Blushy's Day

I had the bottom of the ladder from about eleven o'clock, and it is a very good job.

Nobody watches the fluff at the bottom. You stand there and keep the feet steady and pass things up, and everybody above you gets on with the interesting part, and the whole time you are completely and comfortably invisible.

I did eleven fluffs' worth of ladder before lunch and I was perfectly happy.

There was one lantern in the box that was wrong. Six-sided, punched tin, older than all the others, with little holes in it shaped like stars.

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

Spotty picked it up, and I went over, because I always go over when somebody is about to be left out of something. I have my reasons.

"It's the best one," I said.

And it was. We took it up to the turn by the bridge, where the hedge comes over and you cannot see your own feet, and hung it on its own where a light was genuinely needed.

Walking back down, Spotty said, "Name one thing that makes you, you."

I thought about it for most of the lane, because it deserved a proper walk.

"I go red," I said, "and I carry on anyway."

"Nobody else in this land does that," said Spotty.

Then Lovey came up the lane and said the thing at the bridge was the best bit of the whole path and who did it — and I pointed at Spotty.

I did not think about that. It was not modesty; I did not have a thought at all. My arm did it.

And then at five o'clock Beamy stopped in the middle of the yard and said, loudly, "Has anybody actually thanked Blushy?"

The yard turned round.

It came all at once, the way it always does — up from the feet, through the middle, out across the face, and both ears going, and the horrible bright certainty that every fluff present can see them going, which makes them go more.

"Six hours," Beamy was saying, delighted. "Six hours on that ladder. I've been up it three times."

And what I wanted, with a whole heart, was to put the ladder down and go home and stay there until next week.

Which was confusing. Because nothing had gone wrong.

That is the bit I had never noticed before. I know the going-red that comes after a mistake. I know it extremely well and I have a whole trick for it — giggle it off, oops, that's okay — and I reached for the trick and it did not fit, because there was no oops. Nobody had tripped. Nobody had laughed.

Somebody had just looked.

"You're allowed to say thank you back," said Peeky, from somewhere near my elbow.

So I said thank you to the yard, and stayed exactly where I was, holding the ladder, being looked at, for the whole of the next eleven seconds. Then somebody needed the ladder moved and it was over.

I held it for four more fluffs after that and I did not go home once.

I said the first line of the welcome at the door.

Eleven words, in front of fifty-five fluffs and a chief, at the door of Winky's house with the last lantern lit over my head. I had said it about forty times to a hedge that afternoon.

I got it right.

I went red, obviously. I went red before I started and I was still red afterwards and it made not the slightest difference to the words, which came out in the right order, at the right speed, and were heard.

That is a thing I did not know: that the red can be happening and the thing can be happening at the same time. I had always assumed one of them had to stop.

Later Beamy read the envelope out and said my name again — the ladder, six hours — and I went the colour of a strawberry for the second time that day, in front of everybody, and stayed where I was.

Spotty came and found me by the window afterwards and said, "You weren't exaggerating in the lane."

"I nearly went home at five o'clock," I said.

"You didn't though."