Ribbon Cove

"Straight there and straight back," Mummy had said, not looking up from the washing, "I've got my hands full, so no dawdling — and no arguing over who gets the last humbug." Neither boy had promised anything about the humbug.

The newest jigsaw piece had been sitting warm in Felix's pocket since breakfast, and by the time they'd counted out their coins on the kitchen table it was glowing properly, gold right through the seams, the way it always did just before it meant business.

"Ready?" Alex asked, though he was already holding out his hand.

Felix took it. The kitchen light went gold at the edges, warm and soft as a held breath, and then it wasn't the kitchen at all — it was salt air and gulls and the particular, unmistakable smell of a sweet shop from just down the lane, except the lane wasn't their lane, and the shop wasn't quite like any shop they'd seen before.

"It KNEW," said Felix, with total conviction, pocketing the piece — merely warm now, its work done for the moment — and pushed open the door of the little sweet shop.

The bell above the door rang. Nothing else happened.

Usually the shop's shelves were stacked from floor to ceiling — jars of humbugs, trays of fudge, ropes of liquorice curled up like sleeping cats, a whole window display of gobstoppers arranged by size like a family photo. Today, most of the shelves were just... shelves. A few sad, lonely sweets rattled around in the bottom of otherwise empty jars.

"Oh," said Felix, stricken, in the voice of someone whose entire life plan had just been cancelled. "Where did they GO?"

Mrs Humbug looked up from behind the counter, where they'd clearly been rearranging the same three jars for want of anything better to do. "Delivery didn't come," they said. "Hasn't come in three days, if I'm honest. First time in I-don't-know-how-long."

"Three DAYS," Felix repeated, aghast, as though being told about a great historical tragedy.

Alex, meanwhile, had gone quiet in the way he did when something interesting had appeared that wasn't sweets. "Why not?"

Mrs Humbug shrugged, but it was the kind of shrug that meant I have a guess and I don't love it. "Word from the boats is the shaping folk are short of something themselves. You'd have to ask them. Try the workshop — can't miss it, it smells like the whole world's favourite thing at once."

Felix was already halfway back out the door. "Come ON, Alex, if THEY don't know either we just have to keep going till someone DOES."

Alex followed, more slowly, already turning something over. "That's not really how a mystery works, you know. You don't just keep going till—"

"Yes it IS," said Felix, who had never in his life let a technicality slow him down.

• • •

They found Ribbon Cove by smell alone, exactly as promised — a rich, warm, buttery-sweet smell that got stronger with every step, like walking directly into the good part of a dream. A hand-painted sign over the workshop door read THE STRIPE & SWIRL, and the building lived up to it: it looked like it had been iced rather than built, smooth swirled walls in stripes of colour, a chimney puffing little intermittent clouds that smelled of peppermint.

Inside was the best-organised chaos either of them had ever seen. Long benches ran the length of the room, each one doing something different: one where ropes of warm, glossy sugar-paste were being pulled and folded and pulled again until they turned glossy and full of air; one where the pulled ropes were twisted into stripes, two colours becoming one striped one, then fed through a little wheeled cutter that chopped them into bite-sized pieces with a sound like tock-tock-tock-tock; one where finished sweets rolled down a little chute into a barrel, already wrapped.

"Can we—" Felix started.

"Go on then," said Stripe, not even looking up, already used to the question. They were elbow-deep in a warm rope of something the colour of a sunrise, folding it over on itself with practiced ease. "Mind the cutter, it's got a mind of its own on a Tuesday."

Felix's hands were on the pulling-bench before Alex had even finished deciding where to stand. He grabbed a warm handful of sugar-paste and pulled — it stretched further than he expected, further than seemed reasonable, and he yelped with delight and pulled it further still, until it was thin as string and he had to fold it back on itself before it snapped.

"It's still WARM," he said, amazed, as if warmth were a personality trait. "And it's gone all — shiny. It wasn't shiny before."

"That's the pulling," said Stripe. "Does something to it. Traps little bits of air in, is what my old teacher always said. Makes it go from a sad dull lump into a proper sweet. You have to pull it exactly the right number of times, mind — too few and it stays a sad dull lump, too many and it goes hard as a rock before you've had a chance to shape it."

Alex, meanwhile, had drifted to the twisting bench, where two different colours of pulled rope were being wound together into candy-cane stripes. He watched three full sweets get made before he tried it himself — watching, always, before joining — and when he finally did try, his stripes came out perfectly even, wound with the same careful, unhurried attention he gave to everything.

"Yours are neater than mine," Felix said, peering over, entirely without jealousy, because Felix's own stripes had come out looking like a stripe that had given up halfway through being a stripe.

"Yours taste better, probably," Alex said generously, which was true, because Felix had also been quietly eating slightly more raw sugar-paste than was strictly part of the demonstration.

They tried the cutter next, and the tock-tock-tock was, they agreed, one of the most satisfying sounds either of them had ever heard — Felix insisted on feeding it three separate ropes himself, purely so he could hear it three separate times, and was visibly disappointed when Stripe gently suggested a fourth rope wasn't strictly necessary.

Beyond the cutter, right at the end of the room, was the quietest station of all — a little wooden chute where finished sweets, already cooled and cut, rolled gently down into waiting sheets of coloured paper, twisted at both ends by a pair of small, endlessly patient wooden pincers that seemed to work entirely on their own.

"How do they know how to do that?" Alex asked, crouching to watch one twist, release, and reset, twist, release, and reset, with perfect, unhurried rhythm.

"They don't know anything," Stripe said, not unkindly. "They just do the one thing, over and over, properly. Older than me, those pincers. Older than my old teacher, probably." A note of real fondness crept in. "Best worker in the whole place, if you ask me. Never complains, never gets it wrong, never once asked for a day off."

Felix, delighted by the idea of a machine with a personality, spent a full minute feeding it the same misshapen practice-sweet over and over just to watch it get wrapped identically each time, and only stopped when Alex pointed out — gently, the way he pointed out most things — that they were, technically, meant to be looking for clues.

"You're only saying that because YOUR sweet got wrapped wonky," Felix said.

"My sweet got wrapped exactly as wonky as I twisted it," Alex said, with dignity. "That's not the pincers' fault. That's mine."

Felix considered this a moral victory and said nothing further about it, which was, for Felix, its own kind of gracious.

They tried the flavouring station next, where tiny jars of extract — mint, lemon, a red one that Stripe wouldn't name but promised was "everyone's favourite, don't ask questions" — got mixed into the sugar-paste before it was pulled. Felix tried a sweet flavoured with something bright green that turned out to taste, unmistakably and to his enormous delight, exactly like a swimming pool smells.

"That one's not for selling," Stripe admitted. "That one's just for me."

Felix, halfway through asking for a second swimming-pool sweet, stopped with his hand still out. "Why's this jar empty, though?" he asked, tipping it upside down to prove his point, one lonely drop of syrup sliding to the rim and no further. "You've only got the little jars left. Where's the BIG jug that goes with the big pot?"

It was a fair question, and a blunter one than Alex would have asked, and it turned out to be exactly the right one.

• • •

Stripe's easy good humour dimmed a notch. "Sharp eyes," they said, and this time it was Felix who'd earned it. "We're stretching what we've got. Syrup's not come in — not since three deliveries back."

Alex, meanwhile, had gone quiet in the particular way he did when he was noticing something rather than joining in, and his eyes had drifted past the flavouring station to the benches beyond it.

"You've only got two benches running," he said. It wasn't a question. "There were five stations. Only two have got anyone working them."

Stripe nodded, unsurprised to be caught twice in one conversation. "We're working through what was already in the vats, and there's precious little of that left." They nodded at a barrel in the corner, mostly empty, one thin skin of syrup clinging to the bottom. "Once that's gone, we're not shaping anything. Not sweets, not the icing batches either."

"Icing?" said Felix, who had not previously known icing needed anyone to shape it at all.

"Biscuit folk," said Stripe. "Get a good share of our overflow syrup for their glazes, every week, regular as anything. Told them yesterday there mightn't be any this week. They were very understanding about it, considering." A small, wry look. "Understanding's a nice word for it."

Alex filed that away carefully, the way he filed most things — not saying much, but clearly not forgetting it either.

"So it's not just US who don't get sweets," Felix said slowly, working out the shape of something much bigger than a sweet shop with empty jars. "It's — everyone. Everyone who needs the syrup stuff."

"Looks that way," said Stripe. "Wish I could tell you why. All I know is the boats keep coming back from Simmer Slopes with less than they're supposed to, and nobody there's saying much about it either."

Felix squared his shoulders in the manner of someone accepting a very important mission. "Then that's where we go next."

Alex was already looking toward the door, and for once wasn't hanging back at all. "Simmer Slopes," he agreed. "Before there's none left there either."

Stripe pressed one last warm, striped sweet into each of their hands on the way out — "for the road," they said, "won't miss two out of the ones we can't sell anyway" — and the boys ate them slowly, making them last, all the way down to the boats.

P.S. — Felix's striped sweet lasted exactly four minutes. Alex's lasted the whole walk to the harbour, on the grounds that he was, he explained, "saving the best bit for last," though he could never afterward say what the best bit had actually been.

P.P.S. — "Do you think," Felix asked, staring at the empty jars one more time before they left, "sweets know when people are worried about them?" Alex considered this with real seriousness. "I think," he said, "it's probably the other way round."