Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Peter’s frozen fingers fumbled for the buttons of the red frock coat (Hook’s second-best frock coat) and slipped his arms out of its sleeves. Despite the icy blast wrapping the mountain in coils of cold as jagged as barbed wire, the jacket dropped to the ground behind him and his flimsy tunic rattled round him in the wind.

  Ravello laughed. ‘You may shed the coat, but not the man you are become! No one but an Eton boy can unfasten the old school tie!’ And it was true that however hard Peter wrenched at the white tie round his throat, he could not slip its knot. ‘How willingly you let me comb the imagination out of your head! How readily you let me help you back into the coat each time you shed its scarlet magic. But I see your friends doubt me, Pan! So tell them! Tell them! Tell them how you have dreamed Hook’s dreams—remembered Hook’s memories—felt his boyhood disappointments, given in to his temper!’ He began to load cups and trophies, caps and ribbons into the big pockets of his peculiar garment. ‘You are become James Hook, and here is the proof! These were the things dearest to his heart, and only YOU could wish them here! That is why I needed you.’

  ‘No! No! I am Pan!’ protested Peter, tugging off the shiny leather boots. ‘I shall always be young and there is no one like me! I am the One-and-Only Child!’

  The Ravelling Man gave a snort of disdain. ‘Call yourself what you please, mayfly. Your summer is ended, and winter is come.’

  The little ones, too cold fully to understand what was happening, stood hugging each other for warmth. ‘Can’t we fly home now, Wendy? Somewhere warm?’ Wendy nodded briskly and went from person to person rubbing handfuls of fairy dust into their hair.

  Ravello watched her do it. When she was finished, he asked very sweetly: ‘What? Without your shadows? An impossibility, I’m afraid, stupidi bambini. You may have fairy dust. You may have happy thoughts (though somehow I doubt it). But without a shadow no one can fly. Why do you suppose I took them?’ Reaching into the sea chest, he lifted out their shadows, all neatly rolled up like window-blinds, stiff-brittle with the cold. The Twins moved towards him, hands outstretched. Teasingly he held the scrolls high above their heads.

  ‘What, will you hold our own shadows to ransom?’ demanded Pan.

  ‘Faith no, blowfly. I hold nothing captive. I have a horror of confinement. Ask any of my animals. I shall free your shades to go their way!’ Then Hook opened his good hand and let go the shadows—gave them into the teeth of the biting wind. The silhouettes of six children went dancing out over the abyss, tumbling and colliding and rolling themselves into a single, grubby ball. Each explorer felt a searing pain as each shadow tore into tatters on the gale.

  ‘Hook, you are a scoundrel and a villain. Only the Devil steals a man’s shadow!’

  Ravello gave a dismissive wave of one sleeve. ‘In the unlikely event you live long enough, they will re-grow. With every grief that befalls a man, his shadow increases. Have you not seen how I trail behind me a shadow like a leak from the Quink Ink factory? But then you have not heard my sad story, have you? Oh, you should, you should! I know how you children love your stories! So let me tell it. The story of Captain James Hook, yes? A man I was heartily fond of once, I confess it. A man with the strength and vitality to climb any mountain, to hunt down any treasure … Pay good heed.’ And he began then and there to recount his life history.

  ‘Once upon a time, Jas. Hook was a child. (How is it that children find that so hard to believe—that grown-ups were ever young?) He was a child just like you … but better! He excelled! Name any sport, and James Hook mastered it. On the playing fields of Eton College he could have writ his name large enough for the constellations to see from Outer Space! Let Latin go hang. Let mathematics sink. Let foreign languages remain a mystery. Hook was a sportsman! Winning was all in all to him. Let him but see his name on the sporting cups in Eton’s trophy cabinet, and his heart would have filled with joy for ever! Just as you, Pan, gave up everything to be forever young, so I—acch!—he—Hook—gave up all to be the best, the fastest, the strongest, highest, fittest … By Skylights, but I kept a straight bat!’

  The north wind hooted around the peak of Neverpeak. Whenever Ravello fell silent, the wind took over from him, bullying the children.

  ‘But mothers are mothers. And mothers must pay their dressmakers before paying out for such trifles as school fees. So James Hook’s dreams were ended by a vain rustle of taffeta. His mother came on Sports Day to fetch me—him—away from College. The other boys were competing for prizes which, in one more day, would have been his—for honours and laurels that would have …’ He broke off, picturing the Headmaster’s hand extended towards him, hearing the cheers of School House … His head rose; his shoulders squared. Then Disappointment struck again, like stomach cramp. ‘Since Hook could not win ’em fair and square, he emptied the trophy cabinet and took every sporting prize away with him. His Treasure. His objects of desire.’

  The Explorers gasped. ‘You stole your school cups?’

  Ravello took out a handkerchief speckled with acid burns and holes, and wiped his nose. ‘Not good form, I admit, but if mothers will be mothers, then boys will be boys. Or pirates, in my case. Thus began James Hook’s life of crime. On the journey home he made up his mind: he would cut loose from home and family, and come to Neverland—this one place in the world where a boy can shape his own destiny! He travelled by airship. Here, in this place, he crashed. In this place he left his Treasure and dragged his carcass down to the Lagoon and a life of greed and pillage. But his heart he left up here, meaning always to return one day and find it. So I would have! I would … but for Pan!

  ‘That weevil in the meat. That fishbone in the gullet. That malaria in the bloodstream! First he took my right hand … Hook’s hand, I mean—his bowling hand, his tiller hand, his rowing and fencing and … But let that pass. Then he consigned Hook to the belly of a crocodile! Ha! You think this mountain is a fearful place to die? You should taste life inside a saltwater crocodile! Lightless, airless tomb awash with digestive juices; a run-down clock wedged in the small of the back, and scarce room to turn over. What more terrible a grave! He lived on the eggs of the crocodile—a female. (Did you know she was a female?) Oh, how well acquainted Hook grew with the interior anatomy of the adult female saltwater crocodile!

  ‘Each day the stomach acid burned him and the stench choked him … But I refused … Hook refused to take deadness. Gone were his days of playing the Good Sport; as he lay there and suffered his sea change, Hook thought on nothing but revenge!

  ‘Then and there it started, unbidden, without him lifting a finger. For the bottle of poison he kept always in my breast pocket cracked and leaked and loosed its venom into the crocodile, into the Lagoon, into …’ The sweeping gesture of his outstretched hook took in the whole wintry landscape that surrounded Neverpeak. ‘At last, when the beast died of poisoning, he cut his way out with his hook—out of the creature’s belly—and made him a pair of boots from the remnant. I would not—dash it!—he would not take deadness, you see!

  ‘But the man who slithered into the daylight was not Hook. It was a digest of the man. Gone the scarlet coat, the britches, the glossy hair. The pride. They had dissolved all—flesh and hair and coat and colour and soul, in the bile of the crocodile. And sleep!—ah, agony!—the gift of sleep was gone! All that emerged was this … this SOFTNESS of a man! A thing like a sponge. A thing like a dead thing. From my panache to my underwear, all was frizzled to wool! The Hookness of Hook was eaten away and all that remained was Ravello, the Ravelling Man! Even my dear old ship presented herself to you, Pan, rather than to me! Try as I might, I could not summon her out of the Lagoon—could not draw her to me, for there was no magnetism left in me. The iron in my soul all rusted away, you see, as I lay in the briny slops of that crocodillo’s belly!

  ‘It was some comfort to find how the world, too, had changed during my imprisonment: how my little bottle of poison had worked its worst on Neverland; seeping through the Neverwood and the wetlands;
cramping the summer months until the very year itself doubled up in pain!

  ‘Not much was left of Hook, as I say, in this miserable chinchilla of a man. Only the dreary nag of longing. Only that oldest, deepest desire to recover his Treasure from the remote place he left it. And there was the biggest joke of all in this most hellish of Divine Comedies. I … could … not … wish! I could not wish any more than I could sleep. Only the iron will of James Hook could open that Treasure Chest there and find my … his … our … dash and blight you!—the Treasure that lay in there.

  ‘See then how I found me an understudy. A proxy. A substitute. The only one in Neverland whose willpower equalled that of James Hook. Are you not grateful to me? Oh, what I would give to look like Hook again, to swagger like Hook, to blare and terrify like Hook! You should be grateful, Pan! Think how I drove you on, with thirst and flattery—how I bled the Pan out of you and replaced it with temper and tyranny. See how, with a coat and tie and boots, I turned you—scrubby boy that you are—from a mere child into the greatest pirate of them all—into Captain James Hook!’

  ‘NO! No. No. I am Pan!’ said Peter. ‘I will always be young, and no one else in the whole world will ever be like me! And you, Hook, will always be my sworn enemy and I shan’t rest until …’

  ‘Tish. You are all fire and fury, lad.’ Ravello flapped a listless hand as if to be rid of a fly. ‘Now that you have lost, you should cultivate patience. Like me. A spell inside a saltwater amphibian would pacify you; let me commend it to you … But no more rancour. Give me your hand. You have served your purpose, little Captain. I have what I came here for. Let us shake hands and be reconciled.’ And he actually extended his good left hand in its overlong sleeve, to help Peter to his feet. Peter lashed out with his sword, but its saw-teeth simply snagged in the wool of the sleeve, and the hand within gripped his hand tighter than tight. ‘So fierce! What would you have been, I wonder, if you had grown to manhood; if you had not opted for everlasting childhood. Would you have been a pirate like me?’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘No? A pilot, then. Or an actor, taking ten curtain calls to the applause of your adoring fans! A man of rank, I don’t doubt it! A hero … Oh, but wait! I know! Of course! An explorer! A discoverer of new lands, writing your name in letters of gold on maps of the thirteen continents!’

  Within Peter’s hand the oily strands of wool began to separate, to unravel, to unknit. The numbing cold, the dizzying snow-flurries, the words Ravello sprinkled like salt over him, slowed Peter’s thinking. The words had pictures attached to them, like little fluttering gift tags, and he really could almost see what life would be like if he were …

  ‘What, then, what?’ Hook badgered him, grinning—all the time grinning. ‘Not an explorer. Something easier? Something not so taxing?’

  Peter bridled. Did Ravello think he was not up to being an explorer? Absurd! Why, Peter could almost imagine …

  ‘Don’t answer him!’

  A figure stumbled up on to the peak—a young man no one recognized—until they saw the tails of his evening shirt fluttering beneath his outgrown coat.

  ‘Slightly!’

  ‘Don’t answer him, Peter!’ called Slightly pointing his clarinet at the Ravelling Man.

  Wendy ran to Slightly’s side. His bigness made her feel awkward, but she could not help flinging her arms around him. ‘Oh, you aren’t a Roarer after all! You followed us! How cold your poor knees must be! I do wish I had made your coat bigger!’

  ‘Don’t answer him, Peter!’ said Slightly again, never once taking his eyes off Ravello. ‘He asked me the selfsame thing—What do you want to be when you grow up?—and the wool unravelled in my hand, and in that moment—in that moment, I started to grow. I have worked it out, you see, Ravelling Man!’

  Ravello gave his strange, underwater laugh, though his vexation was plain. ‘Slightly-wiser now, I see.’

  Peter Pan looked up at Hook, incredulous. ‘You would have made me grow up? Under cover of a handshake!’

  Hook met the accusation with a jaunty shrug. ‘Not I. You yourself. The moment a child answers the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he is halfway to being an adult. He has betrayed childhood and Looked Ahead. He has joined the ranks of those clerks and chicken-pluckers and box-packers who scan the Situations Vacant column in the newspapers.’ His grip on Peter’s hand tightened and he hauled the whole boy up to a level with his face. It was a terrible face, scarred by grief, regret, stomach-acid, and loathing. ‘Say that you did think ahead when I asked you! Tell me you pictured yourself a grown man, rowing your canoe up the Amazon River—or dragging your sled over pack-ice towards True South! Curse you, Slightly! One moment more and I would have done what no mother or father could do: I would have stolen childhood away from the boy Pan!’

  Still Slightly pointed an accusing finger at Hook. Still he raged: ‘That man told the Roarers you poisoned them, Peter, and made them grow older, but I say it was him! I say he poisoned them!’

  ‘He poisoned all Neverland!’ snarled Peter. His face was so close to the pirate’s that their noses touched. ‘I should carve you to the bone, villain!’

  ‘You would find nothing there but my hatred of thee, Peter Pan,’ said Ravello and threw him to the ground.

  All this while, the Twins had been trotting to and fro with twigs from the treasure chest, to make a bonfire. As often as they piled up two armfuls of fuel, the wind scattered them again. (The blizzard grew worse with every passing moment, lashing the mountain peak with flails of snow.) Slightly went to their rescue, pinning the wood in place with bags of gold and bolts of silk from among the Treasure.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad you didn’t turn brigand, Slightly!’ said First Twin with a sniff.

  ‘Or forget all about us, Slightly!’ said the Second.

  But what else could Slightly have done, knowing the danger they were in? What choice did he have but to dog their footsteps all the way to the Point of No Return? Slightly was adult now, and though growing up is a blight and a nuisance, grown-ups do have one great merit: they cannot help caring and going on caring.

  So Slightly helped the Twins to build the bonfire which might just save his friends from an icy death on the summit of Neverpeak. John ran to the sea chest to fetch a match, but Ravello slammed its lid shut with the toe of his boot and gave it a push, so that it rolled to the very brink.

  ‘Give me a match, pirate,’ John demanded.

  ‘Don’t speak to him!’ snapped Peter. ‘I have banished him to Nowhereland and nobody must speak to him. I will light the fire, as I always lit fires in the grate at the Wendy House! By Imagination!’ But though he strained and struggled, though he banged his head on the ground and wrenched at his glossy hair with desperate fingers, Peter could no more conjure up fire than he could imagine them their supper. Ravello had combed the Imagination out through the ends of his hair, you see.

  The Twins were sure they could do it. After all, hadn’t they set the Neverwood alight to kill the timber dragon? But Ravello laughed his mirthless laugh. ‘Ha! Do you really credit yourselves with that, doppel-kinder? It was I who torched the Neverwood! Turned loose my animals. Sacked my circus-hands (Roarers, every one). Set fire to my beautiful tent … Burned my bridges. For as soon as I saw the Wendy girl, I knew my waiting was over. The time had come for revenge. What is a circus in comparison with sweet revenge?’

  The air was crammed with snowflakes—as though a goose-feather pillow had burst. Without the red frock coat, Peter was gibbering with cold and he struggled to pull the white tie from round his throat.

  ‘A match, Ravello. Let us get this fire lit and talk after!’ called Curly.

  ‘A match, Ravello. Quickly!’ said Tootles. ‘Aren’t you cold too?’

  ‘What’s the little word that gets things done?’ said the Ravelling Man, his voice high and mocking.

  Then the Explorers wanted to send him to Nowhereland and never have to speak to him again.

  ‘Please,
’ said Wendy coldly.

  ‘Please,’ said Curly.

  ‘Please,’ said John.

  Ravello gave a tug on the rope, and brought the wheeled sea chest back to his feet like a chastened pet. He opened its lid and took out a box of lucifers, shaking it gently: a sound like a baby’s rattle. Only one match left. ‘Tell me again. What’s the little word?’

  ‘Please!’ said Tootles.

  ‘Please!’ chorused the Twins.

  (‘Ah! Now I see!’ said Peter to himself, puzzle solved.)

  ‘PLEASE!’ said all but Peter.

  ‘WRONG,’ said Ravello, striking the match against the stubble of his unshaven jaw. The flare lit up his face. It was a wretched face, scarred by his time inside the crocodile, scarred by time passing where no time should have passed. Only the aristocratic tilt of his head and the fire in his bleached-brown eyes proved that Pan’s deadliest foe, Captain James Hook, was still living within. ‘Let me think now. What is that little word that gets things done? Ah yes. Now I remember …’

  Then he blew out the match and said, ‘DIE!’

  Wind smashed against the mountain. The scarlet treasure chest, still half-buried in snow, only banged its lid open and shut, open and shut. But the battered old sea trunk Ravello had pulled over such a distance on its springy wheels—that the wind shook and rocked and set rolling like a runaway perambulator. It rolled over the brink, arcing out into space and falling, falling, spilling out salt cellars, crockery, maps, tools, and string. They never heard it land; the blizzard was on them now, larding them with ice, filling their ears and eyes and hands with snow.

  ‘Now you will die too, Hook!’ cried Peter Pan.

  The circus-pirate shrugged. ‘I may. It is of no consequence. I have done what I set out to do. I have my Treasure. What else remains?’