The Ocean at the End of the Lane

V.

That evening my sister sat on her bed, brushing her hair over and over. She brushed it a hundred times every night, and counted each brush stroke. I did not know why.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Looking at my foot,” I told her.

I was staring at the sole of my right foot. There was a pink line across the center of the sole, from the ball of the foot almost to the heel, where I had stepped on a broken glass as a toddler. I remember waking up in my cot, the morning after it happened, looking at the black stitches that held the edges of the cut together. It was my earliest memory. I was used to the pink scar. The little hole beside it, in the arch of my foot, was new. It was where the sudden sharp pain had been, although it did not hurt. It was just a hole.

I prodded it with my forefinger, and it seemed to me that something inside the hole retreated.

My sister had stopped brushing her hair and was watching me curiously. I got up, walked out of the bedroom, down the corridor, to the bathroom at the end of the hall.

I do not know why I did not ask an adult about it. I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort. That was the year I dug out a wart from my knee with a penknife, discovering how deeply I could cut before it hurt, and what the roots of a wart looked like.

In the bathroom cupboard, behind the mirror, was a pair of stainless steel tweezers, the kind with pointed sharp tips, for pulling out wooden splinters, and a box of sticking plasters. I sat on the metal side of the white bathtub and examined the hole in my foot. It was a simple, small round hole, smooth- edged. I could not see how deeply it went, because something was in the way. Something was blocking it. Something that seemed to retreat, as the light touched it.

I held my tweezers, and I watched. Nothing happened. Nothing changed.

I put the forefinger of my left hand over the hole, gently, blocking the light. Then I put the tip of the tweezers beside the hole and I waited. I counted to a hundred—inspired, perhaps, by my sister’s hair- brushing. Then I pulled my finger away and stabbed in with the tweezers.

I caught the head of the worm, if that was what it was, by the tip, between the metal prongs, and I

squeezed it, and I pulled.

Have you ever tried to pull a worm from a hole? You know how hard they can hold on? The way they use their whole bodies to grip the sides of the hole? I pulled perhaps an inch of this worm—pink and gray, streaked, like something infected—out of the hole in my foot, and then felt it stop. I could feel it, inside my flesh, making itself rigid, unpullable. I was not scared by this. It was obviously just something that happened to people, like when the neighbor’s cat, Misty, had worms. I had a worm in my foot, and I was removing the worm.

I twisted the tweezers, thinking, I suspect, of spaghetti on a fork, winding the worm around the tweezers. It tried to pull back, but I turned it, a little at a time, until I could definitely pull no further.

I could feel, inside me, the sticky plastic way that it tried to hold on, like a strip of pure muscle. I leaned over, as far as I could, reached out my left hand and turned on the bath’s hot-water tap, the one with the red dot in the center, and I let it run. The water ran for three, four minutes out of the tap and down the plug hole before it began to steam.

When the water was steaming, I extended my foot and my right arm, maintaining pressure on the tweezers and on the inch of the creature that I had wound out of my body. Then I put the place where the tweezers were under the hot tap. The water splashed my foot, but my soles were barefoot- hardened, and I scarcely minded. The water that touched my fingers scalded them, but I was prepared for the heat. The worm wasn’t. I felt it flex inside me, trying to pull back from the scalding water, felt it loosen its grip on the inside of my foot. I turned the tweezers, triumphantly, like picking the best scab in the world, as the creature began to come out of me, putting up less and less resistance.

I pulled at it, steadily, and as it went under the hot water it slackened, until the end. It was almost all out of me—I could feel it—but I was too confident, too triumphant, and impatient, and I tugged too quickly, too hard, and the worm came off in my hand. The end of it that came out of me was oozing and broken, as if it had snapped off.

Still, if the creature had left anything behind in my foot, it was tiny.

I examined the worm It was dark gray and light gray, streaked with pink, and segmented, like a normal earthworm Now it was out of the hot water, it seemed to be recovering. It wriggled, and the body that had been wrapped around the tweezers now dangled, writhing, although it hung from the head (Was it its head? How could I tell?) where I had pinched it.

I did not want to kill it—I did not kill animals, not if I could help it—but I had to get rid of it. Ii was dangerous. I had no doubt of that.

I held the worm above the bath’s plug hole, where it wriggled, under the scalding water. Then I let it go, and watched it vanish down the drain. I let the water run for a while, and I washed off the tweezers. Finally I put a small sticking plaster over the hole in the sole of my foot, and put the plug in the bath, to prevent the worm from climbing back up the open plug hole, before I turned off the tap. I did not know if it was dead, but I did not think you came back from the drain.

I put the tweezers back where I had got them from, behind the bathroom mirror, then I closed the

mirror and stared at myself.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?

I went back to the bedroom. It was my night to have the door to the hallway open, and I waited until my sister was asleep, and wouldn’t tell on me, and then, in the dim light from the hall, I read a Secret Seven mystery until I fell asleep.