The Isles of Yum

It was raining. Not exciting rain, not thunder-and-puddles rain — just the grey, going-on-forever kind that presses its nose against the window and doesn't leave.

"I'm BORED," said Felix, upside down on the sofa.

"You've said that four times," said Alex, who was counting.

Elfine and Marion were visiting for the weekend, and the four of them had turned out every cupboard in the sitting room looking for something to do. That's when Marion found it — wedged down the side of the sofa cushion, warm as toast, though nobody could explain why a jigsaw piece would be warm.

"It's from Mummy's puzzle," said Elfine, who noticed things like that. "The big wooden one. Look — there's a gap on the world map, right in the middle of the sea."

Mummy came in with a cup of tea and looked at the piece in Marion's palm. It showed a tiny painted island, no bigger than a fingernail, shaped a bit like a fish finger.

"Well," said Mummy, turning it over. "I haven't seen that piece in years. I always wondered where it got to."

"Should we put it back?" asked Alex.

Elfine was already crouched by the puzzle on the side table, running her finger along the gap. She was good at this — puzzles, patterns, the way things were supposed to fit.

"It goes here," she said, and pushed it into place.

The piece clicked in. Then it got warmer. Then the whole puzzle glowed gold, bright and buttery, like sunshine coming through a jar of honey.

"Ooh," said Felix, which was a fair thing to say, because the glow was now a hole, and the hole smelled unmistakably of hot buttered toast and melting chocolate, and it was getting bigger.

"Hold hands," said Mummy, in the voice that meant now, and the room tipped sideways, and the sofa and the rain and the boredom all fell away. Nobody noticed the small, pale gold shape that slipped in through the gap at the very last moment, tail last of all.

• • •

They landed softly, all five of them together, on a jetty made of golden, crusty toast that didn't crumble no matter how hard Felix bounced on it. The air smelled of warm butter and hot chocolate steam, and somewhere close by, something was sizzling.

"I don't think we're in the sitting room," said Marion.

She was right. Stretching out in every direction was a sparkling blue sea, and dotted across it — as far as anyone could see — were islands. Proper islands, with cliffs and hills and little harbours. Except every single one of them was made of food.

The nearest island had golden, crispy-looking cliffs and pale sandy beaches shaped suspiciously like chips.

"FISH FINGERS," bellowed Felix, at a volume that startled a seagull. "That island is FISH FINGERS AND CHIPS."

Further off, a mountain rose up dark and glossy, with a little river of brown trickling down its side. Beside that, pink fluffy clouds floated just above the water instead of in the sky, wobbling gently like they might float away completely. And past that, a hill entirely covered in giant, red, glossy strawberries, each one the size of a beanbag.

"This," said Alex slowly, taking it all in, "is the best place we have ever been."

A small wooden signpost stood at the end of the jetty, its arrows pointing every which way: FISH FINGER REEF. BEANS-ON-TOAST BAY. CHOCOLATE MOUNTAIN. CANDY FLOSS CLOUDS. STRAWBERRY HILL. FROZEN MANGO ISLE. And underneath, in smaller letters: Welcome to the Isles of Yum. Please do not eat the residents.

"What residents?" asked Elfine.

As if in answer, a small golden creature toddled out from behind a rock on Fish Finger Reef. It was shaped exactly like a fish finger, with two stubby arms, two stubby legs, and a face that was currently very worried.

"You've got to help," it said, in a crumbly sort of voice. "It's coming. The Soggy Storm. It always comes eventually, but never like this, never this big— oh, I'm Crispin, by the way. Sorry. Manners."

Right on cue, a low rumble rolled in from somewhere out past the horizon, and a wall of grey cloud began sliding across the sparkling sea, swallowing the sunshine as it came.

• • •

Mummy crouched down to Crispin's height, the way she did when Felix or Alex had a wobbly lip and needed steadying. "What happens when the storm comes?"

"Everything goes soggy," said the creature miserably. "Crispy goes floppy. Fluffy goes flat. It's not just rain. It's sad rain."

Nobody needed telling twice. As the grey cloud rolled closer, the very edge of Fish Finger Reef began to droop — the crisp golden cliffs slumping like a fish finger left out all afternoon, the crunch visibly draining out of them.

"That is genuinely tragic," said Felix, with feeling.

"We should help," said Alex. It wasn't a question. Alex had already spotted the enormous rhubarb leaves growing at the top of the cliff, each one as big as an umbrella, and was walking towards them without waiting to be told.

"Rhubarb leaves," said Elfine, catching on. "As umbrellas. For the whole reef."

It took all four children and every fish finger islander who could toddle to drag the giant leaves into place along the clifftop, propping them up with driftwood so they leaned out over the crumbling golden rock like a roof. Mummy held the biggest one steady with both arms while the wind tried to snatch it away, and just in time — the first fat, grey drops came hissing down, and bounced harmlessly off rhubarb instead of soaking into fish finger.

"IT'S WORKING," Felix shouted, punching the air, which was possibly not the most useful thing to do while holding a leaf, but nobody minded.

Crispin let out a wobbly, crumbly cheer. "You saved the crunch!"

"For now," said Mummy quietly, looking out at the storm still rolling in, bigger and greyer than before. "But I don't think an umbrella is going to be enough for the whole sea."

• • •

They pushed on towards the Candy Floss Clouds, borrowing a little boat shaped like half a walnut shell that the fish finger folk insisted they take. On the way, they cut across the corner of Beans-on-Toast Bay, where the water itself had turned rich and orange and faintly tomatoey, and the "waves" were really just very slow, very polite baked beans, lapping gently against toast-slice rocks.

"Don't fall in," Elfine warned, steering carefully around a bean the size of a beach ball. "You'd smell of dinner for a week."

"That doesn't sound like a punishment," said Felix, leaning dangerously far over the side to look, until Mummy hooked a finger through the back of his collar without even glancing up.

A little further on, they passed close enough to Chocolate Mountain to feel the warmth coming off it — its glossy brown slopes steaming gently in the storm-light, with a thin trickle of melted chocolate river winding down to the sea. Felix looked at it longingly. But Alex was looking somewhere else entirely, eyes narrowed at the horizon.

"We can't stop," Alex said. "Look at the clouds over there. That's where it's worst. That's where we're needed."

Elfine sat at the front working out the fastest way between the waves, and Marion kept watch behind them, because someone sensible needed to.

Up close, the Candy Floss Clouds weren't clouds at all, but islands of spun pink and blue sugar, floating just above the water like the world's fluffiest bath sponges. Except they were drooping. Where the Soggy Storm's rain had already reached, the candy floss was collapsing into damp, sticky, deflated puddles, sliding slowly off the edges and into the sea below with a sound like —

"SCHLOOP," said the candy floss, unhappily, as another chunk slid off.

"Oh no," said Marion. "That's so sad. Imagine working really hard to be fluffy and then just... schlooping."

Felix was already standing up in the boat, which Mummy did not love, pointing at the sail — which Elfine had rigged from an old bedsheet tied between two oars. "What if we caught it? The floss! Before it schloops into the sea!"

It wasn't a perfect plan, but perfect plans were Elfine's department, and she was already adjusting the sail to catch the drooping strands as they peeled away, gathering great pink handfuls before they hit the water and dissolved for good. Alex, meanwhile, had gone very quiet and very still, watching the storm.

"It's not spreading evenly," Alex said. "Look. It's worse in the middle. Right where the clouds are darkest."

Everyone looked. Alex was right — the storm wasn't just a storm. It had a centre. And the centre wasn't grey rock or grey wind. It was one single, enormous, sulking, sniffling cloud, hunched low over the sea like it was trying to hide.

"That's not a storm," said Alex. "That's someone."

• • •

They rowed towards it, the walnut-shell boat bobbing over increasingly damp, increasingly grey waves. The wind picked up the closer they got, shoving the little boat sideways, and the water had turned the colour of old dishwater.

"Hold on to something," said Elfine, fighting the oar against a wave that didn't want to let it go.

It didn't help. A gust caught the boat side-on, tipped it hard, and the oar was ripped clean out of Elfine's hands and spun away across the water.

"I'll get it!" shouted Felix, and before anyone could tell him not to, he'd gone straight over the side after it.

"FELIX!"

Mummy lunged for him and missed by a hand's width. For one horrible second there was nothing but grey water where Felix had been, and everyone in the boat went very, very quiet in the worst possible way.

Felix's head came back up, spluttering, further from the boat than he meant to be — the same gust that had taken the oar was pushing him steadily away from it, and every stroke he took only seemed to tire him out without bringing him any closer.

"I'm okay," he called, in a voice that didn't entirely sound it. "I just need — " A wave went over his head and the rest of the sentence went with it.

Alex didn't shout. Alex didn't waste time being frightened out loud, even though — anyone looking closely would have seen — Alex was. Alex grabbed the coiled rope from the bottom of the boat, the one they'd used to tie the sail, and threw it as far and as hard as five years old could manage. It fell short by an arm's length.

That was when Crispin — who had, it turned out, tucked himself into the bottom of the boat back at the reef and said nothing about it — popped up over the side, took one look, and dove in without any hesitation at all. He paddled with a strange, stubby, determined doggy-paddle, closed the gap in a few seconds, and pushed the end of the rope right into Felix's hand.

"Kick your legs! Both of you!" Alex shouted, already hauling the rope in hand over hand, and Marion and Elfine threw their weight in behind, and Mummy's hands were right there over Alex's the moment the rope started moving, pulling together.

It felt like a very long time. Then Felix's hands hit the side of the boat, and four children and one very relieved fish finger got him back over the edge, dripping and shivering and laughing in the slightly too-loud way people laugh right after being frightened.

"That," said Mummy, holding onto Felix so tightly he could barely breathe, "was extremely brave and also the single most frightening thing I have ever seen you do, and we are going to talk about the diving-in-after-things part later."

"I got the oar, though," said Felix, and held it up as evidence, which was somehow exactly the wrong thing to say and exactly the right thing at the same time, and even Mummy, hand pressed to her chest, laughed despite herself.

The fish finger creature wrung itself out with great dignity and said nothing about having been a stowaway, then or ever.

• • •

Once the boat was moving properly again, and Felix was wrapped in the picnic blanket from under the seat and had stopped shivering, the little boat went quiet for a while — the ordinary, catching-your-breath kind of quiet, the kind that comes after a fright when nobody quite wants to talk yet but everyone's glad the others are close by. Marion kept one hand on Felix's arm the whole way, just to check he was still there. Then, at last, they came within sight of the huge cloud. It wasn't a wall of weather at all — it was one single, hunched, dripping creature, grey and soggy all over, with two small unhappy eyes and shoulders that shook every so often with a hiccupping sob that came out as thunder.

Mummy gripped the side of the boat rather harder than she needed to. "Goodness," she said, in a voice that was trying quite hard to sound ordinary, though her hands hadn't quite stopped shaking. "That's... a lot bigger up close, isn't it."

"Are you scared?" asked Marion.

"A little bit, yes," said Mummy, and didn't pretend otherwise. "I was already a little bit scared before we even got here, if I'm honest. Big feelings can be frightening, even when you're a grown-up. But being a bit scared doesn't mean we stop."

"Go AWAY," it sniffled, when it noticed them. "I'm not doing anything wrong. I'm just RAINING. That's my JOB."

"It's a bit much rain, though," said Felix, honestly, because Felix always said the true thing plainly.

"THAT'S WHAT EVERYONE ALWAYS SAYS," bellowed the cloud, and a fresh sheet of rain came sideways off it, drenching everyone in the boat. "Too much rain, not enough rain, wrong sort of rain! Nobody ever says thank you! I water the strawberries every single morning so they grow big and red and juicy and does ANYONE say thank you? NO. They just complain when I get it slightly wrong!"

Its shoulders shook again. More thunder. More rain.

• • •

Alex, quiet as ever, was watching the cloud's face rather than its storm. "You're not angry," Alex said slowly. "You're sad. You've been sad for ages."

The cloud stopped mid-sob, startled. Nobody had said that to it before.

"My name is Mizzle," it said, in a much smaller voice, the thunder dying down to a drizzle. "I used to just be a little grey cloud who rained exactly the right amount for the strawberries. And I loved it. But everyone only ever noticed me when I got it wrong. So I started worrying I'd get it wrong. And then I started raining too much because I was worried, and then everyone complained about THAT, and then I got so upset I just... didn't stop."

"That sounds lonely," said Marion, in the voice she used when she meant the true thing, not the easy thing.

Mizzle sniffed enormously, which made it drizzle for a moment. "Nobody's ever once said thank you," it said. "Not once. In years."

Everyone in the boat went quiet. Felix looked at Mummy. Mummy, still gripping the side of the boat, gave the smallest nod — the nod that meant I don't know exactly what to do here either, but I think you might.

Felix stood up in the boat — carefully this time — and looked right up at the enormous, damp, hiccupping cloud.

"Thank you for the strawberries," Felix said, simply, because Felix always cut straight to the important thing. "They're my favourite. I didn't know it was you doing it."

Mizzle blinked. The drizzle paused.

"Thank you for Fish Finger Reef staying crunchy on the good days," said Alex.

"Thank you for the candy floss clouds," said Marion. "Even the schloopy ones."

"Thank you for making this whole place work," said Elfine, "even when nobody was watching."

For a moment, nothing happened. Then Mizzle sniffed, long and wet and unconvinced, and the rain picked back up a little.

"You're just saying that," Mizzle said, "because you want me to stop."

Nobody had an answer ready for that. It was, Felix privately thought, a fair point.

"That's true," said Alex slowly, because Alex never said something wasn't true when it was. "We do want you to stop. But that doesn't mean we don't mean it."

"Prove it," said Mizzle, and more rain came down, sharp and quick, like the cloud was testing them.

Felix thought about this properly, the way he didn't always bother to. Then he said the thing again — not louder this time, just steadier. "Thank you for the strawberries. I still mean it, even though you're still raining on us right now and it's actually quite annoying."

Marion laughed, which surprised everyone including her. "That's the truest thank you I've ever heard."

Alex added, quietly, "You don't have to believe us straight away. We'll just keep saying it until you do."

And they did. One at a time, without being asked twice, they said thank you again — for the strawberries, for the reef, for the clouds, for years of a job nobody had noticed — not because the rain stopped when they said it, but simply because it was true and it hadn't been said enough.

Slowly, the sobbing in Mizzle's shoulders began to change into something else. Not instantly. Not all at once. But a little at a time, the way a knot works loose when you keep gently pulling at the right end.

"Nobody's ever said it twice," Mizzle said, very small. "Nobody's ever bothered saying it again after the first time didn't fix everything."

"We're not saying it to fix you," said Elfine. "We're saying it because it's true."

That was the thing that finally did it. Mizzle let out one enormous breath — not a sob, just a breath, the kind you let out when you've been holding your shoulders too tight for too long — and the grey began to lift off him like steam off a hot chocolate.

Underneath, he wasn't grey at all. He was a soft, ordinary, gentle sort of cloud, pale silver at the edges, drifting rain down in small, careful, exactly-right drops.

The storm didn't stop all at once. It simply stopped being a storm, and became weather again.

• • •

The sun came out properly for the first time since they'd arrived, and the whole sea seemed to exhale. Fish Finger Reef re-crisped, the golden cliffs snapping back to crunchy in the warm light. The Candy Floss Clouds puffed back up, fluffier than ever, bobbing happily where they'd drooped before. Even from a distance, they could see Strawberry Hill glowing red and glossy, plumper than before.

"I'll rain just the right amount from now on," said Mizzle, sounding a bit shy about it. "For the strawberries. And I'll try not to worry so much about getting it exactly perfect every single time."

"Everyone gets it wrong sometimes," said Alex. "That doesn't mean you have to become a storm about it."

Mizzle almost smiled, which came out as a very small rainbow.

On the way back, Mizzle drifted along beside the little boat and, shyly, showed them one more place — Frozen Mango Isle, glowing gold and orange in the new sunshine, its hills made of smooth, cool, mango-flavoured ice that never quite melted no matter how warm the day got. It hadn't been touched by the storm at all, tucked away as it was, and the mango folk who lived there hadn't even known anything was wrong until the sun came back and they wondered why everyone was cheering.

"It's the coolest place in the whole sea," said Mizzle, "in both ways," and everybody groaned at the joke, which Mizzle seemed rather pleased about.

Felix and Alex were allowed exactly one mango-ice lolly each, on account of it technically being pudding and technically not being dinner time, a rule Mummy enforced with the specific weariness of someone who has had this exact argument before.

The islands threw them a feast on the toast jetty before they left — warm buttered toast towers, a paddling pool of beans, fish fingers that Felix and Alex insisted, several times, were "unbelievably" crunchy, strawberries the size of apples, and a bowl of candy floss that the cloud islanders had generously re-fluffed especially for the occasion. It was Marion who found Willow, fast asleep in the middle of the candy floss bowl, entirely covered in pink fluff, having apparently followed them through the puzzle piece and said absolutely nothing about it since.

Elfine was the one who worked out how to get home — she noticed the warm jigsaw piece was still glowing faintly in Marion's pocket, exactly the way it had glowed before it opened. "It's not just a door," she said, turning it over in her fingers. "It's a door that goes both ways. We just have to want to go back."

They held hands. The toast jetty, the storm-cleared sky, and Mizzle waving one damp, grateful corner of himself all faded gently away, and the sitting room folded back in around them, rain still pattering ordinarily against the window as though no time had passed at all.

• • •

P.S. — Willow was still faintly pink the next morning, having apparently decided the airing cupboard was the best place to think about what she'd done. She has not commented further. Felix, meanwhile, did have a proper talk with Mummy about diving into unknown seas after oars, which he listened to with real seriousness and which did not stop him, three minutes later, from asking whether he could do it again sometime "if it was a bit safer."

P.P.S. — That evening, Mummy tucked the warm little jigsaw piece back into its gap in the puzzle, and it glowed gold for just a second before settling, which everybody agreed meant the Isles of Yum were happy. "I watched you work that one out," Mummy told them, tucking Felix and Alex in. "I wasn't sure saying thank you twice would be enough, if I'm honest. But you didn't give up on it, and it was." Marion, already half asleep, murmured that she was going to say thank you to absolutely everyone tomorrow, just to see what happened. Nobody doubted she would.