The Ocean at the End of the Lane (17 page)

Something wet and warm was soaking my back.

–
No . . . No, lady.

That was the first time I heard fear or doubt in
the voice of one of the hunger birds.

“There are pacts, and there are laws and there are
treaties, and you have violated all of them.”

Silence then, and it was louder than words could
have been. They had nothing to say.

I felt Lettie's body being rolled off mine, and I
looked up to see Ginnie Hempstock's sensible face. She sat on the ground on the
edge of the road, and I buried my face in her bosom. She took me in one arm, and
her daughter in the other.

From the shadows, a hunger bird spoke, with a voice
that was not a voice, and it said only,

–
We are sorry for your loss.

“Sorry?” The word was spat, not said.

Ginnie Hempstock swayed from side to side, crooning
low and wordlessly to me and to her daughter. Her arms were around me. I lifted
my head and I looked back at the person speaking, my vision blurred by
tears.

I stared at her.

It was Old Mrs. Hempstock, I suppose. But it
wasn't. It was Lettie's gran in the same way that . . .

I mean . . .

She shone silver. Her hair was still long, still
white, but now she stood as tall and as straight as a teenager. My eyes had
become too used to the darkness, and I could not look at her face to see if it
was the face I was familiar with: it was too bright. Magnesium-flare bright.
Fireworks Night bright. Midday-sun-reflecting-off-a-silver-coin bright.

I looked at her as long as I could bear to look,
and then I turned my head, screwing my eyes tightly shut, unable to see anything
but a pulsating afterimage.

The voice that was like Old Mrs. Hempstock's said,
“Shall I bind you creatures in the heart of a dark star, to feel your pain in a
place where every fragment of a moment lasts a thousand years? Shall I invoke
the compacts of Creation, and have you all removed from the list of created
things, so there never will have been any hunger birds, and anything that wishes
to traipse from world to world can do it with impunity?”

I listened for a reply, but heard nothing. Only a
whimper, a mewl of pain or of frustration.

“I'm done with you. I will deal with you in my own
time and in my own way. For now I must tend to the children.”

–
Yes, lady.

–
Thank you, lady.

“Not so fast. Nobody's going anywhere before you
put all those things back like they was. There's Boötes missing from the sky.
There's an oak tree gone, and a fox. You put them all back, the way they were.”
And then the silvery empress voice added, in a voice that was now also
unmistakably Old Mrs. Hempstock's,
“Varmints.”

Somebody was humming a tune. I realized, as if from
a long way away, that it was me, at the same moment that I remembered what the
tune was: “Girls and Boys Come Out to Play.”

. . . the moon doth shine as
bright as day.

Leave your supper and leave your meat,

and join your playfellows in the street.

Come with a whoop and come with a call.

Come with a whole heart or not at all
. . .

I held on to Ginnie Hempstock. She smelled like a
farm and like a kitchen, like animals and like food. She smelled very real, and
the realness was what I needed at that moment.

I reached out a hand, tentatively touched Lettie's
shoulder. She did not move or respond.

Ginnie started speaking, then, but at first I did
not know if she was talking to herself or to Lettie or to me. “They overstepped
their bounds,” she said. “They could have hurt you, child, and it would have
meant nothing. They could have hurt this world without anything being said—it's
only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds. But
Lettie's a Hempstock. She's outside of their dominion, my little one. And they
hurted her.”

I looked at Lettie. Her head had flopped down,
hiding her face. Her eyes were closed.

“Is she going to be all right?” I asked.

Ginnie didn't reply, just hugged us both the
tighter to her bosom, and rocked, and crooned a wordless song.

The farm and its land no longer glowed golden. I
could not feel anything in the shadows watching me, not any longer.

“Don't you worry,” said an old voice, now familiar
once more. “You're safe as houses. Safer'n most houses I've seen. They've
gone.”

“They'll come back again,” I said. “They want my
heart.”

“They'd not come back to this world again for all
the tea in China,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Not that they've got any use for
tea—or for China—no more than a carrion crow does.”

Why had I thought her dressed in silver? She wore a
much-patched gray dressing gown over what had to have been a nightie, but a
nightie of a kind that had not been fashionable for several hundred years.

The old woman put a hand on her granddaughter's
pale forehead, lifted it up, then let it go.

Lettie's mother shook her head. “It's over,” she
said.

I understood it then, at the last, and felt foolish
for not understanding it sooner. The girl beside me, on her mother's lap, at her
mother's breast, had given her life for mine.

“They were meant to hurt me, not her,” I said.

“No reason they should've taken either of you,”
said the old lady, with a sniff. I felt guilt then, guilt beyond anything I had
ever felt before.

“We should get her to hospital,” I said, hopefully.
“We can call a doctor. Maybe they can make her better.”

Ginnie shook her head.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

“Dead?” repeated the old woman in the dressing
gown. She sounded offended. “Has hif,” she said, grandly aspirating each aitch
as if that were the only way to convey the gravity of her words to me. “Has hif
han 'Empstock would hever do hanything so . . .
common
. . .”

“She's hurt,” said Ginnie Hempstock, cuddling me
close. “Hurt as badly as she
can
be hurt. She's so close to death as makes no
odds if we don't do something about it, and quickly.” A final hug, then, “Off
with you, now.” I clambered reluctantly from her lap, and I stood up.

Ginnie Hempstock got to her feet, her daughter's
body limp in her arms. Lettie lolled and was jogged like a rag doll as her
mother got up, and I stared at her, shocked beyond measure.

I said, “It was my fault. I'm sorry. I'm really
sorry.”

Old Mrs. Hempstock said, “You meant well,” but
Ginnie Hempstock said nothing at all. She walked down the lane toward the farm,
and then she turned off behind the milking shed. I thought that Lettie was too
big to be carried, but Ginnie carried her as if she weighed no more than a
kitten, her head and upper body resting on Ginnie's shoulder, like a sleeping
infant being taken upstairs to bed. Ginnie carried her down that path, and
beside the hedge, and back, and back, until we reached the pond.

There were no breezes back there, and the night was
perfectly still; our path was lit by moonlight and nothing more; the pond, when
we got there, was just a pond. No golden, glimmering light. No magical full
moon. It was black and dull, with the moon, the true moon, the quarter moon,
reflected in it.

I stopped at the edge of the pond, and Old Mrs.
Hempstock stopped beside me.

But Ginnie Hempstock kept walking.

She staggered down into the pond, until she was
wading thigh-deep, her coat and skirt floating on the water as she waded,
breaking the reflected moon into dozens of tiny moons that scattered and
re-formed around her.

At the center of the pond, with the black water
above her hips, she stopped. She took Lettie from her shoulder, so the girl's
body was supported at the head and at the knees by Ginnie Hempstock's practical
hands; then slowly, so very slowly, she laid Lettie down in the water.

The girl's body floated on the surface of the
pond.

Ginnie took a step back, and then another, never
looking away from her daughter.

I heard a rushing noise, as if of an enormous wind
coming toward us.

Lettie's body shook.

There was no breeze, but now there were whitecaps
on the surface of the pond. I saw waves, gentle, lapping waves at first, and
then bigger waves that broke and slapped at the edge of the pond. One wave
crested and crashed down close to me, splashing my clothes and face. I could
taste the water's wetness on my lips, and it was salt.

I whispered, “I'm sorry, Lettie.”

I should have been able to see the other side of
the pond. I had seen it a few moments before. But the crashing waves had taken
it away, and I could see nothing beyond Lettie's floating body but the vastness
of the lonely ocean, and the dark.

The waves grew bigger. The water began to glow in
the moonlight, as it had glowed when it was in a bucket, glowed a pale, perfect
blue. The black shape on the surface of the water was the body of the girl who
had saved my life.

Bony fingers rested on my shoulder. “What are you
apologizing for, boy? For killing her?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“She's not dead. You didn't kill her, nor did the
hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She's been
given to her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.”

I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls
for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my
goldfishes' tails had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie,
belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, “Will she be the
same?”

The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the
funniest thing in the universe. “Nothing's ever the same,” she said. “Be it a
second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people
change as much as oceans.”

Ginnie clambered out of the water, and she stood at
the water's edge beside me, her head bowed. The waves crashed and smacked and
splashed and retreated. There was a distant rumble that became a louder and
louder rumble: something was coming toward us, across the ocean. From miles
away, from hundreds and hundreds of miles away it came: a thin white line etched
in the glowing blue, and it grew as it approached.

The great wave came, and the world rumbled, and I
looked up as it reached us: it was taller than trees, than houses, than mind or
eyes could hold, or heart could follow.

Only when it reached Lettie Hempstock's floating
body did the enormous wave crash down. I expected to be soaked, or, worse, to be
swept away by the angry ocean water, and I raised my arm to cover my face.

There was no splash of breakers, no deafening
crash, and when I lowered my arm I could see nothing but the still black water
of a pond in the night, and there was nothing on the surface of the pond but a
smattering of lily pads and the thoughtful, incomplete reflection of the
moon.

Old Mrs. Hempstock was gone, too. I had thought
that she was standing beside me, but only Ginnie stood there, next to me,
staring down silently into the dark mirror of the little pond.

“Right,” she said. “I'll take you home.”

XV.

T
here was a
Land Rover parked behind the cowshed. The doors were open and the ignition key
was in the lock. I sat on the newspaper-covered passenger seat and watched
Ginnie Hempstock turn the key. The engine sputtered a few times before it
started.

I had not imagined any of the Hempstocks driving. I
said, “I didn't know you had a car.”

“Lots of things you don't know,” said Mrs.
Hempstock, tartly. Then she glanced at me more gently and said, “You can't know
everything.” She backed the Land Rover up and it bumped its way forward across
the ruts and the puddles of the back of the farmyard.

There was something on my mind.

“Old Mrs. Hempstock says that Lettie isn't really
dead,” I said. “But she looked dead. I think she is actually dead. I don't think
it's true that she's not dead.”

Ginnie looked like she was going to say something
about the nature of truth, but all she said was, “Lettie's hurt. Very badly
hurt. The ocean has taken her. Honestly, I don't know if it will ever give her
back. But we can hope, can't we?”

“Yes.” I squeezed my hands into fists, and I hoped
as hard as I knew how.

We bumped and jolted up the lane at fifteen miles
per hour.

I said, “Was she—is she—really your daughter?” I
didn't know, I still don't know, why I asked her that. Perhaps I just wanted to
know more about the girl who had saved my life, who had rescued me more than
once. I didn't know anything about her.

“More or less,” said Ginnie. “The men Hempstocks,
my brothers, they went out into the world, and they had babies who've had
babies. There are Hempstock women out there in your world, and I'll wager each
of them is a wonder in her own way. But only Gran and me and Lettie are the pure
thing.”

“She didn't have a daddy?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did you have a daddy?”

“You're all questions, aren't you? No, love. We
never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed
more men.”

I said, “You don't have to take me home. I could
stay with you. I could wait until Lettie comes back from the ocean. I could work
on your farm, and carry stuff, and learn to drive a tractor.”

She said, “No,” but she said it kindly. “You get on
with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and
be worth it.”

A flash of resentment. It's hard enough being
alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the
things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did,
whatever it was, was worth someone having . . . if not
died,
then
having given up her life. It wasn't
fair
.

“Life's not fair,” said Ginnie, as if I had spoken
aloud.

She turned into our driveway, pulled up outside the
front door. I got out and she did too.

“Better make it easier for you to go home,” she
said.

Mrs. Hempstock rang the doorbell, although the door
was never locked, and industriously scraped the soles of her Wellington boots on
the doormat until my mother opened the door. She was dressed for bed, and
wearing her quilted pink dressing gown.

“Here he is,” said Ginnie. “Safe and sound, the
soldier back from the wars. He had a lovely time at our Lettie's going-away
party, but now it's time for this young man to get his rest.”

My mother looked blank—almost confused—and then the
confusion was replaced by a smile, as if the world had just reconfigured itself
into a form that made sense.

“Oh, you didn't have to bring him back,” said my
mother. “One of us would have come and picked him up.” Then she looked down at
me. “What do you say to Mrs. Hempstock, darling?”

I said it automatically.
“Thank-you-for-having-me.”

My mother said, “Very good, dear.” Then, “Lettie's
going away?”

“To Australia,” said Ginnie. “To be with her
father. We'll miss having this little fellow over to play, but, well, we'll let
you know when Lettie comes back. He can come over and play, then.”

I was getting tired. The party had been fun,
although I could not remember much about it. I knew that I would not visit the
Hempstock farm again, though. Not unless Lettie was there.

Australia was a long, long way away. I wondered how
long it would be until she came back from Australia with her father. Years, I
supposed. Australia was on the other side of the world, across the
ocean . . .

A small part of my mind remembered an alternate
pattern of events and then lost it, as if I had woken from a comfortable sleep
and looked around, pulled the bedclothes over me, and returned to my dream.

Mrs. Hempstock got back into her ancient Land
Rover, so bespattered with mud (I could now see, in the light above the front
door) that there was almost no trace of the original paintwork visible, and she
backed it up, down the drive, toward the lane.

My mother seemed unbothered that I had returned
home in fancy dress clothes at almost eleven at night. She said, “I have some
bad news, dear.”

“What's that?”

“Ursula's had to leave. Family matters. Pressing
family matters. She's already left. I know how much you children liked her.”

I knew that I didn't like her, but I said
nothing.

There was now nobody sleeping in my bedroom at the
top of the stairs. My mother asked if I would like my room back for a while. I
said no, unsure of why I was saying no. I could not remember why I disliked
Ursula Monkton so much—indeed, I felt faintly guilty for disliking her so
absolutely and so irrationally—but I had no desire to return to that bedroom,
despite the little yellow handbasin just my size, and I remained in the shared
bedroom until our family moved out of that house half a decade later (we
children protesting, the adults I think just relieved that their financial
difficulties were over).

The house was demolished after we moved out. I
would not go and see it standing empty, and refused to witness the demolition.
There was too much of my life bound up in those bricks and tiles, those
drainpipes and walls.

Years later, my sister, now an adult herself,
confided in me that she believed that our mother had fired Ursula Monkton (whom
she remembered, so fondly, as the only nice one in a sequence of grumpy
childminders) because our father was having an affair with her. It was possible,
I agreed. Our parents were still alive then, and I could have asked them, but I
didn't.

My father did not mention the events of those
nights, not then, not later.

I finally made friends with my father when I
entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am
certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a
book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and
boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that
was not what he had wound up with.

I did not ever go down the lane all the way to the
end. I did not think of the white Mini. When I thought of the opal miner, it was
in context of the two rough raw opal-rocks that sat on our mantelpiece, and in
my memory he always wore a checked shirt and jeans. His face and arms were tan,
not the cherry-red of monoxide poisoning, and he had no bow-tie.

Monster, the ginger tomcat the opal miner had left
us, had wandered off to be fed by other families, and although we saw him, from
time to time, prowling the ditches and trees at the side of the lane, he would
not ever come when we called. I was relieved by this, I think. He had never been
our cat. We knew it, and so did he.

A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that
the people in the story change. But I was seven when all of these things
happened, and I was the same person at the end of it that I was at the
beginning, wasn't I? So was everyone else. They must have been. People don't
change.

Some things changed, though.

A month or so after the events here, and five years
before the ramshackle world I lived in was demolished and replaced by trim,
squat, regular houses containing smart young people who worked in the city but
lived in my town, who made money by moving money from place to place but who did
not build or dig or farm or weave, and nine years before I would kiss smiling
Callie Anders . . .

I came home from school. The month was May, or
perhaps early June. She was waiting by the back door as if she knew precisely
where she was and who she was looking for: a young black cat, a little larger
than a kitten now, with a white splodge over one ear, and with eyes of an
intense and unusual greenish-blue.

She followed me into the house.

I fed her with an unused can of Monster's cat food,
which I spooned into Monster's dusty cat bowl.

My parents, who had never noticed the ginger tom's
disappearance, did not initially notice the arrival of the new kitten-cat, and
by the time my father commented on her existence she had been living with us for
several weeks, exploring the garden until I came home from school, then staying
near me while I read or played. At night she would wait beneath the bed until
the lights were turned out, then she would accommodate herself on the pillow
beside me, grooming my hair, and purring, so quietly as never to disturb my
sister.

I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her
fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek.

She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of
the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.