The Ocean at the End of the Lane(34)

We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long books. The kind with no pictures or conversations.

‘I love my ocean,’ Lettie said, in the end.

‘It’s just pretending, though,’ I told her, feeling like I was letting childhood down by admitting it. ‘Your pond. It’s not an ocean. It can’t be. Oceans are bigger than seas. Your pond is just a pond.’

‘It’s as big as it needs to be,’ said Lettie Hempstock, nettled. She sighed. ‘We’d better get on with sending Ursula whatsername back where she came from.’ Then she said, ‘I do know what she’s scared of. And you know what? I’m scared of them too.’

The kitten was nowhere to be seen when we returned to the kitchen, although the fog-coloured cat was sitting on a windowsill, staring out at the world. The breakfast things had all been tidied up and put away, and my red pyjamas and my dressing gown, neatly folded, were waiting for me on the table, in a large brown paper bag, along with my green toothbrush.

‘You won’t let her get me, will you?’ I asked Lettie.

She shook her head, and together we walked up the winding flinty lane that led to my house and to the thing who called herself Ursula Monkton. I carried the brown-paper bag with my nightwear in it, and Lettie carried her too-big-for-her raffia shopping bag, filled with broken toys, which she had obtained in exchange for a mandrake that screamed, and shadows dissolved in vinegar.

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden tracks, while adults take roads and official paths. We went off the road, took a short cut that Lettie knew that led us through some fields, then into the extensive abandoned gardens of a rich man’s crumbling house, and then back on to the lane again. We came out just before the place where I had gone over the metal fence.

Lettie sniffed the air. ‘No varmints yet,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’

‘What are varmints?’

She said only, ‘You’ll know ’em when you see ’em. And I hope you’ll never see ’em.’

‘Are we going to sneak in?’

‘Why would we do that? We’ll go up the drive and through the front door, like gentry.’

We started up the drive. I said, ‘Are you going to make a spell and send her away?’

‘We don’t do spells,’ she said. She sounded a little disappointed to admit it. ‘We’ll do recipes sometimes. But no spells or cantrips. Gran doesn’t hold with none of that. She says it’s common.’

‘So what’s the stuff in the shopping bag for, then?’

‘It’s to stop things travelling when you don’t want them to. Mark boundaries.’

In the morning sunlight, my house looked so welcoming and friendly. Warm red bricks, and a red tile roof. Lettie reached into the shopping bag. She took a marble from it, pushed it into the still-damp soil. Then, instead of going into the house, she turned left, walking the edge of the property. By Mr Wollery’s vegetable patch we stopped and she took something else from her shopping bag: a headless, legless pink doll-body, with badly chewed hands. She buried it beside the pea plants.

We picked some pea pods, opened them and ate the peas inside. Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good raw, and put them in tins, and make them revolting.

Lettie placed a toy wolf, the small plastic kind you would find in a children’s zoo, or an ark, in the coal shed, beneath a large lump of coal. The coal shed smelled of damp and blackness and of old, crushed forests.

‘Will these things make her go away?’

‘No.’

‘Then what are they for?’

‘To stop her going away.’

‘But we want her to go away.’

‘No. We want her to go home.’

I stared at her: at her short brown hair, her snub nose, her freckles. She looked three or four years older than me. She might have been three or four thousand years older, or a thousand times again. I would have trusted her to the gates of Hell and back. But still …

‘I wish you’d explain properly,’ I said. ‘You talk in mysteries all the time.’

I was not scared, though, and I could not have told you why I was not scared. I trusted Lettie, just as I had trusted her when we had gone in search of the flapping thing beneath the orange sky. I believed in her, and that meant I would come to no harm while I was with her. I knew it in the way I knew that grass was green, that roses had sharp, woody thorns, that breakfast cereal was sweet.

We went into the house through the front door. It was not locked – unless we went away on holidays, I do not ever remember it being locked – and we went inside.

My sister was practising the piano in the front room. We went in. She heard the noise, stopped playing ‘Chopsticks’ and turned around.

She looked at me curiously. ‘What happened last night?’ she asked. ‘I thought you were in trouble, but then Mummy and Daddy came back and you were just staying with your friends. Why would they say you were sleeping at your friends’? You don’t have any friends.’ She noticed Lettie Hempstock then. ‘Who’s this?’

‘My friend,’ I told her. ‘Where’s the horrible monster?’