Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  ‘Are you friend or are you foe

  Say before we let you go—

  Let you live, or make you die.

  Say what colour flag you fly.’

  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.

  ‘Take a side. Take a side.

  Tell us how your flag is dyed.

  Raise your flag and raise it high.

  If you don’t, PREPARE TO DIE.’

  ‘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.

  ‘Are you Reds or are you Blues?

  Do you win or do you lose?

  Dead in three unless you choose

  Are you Reds or are you Blues? ONE—’

  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?’

  The mountain was so close now that it filled one whole horizon. They could easily see its surplice of snow, its flanks scarred by rockfalls. It was unimaginably high.

  Within the hour, they passed the scene of a fairy battle, the ground scattered with ten thousand ragged wings, the cobwebs clogged with fairy dust. Fat, black crows hopped about, glossy and villainous.

  ‘How long have the fairies been fighting each other?’ Wendy asked, trying to take care where she trod, holding on to the back of Peter’s coat. Peter swished and swashed the rainbow flag this way and that, for the fun of seeing the crows jump up into the sky. ‘Peter! What are the Reds and Blues fighting about?’

  He laughed, and skipped over a pile of fairy catapults made from the wishbones of wrens. ‘Well, their favourite colour, of course! Which is best.’

  The sea chest, mounted on its springy pram wheels, creaked and rattled as Ravello towed it over the bumpy battlefield. ‘Fairies travel,’ he observed. ‘They pick things up. Souvenirs. Head colds. Ideas. I dare say this War of theirs is some idea they brought home from overseas … like black rats bringing the Plague!’ Then he smiled at some fleeting thought, and murmured in silken tones, ‘Or perhaps the fairies left open the night windows of Neverland. And in came War.’

  The Ravelling Man stopped speaking to listen, cocking his hooded head first one way, then another, as he frequently did. He said he was partial to birdsong and was listening for nightingales. But Wendy could hear nothing—not nightingales, not even Slightly’s clarinet.

  Only the plump crows cawing.

  At the foot of Neverpeak Mountain lay scarlet bogs and swamps, as innocent-looking as parlour carpets, but as deadly deep as graves. The Company had to watch their every step, for straying off the path might sink them in quicksand and leave nothing to show for Pan’s Quest but a bubble of marsh gas. Between the swamps grew mangroves and mandrakes, corkscrew-dogwood and dog-tooth corkwood oozing amber gum. There was no food to be had, except for the berries they had picked earlier and brought with them. Ravello counted these out on to the Explorers’ plates at mealtime, keeping none back for himself.

  The only trouble was, the berries brought on dreams, and the only trouble with dreams is that there is no choosing which ones you get. They arrive like the weather, blown in from north or south, past or future, dark places or light. Dreams float seven-eighths beneath the water.

  Tootles dreamed she was a man wearing worsted trousers, a red robe, and a big moustache—which was very confusing.

  Wendy dreamed of a little girl called Jane asleep in a moonlit bedroom. The girl dreamed Wendy and Wendy dreamed the girl, and when their sleeping eyes met, the child sat bolt upright and cried, ‘Mummy!’ It churned up the blood in Wendy’s heart like the lees in a bottle of port wine.

  The Twins dreamed each other’s dreams, which was fine.

  John dreamed of his brother Michael and woke up crying.

  Curly dreamed of Slightly, who was calling to him, telling him to beware, but the dream unravelled before he could find out why.

  But Peter! Peter had a marvellous dream of somewhere he had never been, somewhere aswarm with boys all older than himself, all strangers, playing games he had never played, crowding into buildings he had never seen. He was rowing a skiff over sunlit water, and his legs were not long enough to reach the footboards. He was dressed in white, pitching a ball at three wooden sticks in the ground, and he knew that something vital depended on it. He had to sing a song he did not know, in a language he did not understand.

  And he was so HAPPY and so AFRAID and so HOPEFUL, because just around the river’s bend, just at the top of the grand stairs, just beyond Agar or Jordan or Luxmoore’s Garden or Fellows’ Eyot—what were these places and how did he know their names?—he would find the treasure, the whole wonderful …

  They were woken by the sound of Slightly’s clarinet. It was playing the same tune he had played to the witches, back at the Maze:

  ‘Better loved ye canna be.

  Will ye no come back again?’

  And they shouted for him to go away, but he just went on playing.

  They had pitched camp at night, unaware how close they had come to the mountain itself. Now, in the dawn light, it rose above them, higher than high, its head in the clouds and its feet fourteen storeys underground. Neverpeak stretched up and away: granite cliff
s and marble precipices, pumice ledges and slaty slopes of scree. It was the shape of a cupcake, steep sides rising to a bumpy mound of white icing. Glaciers had cut helter-skelter grooves, round and around. Lightning had burned it bare. Thunder rolled around its ravines. And Neverpeak was so vast that it turned back the wind, as dry land turns back the sea.

  ‘Oh, Peter!’ said Tootles. ‘Won’t you fly up to the top and fetch back the treasure?’

  ‘Idle, mutinous moll!’ shouted Peter, scaring Tootles so much that she ran to Wendy and asked for a hug. ‘What are you: Explorers or lily-livered scupper-rats born with your tails in your mouths? Leading you is like dragging anchor! You’re a cargo of sour milk! You’re a waste of rations, that’s what you are!’

  ‘What rations?’ asked First Twin, reminded of his hunger. His brother tried to shush him, but it was too late. Pan turned his tirade from Tootles to First Twin and then to every other boy, telling them they were turncoats and whiners, mutineers and fair-weather sailors.

  ‘They are just tired, Peter,’ said Wendy gently. ‘Tired and hungry. Couldn’t we …’

  ‘What are you, the fo’c’sle lawyer? So it’s you who’s been turning them against me, is it? I should have known! Girls! What are they good for but growing into mothers, and everyone knows what mothers are!’ Wendy gasped. Peter’s cheeks flashed fiery red and he wrenched at the flaps of his frock coat, sweating with rage, panicky to be out of it. ‘Coat, Ravello!’

  Ravello stepped sharply forward, but only to try and persuade him back into the scarlet. ‘The air is chill, milord. I beg you to keep its warmth around you.’ Peter tugged off the coat and threw it at him.

  Round the base of the mountain, huge monkey-puzzle trees, dark and crooked, flattened themselves against vertical cliffs, like cornered villains with their backs to a wall. Big wasp’s nests balanced in the crook of every branch. Now Peter leapt away from the Company of Explorers and began to climb the trees—hand-over-hand—showing off with leaps and somersaults, proving how simple it was, even for those with too little fairy dust to fly. The Darlings hesitated, daunted by the monstrous mountain.

  Ravello opened the sea chest, folded and put away the frock coat. From the very way he handled it, there was no mistaking the tender admiration he felt for its owner. He also took out four fathoms of rope, too: lashed one end to the handle, the other to his belt. Then he began doggedly to climb. ‘I would advise haste, esploratori piccoli,’ he confided gently, his voice almost soundless after the ferocity of Captain Pan. ‘There are Roarers all around.’

  That was all it took. The Explorers belted tight their blanket coats and clambered into the trees, like sailors swarming up rigging towards a crow’s nest among the stars.

  The climb was exhausting. Thin boughs snapped under their feet. Fir needles pricked at them. Bark came loose under their fingers and the smell of resin made them dizzy. Worst of all, the oozing gum within the trees smothered them in stickiness, gave them webbed fingers and glued their knees together. Pine needles stuck to their arms and legs and hair until they were furry with fir. At first only single wasps cruised by, curious, clumsy, buffeting the children’s faces, buzzing in their ears. But when the shaking of the tree dislodged a hive from its crevice, tens and hundreds of wasps poured out of it and gathered round in clouds, drawn to gummy faces, sticking to open palms.

  ‘Owowo! I got stung!’

  And crane-flies came, too, and gnats and horseflies and bluebottles and ladybirds. The children’s shadows caught and stuck fast to the welling gum, pulling them up short, threatening to tangle their feet in darkness.

  Curly made the mistake of looking down and saw that the land beneath had shrunk with distance to the size of a pocket garden. John made the mistake of looking up, and saw that the tree tops were almost reached and above those was nothing but grey rock and snow. They dragged themselves on to a narrow ledge of rock, and lay there, noses over the brink, too tired to close their eyelids. So they saw the Ravelling Man make his slow ascent.

  In among the branches, his tangle of clothing would have snagged on every twig and splinter and unravelled him to his backbone. So he avoided the monkey-puzzle trees and climbed the sheer rock face instead—not nimbly, not fast, but with a stolid determination—step, balance, pull. The heavy sea chest swung from the back of his belt like the pendulum of a clock: tick tock, tick tock. Reaching their perch, he carefully, carefully laid himself along the narrow shelf of rock. Wendy had the curious compulsion to reach out and touch that strange woolly pelt. She caught the smell of snake’s eggs, cough drops, and lion.

  ‘Will the Roarers come after us, Mr Ravello?’ she asked.

  ‘No, miss. I think not.’

  ‘And will there be food?’ asked the Second Twin.

  ‘Undoubtedly. Eagle’s eggs. Mountain cucumbers. And manna.’

  ‘Manna?’

  ‘Mannas good and bad. Be careful which you eat.

  Mannas maketh man, but only the good kind.’

  ‘How do you know these things, Mr Ravello, sir?’ asked Curly.

  Ravello began hauling up the sea chest, hand-over-hand. They could hear his clenched teeth grinding with the effort of it. ‘Oh, I am a travelling man, pequeño marquis. I listen out. I listen in.’

  The last of the wasps sank down and away, like swimmers realizing they are out of their depth.

  Clip. Clip. Instead, pebbles began to rattle through the branches of the trees, then to hit the ledge. Clip. Clip. Soon some began to hit the Explorers—ow! ouch!—and they realized that they were under attack from something bigger than wasps. Huge grey birds with scraggy legs and claws like sugar tongs were circling overhead, dropping stones to dislodge the intruders. This ledge was the birds’ evening perch, and they meant to keep it for themselves. The stones rattled down like hailstones. A cold wind blew.

  Tootles sniffed loudly and put into words what everybody was thinking. ‘This is no fun any more.’

  Sometimes a game takes over from the person who thought of it. In Neverland games always do, and play isn’t play: it’s real—which is wonderful and makes your brain spin zigger-zag behind your eyes and sends little jets of hotness through your stomach and steals the spit out of your mouth; and all the birds are harpies and all the logs are cannon and all the curtains are ghosts and all the noises are monsters … It’s the best of moments, and you know you will remember it for ever.

  But, by Skylights, it’s scary!

  Peter Pan rose to his knees, white shirt blustering around him, long dark hair standing on end in the wind. There was the most wonderful smile on his face. ‘My friends—my band of brothers—we came here …’

  ‘And sisters!’ said Tootles peevishly.

  ‘And sisters, of course. We came here to be Explorers. To be treasure-seekers. Yes? What did we think? That it would be easy? That it would be safe? Look there! Look!’ And they looked where he was pointing, out across the landscape they had crossed, lush and green in the distance, harsh and bare close to; a trackless wilderness of hardships and toil. ‘Did we think the trails would be well trodden? No. But we did it! Did we think that ordinary everybodies came here every day of the week? No, none but the likes of us! Did we want to do something easy? Did we want a walk in the park?’ They looked at him with his fists raised above his head, the wind clenched between his white teeth, his collarbones like two wings above his heart. The skin of his wrists was lined with white scars where tiny slivers of metal had flown from the blades of two swords as he and Jas. Hook fought it out to the death. He was magnificent.

  ‘But we are not like you, Peter!’ cried Curly. ‘Some of us get tired—and scared.’

  ‘Supposing the treasure’s not worth it, after all this?’ said John.

  ‘Then it would not be treasure,’ murmured Ravello with undeniable logic.

  ‘Not everyone can be rich,’ Peter went on. ‘Not everyone can be strong or clever. Not everyone can be beautiful. But we can all be brave! If we tell ourselves we can do it; if we say to our h
earts, “Don’t jump about”; if we carry ourselves like heroes … we can all be brave! We can all look Danger in the face and be glad to meet it, and draw our swords and say, “Have at you, Danger! You don’t scare me!” Courage is just there for the taking: you don’t need money to buy it. You don’t need to go to school to learn it! Courage is the thing, isn’t it? Don’t you think so, people? Aren’t I right? Courage is the thing! All goes if courage goes!’

  Earlier in the day, no one would have taken one step more for the boy who called them scupper-rats and mutineers and threatened them with stranding and short rations. Now, though, if Peter Pan had asked it, any one of them would have walked out on to the wing of an airborne aeroplane or leapt off the highest diving board into a glass of milk. They brushed the pine needles off their limbs, sucked the wasp-stings out of their skin, and prepared to scramble onwards up the rocky mountainside.

  Ravello kindly produced a knife and cut loose the Darlings’ sticky shadows—‘Now they won’t catch as you climb’—and put the shadows into the sea chest for safe-keeping. Puppy must have thought the cutting hurt, because it rushed in and seized hold of Ravello’s garment in its sharp little teeth, and began to pull for all it was worth. Whole hanks of wool came away and began to unravel, exposing a strangely knobbly, mottled, scuffed boot. The circus-master reached out with lightning speed and, grabbing Puppy round the throat, held it up close to his face. The children feared for it—thought Ravello must be about to bite its nose or hurl it off the cliff. But he only looked into the creature’s bulgy little eyes and whispered a few gentle words: asked, ‘Animal. Do you have the smallest desire ever to grow up and be a big dog?’ Puppy took this to heart and stopped chewing on him. It said a lot for Ravello’s powers as an animal trainer.

  He also persuaded Pan back into the scarlet frock coat—‘It is the colour of bravery, sir; it will encourage the others.’ Then he whetted his knife on a stone and reached for the sticky, tattered darkness around Peter’s feet.