Sparkly's Day

I had been worrying about the cheering for three days, which nobody knows and which I am only writing down here.

Not about doing it. About whether anybody actually wanted me to do it, or whether it is simply the thing Sparkly does now, and everyone has got used to it, and the first year I did not do it there would be a sort of relief.

I have no evidence for any of that. That is rather the point of it.

I spent most of the day on ordinary jobs and most of the day with Beamy's envelope somewhere in my head.

Beamy had been keeping a list since nine in the morning — everything anybody did well, both sides of the paper — and kept reading bits of it out to whoever was nearest, all day, in the yard, like somebody handing out sandwiches.

At about six I found Beamy on the step reading it over.

"That's everyone," I said, over his shoulder. "That is genuinely everyone. Fifty-four names."

"Fifty-five things happened."

"Fifty-four names," I said again, "and you're not on it."

And Beamy looked at that envelope like somebody catching themselves in a mirror, and said, "I didn't do a lantern. I just watched."

I said what needed saying — that watching fifty-four fluffs have the best day of the year and writing down every one of them is not nothing, and that it was the only copy.

It is much easier to be certain about somebody else. I am extremely good at it. I could have argued Beamy's case in front of a court.

The lighting went from the far end back, so the path came on in stretches, one at a time, coming down the lane towards us.

I stood up on the gatepost with Beamy's envelope in one paw, paws on hips, not feeling one single bit as certain as I looked, which is the standard arrangement.

"THE ORCHARD," I shouted, as forty hooks came alight all at once up on the hill, "IS JELLY'S. FORTY OF THEM. ON HIS OWN. ALL AFTERNOON."

The lane went up. Somewhere up the hill Jelly cheered louder than anybody.

"THE BRIDGE — that's Truly's, who did them twice, and the second time was better —"

And it went the whole length of the path. The hedge tunnel, standing in the roots, which was Cloudy's. Yetty's rope. The nine patched ones, which got a very long one, coming on in colours. I read every name off that envelope and I did not miss one, and I was not nervous for a second of it, because it was not about me.

Peeky was at the bottom of the post and asked me afterwards how I do it in front of everyone.

And in the dark, which makes things easier, I said the true one: that I am never sure, that I stand tall and say I can do this and then do it anyway, and that the trick is that I am not doing it for me. It is much easier to be certain about you than about me.

"Say one for you, then," said Peeky.

I did not want to. I have never wanted anything less in my life.

It took me until about eleven o'clock, and then I said one — out loud, in that room, one true thing about Sparkly — and went red doing it, and it came out about a third as well as any of the fifty-four I had done off the gatepost.

And Peeky started the cheer. Peeky, who had needed two goes that afternoon to be heard at all, in a room of fifty-five, on purpose.

It was almost unbearable. I mean that quite literally: I nearly went and stood in the kitchen.