🏠Winky's front room

I told Bravo about it at Winky's, at about nine, with nettle stings all up both arms.

The arriving in a sitting position. The lying there a good while with the day carrying on above. Pouty at the top not once telling me to get up.

"I was in far too much of a hurry to notice it the first time," I said.

And Bravo said the thing about saying it out loud first, and about who is watching when a job gets handed out, and I did not entirely follow all of it, but the bit I took away was this: Bravo goes first on purpose and slowly, and I go first by accident and fast, and those look identical from the outside and are not remotely the same.

Winky's was full by eight and I did my rounds.

I am aware that sounds like a joke. It is not really a joke. I went round that room about four times over the evening, and each time I was looking for the same thing: one fluff standing slightly outside the shape of a group, doing the fence-post face.

There were three. I am not going to say who, because two of them would be embarrassed and the third would argue.

I talked a great deal at Winky's and I enjoyed all of it.

But the bit I keep coming back to is standing in the kitchen at about ten with Hushy, who had lasted until half past nine and then gone to the corner by the dresser where the noise only comes off one wall.

"You did the hard half this morning," I said.

"So did you," said Hushy. "Yours just looks easy."

I walked to Winky's through my own tunnel.

Thirty feet of the worst dark in Candyfloss Land, lit from the ground up out of the roots, so the light came sideways and upwards through the hedge and you could see every one of your own feet the whole way along.

Shivvy walked it that night without holding on to anything. Somebody told me that. I have thought about it more than anything else that has ever happened to me.

I spent most of the party with pens out, because a party with fifty-five fluffs in it and nothing to do with your hands is my idea of a long evening, and by about eleven there were four of us doing lanterns on the backs of things.

Later Cloudy found me on the step and we improved the whole thing for about half an hour — that the hedge tunnel was the bit where the strand went underground, and the tin lantern at the bridge was a knot in it.

None of that is any use to anybody. It was the best conversation I had all day.

I got to Winky's and it was full and loud and there was cake, and Jitters sang the welcome twice, and Beamy read the whole day out off an envelope, and Rainbow put a cloud on the Wheel at eleven o'clock at night and the Wheel turned for the first time since the spring.

And none of that is going to happen again.

The game will be there tomorrow. It is there now. It is exactly where I left it on that crate, and it will be precisely as good on Thursday as it was this morning, and it will wait, because waiting is all it does.

I found Nopsy at Winky's, at about ten, and asked how it is done.

Nopsy looked at me as though I had asked how walking is done.

"It's a sentence, not a word," Nopsy said. "No, thank you, because. The because is the kind half. It tells them where you stop, so they know where to go next."

I have turned that over about forty times since. So they know where to go next. All the nos I have imagined saying were just holes — a job dropped, a friend left standing. It had genuinely never occurred to me that a no could contain directions.

Then I stood in the doorway with a hot cup, which is the best place at any party, and watched the whole lane come alight from the far end down.

I was in the doorway for most of the evening. Fluffs kept arriving past me and I said hello to every single one of them, which is more fluffs than I have spoken to in a month. Blushy said the welcome line at the door and got it right, about four feet from where I was standing. I heard Beamy read the envelope out from there. I had bread in my bag and it went in about nine minutes.

The map got carried into Winky's at about nine and propped on the dresser, because four fluffs wanted to look at it, and I sat next to it for a while like somebody's uncle at an exhibition.

Winky's front room was too loud for me by about half past nine, which I had expected, so I had a plan.

My plan was the corner by the dresser, where the noise comes at you off one wall instead of four. I sat there with a cup and let it all go over, and it was lovely, in the way a rainstorm is lovely from indoors.

I knew where I was going to stand at Winky's before I got there. I always do. The left-hand side of the fire, where you can see the door.

I did not stand there for very long, as it turned out.

Peeky came and found me. Then Buddy, who knows everybody's name and had spent the whole day making sure nobody ended up standing on their own, and who I suspect was doing his rounds. Then Newby wanted to describe the green bun to somebody who had been there, which does not technically require a witness but is better with one.

At Winky's I told the story of the first homecoming to four fluffs who had never heard it, twice, and the second telling was better. Beamy read the envelope out and my line was Memo — remembered why it failed last time, and Tidy caught my eye from across the room and made a face that meant I should have listened at ten o'clock, and I made a face back that meant it is fine.

It was fine. It took five hours and a book and it was still fine, because the hour was still there when we needed it.

Winky's front room at nine o'clock at night is about fifty degrees and entirely full of fluff.

I got to Winky's early and immediately had eleven ideas about the seating, which I did not say out loud, which I count as a personal triumph.

Then I found Tidy by the fire and said thank you for the wicks.

"For the what?"

"You said 'say the smallest one'. This morning. I'd have still been standing in that yard at lunchtime."

Handy found me at about ten o'clock, by the dresser, and asked me how it is done.

I genuinely did not understand the question for a moment. It was like being asked how walking is done.

And then I looked at Handy properly — at a fluff who had done eight jobs before sunrise and eleven hooks by mid-morning and whose arms had been shaking by eleven, and who had needed Lovey to announce to an entire yard that he was having a sit down because he could not announce it himself — and I understood the question perfectly.

So I said it: a sentence, not a word. No, thank you, because. The because is the kind half.

I did not do very much at Winky's, and that is the achievement.

I sat down at about nine o'clock and I stayed sat down. Twice I got up to fetch something for somebody and both times somebody else said "sit down, Pinky" and meant it, and both times I did.

Snuggs came in at about six with empty arms, and I saw it from clear across the gate and knew exactly what it was, because I have stood like that myself about four hundred times.

I did not get there. Lovey did, and I only heard what was said much later, from Lovey, at the party: that thirty fluffs had been hugged today and nobody had hugged Snuggs, and that it took Snuggs three goes to ask for one back, and that Mopsy came over and made it three without being asked at all.

And I sat in Winky's with a cup and could not quite get past the sum.

We finished with about forty minutes to spare. Forty. If I had asked at nine o'clock in the morning we would have had five hours more, and nobody would have had to run, and the four o'clock hour when the whole land turned on each other might not have happened at all.

I have not said that to anybody, and I am not going to, because six fluffs would immediately tell me not to think like that and they would all be right and it would not help.

Wondy came and found me about half past nine and asked me something genuinely difficult about the hole in the bank — how two fluffs could want opposite things and both be right — and I said the first thing that came into my head, which was that Wondy had been right about the hole and Newby had been right about Wondy.

Inside, Snoozy had been making somewhere to land since six o'clock that morning while everybody else was out on the path — blankets down, cushions along the window seat, lamps low. Somebody put a blanket round my shoulders and a cup in my paws and I did not have to ask for either.

I did the plates at Winky's, which is not a job anybody gave me.

There is a particular moment at a party with fifty-five fluffs in it when there is not quite enough of something, and everybody notices at the same time and pretends not to, and it goes slightly flat. I have been watching for that moment my whole life. Tonight it was the cake, at about half past nine.

So I cut what was left the way I had done the oil: proper pieces to the fluffs who had been on the far end of the path since sunrise and had not sat down, thin ones to the rest of us who had, and none at all to me and Handy, who had both eaten at Market Row and were the only two who knew it.

Nobody noticed. That is the point of doing it properly.

My party was the window seat filling up.

I sat at the end of it, where I had been planning to sit since about half past six that morning, and I watched it happen. Nobody came in and sat down. They came in and stood, still going, still talking about hooks — and then one by one, over about an hour, each of them found somewhere to put themselves, and went quiet, and stopped.

Homey ended up in the doorway with a hot cup, which is the best place at any party, and had the blanket I had folded on the seat earlier without knowing it was folded for anybody in particular.

By nine o'clock there was not a fluff in that room who had not sat down in it at some point.

And then I went into that party and sat on Snoozy's window seat with a blanket that was not one of mine, and somebody brought me cake instead of the other way round, and I found it almost unbearable for about ten minutes and then extremely nice.

I wore the tin lantern's reflection all evening, in the sense that four separate fluffs came up to tell me about the stars on the hedge without knowing it was anything to do with me.

I did not correct any of them, which I would like some credit for.

I sat with Hushy for a bit at Winky's, in the quiet corner by the dresser, and we did not say very much, and it was restful. Two fluffs who both found out today that the difficult part is not the knowing.

Fizzy found me by the window at about ten and said he had been wrong twice and loudly, which I had not expected and did not need.

"It was mostly boring," I said.

Fizzy said that was the most honest description of heroism he had ever heard, which I think was a joke, and then said something I have been thinking about since: that Fizzy is the one who never gives up and that today somebody had out-lasted him by sitting still.

I would not have put it that way. I do not think of it as out-lasting anything. But I did sit still for an hour and a bit, and the rope did come out in one piece, and the two of those are connected.

I have three clear memories of the party and they are all loud.