Oopsy's Day

I carried things, which is what I am for on a day like this.

Nine lanterns came up out of the ditch after Muddle found the box down the bank, and I made three trips with them and put them down in a row against the barn wall. Nine of them had gone at the seams — split right down the side, from the roll and the wet.

"They're ruined," I said. "That's nine. That's nine dark bits of path. That's —"

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

So I sat in the shade through the hottest hour of the day handing Mendy scraps and thread and wax, and gradually stopped being terrible.

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

"Yes."

"Doesn't it bother you?"

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

Mopsy came and sat down with us for a bit around one o'clock and said nothing at all, and nobody minded. It was, up until half past four, an extremely good day.

The moment the yard heard fifty-four, I went cold.

Because I had carried nine lanterns up from that ditch, and I had put them down in a hurry to go and help with something else, and I could not — standing there, at half past four, with everybody looking at the wall — swear on any account that all nine of them had made it.

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

"Oopsy," said Mendy. "Stop."

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

"Stop."

I stopped, with difficulty. I want to be clear about how hard that was. Everything in me wanted to get to the apologising, because the apologising is the part I am good at and it makes the horrible feeling stop for about four seconds.

"Say sorry, fix what you can, forgive yourself," said Mendy. "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."

So we went and found out. It took eleven minutes.

Nine came up from the ditch. Nine were on the wall — I counted them myself, including the crooked-patched one with the flower off a tea towel.

The fifty-fifth lantern was not lost and had never been lost. Snoozy took it off the wall at six o'clock that morning, before anybody had counted anything, carried it indoors, cleaned it, and set it on the table by Winky's door, where it sat all day being the one lantern nobody in the yard could see.

"So there never was a missing one," said Neaty, slowly.

"There was," I said. "It was just already where it was going."

I sat down on the step and let out a breath that had been in me since half past four.

Afterwards I went and helped Truly redo the three bridge hooks that had been done through the wire instead of the loop, and I did not once say anything about whose fault it was, because I had just spent an hour finding out how that feels from the inside.

"Doesn't it get easier?" I asked.

"No," said Truly. "It gets lighter. Afterwards. Not before."

I told Snoozy about it at the party, at about ten o'clock, and went slightly pink doing it.

I had not meant to. It came out. Snoozy looked genuinely stricken for a second — an hour of the whole yard going cold, over one clean lantern on a table — and said, "I did feel a bit bad about that."

And I found I did not want an apology at all, which was new.

I sat with Neaty for most of the evening. Neaty is good company once you are both past the part where you are each certain you have ruined something. Beamy read the envelope out and we were both on it — Neaty for counting twice, me for the eleven minutes of finding out — and that is not a line I would ever have written for myself.

Found out first. On an envelope. In front of everybody.