Mopsy's Day

Big days are hard for me and there is never any reason, which makes it worse rather than better.

Everybody rushing and laughing and shouting about hooks, and me somewhere at the edge of it feeling heavy and slightly apart, with nothing whatsoever wrong. If something were wrong I could tell somebody. You cannot really announce I feel grey and the weather is lovely and everybody is having a nice time.

So I sat on the wall for a good deal of the early part.

Which is where Sunny found me, at about half past seven, with a fistful of long matches and a face doing something that did not match the mouth.

"You've gone quiet," I said.

"I'm fine."

"Mm," I said, and went on not doing anything much, and left a space.

Sunny sat down in the space. And then told me the thing: that they always give Sunny the first lantern because Sunny is the cheerful one, and that this morning was a grey sort of morning, and nobody ever asks a sunny fluff whether it is a grey sort of morning.

"Cloudy's allowed," I said.

"I know. I think I'd like somebody to light it with me, though. That's all."

Four seconds. Sunny had been carrying that since six.

I sat with Mendy in the shade for a bit around one o'clock, while the nine split lanterns were being patched, and I said almost nothing and nobody minded.

Then at two the three of us went down to the Candyfloss Garden — me and Hushy and Homey — because the yard had been loud since before sunrise.

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

Hushy said the good thing. You don't have to want the loud bit. You're allowed to want the doorway.

I said almost nothing for two hours and stayed the entire time.

We came 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 explain why. We got about nine words. Apparently Memo had remembered something.

And at six o'clock I found Homey on the bridge wall with both arms round both knees, deciding to go home for good.

I did not say cheer up. I did not say everybody's down at the gate.

"Can I sit with you for a bit?"

"Mm."

So we sat. For a long while, in the dark, while the rest of the land cheered somewhere down the lane.

And because we were the only two fluffs in Candyfloss Land being silent, I heard it: a small dry tick from the lantern on the bridge rail. Then another.

"That's not right."

The glass had a crack in it and the crack was opening as the flame warmed it, one tick at a time, and in about ten minutes it would have gone — on the bridge, on the rail, over the water, exactly where Rainbow would be walking.

We swapped it for one of Mendy's spares, the one with the flower off a tea towel.

"How did you even hear that?" said Lonny, who had run up from the gate.

"We weren't doing anything," I said. "It's the only way you hear that sort of thing."

I did not go straight in.

Rainbow put the cloud down at the gate and then his arms started shaking, great long shudders right down to the paws, and he could not get one word out — the chief of Candyfloss Land, in front of fifty-five fluffs, with a cloud on a table and nothing to say.

Nobody said anything clever, which I was glad about.

I sat down on the wall next to him. That is all I did.

After a while I asked which colour it was today, which is his own question, the one he has asked every fluff in this land hundreds of times.

He thought about it for a long time.

"Grey," he said. "A sort of worn-out grey. I've been carrying it on my own since the spring and I never said, because I didn't want anybody worrying about me."

"That's a real one," I said.

He sat on that wall a full five minutes before he went in, and fifty-five fluffs waited, and not one of them hurried him.