Peggy

Peggy's eyes lit up. "There is, and it's my favourite. You make each number into a permanent picture, once, forever — because numbers are hard to picture but shapes are easy. Look: the number one is tall and thin with a little flame-tip, so — a candle. Two curves like a swan's neck. Three is two round bumps, like a heart on its side. Four looks like a little sail. Once you've built these pegs, they never change." Peggy tapped her drawings. "Now, to remember that the seventh item is, say, an apple? You hang the apple on peg seven. Seven looks like a cliff or a boomerang — so picture an apple hurled off a cliff, or a boomerang made of apple. Then when someone asks 'what was number seven?', you don't count. You go straight to your seven-peg and there's the apple, waiting on its hook."

"I built these pegs when I was small," Peggy said, "and I've used the very same ones ever since — that's the beauty of it. The palace is a route you walk in order. The pegs are hooks you can grab in any order, by number. I once thought I'd have to memorize a new system for every list. Then I understood: you build the ten pegs once, and they serve you for the rest of your life. Every numbered list you'll ever meet already has its hooks hanging there, empty, ready. You just hang the new things on and take them down again when you're done."

"The trick," Peggy added, "is to make the hanging vivid — the item and the peg smashed together into one silly picture. Don't just set the apple near the cliff. Throw it off. Make it splat. The wilder the collision, the tighter it sticks. And because peg seven is always seven, you never lose your place — ask me item three, I leap to the heart; item nine, I leap to the balloon-on-a-string. No counting. Just reach for the hook."