The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

by Neil Gaiman

  There was a children’s table in the kitchen, where we ate when my parents had friends over, or would be eating late. But that night we were at the adult table. I preferred the children’s table. I felt invisible there. Nobody watched me eat.

  Ursula Monkton sat next to my father and stared at me, with a tiny smile at the corner of her lips.

  I knew I should shut up, be silent, be sullen. But I couldn’t help myself. I had to tell my father why I did not want to eat.

  “I won’t eat anything she made,” I told him. “I don’t like her.”

  “You will eat your food,” said my father. “You will at least try it. And apologize to Miss Monkton.”

  “I won’t.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” said Ursula Monkton sympathetically, and she looked at me, and she smiled. I do not think that either of the other two people at the table noticed that she was smiling with amusement, or that there was nothing sympathetic in her expression, or her smile, or her rotting-cloth eyes.

  “I’m afraid he does,” said my father. His voice was just a little louder, and his face was just a little redder. “I won’t have him cheeking you like that.” Then, to me, “Give me one good reason, just one, why you won’t apologize and why you won’t eat the lovely food that Ursula prepared for us.”

  I did not lie well. I told him.

  “Because she’s not human,” I said. “She’s a monster. She’s a . . .” What had the Hempstocks called her kind of thing? “She’s a flea.”

  My father’s cheeks were burning red, now, and his lips were thin. He said, “Outside. Into the hall. This minute.”

  My heart sank inside me. I climbed down from my stool and followed him out into the corridor. It was dark in the hallway: the only light came from the kitchen, a sheet of clear glass above the door. He looked down at me. “You will go back into the kitchen. You will apologize to Miss Monkton. You will finish your plate of food, then, quietly and politely, you will go straight upstairs to bed.”

  “No,” I told him. “I won’t.”

  I bolted, ran down the hallway, round the corner, and I pounded up the stairs. My father, I had no doubt, would come after me. He was twice my size, and fast, but I did not have to keep going for long. There was only one room in that house that I could lock, and it was there that I was headed, left at the top of the stairs and along the hall to the end. I reached the bathroom ahead of my father. I slammed the door, and I pushed the little silver bolt closed.

  He had not chased me. Perhaps he thought it was beneath his dignity, chasing a child. But in a few moments I heard his fist slam, and then his voice saying, “Open this door.”

  I didn’t say anything. I sat on the plush toilet seat cover and I hated him almost as much as I hated Ursula Monkton.

  The door banged again, harder this time. “If you don’t open this door,” he said, loud enough to make sure I heard it through the door, “I’m breaking it down.”

  Could he do that? I didn’t know. The door was locked. Locked doors stopped people coming in. A locked door meant that you were in there, and when people wanted to come into the bathroom they would jiggle the door, and it wouldn’t open, and they would say “Sorry!” or shout “Are you going to be long?” and—

  The door exploded inward. The little silver bolt hung off the door frame, all bent and broken, and my father stood in the doorway, filling it, his eyes huge and white, his cheeks burning with fury.

  He said, “Right.”

  That was all he said, but his hand held my left upper arm in a grip I could never have broken. I wondered what he would do now. Would he, finally, hit me, or send me to my room, or shout at me so loudly that I would wish I were dead?

  He did none of those things.

  He pulled me over to the bathtub. He leaned over, pushed the white rubber plug into the plug hole. Then he turned on the cold tap. Water gushed out, splashing the white enamel, then, steadily and slowly, it filled the bath.

  The water ran noisily.

  My father turned to the open door. “I can deal with this,” he said to Ursula Monkton.

  She stood in the doorway, holding my sister’s hand, and she looked concerned and gentle, but there was triumph in her eyes.

  “Close the door,” said my father. My sister started whimpering, but Ursula Monkton closed the door, as best she could, for one of the hinges did not fit properly, and the broken bolt stopped the door closing all the way.

  It was just me and my father. His cheeks had gone from red to white, and his lips were pressed together, and I did not know what he was going to do, or why he was running a bath, but I was scared, so scared.

  “I’ll apologize,” I told him. “I’ll say sorry. I didn’t mean what I said. She’s not a monster. She’s . . . she’s pretty.”

  He didn’t say anything in response. The bath was full, and he turned the cold tap off.

  Then, swiftly, he picked me up. He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.

  I looked at him, at the intent expression on his face. He had taken off his jacket before he came upstairs. He was wearing a light blue shirt and a maroon paisley tie. He pulled off his watch on its expandable strap, dropped it onto the window ledge.

  Then I realized what he was going to do, and I kicked out, and I flailed at him, neither of which actions had any effect of any kind as he plunged me down into the cold water.

  I was horrified, but it was initially the horror of something happening against the established order of things. I was fully dressed. That was wrong. I had my sandals on. That was wrong. The bathwater was cold, so cold and so wrong. That was what I thought, initially, as he pushed me into the water, and then he pushed further, pushing my head and shoulders beneath the chilly water, and the horror changed its nature. I thought, I’m going to die.

  And, thinking that, I was determined to live.

  I flailed with my hands, trying to find something to hold on to, but there was nothing to grab, only the slippery sides of the bath I’d bathed in for the last two years. (I had read many books in that bath. It was one of my safe places. And now, I had no doubt, I was going to die there.)

  I opened my eyes, beneath the water, and I saw it dangling there, in front of my face: my chance for life, and I clutched it with both hands: my father’s tie.

  I held it tightly, pulled myself up as he pushed me down, gripping it for life itself, pulling my face up and out of that frigid water, holding on to his tie so tightly that he could no longer push my head and shoulders back into the bath without going in himself.

  My face was now out of the water, and I clamped my teeth into his tie, just below the knot.

  We struggled. I was soaked, took some small pleasure in the knowledge that he was soaked as well, his blue shirt clinging to his huge form.

  Now he pushed me down again, but fear of death gives us strength: my hands and my teeth were clamped to his tie, and he could not break his grip on them without hitting me.

  My father did not hit me.

  He straightened up, and I was pulled up with him, soaked and spluttering and angry and crying and scared. I let go of his tie with my teeth, still held on with my hands.

  He said, “You ruined my tie. Let go.” The tie knot had tightened to pea size, the lining of the tie was dangling damply outside of it. He said, “You should be glad that your mother isn’t here.”

  I let go, dropped to the puddled bathroom lino. I took a step backward, toward the toilet. He looked down at me. Then he said, “Go to your bedroom. I don’t want to see you again tonight.”

  I went to my room.

  VIII.

  I was shivering convulsively and I was wet through and I was cold, very cold. It felt like all my heat had been stolen. The wet clothes clung to my flesh and dripped cold water onto the floor. With every step I took my sandals made comical squelching noises, and water oozed from the little diamond-shaped holes on the top of the sandals.

  I pulled all of m
y clothes off, and I left them in a sopping heap on the tiles by the fireplace, where they began to puddle. I took the box of matches from the mantelpiece, turned on the gas tap and lit the flame in the gas fire.

  (I am staring at a pond, remembering things that are hard to believe. Why do I find the hardest thing for me to believe, looking back, is that a girl of five and a boy of seven had a gas fire in their bedroom?)

  There were no towels in the room, and I stood there, wet, wondering how to dry myself off. I took the thin counterpane that covered my bed, wiped myself off with it, then put on my pajamas. They were red nylon, shiny and striped, with a black plasticized burn mark on the left sleeve, where I had leaned too close to the gas fire once, and the pajama arm caught alight, although by some miracle I had not burned my arm.

  There was a dressing gown that I almost never used hanging on the back of the bedroom door, its shadow perfectly positioned to cast nightmare shadows on the wall when the hall light was on and the door was open. I put it on.

  The bedroom door opened, and my sister came in to get the nightdress from under her pillow. She said, “You’ve been so naughty that I’m not even allowed to be in the room with you. I get to sleep in Mummy and Daddy’s bed tonight. And Daddy says I can watch the television.”

  There was an old television in a brown wooden cabinet in the corner of my parents’ bedroom that was almost never turned on. The vertical hold was unreliable, and the fuzzy black-and-white picture had a tendency to stream, in a slow ribbon: people’s heads vanished off the bottom of the screen as their feet descended, in a stately fashion, from the top.

  “I don’t care,” I told her.

  “Daddy said you ruined his tie. And he’s all wet,” said my sister, with satisfaction in her voice.

  Ursula Monkton was at the bedroom door. “We don’t talk to him,” she told my sister. “We won’t talk to him again until he’s allowed to rejoin the family.”

  My sister slipped out, heading to the next room, my parents’ room. “You aren’t in my family,” I told Ursula Monkton. “When Mummy comes back, I’ll tell her what Daddy did.”

  “She won’t be home for another two hours,” said Ursula Monkton. “And what can you say to her that will do anything? She backs up your father in everything, doesn’t she?”

  She did. They always presented a perfectly united front.

  “Don’t cross me,” said Ursula Monkton. “I have things to do here, and you are getting in my way. Next time it will be so much worse. Next time, I lock you in the attic.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” I told her. I was afraid of her, more afraid than I had ever been of anything.

  “It’s hot in here,” she told me, and smiled. She walked over to the gas fire, reached down, turned it off, took the matches from the mantel.

  I said, “You’re still just a flea.”

  She stopped smiling. She reached up to the lintel above the door, higher than any child could reach, and she pulled down the key that rested there. She walked out of the room, and closed the door. I heard the key turn, heard the lock engage and click.

  I could hear television voices coming from the room next door. I heard the hallway door close, cutting off the two bedrooms from the rest of the house, and I knew that Ursula Monkton was going downstairs. I went over to the lock, and squinted through it. I had learned from a book that I could use a pencil to push a key through a keyhole onto a sheet of paper beneath, and free myself that way . . . but the keyhole was empty.

  I cried then, cold and still damp, in that bedroom, cried with pain and anger and terror, cried safely in the knowledge that no one would come in and see me, that no one would tease me for crying, as they teased any boys at my school who were unwise enough to give way to tears.

  I heard the gentle patter of raindrops against the glass of my bedroom window, and even that brought me no joy.

  I cried until I was all cried out. Then I breathed in huge gulps of air, and I thought, Ursula Monkton, flapping canvas monster, worm and flea, would get me if I tried to leave the property. I knew that.

  But Ursula Monkton had locked me in. She would not expect me to leave now.

  And, perhaps, if I was lucky, she might be distracted.

  I opened the bedroom window, and listened to the night. The gentle rain made a noise that was almost a rustling. It was a cold night, and I was already chilled. My sister was in the room next door, watching something on the television. She would not hear me.

  I went over to the door, and turned off the light.

  I walked through the dark bedroom, and climbed back on the bed.

  I’m in my bed, I thought. I’m lying in my bed, thinking about how upset I am. Soon, I’ll fall asleep. I’m in my bed, and I know she’s won, and if she checks up on me I’m in my bed, asleep.

  I’m in my bed and it’s time for me to sleep now . . . I can’t even keep my eyes open. I’m fast asleep. Fast asleep in my bed . . .

  I stood on the bed, and climbed out of the window. I hung for a moment, then let myself drop, as quietly as I could, onto the balcony. That was the easy bit.

  Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisors. In books, boys climbed trees, so I climbed trees, sometimes very high, always scared of falling. In books, people climbed up and down drainpipes to get in and out of houses, so I climbed up and down drainpipes too. They were the heavy iron drainpipes of old, clamped to the brick, not today’s lightweight plastic affairs.

  I had never climbed down a drainpipe in the dark, or in the rain, but I knew where the footholds were. I knew also that the biggest challenge would not be falling, a twenty-foot tumble down into the wet flower bed; it was that the drainpipe I was climbing down went past the television room, downstairs, in which, I had no doubt, Ursula Monkton and my father would be watching television.

  I tried not to think.

  I climbed over the brick wall that edged the balcony, reached out until I felt the iron drainpipe, cold and slick with rain. I held on to it, then took one large step toward it, letting my bare feet come to rest on the metal clamp that encircled the drainpipe, fixing it sturdily to the brick.

  I went down, a step at a time, imagining myself Batman, imagining myself a hundred heroes and heroines of school romances, then, remembering myself, I imagined that I was a drop of rain on the wall, a brick, a tree. I am on my bed, I thought. I was not here, with the light of the TV room, uncurtained, spilling out below me, making the rain that fell past the window into a series of glittering lines and streaks.

  Don’t look at me, I thought. Don’t look out of the window.

  I inched down. Usually I would have stepped from the drainpipe over to the TV room’s outer window ledge, but that was out of the question. Warily, I lowered myself another few inches, leaned further back into the shadows and away from the light, and I stole a terrified glance into the room, expecting to see my father and Ursula Monkton staring back at me.

  The room was empty.

  The lights were on, the television on as well, but nobody was sitting on the sofa and the door to the downstairs hallway was open.

  I took an easy step down onto the window ledge, hoping against all hope that neither of them would come back in and see me, then I let myself drop from the ledge into the flower bed. The wet earth was soft against my feet.

  I was going to run, just run, but there was a light on in the drawing room, where we children never went, the oak-paneled room kept only for best and for special occasions.

  The curtains were drawn. The curtains were green velvet, lined with white, and the light that escaped them, where they had not been closed all the way, was golden and soft.

  I walked over to the window. The curtains were not completely closed. I could see into the room, see what was immediately in front of me.

  I was not sure what I was looking at. My father had Ursula Monkton pressed up against the side of the big fireplace i
n the far wall. He had his back to me. She did too, her hands pressed against the huge, high mantelpiece. He was hugging her from behind. Her midi skirt was hiked up around her waist.

  I did not know exactly what they were doing, and I did not really care, not at that moment. All that mattered was that Ursula Monkton had her attention on something that was not me, and I turned away from the gap in the curtains and the light and the house, and I fled, barefoot, into the rainy dark.

  It was not pitch-black. It was the kind of cloudy night where the clouds seem to gather up light from distant streetlights and houses below, and throw it back at the earth. I could see enough, once my eyes adjusted. I made it to the bottom of the garden, past the compost heap and the grass cuttings, then down the hill to the lane. Brambles and thorns stuck my feet and pricked my legs, but I kept running.

  I went over the low metal fence, into the lane. I was off our property and it felt as if a headache I had not known that I had had suddenly lifted. I whispered, urgently, “Lettie? Lettie Hempstock?” and I thought, I’m in bed. I’m dreaming all this. Such vivid dreams. I am in my bed, but I did not believe that Ursula Monkton was thinking about me just then.

  As I ran, I thought of my father, his arms around the housekeeper-who-wasn’t, kissing her neck, and then I saw his face through the chilly bathwater as he held me under, and now I was no longer scared by what had happened in the bathroom; now I was scared by what it meant that my father was kissing the neck of Ursula Monkton, that his hands had lifted her midi skirt above her waist.

  My parents were a unit, inviolate. The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and was coming down the lane with me, then.

  The flints of the lane hurt my feet as I ran, but I did not care. Soon enough, I was certain, the thing that was Ursula Monkton would be done with my father. Perhaps they would go upstairs to check on me together. She would find that I was gone and she would come after me.

  I thought, If they come after me, they will be in a car. I looked for a gap in the hedgerow on either side of the lane. I spotted a wooden stile and clambered over it, and kept running across the meadow, heart pounding like the biggest loudest drum there was or had ever been, barefoot, with my pajamas and my dressing gown all soaked below the knee and clinging. I ran, not caring about the cow-pats. The meadow was easier on my feet than the flint lane had been. I was happier, and I felt more real, running on the grass.