Gladly's Day

At seven o'clock there were no lanterns hanging anywhere in Candyfloss Land.

I want to start there, because I am the fluff who remembered that at four o'clock in the afternoon, and I could only remember it because I had actually looked at it in the morning and thought well, there is nothing at all yet.

That is the first thing my eye does. The gap. Always. Show me a row of fifty-five hooks with fifty-four lanterns on it and I will find the empty one before I have taken my coat off, and the fifty-four might as well be wallpaper.

Four of us went down Market Row in the afternoon for wicks and string and matches, and Market Row was nearly out of everything, because fifty-five fluffs had had the same idea since breakfast.

I heard myself starting on it. No matches. Hardly any wick. The good string gone.

And then I stopped, on purpose, in the middle of the road, and did it the other way round: what have they still got?

Enough wick for the tunnel, which is the stretch that needs it most. Two boxes of the long matches. String that is not the good string and will do perfectly well for one night.

Nopsy said no twice on that walk, kindly, out loud, to fluffs who were being perfectly nice about asking, and Handy went completely quiet for a hundred feet afterwards.

Snuggs bought eleven blankets on the grounds that it would be cold on the path tonight and we teased Snuggs the whole way home about it, and every one of them went out at six o'clock, so that is the last time I tease Snuggs about anything.

And then at four o'clock the whole land came apart.

Tipsy stopped it — walked into the middle and stood there being still until everybody stopped, and got fifty-five tired fluffs to take three breaths together. That worked. It genuinely worked. But three breaths gets you quiet; it does not get you moving, and the yard was quiet and flat and there were four hours of daylight left at most.

So I climbed on Winky's bucket, which had been standing in that yard since morning, and asked if I could say the other number.

"What other number?"

"Fifty-four," I said. "This morning there were none. There were none at seven o'clock, and there was a box in a ditch, and nobody had any oil."

Somebody stopped stacking things.

"Nine came out of the nettles. Nineteen hinges got mended, and Yetty got forty feet of rope out of a knot the size of a cat. The orchard's done. The orchard was the worst one and it's done." I ran out of breath. "Thank you, thank you, thank you. That's three and I've got about forty more."

Pouty, who had been having a grim sort of hour, said, "Say the bit about the orchard again."

So I said it again.

It did not fix the missing lantern. Somebody else did that twenty minutes later, and it turned out never to have been missing at all. But the yard got up off the floor, and finished, and Jelly cheered at dusk, and a good part of that was decided on a bucket at four o'clock.

I was more nervous about that bucket than about anything else I did today, and I have thought about why.

Because it is the thing everybody thinks I do anyway.

Fluffs say it about me the way they say Chatty talks and Mossy is outdoorsy: oh, Gladly always finds the good bit. As though it arrives on its own. As though I open my eyes in the morning and the bright side is simply there, waiting, like weather.

It is not. My eye goes to the gap. Every single time, first, before anything. What I have is not sunny weather — it is a habit, worked at for years, of making myself say the second list out loud after the first one has already happened in my head.

Doing that alone, at bedtime, with three thank-yous, is easy.

Doing it on a bucket at four o'clock to forty exhausted fluffs who want to be cross is a completely different piece of work, and my paws were shaking.

Beamy read it off the envelope — Gladly — said the other number — and Pouty shouted something from the window seat.