When the Sun Goes Down

When the last stretch went up, everybody stood at the gate and looked, and nobody said anything, because nobody had the words for it.

Dreamy had the words. Dreamy always has the words for this sort of thing; it is the wrong-times ones Dreamy struggles with.

"It's a strand of floss," said Dreamy.

Everybody turned.

"Look at it. From up here. It goes up the lane and over the bridge and round the long bend, and it's exactly the shape of one strand of candyfloss being pulled off the Wheel." Dreamy's paws were going. "And Rainbow's coming down the other end of it with a whole cloud. We've spun him a thread to walk home on."

There was a silence.

"...We have, haven't we," said Snoozy, from the doorway, with a blanket round both shoulders.

Cloudy said, "I'd have got there eventually," which was almost certainly true and considerably later.

Dreamy went and drew it before it got away — quickly, badly, on the back of Beamy's envelope, which had room on it by then: the lane, the bend, the long bright thread of it, and a small round cloud at the far end.

That drawing is still in Winky's kitchen. Dreamy's whole gift is that a thing seen is a thing kept, and somebody has to do the seeing out loud, or a whole evening goes by and afterwards nobody can say what it was like.

Homey had been sitting on the wall by the bridge for half an hour deciding to go home.

It was not that anything was wrong. It was that everything was different: the path all changed, the whole land out of its usual shape, fifty-five fluffs about to be in one house, and a party that would go on until goodness knows when. Homey's chest had been doing the tight thing since about four.

Nobody came to fetch Homey, which was a relief. Mopsy came and sat, which was different, and said nothing much for a good long while.

"I've got my blanket in my bag," Homey said eventually. "I brought it this morning. I was going to stay over."

"Mm."

"I don't think I want the party."

"That's allowed," said Mopsy.

And because nobody was arguing, Homey got to work out what was actually true, which took another ten minutes of sitting.

What was true was this: Homey did not want three hours of noise. Homey did want, very much, to be there when Rainbow came up the path and got to the door.

"Is there a job at the door?" said Homey.

There was. Snoozy had been keeping it all day — the last lantern of the whole route, the one that had been sitting on the table since six that morning, the one that goes over Winky's door and says here, this is it, you're home.

Homey lit that one, at ten past six, standing on a chair, with the blanket from the bag already folded on the window seat for later.

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

"Hopsy. Take this up the lane and don't let it go out."

It was a twig. It had about an inch of flame on it and it did not look like it would last to the end of the wall, never mind the two hundred feet down to the gate.

Hopsy has a thing about small lights. Hopsy is the one who keeps a candle going on the greyest day of the year, when everybody else has given up and gone in, and the honest truth is that Hopsy does not always feel hopeful while doing it. Quite often Hopsy feels nothing much at all and keeps the candle going anyway, because that is what the job is.

So Hopsy cupped both paws round it and walked.

Slowly. Ridiculously slowly. Past the bridge, where everybody had gone quiet. Past the three steps. There was a moment near the hedge where the flame went almost flat and blue, and somebody behind made a small noise, and Hopsy did not hurry, because hurrying makes wind, and wind is the whole problem.

Then Hopsy stood at the gate and touched the twig to the wick, and the gate lantern caught.

The cheer went all the way back up the lane, lantern by lantern, to the orchard.

"Weren't you scared it'd go out?" said Sunny.

"It nearly did, twice."

"But you looked so calm."

"I was thinking about tomorrow morning," said Hopsy. "There's going to be cake left."

Pouty, who had thought of the whole thing, said, "That is the least inspiring sentence anybody has said all day."

"It's a seed of hope," said Hopsy. "One thing you're looking forward to, that's all it has to be. It doesn't have to be a big one. Mine was cake."

"Cake."

"It got me down the lane," said Hopsy.

At dusk there is always a bit where everybody totals themselves up.

Neaty was doing it on the wall: "I only did the count. I didn't actually make anything."

Lovey has heard this all day, in eleven different voices. I only held the ladder. I just watched. I didn't do a lantern. It is astonishing, on a day when the entire land has worked since sunrise, how many fluffs can arrange the facts so that they personally did nothing.

Lovey could have argued. Arguing does not work; Lovey found that out years ago.

So Lovey said, to the wall, at a perfectly ordinary volume: "I carried oil dishes for an hour and I was good at it, and I made Handy sit down, and I'm pleased with myself about that."

There was a pause.

"You can't just say that," said Neaty.

"Why not?"

Neaty opened their mouth and could not find the reason, which is the entire trick.

"I'm lovable just as I am," said Lovey, cheerfully, to nobody. "I do that one at the mirror most mornings — a mirror hug, one kind thing, out loud, to my own face. Out here it's the same thing with witnesses." Lovey nudged Neaty. "Your go."

"...I counted them twice," said Neaty, at last, "when everybody said I'd got it wrong. And I had not got it wrong."

"There you are."

By the time the path was lit there were four fluffs on that wall taking turns, and the last one was Snuggs, who needed two goes and a hug.

Mopsy had been finding the day hard, in the ordinary way, without anything being wrong.

Big days are like that for Mopsy. Everybody rushing and laughing, and Mopsy somewhere at the edge of it feeling heavy and slightly apart, and no reason for it at all, which makes it worse rather than better.

So at dusk, while everybody went down to the gate to see the path lit, Mopsy went and sat on the wall by the bridge on their own.

Which is exactly where Homey was, sitting with both arms round both knees, very quietly not going to the party.

Mopsy did not say cheer up. Mopsy did not say everyone's down at the gate.

"Can I sit with you for a bit?" said Mopsy.

"Mm," said Homey.

So they sat. For quite a long while. Two fluffs on a wall in the dark, not doing anything, while the rest of Candyfloss Land cheered somewhere down the lane.

And because they were the only two fluffs in the entire land being silent, Mopsy was the only one who heard it: a small dry tick, from the lantern on the bridge rail. Then another.

"That's not right," said Mopsy.

The glass had a crack in it, and the crack was opening as the flame warmed it, one tick at a time, and in about ten minutes it would have gone — on the bridge, on the rail, over the water, exactly where Rainbow would be walking.

They swapped it for Mendy's spare, the one with the flower off a tea towel.

"How did you even hear that?" said Lonny, who had run up from the gate.

"We weren't doing anything," said Mopsy. "It's the only way you hear that sort of thing."

There were four posts on the long bend that are taller than the rest, and by six o'clock they were the only hooks left empty on the entire path.

You need somebody on the top of the ladder. Somebody light, with long arms.

Everybody looked at Newby, who is exactly that shape, and who has never in an entire life gone above the third rung.

"I don't do ladders," said Newby.

Which is true, and is also the sentence Newby says about a great many things, and Newby has got rather good at hearing it come out.

The one-bite rule is the arrangement Newby has with the world: you do not have to like it, you do not have to finish it, you have to have one small bit of it. It works on food. It works on a ladder too, apparently, which Newby had not previously tested.

"One rung," said Newby. "I'll do one rung and then I'll say."

Shivvy held the bottom, which was funny in a way both of them noticed and neither mentioned.

One rung was fine. Newby said so out loud, and did another, and said so again.

It took eleven minutes to get to the top, with a report from every rung, and Wondy shouting up unhelpful facts about how tall the posts were.

Newby did all four posts. Newby also came down shaking, and sat on the grass, and said, "I still don't do ladders."

"You've just done four," said Wondy.

"I've just done four," Newby agreed. "I still don't like them. Both things are allowed."

The matches ran out with one lantern to go.

Not a spare one. The gate lantern. The first one anybody would see coming up the lane, and the one Sunny had been promised at seven o'clock that morning.

"But I really wanted to —" Pouty began, and stopped, because everybody had turned round, and because it was not actually Pouty's lantern to want.

It was, though, Pouty's kind of moment. Pouty knows this feeling from the inside out: the flat drop when the thing you had all lined up in your head simply does not happen. Pouty has had a hundred of those. Pouty is, without any question, the land's leading expert.

So Pouty gave it a minute. A proper minute, standing there feeling genuinely fed up about somebody else's lantern, because rushing past that bit is how you end up with a bad Plan B.

Then: "You don't need a match."

"We do rather," said somebody. "It's a candle."

"You need a flame," said Pouty. "There's forty-nine of them lit up that lane already."

They sent Hopsy up to the third lantern with a dry twig, and Hopsy came back walking at the speed of somebody carrying a small flame in the wind, with everybody holding their breath, and the gate lantern went on from the light of one that was already burning.

It was much better than a match. Everybody said so. Somebody said they should do it that way every year, as though there had ever been a year.

"That's a better Plan A than our Plan A was," said Mopsy.

"Usually is," said Pouty, only slightly smugly.

Rainbow came down off the hill at twenty past six with a cloud in both arms and no idea what was waiting.

It had been a long season. Longer than Rainbow had told anybody it would be. The far side of the land is further than it looks on a map, and asking the sky for a cloud is not a thing that happens quickly, and there had been a good many nights out there on his own with nothing but the walking.

Rainbow had not minded. That is what Rainbow would have said, if anybody had asked. I don't mind. It's my job. Every colour belongs.

The cloud was heavy and getting heavier, and it could not be put down, because a cloud set on wet ground is a cloud lost.

At the top of the long bend, Rainbow stopped.

Below him the whole lane was lit. Not a few lanterns at the gate, the way you might leave a light on for somebody. Every hook. All the way down: over the bridge, past the orchard, forty in a row up there on their own, and thirty feet of hedge tunnel glowing from the ground up out of the roots, which was not a thing anyone had ever done before.

Rainbow stood on the hill for rather a long time.

Then he walked down it, slowly, and read the day off the path as he went, the way you read a letter.

Nine lanterns with bright crooked patches — somebody had sat and mended those; that was hours. Every lantern hung low, two feet lower than looks right, which is not how anyone does it unless somebody remembered. A six-sided tin one, on its own at the worst corner, throwing stars all over the hedge. Not a single gap anywhere, on a path this long, which does not happen unless somebody counted, and was not believed, and counted again.

They were all at the gate. Every one of them, in the dark, under the last lantern, and a great deal of shouting.

And the first thing Rainbow did — before the hello, before anything — was open his mouth to ask who needed what. Who was tired. Who had been left out. What wanted fixing.

It is what Rainbow does. It is entirely automatic. Nine seasons of it.

"Rainbow," said Tipsy, who had tip-toed to the front. "Put the cloud down. Winky's got a table for it."

Rainbow put the cloud down.

And then, without any warning at all, his arms started shaking — great long shudders, right down to the paws — and he found he could not get a single word out.

Nobody said anything clever. Mopsy simply sat down on the wall next to him, which is Mopsy's entire method and has never once failed.

"Which colour is it?" said Mopsy, eventually. "Today."

Rainbow thought about that for a while. It is his own question. He has asked it of every fluff in this land, hundreds of times, and has not once asked it of himself on the way home.

"Grey," said Rainbow. "A sort of worn-out grey. I've been carrying it on my own since the spring and I never said, because I didn't want anybody worrying about me."

"That's a real one," said Mopsy.

"Every colour belongs," said Winky, from the gate, not entirely steadily.

"Yes," said Rainbow. "So it does."

He sat on the wall for a full five minutes before he went in, with fifty-five fluffs waiting and not one of them hurrying him, and every lantern in Candyfloss Land burning behind him all the way up the hill.

Snuggs had been handing things out since the morning and had eleven blankets left at dusk, which is exactly the sort of number Snuggs keeps in reserve.

They went up the lane: one to Jelly in the orchard, one to Peeky, two to the fluffs standing about at the bridge waiting for the path to be lit and going slowly blue about the paws.

It is a lovely thing to do. Snuggs would not have swapped it for any other job in the land. Do one kind thing and notice how it feels — that is Snuggs's whole trick, and it works, it genuinely does, every time.

The difficulty is what happens at the end of a day of it.

By the time Snuggs got back down to the gate there were no blankets and nothing left to hand anybody, and Snuggs stood at the edge of the crowd feeling oddly hollow, in the way you do when the thing you are for has run out.

Lovey was standing next to Snuggs and looked sideways and said, "You've gone quiet."

"I'm fine."

"Mm," said Lovey. "I'm going to say a thing and you're not going to like it. You've hugged about thirty fluffs today and nobody's hugged you."

"That's not —" Snuggs stopped. "No. That's true, actually."

"Go on then."

It took Snuggs three goes to get the words out, which was ridiculous, given how many times a day Snuggs says them to other people.

"Need a hug?" said Snuggs, at last. And then, going red: "I mean. Do I. Can I have one."

"You can have two," said Lovey.

Mopsy came over and made it three, without being asked, which is the only way Mopsy does anything.

Somebody had to start the cheering, and everybody knew who.

"Go on, Sparkly."

Sparkly stood up on the gatepost, paws on hips, and did not feel one single bit as certain as Sparkly looked, which is the standard arrangement.

The lighting went from the far end back — Tidy's plan — so the path came on in stretches, one at a time, coming down the lane towards the gate.

"THE ORCHARD," Sparkly shouted, as forty hooks came alight all at once, "IS JELLY'S. FORTY OF THEM. ON HIS OWN. ALL AFTERNOON."

The lane went up. Somewhere up the hill Jelly cheered louder than anybody.

"THE BRIDGE — that's Truly, who did them twice, and the second time was better —"

It went the whole length of the path. Sparkly had Beamy's envelope in one paw and read every name off it, and there was a cheer for the hedge tunnel standing in the roots, which was Cloudy, and a cheer for Yetty's rope, and a very long one for the nine patched lanterns that came on in colours.

Peeky, standing at the bottom of the post, said afterwards: "How do you do that? In front of everyone?"

And Sparkly, who had been worrying for three days about whether anybody actually wanted Sparkly to do the cheering or just expected it, said the true thing, which was easier in the dark.

"I'm not sure of myself at all. I'm never sure. I stand tall and say I can do this, and then I do it anyway, and the trick is I'm not doing it for me." Sparkly got down off the gatepost. "It's much easier to be certain about you than about me."

"Say one for you, then," said Peeky.

Sparkly did, eventually, at about eleven o'clock, and Peeky started the cheer.

At half past five, with the path lit and everybody standing about feeling pleased, Wobbly said: "What if one of them goes out?"

There was a small silence of the kind Wobbly is extremely used to.

"What if the wind gets up. What if the ones in the roots fall over. What if somebody's put one where the hedge can reach it and it catches —"

"Wobbly," said Tidy.

Here it comes, thought Wobbly. Don't spoil it. Try not to worry. It'll be fine.

"— will you go and check them?" said Tidy. "All of them. Start at the far end and walk back. You'll see things the rest of us won't."

Wobbly stopped mid what-if.

"...All of them?"

"You're the only one who'd actually do it properly."

So Wobbly walked the whole path backwards through the dusk, from the far end of the orchard down to Winky's gate, alone, with Shivvy coming along for the dark bits.

Five things you can see. Four you can hear. Three you can touch. Wobbly does that on the move now, which took years.

And Wobbly found: one lantern in the roots leaning on a dry twig. One hung near enough to the hedge to scorch it. Two in the tunnel standing on soft ground that would tip the first time somebody's foot went past.

Four. Four things, on a path that fifty-five fluffs had been perfectly happy with.

Wobbly fixed all four, and got to the gate as the last of the light went, and found that the worry had gone somewhere. Not answered. Used.

"What if it goes okay?" said Wobbly, to Shivvy, trying it out.

"It's going to," said Shivvy, who does not say that lightly.