The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Page B

sleeping
draughts, and dying this concoction red, so she thought it was blood, and she
drank it, and fell asleep. Ra, the father of the gods, made her the goddess of
love after that, so the wounds she had inflicted on people would now only be
wounds of the heart.
    I wondered why the gods had done that. Why hadn’t
they just killed her, when they had the chance?
    I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they
weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were .
    Adult stories never made sense, and they were so
slow to start. They made me feel like there were secrets, Masonic, mythic
secrets, to adulthood. Why didn’t adults want to read about Narnia, about secret
islands and smugglers and dangerous fairies?
    I was getting hungry. I climbed down from my tree,
and went to the back of the house, past the laundry room that smelled of laundry
soap and mildew, past the little coal-and-wood shed, past the outside toilet
where the spiders hung and waited, wooden doors painted garden green. In through
the back door, along the hallway and into the kitchen.
    My mother was in there with a woman I had never
seen before. When I saw her, my heart hurt. I mean that literally, not
metaphorically: there was a momentary twinge in my chest—just a flash, and then
it was gone.
    My sister was sitting at the kitchen table, eating
a bowl of cereal.
    The woman was very pretty. She had shortish
honey-blonde hair, huge gray-blue eyes, and pale lipstick. She seemed tall, even
for an adult.
    â€œDarling? This is Ursula Monkton,” said my mother.
I said nothing. I just stared at her. My mother nudged me.
    â€œHello,” I said.
    â€œHe’s shy,” said Ursula Monkton. “I am certain that
once he warms up to me we shall be great friends.” She reached out a hand and
patted my sister’s mousey-brown hair. My sister smiled a gap-toothed smile.
    â€œI like you so much,” my sister said. Then she
said, to our mother and me, “When I grow up I want to be Ursula Monkton.”
    My mother and Ursula laughed. “You little dear,”
said Ursula Monkton. Then she turned to me. “And what about us, eh? Are we
friends as well?”
    I just looked at her, all grown-up and blonde, in
her gray and pink skirt, and I was scared.
    Her dress wasn’t ragged. It was just the fashion of
the thing, I suppose, the kind of dress that it was. But when I looked at her I
imagined her dress flapping, in that windless kitchen, flapping like the
mainsail of a ship, on a lonely ocean, under an orange sky.
    I don’t know what I said in reply, or if I even
said anything. But I went out of that kitchen, although I was hungry, without
even an apple.
    I took my book into the back garden, beneath the
balcony, by the flower bed that grew beneath the television room window, and I
read—forgetting my hunger in Egypt with animal-headed gods who cut each other up
and then restored one another to life again.
    My sister came out into the garden.
    â€œI like her so much,” she told me. “She’s my
friend. Do you want to see what she gave me?” She produced a small gray purse,
the kind my mother kept in her handbag for her coins, that fastened with a metal
butterfly clip. It looked like it was made of leather. I wondered if it was
mouse skin. She opened the purse, put her fingers into the opening, came out
with a large silver coin: half a crown.
    â€œLook!” she said. “Look what I got!”
    I wanted a half a crown. No, I wanted what I could
buy with half a crown—magic tricks and plastic joke-toys, and books, and, oh, so
many things. But I did not want a little gray purse with a half a crown in
it.
    â€œI don’t like her,” I told my sister.
    â€œThat’s only because I saw her first,” said my
sister. “She’s my friend.”
    I did not think that Ursula Monkton was anybody’s
friend. I wanted to go and warn Lettie Hempstock