The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
I was getting tired. The party had been fun, although I could not remember much about it. I knew that I would not visit the Hempstock farm again, though. Not unless Lettie was there.
Australia was a long, long way away. I wondered how long it would be until she came back from Australia with her father. Years, I supposed. Australia was on the other side of the world, across the ocean . . .
A small part of my mind remembered an alternate pattern of events and then lost it, as if I had woken from a comfortable sleep and looked around, pulled the bedclothes over me, and returned to my dream.
Mrs. Hempstock got back into her ancient Land Rover, so bespattered with mud (I could now see, in the light above the front door) that there was almost no trace of the original paintwork visible, and she backed it up, down the drive, toward the lane.
My mother seemed unbothered that I had returned home in fancy dress clothes at almost eleven at night. She said, “I have some bad news, dear.”
“What’s that?”
“Ursula’s had to leave. Family matters. Pressing family matters. She’s already left. I know how much you children liked her.”
I knew that I didn’t like her, but I said nothing.
There was now nobody sleeping in my bedroom at the top of the stairs. My mother asked if I would like my room back for a while. I said no, unsure of why I was saying no. I could not remember why I disliked Ursula Monkton so much—indeed, I felt faintly guilty for disliking her so absolutely and so irrationally—but I had no desire to return to that bedroom, despite the little yellow handbasin just my size, and I remained in the shared bedroom until our family moved out of that house half a decade later (we children protesting, the adults I think just relieved that their financial difficulties were over).
The house was demolished after we moved out. I would not go and see it standing empty, and refused to witness the demolition. There was too much of my life bound up in those bricks and tiles, those drainpipes and walls.
Years later, my sister, now an adult herself, confided in me that she believed that our mother had fired Ursula Monkton (whom she remembered, so fondly, as the only nice one in a sequence of grumpy childminders) because our father was having an affair with her. It was possible, I agreed. Our parents were still alive then, and I could have asked them, but I didn’t.
My father did not mention the events of those nights, not then, not later.
I finally made friends with my father when I entered my twenties. We had so little in common when I was a boy, and I am certain I had been a disappointment to him. He did not ask for a child with a book, off in its own world. He wanted a son who did what he had done: swam and boxed and played rugby, and drove cars at speed with abandon and joy, but that was not what he had wound up with.
I did not ever go down the lane all the way to the end. I did not think of the white Mini. When I thought of the opal miner, it was in context of the two rough raw opal-rocks that sat on our mantelpiece, and in my memory he always wore a checked shirt and jeans. His face and arms were tan, not the cherry-red of monoxide poisoning, and he had no bow-tie.
Monster, the ginger tomcat the opal miner had left us, had wandered off to be fed by other families, and although we saw him, from time to time, prowling the ditches and trees at the side of the lane, he would not ever come when we called. I was relieved by this, I think. He had never been our cat. We knew it, and so did he.
A story only matters, I suspect, to the extent that the people in the story change. But I was seven when all of these things happened, and I was the same person at the end of it that I was at the beginning, wasn’t I? So was everyone else. They must have been. People don’t change.
Some things changed, though.
A month or so after the events here, and five years before the ramshackle world I lived in was demolished and replaced by trim, squat, regular houses containing smart young people who worked in the city but lived in my town, who made money by moving money from place to place but who did not build or dig or farm or weave, and nine years before I would kiss smiling Callie Anders . . .
I came home from school. The month was May, or perhaps early June. She was waiting by the back door as if she knew precisely where she was and who she was looking for: a young black cat, a little larger than a kitten now, with a white splodge over one ear, and with eyes of an intense and unusual greenish-blue.
She followed me into the house.
I fed her with an unused can of Monster’s cat food, which I spooned into Monster’s dusty cat bowl.
My parents, who had never noticed the ginger tom’s disappearance, did not initially notice the arrival of the new kitten-cat, and by the time my father commented on her existence she had been living with us for several weeks, exploring the garden until I came home from school, then staying near me while I read or played. At night she would wait beneath the bed until the lights were turned out, then she would accommodate herself on the pillow beside me, grooming my hair, and purring, so quietly as never to disturb my sister.
I would fall asleep with my face pressed into her fur, while her deep electrical purr vibrated softly against my cheek.
She had such unusual eyes. They made me think of the seaside, and so I called her Ocean, and could not have told you why.
Epilogue
I sat on the dilapidated green bench beside the duck pond, in the back of the red-brick farmhouse, and I thought about my kitten.
I only remembered that Ocean had grown into a cat, and that I had adored her for years. I wondered what had happened to her, and then I thought, It doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.
A door opened in the farmhouse, and I heard feet on the path. Soon the old woman sat down beside me. “I brung you a cup of tea,” she said. “And a cheese and tomato sandwich. You’ve been out here for quite a while. I thought you’d probably fallen in.”
“I sort of did,” I told her. And, “Thank you.” It had become dusk, without my noticing, while I had been sitting there.
I took the tea, and sipped it, and I looked at the woman, more carefully this time. I compared her to my memories of forty years ago. I said, “You aren’t Lettie’s mother. You’re her grandmother, aren’t you? You’re Old Mrs. Hempstock.”
“That’s right,” she said, unperturbed. “Eat your sandwich.”
I took a bite of my sandwich. It was good, really good. Freshly baked bread, sharp, salty cheese, the kind of tomatoes that actually taste like something.
I was awash in memory, and I wanted to know what it meant. I said, “Is it true?” and felt foolish. Of all the questions I could have asked, I had asked that.
Old Mrs. Hempstock shrugged. “What you remembered? Probably. More or less. Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.”
There was another question I needed answered. I said, “Why did I come here?”
She looked at me as if it were a trick question. “The funeral,” she said. “You wanted to get away from everyone and be on your own. So first of all you drove back to the place you’d lived in as a boy, and when that didn’t give you what you missed, you drove to the end of the lane and you came here, like you always do.”
“Like I always do?” I drank some mo
“Like you always do,” she repeated.
“No,” I said. “You’re wrong. I mean, I haven’t been here since, well, since Lettie went to Australia. Her going-away party.” And then I said, “Which never happened. You know what I mean.”
“You come back, sometimes,” she said. “You were here once when you were twenty-four, I remember. You had two young children, and you were so scared. You came here before you left this part of the world: you were, what, in your thirties, then? I fed you a good meal in the kitchen, and you told me about your dreams and the art you were making.”
“I don’t remember.”
She pushed the hair from her eyes. “It’s easier that way.”
I sipped my tea, and finished the sandwich. The mug was white, and so was the plate. The endless summer evening was coming to an end.
I asked her again, “Why did I come here?”
“Lettie wanted you to,” said somebody.
The person who said that was walking around the pond: a woman in a brown coat, wearing Wellington boots. I looked at her in confusion. She looked younger than I was now. I remembered her as vast, as adult, but now I saw she was only in her late thirties. I remembered her as stout, but she was buxom, and attractive in an apple-cheeked sort of a way. She was still Ginnie Hempstock, Lettie’s mother, and she looked, I was certain, just as she had looked forty-something years ago.
She sat down on the bench on the other side of me, so I was flanked by Hempstock women. She said, “I think Lettie just wants to know if it was worth it.”
“If what was worth it?”
“You,” said the old woman, tartly.
“Lettie did a very big thing for you,” said Ginnie. “I think she mostly wants to find out what happened next, and whether it was worth everything she did.”
“She . . . sacrificed herself for me.”
“After a fashion, dear,” said Ginnie. “The hunger birds tore out your heart. You screamed so piteously as you died. She couldn’t abide that. She had to do something.”
I tried to remember this. I said, “That isn’t how I remember it.” I thought about my heart, then; wondered if there was a cold fragment of a doorway inside it still, and if it was a gift or a curse if there was.
The old lady sniffed. “Didn’t I just say you’ll never get any two people to remember anything the same?” she asked.
“Can I talk to her? To Lettie?”
“She’s sleeping,” said Lettie’s mother. “She’s healing. She’s not talking yet.”
“Not until she’s all done with where she is,” said Lettie’s grandmother, gesturing, but I could not tell if she was pointing to the duck pond or to the sky.
“When will that be?”
“When she’s good and ready,” said the old woman, as her daughter said, “Soon.”
“Well,” I said. “If she brought me here to look at me, let her look at me,” and even as I said it I knew that it had already happened. How long had I been sitting on that bench, staring into the pond? As I had been remembering her, she had been examining me. “Oh. She did already, didn’t she?”
“Yes, dear.”
“And did I pass?”
The face of the old woman on my right was unreadable in the gathering dusk. On my left the younger woman said, “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.”
I put the empty cup and plate down on the ground.
Ginnie Hempstock said, “I think you’re doing better than you were the last time we saw you. You’re growing a new heart, for a start.”
In my memory she was a mountain, this woman, and I had sobbed and shivered on her bosom. Now she was smaller than I was, and I could not imagine her comforting me, not in that way.
The moon was full, in the sky above the pond. I could not for the life of me remember what phase the moon had been in the last time I had noticed it. I could not actually remember the last time I had done more than glance at the moon.
“So what will happen now?”
“Same thing as happens every other time you’ve come here,” said the old woman. “You go home.”
“I don’t know where that is, anymore,” I told them.
“You always say that,” said Ginnie.
In my head Lettie Hempstock was still a full head taller than I was. She was eleven, after all. I wondered what I would see—who I would see—if she stood before me now.
The moon in the duck pond was full as well, and I found myself, unbidden, thinking of the holy fools in the old story, the ones who had gone fishing in a lake for the moon, with nets, convinced that the reflection in the water was nearer and easier to catch than the globe that hung in the sky.
And, of course, it always is.
I got up and walked a few steps to the edge of the pond. “Lettie,” I said, aloud, trying to ignore the two women behind me. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“She should never’ve taken you with her in the first place, when she went off to find the start of it all,” sniffed Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Nothing to stop her sorting it all out on her own. Didn’t need to take you along for company, silly thing. Well, that’ll learn her for next time.”
I turned and looked at Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Do you really remember when the moon was made?” I asked.
“I remember lots of things,” she said.
“Will I come back here again?” I asked.
“That’s not for you to know,” said the old woman.
“Get along now,” said Ginnie Hempstock, gently. “There’s people who are wondering where you’ve got to.”
And when she mentioned them, I realized, with an awkward horror, that my sister, her husband, her children, all the well-wishers and mourners and visitors would be puzzling over what had become of me. Still, if there was a day that they would find my absent ways easy to forgive, it was today.
It had been a long day and a hard one. I was glad that it was over.
I said, “I hope that I haven’t been a bother.”
“No, dear,” said the old woman. “No bother at all.”
I heard a cat meow. A moment later, it sauntered out of the shadows and into a patch of bright moonlight. It approached me confidently, pushed its head against my shoe.
I crouched beside it and scratched its forehead, stroked its back. It was a beautiful cat, black, or so I imagined, the moonlight having swallowed the color of things. It had a white spot over one ear.
I said, “I used to have a cat like this. I called her Ocean. She was beautiful. I don’t actually remember what happened to her.”
“You brought her back to us,” said Ginnie Hempstock. She touched my shoulder with her hand, squeezing it for a heartbeat; she touched my cheek with her fingertips, as if I were a small child, or a lover, and then she walked away, back into the night.
I picked up my plate and my mug, and I carried them along the path with me as we made our way back to the house, the old woman and I.
“The moon does shine as bright as day,” I said. “Like in the song.”
“It’s good to have a full moon,” she agreed.
I said, “It’s funny. For a moment, I thought there were two of you. Isn’t that odd?”
“It’s just me,” said the old woman. “It’s only ever
“I know,” I said. “Of course it is.”
I was going to take the plate and mug into the kitchen and put them in the sink, but she stopped me at the farmhouse door. “You ought to get back to your family now,” she said. “They’ll be sending out a search party.”
“They’ll forgive me,” I said. I hoped that they would. My sister would be concerned, and there would be people I barely knew disappointed not to have told me how very, very sorry they were for my loss. “You’ve been so kind. Letting me sit and think, here. By the pond. I’m very grateful.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “Nothing kind about it.”
“Next time Lettie writes from Australia,” I said, “please tell her I said hello.”
“I will,” she said. “She’ll be glad you thought of her.”
I got into the car and started the engine. The old woman stood in the doorway, watching me, politely, until I had turned the car around and was on my way back up the lane.
I looked back at the farmhouse in my rearview mirror, and a trick of the light made it seem as if two moons hung in the sky above it, like a pair of eyes watching me from above: one moon perfectly full and round, the other, its twin on the other side of the sky, a half-moon.
Curiously I turned in my seat and looked back: a single half-moon hung over the farmhouse, peaceful and pale and perfect.
I wondered where the illusion of the second moon had come from, but I only wondered for a moment, and then I dismissed it from my thoughts. Perhaps it was an afterimage, I decided, or a ghost: something that had stirred in my mind, for a moment, so powerfully that I believed it to be real, but now was gone, and faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk.
Acknowledgments
This book is the book you have just read. It’s done. Now we’re in the acknowledgments. This is not really part of the book. You do not have to read it. It’s mostly just names.