The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘Funny them leaving it down here, though,’ said the policeman. ‘Because it’s a long walk back to anywhere from here.’

We passed a bend in the lane and saw the white Mini over on the side, in front of a gate leading into a field, tyres sunk deep in the brown mud. We drove past it, parked on the grass verge. The policeman let me out, and the three of us walked over to the Mini, while the policeman told my dad about crime in this area, and why it was obviously the local kids who had done it, then my dad was opening the passenger-side door with his spare key.

He said, ‘Someone’s left something on the back seat.’ He reached back and pulled away the blue blanket that covered the thing in the back seat, even as the policeman was telling him that he shouldn’t do that, and I was staring at the back seat because that was where my comic was, so I saw it.

It was an it, the thing I was looking at, not a him.

Although I was an imaginative child, prone to nightmares, I had persuaded my parents to take me to Madame Tussauds waxworks in London, when I was six, because I had wanted to visit the Chamber of Horrors, expecting the movie-monster Chambers of Horrors I’d read about in my comics. I had wanted to thrill to waxworks of Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf-man. Instead I was walked through a seemingly endless sequence of dioramas of unremarkable, glum-looking men and women who had murdered people – usually lodgers, and members of their own families – and who were then murdered in their turn: by hanging, by the electric chair, in gas chambers. Most of them were depicted with their victims in awkward social situations – seated around a dinner table, perhaps, as their poisoned family members expired. The plaques that explained who they were also told me that the majority of them had murdered their families and sold the bodies to anatomy. It was then that the word anatomy garnered its own edge of horror for me. I did not know what anatomy was. I knew only that anatomy made people kill their children.

The only thing that had kept me running screaming from the Chamber of Horrors as I was led around it was that none of the waxworks had looked fully convincing. They could not truly look dead, because they did not ever look alive.

The thing in the back seat that had been covered by the blue blanket (I knew that blanket. It was the one that had been in my old bedroom, on the shelf, for when it got cold) was not convincing either. It looked a little like the opal miner, but it was dressed in a black suit, with a white ruffled shirt and a black bow tie. Its hair was slicked back and artificially shiny. Its eyes were staring. Its lips were bluish, but its skin was very red. It looked like a parody of health. There was no gold chain around its neck.

I could see, underneath it, crumpled and bent, my copy of SMASH!, with Batman, looking just as he did on the television, on the cover.

I don’t remember who said what then, just that they made me stand away from the Mini. I crossed the road, and I stood there on my own while the policeman talked to my father and wrote things down in a notebook.

I stared at the Mini. A length of green garden hose ran from the exhaust pipe up to the driver’s window. There was thick brown mud all over the exhaust, holding the hosepipe in place.

Nobody was watching me. I took a bite of my toast. It was burnt and cold.

At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. ‘Yum!’ he’d say, and ‘Charcoal! Good for you!’ and ‘Burnt toast! My favourite!’ and he’d eat it all up. When I was much older, he confessed to me that he had never liked burnt toast, had only eaten it to prevent it from going to waste, and for a fraction of a moment, my entire childhood felt like a lie: it was as if one of the pillars of belief that my world had been built upon had crumbled into dry sand.

The policeman spoke into a radio in the front of his car.

Then he crossed the road and came over to me. ‘Sorry about this, sonny,’ he said. ‘There’s going to be a few more cars coming down this road in a minute. We should find you somewhere to wait that you won’t be in the way. Would you like to sit in the back of my car again?’

I shook my head. I didn’t want to sit there again.

Somebody, a girl, said, ‘He can come back with me to the farmhouse. It’s no trouble.’

She was much older than me, at least eleven. Her hair was worn relatively short, for a girl, and her nose was snub. She was freckled. She wore a red skirt – girls didn’t wear jeans much back then, not in those parts. She had a soft Sussex accent and sharp grey-blue eyes.

The girl went, with the policeman, over to my father, and she got permission to take me away, and then I was walking down the lane with her.

I said, ‘There is a dead man in our car.’

‘That’s why he came down here,’ she told me. ‘The end of the road. Nobody’s going to find him and stop him around here, three o’ clock in the morning. And the mud there is wet and easy to mould.’

‘Do you think he killed himself?’

‘Yes. Do you like milk? Gran’s milking Bessie now.’

I said, ‘You mean, real milk from a cow?’ and then felt foolish, but she nodded, reassuringly.

I thought about this. I’d never had milk that didn’t come from a bottle. ‘I think I’d like that.’

We stopped at a small barn where an old woman, much older than my parents, with long grey hair, like cobwebs, and a thin face, was standing beside a cow. Long black tubes were attached to each of the cow’s teats. ‘We used to milk them by hand,’ she told me. ‘But this is easier.’

She showed me how the milk went from the cow down the black tubes and into the machine, through a cooler and into huge metal churns. The churns were left on a heavy wooden platform outside the barn, where they would be collected each day by a lorry.

The old lady gave me a cup of creamy milk from Bessie the cow, the fresh milk before it had gone through the cooler. Nothing I had drunk had ever tasted like that before: rich and warm and perfectly happy in my mouth. I remembered that milk after I had forgotten everything else.

‘There’s more of them up the lane,’ said the old woman, suddenly. ‘All sorts coming down with lights flashing and all. Such a palaver. You should get the boy into the kitchen. He’s hungry, and a cup of milk won’t do a growing boy.’

The girl said, ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Just a piece of toast. It was burned.’

She said, ‘My name’s Lettie. Lettie Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. Come on.’ She took me in through the front door, and into their enormous kitchen, sat me down at a huge wooden table, so stained and patterned that it looked as if faces were staring up at me from the old wood.

‘We have breakfast here early,’ she said. ‘Milking starts at first light. But there’s porridge in the saucepan, and jam to put in it.’

She gave me a china bowl filled with warm porridge from the stove top, with a lump of home-made blackberry jam, my favourite, in the middle of the porridge, then she poured cream on it. I swished it around with my spoon before I ate it, swirling it into a purple mess, and was as happy as I have ever been about anything. It tasted perfect.

A stocky woman came in. Her red-brown hair was streaked with grey, and cut short. She had apple cheeks, a dark green skirt that went to her knees, and wellington boots. She said, ‘This must be the boy from the top of the lane. Such a business going on with that car. There’ll be five of them needing tea soon.’

Lettie filled a huge copper kettle from the tap. She lit a gas hob with a match and put the kettle on the flame. Then she took down five chipped mugs from a cupboard, and hesitated, looking at the woman. The woman said, ‘You’re right. Six. The doctor will be here too.’

Then the woman pursed her lips and made a tchutch! noise. ‘They’ve missed the note,’ she said. ‘He wrote it so carefully too, folded it and put it in his breast pocket, and they haven’t looked there yet.’