In Silverton, where tigers wear rocket skates and pigs can fly, there are three days to go until the Silverton Speed Cup. You can hear that it is three days. The whole track is clicking.

Three days to the Speed Cup, and every single child at that track has a stopwatch. It sounds like rain, if rain had thumbs. Here is the noise. Say it with me.

Click. Click. Click.

Zion: “I have TWO.”

Zion did have two. One on each wrist. He held them up above his visor so everybody could see them, which is Zion's favourite part of having anything at all.

Ava: “What is the second one FOR?”
Zion: “It is for the other times.”
Ava: “What other times?”
Zion: “The ones the first one is not doing.”

Nobody understood that, very possibly including Zion. He clicked them both anyway, and everybody looked, and Zion had a lovely afternoon.

Ava's ears went hot first. They always do. Then her feet started running on the spot without checking with Ava about it. Yours might do something else entirely. Mine hover two inches off the ground, which is no help whatsoever in a queue.

Mum: “A stopwatch is four coins, love.”
Ava: “I have four coins. I have EXACTLY four coins.”
Mum: “And you can count in your head. You are the fastest counter I know.”
Ava: “Counting in your head does not CLICK.”

Four coins on Ava's money-band. One stopwatch. And a head that already counts faster than anybody in Silverton, silently, for nothing.

Louis: “The Cup has a clock. A big one, on the wall.”
Ava: “It is not MINE, Louis.”

Then Bennie went past holding one. Bennie is a budgie, and quite small, and even Bennie had a stopwatch, and Bennie clicked it, twice, on purpose. Go on. Your turn.

Click. Click. Click.

Ava's feet went faster. Wanting is like that. It gets louder when everybody else has already got the thing.

So. Three days. Four coins. One clicking thing she could hold in her hand, and one head that already does the job and makes no noise at all.

That is where I stop. Ava has not decided yet, and neither have you. There is a grown-up sitting right beside you. Go on.

Tap. Tap. Pause.