Dreamy's Day

I was not much use in the morning and I would like to be upfront about it.

I was given a job. I do not remember what it was. I started it and something about the way the light was coming through the hedge got hold of me, and then it was an hour later.

That happens. It has happened my whole life. Fluffs have mostly stopped giving me jobs with times attached to them, which is fair, and which occasionally stings.

At half past eleven four of us walked up to the Library, because Memo kept saying the path had been lit once before and nobody believed it.

Memo wanted the old doings of the land. Puzzly asked the librarian three questions. Cloudy went off behind the eyes somewhere around the middle and came back with something about a drum.

And I read an entirely different book for an hour and a half.

It was about the sea, which Candyfloss Land does not have. I have thought about it on and off ever since and it had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

Memo found the line in the thin book, which is what we had gone for. I did not help with that at all.

So: I was at a library, on the busiest day in living memory, reading about the sea. That is the honest account of my afternoon and I am not going to dress it up as research.

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

I had the words for it. I always have the words for that sort of thing. It is the wrong-time ones I cannot manage.

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

Everybody turned round.

"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." My 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.

And then I did the thing I have had to teach myself, which is the only genuinely difficult part of being me: I went and drew it immediately, before it got away. Quickly. Badly. On the back of Beamy's envelope, standing at a gate in the dark with a borrowed pencil — the lane, the bend, the long bright thread of it, and a small round cloud at the far end.

If I had waited until morning it would have been gone. They always are. I have lost more of those than I have kept, and the ones I have kept are the ones I got down within about four minutes.

That drawing is in Winky's kitchen. It is still there. It is badly drawn and it is perfect.

Later Cloudy found me on the step and we improved the whole thing for about half an hour — that the hedge 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.