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I walked into the farmyard I went past the chicken coop, past the old barn and along the edge of the field, re in the knowledge Hazels lined the side of the reen nuts, put them in my pocket

The pond is next, I thought I just have to go around this shed, and I’ll see it

I saw it and felt oddly proud of myself, as if that one act of memory had bloay some of the cobwebs of the day

The pond was smaller than I remembered There was a little wooden shed on the far side, and, by the path, an ancient, heavy wood-and-reen a few years ago I sat on the bench, and stared at the reflection of the sky in the water, at the scues, and the half-dozen lily pads Every now and again I tossed a hazelnut into the middle of the pond, the pond that Lettie Hempstock had called …

It wasn’t the sea, was it?

She would be older than I am now, Lettie Hempstock She was only a handful of years older than I was back then, for all her funny talk She was eleven I was … as I? It was after the bad birthday party I knew that So I would have been seven

I wondered if we had ever fallen in the water Had I pushed her into the duckpond, that strange girl who lived in the far in the water Perhaps she had pushed me in too

Where did she go? A ay

And it wasn’t the sea It was the ocean

Lettie Hempstock’s ocean

I re

Chapter 1

Nobody came to my seventh birthday party

There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the centre of the table The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing My anised the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships I was their first book

When it beca, my mother lit the seven candles on the cake, and I blew them out I ate a slice of the cake, as did my little sister and one of her friends (both of the the party as observers, not participants), before they fled, giggling, to the garden

Party games had been prepared by my mother, but because nobody was there, not even ames were played, and I unwrapped the newspaper around the pass-the-parcel gift ure I was sad that nobody had coure, and there was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories

I liked that Books were safer than other people anyway

My parents had also given me a Best of Gilbert and Sullivan LP, to add to the two that I already had I had loved Gilbert and Sullivan since I was three, when est sister, my aunt, took me to see Iolanthe, a play filled with lords and fairies I found the existence and nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords My aunt had died soon after, of pneumonia, in the hospital

That evening, when ht a cardboard box with him In the cardboard box was a soft-haired black kitten of uncertain gender, which I immediately named Fluffy, and which I loved utterly and wholeheartedly

Fluffy slept on ht I talked to it, so it to answer in a huue It never did I did not ood companion for someone whose seventh birthday party had consisted of a table with iced biscuits and a blanc chairs

I do not re any of the other children in my class at school why they had not come to my party I did not need to ask them They were not my friends, after all They were just the people I went to school with

I made friends slohen I made them

I had books, and now I had ton and his cat, I knew, or, if Fluffy proved particularly intelligent, ould be the miller’s son and Puss in Boots The kitten slept on my pillow, and it even waited foron the driveway in front of my house, by the fence, until, a ht the opal miner to stay

I was not there when it happened

I got ho to ycoffee at the kitchen table, I could smell it In those days all coffee was instant coffee, a bitter dark broder that came out of a jar

‘I’ here,’ he told me, cheerfully ‘But not to worry’ His accent was clipped, unfamiliar: it was the first South African accent I had heard

He, too, had a cardboard box on the table in front of him

‘The black kitten, was he yours?’ he asked

‘It’s called Fluffy,’ I said

‘Yeah Like I said Accident co here Not to worry Disposed of the corpse Don’t have to trouble yourself Dealt with the matter Open the box’

‘What?’

He pointed to the box ‘Open it,’ he said

The opal miner was a tall man He wore jeans and checked shirts every tiold around his neck That was gone the last time I saw him, too