Tipsy's Day

I was out in the garden by seven, tip-toeing, so softly the dew stayed where it was.

Winky had been round the land twice by then and had told eleven fluffs and woken four more and drawn a map on the back of a shopping list. Winky was bouncing and radiant and entirely unstoppable and had, I could see, missed something.

"Winky. How many of them said yes?"

"All of them!"

"How many of them did you ask?"

That is nine words and it took the whole morning off its hinges, and I want to note that I could only say it because there were two of us in a garden. In a yard I could have said the same nine words at the top of my voice and nobody would have turned round.

I spent most of the day on the wall, and most of that watching.

I watched Huffy say three times that the rope was frayed and be told not to spoil the day. I did not say anything. Huffy did not need me; Huffy needed the yard to look, and Huffy got them to look by holding the rope out and going quiet, which is my own method and which Huffy arrived at without any help from me.

I watched the row at half past twelve go up like dry grass, and I watched Dinky get in the middle and fall over a bucket on purpose, and I watched the dry grass go out.

And then I watched Dinky not walk away.

That is the thing I will remember from that day. Everybody else in that yard saw a joke and a row ending. I was sitting on a wall about fifteen feet away and I could see Dinky's face when Jelly's face did not change — and I saw Dinky decide, and then wait ten seconds in a hot yard for a fluff to say a true thing out loud.

"You could have left it at the bucket," I said afterwards.

"I know. I nearly did."

I did not do anything at all in that scene. I want to be accurate about my own day. I sat on a wall and noticed.

At four o'clock the whole land went wrong at once.

It was nobody's fault. It was six hours of work and a sundown four hours earlier than anybody had planned for, and by four there were fluffs snapping at each other over whose turn it was with the ladder. Somebody said a thing about the orchard that was not fair. Somebody dropped a lantern and the sound of it went through the yard like a slap. Huffy, who had been magnificent all day, puffed up in the corner. Wobbly had gone very quiet, which in Wobbly means the what-ifs have reached the loud stage.

I could see all of it from the wall. I could see exactly what was needed, too, which is the part that has made a certain sort of afternoon painful for me my whole life.

Because here is the thing about being the quiet one in a yard of fifty-five. I have a voice that does not carry. I have never once been able to cut across a room. And I have sat on a great many walls with exactly the right thing to say and no way at all of getting it into the middle.

I could have stayed on that wall. Nobody would have blamed me, because nobody would have noticed.

So I got down and tip-toed into the middle of the yard.

And stood there. Not talking. Standing, in the middle, being extremely still — which is the one thing you cannot ignore for long, because it is so entirely unlike everything else that is going on.

One by one, they stopped.

"Breathe in the fluff," I said, when it was quiet enough not to have to shout. "Breathe out the huff."

Fifty-five fluffs, at four o'clock on the longest working day of the year: in through the nose, tummy out like a balloon, and a long slow one out. Then another. Then a third, because the third is the one that works.

Somebody laughed at nothing. Somebody apologised about the ladder. Huffy went and got the dropped lantern and found it was fine.

They did the last stretch properly after that, and the path was lit by twenty past six, and it would not have been.

Afterwards Zenny came and sat on the wall next to me.

"That was the loudest thing anybody did all day."

"Nobody could hear me," I said.

"I know. So you stopped talking. Very good idea."

Rainbow came down off the hill at twenty past six with a cloud in both arms and stopped at the top of the bend for a long time, and then walked down and read the day off the path as he came.

And at the gate, in front of fifty-five fluffs, he opened his mouth to ask who needed what. Automatic. Nine seasons of it.

I got there first.

"Rainbow. Put the cloud down. Winky's got a table for it."

Six words and a name. He put it down, and then his arms started shaking, and he could not speak, and Mopsy sat on the wall next to him and asked which colour it was today.

I did not have to say anything else after that, and I would not have known what.

Later, at the edge of the room, I found Jitters — who had sung the welcome three times and who had spent the whole afternoon at the far end of the orchard practising where nobody could hear.

"You went all the way to the far end of the orchard so that nobody would hear you get it wrong."

"Yes."

"That's why you were the only one who could see it."