Mello's Day

I sat with Sharey for an hour while the oil was divided.

That is the whole of my morning and it does not look like much written down. A third of a can, fifty-five lanterns, a spoon, a great many small dishes, and Sharey working out that the dark places want more and the moonlit places want less.

My job was passing dishes. My other job, which nobody gave me and which was the actual one, was not hurrying anybody.

You would be surprised how much of that there was to do. Fluffs kept putting their heads round and asking how long, and I said "she's doing it properly" about nine times, and they went away again. If any one of them had stood there and watched, Sharey would have gone faster, and gone faster is exactly the thing you cannot do with a third of a can and no second chance.

There is one ladder in Candyfloss Land and there were a great many hooks.

By the middle of the afternoon the queue for it had become the worst place in the entire land. Everybody tired. Everybody perfectly certain their own stretch was the urgent one. The fluff at the front always taking slightly too long.

I stood in that queue for an hour and forty minutes and made it a better queue.

That is not a job anybody hands out. I held things for whoever was next so they had both paws free when their turn came. I said "slow and steady, friend" to Fizzy twice, and Fizzy did not enjoy it either time, and stayed. When Zippy arrived at a run, vibrating, and asked whether the queue was even moving, I said: "It is. Breathe in slow. Breathe out slower."

Zippy did. Then hummed most of a song, and stayed, and never once made it anybody else's problem, which I know cost Zippy something because I have watched Zippy for years.

And nothing happened.

That is the entire point and it is the hardest thing about my life. For an hour and forty minutes, in the worst place in Candyfloss Land, on the most pressed afternoon of the year, nothing whatsoever went wrong.

Sharey came past with the dishes at about three and stopped to watch for a moment.

"You've been here ages."

"I have."

"Doesn't it drive you mad? Everyone going past you doing things?"

And I thought about it properly, because Sharey deserves a proper answer and because it is a fair question.

"It used to," I said. "I used to think the waiting bit was where I got left behind." I passed a lantern up to the next fluff. "Then I noticed that when I'm not in it, this queue has a row in it by half past three."

There was no row. There had not been one all day, in that queue, on that afternoon, with fifty-five exhausted fluffs going through it.

The land did have its row, of course. At four o'clock the whole yard came apart at once, everywhere except one place.

My party started before the party, at the gate, when the path came alight from the far end back.

Sparkly stood on the gatepost naming whose bit each stretch was as it came on, and the lane cheered each one, and I stood at the back and watched.

Nobody shouted "and the ladder queue". Obviously nobody shouted that. There is nothing to point at. You cannot light up the arguments that did not occur.

Then Rainbow stood up at Winky's, much later, and did the counting-off, and got to the end of it — and said the one who cannot hurry kept the ladder queue from falling to pieces for an hour and forty minutes.

I looked at the floor.

Beamy had put it on the envelope. Beamy had been in that queue, three times, and had written it down.

I have been in this land a long while and that is the first time anybody has described a thing that did not happen as a thing I did.