Mendy's Day

Nine of the lanterns that came up out of the ditch had gone at the seams. Split right down one side, from the roll and the wet.

"They're ruined," said Oopsy, who had carried them and was taking it personally, as Oopsy does. "That's nine. That's nine dark bits of path. That's —"

"Sit down," I said, "and pass me the basket."

I keep a basket for this. Scraps, thread, a needle, wax, and a great deal of patience, which does not fit in a basket but turns up anyway.

The work is slow and cannot be made faster. You cannot hurry a patch; a hurried patch comes off in the rain, and then you have a hole and a piece of wasted cloth and a fluff who thinks mending does not work.

So I sat in the shade through the hottest hour of the day and stitched paper and cloth over nine split seams, while the whole land ran about outside in the heat.

Oopsy sat alongside handing me things and gradually becoming less terrible, which is most of what that hour was actually for.

"That one's crooked," Oopsy said, after a while.

"Yes."

"Doesn't it bother you?"

"Look at it tonight," I said, "when there's a candle behind it."

Mopsy came and sat with us for a bit around one and said almost nothing and nobody minded. By three there were nine lanterns standing in a row against the barn wall, each with a bright crooked patch on one side — orange, green, striped, and one with a flower on it that had come off a tea towel.

Then at half past four the yard heard that there were fifty-four lanterns and not fifty-five, and Oopsy went cold.

"It was me. I think it was me. I had nine and I put them —"

"Oopsy. Stop."

"But if I've lost one and Rainbow's walking up a dark bit and —"

"Stop."

And then I said the thing, and I want to write down that I did not invent it. I have never invented anything in my life. I repair.

"Say sorry, fix what you can, forgive yourself. You taught me the order of that. And you have gone straight to the last-but-one without doing the first bit of all, which is finding out whether there is anything to be sorry for."

You taught me the order of that. I said it in the middle of stopping him and I do not think he heard it, and it is the truest thing I said all day.

Because it is Oopsy's rule. Oopsy worked it out years ago, out of getting things wrong more often than anybody else in this land and refusing to become hard about it, and gave it to the rest of us, and cannot use it on himself for eleven minutes in a yard in the afternoon.

It took eleven minutes to find out. Nine came up from the ditch; nine were on the wall. The fifty-fifth had been on Winky's table since six that morning, cleaned, where Snoozy put it.

My nine were the ones everybody stopped at on the way up the lane.

A plain lantern gives you light. A patched one gives you light in a shape — thrown up the hedge, in colours, orange and green and the shadow of a flower off a tea towel about four feet across.

Fluffs kept asking which ones were mine and I kept saying all of the crooked ones.

At Winky's I sat with Neaty for part of the evening, who had spent an hour being told she had miscounted and had been right the whole time, and who was doing what fluffs do at the end of a day like that: totting herself up and coming out short.

I did not argue with her. Arguing does not work; I have known that for years. I said that a thing with a patch on it is not a spoiled thing, and Neaty said "you say that about lanterns", and I said yes, and left it there, because you cannot mend a fluff in one evening and the attempt usually makes it worse.