Peter Pan in Scarlet (18 page)

They stood once more on high ground, the sea a distant flicker and the grass balding away to rock beneath their feet. The Maze of Regrets, with its striped strata and crests as sharp as elbows, lay directly ahead. It leaked the sound of sorrow and a strange mixture of old perfumes.

‘This is dangerous,’ said Peter Pan.

Wendy laid a hand on his sleeve, but he shook it off, saying, ‘I must not be touched.’

‘But Slightly and Curly have to go home,’ said Wendy for the fiftieth time. ‘They are too big to live at Fort Pan, and they are just not the stuff of Roarers—or pirates—or redskins.’

And here was their Way Out, their Emergency Exit from Neverland: the Maze. In this place, the mothers of Lost Boys passed their years searching for the babies they had once lost. The carelessness of nursery maids could not be blamed in every case. (Lots of parents cannot afford nursery maids.) Even with parents in charge, babies go missing—fall out of prams, run away with the bath water, or get put out instead of the cat. Mistakes happen in the best regulated households.

When they do, the result is always the same. Somewhere, a mother packs herself a bag, pushes the empty pram to the local docks—Grimsby or Marseilles or Valparaiso—and sets sail. Keeping the red buoys to her prow and the green buoys to her stern, she goes in search of her lost buoy … boy, in a place worn smooth by millions of tears. Without the magic to advance further into Neverland, she ends up here, in the Maze of Regrets, living from day to day on egg-and-cress sandwiches and the hope that her little boy will one day come whistling round the next corner in the Maze.

The Roarers, when they spilled unwittingly into the Maze, had been seized on like bargains in a sale. Wild-haired women with wilder eyes had grabbed them and searched their faces for family features, their bodies for birthmarks. Youths who had tried never even to brush against one another had been stroked and kissed and hugged—washed with tears and wiped clean with lace handkerchiefs. What Slightly and Curly had witnessed was not a massacre. It was a reunion!

Among the Roarers, a dozen mothers had found what they were looking for, and had left Neverland with their sulking, hulking sons. Even as they climbed back into their sea-going perambulators at Grief Reef, the mothers had started to polish up manners and brush down clothes.

You see, any mother who searches out her Lost Boy can find her way home unerringly. The voyage might be long and dangerous, and tankers and luxury liners sometimes run them down in the sea lanes, but their homing instinct is as strong as that of Canada geese or messenger pigeons. Home signals to them like a flashing beacon on a distant clifftop. They are almost bound to get there.

Now it was the turn of Slightly and Curly to enter the Maze, and no terror that had faced them on their quest to Neverpeak compared with the quaking fright they felt now. Being grown-ups—Slightly a youth of eighteen, Curly a fully-fledged doctor—they could not let their fright show, of course, but smoothed their hair and straightened their collars and polished their shoes against the backs of their trouser-legs. (That was hard for Slightly since he was barefoot and had no trousers. But at least his evening shirt fitted; unlike the pullover that Smee had knitted for Curly during the journey from the Neverwood.)

‘But we already
have
a mother!’ Slightly protested yet again. ‘Mrs Darling adopted us!’

‘Yes, dear, but even
before
Mother adopted you, you and all the Lost Boys had mothers of your own—somewhere.’

‘Mine won’t be here,’ said Curly dismally. ‘She won’t have come looking—not all this way.’

‘She will,’ said Wendy, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the jaw.

‘And even if she don’t,’ said Tootles off-handedly, ‘one of those women will probably think you’re hers and take you home.’

‘Well then,’ said Curly.

‘This is it, then,’ said Slightly.

‘Till London,’ said John.

‘Till London,’ said Curly.

‘Safe journey,’ said Wendy. ‘Give our love to Nibs.’

‘Don’t drown,’ said Tootles, and shed a tear or two.

Peter turned his back and would not shake hands. He could not understand why anyone wanted to leave Neverland. He had offered to try and
pretend
Slightly and Curly back to a tolerable size but they had chosen to come here instead. Now Peter could not wait to get back to the Neverwood. Games were calling. Quests were piling up. There was a fort to be built. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Go, if you are going.’

Curly and Slightly-more would also have liked to help build Fort Pan. But the thought of homes and wives and work and Nibs and London buses was working its magic on both young men. They squared their shoulders and walked down to the Maze. Curly turned back only once: ‘I was so young when I got Lost. How will Mummy know me?’ he said, and for a moment he looked a littler boy than anyone there.

‘She will,’ said Wendy. ‘She just will.’

Slightly put his clarinet to his lips and began to play. Curly led the way. Their anxious friends drifted downhill behind them, to watch what became of them.

Women harassed by years of woe and worry lifted their heads at the sound of music. They blinked in confusion at the sight of a youth and a grown man, for they had thought this a place of children, and children were what filled their every thought. They did not fall on Curly, for none could imagine … none had been expecting … anyone like this. He shook hands. The women tucked away stray wisps of hair; some even bobbed a curtsy. Soothed by the music and taken by surprise, they allowed Curly to speak, and the watching children could see him explaining, describing, pointing back the way he had come.

Then he must have mentioned his own name, for through the growing throng of mothers came a woman, lunging like a horse in deep water, stretching and ducking to catch a glimpse, pushing her way through. Plaits that for thirty years had stayed neatly coiled came flying loose and she collided with Curly head-on. The League of Pan shut their eyes … and when they opened them again, Curly was helping his mother to refasten her hair.

Slightly looked up from a particularly difficult key change on the clarinet to find a thin woman with long thin fingers and a thin, artistic face staring at him. ‘You didn’t take this, my darling,’ she said. ‘When you went missing.’ And she produced a baby’s rattle with bells at either end.

Then and there, Slightly’s tunes—the ones in his head, the ones in his clarinet, and the ones in his heart—all came back to doh.

That was when the Twins strayed a little too close to the Maze and heard someone calling: ‘
Marmaduke? Binky?
’

Now this may come as a shock to you if you thought that the two brothers really were named First Twin and Second Twin at birth. They weren’t. True, they were lost at such an early age that their names were no more than a memory forgotten. But when their mother—hands still clarty with pastry, hair still dusty with flour—came running and staring and blinking and crying and laughing and breaking into a run—‘
Marmaduke? Binky?
’—they remembered well enough.

Marmaduke and Binky. Ah well. Everyone makes mistakes. Luckily, the Twins took to the names as no one else could, and thought themselves the luckiest boys in the world. For now they had
two
mothers! Mrs Darling would always be the real one, because she had taken them in when they were Lost Boys, and had raised them and let them lick the mixing bowl and shampoo the dog and wear warpaint in bed and ride upstairs on buses … But here was a NEW mother from longer ago—the one who had given them the best two names in the world.

Wendy turned to Tootles. ‘You could go home this way, too, you know, Princess?’

Tootles shook her head very decidedly. ‘I’m not going ever!’ she said. ‘I’m going to stay here for always and play weddings with Peter!’

A fox in a chicken coop could not have caused more of a stir. Wendy looked at Peter, and Peter looked at Wendy, and there was real panic in his eyes.

‘Tootles! You know very well you have a family waiting for you back in Grimswater,’ said John. But sadly Tootles had forgotten all about Grimswater or The Gentlemen’s Club or being a judge in the High Courts.

‘I’ll be Tootles Pan, and Peter can pick flowers for me and lift up his feet when I am sweeping, and I’ll say to the little ones, “Just you wait till your father comes home!”’

For some reason—I couldn’t say why—Wendy chose that exact moment to run into the Maze calling, ‘
Tootles!
There’s a Tootles here! Has anyone lost a Tootles?
’

A man with a face the colour of morocco leather in a curly lawyer’s wig and with a huge book under one arm stepped out from behind a rock. He wagged a finger at her sternly. ‘Do not be absurd, young lady!’ he said, looking Wendy up and down. ‘Are you trying to pass yourself off as my boy Tootles? Absurd! Poppycock!’ But just as he was opening his book to look up which law Wendy had broken, he caught sight of Princess Tootles, tying the ribbons of her satin ballet shoes and practising her plié. ‘Aha! There you are, son,’ he said gruffly, without a moment’s doubt. ‘And about time, too!’ Then, in an outburst of uncontrollable delight, he took off his judge’s wig, threw it high in the air and danced a little jig on the spot.

‘Fathers, too,’ murmured Smee. ‘Who’d’ve thought it.’

Sitting astride his father’s shoulders and wearing his father’s wig, Tootles rode off without a backward glance. Wendy looked at Peter, and Peter looked at Wendy, and there was a big ‘THANK YOU’ written in his eyes.

‘Can we go, too, sis?’ asked John, infected by all the happiness. It was an odd infection—it made the pouches under his chin ache, like mumps. He began to look this way and that in search of a mother who would choose him.

Wendy’s heart too, was cram-full with the longing to get home and see her own daughter Jane. But she knew this was not
her
Emergency Exit, not
her
Way Out of Neverland. ‘There is no one here for us, John. We were never Lost, remember? We flew to Neverland of our own choosing—and home again before Mother could set sail to come looking.’ But she could see John still looking about, still wondering: how life would have been with another mother; a different mother; that one there with the blonde hair or that one there with the red. ‘We shall just stay here, John, until our shadows grow back … and the fairies stop being silly and we can ask them for fairy dust … and Fort Pan is built.’

‘Good,’ said Peter decidedly. ‘I don’t mind
you
. You play proper games.’

‘Nothing to stop you a-coming with me!’ said Smee, rolling into the conversation on his sailor’s bandy legs. ‘I’m in need of a crew for the voyage home! Reckon I’ll pay a visit to the old country, now I’ve got me a mother aboard for luck.’ Small as he was, Smee had managed to find someone even smaller to clutch the crook of his arm: a tiny old lady with snow-white hair and an angelic smile.

Wendy clapped her hands with joy. ‘Oh, how wonderful! This is
your
mother, Smee?’

Smee spoke from behind his hand. ‘Nah. I nicked her. But her eyes aren’t up to much, so she’ll never notice. And she seems glad to have me. So, who else is coming, eh? Look lively! All aboard the good ship
Dirty Duck
, bound for the Serpentine by way of Kirriemuir!’

They lashed together all the prams languishing on the rocks of Grief Reef, making a huge raft. Like eggs into an egg-tray, everyone heading home squeezed themselves into the hollow compartments. Even Puppy. They all fitted.

Finding somewhere for all the happiness was the only problem.

Wendy was the last left on shore. ‘
Come with us, Peter!
’ she cried suddenly, seizing him by the hand. ‘Oh,
do
come with us! I know where there are fairies to be found! And when your shadow grows back you can fly back here and …’

But Peter snatched his hand away. ‘I don’t go about with grown people,’ he said, turning his back on the good ship
Dirty Duck
.

Wendy took the other hand and led him aside. ‘I have a whisper for you,’ she said.

‘Is that like a thimble?’

It was, in a way. It made Peter’s hair bristle and his neck tickle and he wanted—and didn’t want—to snatch his head away as Wendy whispered in his ear. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said.

‘You don’t want to play
Weddings
?’ squeaked Peter in open panic.

Wendy pulled a face. ‘Peter, just suppose
your
mother …’

Peter’s face shut like curtains at a window. ‘No.’

‘Oh, but, Peter! Suppose she is just like all these: still hoping to see you again one day! Maybe she even …’

But Peter’s delicate mouth set in a hard line and he put his fingers in his ears. Once upon a time he had flown home only to find the window of his bedroom shut and barred, another boy asleep in his bed. He refused to hear anything good about mothers.

The prams, freed from the rocks, felt the far distant pull of Lodestone Rock and the
Dirty Duck
began moving out to sea. John and Curly and Slightly and Smee all shouted for Wendy to ‘
Come—come aboard quickly! Don’t get left behind!
’