The Ocean at the End of the Lane(35)

‘Don’t call her that,’ said my sister. ‘She’s nice. She’s having a lie-down.’

My sister did not say anything about my clothes.

Lettie Hempstock took a broken xylophone from her shopping bag and dropped it on to the scree of toys that had accumulated between the piano and the blue toy box with the detached lid.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Now it’s time to go and say hello.’

The first faint stirrings of fear inside my chest, inside my mind. ‘Go up to her room, you mean?’

‘Yup.’

‘What’s she doing up there?’

‘Still giving people money,’ said Lettie. ‘Only local people so far. She finds what they think they need and she tries to give it to them. She’s doing it to make the world into something she’ll be happier in. Somewhere more comfortable for her. Somewhere cleaner. And she doesn’t care so much about giving them money, not any more. Now what she cares about more is people hurting.’

As we went up the stairs, Lettie placed something on each step: a clear glass marble with a twist of green inside it; one of the little metal objects we called knucklebones; a bead; a pair of bright blue doll’s eyes, connected at the back with white plastic, to make them open or close; a small horseshoe magnet; a black pebble; a badge, the kind that came attached to birthday cards, with I Am Seven on it; a book of matches; a plastic ladybird with a black magnet in the base; a toy car, half squashed, its wheels gone; and last of all, a lead soldier. It was missing a leg.

We were at the top of the stairs. The bedroom door was closed. Lettie said, ‘She won’t put you in the attic.’ Then, without knocking, she opened the door, and she went into the bedroom that had once been mine, and, reluctantly, I followed.

Ursula Monkton was lying on the bed with her eyes closed. She was the first adult woman who was not my mother that I had seen naked, and I glanced at her curiously. But the room was more interesting to me than she was.

It was my old bedroom, but it wasn’t. Not any more. There was the little yellow hand basin, just my size, and the walls were still robin’s-egg blue, as they had been when it was mine. But now strips of cloth hung from the ceiling, grey, ragged cloth strips, like bandages, some only a foot long, others dangling almost all the way to the floor. The window was open and the wind rustled and pushed them, so they swayed, greyly, and it seemed as if perhaps the room was moving, like a tent or a ship at sea.

‘You have to go now,’ said Lettie.

Ursula Monkton sat up on the bed, and then she opened her eyes, which were the same grey as the hanging cloths. She said, in a voice that still sounded half asleep, ‘I wondered what I would have to do to bring you both here, and now look, you came.’

‘You didn’t bring us here,’ Lettie said. ‘We came because we wanted to. And I came to give you one last chance to go.’

‘I’m not going now,’ said Ursula Monkton, and she sounded petulant, like a very small child who wanted something. ‘I’ve only just got here. I have a house, now. I have pets – his father is just the sweetest thing. I’m making people happy. There is nothing like me anywhere in this whole world. I was looking, just now when you came in. I’m the only one there is. They can’t defend themselves. They don’t know how. So this is the best place in the whole world.’

She smiled at us both, brightly. She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identity to her for the asking, as my father did.

‘You think this world’s like that,’ said Lettie. ‘You think it’s easy. But it en’t.’

‘Of course it is. What are you saying? That you and your family will defend this world against me? You’re the only one who ever leaves the borders of your farm – and you tried to bind me without knowing my name. Your mother wouldn’t have been that foolish. I’m not scared of you, little girl.’

Lettie reached deep into the shopping bag. She pulled out the jam jar with the translucent wormhole inside, and held it out.

‘Here’s your way back,’ she said. ‘I’m being kind, and I’m being nice. Trust me. Take it. I don’t think you can get any nearer to home than the place we met you, with the orange sky, but that’s far enough. I can’t get you from there to where you came from in the first place – I asked Gran, and she says it isn’t even there any more – but once you’re back, we can find a place for you, somewhere similar. Somewhere you’ll be happy. Somewhere you’ll be safe.’

Ursula Monkton got off the bed. She stood up and looked down at us. There were no lightnings wreathing her, not any longer, but she was scarier standing naked in that bedroom than she had been floating in the storm. She was an adult – no, more than an adult. She was old. And I have never felt more like a child.

‘I’m so happy here,’ she said. ‘So very, very happy.’ And then she said, almost regretfully, ‘You’re not.’

I heard a sound, a soft, raggedy, flapping sound. The grey cloths began to detach themselves from the ceiling, one by one. They fell, but not in a straight line. They fell towards us, from all over the room, as if we were magnets, pulling them towards our bodies. The first strip of grey cloth landed on the back of my left hand, and it stuck there. I reached out my right hand and grabbed it, and I pulled the cloth off; it adhered, for a moment, and as it pulled off, it made a sucking sound. There was a discoloured patch on the back of my left hand, where the cloth had been, and it was as red as if I had been sucking on it for a long, long time, longer and harder than I ever had in real life, and it was beaded with blood. There were pinpricks of red wetness that smeared as I touched them, and then a long bandage cloth began to attach itself to my legs, and I moved away as a cloth landed on my face and my forehead, and another wrapped itself over my eyes, blinding me, so I pulled at the cloth on my eyes, but now another cloth circled my wrists, bound them together, and my arms were wrapped and bound to my body, and I stumbled, and fell to the floor.