I pushed my fingers as deeply as I could into my mouth, desperate and panicked and determined. I felt the edge of something hard with the tip of my forefinger, put the middle finger on the other side of it, choking myself, clamping the thing between them, and I pulled whatever it was out of my throat.
I gasped for breath, and then I half vomited on to my bedsheets, threw up a clear drool flecked with blood, from where the thing had cut my throat as I had pulled it out.
I did not look at the thing. It was tight in my hand, slimy with my saliva and my phlegm. I did not want to look at it. I did not want it to exist, the bridge between my dream and the waking world.
I ran down the hallway to the bathroom, at the far end of the house. I washed my mouth out, drank directly from the cold tap, spat red into the white sink. Only when I’d done that did I sit on the side of the white bathtub and open my hand. I was scared.
But what was in my hand – what had been in my throat – wasn’t scary. It was a coin: a silver shilling.
I went back to the bedroom. I dressed myself, cleaned the vomit from my sheets as best I could with a damp face flannel. I hoped that the sheets would dry before I had to sleep in the bed that night. Then I went downstairs.
I wanted to tell someone about the shilling, but I did not know who to tell. I knew enough about adults to know that if I did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway. Why would they believe me about something so unlikely?
My sister was playing in the back garden with some of her friends. She ran over to me angrily when she saw me. She said, ‘I hate you. I’m telling Mummy and Daddy when they come home.’
‘What?’
‘You know,’ she said. ‘I know it was you.’
‘What was me?’
‘Throwing coins at me. At all of us. From the bushes. That was just nasty.’
‘But I didn’t.’
‘It hurt.’
She went back to her friends, and they all glared at me. My throat felt painful and ragged.
I walked down the drive. I don’t know where I was thinking of going – I just didn’t want to be there any longer.
Lettie Hempstock was standing at the bottom of the drive, beneath the chestnut trees. She looked as if she had been waiting for a hundred years and could wait for another hundred. She wore a white dress, but the light coming through the chestnut’s young spring leaves stained it green.
I said, ‘Hello.’
She said, ‘You were having bad dreams, weren’t you?’
I took the shilling out of my pocket and showed it to her. ‘I was choking on it,’ I told her. ‘When I woke up. But I don’t know how it got into my mouth. If someone had put it into my mouth, I would have woken up. It was just in there, when I woke.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘My sister says I threw coins at them from the bushes, but I didn’t.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘You didn’t.’
I said, ‘Lettie? What’s happening?’
‘Oh,’ she said, as if it was obvious. ‘Someone’s just trying to give people money, that’s all. But it’s doing it very badly, and it’s stirring things up around here that should be asleep. And that’s not good.’
‘Is it something to do with the man who died?’
‘Something to do with him. Yes.’
‘Is he doing this?’
She shook her head. Then she said, ‘Have you had breakfast?’
I shook my head.
‘Well then,’ she said. ‘Come on.’
We walked down the lane together. There were a few houses down the lane, here and there, back then, and she pointed to them as we went past. ‘In that house,’ said Lettie Hempstock, ‘a man dreamed of being sold and of being turned into money. Now he’s started seeing things in mirrors.’
‘What kinds of things?’
‘Himself. But with fingers poking out of his eye sockets. And things coming out of his mouth. Like crab claws.’
I thought about people with crab legs coming out of their mouths, in mirrors. ‘Why did I find a shilling in my throat?’
‘He wanted people to have money.’
‘The opal miner? Who died in the car?’
‘Yes. Sort of. Not exactly. He started this all off, like someone lighting a fuse on a firework. His death lit the touchpaper. The thing that’s exploding right now, that isn’t him. That’s somebody else. Something else.’
She rubbed her freckled nose with a grubby hand.
‘A lady’s gone mad in that house,’ she told me, and it would not have occurred to me to doubt her. ‘She has money in the mattress. Now she won’t get out of bed, in case someone takes it from her.’
‘How do you know?’
She shrugged. ‘Once you’ve been around for a bit, you get to know stuff.’
I kicked a stone. ‘By “a bit”, do you mean “a really long time”?’
She nodded.
‘How old are you, really?’ I asked.
‘Eleven.’
I thought for a while. Then I asked, ‘How long have you been eleven for?’
She smiled at me.
We walked past Caraway Farm. The farmers, whom one day I would come to know as Callie Anders’ parents, were standing in their farmyard, shouting at each other. They stopped when they saw us.
When we rounded a bend in the lane, and were out of sight, Lettie said, ‘Those poor people.’