Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  The children dined, as ever, on food conjured up out of Peter’s imagination (although Ravello did bring out a tarnished silver cellar of salt to sprinkle over their dinners). Surprisingly, Peter’s thoughts seemed to have turned to seafood, so that they ate imaginary lobster and turbot, jellied eels and crabmeat paste. (Tootles even broke out in an imaginary rash because she was allergic to whelks.)

  The soft squelching ground of the gentle purple moor became drier with every mile they walked. Instead of moss and heather, soon there was nothing but dry dust studded with bristly cactus plants and strung with tripwires of briar and bramble. It was impossible to sit down for a rest, let alone stretch out on the ground and sleep: it would have been like sleeping in a box of needles and drawing pins. They took it in turns to ride on the curved lid of the sea chest.

  Caught on the thorns, and dangling from every briar, were rags of cloth—navy serge or striped cotton, faded organdie or the white lace from the hem of a petticoat. Soon enough, the Explorers discovered why. For they came to The Maze.

  A wilderness of rippling sandstone, striped with every shade of blue and grey and sad cypress green, had been hollowed out by wind or rain into a honeycomb maze of corridors and passageways. Open to the sky, it whorled and swirled as far as the eye could see, crossing and inter-crossing, so that a person could wander to and fro and never find anything but another corridor to climb, another flume to slide down. And in among these candystripe cones, archways, and gullies of rock, countless women scurried up and down, calling and calling:

  ‘Henry!’

  ‘George!’

  ‘Ignatius!’

  ‘Jack!’

  Their anxious hands clutched handkerchiefs or small toys or corners of blanket. Perhaps, after all, it was not wind or rain that had carved out the soft rock, but the fretful tread of these women’s button boots and sensible shoes, the swish of their old-fashioned long skirts, as they wandered the Maze of …

  ‘Witches! Watch out!’ hissed Peter, and the children all bobbed down.

  ‘They don’t look like witches,’ said Tootles doubtfully. ‘Where are their pointy hats?’

  ‘Grown-ups in Neverland? What else can they be?’ said Pan.

  ‘His lordship is correct, I fear,’ whispered Ravello. ‘This is the Maze of Witches. On no account let them see or touch you or pour their spells in at your ears. These are the women I told you of.’

  ‘The nursery maids?’

  ‘Precisely. This is where their travels brought them. Failure and temper poisoned their spirits and turned them into witches. That’s how they magicked their way into Neverland. But now if they see a child—any child—they will catch it and wash it; change its socks and feed it semolina; make it learn its tables and go to bed when it’s still light. Like as not, they will probably even kiss it.’ The boys squirmed and grimaced, pulled their heads down into their shoulders and shuddered. Almost as an afterthought, Ravello said, ‘Then they will roast the child and eat it.’

  ‘It was called something different on the map, I thought,’ mused Wendy. ‘The Maze of … something else.’ But Peter (still beaming with pleasure at being called ‘his lordship’) unrolled the map to check, and assured her that yes, yes, it was: The Maze of Witches. (Please remember, though, that he could not read.)

  ‘Edgar!’

  ‘Edmund!’

  ‘Paul!’

  ‘Jamie!’ The witches kept up their baleful hunting cry. Betweenwhiles, they could be heard sniffing—quite distinctly sniffing—as if to pick up the scent of their prey.

  Worming along on their stomachs, grazing knees and wrists on the gritty sandstone, the Explorers inched forward. Within minutes they were hopelessly lost—no longer knew which way they had come, any more than they knew how to get out. Some gulleys were dead ends. Some grew so narrow that the slenderest shoulders would not fit through. Some twisted and turned and doubled back so often that the children lost all sense of direction. John scraped a J in the rock with his swordfish sword-point, and within the next hour they passed the same mark four times over. The un-oiled pram wheels on the sea chest squeaked, and the contents shifted and rattled as it teetered along behind them. But the witches were making so much noise—

  ‘Shinji!’

  ‘Pierre!’

  ‘Ivan!’

  ‘Ali!’

  —there was no chance they would hear. From behind and ahead, above and below, to right and left came the cries of the witches hunting for children:

  ‘Percival!’

  ‘Richard!’

  ‘Billy!’

  ‘Rudyard!’

  The rocks gave off a strange smell, too, that brought with it the ache of tears. It was Slightly who began to cry first, big teardrops dripping on to the backs of his hands as he crawled along. The Maze was swimming with sadness, and the sadness was as catching as influenza.

  ‘Florizel?’

  Directly into their path pattered one of the witches, skirt hems ragged, dance slippers worn through, but the jewels still sparkling around her neck. A bedraggled ostrich feather drooped over her face and she tugged it aside so as to see them better. ‘Is it you, Florry? Is it?’

  Peter tried to crawl backwards, but collided with Curly. The witch shouted the name over and over again, so loudly that John put his hands over his ears. Other witches were drawn to the noise:

  ‘Children? There are children?’

  ‘Children!’

  Dozens came jostling to catch a glimpse, ran out of their shoes without noticing it, dropped toys and rattles in their haste. Their banshee wailing echoed to and fro. They reached out their arms and cupped their hands and turned their faces up to the sky, saying, ‘Please! Please let it be him!’

  The Explorers leapt to their feet and ran, dodging this way and that, heads down, sliding down gulleys and jumping from ridge to ridge. Towed along by Ravello, the sea chest bounded and bounced high into the air, knocking over witches, knocking drinky cups and feeding-bottles out of their hands. Those same hands grabbed at the butler instead, snatching and catching in his woollen garment as if they would pull him apart:

  ‘Wilfred?’

  ‘Matela?’

  ‘François?’

  ‘Roald?’

  Blinded by tears, Slightly ran straight into another witch—a woman of such hollow-eyed loveliness that his blood seemed to turn to blues music and his heart to pain. For a moment she held his face between her hands, and they stared at each other. There was a maze, too, in the green iris of her eyes … Then Slightly broke away and ran like the very blazes.

  In the pocket of the scarlet frock coat the compass banged against Peter’s leg. He pulled it out and (for all it had more points than a frightened hedgehog) worked out which way to run. But there were just too many witches. From high and low, right and left, front and back they closed in:

  ‘Klaus!’

  ‘Johann!’

  ‘Ai De!’

  ‘Pedro!’

  Slightly stopped running. He rested his back against a ridge of rosy, twilit rock, gulping in air, gulping down fear. Then, as the witches flapped towards him in a shrieking mob, he took out his clarinet and started to play.

  The notes sobbed through the Maze. A sad, haunting tune it was—but it might as well have been grapeshot fired from a cannon at point-blank range. The witches stopped in their tracks, hands flying to their hearts. Slightly played—the same tune over and over again. From among the ranks of women, a single Scottish voice supplied the words:

  ‘Will ye no come back again?

  Will ye no come back again?

  Better loved ye canna be.

  Will ye no come back again?’

  I dare say you never cry or haven’t ever tried it while playing the clarinet, so I’ll tell you: your lips won’t hold their shape and your nose drizzles. It was hard to play—never harder. Even so, Slightly managed sixteen verses, while the witches swayed and tossed in front of him, like weeping willow trees, and the words echoed round and arou
nd. Like Horatius holding the bridge, like Roland at Roncevalles, Slightly played the clarinet while his friends fled to safety. Only when all the women’s eyes were shut in an ecstasy of sorrow, and his fellow Explorers had got clean away, did he pick up his heels and run!

  The whole Company ran, until the soft, striped sandstone under their feet gave way to grass, and even then they kept on running. They ran until there were trees, and the trees held up their branches in surrender: Stop! They ran until their lungs hung inside them like dead bats in a cave. Then, panting and gasping and leaning on their knees and deafened by the thudding of their heartbeats, they waited for Slightly to catch them up.

  ‘You were wonderful!’ they greeted him.

  ‘So clever!’

  ‘Marvellous!’

  ‘Is it hard to learn?’

  The Company of Explorers gathered round Slightly, praising and congratulating him. (Fireflyer grew so jealous that he bit Puppy.)

  ‘Very fine indeed,’ agreed Ravello, fetching the makings of afternoon tea out of the sea chest. ‘You are to be congratulated, young sir, on your musical genius.’

  Slightly blushed redder and redder. ‘They seemed more sad than angry,’ he said (being sensitive to other people’s feelings). ‘Those ladies: are you sure they wanted to eat us?’

  ‘A few may be vegetarians,’ said Ravello quickly, then drew Slightly aside to shake him by the hand. (That is to say, Slightly found his palm filled with crinkled wool.) ‘It is entirely thanks to you that we escaped! Such skill, such artistry! A maestro in the making! I suppose that is what you wish to be, is it? When you are grown-up? A musician?’

  Slightly’s ears were still pink from all the praise. ‘Me?’ he said, searching for enough of Ravello’s face to see if he was teasing. But the pale brown eyes fastened on his were earnest and intense, while the sleeve unravelled and unravelled. Whole hanks of wool filled Slightly’s hands.

  And all at once he saw a picture in his head, like reflections in a Hall of Mirrors: himself a grown man, a thousand tunes tucked away inside his head like the doves in a magician’s top hat; playing the clarinet with never a single wrong note; a host of faces smiling with pleasure as, with pursed lips and closed eyes, he blew music out into the world like so many soap bubbles.

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Slightly. ‘I would love to be one of those when I grow up!’

  ‘Then who can prevent it?’ said the Ravelling Man, and his eyes flashed with pure delight before he turned away.

  He never slept. Wendy (who tucked in everybody else at night and listened to their dreams each morning) could not help but notice: the Ravelling Man never slept at all, but sat up all night, darning his tattered garment. He was so adept with needle and wool and he could do it one-handed. Meanwhile, his eyes scanned the darkness and his head tilted this way and that as he listened for … for what? Danger? He must be guarding them from danger, but Wendy preferred not to ask what kind.

  The Explorers saw any number of wonders in the days that followed. They saw hills that rose and fell, breathingly. They saw rivers that flowed uphill, flowers that opened their trumpets and sang, trees that snatched birds out of the sky and ate them, pebbles that floated like corks. John trod on a mirage and sank up to his waist, whereas Tootles managed to cross a river using only the fish for stepping-stones. Once, it even rained conkers—and not one tree in sight.

  ‘What happened to summer?’ asked Slightly, half remembering sunnier times.

  But Pan only shrugged as if he had not noticed. ‘I suppose it got lost,’ he said.

  To pass the time, they discussed what they would find when, finally, they reached Neverpeak and the treasure chest hidden there. The Twins suggested gold doubloons and pieces of eight and nine. But in Neverland, rainbows stand with both feet on the ground, so, when the weather is right, you can easily go to the end of some rainbow and dig up a pot of gold, if that’s what takes your fancy. Consequently, there is nothing very marvellous about gold coins (unless they are chocolate inside).

  Tootles thought there would be crowns and tiaras, diamond necklaces and golden pocket watches. ‘That’s the sort of thing Hook would steal from the poor helpless princesses and sultanas who fell into his merciless hands!’ she said.

  Fireflyer thought sherbet lemons. Puppy was hoping for mutton chops. Wendy thought bolts of Indian silk, handcoloured picture books, and Fabergé eggs from Russia.

  ‘Fabergees don’t lay eggs,’ said Peter with a snort of contempt, though he did not say what treasure he expected to find in the chest. Ravello, running the comb slowly through Peter’s hair, curling the glossy locks around a pencil, said nothing at all.

  ‘What would you wish for, Mr Ravello?’ asked Wendy.

  The comb came to a halt. The brows knit in a way that suggested a fearful headache raging behind the valet’s eyes. ‘I cannot wish, miss,’ Ravello said. ‘No more than I can dream. To do either, a man needs sleep. And I do not sleep, you see.’

  ‘It all depends what Hook prized most in all the world,’ said Slightly who had been riding along in his own private train of thought. ‘Cos that’s what treasure is, isn’t it? The thing you want most of all in the whole world to keep and have for your own?’

  At which Fireflyer squeaked: ‘The eyeballs of his enemies!’ and everybody threw things at him. ‘What?’ he protested. ‘I ’spect pirates eat eyeballs ’stead of sherbet lemons! What’s for supper?’

  Ravello brought out the tablecloth and spread it on the ground, with the salt in the middle. They all sat round, cross-legged, and Peter began to imagine them something to eat.

  ‘What’s on the menu, Cap’n?’ asked John, patting at the creased white linen.

  A frown creased Peter’s forehead, so that his eyebrows cocked like little angel-wings. ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘I’m not hungry. You can eat mine if you like.’

  Everyone reached for the invisible food. There was a faint smell of cauliflower and privet. Curly thought his fingers had brushed a cabbage or a spoon, but nobody could quite lay hands on their portion of food. Slightly, who was having trouble stowing his long legs under him, reached out clumsily and knocked over the salt.

  ‘By Kraken and Krakatoa!’ bawled Peter Pan jumping to his feet. ‘Put stones in that boy’s boots and feed him to the fishes!’ The League stared at him, startled. Peter glared back. ‘Didn’t you see? What are you all, blind? The clumsy swab spilled the salt! Does he mean to bring down bad luck on us all? By all the shanks in me ratline, I’ve a mind to brand him or strand him here and now!’

  All eyes turned on Slightly, who blushed, righted the salt pot and apologized.

  ‘I didn’t know you were superstitious, Peter,’ said Wendy, worried by the way the big purple veins were beating in his small white neck.

  ‘I once saw five black cats …’ Tootles began, but broke off, not able to remember whether black cats brought good luck or bad.

  ‘One for sorrow, two for joy …’ said one Twin.

  ‘That’s magpies,’ said his brother. ‘Or babies.’

  The meal lapsed into silence, then broke up, because meals do not last very long when there is nothing to eat. When they set off to walk again, Slightly was sent to the back of the line. Nobody liked to mention that they had had no supper, in case the Leader lost patience with them, too. Ravello shook the offending salt off the tablecloth, folded it up and put it back in the sea chest, first removing Fireflyer, who had fallen asleep in the collar drawer. Puppy wandered off in search of something more filling than nothing at all.

  Still quivering, like a cat that has been stepped on, Slightly hung back from the rest. He was glad when Fireflyer came and rode on his shoulder. Fireflyer did not care if Slightly had suddenly grown clumsy; he was devoted to the boy who called him a ‘whopping liar’ and who could produce musical notes from A to G. ‘When you get bigger will you play the rest of the alphabet?’ Fireflyer asked.

  ‘No,’ said Slightly. ‘You’ll have to make do with A to G.’

  Fireflyer
liked nothing better than to chase the notes that came from Slightly’s clarinet—to eat them like chocolates, out of the air. The breves were best—fat and round, with creamy centres. The demi-semi-quavers were fizzy, but it took dozens just to make one mouthful. The sharps were sharp as lemons, and the flats slipped down like slices of cucumber cut very thin. Slightly laughed to see the fairy bite into them, making them pop: it took his mind off the shock of being shouted at by Peter.

  ‘More music! More music!’ urged Fireflyer.

  ‘What’s the little word?’ said Slightly, who knew the importance of good manners.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Fireflyer, who did not.

  The higher the note, the higher Fireflyer had to fly to pop it. ‘What can you see from up there?’ Slightly called, as the fairy soared after a top G.

  ‘Oooo. Far as far! Mount Etna and the Po River!’ called Fireflyer. ‘Higher! Higher!’

  ‘Little liar!’ called Slightly, and played a higher scale. Fireflyer flew up and up and up …‘Now what can you see?’

  ‘Ooo. Right over the horizon! Constantinople and Timbuktu! Higher! Higher!’

  ‘Little liar!’ said Slightly with a smile, and when he had played the topmost note on the clarinet, put it away and began to whistle instead. ‘Now what can you see?’

  ‘Oooo. Right into the past! I see the Aztecs and the Vikings!’ called Fireflyer, through a mouthful of crotchets. ‘Higher! Higher!’

  ‘Little liar!’ said Slightly and laughed, and whistled again, even more shrilly.

  ‘Belay that whistling, you swab!’ Suddenly Peter Pan stood in front of him, cheeks fiery red, eyelids straining wide. ‘Do you mean to whistle up Bad Luck?’

  The hairs stood up stiff with terror in the nape of Slightly’s neck. ‘Sorry, Cap’n,’ he whispered.