Rainbow's Day

My morning was a hillside two days from anywhere, and a cloud that had got heavier every day since the spring.

You cannot put a cloud down. That is the first thing they tell you and it is the only rule that matters: a cloud set on wet ground is a cloud lost, and there is no second one, and the sky does not give them out twice in a season.

So you carry it. And you walk. And because it cannot travel in sunlight, you do the last of it after sundown, which means arriving in the dark at the end of a day when you are already finished.

I had been away since the blossom came. Long enough that the little ones would have started to forget my voice.

And I had not minded. That is what I would have said, if anybody had asked, and nobody was out there to ask, and I had got so used to nobody asking that I stopped noticing it was a thing that could be done.

I came down off the hill at twenty past six and stopped at the top of the long bend.

Below me the whole lane was lit.

Not a few at the gate, the way you leave a light on for somebody. Every hook. All the way down: over the bridge, past the orchard, forty in a row up there on their own, and thirty feet of hedge tunnel glowing from the ground up out of the roots, which is not a thing anybody has ever done before because there is nothing in a tunnel to hang a lantern on.

I stood on that hill a long time.

Then I walked down it slowly and read the day off the path as I went, the way you read a letter.

Nine lanterns with bright crooked patches. Somebody sat and mended those — you cannot hurry a patch, so that is hours, in the heat, while everybody else was running.

Every lantern hung low. Two feet lower than looks right, which nobody does unless somebody remembered the last time and why it failed.

A six-sided tin one on its own at the worst corner, throwing stars all over the hedge, where the light was actually needed and nothing else was going.

And not one gap. Not one, the whole way, on a path that long — which does not happen unless somebody counted, and was not believed, and counted again.

I have walked that path ten thousand times. I have never once had it explain itself to me.

They were all at the gate. Every one of them, in the dark, under the last lantern, and a great deal of shouting.

And the first thing I did — before the hello, before anything at all — was open my mouth to ask who needed what. Who was tired. Who had been left out. What wanted fixing.

Nine seasons of it. It is not even a decision any more; it is the shape my mouth makes.

"Rainbow," said Tipsy, who had tip-toed to the front. "Put the cloud down. Winky's got a table for it."

So I put the cloud down.

And then, with no warning whatsoever, my arms started shaking — great long shudders, right down to the paws — and I found I could not get a single word out. In front of fifty-five fluffs. The chief of Candyfloss Land, standing at a gate, unable to speak.

Nobody said anything clever. Mopsy sat down on the wall next to me, which is Mopsy's entire method and has never once failed.

After a while: "Which colour is it? Today."

My own question. I have asked it of every fluff in this land, hundreds of times, of children and of grown fluffs and of Mopsy on a grey step under a grey sky — and I had not once asked it of myself on that road.

"Grey," I 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," said Mopsy.

"Every colour belongs," said Winky, from the gate, not entirely steadily.

"Yes," I said. "So it does."

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

Inside, Snoozy had been making somewhere to land since six o'clock that morning while everybody else was out on the path — blankets down, cushions along the window seat, lamps low. Somebody put a blanket round my shoulders and a cup in my paws and I did not have to ask for either.

Blushy said the welcome at the door and got it right. Jitters sang, three times.

And then Beamy climbed on a bucket with an envelope and read out the entire day. Eleven minutes. Every name.

That is when I found out what had actually happened.

A box went over on a doorstep before the birds and nobody saw it. Zenny heard it and remembered the direction. Mossy found the first one in the wet grass and never mentioned it. Muddle got lost going to the shed and fell over the rest of it at the bottom of a bank. Huffy said the rope was frayed and was told off for saying so and was right. Wondy stopped at a hole instead of climbing into it, which is the only reason there was any oil. Puzzly asked what time the sun went down, at two o'clock, when everybody still thought they had until seven. Neaty counted fifty-four and was disbelieved. Peeky said it out loud, and was lost in the noise, and walked into the middle of the yard and said it again.

I stood up at the end of it, which took me a moment.

"I have been telling this land for years that every colour belongs," I said. "I would like you to notice what actually happened today. Because I have been walking since the spring, and I could not have done one single bit of it."

And I counted them off, and every one of them was a fluff doing the thing they have been quietly apologising for their whole life.

Then Winky, who had been unusually quiet for nearly four minutes, said: "Can we do the cloud now?"

We did the cloud. All fifty-five of us walked back out into the dark, up the lit lane, to the Wheel — and it turned for the first time since the spring.