Snuggs' Day

I started handing things out at about seven in the morning and I did not really stop until six in the evening, which is a normal day for me and which I enjoyed.

Four of us went down Market Row in the afternoon for wicks and string and matches.

And I bought eleven blankets.

I want to explain the eleven, because everybody found it extremely funny and nobody asked.

I had been thinking about six o'clock. Not about the lighting — about the standing about. Fifty-five fluffs, out on a path, in the open, in the dark, at the cold end of a day, waiting for a chief who might be late. And the fluffs on the far stretches would be furthest from a door and would either stand there going blue or give up and come back and miss the whole thing.

So: eleven blankets. It was not generosity. It was arithmetic.

They teased me the entire way home. Nopsy carried four of them and made a remark about my arms that I shall not repeat. Handy said something about the cart. Gladly, who had been counting what the shops still had rather than what they had run out of, said at least somebody had bought the last of something.

Every single one of those blankets went out at six o'clock. Jelly in the orchard. Peeky. Two at the bridge to fluffs who were going quietly blue about the paws and had not said so. I got rid of the lot in about eleven minutes.

Nobody mentioned the teasing afterwards. Fluffs never do. That is fine — I did not do it to be proved right, I did it because I could feel how cold that path was going to be.

And then I came back down to the gate with nothing left in my arms.

That is the bit I had not planned for.

There is a thing that happens to me at the end of a day of handing out, and I have never said it to anybody, and I am going to write it down here: when I have run out of things to give, I go hollow. Not sad exactly. Hollow — the way you do when the thing you are for has stopped.

I stood at the edge of the crowd at the gate with empty arms and no idea what to do with myself.

Lovey was next to me and looked sideways and said, "You've gone quiet."

"I'm fine."

"Mm," said Lovey. "I'm going to say a thing and you're not going to like it. You've hugged about thirty fluffs today and nobody's hugged you."

"That's not —" And then I stopped, because it was not the start of a sentence I could finish. "No. That's true, actually."

"Go on then."

It took me three goes. Three. Which is ridiculous, given that I say the words to other fluffs about forty times a week.

"Need a hug?" I said, at last. And then, going red: "I mean. Do I. Can I have one."

"You can have two," said Lovey.

Mopsy came over and made it three, without being asked, which is the only way Mopsy does anything.

And then I went into that party and sat on Snoozy's window seat with a blanket that was not one of mine, and somebody brought me cake instead of the other way round, and I found it almost unbearable for about ten minutes and then extremely nice.