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“I’m in publishing,” he offers finally.
Alice laughs sharply. “How hungry a thing is a book! Devoured you whole straight from the womb, and still gnawing away at your poor bones. Oh, but it was different for you, wasn’t it? It was only ever that summer, really, with Charles and I and Edith and Lorina, punting on the river. But your James raised you, didn’t he? Adopted the whole lot of Davies orphans. I can’t tell if that would be better or worse. Tell me. Should I envy you?”
The soup course arrives. He frowns into a wide circle of pink bisque. His brain is a surfeit of fathers—his own, a-bed, rotting cancerous jaw like a crocodile, all teeth and scaled death, his older brothers, always running, fighting, so far ahead, so untouched, and Barrie, always Barrie, Barrie always kind and generous and ever-present, ever watching, his eyes like starving cameras freezing Peter in place for a flash and a snap that never came.
“He drank me,” Peter whispers finally. “And grew larger.”
Large as Life and twice as natural
Olive put her hand against the looking glass.
She was balanced rather precariously on the mantel, one knee on either side of a portrait of Darling Mother as a young girl, before Father Dear, before the Other One, before Olive and Little George and Eglwysbach and the sheep and the paintbrushes and all of everything ever. A book of matches tumbled down onto the hearth as Olive tried, somehow, to grip the brickwork with her kneecaps.
When she’d been cleaning it with vinegar, the mirror had felt cool and slick and perfect as dolphin-skin. Olive pressed her other hand against the glass. It wasn’t cool now. Or slick. It felt warm and alive and prickly, like a wriggling hedgehog thrilled to see its mate waddling through a wet paddock. The marble wolf’s head in the looking glass parlour still snarled. The one in Fuss Antonym’s parlour still did nothing of the kind.
“Don’t be stupid, Olive,” she scolded herself. Darling Mother never did, anymore. Someone had to pick up the slack. “Really, you’re such an awful little fool. Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing’s ever going to happen to you. That’s just how it is and you know it. You’ve gone barking, that’s all, and pretty soon someone will come and take you away to a nice padded room by the sea where you can’t bother anyone.”
The looking glass writhed under her hands. It spread and stretched and undulated like a great glass python just waking from a thousand years asleep. Slowly, the mirror turned to mist, and the mist stroked the bones of her wrists with fond fingers.
“Mum!” Olive screamed—but the looking glass took her anyway, scream and all, and in half a moment she tumbled through to the other side into a cloud of green glow-worms, and a thumping, ancient forest, and the hot, thrilling blackness of a summer’s midnight.
Each Shining Scale
The salad course appears amid the wash of unbridgeable silence. Beets, radishes, hard cheeses as translucent as slivers of pearl, sour vinegars, peppercorns green and black. Peter sighs. The other diners around him simply will not stop their idiotic noises, the belligerent scraping of silver against china, the oceanic murmur of inane conversation, the animal slurping of their food. The oysters begin to turn on him. He feels a pale bile churning within.
“He said not to grow up, not ever,” he whispers. “He made me promise. But I couldn’t help it. Not for a minute. Even while he was telling his tale, scribbling away at his own cleverness while my father rotted away in bed, I was growing up. Becoming not-Peter all the time while he told me to stop, stop at once, hold still, keep frozen like…like a side of lamb.”
Alice rolls her eyes and bites through a red radish. She has a spot of mauve lipstick on her teeth. “Oh, how very dare those precious old men prattle on and on to us about childhood! The only folk who obsess over the golden glow of youth are ones who’ve forgotten how perfectly dreadful it is to be a child. Did you feel invincible and piratical and impish when your father died? I surely did not when Edith passed. You simply cannot stop things happening to you in this life. And do you know the funniest thing? An Oxford don, living in the walled garden of the university, with servants and a snug little house in which to write nonsense poems and puzzles and make inventions to your heart’s content—that’s more and more permanent a childhood than I ever had. He used to moan and mewl over me about the horror of corsets to come, the grimoire of marriage, the charnel house of childbirth, the dark curtains that would close over me upon some future birthday—well, for goodness sake! What would he know about any of that? He never married, he never had a child, he never so much as scrubbed his own underthings! How dare he tell me four years old was the best of life when I had so many years left to face?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Pardon?”
“When Peter left for Neverland. He was eighteen months old. In a pram in Kensington Gardens. An eighteen-month-old child can barely speak, barely walk without falling. But that was the best I had ever been, in his eyes. The best I ever could be. And all those people went to see the play and clapped their hands and agreed he was right, and all the while I was twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Thirty. As old as Hook. Watching myself fly away. Watching from the back row while my bones screamed, all in quiet: That’s not what I was like, that’s not how any of it goes; Christ, James, I was never heartless, I wish I was, I wish I was!”
Alice frowns into her beer. She rubs the glass with one fingertip.
“It’s not children who are innocent and heartless,” she says—bitterly? Pityingly? Peter has never had the knack of reading people. Only books, and only on good days. “Only the mad,” she finishes, and goes after her beets with a vengeful stab.
A Life Asunder
The very first thing Olive did was look behind her. There was dear, familiar, batty old Fuss Antonym’s wall—but it was no longer dear or familiar at all, and quite a bit battier. Instead of storm-slashed whitewash, the house sported a shimmering blackwash, roofed with overturned tea-saucers, and crawling with a sort of luminous ivy peppered with great, blowy hibiscus flowers in a hundred comic-book colours. She had come through the middle window in a row of three. On the other side of the window, she could still see the parlour, the mustard-coloured chair, the painting of the shepherdess and the black sheep, the peeling moulding, the chilled grey afternoon peeking in past the curtains on the ordinary wall opposite. All right, yes, fine, Olive told herself, half-terrified, half-irritated. This sort of thing happens when you’ve gone mad. It’s nothing to get tizzy over. You’ve sniffed too much silver polish, that’s all. Might as well enjoy it! The other side of the looking glass was a window, and the other side of the house was a deep night, and a deep summer, and a deep forest, deep and hot and sticky and bright.
Olive’s knees abandoned her. She tumbled down onto a new, savage, harlequin earth. She was going to have a tizzy, after all. For God’s sake, Olive! She plunged her knuckles into the alien ground. Even the soil sparkled. Hot mud squelched between her fingers, streaked with glittering grime like liquefied opals. An infinite jungley tangle spread out before her, and it simply refused to not be there, no matter how Olive tried to make it stop being there. A path tumbled down the hillocks and shallows, away into rose-jet shadows and emerald-coal mists. Delicate wood-mushrooms curled up everywhere like flowers in a busy garden: chartreuse chanterelles, fuchsia toadstools, azure puffballs.
Something was moving down there, down the path, between the mushrooms and the ferns and the trees no prim Latin taxonomy could pin down. Something pale. Something rather loud. And, just possibly, not one something alone, but three somethings together. There is nothing for a tizzy like a something, and before she could tell herself sensibly to stay close to home, no matter how odd and unhomelike home had suddenly become, Olive was off down the path and through the garden of night fungus, chasing three hard, pale, loud voices through the dark.
“You’re such an awful brat,” growled something just ahead. “I don’t know why we trouble ourselves with you at all.”
“And deadly boring, to ice the cake,” sniffed something else. “Why even tell a riddle if you don’t have any earthly intention of answering it for anybody? It’s not sporting, that’s what.”
“I think it’s jolly sporting,” crowed a third something. “For me.”
“A raven isn’t like a writing desk. You can smirk all you like, but that’s the truth and I hate you. It just isn’t, in any sort of way that makes sense—” the second something spluttered.
“The farthing you go for sense, the furthing you are from the pound,” the third something said loftily.
“Do shut up,” snarled the first something.
