Peter Pan in Scarlet (15 page)

The bonfire was a black heap of charcoal. The Twins pulled out two sticks and drew a picture of Ravello on the rock, and threw stones at it. Wendy, who had been watching Peter’s face since the pirate left, pulled out another piece and wrote in big letters across the highest jutting pinnacle of rock:

‘Well?’ she said, standing back proudly, wiping clean her hands on her pirate-flag dress.

‘What?’ said Peter blankly, not able to read it. So Wendy drew a cockerel with its beak open, shrieking and Peter understood and smiled. It was a small smile, a worn-out smile. His fingers were still hooked through the white Eton tie that circled his neck like a hangman’s noose.

John, wanting to draw a picture of his own on the rock, pulled another blackened twig out of the bonfire … and found a fairy sitting on its tip, sooty from head to foot! An ink-blot of a fairy.

‘Fireflyer! You’re alive!’

‘
Naturally
,’ said the ink-blot. They crowded eagerly round, and Tootles made a little bath out of a cup of cool tea.

But as the fairy sank from sight, turning the tea black with soot, another voice behind them said, ‘
Don’t believe a word he says. He is such a liar, that boy!
’ And a similarly filthy Tinker Bell clambered out of the bonfire and roughly hauled Fireflyer out of the teacup. ‘
Ladies first
,’ she said, and got in. They all had to close their eyes while she washed the soot off.

‘So fairies are fireproof,’ said John, who had a scientist’s curiosity about these things.

‘
Only on Wednesdays
,’ said Fireflyer categorically.

‘I think it’s Friday,’ said Curly.

‘
Oh dear
.
Then I must be dead
,’ said Fireflyer.

After that Tinker Bell and Fireflyer would only speak to each other, because they were so much in love. They did not seem to hear anything that was said to them; took no interest in the gathering up of litter and treasure, the raising of the rainbow banner, the scanning of the island through Hook’s brass telescope.

‘Come, then, if you are coming!’ called Peter. But the fairies ignored him.

‘People die if fairies ignore them!’ said Slightly teasingly. But the two fairy lovers only leapt into the treasure chest and pulled shut the lid with a deafening slam. When Curly opened it again, there was nothing and no one inside. Not even any cold sago pudding.

Going Down should have been easy. The cold was not so fierce. The mountain was not so slippery. Lower down, the air was not so thin. Here and there they found wreckage from the sea chest: a pram wheel, a pair of sugar tongs, an empty matchbox. And yet with each slope and cliff-face and danger they overcame, Peter grew paler and slower and wearier. He wrenched at the Eton cravat until his neck was a livid red. He tripped and stumbled and fell, and each time took longer to get back on his feet.

‘Let’s pitch camp here, Captain,’ said Slightly when they reached a grassy ledge, but found he was still banished and in Nowhereland, because Peter would not speak to him. The others sat down then and there, exhausted, but Peter pressed on, head down, shoulders rounded, hands pressed to his ribcage.

‘I don’t go about with grown-ups,’ he muttered. ‘Grown-ups can’t be trusted.’ But the voice was more defeated than defiant. Then he leaned against the cliff and coughed and coughed until his legs pleated under him, coughed and coughed until he was kneeling on the ground, coughed and coughed until his forehead was on the grass, coughed and coughed until he slumped over sideways … and disappeared entirely over the brink of the ledge.

Further down the mountain, Captain Jas. Hook—or Ravello if you prefer—sat with his long legs encircling a bird’s nest, holing one egg at a time with his hook and sucking out the contents. For the first time in his life, he was finding it hard not to whistle for sheer joy (though everyone knows whistling is damnably unlucky).

He picked a blade of grass, and pinning it between two fingers of his good hand blew a single quacking note. Eddies of movement stirred the bracken on the plain below him. Ravello smiled to see it.

Then, unannounced, a boy came slithering down the escarpment behind him and all but dislodged him from his perch. Thinking he was under attack, Hook jumped to his feet, a bird’s egg still impaled on his hook. But the boy only jack-knifed around his ankles and lay like a dead thing, eyelids half open.

Before Hook had a chance to recognize Peter and raise a hook to impale him like an eggshell, lots more children came sliding down the cliff, showering him with earth and pebbles, and all yelling like dervishes. ‘
Leave him be!
’

‘
Let him go!
’

‘
Don’t touch him!
’

‘
He must not be touched!
’

‘I’ll nurse you, Peter!’ cried Tootles and ran to Peter’s side. ‘I’ll take care of you!’

John rushed at Hook, sword drawn. ‘This is your doing, you blaggard!’

‘I—’ the pirate began, too startled for retaliation or glee.

The Explorers sank to their knees round their Leader. ‘Maybe he has new-moanier,’ Tootles said, ‘from wearing only his shirt in the blizzard.’

Tootles tried to cover Peter over with the scarlet frock coat, but Wendy gave a cry of horror and ran and pulled it off again, throwing it at Hook. ‘You’ve killed him, haven’t you!’ she yelled.

‘I?’ said Hook.

Tootles felt his forehead, looked for a pulse, stroked his hair, and laid her head on his chest to listen for a heartbeat. Then she sat back with a sob, and declared …

‘Peter is Dead!’

A quiver went through Neverland then that made the horizon buckle and the reflections climb out of every pool and lake and lagoon. The League of Pan covered him with the rainbow banner. In the dreadful silence that followed, the accusations stirred again.

‘He died of getting so cold,’ said Second Twin.

‘Sooner than be like you!’ said John, and jabbed the tip of the swordfish blade in Hook’s face.

‘No! It was that tie round his throat. It choked the life out of him!’ said Wendy.

‘
Your
tie!’ snarled John and jabbed the blade-tip at Hook’s woolly throat.

‘Or else you made him think what he would be when he grew up, and it broke his heart!’ said Slightly.

‘All down to
you
,’ said John, jabbing Hook in the chest.

‘Or maybe he hated being Hook so much that he upped and died on purpose!’ suggested First Twin.

‘Happy now?’ said John and jabbed Hook in the belt buckle.

‘Or maybe Hook poisoned him with the salt,’ said Curly, ‘or the comb or the boot polish or the tea or the berries or … or …’

‘… like he poisoned all Neverland!’ growled John.

Hook smartly side-stepped to avoid John’s next sword thrust. ‘He is not yet dead, you fools,’ he said between gritted teeth, and pointed at the small body on the ground.

The ripple was no bigger than the surface of a river when a pike swims by, but the rainbow banner did ripple from some movement beneath it.

‘No thanks to you!’ said John and jabbed again.

Hook gave an exasperated gasp, stamped on the blade with one crocodile-skin boot and snapped it in twelve places. ‘I did not
poison
him or
strangle
him or
cozen
him out of his life!’ said Hook, writhing with irritation. ‘Did I not preserve him through danger and hardship? Did I not pluck him from certain death at the ice-bridge? Not out of fondest affection, I confess, but I did so. Do you not understand? I
needed
the brat! For my grand plan! Make him ill? I was relying on him to recover my Treasure! He was more Hook than I am: do you think I would have poisoned my own likeness? Were you not there when I abandoned you to the mercies of the Island? When I left it for land and weather to kill you all? If ever I raise a hand to finish Peter Pan it will be this hand!’

And he brandished his hook, first in John’s face and then over the boy Pan. When he aimed a downward slash at Peter’s throat, the children screamed, thinking they were witnessing cold-blooded murder, and Slightly called Hook ‘a coward and a monster’. But the hook caught only the fabric of the white tie round Peter’s neck and hauled the boy within reach of Hook’s good hand.

In the time it takes to click two fingers, the white knot was untied and Peter fell back, cracking his head on the ground but otherwise unmurdered. ‘Now are you satisfied, madam?’ said Hook to Wendy, and slumped down again, his back to the group.

Tootles knelt and whispered in Peter’s ear. ‘Are we playing doctors and nurses, Peter? Oh, please say we are! I’m your nurse and you’re the patient and you have to get better and be everso thankful.’ But the boy on the ground did not stir. When she trickled pretend medicine in at his lips, it trickled out again at the corner of his mouth. His skin was clammy and the breath rasped in his throat. Tootles whispered, ‘You’re not playing this game right, Peter. Really you’re not.’

First Twin bundled up the discarded red coat and hugged it to him, as if it were Peter himself.

Thus the band of Explorers formed a circle once more, on the slopes of Neverpeak, not blasted this time by wind and snow but by the terrible possibility that the boy on the ground was dying, might still die, and they had no idea why, or how to prevent it.

There were two moons that night. Alongside the midnight moon, dark-eyed with worry, hung her quavering reflection, risen from the sea in need of comforting company. Their two anxious white faces gazed down at the slopes of Neverpeak, offering bandages of moonbeam.

Remembering Peter’s words, they sent Hook to Nowhereland, refusing to speak a word to him, pretending he no longer existed. But there he remained, bunched up on himself, eyes glimmering in the dark, wide awake as usual. Was it to witness the death of his sworn enemy, or because it was too dark to descend the mountain, or simply because he liked to be contrary?

‘Go away,’ John said. ‘You have been banished. It’s in the rules. You have to go.’

‘Whose rules?’ said Hook. ‘Go yourselves. I was here first.’

‘What, are you waiting for Peter to die?’ said Wendy.

‘Might be.’

‘Only a bad sport breaks the rules,’ John brooded sulkily, and vowed not to speak another word to the man—until a question entered his head that wanted answering. ‘… Anyway, I don’t believe what you said. I thought you were a pirate before you came here, not a schoolboy. “Bosun to Blackbeard: blood-thirstiest pirate ever to sail the seven seas.” That’s what I heard!’

‘Huh! Lies. A slur put about by my enemies. I have never served
under
any man! Why would Hook serve a styleless ship’s rat who could not count past five. I doubt Blackbeard could
spell
Eton, let alone wear the old school tie. I would not have suffered him aboard a ship of mine to chip paint.’

‘And where are your scurvy pirate cronies now?’ asked John, trying to sound haughty and disdainful, though secretly he just wanted to know. (John would have liked to be a pirate but for the robbing and killing part of it.)

‘I sent them off to do their bit in the War,’ said Hook. ‘As every man should. They sent me postcards first off. From Belgium and France. Then they forgot, I suppose. The postcards stopped. I imagine they were having too good a time. I imagine they were too busy living it up on booty and the spoils of war. Spending their loot on cake and beautiful French women. Unwilling to return to the drudgery of life aboard the
Jolly Roger
.’

Wendy nodded. ‘I like to imagine that as well,’ she said, ‘every time I think about my brother Michael.’ Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, during which they understood each other perfectly.

‘I see
you
didn’t go to the War, though,’ said John sarcastically.

The pirate glared at him murderously and said in a roaring whisper as low and cold as a subterranean river, ‘Thanks to that one there, I was
UNFIT FOR DUTY
!’

‘Hush!’ said Nurse Tootles in a flutter of fright. ‘We should let Peter sleep. Sleep is good for people. Sleep does wonders.’

Hook, who had not slept for twenty years, gave a low and bitter laugh and turned his back on them, hunching his wool around him.

Suddenly Curly was up on his feet. ‘What Peter needs is a doctor!’ he declared desperately. ‘A real doctor!’

Everyone looked out from their mountain perch at the wilderness waste and wild vastnesses of Neverland and wondered how a doctor was to be conjured from such shaggy chaos. Doctors are spawned in ponds of antiseptic and on plains of clean linoleum or starched sheets. Neverland is not their natural habitat. And yet Curly already knew where one was to be found; it showed in the set of his jaw. Taking one deep breath, he crossed to where the pirate sat slumped under his fleece. ‘Ask me,’ he said, sinking the fingers of both hands in Ravello’s sleeve. ‘Ask me now.’

Slightly sprang up. ‘No, Curly, don’t!’

‘Ask me, Ravello.’

There was a mooing confusion of worry and questions from the others who did not understand. Hook scowled at Curly and tried to ease himself free, but Curly hung on, fierce as a terrier. ‘Ask me, Hook. Ask me what I want to be when I grow up.’

‘But, Curly!’ protested Slightly, trying to pull him away. ‘Think what you are doing! Do you want to be like me—grown-up like me? Never able to go home? There’s nothing left for me but to be a Roarer. Do you want to be a Roarer, Curly?’

Curly swallowed hard and began to tug on the tangle of greasy wool that was both sleeve and arm of the pirate. Ravello’s face contorted with pain, and he said, ‘Listen to your friend, Master Curly. If the cock-a-doodle lives, do you really think he will thank you? He will turn you out, as he turned out all the rest. He won’t suffer grown-ups in his Company.’ The man’s eyes were liquid with midnight, and where there should have been stars reflected in them there were flying sparks and shards of eggshell. ‘The brat is dying, Mr Curly. Nothing can save Pan now. Ah, but who am I to dissuade you from your chosen fate? So tell me, Master Curly: what do you want to be when you—’

‘
A doctor!
’ Curly interrupted, sinking in his fingers almost to the bone of Hook’s arm. So steeped was the fabric in poison that it cancelled out the youthful magic of Neverland and let Time soak in through the pores of Curly’s tender skin. As his fists filled up with unravelling wool, he felt the squibs and sparklers fizzle out in his head, to be replaced with the dull gleam of good sense and cleverness. His nose could smell chloroform and liniment. White coats paraded through his imagination like starched ghosts. His pockets rattled with hypodermics, thermometers, and spatulas. Curly wished so hard to be a doctor that he grew taller, then and there, sloughing his blanket coat and even his wealth of curly hair. The growing pains were fearsome, but he kept tight hold of Ravello.

And the bigger he grew the more he remembered of being a doctor—after all, he had been one before—back in Fotheringdene, before the quest to Neverpeak. He remembered his studies now, at medicine school, his days in Fotheringdene County Hospital. And all this while his hands filled with the wool that was both Ravello’s arm and Ravello’s clothing. He laid bare the steel hook and the scars inflicted by the crocodile. Ravello rose to his feet with a bloodcurdling yell, but found himself no taller than Doctor Curly Darling MD, MRCS.

‘I’m sorry if I hurt you, sir,’ said Curly (now that he was a doctor, he regretted causing pain to anyone) and emptied his hands of the crinkled wool, which spilled to the ground around the pirate’s crocodile-skin boots. Instinctively the children moved away from Curly. (Doctors are almost as scary as pirates, what with their cold hands and dangerous handwriting. And they only ever visit when you are feeling too ill to make friends.)

Pulling a stethoscope from his pocket, Doctor Curly knelt down beside Peter and listened to the fluttering beat of his heart. It was the sound of Fairyland at war with itself. It was the sound of Eternal Youth dying, dying, dying.

But he clearly heard something else as well. Breaking the tip off his own swordfish blade (how small it seemed now in his big, cold hands) Curly cut a hole just over Peter’s heart and, using the sugar tongs, drew out a length of something grey and wispy and flecked with soot. ‘I think that this may be the source of the trouble,’ he said.

Back in the house in Cadogan Square, in sneezing the last sneeze of her cold, Wendy had reached out for a handkerchief and tucked it into her sleeve—a grown woman’s handkerchief tucked into the sleeve of a girl’s sundress. And inside that handkerchief, unknown to her,
a strand of
London fog!

In the Neverwood, when Peter had mopped the blood from his face using her handkerchief, he had breathed in that same strand, and it had wound itself about his heart, tightening its grip day by day.

Not the burning of the Neverwood, nor shipwreck, nor the touch of witches, nor the crushing weight of hostile fairies had got the better of Peter Pan; not hunger nor cold; not Ravello’s salt, nor his words of temptation were killing Peter; not even Hook’s little bottle of poison—which had blighted all Neverland—had brought Peter Pan to the edge of death. Only a strand of London fog.

Dr Curly made hard work of getting to his feet, as only grown-ups can. ‘Come, Slightly. Time for us to go,’ he said. And cutting his own door in the air with his surgeon’s lancet, he stepped through it and into banishment.

‘Where are you going?’ said Hook, still clutching an arm unravelled to the bone.

‘I broke the Rule and grew,’ said Curly peaceably. ‘And
unlike some people
, I know how to play by the Rules. I prescribe sleep for that arm, Ravello. As Nurse Tootles says, Sleep is a great healer. Sleep and Time.’ And with that he left, drawing Slightly away, skidding noisily and clumsily down the mountainside by the light of two moons.

With a deep sigh and then with a deeper intake of breath, Peter Pan sat up. Putting one small hand to his chest, he felt the life pouncing through his bloodstream, put back his head and crowed:

Peter Pan restored to health was a wonderful sight. He could turn cartwheels, walk on his hands, and leap from ledge to ledge as nimbly as a mountain goat. In fact (being no longer a pirate or superstitious about whistling) he whistled up all the chamois goats that lived locally, and mounted his friends on their backs, so that they fairly cantered down the slopes and precipices of Neverpeak towards the dismal plain below. Even Humpty Dumpty jumping off his wall never had so much fun. Ravello was left far behind, maimed, unthought-of, and as slow-moving as a sloth by comparison with the League of Pan.

Nobody would have mistaken Peter for any dandified pirate captain now. The glossy ringlets Ravello had combed into place were soon tangled and matted, and stood up in wild confusion, lightening in the sunshine. Butterflies clamoured round the bright colours of his tunic and on their wings brought pollen that made him sneeze.

‘Every time I sneeze,’ he bragged, ‘astrologers in China spot a new planet coloured like a soap bubble!’ He went to blow his nose, and when Wendy snatched the handkerchief out of his hand, simply laughed and wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve instead. Then he made up a rude song about baboons, and they sang it at the top of their voices all the way down to the monkey-puzzle trees.

Not Wendy, though. She did not sing. She clutched the handkerchief between her two hands and began to weep inconsolably. The others stopped singing—‘
bumti-boo-ba-
boo-oo-boons
!’—to stare at her. ‘It was all my fault!’ she wailed. ‘I might have killed Peter, and all for a silly sneeze!’

But Peter did not trouble with ‘what-ifs’ or ‘might-have-beens’. He did not even mind about having no treasure to show for the quest to Neverpeak; the hunt for treasure is always more fun than the finding of it. After all, what could he have wished for, having what he had already: friends and freedom and adventure and youth? Wendy, though, washed out the handkerchief in a little stream of icy water from the melting glacier (for fear any fog remained), then pinned it to her coat to dry.

And because it had belonged once to a grown-up Wendy Darling, she began to remember things. She remembered Cadogan Square and a little girl called Jane, remembered grocery bills and washdays, committee work and a husband, appointments at the dentist, and putting the bins out on Tuesdays. Just as dreams of Neverland had disturbed her peace of mind while she was in London, so dreams of home began to hover around her now, as the butterflies hovered around Peter.

Butterflies and wasps!

Climbing down the monkey-puzzle trees was no more pleasant than before. The insects stung, the sap stuck their fingers and knees together, the spines pricked, and the twigs broke under their weight. Suddenly, to the sound of banshee wailing and hooting and shrieking and yelling, the trees began to toss and flex and lash about, sending wasp’s nests and pinecones tumbling. The children clung on for as long as they could, then Peter sprang rashly out into empty air and everyone else lost their grip and dropped through the trees.

The lower branches showed no interest in catching them—only the nets stretched wide by the Roarers who had been lying in ambush for days.