Free The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Page B

red, and he would shout, shout so
loudly and furiously that it would, literally, paralyze me. I would not be able
to think.
    He never hit me. He did not believe in hitting. He
would tell us how his father had hit him, how his mother had chased him with a
broom, how he was better than that. When he got angry enough to shout at me he
would occasionally remind me that he did not hit me, as if to make me grateful.
In the school stories I read, misbehavior often resulted in a caning, or the
slipper, and then was forgiven and done, and I would sometimes envy those
fictional children the cleanness of their lives.
    I did not want to approach Ursula Monkton: I did
not want to risk making my father angry with me.
    I wondered if this would be a good time to try to
leave the property, to head down the lane, but I was certain that if I did I
would look up to see my father’s angry face beside Ursula Monkton’s, all pretty
and smug.
    So I simply watched them from the huge branch of
the beech tree. When they walked out of sight, behind the azalea bushes, I
clambered down the rope ladder, went up into the house, up to the balcony, and I
watched them from there. It was a gray day, but there were butter-yellow
daffodils everywhere, and narcissi in profusion, with their pale outer petals
and their dark orange trumpets. My father picked a handful of narcissi and gave
them to Ursula Monkton, who laughed, and said something, then made a curtsey. He
bowed in return, and said something that made her laugh. I thought he must have
proclaimed himself her Knight in Shining Armor, or something like that.
    I wanted to shout down to him, to warn him that he
was giving flowers to a monster, but I did not. I just stood on the balcony and
watched, and they did not look up and they did not see me.
    My book of Greek myths had told me that the
narcissi were named after a beautiful young man, so lovely that he had fallen in
love with himself. He saw his reflection in a pool of water, and would not leave
it, and, eventually, he died, so that the gods were forced to transform him into
a flower. In my mind, when I had read this, I had imagined that a narcissus must
be the most beautiful flower in the world. I was disappointed when I learned
that it was just a less impressive daffodil.
    My sister came out of the house and went over to
them. My father picked her up and swung her in the air. They all walked inside
together, my father with my sister holding on to his neck, and Ursula Monkton,
her arms filled with yellow and white flowers. I watched them. I watched as my
father’s free hand, the one not holding my sister, went down and rested,
casually, proprietarily, on the swell of Ursula Monkton’s midi skirted
bottom.
    I would react differently to that now. At the time,
I do not believe I thought anything of it at all. I was seven.
    I climbed up into my bedroom window, easy to reach
from the balcony, and down onto my bed, where I read a book about a girl who
stayed in the Channel Islands and defied the Nazis because she would not abandon
her pony.
    And while I read, I thought, Ursula Monkton cannot
keep me here forever. Soon enough—in a few days at the most—someone will take me
into town, or away from here, and then I will go to the farm at the bottom of
the lane, and I will tell Lettie Hempstock what I did.
    Then I thought, Suppose Ursula Monkton only needs a
couple of days. And that scared me.
    Ursula Monkton made meatloaf for dinner that
evening, and I would not eat it. I was determined not to eat anything she had
made or cooked or touched. My father was not amused.
    â€œBut I don’t want it,” I told him. “I’m not
hungry.”
    It was Wednesday, and my mother was attending her
meeting, to raise money so that people in Africa who needed water could drill
wells, in the village hall of the next village down the road. She had posters
that she would put up, diagrams of wells, and photographs of smiling people. At
the