Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  ‘Hook?’ The Roarers were confused by the name. ‘Captain Hook?’ It reminded them of their days in the Wendy House, listening to stories of the villainous pirate eaten by a crocodile before they were even born. ‘ ’Snot Hook. Tha’s the circus man!’

  ‘… travelling man.’

  ‘… ravelling man.’

  Each knew the man on the mountainside, but not as Jas. Hook, only as someone they had met on their travels.

  ‘Wendy is right. He is the one who poisoned Neverland!’ shouted Peter, chest-deep now in the mire. ‘Tell them, Hook! Tell them how the bottle in your breast pocket leaked poison and killed the crocodile!—poisoned the Lagoon!—let in Time, and turned my Lost Boys into Roarers!’

  And Hook laughed and bowed one last time to Peter—no longer the servile bow of a valet, but the arrogant flourish of a victor acknowledging cheers.

  Each of the Roarers could remember meeting the ravelling man. A few could remember the feel of the greasy wool in their hands, and answering the question—‘What do you want to be when you grow up, boy?’ None realized till now that they had met the notorious Captain James Hook.

  Captain James Hook saw the Roarers drop their branches and, like a turning tide, start back towards him. They were roaring in that low crescendo of hate that gave them their name. ‘Hook! Hook! Hook! Hook!’ they chanted—reaching the cliff—starting up the trees. Within minutes they would scramble up to the ledge where he stood. He raised the fingers of his left hand to his mouth … and blew.

  It was a startling, quacking noise, which made the Roarers falter in their climb, the quagmire falter in its eager sucking. The ferns and heather of the plain stirred in swashing eddies, and, looking down, the Roarers recoiled in shock. For twelve lions and a family of bears, three tigers and a cotillo; ponies, a puma, and a palmerion were coming at their master’s call. Instinct taught the animals the safe routes through the bogs; loyalty taught them their duty: to save the Great Ravello from danger, and to slaughter his foes.

  The Roarers scattered—each man for himself—dropping their loot, throwing aside the rainbow banner. Like a firework exploding, they were invisible five seconds later. Some of the beasts gave chase and others stood snuffing the air; some prowled to and fro, looking for a way up to the master who had summoned them. The bears were sidetracked by the hives in the trees.

  Meanwhile, John had sunk in the mire up to his knees, Wendy to her waist, but Peter’s chin was already beneath the sucking mud. The Twins snatched up one of the branches dropped by the Roarers and leaned out towards him as far as they dared. But then and there, in front of their very eyes, taking one last gasp of air, Peter sank under; nothing remained but two pale hands growing like fennel out of the smooth red moss.

  And the branch did not reach!

  ‘PETER!’

  ‘Pass me that other branch there!’ said John. ‘And keep back from the edge!’

  But John’s branch could not reach Peter either.

  ‘Give me one, too!’ said Wendy. ‘… And hold still, John, or you’ll sink faster!’ The Twins threw a branch to John who passed it to Wendy and she reached out with it as far as her arms would let her.

  At the touch of rough wood, the pale hands closed into fists. Then Wendy pulled, and John pulled her, and the Twins pulled John, and slowly, slowly, red feathers, coppery leaves, brown mud, and bright blue eyes came to light.

  Like spring after winter.

  Like the story of the Giant Turnip, they dragged Peter (and each other) to firm ground. And the band of friends saved themselves and each other from the terrible grip of the crimson quicksand.

  Panting and coughing and spitting and complaining about the mud in their knickers, they lay on solid ground, looking very like the branches that lay between them, laughing up at the sky. Such a lovely sky! with shreds and dabbles of rainbow in it.

  Then into their field of vision, into that sky, poked the leathery button nose of a bear. And into their mud-clogged ears came the throaty grumbling of lions discussing their next meal. And into their faces came the warm breath of twenty assorted beasts closing in for the kill.

  If Time truly stood still in Neverland, then nothing at all would happen. A lion’s open mouth would never close in a bite. A ravening bear would stand still, like a stuffed exhibit in a museum. But Time never stood that still in Neverland, not even Before. Things happen all the time in Neverland, and some are wonderful and some are utterly deadly.

  Two seconds more and they would be cat meat. Two minutes more and they would be bones. They were outnumbered. Just one of the bears could have outnumbered them all by itself, but there were five, prancing in dance-time—1-2-3, 1-2-3—as once they had in the ring. The lions’ hot breath smelt of dead rabbit, and there were bird bones between the palmerion’s pin-sharp teeth. Circus ponies, the charred stumps of plumes still sticking up from their browbands, pounded round and round, hemming the children in: there was no escape.

  Wendy pretended they were nightmares and would go away at any moment.

  The Twins thought of mothers and how one should come now and put a stop to the game.

  John thought of a pistol he had found once under his pillow—once, long ago when he had been grown-up—and how, if he had just brought that pistol …

  But First Twin thought of the red coat. He had brought it down from the mountain, sleeves knotted around his waist. Now he wrestled it loose and threw it into the air, and the downward slash of a bear’s claws caught it and snagged it and carried it aloft as the creature tried to shake it free. The lions, excited by movement, leapt up at it, saliva splashing like rain. The red meant nothing to them, colour-blind all, but the thrashing of the coat and the flashing of its buttons in the sunlight teased and agitated them. Hind paws trampled the children on the ground as the circus beasts tussled for the red frock coat.

  Red mattered to Peter, though. Peter had been looking up at the sky, and now Red mattered so much that he shouted it at the top of his lungs: ‘RED! RED! RED! RED! DO YOU SEE? RED!’

  Out of the sky fell flakes of a colour they had all seen once before. A confetti of fairies. A handful, a fistful, a crateful, a tubful, a cartload, a torrent of fairies.

  As the animals looked up in surprise, and batted paws at the strange downfall of prettiness, the children squirmed away to hide in among the swamp reeds. So when the Blue fairy army fell in earnest on the red coat, it felled only the animals. Claws and teeth were useless against such an onslaught. The gaping jaws were soon crammed solid with prickly fairies; paws were soon pinned to the ground. Lion and bear, cottilo, tiger, and all were buried so deep under a drift of hooligan fairies that not a whisker or a tail or an ear was left showing.

  ‘Let them go!’

  Somehow, by jumping and clambering and sliding and then by falling the rest of the way, Ravello descended the cliffs at the base of Neverpeak. In a matter of moments he was at the bottom (though the monkey-puzzle trees had taken their toll) and was running towards the fray. ‘Let them go! Get them off, Pan! Help my beasts!’

  Like a swarm of locusts, the fairies formed a shimmering, shifting, crackling net over the captive animals. These were fairies of the Blue Faction and believed they had just won a great victory over the forces of Redness. They thought it with one mind—as the ants in an anthill think like a single brain. And their single-mindedness told them not to shift until the life was crushed out of the red-loving opposition.

  Ravello ran the whole way, brandishing the oar from among his Treasure. The corkscrew-dogwoods plucked at him as he passed, as if to say, Too late, too late. ‘Let them go, you vermin! They cannot breathe! They cannot move!’ And he began shovelling up fairies with the blue-green rowing blade, and pitching their tiny bodies into the air. A parent with children buried under rubble would not have dug with more frenzy. It was useless: the fairies were no sooner in the air than they dived back down into the scrum. ‘Help me, Pan! Don’t just stand there! Can’t you hear them crying? They’re afraid! They’re suffo
cating! They cannot move!’ And the breath wheezed in his own throat, as though he was back inside the crocodile and suffocating himself. ‘Help me free them, Pan! Lend a hand, you idle whelp!’

  ‘And have them eat us? Are you mad?’ Peter took up his favourite stance, feet apart, hands on hips, defiantly young.

  ‘They are beasts! I did not set them on you! They follow their instincts! There is no malice in them. Not like these … these … insects! Hush, cub-bages, I am coming! Calmly, cat-kins, Ravello is here. What are you waiting for, Pan?’

  Peter tilted his head on one side and gave a twinkling smile. ‘What’s the little word that gets things done?’ he enquired gleefully.

  Ravello went rigid. He straightened up. ‘To think I suffered you to wear my school tie round that worthless little throat. When I was your valet, I should have tied it tighter for you—tighter by far!’

  Peter raised one hand, and the fingers beckoned for Hook to give him the right answer. ‘What’s the little word?’

  Ravello stared at him. ‘I see now why the swamp spat you out,’ he said.

  But Peter spoke the little sing-song chant again, determined to make Hook say ‘please’ for the first time in his reprehensible life. ‘What’s the little …’

  ‘PITY!’ roared Ravello, and the horizons of Neverland twanged like bowstrings, and North and South swapped ends.

  Then Wendy ran and grabbed up the crumpled rainbow banner from where the Roarers had dropped it. She shook the rumples out with a crack that made the boys jump, and laid it on top of the fairy mound like a tablecloth. ‘Here! Here’s a new banner for you, fairies! The prettiest in Neverland! Now go away and pick on someone your own size!’

  Dazzled and distracted by something so shiny, the fairies allowed themselves to fall skywards, taking the banner with them, dividing up its rainbow colours between them—‘I’ll have this one.’ ‘I want that one!’—as they drifted away to make war on someone their own size instead of fifty times bigger.

  ‘Peter … how did you know they were the Blue Army?’ asked John in a whisper.

  ‘Lucky guess!’ Peter was jubilant.

  The animals from Ravello’s circus looked flatter than paper cut-outs. They lay along the ground glassy-eyed, winded, their legs at all angles, tails kinked, whiskers nibbled short by the thuggish fairies. Ravello went down on his knees, stroking flanks, untucking fragile limbs, crooning encouragement to them. He paused only to glower at Peter with eyes the colour of burning peat. ‘Now I will fight you, Pan,’ he said. ‘Now I will fight you.’

  ‘I am ready, Hook.’

  One by one the animals got shakily to their feet, whimpering and whining, here and there raising a paw to touch Ravello’s cuff, remembering some circus trick that had brought them a treat in the past. Then they tottered away to lick their wounds, melding with the yellow of the spilled hives, with the brown of the grassless earth. The ferns and heathers of the great plain swashed with eddies of movement, and they were gone. Not one animal remained in the shadow of Neverpeak.

  Then Ravello advanced on Peter, unearthing his hook from the tangle of his right sleeve. He did not seem to see the other children, but came at Peter like a privateer closing on a treasure ship. ‘Have at thee, boy!’ He was Roarer through and through.

  ‘I have no sword, pirate.’

  ‘Then this time I have the advantage. Last time we fought, you had the power of flight. Not quite within the spirit of the Game, I always thought. Have at thee, I say!’

  If you think he slipped and the swamp swallowed him, you are quite wrong.

  If you think that the fairies returned—or that John found he had brought that pistol after all—or that Slightly and Curly came back—or that Tootles summoned the police, then you still do not understand how deadly a place Neverland can be.

  ‘Consequences!’ said Hook, slashing at Peter’s head. ‘All acts have consequences, you see!’

  Peter ducked and wove, leapt away, dodged behind the cork trees; but Ravello came after him brandishing a dagger in his left hand, and swinging with his right. Jay feathers flew like gouts of blood, as the hook slashed Peter’s tunic. Peter’s bare soles recoiled from sharp stones underfoot: he scrabbled up the stones and threw them at Ravello, but they lifted only puffs of dust from the shaggy fleece and, just once, the sound of an egg breaking. Peter clicked his tongue and made the sound of a clock ticking, but the thought of crocodiles no longer frightened Hook—it only enraged him. A crooked branch snagged Peter’s collar and held him, like fruit ripe for the picking. Hook stopped for a moment to savour the sight of his enemy vainly struggling, powerless to save himself. Then he considered in what soft part of Peter’s body to sink the killing blow.

  Oh.

  Did I say there were no animals left in the shadow of Neverpeak? No circus animals, I meant. There was one that had come there to cock its leg against a dogwood tree. Like everything in Neverland, this animal was a little … changed. As a consequence of tangling in Ravello’s fleece, little Puppy had aged since falling off the mountain. And when a Newfoundland puppy ages, there is quite an alteration.

  Out it came now: a hound half as high as a horse, bouncy as ever but thirty times as big. Puppy was as big now as its great-grandmother, Nana the Nursery-Nurse-Hound, and its devotion was every bit as huge. It went to Peter’s rescue with bark and bite and snarl and claws, and it did not let go—got snaggled and couldn’t let go—pulled and struggled and scrabbled and bit, until Hook lay like a hank of dead mermaid’s hair on the shore of a poisoned Lagoon.

  John gathered up the Treasure scattered between the red swamp and the trees: cups and trophies and caps. He looked around for something to carry it all in, and found the red coat lying ripped and discarded on the ground.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Pan, generous in victory. ‘It is not my kind of treasure. I do not need it.’ And that was true, because the boy in the leafy tunic and bare feet and caking of mud showed no likeness at all to Captain James Hook. ‘Leave it all.’

  Nurse Tootles might have liked to practise bandaging, or making a sling, but she did not have the courage to go anywhere near the unravelled man on the ground. So it was Wendy who finally went and crouched down beside Ravello. She had sewn potholders. She had sewn traycloths and aprons. She had once even sewn a boy’s shadow back on when it came adrift. But her powers of needlework did not stretch to this particular piece of mending.

  ‘Are you dying, Mr Ravello?’ she asked.

  ‘I fear, lady, that I am … undone, yes. I thank you for rescuing my animals.’

  ‘It was a little bit our fault they got squashed.’ She tucked the blue-green oar under his arm, like a hot-water bottle, and stacked the trophies and cups in a shining silver pyramid, where he could see them as he died. ‘Some of these got rather bent, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Their worth is not in their condition, madam.’ His eyes rested on them with ineffable joy. ‘You know—I may return them if ever I am invited back to address the School on Speech Day.’

  ‘That would be a very interesting Speech Day, Mr Ravello.’

  ‘Hook! My name is Hook, madam. Captain James Hook.’

  Wendy reminded him of Doctor Curly’s advice: ‘Sleep is a great healer, you know? You should sleep.’

  For a second Hook’s eyes flashed bitter resentment. ‘Madam, I have not slept for twenty years. Not since the crocodile!’

  ‘I expect that’s because you haven’t had anyone to kiss you goodnight—not since the crocodile, anyway.’

  The great straggling tangle that was James Hook writhed like an old fishing net caught in a rising tide. His voice was weak but there was no mistaking the strength of his feelings. ‘Madam, I have never had anyone kiss me goodnight! Mine was not that breed of mother. In any case, it would be vulgar and namby-pamby and sentimental and … and not quite manly.’

  Wendy nodded and patted his hand. ‘But worth a try?’

  ‘But worth a try,’ conceded Captain Hook.

  So even though he
was the blood-thirstiest pirate on all the seven seas and hated her friend Peter Pan more than Death itself, Wendy bent and kissed Hook on the cheek, then covered him over with the rags of the red frock coat. ‘Goodnight, James,’ she said, in her most motherly voice. ‘Sweet dreams.’ Then she left him alone, knowing that Death would be along shortly to cradle him in gentle and forgiving arms.

  Peter saw it and he was furious—really quite astonishingly furious, considering he was no longer wearing the red frock coat. His cheeks flushed and he called Wendy a traitor. ‘Hook is the Enemy! If you are nice to my enemies, you must be my enemy, too!’ And he went for his sword.

  He had no sword, of course; he looked at the others, but they had no swords either, because the Roarers had taken them all. Besides, no one wanted to lend Peter a sword for the killing of Wendy. Unfortunately, Peter was not deterred. With every passing hour the power of Imagination was returning to him. So he simply unsheathed an imaginary sword and used that—‘Oh, Peter, no!’—to cut a door in the air.

  ‘A french window for me, if you please!’ said Wendy defiantly, and Peter, taken aback, made the door into a pair of french windows instead.

  ‘Wendy Darling, I banish you to Nowhereland for giving succour to the enemy! Go now!’

  ‘The door jambs are not straight,’ said Wendy and folded her arms.

  John sprang forward and opened the doors, not because he wanted his sister to be banished, but because he had been nicely brought up and knew to open a door for a lady. There was a look of stricken misery on the Twins’ faces. Wendy politely thanked her brother and stepped through the french windows, head held high.

  Peter Pan had been expecting her to beg forgiveness and speak the-little-word-that-gets-things-undone. But now she was outside, in Nowhereland, and had not said Sorry at all! He fumbled sheathing his imaginary sword, and dropped it on his foot. And because he could not think what else to do, he shut the french windows and shot the bolts top and bottom. Tootles burst into tears.