Peter Pan in Scarlet

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Wendy did not look very punished. She did not even look very banished, standing there on the far side of the door with her arms crossed. ‘Stand away, please,’ she said sharply, and the boys stepped smartly backwards—even Peter Pan. Then Wendy bent down, picked up an imaginary boulder and hurled it through the imaginary french windows. There was the most tremendous smash of breaking glass. ‘Bosh and tosh!’ she said, stepping through the wreckage of glazing bars and locks and bolts, being careful not to tear her pirate-flag dress on the jagged glass. ‘Sometimes, Peter, you are such a ninny!’

  John had never heard his sister say either ‘bosh’ or ‘tosh’, and certainly not both at once. His mouth dropped open and he brushed some imaginary glass out of her hair. As Wendy led the way briskly along the narrow pathway and out of the shadow of Neverpeak, the others fell into step behind her.

  ‘Should you have done that, sis?’ whispered First Twin. He had to trot just to keep up.

  ‘It is quite all right,’ said Wendy. ‘I bent my knees and kept my back straight. I know to be very careful lifting boulders.’

  And beyond that no more was said.

  By the next day, Peter Pan had forgotten all about the quarrel. He was always good at forgetting things he did not want to remember.

  Having neither the power of flight nor a ship to sail, the Company of Pan knew they had to walk clear across the island to reach the Neverwood again. Without the power of flight or the gift of fairy dust or the company of half the Company, it seemed a very long way indeed. Out there lurked Roarers and injured beasts, hostile fairies and homeless harpy birds, thirsty deserts and junior pirates, witches, dragons, swamps and unpredictable puddles.

  They were toiling up a particularly wearisome hill, expecting to find below them the waterless wastes of the Thirsty Desert, when the sky ahead turned ochre yellow with flying dust. Sandstorm, they thought. Then they topped the rise, and a sight met their eyes that none would ever forget. There, streaming towards them across the flat skillet of the sear desert sands, came all the bison and appaloosas and travois and squaws and dogs and braves and thunderbirds and drums and papooses and war bonnets and peace-pipes and braids and coup sticks and moccasins and bows and arrows that went to make up the Tribes of the Eight Nations.

  The smoke signals Peter had sent from the top of Neverpeak had not been smudged out completely. Now Tribes from north, south, east, west and the other place came thundering over the Thirsty Desert as fast as their appaloosas and bison would carry them. At the sight of Peter and his fellow Explorers, they began to bang on their shields and drums and papooses and so forth in a triumphant chorus of greeting.

  The Tribes threw a potlatch for the League: a party that consisted of eating and drinking and giving away most of their belongings. They gave a lot of these to Peter and Wendy and Tootles and the Twins and John (who was thrilled to the core). But sadly, because they had nothing of their own to give, the children had to give away the gifts they had just been given.

  At the feast that followed, a lovely Princess came and smeared their faces with warpaint and told them that now they were honorary members of the Eight Nations.

  ‘Hello, Tiger Lily,’ said Peter. But the Princess looked at him strangely and said she was Princess Agapanthus, actually. ‘Ah. I could never remember names,’ Peter said. ‘Or faces.’

  ‘Twins? Whatever is the matter?’ asked Tootles. ‘Just because you had to give away those bowie knives …’

  But the Twins were not crying because of the bowie knives. They had just remembered riding on an omnibus to Putney and falling asleep and waking to find themselves wearing warpaint. ‘Will we ever see Putney again, Wendy?’ they asked.

  Wendy put on her most businesslike face. ‘We shall just have to wait for the fairies to stop quarrelling and for our shadows to grow back. Look: yours are starting to come already.’ The Twins brightened—then, of course, their shadows stopped growing again, which rather defeated Wendy’s efforts.

  They travelled on in a cloud of dust, with an escort of Eight Nations (not to mention the bison)—through the Elephants’ Graveyard, over Parcel Pass and the primaeval ruins of Never City and the Groves of Academe. If there were Roarers or lions lying in ambush, the bison and travoises flattened them, because suddenly the horizon was plush with the trees of Neverwood, and the Tribes were saying goodbye and moving off in eight different directions—to tepees, hogans, kivas or longhouses, roundhouses, bivouacs or stockades; some to sleep under the stars.

  ‘Where will we sleep tonight?’ asked Tootles.

  The Nevertree still lay where it had fallen in the storm, like a giant crossing-out. What a long way they had come to reach home, half forgetting that home was not where they had left it. Its leaves had all burned off in the fire.

  ‘Tomorrow we can all start to build Fort Pan,’ said Peter, but it did not quite answer where they were going to sleep.

  In the end, it was Puppy who served as a bed. It lay down on its side, and the Explorers curled up between front and back legs, in among the fur. Puppy was no great shakes as a nursemaid—licked them over a bit before bedtime, but forgot tooth brushing or prayers. Secretly, it was missing Slightly and Curly and that interesting chewy man who had smelt of eggs and cough drops and fear. While the Company of Pan looked up at the stars, Wendy told them all a fairy story about a little white bird in Kensington Gardens. A warm breeze blew through the Neverwood.

  All of a sudden, without a word of warning and with an upheaval that rolled everyone on top of everyone else, Puppy stood up. It lolloped off into the trees and did not stop till it had searched out Peter’s old underground den. Then it began to dig.

  Now Puppy, when it was a puppy, had wanted nothing but to get out of Peter Pan’s underground den as quickly as possible after falling in. But now that it stood four feet tall at the shoulder it was more ambitious. It could hear and smell the Something underground, and was determined to get in. By the time the Explorers arrived on the scene, Puppy had dug a hole big enough to bury a treasure chest.

  John called: ‘Careful, Puppy! You will go through the …’

  ‘R

  o

  o

  f!’said Puppy (or something like it) and arrived abruptly in the den where Peter had once lived with his Lost Boys. Now the Something was bound to emerge, be it badger, slaggoth, or giant truffle, and the weary travellers stood transfixed, awaiting the awful sight.

  Several things in fact emerged from the hole in the den roof, some quicker than others:

  —candlelight

  —barking

  —music (broken off short)

  —yelps of fright

  —the noise of breaking furniture

  —Puppy’s panting

  —no candlelight

  —that distinctive sound people make when licked on the neck in the dark

  —then a white flag of surrender. (Well, actually it was pink and tied to a walking stick, but it was the only handkerchief available and it is hard to tell pink from white in the dark.)

  —then Slightly-more,

  —and Dr Curly MD, MRCS,

  —and Smee, erstwhile First Mate to Hook, blood-thirstiest pirate ever to sail the seven seas.

  ‘Well done, Curly! Well done, Slightly! Did you take him prisoner? Did you? Did you fight him with your bare hands?’ said John, breaking Smee’s pink flag across his knee.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Slightly, relighting the candles. ‘He made us a nice cup of tea. Apparently Mr Smee has been living here for years. He has made the place very cosy.’

  ‘What is it now, then, a bandits’ hideout?’ asked John, rubbing his knee.

  ‘More of a retirement home, I think,’ said Dr Curly.

  Nobody thought twice about talking to Slightly or Curly, despite them being big. (That must have had something to do with the smashing of the french windows.) As for Smee, he busied round righting tables and taping enough chairs back together for everyone to sit down.

  ‘I thought Hoo
k sent you off to do your bit in the Big War?’ said Tootles to him.

  ‘Me and the rest of us, yes he did. The others got … lost. Afterwards I was on me own. So I travelled ’bout giving talks ’bout life aboard the Jolly Roger, and how Smee was the only man James Hook ever feared.’

  ‘I think I saw a poster,’ said Curly.

  ‘Is that true, Mr Smee? That James Hook was afraid of you?’

  ‘Faith no, boy! What’s the truth got to do with show business? But a man has to live. In the end, I got too afeared—that Hook would hear of it and hunt me down and cut out me lying tongue, or some such. Soft-headed, I know, but I used to dream him come squirming out of that old crocodile to haunt me, hook glinting and me name all twisted up on his lips: Smeeee!’ (The Explorers glanced at one another, but no one broke the bad news to Smee that his dreams were not far wide of the mark.) ‘I got the heeby-jeebies and chucked the lecture circuit and took up selling household cleaning products door-to-door. Mops. Sponges. Scouring pads, that manner of thing.’ (The underground den certainly did look very clean and tidy and was very well stocked with sponges, scouring pads, and mops and that manner of thing.) ‘… But I missed this place. Neverland, I mean.’ He looked about him as though the small earth-walled burrow where he lived contained Neverland entire. ‘So I nicked a pram and sailed back here.’

  ‘But you aren’t a child!’ said John, impressed.

  ‘Nah. But there was a shortage of pirates, thanks to you lot, so I got permission. I’d kill for chocolate money: reckon that makes me near enough a Lost Boy.’

  ‘But you don’t work as a pirate any more?’

  ‘Nah. Gave it a try, but me heart wasn’t in it, somehow. Not without a captain. Or a ship. Starkey calls round sometimes for rum and scones. We spin a yarn or two. Generally there’s not much I miss—though I’m rare fond of talcum powder, and that can’t be had in Neverland. Not for real money. Well, not even for chocolate money, which is ’stonishing!’

  ‘There was some aboard the Jolly Roger,’ said Wendy.

  ‘That was gunpowder, lassie. It’s not the same. Been a quiet sort of a life, all in all, since I came here. Till tonight, that is. What’s that horrible dog of yours doing now? I don’t crochet table-mats for dogs to do that with them.’ They rescued the crochet work from Puppy who had been unravelling it, reminded of the chewy man who smelt of fear. ‘Mr Curly and Mr Slightly here were just telling me some of their excitements on the way here. Go on, won’t you, gentlemen?’

  And so despite the interruption of the roof falling in and the sudden arrival of Peter Pan and Co., Curly and Slightly took up their story again.

  ‘We were walking back from Neverpeak, towards the Reef, thinking to build a raft or signal a passing ship, I don’t know. We heard running feet behind us, and shouting. At first I thought we were being chased, but they went streaking by like things possessed—Roarers!—yelling that there were lions after them—and bears! Naturally we started running too, but those boys must have been chased oftener than us, because we were left trailing. They tore on like madmen, not looking where they were going, right, Slightly?’

  ‘We shouted a warning when we saw where they were heading. But they were too busy running—straight into the Maze of Witches!’

  ‘We never saw the lions, did we, Slightly?’

  ‘No, but we saw the Witches!’

  ‘They were on the Roarers in a twinkling. It was horrible!’

  ‘Those women lifted grown lads clean off the ground—held them so tight they stopped struggling inside the minute! We hid, didn’t we, Slightly?’

  ‘We should have tried to rescue them. But we hid. I would have played my clarinet, but I hadn’t the breath for it.’

  ‘So we hid.’

  ‘We did.’

  Tootles could not wait: ‘And did the Witches EAT the Roarers?’

  The two were slow to answer. They were picturing once again the horrific round-up in the Maze of Witches, as one by one the Roarers were captured. They could not forget the women’s shrill shrieks of triumph, their plunging faces aimed at throat or nose or ears (difficult to tell from a distance) and the way each prisoner gradually stopped struggling and went limp within the clutches of his captor. Slightly and Curly sank their heads in their hands and rocked with sorrow that they had not done more to help.

  Smee, meanwhile, ate a muffin. ‘Poor souls,’ he said through a cheerful mouthful of crumbs. ‘Now I suppose they will have to go through it all—the baths, the haircuts, the kisses—the night-night songs from people as couldn’t carry a tune if you gave ’em a bucket. All those satchels and chest rubs and woollen swimming drawers and great-aunts. Tapioca! But I don’t know why you style them “witches”. Those females ain’t witches.’ He rummaged in a pencil box for a tube of liquorice, which he cleaned with a pipe cleaner before sucking on it like a pipe. Only then did he notice that the others were staring at him. ‘What?’

  ‘But it’s called the Maze of Witches. Of course they are witches!’ said Tootles.

  Smee snorted scornfully. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Captain H—’

  ‘—Mr Ravello the circus master told us!’ said John drowning out Tootles. And he recounted the sad story of nursery maids sacked, turned out-of-doors, mad with hatred and seeking revenge on the children of Neverland. ‘Maze of Witches, he called it. Perhaps you’re thinking of some other place.’

  Smee bit the end off his liquorice pipe and chewed it till his spit ran black. ‘Stripy rocks all carved out by water? Close by Grief Reef? Your Mr Ravello don’t know his witches from his whats. Don’t know his aunts from his bilboes. That there’s the Maze of Regrets! Nursery maids? Codswallop! No hired servant would set sail over stormy seas in an open perambulator—not out of hate, not out of anything! Nah! Those ladies there are the Heartbroken! There’s none other would make a voyage like that. They do what they have to. Instinct, see. Can’t help theirselves. They’d do anything, Mothers would.’

  They stood once more on high ground, the sea a distant flicker and the grass balding away to rock beneath their feet. The Maze of Regrets, with its striped strata and crests as sharp as elbows, lay directly ahead. It leaked the sound of sorrow and a strange mixture of old perfumes.

  ‘This is dangerous,’ said Peter Pan.

  Wendy laid a hand on his sleeve, but he shook it off, saying, ‘I must not be touched.’

  ‘But Slightly and Curly have to go home,’ said Wendy for the fiftieth time. ‘They are too big to live at Fort Pan, and they are just not the stuff of Roarers—or pirates—or redskins.’

  And here was their Way Out, their Emergency Exit from Neverland: the Maze. In this place, the mothers of Lost Boys passed their years searching for the babies they had once lost. The carelessness of nursery maids could not be blamed in every case. (Lots of parents cannot afford nursery maids.) Even with parents in charge, babies go missing—fall out of prams, run away with the bath water, or get put out instead of the cat. Mistakes happen in the best regulated households.

  When they do, the result is always the same. Somewhere, a mother packs herself a bag, pushes the empty pram to the local docks—Grimsby or Marseilles or Valparaiso—and sets sail. Keeping the red buoys to her prow and the green buoys to her stern, she goes in search of her lost buoy … boy, in a place worn smooth by millions of tears. Without the magic to advance further into Neverland, she ends up here, in the Maze of Regrets, living from day to day on egg-and-cress sandwiches and the hope that her little boy will one day come whistling round the next corner in the Maze.

  The Roarers, when they spilled unwittingly into the Maze, had been seized on like bargains in a sale. Wild-haired women with wilder eyes had grabbed them and searched their faces for family features, their bodies for birthmarks. Youths who had tried never even to brush against one another had been stroked and kissed and hugged—washed with tears and wiped clean with lace handkerchiefs. What Slightly and Curly had witnessed was not a massacre. It was a reunion!

 
; Among the Roarers, a dozen mothers had found what they were looking for, and had left Neverland with their sulking, hulking sons. Even as they climbed back into their sea-going perambulators at Grief Reef, the mothers had started to polish up manners and brush down clothes.

  You see, any mother who searches out her Lost Boy can find her way home unerringly. The voyage might be long and dangerous, and tankers and luxury liners sometimes run them down in the sea lanes, but their homing instinct is as strong as that of Canada geese or messenger pigeons. Home signals to them like a flashing beacon on a distant clifftop. They are almost bound to get there.

  Now it was the turn of Slightly and Curly to enter the Maze, and no terror that had faced them on their quest to Neverpeak compared with the quaking fright they felt now. Being grown-ups—Slightly a youth of eighteen, Curly a fully-fledged doctor—they could not let their fright show, of course, but smoothed their hair and straightened their collars and polished their shoes against the backs of their trouser-legs. (That was hard for Slightly since he was barefoot and had no trousers. But at least his evening shirt fitted; unlike the pullover that Smee had knitted for Curly during the journey from the Neverwood.)

  ‘But we already have a mother!’ Slightly protested yet again. ‘Mrs Darling adopted us!’

  ‘Yes, dear, but even before Mother adopted you, you and all the Lost Boys had mothers of your own—somewhere.’

  ‘Mine won’t be here,’ said Curly dismally. ‘She won’t have come looking—not all this way.’

  ‘She will,’ said Wendy, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the jaw.

  ‘And even if she don’t,’ said Tootles off-handedly, ‘one of those women will probably think you’re hers and take you home.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Curly.

  ‘This is it, then,’ said Slightly.

  ‘Till London,’ said John.