Everlasting Lane

by Andrew Lovett

  ‘But it wouldn’t be true to me and if it wasn’t true to me then it wasn’t really true at all, any more than you and your mum … Like magic: magic isn’t true.’

  ‘But Kat said—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what Kat said. Everlasting Lane isn’t magic just because—’

  ‘But the magic is the name,’ I pleaded. ‘And the name is true. It’s like if you were driving down this road and you saw a sign like Everlasting Lane you’d think, well, that’s a funny name and you might start to think about it like at night when you’re supposed to be sleeping and about who might live there and are there children or families or something? And then it would be like throwing a match into Mr Finch’s cornfield—whooosh!—or doing that thing with a magnifying glass, you know? And you’d be thinking, well, what sort of houses do they have in Everlasting Lane? Are they just like normal houses or would they be a bit magic? Because the name is like a magical thing, isn’t it? And you might think there was a dog like the Beast and a funny man like Mr Merridew and you might wonder about what the trees would be like and always, always you’d be thinking, well, what’s at the end? What’s at the end of an everlasting lane? And in the end you’d have to know because otherwise you might never get to sleep again.

  ‘Don’t you want to find out?’ And then she hit me.

  It was funny because, of course, she was always hitting me. And Tommie too. But she’d never really hit me before. Not like she did then. My whole ear went kind of numb and echoey.

  ‘I’ve told you before!’ she screamed and there were tears running down her face. ‘There’s no magic!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you remember what Mr Merridew says? There’s only chaos. Nothing means anything. There’s no point.’ Her face was moving around like a sheet on a windy washing line. She was cross because she didn’t believe what I was saying was true.

  And then she hit me again.

  And then she swung her satchel round until it whacked me in the face.

  And then she hit me again.

  She was screaming: ‘So, what, Peter? I just squeeze my eyes and pretend that my dad is still alive? That he tucks me in at night? I mean I can pretend but pretend doesn’t make it happen. You can write it all down in a story but that wouldn’t make it true. I mean, even if I did pretend it still wouldn’t be true.’

  All that time, Anna-Marie carried on hitting me. The last straggling children had stopped to stare. I could just about see their feet as I tried to turn away from the blows. I was bent over, my hands covering my head as punch after punch, slap after slap came down upon me. Every now and again I felt her satchel again. It was like she had a million hands.

  I could hear Tommie saying, ‘Anna-Marie,’ and, ‘Anna-Marie,’ and, ‘Anna-Marie,’ in lots of voices—soft and loud—but it didn’t make any difference.

  ‘Do you know, Peter,’ she was yelling, ‘I think you may be the stupidest, stupidest nine year old I’ve ever met.’ Ten! I was—ouch—ten! ‘Think about it: don’t you think if I could change things about my dad I would? Don’t you think I would change about Alice? Yes, I could write a story and maybe if you read it you’d think it was true but—’

  But she was getting it all wrong. I wanted to say about that man, that man in The Copper Kettle, when he said it was like living in a different world or something. He’d said it was nicer there, hadn’t he? Apart from the food, he said. That’s what I meant: that she could pretend and it would be better. And, maybe, if she pretended hard enough, it’d be true.

  ‘If you’ve done something wrong,’ she sobbed, ‘it stays wrong; it doesn’t suddenly get right because you do something else. The things that happen stay happened. You can’t change things, Peter. You can’t change what happened to Alice, whatever it was. And I can’t change what happened to my dad. I miss him but all the pretending in the world isn’t going to bring him back.’

  And the funny thing was that after a while all the punches, pinches and slaps stopped hurting. Well, not literally. I mean they still hurt but I didn’t mind and once you don’t mind something then it hurts a lot less than it would do anyway. I thought about that thing, you know, about if there’s hurricanes and floods and if your daddy dies, then who are you supposed to get angry with? Well, I thought, if there’s no God then perhaps all you really need is someone else who doesn’t mind you being angry with them. But then, maybe that’s what God is for anyway.

  ‘Listen, Peter, you could walk from one end of Everlasting Lane to the other and back again and it wouldn’t make my dad be alive or your dad or Tommie’s dad and mum get married again. Everlasting Lane is just a road. It’s just a road with a funny name. The name doesn’t make it magic. A name is just what something is called.’

  All my world was made up of feet and ground. Tommie’s dirty scuffed shoes and Anna-Marie’s black plimsolls, a flapping sole and thread hanging loose; the dry pavement on which they stood; my bag and the Mousetrap box and all the little bits of coloured plastic. And then the rows of shoes stood by the school-gate, staring. And then I saw this other pair of shoes: brown, large and laced-up, shiny.

  And then I smelt this smell. This smell that I’d smelt before.

  And then the brown, laced-up, shiny shoes said, ‘Now, now, young lady, I think that’s quite enough for one day, don’t you? Quite enough!’

  That voice: I couldn’t think where I’d smelt it before.

  I turned my head to see Anna-Marie still crying and … Well, I’ve run out of different ways to say she was walking away again, shuffling through the school-gates.

  But that smell. A smell that reminded me of—

  ‘Well, Peter, it looks like I found you just in time.’ A voice that twisted me like a Chinese burn. ‘Peter?’ And that smell again except now I remembered where I’d smelt it before. ‘Peter!’ The smell of a cat. ‘Peter!’

  A dead cat.

  ‘Ha!’ cried Doctor Todd as I looked up. ‘At last! Excellent to see you, Peter. Excellent.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Well, you have been in the wars, haven’t you? Anyway,’ he said, ‘ahem, we’ve got a bit of catching up to do, I hear, haven’t we, eh?’

  PART IV

  A Picture of a Tiger

  32

  ‘That’s it,’ said Doctor Todd. ‘A deep breath … and out. Again … and out. That’s it, Peter. Good boy. So, tell me, where are we now?’

  ‘On the swing.’ A gentle breeze lifted my hair and the seat creaked as I moved back and forth, the loops of chain cold in my fists.

  ‘The swing? Which swing?’

  ‘The one at school,’ I said, squinting across the playing field, brown and thirsty, to the school buildings. I could see Miss Pevensie, hair bunched at the back of her head, pinning pictures to the classroom wall. Otherwise, the building seemed deserted like on a weekend.

  ‘Can you describe it?’

  ‘It’s sunny.’

  ‘No. The swing.’

  ‘It’s red.’

  ‘Okay, and this is where you come to—’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, ‘we’re not allowed to play on it; to sit on it I mean. It’s broken.’

  ‘Broken? How is it broken?’

  ‘One of the seats is missing.’ I wiped my eyes. The smoke from Doctor Todd’s cigar was making them all prickly.

  ‘Oh, I see. There are two seats.’

  ‘No,’ I insisted, ‘one of them’s missing.’

  Miss Pevensie had glanced up and seen me. She came to the window and waved. I waved back.

  ‘How long has it been broken?’

  I shrugged. ‘Always.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Doctor Todd. ‘I see. So no one sits on the swing? Peter? I said, so no one gets to sit on the swing? Is that right?’

  ‘Anna-Marie does.’

  ‘Anna-Marie? Oh, yes, of course: the young lady with the flying fists. So why does she get to sit on the swing?’

  Miss Pevensie was at her classroom door, the one that opened onto the playground, and tugging at the handle.


  ‘It’s not like she’s going to kill herself,’ I said.

  ‘But doesn’t she get punished?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Anna-Marie.’

  ‘Oh. She doesn’t care.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Peter.’ Miss Pevensie was half-walking, half-running across the field and calling my name. ‘Peter.’ I slipped guiltily from the swing-seat to stand on the dusty ground still gripping the chains behind me. ‘Peter?’ It was Doctor Todd now, his voice poking me like a knife. ‘Peter? Are you aware that you’re waving? Who are you waving at?’

  ‘Miss Pevensie.’

  ‘Who’s she? A teacher? At school?’

  I nodded. ‘She’s trying to tell me something.’

  Slap! I felt the hot sting of his hand upon my face and blinked in shock.

  ‘Peter,’ Doctor Todd smiled at me with his woodland teeth, ‘thank goodness. I thought we’d lost you there.’ He took his red pen and wrote in his blue notebook. As he did so, he said, ‘Look around you.’ He had the same notebook as that man Craig from The Copper Kettle. ‘Do you know where you are now?’ He looked up at me. ‘I said, do you know where you are now?’

  I nodded. ‘The lounge.’

  ‘That’s right, Peter,’ he said. ‘Well done. Well done. Now, I want you to tell me who else is in the room with us. Can you do that?’

  Of course I could. I turned around. The narrow space between the curtains, drawn against the bright morning, produced a slice of light that cut the sofa in two. They were sat on opposite ends like reflections of each other, clutching identical tissues to their faces, eyes red-raw like devils’ eyes. They sobbed as if their tears were a scratchy record, its needle jumping in and out of the dusty groove.

  ‘Mummy,’ I said, the inside of my chest echoing to the throb of my heart like Mr Waterberry bashing the school water-tank with his big rubber hammer, ‘and Kat.’

  ‘I see,’ said Doctor Todd. He scrunched the end of his cigar against the lip of the ashtray and it sat there hanging by a thread of smoke. ‘Let’s play a game, shall we?’ he said suddenly. ‘See if you can tell me what I’m holding in my hand?’

  ‘A pen.’

  ‘Good. Can you describe it to me?’

  ‘It’s red.’

  ‘Yes. Good. Anything else?’

  ‘It’s got a little silver thing to hang in your pocket.’

  ‘That’s good. Now, what about this hand?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘That’s right. Good. Now, pretend I have two pens. Can you do that?’

  Of course I could. That was easy. I did so and watched as he juggled them between his hands.

  ‘Now,’ he said, stretching out his palms, ‘which is real?’

  I raised my hand ready to point but hesitated. It was hard. They looked just the same.

  ‘I see,’ said Doctor Todd. Popping both pens into the pocket of his jacket he slipped another cigar from its thin box and lit it sucking thoughtfully on the end like a hungry calf. The tip glowed like a precious red jewel. ‘Now, there’s no need to be shy, is there? Why don’t you come and sit down?’ He patted the cushion beside him. ‘We’ve got a few things to talk about, you and I, haven’t we? And I want you to tell me everything. Your mother wants you to tell me the truth. Remember?’

  I shuffled forwards until I was standing right in front of him. But I didn’t sit down.

  ‘I’ve been looking through your scrapbook,’ said Doctor Todd. And he was telling the truth. I could see it sat on his lap beneath the notebook. I could see the corner of the cover poking out with Norman’s sign on it: Trespassers will be Persecuted. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘It’s really the most astonishing piece of work. Astonishing.’

  I was about to say that he couldn’t’ve read it. I wrote it all backwards, you see, so that nobody could. But he held up that little mirror and smiled at me with jagged teeth. It was broken—the mirror I mean.

  ‘You’ve had quite a time it seems,’ he said. ‘All these adventures. Goodness me! This Mr Merridew: what an extraordinary character. Extraordinary. And this is a gruesome series of pictures,’ he went on. ‘Very gruesome. Who is this poor chap?’

  ‘Tommie Winslow.’

  ‘And what’s happened in this picture?’

  ‘He’s been hit by a ball.’

  ‘Goodness, what a lot of blood. And this one?’

  ‘He’s been hit by a stick.’

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘He’s been shot.’

  ‘Shot?’

  ‘With arrows.’

  ‘Oh, they’re arrows. I see. And who is this Tommie Winslow? Is he a friend of yours? You’ve certainly created a lot of unhappy fates for him. Is he someone you know?’

  ‘He’s a friend of Anna-Marie’s.’

  ‘Ah, that name again.’ He flicked through the pages. ‘Ah, yes, here we are: a wholly different set of pictures. My, what an incredible imagination you have. Incredible.

  ‘Tell me, Peter, did anyone ever read you the Alice in Wonderland stories when you were younger?’

  ‘My daddy.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Of course. But the interesting thing about Alice in Wonderland was that it was all a dream, wasn’t it? In fact, you’ve written it here.’ Again he flicked through the pages. ‘Ah, yes, All that Alice-in-Wonderland …’ and he wrinkled his snout as he mouthed: crap. ‘All of it locked away in little Alice’s head. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Peter? I mean the stuff that we lock away in our heads. The trick is to know what’s inside our heads and what’s outside, isn’t it, eh? Can you see the difference? Because,’ went on Doctor Todd, ‘well, you like to make up stories, don’t you?’

  I shook my head. I hadn’t made up anything. It was all there: Tommie’s napkin, the shredded remains of my class work, the game of Consequences I’d played with Norman Kirrin. They were all there. And more. Stuck in. And they were all real.

  ‘What I mean is it’s more like an impression, a picture of what the real world, your world, is like. It’s like—’

  ‘A picture of a tiger.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s it. In fact, I was just admiring your own picture. The black and orange stripes. Very vivid. And those jaws. Argh! I could quite feel myself breaking into a sweat.

  ‘And, of course, the story of Alice—I mean Alice in Wonderland—was make-believe. A man called Lewis Carroll made it all up but her adventures can seem very real because, like you, he had such a vivid imagination. Now, Lewis Carroll was real, of course, but that doesn’t mean Alice was real, does it? How could she be? Think about all the strange things that happen. How could it be true?’

  ‘Alice thinks it’s true.’

  ‘Ha! She does. You’re quite right. But isn’t that because she’s dreaming? When she wakes up she knows it was all just a silly dream, doesn’t she?’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But she’s not real,’ I said, ‘so she can’t dream, so she can’t not know what was real and what wasn’t when none of it was.’

  Doctor Todd stared at me. ‘Exactly.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Absolutely. But putting that to one side for the moment, I think what I’m trying to say is that there’s a line to be drawn between what’s real and what’s not but, maybe for some people, maybe for you, Peter, it’s not always clear exactly where that line should be.’

  I frowned. What Doctor Todd didn’t understand was that sometimes something that wasn’t real could be as real as something that was. That’s what I’d been trying to say to Anna-Marie, of course. It was like, I don’t know, sometimes you’re dreaming but you think you’re awake.

  ‘Yes,’ said Doctor Todd, ‘but then you wake up and realise that it was all a dream, don’t you? In retrospect. Like Alice in Wonderland.’

  Well, I thought, sometimes you do. Maybe.

  ‘What I’m trying to do, Peter, is to find the words to help you understand,’ said Doctor Todd. ‘Your mother has difficulty … relating to you, doesn’t s
he, Peter? Have you ever wondered why? All the stuff in your scrapbook: all that stuff about Alice. Haven’t you been wondering what happened to Alice? The real Alice I mean. Have you never wondered why your mother feels the way she does?’

  ‘That’s why she has a doctor.’

  ‘Oh, Peter,’ said Doctor Todd. ‘No. I’m not your mother’s doctor. I’m yours.’

  I blinked in surprise. What did he mean? There wasn’t anything wrong with me. Was there?

  ‘Let’s talk a little bit about your grandmother, Peter. I understand you paid her a visit the other day.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Why did you attack her?’

  ‘I didn’t. I …’ If anything she’d attacked me. ‘I didn’t know who she was,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hurt her.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Peter, that’s not strictly true. Not strictly. She doted on you when you were little, of course, like any grandmother would but she could never forgive you for what you did to your mother; for what you did to Alice.’

  ‘She tore me out of that picture.’

  ‘Well, that’s right. You can imagine, I think—after all, you have a very powerful imagination—how she felt when you turned up out of the blue yesterday and—’

  ‘But I didn’t—’

  ‘Now, now, Peter. What I would like you to focus on—really focus on—is the truth.’

  ‘Like a secret?’

  ‘No, Peter, this isn’t a secret. Do you remember when I came to visit you at your house,’ I nodded, ‘and you threw your bowl on the floor? And then you broke that watch I bought you, didn’t you?’ I nodded again. ‘That lovely watch. And then I understand you hit this poor boy with a cricket ball.’ He nodded down at my picture of Tommie. I’d used lots of red for the blood but there hadn’t been any blood really. ‘And then that poor dog. And the vase, of course, from your sister’s grave. And then there was today’s little, ahem, altercation at the school gate. Isn’t it fair to say, Peter, that sometimes you … ah … let your emotions get the better of you? That sometimes you get so cross you forget what you’re doing?’