Peter Pan in Scarlet (13 page)

In Neverland, a treasure chest contains the treasure-seeker’s dearest wish, the thing he or she wants more than anything else in the world. Those who had wished for gold doubloons and pieces of nine and ten, those who had thought of tiaras, necklaces, and pocket watches; those who had hoped for storybooks and Fabergé eggs no longer wanted any of those things. All they wanted now was a warm fire and a hot meal, a feather eiderdown and some steaming Bovril. True, Curly did desperately wish he had not lost the puppy, but quickly unthought the wish; a puppy shut up in a treasure chest was not at all a happy thought.

But it made no difference what they wished. They all knew that Peter would wish better than any of them, and that
he
would decide what they found when they finally lifted the lid of Hook’s treasure chest.

They sang to carry them the last little way, and the rainbow banner fluttered bravely over their heads.

‘But we didn’t fight off dragons and bears—not really,’ said First Twin.

‘But we could have!’ said Second.

And before they knew it, there they were, with nowhere further up to go. The sides of the mountain fell away from them like the skirts of a king’s robe, and their heads were crowned with cloud.

From the top of Neverpeak you can see beyond Belief: over every obstacle, over the heads of the oldest, tallest anyone; as far back as you choose to remember, and as far as wherever you mean to go next. You can see where you went wrong and what a long way you’ve come. You can look down on your enemies and overcome your fears. The whole world looks up to a child on the summit of Neverpeak! Now the Explorers stood on the snowy crest and surveyed the whole island, pointing out landmarks to one another. They could see the distant Neverwood, charred and still smoking. They could see the distant yellow Lagoon and the narrow strait leading out into the wild ocean. The course they had sailed aboard the
Jolly
Peter
was still written in the ocean: a white foamy furrow looping out and round and ending in a shatter of wreckage out at Lodestone Rock. They could see Grief Reef and the stripy rockscape that hid the Maze of Witches.

‘Oh look, Peter! Look!’ cried Wendy. ‘There are the trees where you found us berries for breakfast!’

But Peter had no eyes for the view. He was scouring the mountaintop for the Treasure, kicking up clouds of snow, groaning with weariness and cold and frustration. The treasure map flapped itself to tatters in his hands. ‘Where is it? Where
is
it?’ he muttered over and over again.

Since Neverland’s slow slide from summer into winter, snow had settled on Neverpeak where none had lain before. Deep drifts of softness had rounded its rocky summit into a white dome hiding the Treasure promised on the map.

‘May I help you look, sir?’ called Ravello, always slower than the children and only now nearing the top.

‘NO! You can’t come up here!’ Peter shouted back. ‘This is MY place! You can’t come up here!’

‘No,’ said the circus-master, as if this was the simple truth. ‘No, I know,’ and he contented himself with studying the landscape laid out below, intently looking, looking, looking and cocking his head to listen, too.

Pan dug in the snow with his swordfish sword until its sawtooth edge was worn smooth.

‘Cold,’ said Ravello, which was no more than the truth.

Peter dug with a piece of slate, shovelling up snow until he was white-haired from his own digging.

‘Warmer,’ said Ravello … which was absurd.

Peter dug with his bare hands, because they were already too cold to feel the pain of it.

‘Hotter,’ said Ravello from his perch lower down.

And then a hollow sound, a smooth hardness that did not skin his knuckles, a streak of red beneath the snow. The Treasure was found!

There was a big padlock, but Wendy came with her sword, and, with their four hands on the hilt—oh, how cold Peter’s were!—they forced open the hasp. Then Peter Pan stepped up on to the curved lid and raised his two fists in the air, tossed back his head of dark and glossy curls, and
crowed
.

It was a noise part-lark, part-hawk. It was a shout of triumph and an avenging war cry. It was part choirboy, part delinquent. Whatever it was, it was not a cock-a-doodle, and it ended in a spluttering cough.

‘
Hot!
’ whispered Ravello, and closed his eyes in an ecstasy of joy.

The lid rose, and with it the wind, so that a column of twisted snow eddied all around. Even those who had thought they were too tired and cold to care what the chest contained found themselves wishing and wishing that it might contain their heart’s desire.

‘
WHAT?!
’ Peter uttered a cry of dismay and plunged in his hands, hurling aside twigs and dry grass and peat. First Twin had wished for warmth, so here was the fuel to build a fire.

Peter put his hands to his head in despair, and his hands were covered in a glitter that was not snow. Wendy had wished for fairy dust, to help them fly home again, so here was fairy dust.

There were dry tea-leaves and bread dough, cold spaghetti and sago pudding all loose in among everything else, because the Twins had wished when they were hungry.

There were the regular treasure-chest things—gold doubloons and bags of diamonds, because John Darling had not been able to imagine a treasure chest containing anything different. And Tootles’s tiara was there after all, and a few yards of Indian silk.

Puppy, puppy, puppy! thought Curly, but it was too late to wish the lost dog into Hook’s treasure chest. Curly blamed himself that somewhere, out on the bleak glaciers and murrains, a tiny wee puppy was wandering about lost because he had not wished soon enough.

Even Puppy (wherever he was now) must have been better at wishing than Curly, because there was a juicy marrow-bone stuck in the hinge. Just no Puppy to eat it.

But though they had been expecting wonders of some sort,
no one
could understand why
TINKER BELL
was there!

In a corner of the lid, cocooned in gossamer, emerging like a butterfly from its chrysalis, a lovely, lissom fairy no bigger than a child’s hand, stirred into wakefulness, complaining sleepily that someone had left open a window. ‘
How can a person sleep in such a draught?
’ She blinked once, then once again. ‘
Peter? Is that you, Peter Pan?
’

The Darlings were enchanted. They took it in turns to hold the fairy in the palm of a hand. ‘We thought you must be dead at your age!’ said Tootles (which Wendy felt was not quite tactful).

‘
So I was
,’ said Tinker Bell, ‘
or hibernating. It’s hard to tell
.’ Then she complained that their hands were all far too cold to sit on, and that Peter was ignoring her. ‘
Fairies die if you ignore them, you know!
’

‘Peter, look!’ cried Wendy. ‘It’s Tinker Bell! Did you wish for her to be here? Is
she
your treasure?’ It gave her the oddest feeling to think it. But after all, it was very noble of Peter to prize a friend above gold, silver, or honey sandwiches.

But Peter continued to rummage in the treasure chest, casting aside a storybook, crushing a painted egg.

Tinker Bell looked again. ‘
Oh
,’ she said sleepily. ‘
I thought it was Peter Pan, but it is not he. It is the Other one
.’ And she went back to sleep.

And there at last, filling fully half the chest, lay the Real Treasure—the one for which they had risked everything, the one which had brought them here to the Point of No Return. Peter lifted them out with gentle hands: a cup, a trophy, a cane, a statuette, a top hat, a plaque shaped like a knight’s shield, a cap circled with rings of red and white, an oar painted blue-green at the paddle, which he clutched lovingly to his chest.

Wendy picked up a trophy, its base engraved with fifty names and the words,
SPENCER CUP FOR RIFLE
1894. ‘It is very pretty, Peter, but why?’ Peter did not answer, but snatched up another and looked at it, a chalice plated in shiny silver.

Curly was dragging together the kindling into a bonfire. With every moment, the views to north, south, east, and west were melting away, licked up by tongues of flying snow. A blizzard was closing in. John called Ravello to bring a match, to light the fire.

But Peter went on gazing at the cup in his hands, shivers shaking him from head to foot. His look of rapture turned to one of horror as he saw, looking back at him, his own reflection. It was the same one he had seen in the ice-bridge. Reaching sideways, he took hold of Wendy’s hand. ‘I am not myself,’ he said in a whisper. ‘Wendy … I … am … not … me.’

The figure of Peter Pan’s valet just then emerged on to the peak of the mountain. With the weather worsening, it seemed an odd time to push back his hood. His features were hidden now only by the flurrying snow.

‘Ah! Over here, Ravello!’ called John. ‘A match, if you please!’

Ravello did not seem to hear, though he had heard Peter well enough. ‘Not yourself, did you say? Oh true! How true! You have not been yourself for the past ten leagues.’ Again that laugh, like a rising tide swamping a beach. ‘Not yourself, no. For you have become Hook. Captain Hook. Captain Jas. Hook, scourge of Neverland!’

The name alone sank into their chests like a steel hook. Ravello walked over to the treasure chest, gently picked up one of the cups, held it to his cheek and kissed it, long and tender. He also took the opportunity to give Peter a push with the sole of his boot.

‘Here is the proof,’ he said hugging the trophy. ‘Behold the Treasure—the selfsame Treasure Captain Hook left here all those years ago! Are these boys’ toys? No. Do they smack of the Cock-a-doodle? No! Only Hook, with his iron will—his flinty soul—his steely determination—could find the same Treasure he left here all those years ago! See, then, how I groomed you for the role, boy! See how I readied you for this moment! See how I coached you into wishing the right wishes, and finding the right Treasure! But oh, you made it so easy for me! So ridiculously easy! What a service you did me, Pan, of your own free will! What a loving-kindness you did me the day you put on my second-best jacket!’

‘
HOOK!
’

The circus-master flinched and gave a shudder from nose to tail, as a dog will whose ears get wet. ‘Once, but no longer,’ he said. ‘I am the man who
once was Hook
. Look there, if you would see Hook!’ And he pointed at Peter Pan with the iron hook he wore in place of a right hand. ‘See where he wears the red jacket! See where his hair falls in coils to his shoulders! You of all people should know: if you put on another’s clothes, you become that man!’

Peter’s frozen fingers fumbled for the buttons of the red frock coat (Hook’s second-best frock coat) and slipped his arms out of its sleeves. Despite the icy blast wrapping the mountain in coils of cold as jagged as barbed wire, the jacket dropped to the ground behind him and his flimsy tunic rattled round him in the wind.

Ravello laughed. ‘You may shed the coat, but not the man you are become! No one but an Eton boy can unfasten the old school tie!’ And it was true that however hard Peter wrenched at the white tie round his throat, he could not slip its knot. ‘How willingly you let me comb the imagination out of your head! How readily you let me help you back into the coat each time you shed its scarlet magic. But I see your friends doubt me, Pan! So tell them! Tell them! Tell them how you have dreamed Hook’s dreams—remembered Hook’s memories—felt his boyhood disappointments, given in to his temper!’ He began to load cups and trophies, caps and ribbons into the big pockets of his peculiar garment. ‘You are become James Hook, and here is the proof! These were the things dearest to his heart, and only YOU could wish them here!
That
is why I needed you.’

‘No! No! I am Pan!’ protested Peter, tugging off the shiny leather boots. ‘I shall always be young and there is no one like me! I am the One-and-Only Child!’

The Ravelling Man gave a snort of disdain. ‘Call yourself what you please, mayfly. Your summer is ended, and winter is come.’

The little ones, too cold fully to understand what was happening, stood hugging each other for warmth. ‘Can’t we fly home now, Wendy? Somewhere warm?’ Wendy nodded briskly and went from person to person rubbing handfuls of fairy dust into their hair.

Ravello watched her do it. When she was finished, he asked very sweetly: ‘What? Without your shadows? An impossibility, I’m afraid,
stupidi bambini
. You may have fairy dust. You may have happy thoughts (though somehow I doubt it). But without a shadow
no one can fly
. Why do you suppose I took them?’ Reaching into the sea chest, he lifted out their shadows, all neatly rolled up like window-blinds, stiff-brittle with the cold. The Twins moved towards him, hands outstretched. Teasingly he held the scrolls high above their heads.

‘What, will you hold our own shadows to ransom?’ demanded Pan.

‘Faith no, blowfly. I hold nothing captive. I have a horror of confinement. Ask any of my animals. I shall free your shades to go their way!’ Then Hook opened his good hand and let go the shadows—gave them into the teeth of the biting wind. The silhouettes of six children went dancing out over the abyss, tumbling and colliding and rolling themselves into a single, grubby ball. Each explorer felt a searing pain as each shadow tore into tatters on the gale.

‘Hook, you are a scoundrel and a villain. Only the Devil steals a man’s shadow!’

Ravello gave a dismissive wave of one sleeve. ‘In the unlikely event you live long enough, they will re-grow. With every grief that befalls a man, his shadow increases. Have you not seen how I trail behind me a shadow like a leak from the Quink Ink factory? But then you have not heard my sad story, have you? Oh, you should, you should! I know how you children
love
your stories! So let me tell it. The story of Captain James Hook, yes? A man I was heartily fond of once, I confess it. A man with the strength and vitality to climb any mountain, to hunt down any treasure … Pay good heed.’ And he began then and there to recount his life history.

‘Once upon a time, Jas. Hook was a child. (How is it that children find that so hard to believe—that grown-ups were ever young?) He was a child just like you …
but better!
He excelled! Name any sport, and James Hook mastered it. On the playing fields of Eton College he could have writ his name large enough for the constellations to see from Outer Space! Let Latin go hang. Let mathematics sink. Let foreign languages remain a mystery. Hook was a sportsman! Winning was all in all to him. Let him but see his name on the sporting cups in Eton’s trophy cabinet, and his heart would have filled with joy for ever! Just as you, Pan, gave up everything to be forever young, so I—acch!—
he
—
Hook
—gave up all to be the best, the fastest, the strongest, highest, fittest … By Skylights, but I kept a straight bat!’

The north wind hooted around the peak of Neverpeak. Whenever Ravello fell silent, the wind took over from him, bullying the children.

‘But mothers are mothers. And mothers must pay their dressmakers before paying out for such trifles as
school fees
. So James Hook’s dreams were ended by a vain rustle of taffeta. His mother came on Sports Day to fetch me—
him
—away from College. The other boys were competing for prizes which, in one more day, would have been his—for honours and laurels that would have …’ He broke off, picturing the Headmaster’s hand extended towards him, hearing the cheers of School House … His head rose; his shoulders squared. Then Disappointment struck again, like stomach cramp. ‘Since Hook could not win ’em fair and square, he emptied the trophy cabinet and took every sporting prize away with him. His Treasure. His objects of desire.’

The Explorers gasped. ‘You
stole your school cups?
’

Ravello took out a handkerchief speckled with acid burns and holes, and wiped his nose. ‘Not good form, I admit, but if mothers will be mothers, then boys will be boys. Or pirates, in my case. Thus began James Hook’s life of crime. On the journey home he made up his mind: he would cut loose from home and family, and come to Neverland—this one place in the world where a boy can shape his own destiny! He travelled by airship. Here, in this place, he crashed. In this place he left his Treasure and dragged his carcass down to the Lagoon and a life of greed and pillage. But his heart he left up here, meaning always to return one day and find it. So I would have! I would …
but for Pan
!

‘That weevil in the meat. That fishbone in the gullet. That malaria in the bloodstream! First he took my right hand …
Hook
’s hand, I mean—his bowling hand, his tiller hand, his rowing and fencing and … But let that pass. Then he consigned Hook to the belly of a crocodile! Ha! You think this mountain is a fearful place to die? You should taste life inside a saltwater crocodile! Lightless, airless tomb awash with digestive juices; a run-down clock wedged in the small of the back, and scarce room to turn over. What more terrible a grave! He lived on the eggs of the crocodile—a female. (Did you know she was a female?) Oh, how well acquainted Hook grew with the interior anatomy of the adult female saltwater crocodile!

‘Each day the stomach acid burned him and the stench choked him … But I refused …
Hook refused
to take deadness. Gone were his days of playing the Good Sport; as he lay there and suffered his sea change, Hook thought on nothing but
revenge
!

‘Then and there it started, unbidden, without him lifting a finger. For the bottle of poison he kept always in my breast pocket cracked and leaked and loosed its venom into the crocodile, into the Lagoon, into …’ The sweeping gesture of his outstretched hook took in the whole wintry landscape that surrounded Neverpeak. ‘At last, when the beast died of poisoning, he cut his way out with his hook—out of the creature’s belly—and made him a pair of boots from the remnant. I would not—
dash it!
—
he
would not take deadness, you see!

‘But the man who slithered into the daylight was not Hook. It was a digest of the man. Gone the scarlet coat, the britches, the glossy hair. The pride. They had dissolved all—flesh and hair and coat and colour and soul, in the bile of the crocodile. And sleep!—ah, agony!—the gift of sleep was gone! All that emerged was
this
… this SOFTNESS of a man! A thing like a sponge. A thing like a dead thing. From my panache to my underwear, all was frizzled to wool! The Hookness of Hook was eaten away and all that remained was Ravello, the Ravelling Man! Even my dear old ship presented herself to
you
, Pan, rather than to me! Try as I might, I could not summon her out of the Lagoon—could not
draw
her to me, for there was no magnetism left in me. The iron in my soul all rusted away, you see, as I lay in the briny slops of that crocodillo’s belly!

‘It was some comfort to find how the world, too, had
changed
during my imprisonment: how my little bottle of poison had worked its worst on Neverland; seeping through the Neverwood and the wetlands; cramping the summer months until the very year itself doubled up in pain!

‘Not much was left of Hook, as I say, in this miserable
chinchilla
of a man. Only the dreary nag of longing. Only that oldest, deepest desire to recover his Treasure from the remote place he left it. And there was the biggest joke of all in this most hellish of Divine Comedies.
I … could … not … wish!
I could not wish any more than I could sleep. Only the iron will of James Hook could open that Treasure Chest there and find my … his … our …
dash and blight you!
—the Treasure that lay in there.

‘See then how I found me an
understudy
. A proxy. A substitute. The only one in Neverland whose willpower equalled that of James Hook. Are you not grateful to me? Oh, what I would give to
look
like Hook again, to
swagger
like Hook, to blare and
terrify
like Hook! You should be grateful, Pan! Think how I drove you on, with thirst and flattery—how I bled the Pan out of you and replaced it with temper and tyranny. See how, with a coat and tie and boots, I turned you—scrubby boy that you are—from a mere child into the greatest pirate of them all—into Captain James Hook!’

‘NO!
No
. No. I am Pan!’ said Peter. ‘I will always be young, and no one else in the whole world will
ever
be like me! And you, Hook, will always be my sworn enemy and I shan’t rest until …’

‘Tish. You are all fire and fury, lad.’ Ravello flapped a listless hand as if to be rid of a fly. ‘Now that you have lost, you should cultivate patience. Like me. A spell inside a saltwater amphibian would pacify you; let me commend it to you … But no more rancour. Give me your hand. You have served your purpose, little Captain. I have what I came here for. Let us shake hands and be reconciled.’ And he actually extended his good left hand in its overlong sleeve, to help Peter to his feet. Peter lashed out with his sword, but its saw-teeth simply snagged in the wool of the sleeve, and the hand within gripped his hand tighter than tight. ‘So fierce! What would you have been, I wonder, if you had grown to manhood; if you had not opted for everlasting childhood. Would you have been a pirate like me?’

‘Never!’

‘No? A pilot, then. Or an actor, taking ten curtain calls to the applause of your adoring fans! A man of rank, I don’t doubt it! A hero … Oh, but wait! I know! Of course! An
explorer
! A discoverer of new lands, writing your name in letters of gold on maps of the thirteen continents!’

Within Peter’s hand the oily strands of wool began to separate, to unravel, to unknit. The numbing cold, the dizzying snow-flurries, the words Ravello sprinkled like salt over him, slowed Peter’s thinking. The words had pictures attached to them, like little fluttering gift tags, and he really could almost see what life would be like if he were …

‘What, then, what?’ Hook badgered him, grinning—all the time grinning. ‘Not an explorer. Something easier? Something not so taxing?’

Peter bridled. Did Ravello think he was not up to being an explorer? Absurd! Why, Peter could almost imagine …

‘Don’t answer him!’

A figure stumbled up on to the peak—a young man no one recognized—until they saw the tails of his evening shirt fluttering beneath his outgrown coat.

‘Slightly!’

‘
Don’t answer him, Peter!
’ called Slightly pointing his clarinet at the Ravelling Man.

Wendy ran to Slightly’s side. His bigness made her feel awkward, but she could not help flinging her arms around him. ‘Oh, you aren’t a Roarer after all! You followed us! How cold your poor knees must be! I do wish I had made your coat bigger!’

‘
Don’t answer him, Peter!
’ said Slightly again, never once taking his eyes off Ravello. ‘He asked me the selfsame thing—
What do you want to be when you grow up?
—and the wool unravelled in my hand, and in that moment—in that moment, I started to grow. I have worked it out, you see, Ravelling Man!’

Ravello gave his strange, underwater laugh, though his vexation was plain. ‘Slightly-wiser now, I see.’