Fizzy's Day

Nineteen hinges had been in a damp box all season, and damp is a thing a hinge remembers.

I had a system. I always have a system: hold the lantern, thumb on the pin, push, twist. It had worked nineteen times if you count the ones that worked eventually, which I do.

Hinge number four did not care about my system.

"Grrr," I said. "Why won't it work?"

I pushed harder. The pin went sideways. I pushed harder than that, and something in the frame made a small unhappy noise, and the fizzing went right up to the top of my head all at once, the way it does, like a bottle somebody has shaken.

Huffy was on the wall cutting rope into short lengths and being cross about it, and said, without looking up: "You're going to break it."

"I am FIXING it."

"You're fixing it very hard," said Huffy.

Which is an annoying thing to hear and a considerably more annoying thing to be right about.

So I put it down. Shook both paws out to the tips. Stopped. Counted the hinges left, which was four, which is not actually very many.

Picked it up. Did it slowly. It went first go.

"Huh," I said, to nobody.

Zippy came past at about half past six that morning at full speed, shouting, and I could not make out one word in three.

"Say that again. Slower."

And Zippy hummed a whole song first — the whole thing, all the way to the end, standing still in the road — and then said it again at a speed a fluff could write down: that the path was much longer than anybody thought and there were hooks the entire way and if we only did the pretty bit we would run out of day.

I went and found somebody with a pencil. Everything that happened afterwards started there.

I have thought about that since, because Zippy and I have the same trouble from opposite ends. Zippy goes too fast to be understood. I go too hard to be any use. Both of us are trying to get somewhere and neither of us is very good at waiting to be let in.

Then there was the knot.

The spare rope had been in a box all season and had become one solid lump roughly the size and the temper of a cat. Three fluffs had a go and gave it up. Yetty sat down on a crate in the sun with it and started at one end.

I came past and said, "Just cut it."

"There isn't any more rope."

I came past an hour later, and the cat had become an apple.

"How much longer?"

"Don't know," said Yetty. "Bit more."

Forty feet of good rope, in one piece, at half past two. And nobody made a fuss, because by then everybody had forgotten it had ever been a knot, which I thought was outrageous and said so.

I was also in the ladder queue for a good while in the afternoon, which by three o'clock was the worst place in Candyfloss Land, and Mello said "slow and steady, friend" to me twice. I did not enjoy it either time. I stayed in the queue.

I got there early and I helped carry things in, because standing about at a party is not a thing I can do with my hands empty.

The bit I keep coming back to is Beamy reading out Yetty — the knot, one hour, and the whole room making the noise it made.

One hour. On a knot. While I was three feet away telling him to cut it.

I found Yetty later, by the window, and said so — that I had been wrong twice and loudly — and Yetty went pink and said it had mostly been boring, which is the most honest description of heroism I have ever heard.

Then Rainbow stood up and did the counting-off, and there was a line in it about the one who cannot hurry holding the ladder queue together for an hour and forty minutes, and Mello looked at the floor.