The Middle of the Day

There was one lantern left in the nettles, further out than the others, on the bit of bank that goes over.

"I'll get it," said Boingy, and did, and did not.

What happened was very fast and involved a great deal of bank. Boingy arrived at the bottom in a sitting position with nettles up both arms and the wind entirely gone.

Yetty looked down from the top, horrified. "Are you —"

"Yep," said Boingy, from the ground. "Give me a minute."

And then Boingy lay there.

This is the part nobody puts in the stories. Everyone knows the bouncing back. Nobody mentions that first there is a stretch of lying in the nettles at the bottom of a bank feeling entirely flat, while up above you the day carries on being lovely without you in it.

Boingy lay in it for a good while. Long enough for Pouty to come and look over the edge and say, "Oh no," in a deeply sympathetic way, and sit down at the top to keep Boingy company from a safe height.

"Are you getting up?" Pouty asked, eventually.

"In a bit," said Boingy. "It's not a race. It's just a bank."

Then Boingy said, out loud, to the nettles, "I can try again." And bounced. Three times, on the spot, because three is what it takes.

The lantern was right there. It had been right there the whole time.

Boingy came up the bank the slow way, on all fours, along the bit that was solid, which is how Bravo had done it, and which Boingy had been in far too much of a hurry to notice the first time.

Chatty got the bank message from Hushy and had it round the whole land in under four minutes, which is what Chatty is actually rather brilliant at.

"— and so Bravo's taking the bank, and it's sorted, and honestly I said straight away that it wasn't right, someone saying yes just because everyone's looking, and did I tell you what happened with the rope? Because Huffy said —"

Truly was sitting on the step with both paws round a mug, not drinking it.

Chatty got four more sentences out before noticing.

There is a thing that happens in Chatty's chest at that moment, and Chatty has learned to recognise it: the small lurch of oh, you have been talking at somebody who needed a turn.

"Sorry," said Chatty. "Sorry. Your go."

"It's fine."

"It's not, though. Can I tell you how I feel? I feel like I've been talking since seven this morning because if I stop I'll have to notice that I'm a bit worried about tonight too." Chatty ran out of breath. "There. Now it's your go, and I've made the space, and I'm going to sit here and not fill it."

Truly looked up.

Chatty sat, with great difficulty, for a whole minute.

And in the minute, Truly said the thing Truly had been sitting on the step failing to say all morning, and it turned out to matter quite a lot, and it went straight back down the lane in Chatty's mouth at speed, where it did some good.

It was the hot part of the day, when everyone has been working for hours and has not yet had enough to eat, and that is when rows happen.

This one was about the bridge stretch. Huffy had cut the rope into short lengths, three lanterns at a time, which was sensible and slow. Jelly had been given the orchard, which was long and dull, and had watched the bridge team get the good job — the bridge, with the view, where everybody walks past and sees you doing it.

"It's not fair," said Jelly, "that they get —"

"Oh, here we go," said Huffy.

And it went up like dry grass. Both of them loud, both of them right about something, neither of them about the same thing. Somebody started taking sides. Somebody put down a lantern harder than a lantern wants to be put down.

Dinky did what Dinky does. Dinky got in the middle and pulled a face and said something ridiculous about the bridge being haunted, and fell over a bucket on purpose.

It worked. It always works. Huffy made the noise that is nearly a laugh and does not want to be. Jelly looked at the sky. The dry grass went out.

"Hehe, oops," said Dinky. "Right. Back to it, everyone —"

And then Dinky stopped.

Because Dinky could see Jelly's face, and it had not changed at all. The laugh had gone over the top of it like weather. The thing underneath was still there, and would still be there at four o'clock, and at the party, sitting quietly in Jelly's chest all evening.

This is the bit Dinky usually walks away from. You make the room easier and you go, and nobody asks you to do the other thing, because you are the funny one, and being funny gets you excused.

Dinky took a breath.

"Jelly," said Dinky. "Say the real one. Out loud. Not to me — to Huffy."

"What?"

"I feel..." Dinky prompted, and waited, which was the hardest ten seconds of Dinky's day.

Jelly went red. "I feel left out," Jelly said, at the ground. "Because everyone's at the bridge and I'm up an orchard on my own and nobody can see me doing it."

"Oh," said Huffy, entirely differently. "Well. That's not the same as the rope at all."

"No," said Jelly. "It isn't."

They did the orchard together after lunch, the pair of them, arguing amiably about something else.

Tipsy, who had watched all of it from the wall without saying a word, said to Dinky afterwards: "You could have left it at the bucket."

"I know," said Dinky. "I nearly did."

Glowy had been on the barn floor since ten with a game and had done, if Glowy was honest, none of the lanterns.

It was not laziness. It is that a game gives you a next thing, and then another next thing, and each one is small enough to say yes to, and somewhere around the fortieth yes it is suddenly the afternoon.

"Just one more level," said Glowy, to Squirmy, for the fourth time.

Squirmy, who had run the far end of the path twice and was pink with it, said, "Suit yourself," in a genuinely friendly way, and went out again.

That was worse than being told off.

Glowy finished the level. Then Glowy did the thing that is supposed to happen when the timer goes: stood up, stretched, and looked at something far away.

The something far away was the barn door, with Doodle's map on it, and Humdy's green dots.

And Glowy — who counts things all day, in games, without noticing — looked at the tally and said, "That's wrong."

It was. Humdy had been colouring a dot for every hook filled, but four fluffs had been filling hooks at the far end before the map existed and had never told anyone, so the map said forty-one and the path said forty-nine.

Nobody had known they were eight ahead.

"How did you see that?" said Mossy, in the doorway, smelling of outside.

"It's just counting," said Glowy, and put the game down on the crate, and went out to do the last stretch with everybody else, and got there in time for the good part.

By half past one everything that could be done had been done, and the oil was still being divided, and there was nothing for anybody to do but wait in the heat.

"I'm SO bored," said Humdy, luxuriously, lying on the barn floor.

Humdy says this a hundred times a day and means it every time, and the interesting thing about Humdy is what happens about four minutes afterwards.

Humdy looked at the ceiling. Then at the map on the barn door, with all Doodle's little dots on it, one for every hook on the path. Then at the pot of pens.

"Doodle. Can I colour one in every time a hook gets filled?"

"That's what they're for," said Doodle.

So Humdy did, and it was quite satisfying, and then it was extremely satisfying, and then about twenty minutes in Humdy noticed that the gate end was going green fast and the middle was not going green at all.

"Cloudy," said Humdy. "Come and look at this."

Cloudy, who had been staring out of the door at nothing for some while, came and looked, and drifted off again for a moment, and came back with: "...there's nobody working the middle."

There was not. Everybody had started at the ends, because the ends are where you arrive.

Humdy went and told Tidy, who moved four fluffs into the middle, and the map went green in the middle too, and by five o'clock the whole thing was one colour.

"Best afternoon in ages," said Humdy, colouring.

The orchard stretch is forty hooks long and nobody walks past it.

Jelly knew this by eleven o'clock and minded about it by twelve. Down at the bridge there was laughing. Down at the bridge fluffs kept stopping to say ooh, doesn't that look lovely. Up here there were forty hooks, some wasps, and Jelly.

"Ooh," said Jelly, to a wasp, bitterly. "I wish that was mine."

The row afterwards was not Jelly's finest hour, and Jelly knew it halfway through, which is the worst time to know it.

Afterwards, when it had all come out and Huffy had gone off in a better mood than anybody deserved, Sharey came up the lane with half a sandwich held out in front, the way Sharey arrives everywhere.

"Half for you," said Sharey, "half for me."

They sat under a tree with it.

"I wasn't cross about the rope," said Jelly.

"I know."

"I was cross that nobody could see me."

"I know that too," said Sharey. "Three good things," said Sharey. "That's your one, isn't it? Go on. Three good things you've got up here that they haven't got at the bridge."

Jelly thought it was a stupid question, and said so, and then counted them anyway. Shade. Apples. And — Jelly looked along the row — forty hooks all in a line, every one of them filled, which from this end looked like a very long sentence somebody had finished.

"That's three," said Sharey.

At dusk, when the orchard came on all at once, it was the best bit of the whole path, and Jelly cheered louder than anyone, and meant every bit of it.

Nine of the lanterns out of the ditch had gone at the seams.

"They're ruined," said Oopsy, who had carried them up and was taking it personally, as Oopsy does. "That's nine. That's nine dark bits of path. That's —"

"Sit down," said Mendy, "and pass me the basket."

Mendy has a basket for this. Scraps, thread, a needle, wax, and a great deal of patience, which does not fit in a basket but turns up anyway.

The work is slow. You cannot hurry a patch; a hurried patch comes off in the rain. So Mendy sat in the shade through the hottest hour, stitching paper and cloth over nine split seams, and Oopsy sat alongside handing things over and gradually becoming less terrible.

"That one's crooked," said Oopsy, after a while.

"Yes."

"Doesn't it bother you?"

"Look at it tonight," said Mendy, "when there's a candle behind it."

Mopsy came and sat down too, for a bit, and said nothing, and nobody minded.

By three o'clock there were nine lanterns standing in a row against the barn wall, each with a bright crooked patch on one side — orange, green, striped, one with a flower on it that had come off a tea towel.

That night, those nine were the ones everybody stopped at. A plain lantern gives you light. A patched one gives you light in a shape, thrown up the hedge, in colours.

"Every patch makes me stronger," said Mendy, to nobody, and threaded the needle again.

"Nopsy! Bridge stretch. You're tall enough for the outside hooks."

Nopsy looked at the bridge.

The outside hooks are on the far side of the rail, over the water, and you have to lean. Nopsy is tall enough. Nopsy is not, and has never been, steady at a height with water underneath, and knows exactly what happens: it is fine, it is fine, it is fine, and then the hands go stupid.

The familiar thing arrived on cue — the hot, squirmy wrongness of being about to disappoint somebody who is being nice to you.

Everybody was busy. It would take one word to make it all smooth. Nopsy could feel the yes forming, the way it always forms, out of politeness and speed.

"No thank you," said Nopsy.

The yard went on being busy. Nobody fell over.

"Oh," said Handy. "Right. Are you —"

"I'm not steady leaning out over water," said Nopsy. "I'd do it, and I'd be slow, and then somebody would be standing underneath watching me be slow, and we'd lose an hour. Give me the gate steps. I'll do all three and the wall."

It sounds easy written down. It took Nopsy the whole walk from the barn to work out the words.

Peeky, who had been dreading being asked and had not managed to say so, watched this happen from the wall with an expression of open astonishment.

"You just said it," said Peeky.

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

The bridge got done by somebody who likes heights, in half the time, and nobody got fished out of anything.

The question had been sitting in Puzzly's head since breakfast, getting heavier.

Everybody was working extremely hard towards sundown. Hang them by sundown. Fill them by sundown. And Puzzly did not actually know when sundown was, and had assumed, all morning, that this was a thing everybody else knew and Puzzly had missed.

That feeling has a name and the name is silly, and it kept Puzzly quiet from eight o'clock until nearly two.

"Wait," said Puzzly, at last, to the barn in general. "What time does the sun actually go down?"

Somebody laughed. Not unkindly — the way you laugh at a very small question.

Then the laugh stopped, because nobody answered.

Muddle said, "...Seven?" Wondy said, "Half six?" Somebody at the back said, "Eight, surely," with enormous confidence and no evidence whatsoever.

They went and asked Mossy, who is outside all day and knows these things without being told, and Mossy said: "Twenty past six. It's been getting earlier all month."

Twenty past six.

It was ten to two.

There was a short, cold silence while fifty-five fluffs did the same sum, and then the entire land moved about twice as fast for the rest of the afternoon, and the whole path was lit in time, which it would not have been.

"Sorry," said Puzzly, afterwards. "It was probably a daft thing to ask."

"It was the only useful thing anybody said all day," said Wondy.

There was a third of a can of oil, and there were fifty-five lanterns.

Everyone went quiet when Wondy carried it up from the bank, because everyone could do that sum. A third of a can is a lovely amount of oil right up until you count the lanterns.

"We'll do the bridge and the gate properly," somebody said, "and leave the orchard dark."

"No," said Sharey.

Sharey sat down in the middle of the yard with the can and a spoon and a great many small dishes and worked it out. Not equal shares — that was the first thing Sharey threw out. A lantern in the hedge tunnel has to burn for five hours. A lantern on the bridge has the moon helping it. The three steps by the gate only need to be lit from when the walking starts.

So: deep in the dark places, thin where the moon does half the work, and nothing at all wasted on the stretch that would be lit by Winky's windows anyway.

It took an hour and Mello sat with Sharey the whole time, passing dishes, not fussing, not hurrying anybody, which is what Mello is for.

"Half for you, half for me," Sharey said at one point, to two lanterns, and gave one of them rather more than half, and was pleased about it.

They finished with a spoonful left over.

Sharey gave that to Jelly, for the orchard, which was already done and did not need it.

"What's this for?"

"Spare," said Sharey. "In case."

It was not for in case. Sharey had simply noticed who had spent the morning on their own.

There was one lantern in the box that was wrong.

All the others were the same: round, glass-sided, wire handle. This one was six-sided, made of punched tin, older than the rest, with little holes in it in the shape of stars.

"We can't use that," somebody said. "It'll look odd in the row."

Spotty picked it up.

Spotty knows the feeling of being the one that looks odd in the row. Spotty has had whole mornings of wishing to be round and glass-sided like everybody else, and says so, and then gets over it, and then has another one next week.

"Where's it going?" said Blushy, who had come over because Blushy always comes over when somebody is about to be left out of something, having been left out of things.

"They don't want it in the row."

Blushy looked at it. "It's the best one."

"I know," said Spotty.

So they took it up the path to the turn by the bridge — the bit Shivvy had said was the worst, where you cannot see your own feet — and hung it there on its own, away from the row, where a light is genuinely needed and nothing else was going.

That night, walking home, every single fluff knew exactly where they were the moment they came round that corner, because there was only one lantern in all of Candyfloss Land that threw stars on the hedge.

"Name one thing that makes you, you," said Spotty, on the way back down. "Go on. Different is great. That's the whole game."

Blushy thought about it for most of the lane. "I go red," Blushy said at last, "and I carry on anyway."

"See," said Spotty. "Nobody else in this land does that. My spots make me, me. Your red makes you, you."

Lovey, coming the other way, said: "That thing at the bridge is the best bit of the whole path. Who did that?"

Blushy pointed at Spotty. Spotty went pink, which is Blushy's trick, not Spotty's, and did not mind at all.

The spare rope had been in the box all season and had done what rope does in a box: become one solid knot roughly the size and temper of a cat.

Three fluffs had a go. Three fluffs gave it up.

"I can't do it," said Yetty, having a go, and then heard it, and sighed at himself. "I can't do it... yet."

So Yetty sat down on an upturned crate in the sun with the knot in his lap and started at one end.

It is extremely boring work. You find a loop. You follow it. You lose it. You find it again. Nothing visible happens for a very long time, and then the whole thing is suddenly looser everywhere at once, and then it is boring again.

Fizzy came past twice. The first time Fizzy said, "Just cut it."

"There isn't any more rope."

The second time, an hour later, Fizzy stopped and stared, because the knot had gone from cat-sized to about the size of an apple.

"How much longer?"

"Don't know," said Yetty. "Bit more."

Boingy came past at some point covered in nettle stings and said something encouraging from a lying-down position.

Yetty got the last loop out at half past two. Forty feet of good rope, in one piece, coiled properly.

Nobody made a fuss, because by then everybody had forgotten it was ever a knot, which is the usual reward for that sort of afternoon.