Cloudy's Day

I went to the Library with three others at half past eleven and I could not tell you most of what happened there.

Memo needed a book to prove the path had been lit before. Puzzly asked the librarian three excellent questions. Dreamy read something else entirely for an hour and a half.

I was there. I looked at books. Somewhere around the middle of it I went off completely, the way I do, and came back about ten minutes later holding a thought about how a library smells the same as the inside of a drum, which I did not say out loud, because I have learned which ones to keep.

That is my whole morning, honestly told. I was present and I was not there.

The hedge tunnel was the problem nobody had solved.

Thirty feet, hedge on both sides meeting over the top, black as a pocket — and nothing at all to hang a lantern on. No posts. Not one, the whole way.

They had talked about it twice. Both times the conversation ended with somebody saying "we'll think of something", which is what a land says when it has not thought of anything.

I was in the barn doorway looking at the hedge and not, in any sense anybody would recognise, thinking about it.

I was thinking about boats.

I could not tell you now how the boats got there. There was something about the way the hedge came over the top and made a sort of hull shape upside down, and then I was somewhere else entirely, in a harbour, and then — without being asked, arriving sideways the way they always do:

You don't hang them. You put them down.

"Where was I," I said, out loud, to the barn.

And then I did the other half, which is the half I am bad at. I pressed both feet into the barn floor and noticed them — properly noticed them, the floor and the feet and the fact that it was twenty past four and there was a thing to say and somebody to say it to.

I found Wobbly, who was worrying, and Humdy, who was colouring.

"You don't hang them in the tunnel. There's nothing to hang them on. You stand them on the ground, down each side, like a landing strip. You'd see your feet the whole way."

"But what if somebody kicks one?" said Wobbly.

"Then put them in the roots," I said, "where the hedge is thick."

They did it in the roots.

Earlier in the day I had done something similar without noticing — Humdy had said come and look at this, about the map, and I had looked at the green dots and drifted off for a second and come back with there's nobody working the middle, which turned out to be true and which four fluffs were sent to fix.

Twice in one day. Both times by not paying attention.

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.

At the party Beamy read the envelope out and the tunnel was on it, and Sparkly had already shouted it off the gatepost earlier — the tunnel is Cloudy's — which I did not hear at the time because I was, and I am being honest here, looking at the moths.

Dreamy found me late on and said the thing about the path looking like one strand of floss pulled off the Wheel, and we sat on the step and improved it for about half an hour: that the 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.