The Ocean at the End of the Lane(9)

I said, ‘Hello.’

She said, ‘You were having bad dreams, weren’t you?’

I took the shilling out of my pocket and showed it to her. ‘I was choking on it,’ I told her. ‘When I woke up. But I don’t know how it got into my mouth. If someone had put it into my mouth, I would have woken up. It was just in there, when I woke.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘My sister says I threw coins at them from the bushes, but I didn’t.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘You didn’t.’

I said, ‘Lettie? What’s happening?’

‘Oh,’ she said, as if it was obvious. ‘Someone’s just trying to give people money, that’s all. But it’s doing it very badly, and it’s stirring things up around here that should be asleep. And that’s not good.’

‘Is it something to do with the man who died?’

‘Something to do with him. Yes.’

‘Is he doing this?’

She shook her head. Then she said, ‘Have you had breakfast?’

I shook my head.

‘Well then,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

We walked down the lane together. There were a few houses down the lane, here and there, back then, and she pointed to them as we went past. ‘In that house,’ said Lettie Hempstock, ‘a man dreamed of being sold and of being turned into money. Now he’s started seeing things in mirrors.’

‘What kinds of things?’

‘Himself. But with fingers poking out of his eye sockets. And things coming out of his mouth. Like crab claws.’

I thought about people with crab legs coming out of their mouths, in mirrors. ‘Why did I find a shilling in my throat?’

‘He wanted people to have money.’

‘The opal miner? Who died in the car?’

‘Yes. Sort of. Not exactly. He started this all off, like someone lighting a fuse on a firework. His death lit the touchpaper. The thing that’s exploding right now, that isn’t him. That’s somebody else. Something else.’

She rubbed her freckled nose with a grubby hand.

‘A lady’s gone mad in that house,’ she told me, and it would not have occurred to me to doubt her. ‘She has money in the mattress. Now she won’t get out of bed, in case someone takes it from her.’

‘How do you know?’

She shrugged. ‘Once you’ve been around for a bit, you get to know stuff.’

I kicked a stone. ‘By “a bit”, do you mean “a really long time”?’

She nodded.

‘How old are you, really?’ I asked.

‘Eleven.’

I thought for a while. Then I asked, ‘How long have you been eleven for?’

She smiled at me.

We walked past Caraway Farm. The farmers, whom one day I would come to know as Callie Anders’ parents, were standing in their farmyard, shouting at each other. They stopped when they saw us.

When we rounded a bend in the lane, and were out of sight, Lettie said, ‘Those poor people.’

‘Why are they poor people?’

‘Because they’ve been having money problems. And this morning he had a dream where she … she was doing bad things. To earn money. So he looked in her handbag and found lots of folded-up ten-shilling notes. She says she doesn’t know where they came from, and he doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t know what to believe.’

‘All the fighting and the dreams. It’s about money, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Lettie, and she seemed so grown-up then that I was almost scared of her.

‘Whatever’s happening,’ she said, eventually, ‘it can all be sorted out.’ She saw the expression on my face then, worried. Scared even. And she said, ‘After pancakes.’

Lettie cooked us pancakes on a big metal griddle, on the kitchen stove. They were paper thin, and as each pancake was done, Lettie would squeeze lemon on to it, and plop a blob of plum jam into the centre, and roll it tightly, like a cigar. When there were enough, we sat at the kitchen table and wolfed them down.

There was a hearth in that kitchen, and there were ashes still smouldering in the hearth, from the night before. That kitchen was a friendly place, I thought.

I said to Lettie, ‘I’m scared.’

She smiled at me. ‘I’ll make sure you’re safe. I promise. I’m not scared.’

I was still scared, but not as much. ‘It’s just scary.’

‘I said I promise,’ said Lettie Hempstock. ‘I won’t let you be hurt.’

‘Hurt?’ said a high, cracked voice. ‘Who’s hurt? What’s been hurt? Why would anybody be hurt?’

It was old Mrs Hempstock, her apron held between her hands, and in the hollow of the apron so many daffodils that the light reflected up from them transformed her face to gold, and the kitchen seemed bathed in yellow light.

Lettie said, ‘Something’s causing trouble. It’s giving people money. In their dreams and in real life.’ She showed the old lady my shilling. ‘My friend found himself choking on this shilling when he woke up this morning.’

Old Mrs Hempstock put her apron on the kitchen table, rapidly moved the daffodils off the cloth and on to the wood. Then she took the shilling from Lettie. She squinted at it, sniffed it, rubbed at it, listened to it (or put it to her ear, at any rate), then touched it with the tip of her purple tongue.