Tidy's Day

I like a morning with a shape in it. First this, then that.

This morning had no shape at all. Nobody had ever done this before. There was no last time we welcomed the chief home with fifty-five lanterns to look back at, no list from last year, nothing at all to copy.

I stood in the middle of the yard holding a pencil and felt the floor tilt, very gently, the way it does.

Then Muddle arrived at speed with six jobs shouting at once — wicks and glass and oil and the bridge and who is doing the bank and what time does the sun even go down — and I heard myself say the thing I say.

"Stop. Say the smallest one."

"...Wicks."

"Good. That's the top of the plan."

And there it was. The way in. I found a flat board and drew the day in pictures, the way I draw every day: a sun coming up, a bucket, a lantern with a wick in it, a lantern with a flame, a sun going down. Nine pictures in the end, in order.

Wobbly read it over my shoulder and said, "But what if the wicks run out?"

"Then we're on the second picture instead of the third," I said, "and I draw a new one."

I heard that come out of my own mouth and was rather surprised by it.

The one thing I got properly right was the direction. The hanging goes from the far end back towards Winky's house — because if you start at home you finish in the dark at the point furthest from your own bed, and nobody else had thought about that.

By eleven the board was on the gatepost and fluffs were coming past to look at it all morning the way you look at a window. Nobody had to ask what was next. That is the whole of my job and it was going beautifully.

And then at half past four Neaty came and stood in front of me and said there were fifty-four.

"There's fifty-five on the map," I said.

"There's fifty-four on the wall."

"Then you've miscounted."

I want to write that down exactly as it happened, because I have been carrying it about ever since and I would rather not tidy it.

I did not shout. I was not unkind. I said it gently, and I said it while already turning back to the board, which is worse — and then I went back to my pictures and left a fluff standing in a yard holding a true fact that I had just told her was not one.

It took Peeky walking into the middle of the yard and saying it twice before anybody moved.

And they were both right. There were fifty-four on that wall. Nothing was wrong — Snoozy had taken the fifty-fifth indoors at six that morning and never mentioned it — but that is not the point and I know it is not the point. Nobody knew that at half past four. At half past four there was a gap on a wall and a fluff telling me about it and a board telling me otherwise, and I believed the board.

Later on Wobbly asked what if one of them goes out, and I did not say don't spoil it. I said go and check them, all of them, far end back, you will see things the rest of us will not.

Wobbly found four things wrong on a path that fifty-five of us were perfectly happy with. I would like the record to show that I got that one right, because I did not get the other one right at all.

I found Neaty early, before Beamy's envelope, because I did not want to say it afterwards and have it look like the envelope made me.

"You weren't wrong this afternoon and I told you that you were."

Neaty said it was fine. It was not fine, and we both knew it, and we left it there, which is how fluffs actually do these things.

Then Muddle came and thanked me for the wicks, of all things — for saying say the smallest one, at half past nine in the morning, which I could not even remember saying.

"That's just the thing I say," I said.

Muddle looked at me as though I had said something remarkable, and I have thought about that too.

Beamy read the board out as one of the day's items — Tidy, the plan, far end back — and Humdy, who had coloured in a dot for every filled hook, shouted something rude and affectionate from the window seat.