The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

on Bonfire Night.
    “Is she dead?” I asked.
    “No.”
    “Then she’ll come back. And you’ll get in trouble.”
    “That’s as may be,” said Lettie. “Are you hungry?”
    She asked me, and I knew that I was. I had forgotten, somehow, but now I remembered. I was so hungry it hurt.
    “Let’s see…” Lettie was talking as she led me through the fields. “You’re wet through. We’ll need to get you something to wear. I’ll have a look in the chest of drawers in the green bedroom. I think Cousin Japeth left some of his clothes there when he went off to fight in the Mouse Wars. He wasn’t much bigger than you.”
    The kitten was licking my fingers with a small, rough tongue.
    “I found a kitten,” I said.
    “I can see that. She must have followed you back from the fields where you pulled her up.”
    “This is that kitten? The same one that I picked?”
    “Yup. Did she tell you her name, yet?”
    “No. Do they do that?”
    “Sometimes. If you listen.”
    I saw the lights of the Hempstocks’ farm in front of us, welcoming, and I was cheered, although I could not understand how we had got from the field we were in to the farmhouse so quickly.
    “You were lucky,” said Lettie. “Fifteen feet further back, and the field belongs to Colin Anders.”
    “You would have come anyway,” I told her. “You would have saved me.”
    She squeezed my arm with her hand but she said nothing.
    I said, “Lettie. I don’t want to go home.” That was not true. I wanted to go home more than anything, just not to the place I had fled that night. I wanted to go back to the home I had lived in before the opal miner had killed himself in our little white Mini, or before he had run over my kitten.
    The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not. The rain had become a drizzle once again.
    We splashed through deep puddles, Lettie in her Wellington boots, my stinging feet bare. The smell of manure was sharp in the air as we reached the farmyard, and then we walked through a side door and into the huge farmhouse kitchen.

IX.
    L ettie’s mother was prodding the huge fireplace with a poker, pushing the burning logs together.
    Old Mrs. Hempstock was stirring a bulbous pot on the stove with a large wooden spoon. She lifted the spoon to her mouth, blew on it theatrically, sipped from it, pursed her lips, then added a pinch of something and a fistful of something else to it. She turned down the flame. Then she looked at me, from my wet hair to my bare feet, which were blue with cold. As I stood there a puddle began to appear on the flagstone floor around me, and the drips of water from my dressing gown splashed into it.
    “Hot bath,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Or he’ll catch his death.”
    “That was what I said,” said Lettie.
    Lettie’s mother was already hauling a tin bath from beneath the kitchen table, and filling it with steaming water from the enormous black kettle that hung above the fireplace. Pots of cold water were added until she pronounced it the perfect temperature.
    “Right. In you go,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Spit-spot.”
    I looked at her, horrified. Was I going to have to undress in front of people I didn’t know?
    “We’ll wash your clothes, and dry them for you, and mend that dressing gown,” said Lettie’s mother, and she took the dressing gown from me, and she took the kitten, which I had barely realized I was still holding, and then she walked away.
    As quickly as possible I shed my red nylon pajamas—the bottoms were soaked and the legs were now ragged and ripped and would never be whole again. I dipped my fingers into the water, then I climbed in and sat down on the tin floor of the bath in that reassuring kitchen in front of the huge fire, and I leaned back in the hot water. My feet began to throb as they came back to life. I knew that naked was wrong, but the Hempstocks seemed indifferent to my nakedness: Lettie was gone, and my pajamas and dressing gown with her; her mother was getting out knives, forks, spoons, little jugs and bigger jugs, carving knives and wooden trenchers, and arranging them about the table.
    Old Mrs. Hempstock passed me a mug, filled with soup from the black pot on the stove. “Get that down you. Heat you up from the inside, first.”
    The soup was rich, and warming. I had never drunk soup in the bath before. It was a perfectly new experience. When I finished the mug I gave it back to her,