By the Same Author
Supporters
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Copyright
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1961. He began writing at an early age. His first surviving story, a detective thriller called The Castle of Mystery, was written when he was eight. His first published novel was The Accidental Woman in 1987, but it was his fourth, What a Carve Up!, which established his reputation as one of England’s finest comic novelists, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1985 and being translated into many languages. Seven bestselling novels and many other awards have followed, including the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for Like a Fiery Elephant, a biography of the experimental novelist, B. S. Johnson. Jonathan Coe lives in London.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fiction
The Accidental Woman
A Touch of Love
The Dwarves of Death
What a Carve Up!
The House of Sleep
The Rotters’ Club
The Closed Circle
The Rain Before It Falls
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
Expo 85
Number 11
Short Fiction
Loggerheads and Other Stories
Non-fiction
Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson
Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
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Unbound is a new kind of publishing house. Our books are funded directly by readers. This was a very popular idea during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Now we have revived it for the internet age. It allows authors to write the books they really want to write and readers to support the books they would most like to see published.
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The town in this story is called Kennoway, which is the name of a real town in Fife, Scotland, where my great-great-grandparents used to live. But this story is set somewhere in England, and the real town and the fictional town have got nothing to do with each other.
Claire was eight years old when she found the mirror.
It was raining that day. Not heavy rain, but warm summer rain, with thick, occasional drops, falling from a dull, slate-grey sky. These were the last few days of the school holidays, and the weather had only just changed. They had been lucky this year: the sun had shone for almost the whole of their two weeks away. As usual, Claire and her parents had been to Wales for their holiday, staying in a small rented cottage a few miles from the sea. They had gone to the beach every day and for a short time Claire had forgotten her pervasive sense of loneliness. Towards the end of the holiday she had even made friends with another little girl, a nine-year-old called Lisa who was an only child, just like her. They had promised to keep in touch, but Lisa lived hundreds of miles away so there wasn’t really much point. Meanwhile Claire’s best friend Aggie was still on holiday somewhere with her mum and dad, so Claire had nobody to play with for the time being.
It had been a lovely two weeks but now, after only one day at home, everybody’s mood had changed. As soon as they returned, Claire’s father had sat down on the sofa with a pile of unread letters, and after he had finished reading them, he seemed angry with everyone and everything. Now her parents were talking earnestly in the kitchen about something to do with his job, and Claire could think of nothing to do except wander out into the garden. It was a small garden, and it didn’t take her long to get bored, out there by herself. She would have played on the swing, but one of the ropes was broken. So instead, she walked down to the bottom of the garden, and slipped out through the hole in the fence, where one of the posts had rotted away.
From here, you could soon reach the rubbish dump. In the distance there rose a modest, grassy hill, dotted with rocks and heather, where Claire’s parents would sometimes take her for walks on Sunday afternoons. There was a fantastic view of the whole town from the top. But before you got very far along the path towards this hill, there was a clump of dense, stubbly bushes on the left, and once you had pushed your way through those, the ground fell away at your feet into a sheer slope, like the edge of a cliff. But if you trod carefully, you could scramble down the slope – clutching for support onto the weeds which sprung out of the chalky soil – and that was how you got to the dump.
Claire didn’t come here often. This was only the third or fourth time. To be honest, it wasn’t a very nice place at all. It was full of big plastic bags with their contents spilling out, sharp pieces of metal which might catch you in the leg if you weren’t looking out for them, and rotting items of food which people had thrown away and which had started to smell terrible. In fact the smell was the worst thing about it.
