Peter took no notice. He grabbed me by the hand and yanked me into the water. It was surprisingly warm, I felt my muscles relax in an instant, and I dove into the depths and looked around.
Perhaps, I hoped, I would spot Daisy.
The underworld of the lagoon was quite bright and easily visible. The sunlight frolicked as much as Peter, bouncing off shiny fish scales and mica-streaked rocks. Colorful marine life and coral abounded. All around me there were dozens of mermaids. It seemed they had been hiding (or living) underwater, enjoying the coolness of the lagoon’s depths rather than face the wrath of the sun. Looking at them underwater, I found them infinitely more beautiful: their whiskers disappeared, their tails were lithe and lovely, and their bosoms were worthy of, well, closer examination. In shedding my trousers, it was as if I had shed my inhibitions too. In the next few hours I had the time of my life, cavorting with them, wrestling with them, discovering rather astonishing things about them (on which discoveries my Christian upbringing forbids me to elaborate). But the specifics of my playtime have nothing to do with the story I wish to tell, and so I shall leave them in the past, frolicking in the lagoon. Suffice it to say that I did not drown.
Eventually, exhausted, Peter and I emerged from the water and lay on the beach to dry in the sun. Peter picked up my trousers and tried them on, but he didn’t like their feel against his skin and wondered aloud how I could wear them. I bethought me of Daisy then, and looked around for her. At last I spotted her, resting on a stone some twenty feet offshore. I looked to see if Peter had seen her, but he was playing with my pockets. I stood and began to wade in her direction. She saw me coming, turned tail, and disappeared under the surface again. She far preferred Lagoon to Pocket, and I can’t say I blamed her.
I slung my trousers over my shoulder as Peter and I walked home together, as naked as we had been with the merladies, and I didn’t mind this one bit. The jungle air felt good on my skin; there were no mosquitoes; my independence from clothes seemed a metaphor for other freedoms as well. I was happier than I had been since I told my Eton classmates about my nautical ancestor. Best of all, I felt that for the first time in my life I had made a true friend.
I slept that night, beside Peter in the under-tree room, better and deeper than I had slept in a long time. Gradually, however, my dreams were touched with a sting that I found vaguely unpleasant; that sting grew to a sharp searing pain, and suddenly I was back on the Victoria Gloriosa with a laughing Doctor Gin sawing off my legs. I awoke with a howl.
“Oh, sorry,” said Peter. “It’s almost off. Just give me another moment. You can bite on this stick if it hurts.”
He handed me the stick with which he had “stabbed” Barnaby, then went back to work. Only a single candle was burning, so it took me a while to see what he was doing. “Ow!” I cried again, and spied in his hand a knife, a true knife, the keen edge of the blade glinting in the candlelight. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Almost there.”
He held my ankle tight and began a sawing motion at my heel. The pain was intense. I screamed again. “Bloody hell! LET GO!”
He sat back. “Done. You’re not bleeding. I didn’t think it would hurt that much.”
“What . . . what were you doing? Were you cutting off my foot?”
“No. Don’t be silly. I was borrowing this.” He held it up for me to see, a dark piece of something gathered in his fist, a something that seemed to have less substance than cloth while being smoky and viscous at the same time. Quite suddenly I realized what it was. It was my shadow.
Only now was I truly naked.
He grinned. The gold in his eyes flickered in the candlelight. The boy was mad.
Chapter Five
Ever since I heard the name Panther from Peter, I had wanted to know more about him. Thus began my greatest adventure on the Never-Isle, one that brought me the greatest joy, taught me the greatest fear, and punished me with the greatest sorrow.
* * *
“You said I’d meet Panther,” I said to Peter in the morning. “Is he a real panther?” The soles of my feet were tender, and I moved gingerly about the underground room.
“Of course he’s real.” Peter was walking around, trying out my shadow. He would take a few steps, then stop, look at the ground behind him, and grin. He tried to run away from it, but since it was firmly attached to him (by some sort of tree sap, I believe), it followed. He found this delightful. No matter what he did it copied him; wherever he went it came with him. It was, of course, larger than he, as was I. Its size tripped him up on occasion, and more than once he fell over it to land flat on his face. At these times he would grow irritated and try to kick it away, but it always held fast. Then he would laugh. “What fun!” he said, as if he had found a new playmate. “Let’s see if it will fly.”
He reached into Tink’s Cotswold Cottage and came out with a handful of something. “Tink won’t mind, she’s got plenty,” he said to me, forgetting for the moment that Tink was dead. Then he raced up his ladder, and I followed on mine, and we met together on the surface. I had been meaning to inquire further about his ability to fly, and now I hoped to see how he did it.
He shook his closed fist over himself, as if he were peppering his limbs in preparation for eating them.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s the Flying Sand. Would you like some?”
“Yes, please.”
He proceeded to pepper me.
“How does it work?” I queried.
“I don’t know.”
“Do I jump off something?”
“You can. There’s a cliff nearby.”
I remembered his mentioning a cliff yesterday, in the context of describing how he liked to lie to people. “Is that necessary?”
“I don’t know.”
I peered at my arms. The hairs on my forearm stood erect, as they do sometimes in the London winter when my clothes crackle. “How long does it last?” I asked.
He didn’t reply. I turned to look at him and he wasn’t there.
“Peter?” I called.
“Up here!”
I looked up and there he was, standing beside the tree trunk, perhaps twenty feet off the ground.
I was speechless. Feeling a tingling, I looked down at myself again. The hairs on my legs were upright too.
“What did you say?” he called.
“I asked you ‘How long does it last?’ ” I sensed his presence, turned, and there he was. “Oh, there you are. Thanks for coming down again.”
He laughed.
“What are you laughing at?”
“I didn’t come down.”
And now I looked at my legs one more time. My feet were floating in the air, beside his.
I was speechless yet again.
I was flying.
* * *
I never understood how it worked, nor do I know now. It begins with the Flying Sand, of course, which was stored in Tink’s Cottage. I don’t know if this was Peter’s only supply, nor did I ask if it was mined somewhere on Never-Isle, or possibly on Long Tom or an isle I hadn’t visited. I assumed at the time that fairies had sole access to it—I certainly never saw Barnaby fly, or Panther or Tiger Lily. Tink had gifted it to Peter, and now Peter gifted it to me. A fair exchange, I assumed at the time, for a shadow.
At any rate, peppering oneself with Flying Sand seemed no guarantee of flight. It was some moments before Peter flew, and another several seconds before I joined him. Perhaps it took time for it to “soak in,” or required some element of belief. One thing I did know, shortly after I found myself afloat: once one was airborne, it required a good deal of practice to master one’s limbs, direction, and speed, not to mention one’s ability to land on one’s feet and not on one’s head or behind. Rather like learning to walk, I imagined, and I comforted myself with the knowledge that it had taken me almost two years to master the art of walking, and so I should not think less of myself for being unable to f
ly very well at the beginning.
The rest of the day was spent in practice. I struck my head on tree limbs, and once knocked the breath out of me when I flew directly into the trunk of a coconut palm. On my first descent I came down upside down, and remained unconscious (according to Peter) for several minutes. I bled, I bruised, I used language that the Very Reverend Undershaft, chaplain at Wilkinson’s school, would never sanction. Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I burst into tears of frustration. Surprisingly, Peter as my personal instructor was never anything but Kindness Personified. He counseled patience. He demonstrated technique. He took my hand after my breakdown, and we flew together to the lagoon, where we made a gentle water landing. We frolicked a bit with the mermaids, which put me in a much better mood, and then we took off, still hand in hand, and returned to our Underground Home. I fell asleep that night in joy, in pain, in disbelief, in excitement, in pride, in a mixture of all of these emotions. I vaguely remember hearing Peter arguing with someone (himself?) as I drifted off, but I was too tired to open my eyes.
* * *
The next morning I asked if we had had a visitor.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I was arguing with Tink.”
“She’s back?”
“Of course she is. She always comes back. She was furious at me for taking some Flying Sand without her permission, but I told her that since she kept it in my home, I was entitled to use it whenever I wished. She’s sulking now. She’ll recover.”
“So Daisy didn’t eat her,” I declared.
“Oh yes, I think she did. At least Tink says she did. But then again, Tink is such a liar.”
“She must be lying. Because—if Daisy ate her—how can Tink be alive?”
“I told you. She always comes back.”
“Oh. I see.” Which of course I didn’t.
* * *
For several days I worked on improving my flying, and Peter guided me over many parts of the island. We soared above lions and tigers lolling on the southern savanna, but Peter said that they weren’t near as fun as Barnaby and paid attention to him only when they thought he had food or when they wanted their backs scratched. We flew to a midisland mountain crest, where Peter said it occasionally snowed, but the temperature there was almost as hot as it was in the jungle, and I had trouble believing him. We glided over what he said was the fairy village, but I could see nothing but mounds of dirt that resembled anthills, and Peter said he never liked to visit because it was mostly deserted, since nearly all of the fairies were dead. Were these their graves? I wondered.
All the while I asked him questions about his past and how he got here, and he usually said that he didn’t know, or made up an answer that was so absurd I could only laugh. I wondered if he were deliberately concealing something from me. Upon reflection at the end of each day, I found that what was most remarkable about my questions and his answers was that he never asked any questions in return. He seemed to have absolutely no curiosity about me, about who I was and how I got here.
At the end of the fourth day I confronted him. “Peter,” I said, “aren’t you curious about me?”
“Why should I be?” he answered in all innocence. Then his eyes widened. “Do you have a secret?”
“Well, not really. I mean, I have a past. Doesn’t that interest you?”
“You mean, what you did yesterday? But I know all that. I was with you.”
“Yes but—wasn’t there a yesterday before yesterday? What I’m trying to say is—how can you—how can you like me if you don’t know who I am?”
“But I do know who you are. You’re James,” he said bluntly. “Aren’t you?”
“But I . . . I could be a criminal . . . or a king. Or . . . or a nobody.”
“Are you a criminal?” I could tell that he hoped that I was.
“No, and I’m not a king either.”
“And you’re certainly not a nobody. Because you’re a James.”
By the tone of his voice I knew he thought me daft.
“But you—you like me? In spite of knowing nothing about me?”
“You’re my friend,” he replied, as if he were stating the day’s weather, or what he’d had for breakfast. “Why should I want to know anything more?”
My throat swelled and I found it difficult to swallow. For a moment I thought that my questions of him were so—so unnecessary. What did it matter who or what he was, so long as he remained gay and innocent and carefree? I rather liked this incuriosity; it implied a trust and openheartedness that I had never met with in England.
* * *
After a week or so (I found that I was becoming very vague about the passage of time; it was so much easier to think only in terms of “yesterday” and “tomorrow”) I asked Peter again about Panther.
“Would you like to meet him?” he asked, as if I had never inquired about Panther before.
“Very much so, yes.”
“I’ll take you there tomorrow then.”
I made certain, on the following day, to remind him of his promise.
* * *
When I awoke (was this really “the following day”?) I felt, well, an Evil dwelling in my heart. I used to feel this on occasion during catechism at Wilkinson’s school, when the Very Reverend Undershaft reminded us of the unspeakable sin of Adam and Eve, which forever stained our immortal souls. “Try as you might,” he said, “you can never scrub it away. Only if you lead an exemplary life, by shunning all impure thoughts, respecting the clergy, and contributing generously to the Church, will God allow you to pass through the Heavenly Gates, and even then only if He’s feeling magnanimous. Many good people burn in the Everlasting Fire in spite of their leading saintly lives.”
Such thoughts used to burden my soul, but since I’d been falsely accused at Eton and then pressed into service at sea, my troubles on earth had become so enormous that they rubbed out all worries I had about the afterlife. (Assuming that I would live a long life, as most children do, I put off any Concerns of the Soul until much later.) Now, in the long leisurely days I spent with Peter, I began to feel these worries creeping back into my consciousness. It was almost as if, in losing my shadow, I needed to find something else to take its place, and that something was the Dark Side of my Soul, my true shadow-self.
But I said nothing of this to Peter, who would not understand.
“We’re going to visit Panther today,” I told him instead.
“Of course we are. Why are you dawdling?”
I smiled at his accusation, for I was more than ready to depart. “Shall we fly?” I asked, heading for Tink’s Cottage.
“No, they don’t like us to arrive that way. They may shoot us down and tie us to a spit and roast and eat us,” he said matter-of-factly.
“They? Who’s they?”
“Panther’s tribe.”
“So he is human.”
“Of course he is.”
“And a cannibal?”
“What’s a cannibal?”
“Someone who eats other people.”
“Of course he isn’t. That’s disgusting.”
“But you just said . . .”
“What?”
I sighed. “Never mind.”
We donned clothing again—Peter his liana and shells and I my trousers, which were now so sadly torn that they provided scarcely more modesty than Peter’s liana. Still, we needed the pockets. We filled them with food (for we would be walking much of the day), climbed our separate ladders, and headed off into the jungle.
* * *
That overimaginative Scotsman who wrote Peter’s story calls Panther and his tribe the Piccaninnies, a poor gibberish version of their true name, which is Pa-Ku-U-Na-Ini, meaning “Persons of Honor and Trust.” They were depicted in his tale as members of the “red” race, a description that couldn’t have been further from their true appearance. Their skin was a light chocolate brown, and they resembled the natives of our Pacific’s Southern Seas, or at least appeared so
to me, who had seen illustrations of the Sandwich, Tahitian, and Samoan islanders in the books of my father’s library. They are a kind, generous people—or were when I first met them—just as Barnaby was once playful and the lions and tigers were once (and to tell the truth still are) indifferent. The Pa-Ku-U-Na-Ini, as their name implies, always kept their word.
It took us the entire day to reach their village.
It was perched on the north side of the island, the village of tents over which Peter had carried me on the day of my rescue from the burning Alice. It rested on a rocky promontory, longer than it was wide and raked on a gradual incline, sticking out like a four-fingered hand high over the ocean. The natives had built a wall of logs across the wrist of the hand, thus providing them with some sort of protection against predators, though I must confess I had yet to meet any human, bird, or animal that might do them harm. Perhaps the wall was symbolic more than anything, for they were a people who prized their traditions, and the barrier may have served to remind them that they were a group set apart.
As we approached the wall, which appeared quite suddenly on the edge of the jungle, Peter let out a crow, similar to the one I’d heard as I prepared for my fiery death in the crow’s nest. (What a homonymic coincidence, first hearing his “crow” from a “nest.”) A birdcall answered him, of the jungle variety, and we pushed out of the foliage toward a tall gate, its doors just now opening for our admission. As we neared this entrance, I noticed a single black feather (crow?) hanging above the open doors.
“Ah,” Peter said, hesitating. “I see this is not a good time.”
“Why?” I queried. “How can you tell?”
“There’s a funeral feast tonight” was all he said.
“Shall we come back tomorrow?” I asked.
He was quiet, as if he had not heard me. Then he proceeded, but he hung his head low and dragged his feet a bit. “Copy me,” he whispered, and I followed suit. We walked through the open gate, slumped and studying the ground.
Hook's Tale Page 8