The Ocean at the End of the Lane

My father put my toothbrush down on the table in front of me. I unwrapped the toilet paper around the head. It was, unmistakably, my green toothbrush. Under his car coat my father was wearing a clean white shirt, and no tie.

I said, ‘Thank you.’

‘So,’ said my mother. ‘What time should we be by to pick him up in the morning?’

Ginnie smiled even wider. ‘Oh, Lettie will bring him back to you. We should give them some time to play, tomorrow morning. Now, before you go, I baked some scones this afternoon …’

And she put some scones into a paper bag, which my mother took politely, and Ginnie ushered her and my father out of the door. I held my breath until I heard the sound of the Rover being driven away back up the lane.

‘What did you do to them?’ I asked. And then, ‘Is this really my toothbrush?’

‘That,’ said Old Mrs Hempstock, with satisfaction in her voice, ‘was a very respectable job of snipping and stitching, if you ask me.’ She held up my dressing gown: I could not see where she had removed a piece, where she had stitched it up. It was seamless, the mend invisible. She pushed the scrap of fabric that she had cut across the table. ‘Here’s your evening,’ she said. ‘You can keep it, if you wish. But if I were you, I’d burn it.’

The rain pattered against the window, and the wind rattled the window frames.

I picked up the jagged-edged sliver of cloth. It was damp. I got up, waking the kitten, who sprang off and vanished into the shadows. I walked over to the fireplace.

‘If I burn this,’ I asked them, ‘will it have really happened? Will my daddy have pushed me down into the bath? Will I forget it ever happened?’

Ginnie Hempstock was no longer smiling. Now she looked concerned. ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘I want to remember,’ I said. ‘Because it happened to me. And I’m still me.’ I threw the little scrap of cloth on to the fire.

There was a crackle and the cloth smoked, then it began to burn.

I was under the water. I was holding on to my father’s tie. I thought he was going to kill me…

I screamed.

I was lying on the flagstone floor of the Hempstocks’ kitchen and I was rolling and screaming. My foot felt like I had trodden, barefoot, on a burning cinder. The pain was intense. There was another pain, too, deep inside my chest, more distant, not as sharp: a discomfort, not a burning.

Ginnie was beside me. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘My foot. It’s on fire. It hurts so much.’

She examined it, then licked her finger, touched it to the hole in my sole from which I had pulled the worm, two days before. There was a hissing noise, and the pain in my foot began to ease.

‘En’t never seen one of these before,’ said Ginnie Hempstock. ‘How did you get it?’

‘There was a worm inside it,’ I told her. ‘That was how it came with us from the place with the orangey sky. In my foot.’ And then I looked at Lettie, who had crouched beside me and was now holding my hand, and I said, ‘I brought it back. It was my fault. I’m sorry.’

Old Mrs Hempstock was the last to reach me. She leaned over, pulled the sole of my foot up and into the light. ‘Nasty,’ she said. ‘And very clever. She left the hole inside you so she could use it again. She could have hidden inside you, if she needed to, used you as a door to go home. No wonder she wanted to keep you in the attic. So. Let’s strike while the iron’s hot, as the soldier said when he entered the laundry.’ She prodded the hole in my foot with her finger. It still hurt, but the pain had faded, a little. Now it felt like a throbbing headache inside my foot.

Something fluttered in my chest, like a tiny moth, and then was still.

Old Mrs Hempstock said, ‘Can you be brave?’

I did not know. I did not think so. It seemed to me that all I had done so far that night was to run from things. She was holding the needle she had used to sew up my dressing gown, and she grasped it now, not as if she were going to sew with it, but as if she were planning to stab me.

I pulled my foot back. ‘What are you going to do?’

Lettie squeezed my hand. ‘She’s going to make the hole go away,’ she said. ‘I’ll hold your hand. You don’t have to look, not if you don’t want to.’

‘It will hurt,’ I said.

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said the old woman. She pulled my foot towards her, so the sole was facing her, and stabbed the needle down … not into my foot, I realised, but into the hole itself.

It did not hurt.

Then she twisted the needle and pulled it back towards her. I watched, amazed, as something that glistened – it seemed black, at first, then translucent, then reflective like mercury – was pulled out from the sole of my foot, on the end of the needle.

I could feel it leaving my leg – it seemed to travel up all the way inside me, up my leg, through my groin and my stomach and into my chest. I felt it leave me with relief: the burning sensation abated, as did my terror.

My heart pounded strangely.

I watched Old Mrs Hempstock reel the thing in, and I was still unable, somehow, to entirely make sense of what I was seeing. It was a hole with nothing around it, over two feet long, thinner than an earthworm, like the shed skin of a translucent snake.

And then she stopped reeling it in. ‘Doesn’t want to come out,’ she said. ‘It’s holding on.’

There was a coldness in my heart, as if a chip of ice were lodged there. The old woman gave an expert flick of her wrist, and then the glistening thing was dangling from her needle (I found myself thinking now not of mercury, but of the silvery slime trails that snails leave in the garden), and it no longer went into my foot.

She let go of my sole and I pulled my foot back. The tiny round hole had vanished completely, as if it had never been there.

Old Mrs Hempstock cackled with glee. ‘Thinks she’s so clever,’ she said, ‘leaving her way home inside the boy. Is that clever? I don’t think that’s clever. I wouldn’t give tuppence for the lot of them.’

Ginnie Hempstock produced an empty jam jar, and the old woman put the bottom of the dangling thing into it, then raised the jar to hold it. At the end, she slipped the glistening invisible trail off the needle and put the lid on the jam jar with a decisive flick of her bony wrist.

‘Ha!’ she said. And again, ‘Ha!’

Lettie said, ‘Can I see it?’ She took the jam jar, held it up to the light. Inside the jar the thing had begun lazily to uncurl. It seemed to be floating, as if the jar had been filled with water. It changed colour as it caught the light in different ways, sometimes black, sometimes silver.

An experiment that I had found in a book of things boys could do, and which I had, of course, done: if you take an egg, and blacken it completely with soot from a candle flame, and then put it into a clear container filled with saltwater, it will float in the water, and it will seem to be silver: a peculiar, artificial silver, that is only a trick of the light. I thought of that egg, then.

Lettie seemed fascinated. ‘You’re right. She left her way home inside him. No wonder she didn’t want him to leave.’

I said, ‘I’m sorry I let go of your hand, Lettie.’

‘Oh, hush,’ she said. ‘It’s always too late for sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment. And next time, you’ll keep hold of my hand no matter what she throws at us.’

I nodded. The ice chip in my heart seemed to warm then, and melt, and I began to feel whole and safe once more.

‘So,’ said Ginnie. ‘We’ve got her way home. And we’ve got the boy safe. That’s a good night’s work or I don’t know what is.’

‘But she’s got the boy’s parents,’ said Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘And his sister. And we can’t just leave her free as a daisy. Remember what happened in Cromwell’s day? And before that? When Red Rufus was running around? Fleas attract varmints.’ She said it as if it were a natural law.

‘That can wait until the morrow,’ said Ginnie. ‘Now, Lettie. Take the lad and find a room for him to sleep in. He’s had a long day.’

The black kitten was curled up on the rocking chair beside the fireplace. ‘Can I bring the kitten with me?’

‘If you don’t,’ said Lettie, ‘she’ll just come and find you.’

Ginnie produced two candlesticks, the kind with big round handles, each one with a shapeless blob of white wax in it. She lit a wooden taper from the kitchen fire, then transferred the flame first to one candlewick and then to the other. She handed a candle to me, the other to Lettie.

‘Don’t you have electricity?’ I asked. There were electric lights in the kitchen, big old-fashioned bulbs hanging from the ceiling, filaments glowing.

‘Not in that part of the house,’ said Lettie. ‘The kitchen’s new. Sort of. Put your hand in front of your candle as you walk, so it doesn’t blow out.’

She cupped her own hand around the flame as she said this, and I copied her, and walked behind her. The black kitten followed us, out of the kitchen, through a wooden door painted white, down a step, and into the farmhouse.

It was dark, and our candles cast huge shadows, so it looked to me, as we walked, as if everything was moving, pushed and shaped by the shadows: the grandfather clock and the stuffed animals and birds (were they stuffed? I wondered. Did that owl move, or was it just the candle flame that made me think that it had turned its head as we passed?), the hall table, the chairs. All of them moved, and all of them stayed perfectly still. We went up a set of stairs, and then up some steps, and we passed an open window.

Moonlight spilled on to the stairs, brighter than our candle flames. I glanced up through the window and I saw the full moon. The cloudless sky was splashed with stars beyond all counting.

‘That’s the moon,’ I said.

‘Gran likes it like that,’ said Lettie Hempstock.

‘But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it’s full. And it was raining. It is raining. But now it’s not.’

‘Gran likes the full moon to shine on this side of the house. She says it’s restful, and it reminds her of when she was a girl,’ said Lettie. ‘And you don’t trip on the stairs.’

The kitten followed us up the stairs in a sequence of bounces. It made me smile.

At the top of the house was Lettie’s room, and beside it, another room, and it was this room that we entered. A fire blazed in the hearth, illuminating the room with oranges and yellows. The room was warm and inviting. The bed had posts at each corner, and it had its own curtains. I had seen something like it in cartoons, but never in real life.

‘There’s clothes already set out for you to put on in the morning,’ said Lettie. ‘I’ll be asleep in the room next door if you want me – just shout or knock if you need anything, and I’ll come in. Gran said for you to use the inside lavatory, but it’s a long way through the house, and you might get lost, so if you need to do your business, there’s a chamber pot under the bed, same as there’s always been.’

I blew out my candle, and pushed through the curtains into the bed.

The room was warm, but the sheets were cold. The bed shook as something landed on it, and then small feet padded up the blankets, and a warm, furry presence pushed itself into my face and the kitten began, softly, to purr.

There was still a monster in my house, and, in a fragment of time that had, perhaps, been snipped out of reality, my father had pushed me down into the water of the bath and tried, perhaps, to drown me. I had run for miles through the dark. I had seen my father kissing and touching the thing that called itself Ursula Monkton. The dread had not left my soul.

But there was a kitten on my pillow, and it was purring in my face and vibrating gently with every purr, and very soon, I slept.

Chapter 10

I had strange dreams in that house, that night. I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.

I missed my father and I missed my mother, and I missed my bed in my house, only a mile or so away. I missed yesterday, before Ursula Monkton, before my father’s anger, before the bathtub. I wanted that yesterday back again, and I wanted it so badly.

I tried to pull the dream that had upset me so to the front of my mind, but it would not come. There was betrayal in it, I knew, and loss, and time. The dream left me scared to go back to sleep: the fireplace was almost dark now, with only the deep red glow of embers in the hearth to mark that it had once been burning, once had given light.

I climbed down from the four-poster bed, and felt beneath it until I found the heavy china chamber pot. I hitched up my nightgown and I used it. Then I walked to the window and looked out. The moon was still full, but now it was low in the sky, and a dark orange: what my mother called a harvest moon. But things were harvested in autumn, I knew, not in spring.