Peter Pan in Scarlet (10 page)

‘Where did you …?’ Wendy began in astonishment.

‘I flew about by moonlight! I followed the owls and I shadowed the bats. Where the bee sneaks, there snuck I. Oh, the cleverness of Pan!’ There was still something of the moonlight in his face; a silvery pallor: moon tan.

‘I think we may say that His Excellency the Wonderful Boy has saved the day,’ said Ravello bowing reverentially and helping Peter back on with his scarlet coat. In their delight, the Twins began to clap, and the rest of the Darlings joined in.

The berries were scarlet and bullet-hard. One might taste of cherries, the next more like tomato or smoked ham. Ravello sprinkled them liberally with salt. To soften the pips, he said. Peter Pan barely remembered to eat his portion, he was so busy revelling in the words ‘His Excellency the Wonderful Boy’.

Later, as they passed through a dense dark grove of piny trees, the Wonderful Boy pointed out where he had picked them, high among the upper branches; the Twins ran over to jump and snatch, but they were far too tiny to reach. Wendy could not, nor could Tootles. Not even Curly, come to that. As Peter rose effortlessly off the ground, to pick some more for the journey, the others clenched their fists, bent their knees and tried to muster happy thoughts for all they were worth. A cold, drizzling rain and a shortage of fairy dust made it difficult.

Slightly, eager to make himself useful and to put himself back in Peter’s good books, hurried up from the rear, stood on tiptoe, reached up as high as he could, and picked three bunches of scarlet fruit.

‘
Carve the name out of that boy and cast him adrift!
’ Feet planted wide on a high bough, one hand on his sword, Peter Pan pointed a damning finger at Slightly, speaking the words that every Lost Boy dreads to hear. ‘
Cull him for a
traitor and a turncoat! Send him to Nowhereland! Let no one
speak to him ever again!
’

‘Oh, Peter!’ cried Wendy reaching up a restraining hand, but there was no touching Pan, who perched on the bough like some terrible eagle eyeing its prey. She had to tip her head right back on her neck, and the rain fell into her eyes. ‘Oh, Peter! What has he done? He only picked some …’

Pan swooped down, terrifying, hawkish. He snatched the swordfish sword from Slightly’s belt and broke it across his knee. ‘Do you not see? The breaker of oaths! The big long snake-in-the-grass!’ He came to rest as he had before, face-to-face with Slightly (except that now his nose was on a level with the top button of Slightly’s shirt).

Perhaps it was the doing of that witch, holding Slightly’s face between her hands. Perhaps it was because he had entered Neverland by foul means (tunnelling down to the end of his bed). Perhaps it was the fault of Time as it prowled Neverland, turning the summer greenery to red and orange, setting the ship’s bell ringing. Or perhaps he really was a traitor. Whatever the cause, Slightly Darling was
growing up
—no denying it. Already he stood head-and-shoulders taller than Peter and could reach the berries no one else could reach from the ground.

Peter drew his sword—‘
Oh, please, Cap’n, no!
’—and with the swordpoint drew a portcullis in the air, complete with rope and wheel and cruel iron spikes. Then he raised the portcullis, drove Slightly backwards through it on the end of his sword, and lowered the grille again, shutting him out.

‘You all swore not to grow up,’ said Peter, daring anyone to object. ‘That is the only Rule. And Slightly broke it.’

How could they argue? Again the Explorers fell in one behind another, single file, and resumed their long trek towards Neverpeak. Glancing back over her shoulder to where Slightly stood motionless in the rain, Wendy saw that his evening shirt now barely reached to his knees, and the clarinet in his hand seemed smaller than it had before. Distance helped. The further away they got, the smaller he looked, that pathetic figure on the pathway. You might almost have mistaken him for a little boy lost in the rain.

A haunting, yearning music floated to them on the breeze. First thing every morning and last thing every night, the sound of Slightly’s clarinet came to them out of banishment. Nobody had quite expected that. They understood that Slightly had done wrong by growing, and they wanted to shut him out of their minds, as Peter had told them they must. But it is hard to forget someone while they are still within earshot.

The going was getting hard. Pine forests had given way to mere trunks—a landscape of naked sticks as leafless and lifeless as ships’ masts on a sandbank. The mapmaker had called this place the Thirsty Desert, but that was patently wrong. For it was not the
desert
which was thirsty at all: it was anybody travelling through it. There were no lakes or rivers to drink from, and what with the salt on their dinners, the Company of Explorers were quite parched. Peter had gone on ahead to scout about for a spring or a brook. Once more Slightly’s music drifted to them on the wind.

‘Whatever will become of him?’ said Wendy.

She was merely thinking aloud, but Ravello looked up from cleaning Pan’s boots and answered her.

‘He will doubtless become one of the Roarers, miss, and run wild and wayward, and dine on dishes of cold revenge.’

‘Yuck,’ said a Twin. ‘Is that like rice pudding?’

Ravello spat on the leather, for want of boot-polish, and worked up a shine using the tail of his shapeless cardigan. ‘Not quite, Master Darling, sir. Did you never hear the saying: “
Revenge is a dish best served cold
”? Of course, the Witches may catch him first.’

‘Who are the Roarers?’ asked John, fearing for a moment that Slightly might enjoy himself more with them than with the Explorers.

‘The Roarers?’ Ravello seemed surprised at their ignorance. ‘I would have thought His Supreme Highness would have told you about them long ago.’ (How Peter would have delighted in ‘His Supreme Highness’, if he had been there.) ‘The Roarers. The Long Boys. The Long, Lost Boys. They are the ones Peter Pan culled for breaking the Rule. For growing up. He turned them out, and now they roam the wild places, living by banditry and mayhem. Cruel through and through.’

‘No one is all bad,’ said Wendy quickly, knowing Slightly could never do such things.

The valet’s voice was not quarrelsome. It remained as gentle and springy as a lamb. ‘Why would any sweetness linger, miss? Consider. Neglected and mislaid by their mothers, they are posted away to Neverland, their hearts in their boots. But—oh! the blessed relief!—they find themselves welcomed into the cosiness of den and tree house, into a world of friends and fun. They belong again! Life is perfect! Then one day their wrist-bones poke out below their cuffs; their trousers are too short. And for this sin they lose their place in Paradise. They are banished—put out-of-doors like an empty milk-bottle—despised and rejected—and this time by their
very best friend
.’

The League flinched. There was a sharp drawing in of breath. Put that way, it sounded so … unkind.

‘They cannot go home, for they are adult, and adults (as you know) cannot fly. So they are trapped in Neverland, but without any of the joy and benefits that should bestow. Their hearts canker, like apples left too long on the tree; Hate and Regret burrow deep as caterpillars. Consider. Love is learned at our mother’s knee,’ purred Ravello, ‘betrayal when she tires of us and her skirts swish away into the distance. If friends turn their backs too—well! Why not banditry? Why not throat-slitting? Why not a life of crime? Despair kills the heart in a boy.’ He held up the boots he was polishing, an arm down each leg, to admire the glossy leather. ‘No. I have tamed bears and I have tamed lions, miss. By a mixture of love and fear, I have tamed all breeds of animal. But there is no taming the Roarers. They have nothing left to fear, and wisely they have learned never again to love.’ The polished boots stood on the ground in their midst now, as though Pan stood there, but invisibly. The circus-master bowed extravagantly low to these empty boots. ‘But! Mr Slightly broke the Golden Rule and Mr Slightly has paid the price. What choice did the Marvellous Boy have? Such is the Law of Pan.’

The sound of Slightly’s clarinet swooped over their heads like a summer swallow, and everyone but Ravello ducked their heads, fearful of it tangling in their hair.

Out of that same sky Peter returned, each foot sliding home into its shiny boot like a knife into a sheath. He had news of a waterfall up ahead, and the Company of Explorers, now all parched with thirst, jumped up and hurried on.

It was a waterfall complete in itself: no river flowing up to the brink, no river flowing away—simply a cascade of water cloaking a wall of rock as high as the Nevertree and as smooth as glass. They stood as close as they dared, mouths wide open, letting the icy spray drift into their throats. It was delicious. As white and drifting as smoke, the spray enveloped them, silvering their hair with water droplets. When the sun broke through, and shone on the drifting spray, there were rainbows too. And when, high above their heads, there formed a cloud of flittering, glittering colour, they gasped at the sheer Beauty of it.

Not that Beauty ranks high on a child’s wish list. He wouldn’t spend his pocket money buying it. He would not scrape the bowl clean if it was served up for dinner. In fact, on most days, Beauty never got a mention or a passing thought. But this particular sight cast a spell of rare wonder over the Explorers, and they stood gazing up at the kaleidoscope of shifting lilac, blue, mauve, and purple. What is it that writer-man said?
Sometimes Beauty boils over
and then spirits are abroad
.

One by one, the individual flecks of colour separated and floated down, like rose petals at the end of summer. They brushed the upturned faces; settled on their shoulders. More and more fell: a light snow of flaking colour. Like snow it mesmerized them—a dizzying downward whirl of prettiness. Instead of spray from the waterfall they could feel only the soft touch of a thousand thousand velvety fragments of loveliness. It piled up in their hair; it filled their ears and pockets; it tugged on their clothing. Tugged?

‘Fairies!’ cried Tootles delightedly. ‘Thousands of fairies!’

Suddenly the snow was a blizzard. Delight was replaced by unease then, just as quickly, by fear. The snowfall of tiny bodies showed no sign of stopping. Soon the children were floundering ankle-deep, knee-deep in drifts of fairies, unable to take one step. Their  , were too heavy to lift. Tootles’s yellow plaits were blades of corn encrusted with locusts. The weight bore the children down, dragged them down, pressed them down. Those left standing struggled to stay upright, for those who lost their footing were instantly overwhelmed—buried—under a ton of fairies. But one by one they fell, and one by one they were smothered under a carpet—a mattress—a haystack of fairy ambushers. Pinioned to the ground, they could hear nothing but the click of a million tiny wings, the hiss and buzz of a million vicious little voices.

‘Did that treacherous little onion-gobbler send you?’ grunted Peter Pan. But it was already plain that this was not some practical joke or peevish prank. The Explorers had walked into the middle of a fully-fledged war. The Fairies began to pinch and kick. The Twins (remembering Fireflyer’s appetite) thought they were being eaten and started to cry. Again and again the tiny, massed voices vibrated through them, like choirs of bees:

Clearly the world of fairies had split in two, and a war was waging between two great armies—the Red faction and the Blues. Wendy racked her brains to think what the quarrel might be about: what the colours might signify. She remembered that girl fairies are white and that boy fairies are lilac and that those too silly to make up their mind are blue. But this could not be a war of the sexes: there were both males and females among the swarm of attackers. It was so unfair: to have to take sides without knowing what each side stood for!

Their captors chanted their rhymes without any excitement. They must have sung them so often that they no longer even noticed what they were saying. That did not make the words any less chilling.

‘We are not on any side!’ grunted Curly, scarcely able to muster the breath. ‘We’re like the Swiss!’

‘Swiss?’ panted John, who was very patriotic. ‘We’re British!’ If Curly had been able to move a foot, he might have kicked John. Anyway, the fairies did not give a fig for neutrality.

Wendy tried to tell them: ‘Our flag’s the sunflower-and-two-rabbits!’ She tried to say, ‘We’re Explorers! We’re not at war with anyone!’ But there were fairies in her mouth, and a fairy army stoving in her ribs. Anyway, it seemed that the fairies would ignore any answer but ‘Red’ or ‘Blue’.

And if the children guessed and guessed wrong, it would be the last word they ever spoke.

‘How can we raise our flag unless you get off us!’ raged Peter. Perhaps the swarm relented, or perhaps the One-and-Only-Boy was so furiously determined that he thrashed his way to the surface. But there he was at last, at the foot of the waterfall, upright despite the canker of fairies swinging on his white necktie. ‘
We sail under the Skull-and-
Crossbones!
’ he declared. ‘
That’s our flag!
’

‘Peter,
no
! That’s not true!’ Wendy was so shocked that she too wriggled free.

Her eyes met his, and it seemed for a moment as if the words had surprised Peter as much as her. Luckily, ‘skull-and-crossbones’ meant nothing to the chanting fairies: they did not know what colour of flag a pirate flew. Less luckily, their patience was at an end.

All of a sudden, a halo of light exploded about Peter’s slight form. Then he disappeared utterly from sight. He had stepped backwards through the cascading waterfall. Wendy was both thrilled and appalled—thrilled that their Captain had escaped, appalled that he had left his friends to the mercy of the fairies.

‘
TWO!
’

There was nothing for it. They would have to guess—guess Blue and hope that they were not in the hands of the Reds—or Red and hope that they were not among Blues. Every member of the League of Pan called the colours to mind, and tried to decide. Neither blue nor red seemed good enough to die for.

‘RAINBOW!’

Back through the screen of water, out of the noisy spray, came Peter Pan. In his hand flapped one of the rainbows formed by sun and spray. ‘Here is our banner! Now judge us by our flag, sprites, and kill us or free us!’

The fairy army was thrown into confusion. They looked at the banner, woven out of spray and sunlight, and saw both blue and red in equal proportions—as well as a host of other colours. The press of tiny bodies lessened as fairy-gravity took hold. (Fairies always fall upwards.) They looked mildly cheated, for Peter had spoiled their fun: armies enjoy killing more than making new friends. They eyed enviously the rainbow banner, too, almost as if they preferred it to either Red or Blue. Then, forming a spinning tornado-funnel of glittering bodies, they whirled away into the sky.

Wendy wanted to call out to them:
Stop! Don’t! You
never used to fight! What are you thinking of!
But the cloud of lilac and mauve and indigo, of blue and purple and white, tumbled skywards, finally separating like rice at a wedding. Or an exploding shell.

‘Them and their stupid flags,’ said John, but the littler ones were gazing at their Captain and saluting his marvellous rainbow banner. Peter had mounted it on a pole. Now its spray-and-sunlight fabric furled and unfurled over their heads as he gave the order: ‘Fall in, me hearties! Who’s for Neverpeak and a chest full of treasure?’