Dinky's Day

I was funny all morning and it was extremely useful and I am not going to be modest about it.

A yard with fifty-five tired fluffs in it and one ladder needs somebody doing what I do, and I did it for about six hours without being asked: the thing where a fluff is about to get properly cross and instead ends up laughing at me falling over something.

I am good at it. I am the best in this land at it. It takes about four seconds and it works nearly every time.

And then at half past twelve it worked and it was not enough, and that is the whole of my day.

It was the hot part. Everybody had been going since sunrise and nobody had eaten enough, and Jelly came down from the orchard and said the thing about it not being fair that the bridge lot got the good job, and Huffy said "oh, here we go".

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

So I 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 one. Jelly looked at the sky. The dry grass went out.

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

And then I stopped.

Because I could see Jelly's face and it had not changed at all.

The laugh had gone over the top of it like weather. Underneath was exactly the same thing that had been there four seconds earlier, and it was going to be there at four o'clock, and it was going to be sitting quietly in Jelly's chest all evening at the party, and the yard would think it had been dealt with because there had been a laugh.

Here is the bit I would like put on the record, since this is my own account and nobody else can see it.

I did not want to do the next thing. I wanted to walk off. I had already got the laugh — the room was fine, the work restarted, everybody's shoulders had come down — and walking off at that exact moment is the most comfortable thing in the world, and I have done it a hundred times, and nobody has ever once asked me why I did not stay.

That is the arrangement. You are the funny one, so you get to leave at the good bit.

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

"What?"

"I feel..." I said, and then waited.

Ten seconds. I stood in a hot yard and waited ten whole seconds with two cross fluffs and about nine onlookers, and it was the hardest thing I did all day, and I do not think one fluff in that yard could tell.

"I feel left out," said Jelly, 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, arguing amiably about something else.

Tipsy, who had watched the whole thing from the wall without a word, came and found me afterwards.

"You could have left it at the bucket."

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

Winky's was the best party I have ever been to and I laughed until I had to sit down, and I want to be clear that none of what follows is a complaint.

Jitters sang the welcome three times. Blushy said the first line at the door and got it right, having been in front of the whole yard twice already that day. I did a bit near the fire at about ten which I am told was quite good.

And then Beamy read the envelope out.

Dinky — stopped the row, and then made Jelly say the real thing.

And then.

Nobody in that room noticed those two words except me and, I suspect, Tipsy. It is a small thing. It is a joining word.

It is also the entire difference between the fluff I am known as and the fluff I would like to be, and Beamy — who had it second-hand, from somebody who was standing there — put it in.

Later Rainbow did the counting-off, and there was a line about the sad ones being the only two quiet enough to hear a crack in the glass, and one about the worried one checking twice, and I thought: he has a line for everybody's feeling doing its job.

Mine is the one that stops feelings happening for a minute. That is a real job. It is genuinely needed and it got a yard through a hot afternoon.

It is just not the same job as the one Mopsy was doing on a wall at six o'clock.