Handy's Day

I had done eight jobs before the sun was properly up.

That is not a boast. I simply see them. The hook swinging loose on its nail. The bucket with the handle going. The gate that will jam later if nobody lifts it now. I see who needs help before they have worked out how to ask for it, and then my paws are already moving, and the asking never has to happen.

By mid-morning I had rehung eleven hooks along the lane, carried the glass up from the shed twice, and fixed that bucket.

By mid-morning my arms had also started doing the shaky thing.

I went past Pinky at about half past nine, carrying rope, and Pinky was in the middle of refusing to let Lonny do a job — it's quicker if I — and I said, without stopping, "Pinky. Let them."

I did not think about it at the time. I have thought about it a good deal since, given what happened about ninety minutes later.

"Handy! Could you just —"

And I opened my mouth to say how can I help, because that is what comes out. It comes out on its own. It does not wait to be sent.

Lovey got there first.

"Handy's having a sit down," said Lovey, cheerfully, to the entire yard. "Handy told me so."

"I didn't," I said.

"No," Lovey agreed. "But you'd tell me to, if my arms were doing that. Wouldn't you."

So I sat on the step with a cup of something for eleven whole minutes and let the ninth job go to somebody else. It got done. Slightly worse. It got done — and I was still standing at sundown, which turned out to be the entire point.

Then in the afternoon four of us went down Market Row for wicks and string and matches, which is the sort of errand I would normally do on my own at a run.

I said yes to four extra things on the way. A fluff outside the Bun Shop wanted a shelf looked at. Somebody's gate. I cannot help it; I do not even experience it as a decision.

And Nopsy said no. Twice. Out loud, to fluffs who were being perfectly nice about asking.

"No thank you — we've got to be back by three."

That was all. That was the whole of it. Nobody's face fell. Nobody went quiet. One of them said "fair enough" and we carried on down the row, and I walked the next hundred feet in a state of genuine confusion.

Snuggs bought eleven blankets on the grounds that it would be cold on the path tonight and was teased the whole way home about it, and was completely right — every one of those blankets went out at six o'clock.

Gladly counted up what the shops had rather than what they did not, which on a day when Market Row was nearly out of everything was a useful way round.

I found Nopsy at Winky's, at about ten, and asked how it is done.

Nopsy looked at me as though I had asked how walking is done.

"It's a sentence, not a word," Nopsy said. "No, thank you, because. The because is the kind half. It tells them where you stop, so they know where to go next."

I have turned that over about forty times since. So they know where to go next. All the nos I have imagined saying were just holes — a job dropped, a friend left standing. It had genuinely never occurred to me that a no could contain directions.

Beamy read the envelope out and I was on it for the hooks, and Lovey was on it for making me sit down, and the room laughed at that, and I did not mind.