Hushy's Day

I have the biggest ears in Candyfloss Land and by eight o'clock that morning they were completely full.

Winky went past shouting about lanterns. Zippy went past shouting about Winky. A door banged somewhere and somebody laughed and somebody dropped a bucket, and underneath the whole of it, small as a pin going down, I heard something else.

"Oh," somebody said.

Just that. One oh.

It came from a fluff who had been handed the job of going down the bank to fetch what had rolled, and who is frightened of the bank, and who had said yes anyway because everybody was standing there looking.

Nobody else heard it. There was far too much morning piled on top of it.

And then the thing happened that always happens to me. The noticing, and then the quiet, and then the moment going past — with me still standing in the lane holding it, like somebody holding a coat at a party for a person who has gone home.

I want to be honest about how long I stood there, because it is the bit I would rather leave out.

It was several minutes. I had the whole thing. I knew who had said it and what it meant and roughly what needed doing about it, and I stood in the lane and did nothing at all, and the reason is not complicated: I do not like saying things. Listening is free. Saying costs.

Then Chatty came round the corner talking, as Chatty does.

I listened first. That part is easy, and there was a great deal to get through — the rope, and somebody's opinion about bunting, and a long passage about a bucket. I have never minded. Chatty talking is a comfortable noise to stand inside.

And then there was a gap, and I did the hard half.

"Chatty. Somebody needs swapping off the bank job. They won't ask."

Chatty stopped mid-sentence, which almost never happens, and said "Who?" — and I told them, and Chatty was gone down the lane at speed, already talking, carrying it off to somebody who could actually do something about it.

Which is, I think, exactly what Chatty is for. I am the one who hears it. Chatty is the one who moves it. Neither of us is much use on our own.

Bravo took the bank in the end, and I am told stood at the top of it and said out loud that it was frightening before going down. I was not there. I heard about it afterwards, twice, from two different fluffs, both of whom thought it was the most surprising thing that had happened all day.

After that, nobody needed me anywhere in particular, which is the usual shape of my afternoons.

So at two o'clock the three of us went to the Candyfloss Garden — me and Mopsy and Homey — and sat in the blossom, because the yard had been loud since before sunrise and there is only so much of that a fluff can hold.

It is very quiet down there. The blossom comes off the trees if you breathe at it.

Homey had been tight in the chest since the morning and said so, eventually, sitting down: that it was not the work, it was that everything was different. The path all changed. The whole land out of its usual shape. Fifty-five fluffs about to be in one house until goodness knows when.

I listened. That part is easy.

And then I did the other half, because I had already learned that lesson once that morning and it would have been feeble to unlearn it by lunchtime.

"You don't have to want the loud bit," I said. "You're allowed to want the doorway."

Homey looked at me for a while and did not answer, which I have come to understand is Homey agreeing.

Mopsy said almost nothing for two hours and stayed the entire time, which is worth more than most sentences.

We walked back at a quarter to four and found every lantern on the path standing two feet lower than we had left it, and nobody with a spare second to tell us why. We got about nine words of explanation and worked the rest out ourselves. Apparently Memo had remembered something.

Winky's front room was too loud for me by about half past nine, which I had expected, so I had a plan.

My plan was the corner by the dresser, where the noise comes at you off one wall instead of four. I sat there with a cup and let it all go over, and it was lovely, in the way a rainstorm is lovely from indoors.

The bit I will keep is Beamy on the bucket.

Eleven minutes of everybody's day read out loud off an envelope, and somewhere in it: Hushy — heard the one nobody else did, and said so.

Said so. Beamy put that bit in. I do not think Beamy knew what it cost, and it would have been a perfectly nice line without it, but there it was in front of fifty-five fluffs: the hearing and the saying, listed as two separate things.

I have been listening to this land for years. It was extremely odd to be listened to for a sentence and a half, and I would not want it for longer than that, and I would not have missed it.