The Ocean at the End of the Lane Read Online Free PDF Page A

morning. In the afternoon the
ancient Mr. Wollery, who came in on Monday and Thursday afternoons to do some
gardening (Mrs. Wollery, his equally ancient wife, who wore galoshes, huge
semi-transparent overshoes, would come in on Wednesday afternoons and clean),
was digging in the vegetable garden and dug up a bottle filled with pennies and
halfpennies and threepenny bits and even farthings. None of the coins was dated
later than 1937, and I spent the afternoon polishing them with brown sauce and
vinegar, to make them shine.
    My mother put the bottle of old coins on the
mantelpiece of the dining room, and said that she expected that a coin collector
might pay several pounds for them.
    I went to bed that night happy and excited. I was
rich. Buried treasure had been discovered. The world was a good place.
    I don’t remember how the dreams started. But that’s
the way of dreams, isn’t it? I know that I was in school, and having a bad day,
hiding from the kinds of kids who hit me and called me names, but they found me
anyway, deep in the rhododendron thicket behind the school, and I knew it must
be a dream (but in the dream I didn’t know this, it was real and it was true)
because my grandfather was with them, and his friends, old men with gray skin
and hacking coughs. They held sharp pencils, the kind that drew blood when you
were jabbed with them. I ran from them, but they were faster than I was, the old
men and the big boys, and, in the boys’ toilets, where I had hidden in a
cubicle, they caught up with me. They held me down, forced my mouth wide
open.
    My grandfather (but it was not my grandfather: it
was really a waxwork of my grandfather, intent on selling me to anatomy ) held
something sharp and glittering, and he began pushing it into my mouth with his
stubby fingers. It was hard and sharp and familiar, and it made me gag and
choke. My mouth filled with a metallic taste.
    They were looking at me with mean, triumphant eyes,
all the people in the boys’ toilets, and I tried not to choke on the thing in my
throat, determined not to give them that satisfaction.
    I woke and I was choking.
    I could not breathe. There was something in my
throat, hard and sharp and stopping me from breathing or from crying out. I
began to cough as I woke, tears streaming down my cheeks, nose running.
    I pushed my fingers as deeply as I could into my
mouth, desperate and panicked and determined. With the tip of my forefinger I
felt the edge of something hard. I put the middle finger on the other side of
it, choking myself, clamping the thing between them, and I pulled whatever it
was out of my throat.
    I gasped for breath, and then I half-vomited onto
my bedsheets, threw up a clear drool flecked with blood, from where the thing
had cut my throat as I had pulled it out.
    I did not look at the thing. It was tight in my
hand, slimy with my saliva and my phlegm. I did not want to look at it. I did
not want it to exist, the bridge between my dream and the waking world.
    I ran down the hallway to the bathroom, down at the
far end of the house. I washed my mouth out, drank directly from the cold tap,
spat red into the white sink. Only when I’d done that did I sit on the side of
the white bathtub and open my hand. I was scared.
    But what was in my hand—what had been in my
throat—wasn’t scary. It was only a coin: a silver shilling.
    I went back to the bedroom. I dressed myself,
cleaned the vomit from my sheets as best I could with a damp face-flannel. I
hoped that the sheets would dry before I had to sleep in the bed that night.
Then I went downstairs.
    I wanted to tell someone about the shilling, but I
did not know who to tell. I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell
them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe
me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so
unlikely?
    My sister was playing in the back garden with some
of her friends.