The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

by Neil Gaiman

  Then she said, “I wish you hadn’t let go of my hand. But still, you’re all right, aren’t you? Nothing went wrong. No damage done.”

  I said, “I’m fine. Not to worry. I’m a brave soldier.” That was what my grandfather always said. Then I repeated what she had said, “No damage done.”

  She smiled at me, a bright, relieved smile, and I hoped I had said the right thing.

  V.

  That evening my sister sat on her bed, brushing her hair over and over. She brushed it a hundred times every night, and counted each brush stroke. I did not know why.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Looking at my foot,” I told her.

  I was staring at the sole of my right foot. There was a pink line across the center of the sole, from the ball of the foot almost to the heel, where I had stepped on a broken glass as a toddler. I remember waking up in my cot, the morning after it happened, looking at the black stitches that held the edges of the cut together. It was my earliest memory. I was used to the pink scar. The little hole beside it, in the arch of my foot, was new. It was where the sudden sharp pain had been, although it did not hurt. It was just a hole.

  I prodded it with my forefinger, and it seemed to me that something inside the hole retreated.

  My sister had stopped brushing her hair and was watching me curiously. I got up, walked out of the bedroom, down the corridor, to the bathroom at the end of the hall.

  I do not know why I did not ask an adult about it. I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort. That was the year I dug out a wart from my knee with a penknife, discovering how deeply I could cut before it hurt, and what the roots of a wart looked like.

  In the bathroom cupboard, behind the mirror, was a pair of stainless steel tweezers, the kind with pointed sharp tips, for pulling out wooden splinters, and a box of sticking plasters. I sat on the metal side of the white bathtub and examined the hole in my foot. It was a simple, small round hole, smooth-edged. I could not see how deeply it went, because something was in the way. Something was blocking it. Something that seemed to retreat, as the light touched it.

  I held my tweezers, and I watched. Nothing happened. Nothing changed.

  I put the forefinger of my left hand over the hole, gently, blocking the light. Then I put the tip of the tweezers beside the hole and I waited. I counted to a hundred—inspired, perhaps, by my sister’s hair-brushing. Then I pulled my finger away and stabbed in with the tweezers.

  I caught the head of the worm, if that was what it was, by the tip, between the metal prongs, and I squeezed it, and I pulled.

  Have you ever tried to pull a worm from a hole? You know how hard they can hold on? The way they use their whole bodies to grip the sides of the hole? I pulled perhaps an inch of this worm—pink and gray, streaked, like something infected—out of the hole in my foot, and then felt it stop. I could feel it, inside my flesh, making itself rigid, unpullable. I was not scared by this. It was obviously just something that happened to people, like when the neighbor’s cat, Misty, had worms. I had a worm in my foot, and I was removing the worm.

  I twisted the tweezers, thinking, I suspect, of spaghetti on a fork, winding the worm around the tweezers. It tried to pull back, but I turned it, a little at a time, until I could definitely pull no further.

  I could feel, inside me, the sticky plastic way that it tried to hold on, like a strip of pure muscle. I leaned over, as far as I could, reached out my left hand and turned on the bath’s hot-water tap, the one with the red dot in the center, and I let it run. The water ran for three, four minutes out of the tap and down the plug hole before it began to steam.

  When the water was steaming, I extended my foot and my right arm, maintaining pressure on the tweezers and on the inch of the creature that I had wound out of my body. Then I put the place where the tweezers were under the hot tap. The water splashed my foot, but my soles were barefoot-hardened, and I scarcely minded. The water that touched my fingers scalded them, but I was prepared for the heat. The worm wasn’t. I felt it flex inside me, trying to pull back from the scalding water, felt it loosen its grip on the inside of my foot. I turned the tweezers, triumphantly, like picking the best scab in the world, as the creature began to come out of me, putting up less and less resistance.

  I pulled at it, steadily, and as it went under the hot water it slackened, until the end. It was almost all out of me—I could feel it—but I was too confident, too triumphant, and impatient, and I tugged too quickly, too hard, and the worm came off in my hand. The end of it that came out of me was oozing and broken, as if it had snapped off.

  Still, if the creature had left anything behind in my foot, it was tiny.

  I examined the worm. It was dark gray and light gray, streaked with pink, and segmented, like a normal earthworm. Now it was out of the hot water, it seemed to be recovering. It wriggled, and the body that had been wrapped around the tweezers now dangled, writhing, although it hung from the head (Was it its head? How could I tell?) where I had pinched it.

  I did not want to kill it—I did not kill animals, not if I could help it—but I had to get rid of it. It was dangerous. I had no doubt of that.

  I held the worm above the bath’s plug hole, where it wriggled, under the scalding water. Then I let it go, and watched it vanish down the drain. I let the water run for a while, and I washed off the tweezers. Finally I put a small sticking plaster over the hole in the sole of my foot, and put the plug in the bath, to prevent the worm from climbing back up the open plug hole, before I turned off the tap. I did not know if it was dead, but I did not think you came back from the drain.

  I put the tweezers back where I had got them from, behind the bathroom mirror, then I closed the mirror and stared at myself.

  I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?

  I went back to the bedroom. It was my night to have the door to the hallway open, and I waited until my sister was asleep, and wouldn’t tell on me, and then, in the dim light from the hall, I read a Secret Seven mystery until I fell asleep.

  VI.

  An admission about myself: as a very small boy, perhaps three or four years old, I could be a monster. “You were a little momzer,” several aunts told me, on different occasions, once I had safely reached adulthood and my dreadful infant deeds could be recalled with wry amusement. But I do not actually remember being a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.

  Small children believe themselves to be gods, or some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes along with their way of seeing things.

  But I was no longer a small boy. I was seven. I had been fearless, but now I was such a frightened child.

  The incident of the worm in my foot did not scare me. I did not talk about it. I wondered, though, the next day, whether people often got foot-worms, or whether it was something that had only ever happened to me, in the orange-sky place on the edge of the Hempstocks’ farm.

  I peeled off the plaster on the sole of my foot when I awoke, and was relieved to see that the hole had begun to close up. There was a pink place where it had been, like a blood blister, but nothing more.

  I went down to breakfast. My mother looked happy. She said, “Good news, darling. I’ve got a job. They need an optometrist at Dicksons Opticians, and they want me to start this afternoon. I’ll be working four days a week.”

  I did not mind. I would be fine on my own.

  “And I’ve got more good news. We have someone coming to look after you children while I’m away. Her name is Ursula. She’ll be sleeping in your old bedroom, at the top of the stairs. She’ll be a sort of housekeeper. She’ll make sure you children are fed, and she’ll clean the house—Mrs. Wollery is having trouble with her hip, and she says it will
be a few weeks before she can come back. It will be such a load off my mind to have someone here, if Daddy and I are both working.”

  “You don’t have the money,” I said. “You said you didn’t have any money.”

  “That’s why I’m taking the optometrist job,” she said. “And Ursula’s looking after you for room and board. She needs to live locally for a few months. She phoned this morning. Her references are excellent.”

  I hoped that she would be nice. The previous housekeeper, Gertruda, six months earlier, had not been nice: she had enjoyed playing practical jokes on my sister and me. She would short-sheet the beds, for example, which left us baffled. Eventually we had marched outside the house with placards saying “We hate Gertruda” and “We do not like Gertruda’s cooking,” and put tiny frogs in her bed, and she had gone back to Sweden.

  I took a book and went out into the garden.

  It was a warm spring day, and sunny, and I climbed up a rope ladder to the lowest branch of the big beech tree, sat on it, and read my book. I was not scared of anything, when I read my book: I was far away, in ancient Egypt, learning about Hathor, and how she had stalked Egypt in the form of a lioness, and she had killed so many people that the sands of Egypt turned red, and how they had only defeated her by mixing beer and honey and sleeping draughts, and dying this concoction red, so she thought it was blood, and she drank it, and fell asleep. Ra, the father of the gods, made her the goddess of love after that, so the wounds she had inflicted on people would now only be wounds of the heart.

  I wondered why the gods had done that. Why hadn’t they just killed her, when they had the chance?

  I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.

  Adult stories never made sense, and they were so slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?

  I was getting hungry. I climbed down from my tree, and went to the back of the house, past the laundry room that smelled of laundry soap and mildew, past the little coal-and-wood shed, past the outside toilet where the spiders hung and waited, wooden doors painted garden green. In through the back door, along the hallway and into the kitchen.

  My mother was in there with a woman I had never seen before. When I saw her, my heart hurt. I mean that literally, not metaphorically: there was a momentary twinge in my chest—just a flash, and then it was gone.

  My sister was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal.

  The woman was very pretty. She had shortish honey-blonde hair, huge gray-blue eyes, and pale lipstick. She seemed tall, even for an adult.

  “Darling? This is Ursula Monkton,” said my mother. I said nothing. I just stared at her. My mother nudged me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “He’s shy,” said Ursula Monkton. “I am certain that once he warms up to me we shall be great friends.” She reached out a hand and patted my sister’s mousey-brown hair. My sister smiled a gap-toothed smile.

  “I like you so much,” my sister said. Then she said, to our mother and me, “When I grow up I want to be Ursula Monkton.”

  My mother and Ursula laughed. “You little dear,” said Ursula Monkton. Then she turned to me. “And what about us, eh? Are we friends as well?”

  I just looked at her, all grown-up and blonde, in her gray and pink skirt, and I was scared.

  Her dress wasn’t ragged. It was just the fashion of the thing, I suppose, the kind of dress that it was. But when I looked at her I imagined her dress flapping, in that windless kitchen, flapping like the mainsail of a ship, on a lonely ocean, under an orange sky.

  I don’t know what I said in reply, or if I even said anything. But I went out of that kitchen, although I was hungry, without even an apple.

  I took my book into the back garden, beneath the balcony, by the flower bed that grew beneath the television room window, and I read—forgetting my hunger in Egypt with animal-headed gods who cut each other up and then restored one another to life again.

  My sister came out into the garden.

  “I like her so much,” she told me. “She’s my friend. Do you want to see what she gave me?” She produced a small gray purse, the kind my mother kept in her handbag for her coins, that fastened with a metal butterfly clip. It looked like it was made of leather. I wondered if it was mouse skin. She opened the purse, put her fingers into the opening, came out with a large silver coin: half a crown.

  “Look!” she said. “Look what I got!”

  I wanted a half a crown. No, I wanted what I could buy with half a crown—magic tricks and plastic joke-toys, and books, and, oh, so many things. But I did not want a little gray purse with a half a crown in it.

  “I don’t like her,” I told my sister.

  “That’s only because I saw her first,” said my sister. “She’s my friend.”

  I did not think that Ursula Monkton was anybody’s friend. I wanted to go and warn Lettie Hempstock about her—but what could I say? That the new housekeeper-nanny wore gray and pink? That she looked at me oddly?

  I wished I had never let go of Lettie’s hand. Ursula Monkton was my fault, I was certain of it, and I would not be able to get rid of her by flushing her down a plug hole, or putting frogs in her bed.

  I should have left then, should have run away, fled down the lane the mile or so to the Hempstocks’ farm, but I didn’t, and then a taxi took my mother away to Dicksons Opticians, where she would show people letters through lenses, and help them see more clearly, and I was left there with Ursula Monkton.

  She came out into the garden with a plate of sandwiches.

  “I’ve spoken to your mother,” she said, a sweet smile beneath the pale lipstick, “and while I’m here, you children need to limit your travels. You can be anywhere in the house or in the garden, or I will walk with you to your friends’, but you may not leave the property and simply go wandering.”

  “Of course,” said my sister.

  I did not say anything.

  My sister ate a peanut butter sandwich.

  I was starving. I wondered whether the sandwiches were dangerous or not. I did not know. I was scared that I would eat one and it would turn into worms in my stomach, and that they would wriggle through me, colonizing my body, until they pushed out of my skin.

  I went back into the house. I pushed the kitchen door open. Ursula Monkton was not there. I stuffed my pockets with fruit, with apples and oranges and hard brown pears. I took three bananas and stuffed them down my jumper, and fled to my laboratory.

  My laboratory—that was what I called it—was a green-painted shed as far away from the house as you could get, built up against the side of the house’s huge old garage. A fig tree grew beside the shed, although we had never tasted ripe fruit from the tree, only seen the huge leaves and the green fruits. I called the shed my laboratory because I kept my chemistry set in there: the chemistry set, a perennial birthday present, had been banished from the house by my father, after I had made something in a test tube. I had randomly mixed things together, and then heated them, until they had erupted and turned black, with an ammoniac stench that refused to fade. My father had said that he did not mind my doing experiments (although neither of us knew what I could possibly have been experimenting on, but that did not matter; my mother had been given chemistry sets for her birthday, and see how well that had turned out?) but he did not want them within smelling range of the house.

  I ate a banana and a pear, then hid the rest of the fruit beneath the wooden table.

  Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would no
t involve walking down our drive. I decided that I would creep out of the laboratory shed, along the wall to the edge of the lawn and then into the azaleas and bay laurels that bordered the garden there. From the laurels, I would slip down the hill and over the rusting metal fence that ran along the side of the lane.

  Nobody was looking. I ran and I crept and got through the laurels, and I went down the hill, pushing through the brambles and the nettle patches that had sprung up since the last time I went that way.

  Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of the hill, just in front of the rusting metal fence. There was no way she could have got there without my seeing her, but she was there. She folded her arms and looked at me, and her gray and pink dress flapped in a gust of wind.

  “I believe I said that you were not to leave the property.”

  “I’m not,” I told her, with a cockiness I knew I did not feel, not even a little. “I’m still on the property. I’m just exploring.”

  “You’re sneaking around,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “I think you should be in your bedroom, where I can keep an eye on you. It’s time for your nap.”

  I was too old for naps, but I knew that I was too young to argue, or to win the argument if I did.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Don’t say ‘okay,’ ” she said. “Say ‘Yes, Miss Monkton.’ Or ‘Ma’am.’ Say ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ” She looked down at me with her blue-gray eyes, which put me in mind of holes rotted in canvas, and which did not look pretty at that moment.

  I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and hated myself for saying it.

  We walked together up the hill.

  “Your parents can no longer afford this place,” said Ursula Monkton. “And they can’t afford to keep it up. Soon enough they’ll see that the way to solve their financial problems is to sell this house and its gardens to property developers. Then all of this”—and this was the tangle of brambles, the unkempt world behind the lawn—“will become a dozen identical houses and gardens. And if you are lucky, you’ll get to live in one. And if not, you will just envy the people who do. Will you like that?”