Matching overlapping colour circle tattoos on forearms

She swore by red, yellow and blue, the paint box of their schooldays, and said the sea was blue because blue was the bottom of everything. He said light was red, green and blue, that the radio man had told him so, and that a radio man would never lie about light. They had sat under the harbour lamp since midsummer, mixing on the lids of tins until the gulls lost interest in them and the boats came and went without comment.

In the end it was Mrs Ogilvie's grandson who settled it, by drawing three circles on a scrap of card with a borrowed pencil and telling them to fill each one with their own palette and then lay the circles over one another. Teodor's version glowed. Where his three met, the middle went nearly white. Mairead's went muddy in the centre, a brown that smelled, she claimed, of wet rope. They stared at the two cards for a long time while the lamp buzzed and the tide turned under the pier.

The wager was a crab supper for the loser, but when they laid the cards side by side they noticed that the blue-green lens on one and the lemon-yellow lens on the other had been dipped in the same small pool of spilt paint, and the patch was the same grey on both. Neither of them said so. Mairead paid for the crab, Teodor paid for the bread, and they ate it on the wall, arguing about the price of brown.