Huffy's Day

The rope was no good and I said so.

I said it three times, and the third time I said it loudly, because the first two had gone into the yard and come out the other side as nothing at all.

"Huffy. Not today. Please."

That is the bit I would like somebody to sit with for a minute. Not show me. Not where. Not today, please — as though I were weather. As though the rope were fine and I was the problem, and the problem was my personality.

And up it came, hot and fast, right behind my eyes, because I had not said it to spoil anything. I had said it because there was a patch near the middle where the rope had gone soft and hairy and pale, and every single fluff in that yard could have seen it if one of them had looked.

So I breathed in big, and blew out like a dragon, and squeezed both paws, and counted to ten. It took the whole ten. It usually does.

Then I picked the rope up and held the worn part out and did not say one word, which is a thing I have learned and which I hate.

Fizzy came and looked. Then Winky. Then everybody.

"Oh," said Winky.

Nine lanterns. Over the bridge. Onto the stones.

Nobody apologised, because nobody ever quite does. Somebody said "well spotted" in a small voice and went back to work and the singing started up again. I sat on the wall feeling exactly as cross as before, and entirely certain it had been worth it, and I cut that rope into short lengths — three lanterns to a length — so that if one went, only three went.

The row was mine as much as Jelly's and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

It was the hot part of the day. Everyone had been at it for hours and nobody had eaten enough, and Jelly started on about it not being fair that the bridge lot got the good job, and I said oh, here we go, which was not my finest sentence.

Up it went like dry grass. Both of us loud. Both of us right about something, and neither of us about the same thing.

Dinky got in the middle and fell over a bucket on purpose, which stopped it, the way Dinky always stops it.

And then Dinky did not walk away, which Dinky usually does.

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

There was a long pause with a lot of ground-looking in it.

"I feel left out," said Jelly. "Because everyone's at the bridge and I'm up an orchard on my own and nobody can see me doing it."

Well.

That is not the rope. That is not anything like the rope. I had been standing there ready to have an argument about who got which stretch, and the actual thing underneath was a fluff who had been on their own up a hill all morning where nobody could see them working.

We did the orchard together after lunch, the pair of us, arguing pleasantly about something else entirely. There was a spoonful of oil sitting up there in a dish that nobody needed, and Jelly told me Sharey had walked all the way up at one o'clock with half a sandwich and left it, for no reason except that Sharey had noticed who had spent the morning on their own.

I am not a party fluff. I stood near the door for the first hour with a cup and let it happen.

Then Beamy got up on the bucket with that envelope and read out the whole day, and the first name on it was mine — Huffy, rope — and there was a noise in the room that I was not expecting and did not know what to do with.

Nobody had said thank you at half past nine that morning. I had decided that was fine, and I had meant it. It turns out you can be entirely fine about a thing and still go completely still when somebody says it out loud twelve hours later in front of fifty-five fluffs.

Then Rainbow stood up and said the cross one had said the thing nobody wanted to hear, and said it like an ordinary fact about a working day, not like a warning.

Jelly cheered at my name, incidentally. Loudly. Having been up that orchard since eight o'clock in the morning.