Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  In the time it takes to click two fingers, the white knot was untied and Peter fell back, cracking his head on the ground but otherwise unmurdered. ‘Now are you satisfied, madam?’ said Hook to Wendy, and slumped down again, his back to the group.

  Tootles knelt and whispered in Peter’s ear. ‘Are we playing doctors and nurses, Peter? Oh, please say we are! I’m your nurse and you’re the patient and you have to get better and be everso thankful.’ But the boy on the ground did not stir. When she trickled pretend medicine in at his lips, it trickled out again at the corner of his mouth. His skin was clammy and the breath rasped in his throat. Tootles whispered, ‘You’re not playing this game right, Peter. Really you’re not.’

  First Twin bundled up the discarded red coat and hugged it to him, as if it were Peter himself.

  Thus the band of Explorers formed a circle once more, on the slopes of Neverpeak, not blasted this time by wind and snow but by the terrible possibility that the boy on the ground was dying, might still die, and they had no idea why, or how to prevent it.

  There were two moons that night. Alongside the midnight moon, dark-eyed with worry, hung her quavering reflection, risen from the sea in need of comforting company. Their two anxious white faces gazed down at the slopes of Neverpeak, offering bandages of moonbeam.

  Remembering Peter’s words, they sent Hook to Nowhereland, refusing to speak a word to him, pretending he no longer existed. But there he remained, bunched up on himself, eyes glimmering in the dark, wide awake as usual. Was it to witness the death of his sworn enemy, or because it was too dark to descend the mountain, or simply because he liked to be contrary?

  ‘Go away,’ John said. ‘You have been banished. It’s in the rules. You have to go.’

  ‘Whose rules?’ said Hook. ‘Go yourselves. I was here first.’

  ‘What, are you waiting for Peter to die?’ said Wendy.

  ‘Might be.’

  ‘Only a bad sport breaks the rules,’ John brooded sulkily, and vowed not to speak another word to the man—until a question entered his head that wanted answering. ‘… Anyway, I don’t believe what you said. I thought you were a pirate before you came here, not a schoolboy. “Bosun to Blackbeard: blood-thirstiest pirate ever to sail the seven seas.” That’s what I heard!’

  ‘Huh! Lies. A slur put about by my enemies. I have never served under any man! Why would Hook serve a styleless ship’s rat who could not count past five. I doubt Blackbeard could spell Eton, let alone wear the old school tie. I would not have suffered him aboard a ship of mine to chip paint.’

  ‘And where are your scurvy pirate cronies now?’ asked John, trying to sound haughty and disdainful, though secretly he just wanted to know. (John would have liked to be a pirate but for the robbing and killing part of it.)

  ‘I sent them off to do their bit in the War,’ said Hook. ‘As every man should. They sent me postcards first off. From Belgium and France. Then they forgot, I suppose. The postcards stopped. I imagine they were having too good a time. I imagine they were too busy living it up on booty and the spoils of war. Spending their loot on cake and beautiful French women. Unwilling to return to the drudgery of life aboard the Jolly Roger.’

  Wendy nodded. ‘I like to imagine that as well,’ she said, ‘every time I think about my brother Michael.’ Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, during which they understood each other perfectly.

  ‘I see you didn’t go to the War, though,’ said John sarcastically.

  The pirate glared at him murderously and said in a roaring whisper as low and cold as a subterranean river, ‘Thanks to that one there, I was UNFIT FOR DUTY!’

  ‘Hush!’ said Nurse Tootles in a flutter of fright. ‘We should let Peter sleep. Sleep is good for people. Sleep does wonders.’

  Hook, who had not slept for twenty years, gave a low and bitter laugh and turned his back on them, hunching his wool around him.

  Suddenly Curly was up on his feet. ‘What Peter needs is a doctor!’ he declared desperately. ‘A real doctor!’

  Everyone looked out from their mountain perch at the wilderness waste and wild vastnesses of Neverland and wondered how a doctor was to be conjured from such shaggy chaos. Doctors are spawned in ponds of antiseptic and on plains of clean linoleum or starched sheets. Neverland is not their natural habitat. And yet Curly already knew where one was to be found; it showed in the set of his jaw. Taking one deep breath, he crossed to where the pirate sat slumped under his fleece. ‘Ask me,’ he said, sinking the fingers of both hands in Ravello’s sleeve. ‘Ask me now.’

  Slightly sprang up. ‘No, Curly, don’t!’

  ‘Ask me, Ravello.’

  There was a mooing confusion of worry and questions from the others who did not understand. Hook scowled at Curly and tried to ease himself free, but Curly hung on, fierce as a terrier. ‘Ask me, Hook. Ask me what I want to be when I grow up.’

  ‘But, Curly!’ protested Slightly, trying to pull him away. ‘Think what you are doing! Do you want to be like me—grown-up like me? Never able to go home? There’s nothing left for me but to be a Roarer. Do you want to be a Roarer, Curly?’

  Curly swallowed hard and began to tug on the tangle of greasy wool that was both sleeve and arm of the pirate. Ravello’s face contorted with pain, and he said, ‘Listen to your friend, Master Curly. If the cock-a-doodle lives, do you really think he will thank you? He will turn you out, as he turned out all the rest. He won’t suffer grown-ups in his Company.’ The man’s eyes were liquid with midnight, and where there should have been stars reflected in them there were flying sparks and shards of eggshell. ‘The brat is dying, Mr Curly. Nothing can save Pan now. Ah, but who am I to dissuade you from your chosen fate? So tell me, Master Curly: what do you want to be when you—’

  ‘A doctor!’ Curly interrupted, sinking in his fingers almost to the bone of Hook’s arm. So steeped was the fabric in poison that it cancelled out the youthful magic of Neverland and let Time soak in through the pores of Curly’s tender skin. As his fists filled up with unravelling wool, he felt the squibs and sparklers fizzle out in his head, to be replaced with the dull gleam of good sense and cleverness. His nose could smell chloroform and liniment. White coats paraded through his imagination like starched ghosts. His pockets rattled with hypodermics, thermometers, and spatulas. Curly wished so hard to be a doctor that he grew taller, then and there, sloughing his blanket coat and even his wealth of curly hair. The growing pains were fearsome, but he kept tight hold of Ravello.

  And the bigger he grew the more he remembered of being a doctor—after all, he had been one before—back in Fotheringdene, before the quest to Neverpeak. He remembered his studies now, at medicine school, his days in Fotheringdene County Hospital. And all this while his hands filled with the wool that was both Ravello’s arm and Ravello’s clothing. He laid bare the steel hook and the scars inflicted by the crocodile. Ravello rose to his feet with a bloodcurdling yell, but found himself no taller than Doctor Curly Darling MD, MRCS.

  ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you, sir,’ said Curly (now that he was a doctor, he regretted causing pain to anyone) and emptied his hands of the crinkled wool, which spilled to the ground around the pirate’s crocodile-skin boots. Instinctively the children moved away from Curly. (Doctors are almost as scary as pirates, what with their cold hands and dangerous handwriting. And they only ever visit when you are feeling too ill to make friends.)

  Pulling a stethoscope from his pocket, Doctor Curly knelt down beside Peter and listened to the fluttering beat of his heart. It was the sound of Fairyland at war with itself. It was the sound of Eternal Youth dying, dying, dying.

  But he clearly heard something else as well. Breaking the tip off his own swordfish blade (how small it seemed now in his big, cold hands) Curly cut a hole just over Peter’s heart and, using the sugar tongs, drew out a length of something grey and wispy and flecked with soot. ‘I think that this may be the source of the trouble,’ he said.

  Back in the house in Cadogan Square, in
sneezing the last sneeze of her cold, Wendy had reached out for a handkerchief and tucked it into her sleeve—a grown woman’s handkerchief tucked into the sleeve of a girl’s sundress. And inside that handkerchief, unknown to her, a strand of London fog!

  In the Neverwood, when Peter had mopped the blood from his face using her handkerchief, he had breathed in that same strand, and it had wound itself about his heart, tightening its grip day by day.

  Not the burning of the Neverwood, nor shipwreck, nor the touch of witches, nor the crushing weight of hostile fairies had got the better of Peter Pan; not hunger nor cold; not Ravello’s salt, nor his words of temptation were killing Peter; not even Hook’s little bottle of poison—which had blighted all Neverland—had brought Peter Pan to the edge of death. Only a strand of London fog.

  Dr Curly made hard work of getting to his feet, as only grown-ups can. ‘Come, Slightly. Time for us to go,’ he said. And cutting his own door in the air with his surgeon’s lancet, he stepped through it and into banishment.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Hook, still clutching an arm unravelled to the bone.

  ‘I broke the Rule and grew,’ said Curly peaceably. ‘And unlike some people, I know how to play by the Rules. I prescribe sleep for that arm, Ravello. As Nurse Tootles says, Sleep is a great healer. Sleep and Time.’ And with that he left, drawing Slightly away, skidding noisily and clumsily down the mountainside by the light of two moons.

  With a deep sigh and then with a deeper intake of breath, Peter Pan sat up. Putting one small hand to his chest, he felt the life pouncing through his bloodstream, put back his head and crowed:

  Peter Pan restored to health was a wonderful sight. He could turn cartwheels, walk on his hands, and leap from ledge to ledge as nimbly as a mountain goat. In fact (being no longer a pirate or superstitious about whistling) he whistled up all the chamois goats that lived locally, and mounted his friends on their backs, so that they fairly cantered down the slopes and precipices of Neverpeak towards the dismal plain below. Even Humpty Dumpty jumping off his wall never had so much fun. Ravello was left far behind, maimed, unthought-of, and as slow-moving as a sloth by comparison with the League of Pan.

  Nobody would have mistaken Peter for any dandified pirate captain now. The glossy ringlets Ravello had combed into place were soon tangled and matted, and stood up in wild confusion, lightening in the sunshine. Butterflies clamoured round the bright colours of his tunic and on their wings brought pollen that made him sneeze.

  ‘Every time I sneeze,’ he bragged, ‘astrologers in China spot a new planet coloured like a soap bubble!’ He went to blow his nose, and when Wendy snatched the handkerchief out of his hand, simply laughed and wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve instead. Then he made up a rude song about baboons, and they sang it at the top of their voices all the way down to the monkey-puzzle trees.

  Not Wendy, though. She did not sing. She clutched the handkerchief between her two hands and began to weep inconsolably. The others stopped singing—‘bumti-boo-ba-boo-oo-boons!’—to stare at her. ‘It was all my fault!’ she wailed. ‘I might have killed Peter, and all for a silly sneeze!’

  But Peter did not trouble with ‘what-ifs’ or ‘might-have-beens’. He did not even mind about having no treasure to show for the quest to Neverpeak; the hunt for treasure is always more fun than the finding of it. After all, what could he have wished for, having what he had already: friends and freedom and adventure and youth? Wendy, though, washed out the handkerchief in a little stream of icy water from the melting glacier (for fear any fog remained), then pinned it to her coat to dry.

  And because it had belonged once to a grown-up Wendy Darling, she began to remember things. She remembered Cadogan Square and a little girl called Jane, remembered grocery bills and washdays, committee work and a husband, appointments at the dentist, and putting the bins out on Tuesdays. Just as dreams of Neverland had disturbed her peace of mind while she was in London, so dreams of home began to hover around her now, as the butterflies hovered around Peter.

  Butterflies and wasps!

  Climbing down the monkey-puzzle trees was no more pleasant than before. The insects stung, the sap stuck their fingers and knees together, the spines pricked, and the twigs broke under their weight. Suddenly, to the sound of banshee wailing and hooting and shrieking and yelling, the trees began to toss and flex and lash about, sending wasp’s nests and pinecones tumbling. The children clung on for as long as they could, then Peter sprang rashly out into empty air and everyone else lost their grip and dropped through the trees.

  The lower branches showed no interest in catching them—only the nets stretched wide by the Roarers who had been lying in ambush for days.

  They had him at last, all those boys who had broken the Rule and grown bigger; all those boys Peter had banished to Nowhereland, and who hated him for it, with a deadly venom.

  The Roarers bound their prisoners to the trunks of the monkey-puzzle trees and spent the morning throwing pine cones at them for the fun of it. Meanwhile, they discussed what they would do with Peter Pan; how they would put him to death.

  ‘Hang him!’

  ‘No rope.’

  ‘Shoot him!’

  ‘No gun.’

  ‘Cut off his head, then!’

  ‘Or bury ’im alive.’

  ‘Hit him with a rock.’

  ‘Or cut out his lights.’

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t throw me into a briar patch!’ said Peter with a glimmer of a smile. Wendy had once told him the story of Brer Rabbit and how he tricked his way out of just such trouble.

  But the Roarers were not fooled. They too knew the story of Brer Rabbit: they had heard it from Peter as they sat at his feet, happy little Lost Boys all.

  ‘Make him walk the plank!’ suggested the Twins, thinking the Roarers might forget they were on dry land and not aboard ship, and would think that Peter had drowned.

  But the Roarers were not fooled.

  ‘Scare him to death!’ said John, knowing that Peter was far too brave for that to work.

  But the Roarers were not fooled.

  ‘Let us go, and I will be a mother to you all,’ said Wendy. That was not a trick. It was an honest and straightforward offer made out of the goodness of her heart. But, amazingly, the Roarers did not want a mother. Full as they were of rage and disappointment, they believed mothers were almost as bad as Peter Pan.

  ‘Bog’ll do it,’ said the oldest, and the rest agreed.

  ‘Nowt left after bogging.’

  ‘Swamp the lot.’ All the words in the world would not soften this sentence of death: the Roarers were going to drop Peter and his friends into quicksand.

  ‘We demand a trial!’ said Tootles (who had once been a high court judge, remember). But she found herself now in a place without justice or fair play. The Roarers had armed themselves with branches ripped from the corkscrew-dogwoods and dogwood-corktrees; now they drove the children towards their place of execution.

  Not far to go. On each side of the spongy track, swamp softly sucked and seethed: a carpet of crimson moss unrolled to welcome the unwary and the doomed. The heights of Neverpeak still loomed over them, cutting out the eastern sky. The Roarers robbed the children of anything in their pockets, scrunched up the rainbow banner inside a grubby fist, then goaded everyone towards the red swamp.

  ‘Give me a sword and I will fight you all single-handed!’ declared Peter. ‘Or are you too cowardly?’

  But there was no appealing to the Roarers’ valour or pride. Any notion of nobility had died on the day of their banishment. Graceful boyhood had deserted them, through no fault of their own, and left them burly and bumbling and bony; why should they give a hoot for honour or fair play? They jabbed their prisoners in the back, forcing them towards the quagmire.

  ‘Who’s first?’ said the thinnest one, as they reached the brink.

  ‘I am,’ said Peter. ‘Always.’ And he thrust out his chest and tilted back his head and took one long, long stride out o
n to the quicksand. After his illness, he was so light that his weight barely dented the surface. ‘You are supposed to grant me one last wish,’ he said, turning to face his assassins. ‘I ask that you free my friends. They never did you any wrong.’

  The Roarers shrugged their bony shoulders up around their juggy ears. ‘Any friend of yours …’ said the articulate one, without bothering to finish the sentence. ‘And we don’t do wishes. Wishes is for fairies.’

  The jellified ground sucked thoughtfully at Peter’s little bare feet, decided it liked the taste, and closed over his toes and heels.

  ‘Consequences! Didn’t I tell you?’ came a voice from high overhead. And there, on the ledge above the monkey-puzzle trees, the marred shape of Ravello pointed at Peter a steel hook in place of a hand. ‘What did I tell you, cock-a-doodle? Every action has its consequences!’

  The red mire swallowed Peter to his ankles. He spread his arms wide to keep his balance. A Roarer pushed John, too, on to the red carpet of mud and elbowed Wendy after him.

  There was no fear in Pan’s face, only a sad bewilderment that the Roarers should feel so badly done by. ‘You all swore to keep the Rule and not to grow up. Why did you grow bigger, if you didn’t want to be banished?’

  ‘We was poisoned, innit?’ said the roughest one. ‘Poisoned by a dirty double-dealing twister of a chief.’ And he swung at Pan’s head with his branch, and missed. The look of injured reproach on Peter’s face would have softened the hardest heart … if the Roarers had had any hearts to soften.

  ‘Peter didn’t betray you!’ said Wendy. ‘There is the man who betrayed you!’ And she pointed up at Hook. ‘He is the one who made you grow! If it hadn’t been for Hook you could have stayed young for ever, just like Peter! And been able to fly and to come and go and visit your mothers and keep your promises and go questing after treasure six days in any week!’ She let out an involuntary yelp of disgust as the soupy redness reached the hem of her dress. Peter was already sunk to his waist, arms held high to keep his hands clean of mud.