Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  ‘I keep my shadow!’ Peter snarled, stamping on Ravello’s blade.

  The valet snatched his crushed hand to his body but did not protest. It would have been a brave man who wrangled with such a Boy.

  Slightly had been banished to Nowhereland where no one would speak a word to him. Of course Fireflyer had been banished there too, so there was nothing to stop him doing it.

  ‘We hate ’em, don’t we?’ said the fairy, who had taken to calling him (now that he was taller) Mr ‘Slightly-more’.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Slightly doubtfully. He had never quite got the hang of hating people and now that he was bigger it did not seem quite honourable to hate anyone smaller than he was. They were sitting at the foot of Neverpeak Mountain, chewing empty honeycombs filched from the trees by the light-fingered fairy.

  ‘We’d like to cut ’em up for firewood, wouldn’t we?’ said Fireflyer.

  ‘Probably not,’ said Slightly, though he would have appreciated the firewood: it was getting very cold. The honeycombs did not even touch the edges of his hunger. Fireflyer could get by, eating musical notes, but Slightly (if he hadn’t been Slightly and as gentle as a lamb) would have gladly killed somebody for a prawn sandwich.

  ‘I suppose we never shall get to see what treasure is in Hook’s treasure chest. What would you have wished for it to be, Fireflyer?’

  ‘Sherbet-flavoured eyeballs!’ answered Fireflyer quick as a wink (though he might have been lying, of course).

  Oddly, the taller Slightly grew, the further back he remembered, so that now he could picture Cadogan Square again, and Kensington Gardens—even, once upon a time, a piano teacher who held pen-nibs under his wrists to make him arch them. (That was why he had taken up the clarinet.) Slightly-more could even remember his first time in Neverland …

  ‘Tell me a story,’ demanded Fireflyer.

  ‘Why? Do you eat them too, then?’

  ‘Only the ohs and ayes and ees and oos. The kays are too spikey and the zeds are too buzzy and the ones with the dots get stuck in your teeth and the esses sometimes slide down inside your vest and tickle. Oh, and make it a happy ending, Mr Slightly-more, or I’ll get a pain.’

  So Slightly put the pleasant warmth of Fireflyer in his shirt pocket—‘Oh, and be sure there’s a fairy in it!’—and told him the story running through his mind at that moment.

  ‘One day the pirates found Peter Pan’s underground den and lay in wait and captured us Lost Boys one by one as we climbed out; also Wendy and Michael and John. But they couldn’t catch Pan because he was fast asleep inside the den and didn’t come out. So the dastardly Jas. Hook took out a bottle of poison (never went anywhere without one) and trickled some down into Peter’s medicine so that he would drink it when he woke and DIE!’

  ‘I’m getting a pain,’ warned Fireflyer.

  ‘… But the fairy Tinker Bell, who was loyal and true and brave, saw it happen and knew what she had to do!’

  ‘Was she clever, then, this Tinker Bell?’

  ‘Simply brilliant. Don’t interrupt.’

  ‘And beautiful?’

  ‘In a whitish, waspish way. Can I go on?’

  ‘And female?’

  ‘Very. Do you want this story or not?’

  ‘And a liar?’

  ‘She said once that Wendy was a bird and that Peter wanted us to shoot her dead.’

  The lie was so huge that it silenced even Fireflyer.

  ‘Peter woke up and was just about to drink the poison when Tinker Bell up and drank it instead, and so …’

  ‘Ow! Ow! Ow! Why did you have to tell me that? Ah! I have a terrible pain! Ow, I hate stories!’

  ‘… And Tinker Bell almost died but didn’t, because she was too much loved, and so Peter chased after Hook and crept aboard the Jolly Roger and freed us captives and fought Hook with thrust and parry and lunge—huh! huh! have at you!—and drove him to the ship’s rail and tipped him over … tick tick tick … right into the jaws of the crocodile!’

  … dile! … dile! … dile! The tail end of the story lashed to and fro between the rock faces of Neverpeak: an echo of marvellous menace.

  ‘Woohoo!’ Fireflyer was so excited that a small burn appeared in Slightly’s shirt pocket. ‘Boo to Hook and down to the bottom with him!’

  ‘I don’t know that it is quite the thing to triumph over a man you never knew,’ said Slightly sternly.

  ‘Why not? Didn’t Hook deserve it? Wasn’t he a villain and a blackguard and a do-no-good sticky-ender?’

  Slightly had to admit Hook was. ‘And very loud, as I remember,’ he said creasing his forehead. ‘He shouted at his men all the time and threatened them and swaggered and blustered and thought he was no end of a dog and that there was no one to match him in all Neverland.’

  A little voice said, ‘Just like Peter, you mean?’

  ‘Quiet, Fireflyer! You don’t know what you are talking about!’

  The fairy peeped nervously out, his mouth a small round O of surprise. ‘But I didn’t say anything, Mr Slightly-more.’

  And Slightly had to admit it then: that the voice had not come from his shirt pocket at all, but from inside his own heart; a treacherous, mutinous little voice that was still telling him even now, over and over again: Peter Pan had begun to behave exactly like Captain Hook.

  The sun went down like a bacon-slicer, and the night was as dark as black pudding. Or so it seemed to a boy cut off from his supper. Slightly-more’s thoughts were darker still, as he lay with his eyes tight shut, and tried to sleep. For he had realized something truly dreadful: an idea that settled like hot sparks on his forehead.

  ‘You know those other people I spotted from on high when we were playing?’ called Fireflyer through the darkness, in a loud whisper.

  ‘Go to sleep, Fireflyer.’

  ‘But I told you about them, remember?’

  ‘What, the Aztecs and Incas?’

  ‘No. The others. The lurkers and underbrushy ambushers. Remember?’

  ‘No,’ said Slightly firmly. He did not want to play the game again. He wanted to go to sleep where there would be no cold draughts, no painful ideas falling like sparks on his forehead. ‘You tell lovely lies, dear,’ he said, not wishing to be unkind, ‘but tell them in the morning, if you please.’

  Unluckily, Fireflyer was not lying.

  And the sparks falling on Slightly’s forehead were as real as the foot now resting on his hip, the hand now closing around his throat. He opened his eyes to find two dozen hulking boys brandishing clubs and burning bulrushes.

  ‘Let’s spit him and roast him and eat him!’ said one.

  Slightly reached for his clarinet, as a mother might reach for her child. But they mistook it for a weapon and kicked it away into the mud. They kicked Slightly, too.

  ‘You’re in the League. You’re one of his. Saw you with him.’

  A surge of pride went through Slightly before he remembered: he was not in the League of Pan at all; he was just a boy who had grown too long in the arms and legs, and been banished. ‘You shouldn’t be speaking to me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sent to Nowhereland.’ (Slightly, knowing nothing about the Roarers, still did not realize what danger he was in.)

  ‘Speak to you? Blagh,’ grunted a huge youth with ragged earlobes. ‘Kill you is all.’

  A fairy wanting to live on the ohs and ayes and oos and ees of the Roarers would soon starve, because having grown into young men, they hardly spoke at all. Now they believed they had captured one of Pan’s party, and a murderous light burned in their eyes. They lived for the day when they would ambush Peter Pan himself and be revenged for their bigness and banishment. In the meantime they were willing to settle for killing one of his League of Explorers. Ravello had spoken true when he said they were worse than pirates, less tameable than bears, entirely heartless.

  ‘Where’s Pan? Say or die!’ said the oldest Roarer.

  Just then, Fireflyer jumped up out of Slightly’s shirt pocket and ate the wax out of a Roarer’s e
ar. ‘Peter Pan? Peter Pan? We hate him, don’t we, Mr Slightly-more!’

  ‘He has gone up the mountain,’ said Slightly, not seeing any harm in telling them.

  ‘To fetch us our treasure!’ piped Firefly, feeling a nice lie was called for. ‘We made him go.’

  ‘Treasure?’ (The word has magic no matter how tall you have grown.)

  ‘We want to chop ’em up for firewood,’ suggested Fireflyer enthusiastically.

  And so somehow the Roarers got the idea that Slightly and Co. were dogging Peter Pan’s trail, as intent on killing him as they were. They also got wind of a treasure, and they liked the sound of that. Folding their gangling long legs under them, they sat down on the ground, each boy taking care not to brush his bare arms against another’s. (Slightly thought they would be warmer if they huddled together, but then he was new to this adolescence business.) One by one, their bulrushes burned out.

  For a while they sat in silence, then at last Slightly could not help asking the question gnawing away at his heart. ‘Why did you people grow big?’ he said. ‘Do you know?’

  They shrugged their big bony shoulders. ‘Pan poisoned us, of course.’

  ‘Poisoned everyone.’

  ‘Poisoned everywhere.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think …’ began Slightly.

  But the Long Lost Boys were adamant. During the wild and comfortless years of their exile they had all come to believe this one version of history:

  Once upon a time, at the beginning of the end, when it was always summer, Peter Pan took out a bottle of poison and poured it into the Lagoon. First the cuttlefish died and then the mermaids. The turquoise waves grew bigger—much bigger—turned grey, then white-haired with foam. On dry land the summer trees blushed red and dropped their leaves. The poison bleached the colour out of the sun, leached the sap out of the flowers, the song out of the birds. Time moved on, where it was never meant to. Even the weather began to grow bigger: breezes turned into huge winds, felling trees and totem poles. In the sky little wisps of mare’s-tails grew into great clumsy clouds lumpy with thunder and lightning. The fairies, fizzed up by the electricity in the air, went to war with one another.

  ‘And he poisoned us too, when we weren’t looking, and made us grow, then turned us out for getting big, and sent us to Nowhereland same as you.’ The sentence was all the sadder for being the longest any Roarer had yet spoken.

  Slightly swallowed hard. ‘Who told you all this?’

  Again the shrug. Again the lips pushed out, the eyes shifting behind half-closed lids. Their fingers scuffed up stones, which they threw at the mountain, as if at Peter Pan himself.

  ‘Somebody.’

  Each said something to the same effect.

  ‘Some man.’

  ‘Some traveller I met.’

  ‘Gave me a job for a while.’

  ‘Me too. Till the fire.’

  ‘A travelling man.’

  Something cold kissed Slightly’s cheek. A flake of snow. Something colder than snow settled on his heart. As he got to his feet, the seam of his blanket coat, too small now even to reach his elbows, strained and split. He felt dizzy, either from the swirling of the snow round his head or the fear gripping his heart. ‘I must go up the mountain,’ he said. ‘Will someone show me the way?’

  ‘To kill Pan?’ said one, eagerly raising himself up on his elbows.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Slightly. ‘Where should I start the climb?’

  But even for the fearsome Roarers, the mountain was beyond bounds, a place of unimaginable danger. They had never dared to set foot there.

  ‘Is it such a fearful place, then, Neverpeak?’ said Slightly trembling despite his resolve.

  ‘You said there’s treasure up there,’ said a youth through a dirty stain of a beard. ‘D’you think it would still be there, if any had ever climbed up there and lived?’

  ‘Neverpeak?’ said another, talking aloud to himself. ‘Is that what he called it? Every man else calls it by a different name.’

  Every man else called it The Point of No Return.

  It is perfectly true that without their shadows the Explorers felt light-of-heart at first, and happy: even when the snow began, and little avalanches of scree swept down and sliced at their knees. Soon they would be at the top, and Hook’s treasure would be theirs! What would it be? Cloth-of-gold or Turkish Delight? Silver pistols or horse bridles in red morocco leather? The crowns of sixteen eastern potentates? The keys to a glass palace?

  Storybooks? thought Wendy to herself.

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Tootles blithely. ‘Mother used to call us her dearest treasure!’

  ‘And Papa said he should keep us in his bank, because we were worth more than all the money in the world!’

  Wendy glanced quickly at Peter, knowing how much he hated such talk. Whenever there was mention of mothers, he would look at his hands and flex his fingers. Once those fingers had tugged and tugged on a cold brass handle, rapped at a window pane, prised in vain at a lock. Just once, lonely for home, Peter had flown home from Neverland, only to find the bedroom window shut. He had never forgiven his mother for closing it.

  Luckily, though, Peter was not listening. He was too busy climbing, hauling himself higher by the strength of his arms alone. Now and then, his feet floated clear of the ground, like a diver exploring a reef, but it was not what you could call flying—not real flying—and his poor hands were cut and bleeding. At last, with a groan of exhaustion, he came to rest face-down on the cold rock, clawing feebly over one shoulder, clutching for the hem of his own shadow. All the strength seemed to be going out of him.

  ‘Did you say it would be easier without my shadow, Ravello?’

  ‘Far easier, bellissimo generalissimo. It is a well known fact: at this altitude shadows double their weight.’

  ‘Do it, then! Be rid of it! It’s a nuisance and it weighs me down and I never liked it!’

  In one lithe movement, in one painless motion, with a blade not even visible within the sleeve of his cardigan, Ravello sliced away Peter’s shadow. As he folded it neatly in four places and laid it delicately in the sea chest, he crooned his own soft-spoken thoughts on the subject of mothers. (Ravello seemed to have an equally low opinion of the breed.)

  ‘We are all better off without ’em. After all’s said and done, what is a mother good for but to blight a chap’s life? Oh, in her striped gown with the skirts drawn up behind and her neck like a swan, she may draw envious looks from a boy’s cohort. She may look very well sipping a glass of champagne on the Headmaster’s lawn. But when the grass is too wet for her to sit and watch a Dry Bob in the fives court or opening the batting or playing flying man, or the river bank beside the Raft is too muddy for her boots to let her watch a Wet Bob standing proud and steady in Dreadnought during Procession, and when on Wall Day she is too busy at her dressmaker’s—or laughs merrily at the news a boy has failed his colours and ended up in Rowland instead of Schoolyard, and when she sends no encouraging good wishes before the épée bouts … well then, a chap’s undone, wouldn’t you say? Or when at June Speeches a lad looks out from the rostrum, with the words of Ovid on his lips, conned at the greatest pains, ready to recite before the entire Upper, and finds no mother there … though even that is better than when, on a rare visit, she praises mathematics and slights those things her boy excels at, such as his boxing and beagling, and asks only after his Grammar and French declensions and what he knows of the Etruscans. Nay, I tell you, mothers would sooner have for a son a Slack Bob sent up for good for parsing and conjugating, than a batsman who hits four sixes an over on the Threepenny or bowls a maiden on the Sixpenny! And when finally, despite discouragement, all’s to play for and Fate puts in his hand a Pop cane and the clouds stand ready to open and shower their glory on a boy’s head, and show him the best, and award him the very silver and shining proof of his excellence … is it supportable to call him hence to save on musketry and boating bills and school fees? And fuss and fret and tap an impa
tient shoe and bin his ribbon lists while the poor sinner packs up his bags tormented the while by the sound through the open window of willow on leather and the cheering-on of runners, and the clash of blades and the whistle of javelins and the deuce knows what else …? Ach! Worlds have been lost by the heartlessness of mothers. Whole worlds, I tell you! Whole worlds!’

  The crooning had risen to a roar. When at last their silence impressed itself on Ravello, he looked round and found all the Explorers staring at him.

  ‘What language is he talking?’ asked John. ‘Is it Esquimeau?’

  But Wendy went over to Ravello, where he crouched beside the sea chest arranging and re-arranging its contents until everything lay in perfect order. She laid a hand on his heaving shoulder, feeling the greasy coarseness of the bunchy wool tremble. ‘Are you by any chance a Lost Boy, sir?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ Ravello jumped to his feet with startling grace. ‘By no means, miss! No! No no. I am not. Most certainly not.’

  ‘Has anyone seen Puppy?’ asked Curly.

  As soon as they woke next morning, the children glanced nervously at their cuffs and calves, to check that they had not sprouted in the night. Like Slightly. Hard going as their journey was, any hardship was preferable to being cast out on Neverpeak, shunned for growing bigger. Like Slightly. Why had it happened to Slightly and not to them? Not Knowing was the worst and most worrying part. They decided that it was, almost certainly, because Slightly had been wearing adult clothing when he arrived in Neverland.

  Clothes are so much part of what a person is, after all.

  The route to the summit was up chimneys of rock and over ridges of snow. They would scrabble up slopes of slippery marble only to slide back down, dislodging each other into a bruised and breathless pile, and have to set off all over again. Threads of iron and coal and fossils laced the rocks together. Ravines cracked them apart again, so that the explorers often found themselves on the brink of a precipice, looking down into bottomless nothingness.