combination of conventional diary entries and transcripts of short films shot by the author on the camera she was given for her twelfth birthday.ĬAMERAMAN (BLUEBELL) lingers on a pair of feet in frayed canvas All Stars (her own), before panning down stone steps to the garden where FLORA (16, her oldest sibling) is sunbathing in a bikini. I thought about Zoran making hot chocolate for us, putting double the amount of powder in Jas’s because that’s how she likes it, and about how he sat working on his thesis in the rain when it was his turn to watch the rats. You know, with the Babes, and the parents away so much.”įlora shot me one of her sideways Flora looks.

“We are a bunch of kids,” I said, then because that only made her crosser I added, “He’s quite useful. “It’s humiliating,” she raged as we walked.

After Iris by Natasha Farrant