Lovey's Day

I carried oil dishes for an hour and I was good at it, and I am going to say so here at the start because of how the rest of this goes.

I watched Handy do eight jobs before the sun was properly up.

That is not an exaggeration. Eight. Then eleven hooks along the lane, then the glass up from the shed twice, then a bucket — and by mid-morning Handy's arms had started doing the shaky thing that arms do.

"Handy! Could you just —" somebody called from the yard.

And I could see the how can I help forming. It does not even wait to be sent; it arrives on its own, the way mine does about other fluffs.

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

"I didn't."

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

Four seconds. That took me four seconds and no effort at all, and Handy sat on that step for eleven minutes and was still standing at sundown, which was the entire point.

I am extremely fast at that. Show me a worn-out fluff and I will have them sitting down with a cup and a reason inside a minute, and I will be right, and they will thank me later.

I met Spotty and Blushy coming down from the bridge in the afternoon — they had hung the odd tin lantern up at the worst corner, on its own, where a light was actually needed — and I said it was the best bit of the whole path and asked who had done it.

Blushy pointed at Spotty. Straight away. No hesitation at all.

I noticed it at the time and thought: there are a great many of us doing that.

At dusk everybody totals themselves up, and every single one of them comes out short. I have watched it happen at the end of every big day I have ever been part of.

Neaty was on the wall doing it out loud. "I only did the count. I didn't actually make anything."

I have heard that sentence in eleven different voices today. I only held the ladder. I just watched. I didn't do a lantern. It is astonishing, on a day when the whole land has worked since sunrise, how many fluffs can arrange the facts so that they personally did nothing.

And I know from long experience that arguing does not work. If I had said you did loads, Neaty, Neaty would have said no, but, and we would have been there all evening.

So I said, to the wall, at a perfectly ordinary volume:

"I carried oil dishes for an hour and I was good at it, and I made Handy sit down, and I'm pleased with myself about that."

There was a pause.

"You can't just say that," said Neaty.

"Why not?"

Neaty opened her mouth and could not find the reason, which is the entire trick, and which I have never once got to work by any other route.

"I'm lovable just as I am," I said, cheerfully, to nobody. "I do that one at the mirror most mornings — a mirror hug, one kind thing, out loud, to my own face. Out here it's the same thing with witnesses." And I nudged her. "Your go."

"...I counted them twice," said Neaty, at last, "when everybody said I'd got it wrong. And I had not got it wrong."

By the time the path was lit there were four fluffs on that wall taking turns, and the last one was Snuggs, who needed three goes and a hug.

Here is the part I have not told anybody. Walking up to that wall, I had to decide what my own sentence was going to be, and it took me the whole way from the gate, and I rejected four of them for being too small before I settled on one I could actually say out loud.

Four seconds for Handy. About two hundred feet of lane for me.