Jitters' Day

I had to sing the welcome and I knew it at half past seven in the morning and I did not stop knowing it for one second after that.

"My tummy's doing flips," I told Peeky, at about eight.

"Mm," said Peeky, who understood completely, and who did not say any of the things fluffs usually say.

Here is what my tummy is, as far as I can work out. It is not a warning. It is what caring feels like from the inside before the caring has anywhere to go.

So I did what I always do, which is practise, quite a long way past the point where anybody else would have stopped.

Behind the barn first. Then behind the barn was too near everybody, and there is a particular horror in being overheard practising — not being heard singing, being heard getting it wrong on purpose, repeatedly.

So I went up the lane. Past the bridge. Right out to the far end of the orchard, where there is nobody at all and nothing but wasps.

And I sang it there about forty times.

Paw on the tummy. Five slow breaths. Again. There is a high bit near the end on the word home and it wobbled the first twenty-two times and then it stopped wobbling and then I did it eighteen more times to be sure it would still not wobble when there were fifty-five fluffs and a chief in front of me.

It was about five o'clock when I turned round.

And I want to be exact about this, because everybody keeps telling the story as though I found it, and I did not find it. I turned round to walk home and it was simply there, the whole path, all at once, in one piece from the far end down to Winky's — because I was standing further away from it than any fluff had stood all day.

A long strung-out line of little lights going down the hill.

And a piece of black in the middle about two thirds of the way along. Thirty feet of nothing.

I ran the entire way back and arrived completely unable to speak, which for me is saying something, and pointed.

It was the hedge tunnel. They were still arguing about it. They had the lanterns and no posts and no idea, and somebody remembered that Cloudy had said something about putting them on the ground.

They put them in the roots. It became the best stretch of the whole path.

I sang it at nine o'clock and it did not wobble.

Then they asked for it again and I sang it a second time, and then the room shouted and I sang it a third, and by the third one about nine fluffs were up dancing and Squirmy had a whole corner of Winky's front room going.

My tummy was doing flips right up until the first note of the first one and then it simply was not any more, and I have never been able to explain that to anybody.

Wondy shouted for the third one particularly loudly, and told me afterwards it was partly because it was beautiful and partly because I was the fluff who saved the path by standing far enough away, which I did not know how to answer.

Tipsy said the nicest thing, later, quietly, at the edge of the room.

"You went all the way to the far end of the orchard so that nobody would hear you get it wrong."

"Yes."

"That's why you were the only one who could see it."

I have not stopped thinking about that.

Beamy read the envelope out — Jitters — practised out of earshot, found the gap — and Sparkly shouted it off the gatepost earlier too, when the tunnel came on out of the roots.