The Party at Winky's

Fifty-five fluffs will not fit in Winky's front room. They got in anyway.

Snoozy had been right about the end of the party. All day, while everybody else was out on the path, Snoozy had been quietly making somewhere to land: blankets down, cushions along the window seat, the lamps turned low. By nine o'clock there was not a fluff in that room who had not sat in it.

Jitters sang the welcome, note-perfect, twice, and was asked for it again. Blushy said the first line at the door, in front of everybody, and got it right.

And then Beamy climbed up on Winky's bucket with an envelope.

"Right," said Beamy. "I have been writing this down since nine o'clock this morning, and I am going to read all of it."

It took eleven minutes.

Because here is the thing nobody in that room had known until Beamy said it out loud. The day had been one single long piece of work, passed from paw to paw, by fluffs who mostly never saw each other all day.

Zenny had heard the box go over at first light, and remembered where. Mossy had found the first lantern in the wet grass and carried it back, and never mentioned it to anybody. Muddle had got lost on the way to the shed and fallen over the lost box at the bottom of the bank. Huffy had said the rope was frayed, and been told off for saying it, and been right. Wondy had stopped at the hole in the bank instead of climbing into it, which is the only reason there was any oil at all — and Sharey had divided a third of a can between fifty-five lanterns by giving the dark places more and the moonlit places less.

Puzzly had asked what time the sun actually went down. At two o'clock. When everybody still thought they had until seven.

Memo had remembered the last time, years ago, and why it had failed: hung too high, all the light going into the hedge. Every lantern on the path had been moved down two feet.

Jitters had gone so far up the orchard to practise that Jitters became the only fluff who could see the whole path at once — and saw the thirty black feet of the hedge tunnel. Cloudy, staring out of a barn door thinking about boats, had worked out that you do not hang them in a tunnel at all. You stand them in the roots.

Neaty had counted fifty-four, and been told she had miscounted. Peeky had said it out loud and been lost in the noise, and had walked into the middle of the yard and said it again, louder, one word more than the first time. Oopsy had been certain it was his fault and had nearly spent the whole evening apologising for a lantern that was sitting on Winky's table the entire time, cleaned, where Snoozy had put it at six that morning.

And Tipsy had walked into the middle of a yard of fifty-five tired, snapping fluffs at four o'clock, and had not said a single word, and had simply stood there being still until they all stopped.

"And that," said Beamy, "is fifty-four names. Then there is me at the bottom, because Sparkly made me."

Rainbow listened to the whole thing with a blanket round both shoulders and a cup going cold in both paws.

At the end of it he stood up, which took him a moment.

"I have been telling this land for years that every colour belongs," said Rainbow. "I would like you to notice what actually happened today. Because I have been walking since the spring, and I could not have done one single bit of it."

He counted them off on both paws.

"The worried one checked twice. The cross one said the thing nobody wanted to hear. The muddled one got lost in exactly the right direction. The sad ones were the only two quiet enough to hear a crack in the glass. The shy one said it twice. The one who cannot sit still ran the far end of the path before lunch, and the one who cannot hurry kept the ladder queue from falling to pieces for an hour and forty minutes."

Rainbow looked round the room.

"Not one of those is a comfortable feeling to have. Every one of them did a job today that nothing else could have done. That is what I mean by it. It is what I have always meant by it."

Then Winky, who had been unusually quiet for nearly four minutes, said: "Can we do the cloud now?"

So they did the cloud. All fifty-five of them walked back out into the dark, up the lit lane, to the Great Candyfloss Wheel, and Rainbow set the new cloud on it.

The Wheel turned for the first time since the spring.