The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2 page)

I.

N
obody came
to my seventh birthday party.

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles,
with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it
in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My
mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said
that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for
boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book.

When it became obvious that nobody was coming, my
mother lit the seven candles on the cake, and I blew them out. I ate a slice of
the cake, as did my little sister and one of her friends (both of them attending
the party as observers, not participants) before they fled, giggling, to the
garden.

Party games had been prepared by my mother but,
because nobody was there, not even my sister, none of the party games were
played, and I unwrapped the newspaper around the pass-the-parcel gift myself,
revealing a blue plastic Batman figure. I was sad that nobody had come to my
party, but happy that I had a Batman figure, and there was a birthday present
waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I
lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.

I liked that. Books were safer than other people
anyway.

My parents had also given me a
Best of Gilbert and
Sullivan
LP, to add to the two that I already had. I had loved Gilbert and
Sullivan since I was three, when my father's youngest sister, my aunt, took me
to see
Iolanthe
, a play filled with lords and fairies. I found the existence and
nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords. My aunt had
died soon after, of pneumonia, in the hospital.

That evening my father arrived home from work and
he brought a cardboard box with him. In the cardboard box was a soft-haired
black kitten of uncertain gender, whom I immediately named Fluffy, and which I
loved utterly and wholeheartedly.

Fluffy slept on my bed at night. I talked to it,
sometimes, when my little sister was not around, half-expecting it to answer in
a human tongue. It never did. I did not mind. The kitten was affectionate and
interested and a good companion for someone whose seventh birthday party had
consisted of a table with iced biscuits and a blancmange and cake and fifteen
empty folding chairs.

I do not remember ever asking any of the other
children in my class at school why they had not come to my party. I did not need
to ask them. They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I
went to school with.

I made friends slowly, when I made them.

I had books, and now I had my kitten. We would be
like Dick Whittington and his cat, I knew, or, if Fluffy proved particularly
intelligent, we would be the miller's son and Puss-in-Boots. The kitten slept on
my pillow, and it even waited for me to come home from school, sitting on the
driveway in front of my house, by the fence, until, a month later, it was run
over by the taxi that brought the opal miner to stay at my house.

I was not there when it happened.

I got home from school that day, and my kitten was
not waiting to meet me. In the kitchen was a tall, rangy man with tanned skin
and a checked shirt. He was drinking coffee at the kitchen table, I could smell
it. In those days all coffee was instant coffee, a bitter dark brown powder that
came out of a jar.

“I'm afraid I had a little accident arriving here,”
he told me, cheerfully. “But not to worry.” His accent was clipped, unfamiliar:
it was the first South African accent I had heard.

He, too, had a cardboard box on the table in front
of him.

“The black kitten, was he yours?” he asked.

“It's called Fluffy,” I said.

“Yeah. Like I said. Accident coming here. Not to
worry. Disposed of the corpse. Don't have to trouble yourself. Dealt with the
matter. Open the box.”

“What?”

He pointed to the box. “Open it,” he said.

The opal miner was a tall man. He wore jeans and
checked shirts every time I saw him, except the last. He had a thick chain of
pale gold around his neck. That was gone the last time I saw him, too.

I did not want to open his box. I wanted to go off
on my own. I wanted to cry for my kitten, but I could not do that if anyone else
was there and watching me. I wanted to mourn. I wanted to bury my friend at the
bottom of the garden, past the green-grass fairy ring, into the rhododendron
bush cave, back past the heap of grass cuttings, where nobody ever went but
me.

The box moved.

“Bought it for you,” said the man. “Always pay my
debts.”

I reached out, lifted the top flap of the box,
wondering if this was a joke, if my kitten would be in there. Instead a ginger
face stared up at me truculently.

The opal miner took the cat out of the box.

He was a huge, ginger-striped tomcat, missing half
an ear. He glared at me angrily. This cat had not liked being put in a box. He
was not used to boxes. I reached out to stroke his head, feeling unfaithful to
the memory of my kitten, but he pulled back so I could not touch him, and he
hissed at me, then stalked off to a far corner of the room, where he sat and
looked and hated.

“There you go. Cat for a cat,” said the opal miner,
and he ruffled my hair with his leathery hand. Then he went out into the hall,
leaving me in the kitchen with the cat that was not my kitten.

The man put his head back through the door. “He's
called Monster,” he said.

It felt like a bad joke.

I propped open the kitchen door, so the cat could
get out. Then I went up to the bedroom, and lay on my bed, and cried for dead
Fluffy. When my parents got home that evening, I do not think my kitten was even
mentioned.

Monster lived with us for a week or more. I put cat
food in the bowl for him in the morning and again at night as I had for my
kitten. He would sit by the back door until I, or someone else, let him out. We
saw him in the garden, slipping from bush to bush, or in trees, or in the
undergrowth. We could trace his movements by the dead blue-tits and thrushes we
would find in the garden, but we saw him rarely.

I missed Fluffy. I knew you could not simply
replace something alive, but I dared not grumble to my parents about it. They
would have been baffled at my upset: after all, if my kitten had been killed, it
had also been replaced. The damage had been made up.

It all came back and even as it came back I knew it
would not be for long: all the things I remembered, sitting on the green bench
beside the little pond that Lettie Hempstock had once convinced me was an
ocean.

II.

I
was not
happy as a child, although from time to time I was content. I lived in books
more than I lived anywhere else.

Our house was large and many-roomed, which was good
when they bought it and my father had money, not good later.

My parents called me into their bedroom one
afternoon, very formally. I thought I must have done something wrong and was
there for a telling-off, but no: they told me only that they were no longer
affluent, that we would all need to make sacrifices, and that what I would be
sacrificing was my bedroom, the little room at the top of the stairs. I was sad:
my bedroom had a tiny little yellow washbasin they had put in for me, just my
size; the room was above the kitchen, and immediately up the stairs from the
television room, so at night I could hear the comforting buzz of adult
conversation coming from below, through my half-open door, and I did not feel
alone. Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open,
allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as
important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway
light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to.

Exiled to my little sister's huge bedroom, I was
not heartbroken. There were already three beds in there, and I took the bed by
the window. I loved that I could climb out of that bedroom window onto the long
brick balcony, that I could sleep with my window open and feel the wind and the
rain on my face. But we argued, my sister and I, argued about everything. She
liked to sleep with the door to the hall closed, and the immediate arguments
about whether the bedroom door should be open or shut were summarily resolved by
my mother writing a chart that hung on the back of the door, showing that
alternate nights were mine or my sister's. Each night I was content or I was
terrified, depending on whether the door was open or closed.

My former bedroom at the top of the stairs was let
out, and a variety of people passed through it. I viewed them all with
suspicion: they were sleeping in my bedroom, using my little yellow basin that
was just the right size for me. There had been a fat Austrian lady who told us
she could leave her head and walk around the ceiling; an architectural student
from New Zealand; an American couple whom my mother, scandalized, made leave
when she discovered they were not actually married; and, now, there was the opal
miner.

He was a South African, although he had made his
money mining for opals in Australia. He gave my sister and me an opal each, a
rough black rock with green-blue-red fire in it. My sister liked him for this,
and treasured her opal stone. I could not forgive him for the death of my
kitten.

It was the first day of the spring holidays: three
weeks of no school. I woke early, thrilled by the prospect of endless days to
fill however I wished. I would read. I would explore.

I pulled on my shorts, my T-shirt, my sandals. I
went downstairs to the kitchen. My father was cooking, while my mother slept in.
He was wearing his dressing gown over his pajamas. He often cooked breakfast on
Saturdays. I said, “Dad! Where's my comic?” He always bought me a copy of
SMASH!
before he drove home from work on Fridays, and
I would read it on Saturday mornings.

“In the back of the car. Do you want toast?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not burnt.”

My father did not like toasters. He toasted bread
under the grill, and, usually, he burnt it.

I went outside into the drive. I looked around. I
went back into the house, pushed the kitchen door, went in. I liked the kitchen
door. It swung both ways, in and out, so servants sixty years ago would be able
to walk in or out with their arms laden with dishes empty or full.

“Dad? Where's the car?”

“In the drive.”

“No, it isn't.”

“What?”

The telephone rang, and my father went out into the
hall, where the phone was, to answer it. I heard him talking to someone.

The toast began to smoke under the grill.

I got up on a chair and turned the grill off.

“That was the police,” my father said. “Someone's
reported seeing our car abandoned at the bottom of the lane. I said I hadn't
even reported it stolen yet. Right. We can head down now, meet them there.
Toast!
”

He pulled the pan out from beneath the grill. The
toast was smoking and blackened on one side.

“Is my comic there? Or did they steal it?”

“I don't know. The police didn't mention your
comic.”

My father put peanut butter on the burnt side of
each piece of toast, replaced his dressing gown with a coat worn over his
pajamas, put on a pair of shoes, and we walked down the lane together. He
munched his toast as we walked. I held my toast, and did not eat it.

We had walked for perhaps five minutes down the
narrow lane which ran through fields on each side, when a police car came up
behind us. It slowed, and the driver greeted my father by name.

I hid my piece of burnt toast behind my back while
my father talked to the policeman. I wished my family would buy normal sliced
white bread, the kind that went into toasters, like every other family I knew.
My father had found a local baker's shop where they made thick loaves of heavy
brown bread, and he insisted on buying them. He said they tasted better, which
was, to my mind, nonsense. Proper bread was white, and pre-sliced, and tasted
like almost nothing: that was the point.

The driver of the police car got out, opened the
passenger door, told me to get in. My father rode up front beside the
driver.

The police car went slowly down the lane. The whole
lane was unpaved back then, just wide enough for one car at a time, a puddly,
precipitous, bumpy way, with flints sticking up from it, the whole thing rutted
by farm equipment and rain and time.

“These kids,” said the policeman. “They think it's
funny. Steal a car, drive it around, abandon it. They'll be locals.”

“I'm just glad it was found so fast,” said my
father.

Past Caraway Farm, where a small girl with hair so
blonde it was almost white, and red, red cheeks, stared at us as we went past. I
held my piece of burnt toast on my lap.

“Funny them leaving it down here, though,” said the
policeman, “because it's a long walk back to anywhere from here.”

We passed a bend in the lane and saw the white Mini
over on the side, in front of a gate leading into a field, tires sunk deep in
the brown mud. We drove past it, parked on the grass verge. The policeman let me
out, and the three of us walked over to the Mini, while the policeman told my
dad about crime in this area, and why it was obviously the local kids had done
it, then my dad was opening the passenger side door with his spare key.

He said, “Someone left something on the back seat.”
My father reached back and pulled the blue blanket away, that covered the thing
in the back seat, even as the policeman was telling him that he shouldn't do
that, and I was staring at the back seat because that was where my comic was, so
I saw it.

It was an
it,
the thing I was looking at, not a
him.

Although I was an imaginative child, prone to
nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in
London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors,
expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I'd read about in my comics. I
had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster and the
Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of dioramas
of unremarkable, glum-looking men and women who had murdered people—usually
lodgers, and members of their own families—and who were then murdered in their
turn: by hanging, by the electric chair, in gas chambers. Most of them were
depicted with their victims in awkward, social situations—seated around a dinner
table, perhaps, as their poisoned family members expired. The plaques that
explained who they were also told me that the majority of them had murdered
their families and sold the bodies to
anatomy
. It was then that the word
anatomy
garnered its own edge of horror for me. I did not know what
anatomy
was. I knew
only that
anatomy
made people kill their children.

The only thing that had kept me from running
screaming from the Chamber of Horrors as I was led around it was that none of
the waxworks had looked fully convincing. They could not truly look dead,
because they did not ever look alive.

The thing in the back seat that had been covered by
the blue blanket (I
knew
that blanket. It was the one that had been in my old
bedroom, on the shelf, for when it got cold) was not convincing either. It
looked a little like the opal miner, but it was dressed in a black suit, with a
white, ruffled shirt and a black bow-tie. Its hair was slicked back and
artificially shiny. Its eyes were staring. Its lips were bluish, but its skin
was very red. It looked like a parody of health. There was no gold chain around
its neck.

I could see, underneath it, crumpled and bent, my
copy of
SMASH!
with Batman, looking just as he did on the television, on the
cover.

I don't remember who said what then, just that they
made me stand away from the Mini. I crossed the road, and I stood there on my
own while the policeman talked to my father and wrote things down in a
notebook.

I stared at the Mini. A length of green garden hose
ran from the exhaust pipe up to the driver's window. There was thick brown mud
all over the exhaust, holding the hosepipe in place.

Nobody was watching me. I took a bite of my toast.
It was burnt and cold.

At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of
toast. “Yum!” he'd say, and “Charcoal! Good for you!” and “Burnt toast! My
favorite!” and he'd eat it all up. When I was much older he confessed to me that
he had not ever liked burnt toast, had only eaten it to prevent it from going to
waste, and, for a fraction of a moment, my entire childhood felt like a lie: it
was as if one of the pillars of belief that my world had been built upon had
crumbled into dry sand.

The policeman spoke into a radio in the front of
his car.

Then he crossed the road and came over to me.
“Sorry about this, sonny,” he said. “There's going to be a few more cars coming
down this road in a minute. We should find you somewhere to wait that you won't
be in the way. Would you like to sit in the back of my car again?”

I shook my head. I didn't want to sit there
again.

Somebody, a girl, said, “He can come back with me
to the farmhouse. It's no trouble.”

She was much older than me, at least eleven. Her
red-brown hair was worn relatively short, for a girl, and her nose was snub. She
was freckled. She wore a red skirt—girls didn't wear jeans much back then, not
in those parts. She had a soft Sussex accent and sharp gray-blue eyes.

The girl went, with the policeman, over to my
father, and she got permission to take me away, and then I was walking down the
lane with her.

I said, “There is a dead man in our car.”

“That's why he came down here,” she told me. “The
end of the road. Nobody's going to find him and stop him around here, three
o'clock in the morning. And the mud there is wet and easy to mold.”

“Do you think he killed himself?”

“Yes. Do you like milk? Gran's milking Bessie
now.”

I said, “You mean, real milk from a cow?” and then
felt foolish, but she nodded, reassuringly.

I thought about this. I'd never had milk that
didn't come from a bottle. “I think I'd like that.”

We stopped at a small barn where an old woman, much
older than my parents, with long gray hair, like cobwebs, and a thin face, was
standing beside a cow. Long black tubes were attached to each of the cow's
teats. “We used to milk them by hand,” she told me. “But this is easier.”

She showed me how the milk went from the cow down
the black tubes and into the machine, through a cooler and into huge metal
churns. The churns were left on a heavy wooden platform outside the barn, where
they would be collected each day by a lorry.

The old lady gave me a cup of creamy milk from
Bessie the cow, the fresh milk before it had gone through the cooler. Nothing I
had drunk had ever tasted like that before: rich and warm and perfectly happy in
my mouth. I remembered that milk after I had forgotten everything else.

“There's more of them up the lane,” said the old
woman, suddenly. “All sorts coming down with lights flashing and all. Such a
palaver. You should get the boy into the kitchen. He's hungry, and a cup of milk
won't do a growing boy.”