The Ocean at the End of the Lane (5 page)

Lettie knocked the thing I was holding out of my
hands, and it fell to the ground, where it collapsed into itself. She grabbed my
right hand, held it firmly once more. And through all this, she continued to
sing.

I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words
to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she
was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first
language, and I had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream,
it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because
nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick
of everything. In my dreams I have used that language to heal the sick and to
fly; once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed-and-breakfast by the seaside,
and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, “Be
whole,” and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer,
because I had spoken the language of shaping.

And, because Lettie was speaking the language of
shaping, even if I did not understand what she was saying, I understood what was
being said. The thing in the clearing was being bound to that place for always,
trapped, forbidden to exercise its influence on anything beyond its own
domain.

Lettie Hempstock finished her song.

In my mind, I thought I could hear the creature
screaming, protesting, railing, but the place beneath that orange sky was quiet.
Only the flapping of canvas and the rattle of twigs in the wind broke the
silence.

The wind died down.

A thousand pieces of torn gray cloth settled on the
black earth like dead things, or like so much abandoned laundry. Nothing
moved.

Lettie said, “That should hold it.” She squeezed my
hand. I thought she was trying to sound bright, but she didn't. She sounded
grim. “Let's take you home.”

We walked, hand in hand, through a wood of
blue-tinged evergreens, and we crossed a lacquered red and yellow bridge over an
ornamental pond; we walked along the edge of a field in which young corn was
coming up, like green grass planted in rows; we climbed a wooden stile, hand in
hand, and reached another field, planted with what looked like small reeds or
furry snakes, black and white and brown and orange and gray and striped, all of
them waving gently, curling and uncurling in the sun.

“What are they?” I asked.

“You can pull one up and see, if you like,” said
Lettie.

I looked down: the furry tendril by my feet was
perfectly black. I bent, grasped it at the base, firmly, with my left hand, and
I pulled.

Something came up from the earth, and swung around
angrily. My hand felt like a dozen tiny needles had been sunk into it. I brushed
the earth from it, and apologized, and it stared at me, more with surprise and
puzzlement than with anger. It jumped from my hand to my shirt, I stroked it: a
kitten, black and sleek, with a pointed, inquisitive face, a white spot over one
ear, and eyes of a peculiarly vivid blue-green.

“At the farm, we get our cats the normal way,” said
Lettie.

“What's that?”

“Big Oliver. He turned up at the farm back in pagan
times. All our farm cats trace back to him.”

I looked at the kitten hanging on my shirt with
tiny kitten-claws.

“Can I take it home?” I asked.

“It's not an it. It's a
she.
Not a good idea,
taking anything home from these parts,” said Lettie.

I put the kitten down at the edge of the field. She
darted off after a butterfly, which floated up and out of her reach, then she
scampered away, without a look back.

“My kitten was run over,” I told Lettie. “It was
only little. The man who died told me about it, although he wasn't driving. He
said they didn't see it.”

“I'm sorry,” said Lettie. We were walking beneath a
canopy of apple-blossom then, and the world smelled like honey. “That's the
trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the
next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge
together . . .”

She opened a five-bar gate, and we went through it.
She let go of my hand. We were at the bottom of the lane, near the wooden shelf
by the road with the battered silver milk churns on it. The world smelled
normal.

I said, “We're really back, now?”

“Yes,” said Lettie Hempstock. “And we won't be
seeing any more trouble from her.” She paused. “Big, wasn't she? And nasty? I've
not seen one like that before. If I'd known she was going to be so old, and so
big, and so nasty, I wouldn't've brung you with me.”

I was glad that she had taken me with her.

Then she said, “I wish you hadn't let go of my
hand. But still, you're all right, aren't you? Nothing went wrong. No damage
done.”

I said, “I'm fine. Not to worry. I'm a brave
soldier.” That was what my grandfather always said. Then I repeated what she had
said, “No damage done.”

She smiled at me, a bright, relieved smile, and I
hoped I had said the right thing.

V.

T
hat
evening my sister sat on her bed, brushing her hair over and over. She brushed
it a hundred times every night, and counted each brush stroke. I did not know
why.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking at my foot,” I told her.

I was staring at the sole of my right foot. There
was a pink line across the center of the sole, from the ball of the foot almost
to the heel, where I had stepped on a broken glass as a toddler. I remember
waking up in my cot, the morning after it happened, looking at the black
stitches that held the edges of the cut together. It was my earliest memory. I
was used to the pink scar. The little hole beside it, in the arch of my foot,
was new. It was where the sudden sharp pain had been, although it did not hurt.
It was just a hole.

I prodded it with my forefinger, and it seemed to
me that something inside the hole retreated.

My sister had stopped brushing her hair and was
watching me curiously. I got up, walked out of the bedroom, down the corridor,
to the bathroom at the end of the hall.

I do not know why I did not ask an adult about it.
I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort. That
was the year I dug out a wart from my knee with a penknife, discovering how
deeply I could cut before it hurt, and what the roots of a wart looked like.

In the bathroom cupboard, behind the mirror, was a
pair of stainless steel tweezers, the kind with pointed sharp tips, for pulling
out wooden splinters, and a box of sticking plasters. I sat on the metal side of
the white bathtub and examined the hole in my foot. It was a simple, small round
hole, smooth-edged. I could not see how deeply it went, because something was in
the way. Something was blocking it. Something that seemed to retreat, as the
light touched it.

I held my tweezers, and I watched. Nothing
happened. Nothing changed.

I put the forefinger of my left hand over the hole,
gently, blocking the light. Then I put the tip of the tweezers beside the hole
and I waited. I counted to a hundred—inspired, perhaps, by my sister's
hair-brushing. Then I pulled my finger away and stabbed in with the
tweezers.

I caught the head of the worm, if that was what it
was, by the tip, between the metal prongs, and I squeezed it, and I pulled.

Have you ever tried to pull a worm from a hole? You
know how hard they can hold on? The way they use their whole bodies to grip the
sides of the hole? I pulled perhaps an inch of this worm—pink and gray,
streaked, like something infected—out of the hole in my foot, and then felt it
stop. I could feel it, inside my flesh, making itself rigid, unpullable. I was
not scared by this. It was obviously just something that happened to people,
like when the neighbor's cat, Misty, had worms. I had a worm in my foot, and I
was removing the worm.

I twisted the tweezers, thinking, I suspect, of
spaghetti on a fork, winding the worm around the tweezers. It tried to pull
back, but I turned it, a little at a time, until I could definitely pull no
further.

I could feel, inside me, the sticky plastic way
that it tried to hold on, like a strip of pure muscle. I leaned over, as far as
I could, reached out my left hand and turned on the bath's hot-water tap, the
one with the red dot in the center, and I let it run. The water ran for three,
four minutes out of the tap and down the plug hole before it began to steam.

When the water was steaming, I extended my foot and
my right arm, maintaining pressure on the tweezers and on the inch of the
creature that I had wound out of my body. Then I put the place where the
tweezers were under the hot tap. The water splashed my foot, but my soles were
barefoot-hardened, and I scarcely minded. The water that touched my fingers
scalded them, but I was prepared for the heat. The worm wasn't. I felt it flex
inside me, trying to pull back from the scalding water, felt it loosen its grip
on the inside of my foot. I turned the tweezers, triumphantly, like picking the
best scab in the world, as the creature began to come out of me, putting up less
and less resistance.

I pulled at it, steadily, and as it went under the
hot water it slackened, until the end. It was almost all out of me—I could feel
it—but I was too confident, too triumphant, and impatient, and I tugged too
quickly, too hard, and the worm came off in my hand. The end of it that came out
of me was oozing and broken, as if it had snapped off.

Still, if the creature had left anything behind in
my foot, it was tiny.

I examined the worm. It was dark gray and light
gray, streaked with pink, and segmented, like a normal earthworm. Now it was out
of the hot water, it seemed to be recovering. It wriggled, and the body that had
been wrapped around the tweezers now dangled, writhing, although it hung from
the head (
Was
it its head? How could I tell?) where I had pinched it.

I did not want to kill it—I did not kill animals,
not if I could help it—but I had to get rid of it. It was dangerous. I had no
doubt of that.

I held the worm above the bath's plug hole, where
it wriggled, under the scalding water. Then I let it go, and watched it vanish
down the drain. I let the water run for a while, and I washed off the tweezers.
Finally I put a small sticking plaster over the hole in the sole of my foot, and
put the plug in the bath, to prevent the worm from climbing back up the open
plug hole, before I turned off the tap. I did not know if it was dead, but I did
not think you came back from the drain.

I put the tweezers back where I had got them from,
behind the bathroom mirror, then I closed the mirror and stared at myself.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that
age, who
I
was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the
face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be
me whatever happened to my face, then what
was
me? And what was watching?

I went back to the bedroom. It was my night to have
the door to the hallway open, and I waited until my sister was asleep, and
wouldn't tell on me, and then, in the dim light from the hall, I read a
Secret
Seven
mystery until I fell asleep.

VI.

A
n
admission about myself: as a very small boy, perhaps three or four years old, I
could be a monster. “You were a little
momzer,
” several aunts told me, on
different occasions, once I had safely reached adulthood and my dreadful infant
deeds could be recalled with wry amusement. But I do not actually remember being
a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.

Small children believe themselves to be gods, or
some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes
along with their way of seeing things.

But I was no longer a small boy. I was seven. I had
been fearless, but now I was such a frightened child.

The incident of the worm in my foot did not scare
me. I did not talk about it. I wondered, though, the next day, whether people
often got foot-worms, or whether it was something that had only ever happened to
me, in the orange-sky place on the edge of the Hempstocks' farm.

I peeled off the plaster on the sole of my foot
when I awoke, and was relieved to see that the hole had begun to close up. There
was a pink place where it had been, like a blood blister, but nothing more.

I went down to breakfast. My mother looked happy.
She said, “Good news, darling. I've got a job. They need an optometrist at
Dicksons Opticians, and they want me to start this afternoon. I'll be working
four days a week.”

I did not mind. I would be fine on my own.

“And I've got more good news. We have someone
coming to look after you children while I'm away. Her name is Ursula. She'll be
sleeping in your old bedroom, at the top of the stairs. She'll be a sort of
housekeeper. She'll make sure you children are fed, and she'll clean the
house—Mrs. Wollery is having trouble with her hip, and she says it will be a few
weeks before she can come back. It will be such a load off my mind to have
someone here, if Daddy and I are both working.”

“You don't have the money,” I said. “You said you
didn't have any money.”

“That's why I'm taking the optometrist job,” she
said. “And Ursula's looking after you for room and board. She needs to live
locally for a few months. She phoned this morning. Her references are
excellent.”

I hoped that she would be nice. The previous
housekeeper, Gertruda, six months earlier, had not been nice: she had enjoyed
playing practical jokes on my sister and me. She would short-sheet the beds, for
example, which left us baffled. Eventually we had marched outside the house with
placards saying “We hate Gertruda” and “We do not like Gertruda's cooking,” and
put tiny frogs in her bed, and she had gone back to Sweden.

I took a book and went out into the garden.

It was a warm spring day, and sunny, and I climbed
up a rope ladder to the lowest branch of the big beech tree, sat on it, and read
my book. I was not scared of anything, when I read my book: I was far away, in
ancient Egypt, learning about Hathor, and how she had stalked Egypt in the form
of a lioness, and she had killed so many people that the sands of Egypt turned
red, and how they had only defeated her by mixing beer and honey and sleeping
draughts, and dying this concoction red, so she thought it was blood, and she
drank it, and fell asleep. Ra, the father of the gods, made her the goddess of
love after that, so the wounds she had inflicted on people would now only be
wounds of the heart.

I wondered why the gods had done that. Why hadn't
they just killed her, when they had the chance?

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they
weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just
were
.

Adult stories never made sense, and they were so
slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic
secrets, to adulthood. Why didn't adults want to read about Narnia, about secret
islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?

I was getting hungry. I climbed down from my tree,
and went to the back of the house, past the laundry room that smelled of laundry
soap and mildew, past the little coal-and-wood shed, past the outside toilet
where the spiders hung and waited, wooden doors painted garden green. In through
the back door, along the hallway and into the kitchen.

My mother was in there with a woman I had never
seen before. When I saw her, my heart hurt. I mean that literally, not
metaphorically: there was a momentary twinge in my chest—just a flash, and then
it was gone.

My sister was sitting at the kitchen table, eating
a bowl of cereal.

The woman was very pretty. She had shortish
honey-blonde hair, huge gray-blue eyes, and pale lipstick. She seemed tall, even
for an adult.

“Darling? This is Ursula Monkton,” said my mother.
I said nothing. I just stared at her. My mother nudged me.

“Hello,” I said.

“He's shy,” said Ursula Monkton. “I am certain that
once he warms up to me we shall be great friends.” She reached out a hand and
patted my sister's mousey-brown hair. My sister smiled a gap-toothed smile.

“I like you
so
much,” my sister said. Then she
said, to our mother and me, “When I grow up I want to be Ursula Monkton.”

My mother and Ursula laughed. “You little dear,”
said Ursula Monkton. Then she turned to me. “And what about us, eh? Are we
friends as well?”

I just looked at her, all grown-up and blonde, in
her gray and pink skirt, and I was scared.

Her dress wasn't ragged. It was just the fashion of
the thing, I suppose, the kind of dress that it was. But when I looked at her I
imagined her dress flapping, in that windless kitchen, flapping like the
mainsail of a ship, on a lonely ocean, under an orange sky.

I don't know what I said in reply, or if I even
said anything. But I went out of that kitchen, although I was hungry, without
even an apple.

I took my book into the back garden, beneath the
balcony, by the flower bed that grew beneath the television room window, and I
read—forgetting my hunger in Egypt with animal-headed gods who cut each other up
and then restored one another to life again.

My sister came out into the garden.

“I like her so much,” she told me. “She's my
friend. Do you want to see what she gave me?” She produced a small gray purse,
the kind my mother kept in her handbag for her coins, that fastened with a metal
butterfly clip. It looked like it was made of leather. I wondered if it was
mouse skin. She opened the purse, put her fingers into the opening, came out
with a large silver coin: half a crown.

“Look!” she said. “Look what I got!”

I wanted a half a crown. No, I wanted what I could
buy with half a crown—magic tricks and plastic joke-toys, and books, and, oh, so
many things. But I did not want a little gray purse with a half a crown in
it.

“I don't like her,” I told my sister.

“That's only because I saw her first,” said my
sister. “She's
my
friend.”

I did not think that Ursula Monkton was anybody's
friend. I wanted to go and warn Lettie Hempstock about her—but what could I say?
That the new housekeeper-nanny wore gray and pink? That she looked at me
oddly?

I wished I had never let go of Lettie's hand.
Ursula Monkton was my fault, I was certain of it, and I would not be able to get
rid of her by flushing her down a plug hole, or putting frogs in her bed.

I should have left then, should have run away, fled
down the lane the mile or so to the Hempstocks' farm, but I didn't, and then a
taxi took my mother away to Dicksons Opticians, where she would show people
letters through lenses, and help them see more clearly, and I was left there
with Ursula Monkton.

She came out into the garden with a plate of
sandwiches.

“I've spoken to your mother,” she said, a sweet
smile beneath the pale lipstick, “and while I'm here, you children need to limit
your travels. You can be anywhere in the house or in the garden, or I will walk
with you to your friends', but you may not leave the property and simply go
wandering.”

“Of course,” said my sister.

I did not say anything.

My sister ate a peanut butter sandwich.

I was starving. I wondered whether the sandwiches
were dangerous or not. I did not know. I was scared that I would eat one and it
would turn into worms in my stomach, and that they would wriggle through me,
colonizing my body, until they pushed out of my skin.

I went back into the house. I pushed the kitchen
door open. Ursula Monkton was not there. I stuffed my pockets with fruit, with
apples and oranges and hard brown pears. I took three bananas and stuffed them
down my jumper, and fled to my laboratory.

My laboratory—that was what I called it—was a
green-painted shed as far away from the house as you could get, built up against
the side of the house's huge old garage. A fig tree grew beside the shed,
although we had never tasted ripe fruit from the tree, only seen the huge leaves
and the green fruits. I called the shed my laboratory because I kept my
chemistry set in there: the chemistry set, a perennial birthday present, had
been banished from the house by my father, after I had made something in a test
tube. I had randomly mixed things together, and then heated them, until they had
erupted and turned black, with an ammoniac stench that refused to fade. My
father had said that he did not mind my doing experiments (although neither of
us knew what I could possibly have been experimenting on, but that did not
matter; my mother had been given chemistry sets for her birthday, and see how
well that had turned out?) but he did not want them within smelling range of the
house.

I ate a banana and a pear, then hid the rest of the
fruit beneath the wooden table.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are
content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never
occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find
the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen
different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would
not involve walking down our drive. I decided that I would creep out of the
laboratory shed, along the wall to the edge of the lawn and then into the
azaleas and bay laurels that bordered the garden there. From the laurels, I
would slip down the hill and over the rusting metal fence that ran along the
side of the lane.

Nobody was looking. I ran and I crept and got
through the laurels, and I went down the hill, pushing through the brambles and
the nettle patches that had sprung up since the last time I went that way.

Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of
the hill, just in front of the rusting metal fence. There was no way she could
have got there without my seeing her, but she was there. She folded her arms and
looked at me, and her gray and pink dress flapped in a gust of wind.

“I believe I said that you were not to leave the
property.”

“I'm not,” I told her, with a cockiness I knew I
did not feel, not even a little. “I'm still on the property. I'm just
exploring.”

“You're sneaking around,” she said.

I said nothing.

“I think you should be in your bedroom, where I can
keep an eye on you. It's time for your nap.”

I was too old for naps, but I knew that I was too
young to argue, or to win the argument if I did.

“Okay,” I said.

“Don't say ‘okay,' ” she said. “Say ‘Yes, Miss
Monkton.' Or ‘Ma'am.' Say ‘Yes, ma'am.' ” She looked down at me with her
blue-gray eyes, which put me in mind of holes rotted in canvas, and which did
not look pretty at that moment.

I said, “Yes, ma'am,” and hated myself for saying
it.

We walked together up the hill.

“Your parents can no longer afford this place,”
said Ursula Monkton. “And they can't afford to keep it up. Soon enough they'll
see that the way to solve their financial problems is to sell this house and its
gardens to property developers. Then all of
this
”—and
this
was the tangle of
brambles, the unkempt world behind the lawn—“will become a dozen identical
houses and gardens. And if you are lucky, you'll get to live in one. And if not,
you will just envy the people who do. Will you like that?”

I loved the house, and the garden. I loved the
rambling shabbiness of it. I loved that place as if it was a part of me, and
perhaps, in some ways, it was.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Ursula Monkton. I'm your housekeeper.”

I said, “Who are you really? Why are you giving
people money?”

“Everybody wants money,” she said, as if it were
self-evident. “It makes them happy. It will make you happy, if you let it.” We
had come out by the heap of grass clippings, behind the circle of green grass
that we called the fairy ring: sometimes, when the weather was wet, it filled
with vivid yellow toadstools.