Nopsy's Day

"Nopsy! Bridge stretch. You're tall enough for the outside hooks."

I looked at the bridge.

The outside hooks are on the far side of the rail, over the water, and you have to lean out to reach them. I am tall enough. I am not, and have never been, steady at a height with water underneath, and I know exactly what happens: it is fine, it is fine, it is fine, and then my hands go stupid.

And the familiar thing arrived right on cue — that hot, squirmy wrongness of being about to disappoint somebody who is being perfectly nice to you.

Everybody was busy. It would have taken one word to make it all smooth. I could feel the yes forming the way it always forms, out of politeness and speed.

"No thank you," I said.

The yard went on being busy. Nobody fell over.

"Oh," said Handy. "Right. Are you —"

"I'm not steady leaning out over water," I said. "I'd do it, and I'd be slow, and then somebody would be standing underneath watching me be slow, and we'd lose an hour. Give me the gate steps. I'll do all three and the wall."

It sounds easy written down. It took me the entire walk from the barn to work out the words.

Peeky, who had been dreading being asked and had not managed to say so, watched all of it from the wall with an expression of open astonishment.

"You just said it."

"It's a kind no," I said. "That's the whole trick. It's a sentence, not a word. No, thank you, because. The because is the kind half — it tells them where you stop, so they know where to go next."

The bridge got done by a fluff who likes heights, in half the time, and nobody had to be fished out of anything.

In the afternoon the four of us went down Market Row for wicks and string and matches.

I said no twice on the way and I did not think anything of it at the time. A fluff outside the Bun Shop wanted a shelf looked at, and somebody's gate was sticking.

"No thank you — we've got to be back by three."

That is all. That is the whole of it. One of them said "fair enough" and we carried on down the row.

I noticed, about a hundred feet later, that Handy had gone completely quiet.

Snuggs bought eleven blankets on the grounds that it would be cold on the path tonight, and we teased Snuggs the entire way home about it, and every single one of those blankets went out at six o'clock. Gladly counted what the shops still had rather than what they had run out of, which on a day when Market Row was nearly bare was a considerably more useful way round than mine.

Handy found me at about ten o'clock, by the dresser, and asked me how it is done.

I genuinely did not understand the question for a moment. It was like being asked how walking is done.

And then I looked at Handy properly — at a fluff who had done eight jobs before sunrise and eleven hooks by mid-morning and whose arms had been shaking by eleven, and who had needed Lovey to announce to an entire yard that he was having a sit down because he could not announce it himself — and I understood the question perfectly.

So I said it: a sentence, not a word. No, thank you, because. The because is the kind half.

"So they know where to go next," Handy said, and went quiet again, and I could see it landing.

Nobody has ever wanted to learn this from me. Fluffs think of it as a thing I am, like being tall. They do not think of it as a thing I worked out, slowly, over years, mostly by getting it wrong and hurting somebody's feelings and going back the next day to do it better.

Beamy read the envelope out and my line was Nopsy — gave the bridge back early. Early. Beamy had understood the point of it, which is that a no at nine in the morning is a different object entirely from a no at four in the afternoon when you have already let everybody plan around you.