CONTENTS
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.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Over the page, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
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Thank you for your support,
Dan, Justin and John
Founders, Unbound
SUPPORTERS
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.
The names listed below are of readers who have pledged their support and made this book happen. If you’d like to join them, visit www.unbound.com.
Pamela Abbott
Alice Adams
Geoff Adams
John Adams
David Adger
Phil Agius
Moose Allain
Sergio Amadori
Robert Andrews
Sandra Armor
Philippe Auclair
Clare Barker
Sophie Barker
Ruby Bastiman
David Belbin
Emma Bell
Daryl Berrell
Jonathan Blackie
Nadia Bouzidi
Joanna Bowen
John Boxall
John Boyne
Richard W H Bray
Jonathan Bridgland
Emma Brown
Nicky Brown
Simon J. Brown
Gareth Buchaillard-Davies
Steven Buckeridge
Freya Bullock
Paul Bussey
John Caley
Jonathan Cole
Stephen Cooper
Elizabeth Harper Cowan
Paul Daintry
Harriet Fear Davies
Remembering Owen Davies
Royce Cerf Dehmer
Rob Delaney
Tasja Dorkofikis
Chris Dottie
Jenny Doughty
John Dunbar
Valerie Duskin
Jez Fielder
Paul Fielder
Julia Fox
Mark Fraser
Babette Gallard
Annabel Gaskell
Mike Gautrey
Jane Gibbs
Ben Golding
Giles Goodland
Tom Goodrich
Lucille Grant
Jason Hares
Sean Harkin
Claire R E Harris
Amanda Hart
Barry Hasler
Andrew Hearse
Barry Hecker
Caroline Hennigan
Patrick Heren
Philip Hewitt
Matthew H. Hill
Greg Hitchcock
Paul Hodgson
Peter Hogan
Janice Holve
Mary Horlock
Jeff Horne
Jacob Howe
Sarah A Hubert
Matthew Iles
Caroline Irby
Rivka Isaacson
Natascha Jaeger
Stephen Jessop & Donna Laurie
Mark Jones
Julia Jordan
Peter Jordan
Ros Kennedy
Dan Kieran
Patrick Kincaid
Mit Lahiri
Basia Lautman
Garth Leder
Bridget Caron Lee
Justin Lewis
Marina Lewycka
Diana Lilley
Rebecca Lovett
Seonaid Mackenzie
Koukla MacLehose
M. J. Magee
Paul Main
Marianthi Makra
Philippa Manasseh
David Manns
Milcah Marcelo
Katrin Mäurich
Tom McDermott
Brigid McDonough
Roy McMillan
Sam McNabb
Jenny Middleton
John Mitchinson
Chris Monk
Mark Muldowney
Linda Nathan
Carlo Navato
Jay Newman
Jules McNally Norman
Ashley Norris
Julia O’Brien
Rodney O’Connor
Catherine O’Flynn
Michele O’Leary
Misha and Marlon Owen
Scott Pack
Rina Palumbo
Janice Parsons
Finley Peake
Tony Peake
Pernilla Pearce
Bianca Pellet
Edward Penning
Sonya Permyakova
Cynda Pierce
Justin Pollard
Lorca and Llara Prado
Rhian Heulwen Price
Dylan & Esme Price-Davey
br /> David Quantick
Julia Raeside
Alice Rees
Paul Rhodes
Rachael Robinson
David Roche
Alun Roderick
Taylor Royle
Anna Sambles
Libby Sambles
Susan Sandon
Tim Saxton
David Sayers
Dean Scott
Dr David A Seager
Alan Searl
John Sheehan
Joanne Sheppard
David Shriver
Caroline Shutter
Harry Simeone
Diane Sinclair
John Skelton
Hazel Slavin
Nicholas Snowdon
Stuart Southall
Loredana Spadola
Ian Spence
Clive Stock
Ewan Tant
Steve Thorp
Jem Thorpe-Woods
Linda Todgers
Graham Tomlinson
Transreal Fiction
Annabel Turpin
Anne Tyley
Despina Vassiliadou
Mark Vent
Paul Vincent
John Wagstaff
Steve Walsh
Jeremy Warmsley
Alan Webster
Alice Wenban-Smith
Elsie Mai Hâf Westmore
Wiz Wharton
Vicki Whittaker
Patrick Wildgust
Mike Williams & Munson the Alaskan Malamute
Reuben Willmott
Sarah Wilson
Sophie Wilson
Steve Woodward
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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.
ONE
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.
None the less, there was something about the dump that Claire liked. She felt somehow at home in the company of all these thrown-away things. And just occasionally, you might find something useful. Once she had found a radio here, which she had taken back to her bedroom, and although she had never been able to get it to work, it had looked nice, sitting on the table beside her bed, until her parents had eventually persuaded her to get rid of it and bought her a new one for her birthday. The other thing she wanted for her bedroom was an alarm clock so she wondered if today she might be lucky enough to find one.
Almost immediately, however, something quite different caught her eye. There was a flash of light from the top of one of the rubbish piles and when Claire went over to see what it was, she found a fragment of broken mirror, just a couple of inches wide, but with rough, jagged edges forming a shape like an irregular star. She bent down and picked it up – very gingerly, because she didn’t want to cut herself. As she took it in her hand, she was dazzled by the clear, pale blue of the sky reflected on the mirror’s surface, and the sudden play of sunlight flung back by the glass as she held it and turned it this way and that. The brightness of the light even hurt her eyes for a moment or two, so that she had to shield them with her arm as she looked down at the mirror.
Holding the mirror cautiously between finger and thumb, Claire scrambled back to the edge of the dump and found a spot to sit down. Then she laid it flat in her palm and took a closer look Leaning over, she could see the reflection of her own pale, freckly, enquiring face, and beyond that, the blueness of the sky which, the more she looked at it, seemed to be one of the purest and most beautiful colours she had ever seen. She was staring into the depths of the mirror, enjoying the richness of this colour in an almost dreamlike state, when a couple of raindrops fell onto the surface of the glass and startled her out of her daydream. She wiped them away with her sleeve and then glanced up at the sky, frowning. How could raindrops be falling from such a blue sky? Except that – and here was the strange thing – now that she looked at it, the sky wasn’t blue at all. It was just as grey as it had been when she first left the house: and not just grey, in fact, but mottled over with shifting, fast-moving clouds that were as black as charcoal.
Claire looked again into the mirror lying in the palm of her hand. The same pale, freckly face looked back at her. And behind it was the same blue, cloudless sky. And then she saw something fly through the sky, directly behind her head. It was a huge bird – flying so close above her that she could see the soft texture of its feathers and the beady gleam of its fast, searching eye; so close above her that in an involuntary movement she ducked and covered her head with one arm, afraid that the bird was going to fly into her. But it made no sound; and when she looked up into the sky again a second later, there was nothing there.
TWO
Claire was almost certain that the bird she had seen was an eagle. An eagle was the only bird she could think of that was as large as this one, and whose feathers would send off the same wonderful golden shimmer. But even she (who had very little knowledge of birds) knew that there were no eagles in this part of the country.
She looked up again, and scanned the sky from one end to the other. Where had the eagle gone, in any case? It couldn’t have disappeared completely. But try as she might, she could not see it anywhere in the lowering, cloudy sky.
Claire was getting cold now, and
was also convinced that it was going to rain very soon. So she put the fragment of mirror carefully into the pocket at the front of her dress, and scrambled up the side of the dump towards the bushes at the top. In a few minutes she had squeezed through the hole in the fence and was back at the bottom of her garden. She had not been away for long: she could still see her mum and dad sitting at the kitchen table, talking to each other and surrounded by papers. Her mum got up and went over to the sink by the window to fill the kettle. She saw Claire and waved. Claire waved back.
Turning away from the house, she took the mirror out of her pocket and looked at it again. Instead of leaning over it, this time, she held it at arm’s length, level with her face. At first everything seemed normal but then she looked into it more carefully and noticed something odd about the reflection behind her.
Claire’s house was part of an estate on the outskirts of the town, and it had been built about five years ago. All the houses were the same size, the same shape, and were built of the same modern red brick. And sure enough, she could see a house – or at least a building – reflected in the mirror, beyond the image of her own face, but it didn’t appear to be Claire’s house at all. The bricks were much bigger, and were made of much older stone, and were a sandy, yellowy sort of colour. As Claire tilted the mirror in her hand, she could see more of this building: the windows were not square and ugly like theirs, but all sorts of different shapes – arched, round, oval, hexagonal – and they were criss-crossed with metalwork arranged into complex and wonderful patterns. Sunlight glinted back off the windows, dazzling her once again and prompting her seriously to wonder if none of this was real at all, and her eyes were somehow starting to play tricks on her. Maybe this mirror was just a bit dirty: the surface did seem to be streaked with faint marks that wouldn’t come off, no matter how hard she rubbed, and Claire supposed that this might account for the way it didn’t appear to reflect things properly. And yet, the building she could see behind her own face did seem to be awfully clear. She looked at it again, tilting the mirror further upwards so that she could see higher and higher up the surface of the sandstone walls, right up to the top. The roof, she noticed, was made of tiles that were also yellowish, and there were some flags planted at the crest, rippling in a gentle breeze. (She couldn’t make all of them out, but one of them showed a red dragon, against a backdrop of green and white.) Also on the roof was—