The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘P’raps it will be like that,’ I said, to the darkness and the shadows, ‘and p’raps it won’t. And p’raps if it is, it would have been like that anyway. I don’t care. I’m still going to wait here for Lettie Hempstock, and she’s going to come back to me. And if I die here, then I still die waiting for her, and that’s a better way to go than you and all you stupid horrible things tearing me to bits because I’ve got something inside me that I don’t even want!’

There was silence. The shadows seemed to have become part of the night once again. I thought over what I’d said, and I knew that it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the dark, and I was perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old, certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she was my friend.

Time passed. I waited for the night to begin to talk to me again, for people to come, for all the ghosts and monsters of my imagination to stand beyond the circle and call me out, but nothing more happened. Not then. I simply waited.

The moon rose higher. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I sang, under my breath, mouthing the words over and over.

You’re a regular wreck with a crick in your neck

and no wonder you snore for your head’s on the floor

and you’ve needles and pins from your sole to your shins

and your flesh is a-creep for your left leg’s asleep

and you’ve cramp in your toes

and a fly on your nose

you’ve got fluff in your lung and a feverish tongue

and a thirst that’s intense and a general sense that you

haven’t been sleeping in clover …

I sang it to myself, the whole song, all the way through, two or three times, and I was relieved that I remembered the words, even if I did not always understand them.

Chapter 13

When Lettie arrived, the real Lettie, this time, she was carrying a bucket of water. It must have been heavy judging from the way she carried it. She stepped over where the edge of the ring in the grass must have been and she came straight to me.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That took a lot longer than I expected. It didn’t want to cooperate, neither, and in the end it took me and Gran to do it, and she did most of the heavy lifting. It wasn’t going to argue with her, but it didn’t help, and it’s not easy …’

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What are you talking about?’

She put the metal bucket down on the grass beside me without spilling a drop. ‘The ocean,’ she said. ‘It didn’t want to go. It gave Gran such a struggle that she said she was going to have to go and have a lie-down afterwards. But we still got it into the bucket in the end.’

The water in the bucket was glowing, emitting a greenish-blue light. I could see Lettie’s face by it. I could see the waves and ripples on the surface of the water, watch them crest and splash against the side of the bucket.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I couldn’t get you to the ocean,’ she said. ‘But there was nothing stopping me bringing the ocean to you.’

I said, ‘I’m hungry, Lettie. And I don’t like this.’

‘Mum’s made dinner. But you’re going to have to stay hungry for a little bit longer. Were you scared, up here on your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they try and get you out of the circle?’

‘Yes.’

She took my hands in hers, then, and squeezed them. ‘But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn’t listen to them. Well done. That’s quality, that is,’ and she sounded proud. In that moment I forgot my hunger and I forgot my fear.

‘What do I do now?’ I asked her.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘you step into the bucket. You don’t have to take your shoes off or anything. Just step in.’

It did not even seem a strange request. She let go of one of my hands, kept hold of the other. I thought, I will never let go of your hand, not unless you tell me to. I put one foot into the glimmering water, raising the water level almost to the edge. My foot rested on the tin floor of the bucket. The water was cool on my foot, not cold. I put the other foot into the water and I went down with it, down like a marble statue, and the waves of Lettie Hempstock’s ocean closed over my head.

I felt the same shock you would feel if you had stepped backwards, without looking, and had fallen into a swimming pool. I closed my eyes at the water’s sting and kept them tightly shut, so tightly.

I could not swim. I did not know where I was, or what was happening, but even under the water I could feel that Lettie was still holding my hand.

I was holding my breath.

I held it until I could hold it no longer, and then I gulped a breath in, expecting to choke, to splutter, to die.

I did not choke. I felt the coldness of the water – if it was water – pour into my nose and my throat, felt it fill my lungs, but that was all it did. It did not hurt me.

I thought, this is the kind of water you can breathe. I thought, perhaps there is just a secret to breathing water, something simple that everyone could do, if only they knew. That was what I thought.

That was the first thing I thought.

The second thing I thought was that I knew everything. Lettie Hempstock’s ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was – where the universe began, to the sound of uncreated voices singing in the void – and I knew where Rose was – the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang, which would be, I knew now, nothing of the kind.

I knew that Old Mrs Hempstock would be here for that one, as she had been for the last.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.

Everything whispered inside me. Everything spoke to everything, and I knew it all.

I opened my eyes, curious to learn what I would see in the world outside me, if it would be anything like the world inside.

I was hanging deep beneath the water.

I looked down, and the blue world below me receded into darkness. I looked up and the world above me did the same. Nothing was pulling me down deeper, nothing was forcing me towards the surface.

And then I turned my head, a little, to look at her, because she was still holding my hand, she had never let go of my hand, and I saw Lettie Hempstock.

At first, I do not think I knew what I was looking at. I could make no sense of it. Where Ursula Monkton had been made of grey cloth that flapped and snapped and gusted in the storm winds, Lettie Hempstock was made of silken sheets, the colour of ice, filled with tiny flickering candle flames, a hundred hundred candle flames.

Could there be candle flames burning under the water? There could. I knew that, when I was in the ocean, and I even knew how. I understood it just as I understood Dark Matter, the material of the universe that makes up everything that must be there but we cannot find. I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs Hempstock to help you, and you ask nicely.

Lettie Hempstock looked like pale silk and candle flames. I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge, that was the one thing I could not know. That if I looked inward I would see only infinite mirrors, staring into myself for eternity.

The silk filled with candle flames moved then, a slow, graceful, under-the-water sort of a movement. The current pulled at it, and now it had arms and the hand that had never let go of mine, and a body and a freckled face that was familiar, and it opened its mouth and, in Lettie Hempstock’s voice, it said, ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘What for?’

She did not reply. The currents of the ocean pulled at my hair and my clothes like summer breezes. I was no longer cold and I knew everything and I was not hungry and the whole big, complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered. I would stay here for ever.

‘You can’t,’ said Lettie. ‘It would destroy you.’

I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could kill me, not now, but she said, ‘Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You wouldn’t die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that’s not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn’t be anything left that would think of itself as an “I”. No point of view any longer, because you’d be an infinite sequence of views and of points …’

I was going to argue with her. She was wrong, she had to be; I loved that place, that state, that feeling, and I was never going to leave it.

And then my head broke water, and I blinked and coughed, and I was standing thigh deep in the pond at the back of the Hempstocks’ farm, and Lettie Hempstock was standing beside me, holding my hand.

I coughed again, and it felt like the water fled my nose, my throat, my lungs. I pulled clean air into my chest, in the light of the huge, full harvest moon that shone on the Hempstocks’ red-tiled roof, and for one final perfect moment, I still knew everything: I remember that I knew how to make it so the moon would be full when you needed it to be, and shining just on the back of the house, every night.

I knew everything, but Lettie Hempstock was pulling me up out of the pond.

I was still wearing the strange old-fashioned clothes I had been given that morning, and as I stepped out of the pond, up on to the grass that edged it, I discovered that my clothes and my skin were now perfectly dry. The ocean was back in the pond, and all the knowledge I was left with, as if I had woken from a dream on a summer’s day, was that it had not been long ago since I had known everything.

I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. ‘Is that how it is for you?’ I asked.

‘Is what how it is for me?’

‘Do you still know everything, all the time?’

She shook her head. She didn’t smile. She said, ‘Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.’

‘So you used to know everything?’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Everybody did. I told you. It’s nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.’

‘To play what?’

‘This,’ she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars.

I wished I knew what she meant. It was as if she was talking about a dream we had shared. For a moment it was so close in my mind that I could almost touch it.

‘You must be so hungry,’ said Lettie, and the moment was broken, and yes, I was so hungry, and the hunger took my head and swallowed my lingering dreams.

There was a plate in my place at the table in the farmhouse’s huge kitchen. On it was a portion of shepherd’s pie, the mashed potato a crusty brown on top, minced meat and vegetables and gravy beneath it. I was scared of eating food outside my home, scared that I might want to leave food I did not like and be told off, or be forced to sit and eat it in minuscule portions until it was gone, as I was at school, but the food at the Hempstocks’ was always perfect. It did not scare me.

Ginnie Hempstock was there, bustling about in her apron, rounded and welcoming. I ate without talking, head down, shovelling the welcome food into my mouth. The woman and the girl spoke in low, urgent tones.

‘They’ll be here soon enough,’ said Lettie. ‘They aren’t stupid. And they won’t leave until they’ve taken the last little bit of what they came here for.’

Her mother sniffed. Her red cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen fire. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she said. ‘They’re all mouth, they are.’

I had never heard that expression before, and I thought she was telling us that the creatures were just mouths and nothing more. It did not seem unlikely that the shadows were indeed all mouths. I had seen them devour the grey thing that had called itself Ursula Monkton.

My mother’s mother would tell me off for eating like a wild animal. ‘You must essen, eat,’ she would say, ‘like a person, not a chazzer, a pig. When animals eat, they fress. People essen. Eat like a person.’ Fressen: that was how the hunger birds had taken Ursula Monkton, and it was also, I had no doubt, how they would consume me.