by Jonathan Coe
And now Claire gasped out loud, and blinked, and rubbed her eyes in disbelief. Because what she saw at the crest of the roof was the strangest thing of all. A row of gigantic seashells.
Claire put down the mirror and whirled around quickly to look back at her house. There it was, as plain and as squat as ever. The very fact that it looked so boring was almost a comfort, at that moment. She gazed at it for quite a while, taking in the solidness, the reality of it, before raising the mirror slowly to the level of her eyes again. She was almost afraid to look into it this time. Then, instead of staring into it directly, she tilted the mirror upwards once more, up to the roof of the strange, massive old building that it appeared to reflect. She adjusted the angle until she had a steady view of the row of seashells. There were about twelve of them, and each one looked big enough for a girl of Claire’s age to crawl into and curl up inside. She turned the mirror slowly and carefully, looking closely at each shell, one after the other. She wanted to be sure of something in her mind. A realisation had been creeping over her. When she was quite certain that she wasn’t mistaken, she put the mirror away in her pocket, sat down on the damp grass, and started to think.
This is what she was thinking:
Two days ago (was it only two days? It seemed more like two weeks) Claire and Lisa had been playing together on the beach in Wales. For the last day of their holiday, they had decided they were going to do something special, and had started to build a sandcastle. Not just an ordinary sandcastle, but a really spectacular one. They had spent most of the day working on it. The castle they had built was like something out of a fairy tale, complex and higgledy-piggledy, with lots of different courtyards and towers, all set at strange heights and linked by a mazy network of spiral staircases. They had finished by decorating it with flags and seashells. They had bought the flags from the shop by the beach. You got five different flags for a pound. One of them, Claire remembered, was a red dragon on a background of green and white: her dad had explained that it was the national flag of Wales. In the afternoon they had scoured the beach and the nearby rock pools, looking for the most beautiful seashells they could find, and then they had decorated the castle, placing the shells at nicely judged intervals all over the walls, roofs and battlements. It was late in the afternoon when the castle was completed to their satisfaction. Lisa took pictures of it on her smartphone, and Claire’s dad took some photos with his camera. They all agreed that it was the most fabulous sandcastle anyone had ever made.
And here it was. Claire was convinced that the building she could see reflected in the mirror was the same castle: only this time it was not built of sand, and it was more than just a few feet tall. It was made of real stone, and it rose up, proudly and majestically, to a height many times greater than the little houses on Claire’s estate. For some reason, though, only the mirror could see it.
Just then, Claire’s mother opened the back door and called her in for lunch. Claire rose to her feet and made her way up the garden path. When she was almost at the kitchen door, she lifted her mirror, turned it and looked at the reflection. The door she could see in the mirror was, of course, quite different. It was low and arched, and around the curve of the arch she could see curious writing, and figures of strange animals, carved into the stone.
So now it seemed that Claire was about to find out the answer to a question which had already started to preoccupy her.
What was inside the castle?
THREE
W hat are you doing, love?’ Claire’s mother asked. She was staring at her daughter in some puzzlement, because – instead of sitting down at the kitchen table for her lunch – Claire was standing with her back to it against the far wall, and she was looking intently into what seemed to be a dirty, broken fragment of old mirror.
‘Nothing, Mum,’ she answered. ‘It’s just a game that I’m playing.’
‘Well hurry up and eat ,’ said her mother. ‘I don’t want it to get cold.’
Claire’s dad was already sitting at the table, waiting to start his lunch. His fork was poised over his food, in his left hand. At least, that’s what was happening in the real world. In the magical world reflected in Claire’s mirror, the picture was slightly different. Her dad was still holding a fork, but it was about ten times its normal size – the size of the trident which Claire had seen in the pictures in one of her schoolbooks, carried by Poseidon, the Greek God of the Sea. The way her dad was holding it made him seem like a king, and this effect was reinforced by the crown that the mirror showed him to be wearing on his head. It was an unusual – but very beautiful – sort of crown: four big seashells, full of whirls and curlicues and surmounted by a bright red starfish. Her mother was wearing a crown, too: according to the mirror, she still had her hair curlers in place, but behind them was a silver diadem which seemed to be fashioned in the shape of an upturned octopus. This reflection made her look so queenlike and graceful that it was quite a shock to Claire when she heard her mother say in a harsh voice, ‘I won’t tell you again. Put that filthy thing down and come and eat, won’t you? I haven’t cooked this just so it can sit on the table all day.’
As if almost in a trance, Claire came to the table and sat down at her usual place, still holding the mirror in front of her eyes. She kept glancing at her parents to see if they had noticed that there was anything strange about it. To her, the reflections it was giving off seemed so bright and dazzling, so different to the muted colours and dull surroundings of the kitchen that she couldn’t understand why her mum and dad weren’t themselves drawn to it, as surely and irresistibly as all people are drawn to the sparkle of a precious ruby or diamond.
‘I told you to put that away,’ said her mum, as she spooned potato waffles onto her plate. (In the mirror they looked like pink starfish.)
‘But don’t you think it’s amazing,’ said Claire, ‘the way it makes everything look different?’
For the first time – but still without looking very interested – her mum leaned over the mirror and stared closely at it for a few seconds.
‘Sorry, love, I can’t see what you’re talking about,’ she said flatly. ‘If you want me and your father to join in with your games, you’ll have to tell us what the rules are first.’
‘She lives in a dream world anyway,’ said her father, munching on his food.
Claire sighed, and for the time being gave up on the idea of sharing her discovery with her mum and dad. With a great effort of will she put the mirror face down on the table and started eating. It wasn’t much fun trying to snatch glimpses of the reflections while her parents looked on disapprovingly. She would do some proper exploring as soon as the meal was over.
She ate up her lunch as quickly as she could and then left the kitchen and went into the sitting room. She couldn’t wait to see what it would look like in the mirror. Here, instead of the flat-screen TV and her parents’ boring pictures of landscapes and country scenes, the walls were hung with exquisite tapestries showing enormous whales, leaping dolphins and long, scaly sea-serpents with their bodies entwined around the hulls of ancient ships and galleons. The walls themselves seemed to be about four or five times as high as the walls of Claire’s sitting room. At one end there were three arched windows, leading out onto a balcony or terrace, with a balustrade carved out of the same yellow sandstone that the rest of the castle was made of. If you stood and leaned against this balustrade, you would have an incredible view of a vast expanse of sea, a sea almost as flawless in its blueness and stillness as the sky which blended into it on the far horizon.
The infuriating thing was this: Claire couldn’t lean against the balustrade and look across at the ocean. She couldn’t lean against it because it didn’t exist. There was no way of locating it, walking towards it, or touching it. It existed only in the world reflected by this miraculous mirror: a mirror which – she was certain of this by now – somehow managed to reflect not the ordinary, overfamiliar things of which her everyday world consisted, but the things she
might dream about – the things that until now would have existed only in her imagination.
Her head swimming with a strange combination of excitement and frustration, Claire now walked upstairs and went into her bedroom. How small and ordinary it seemed after the seaweedy splendours of the royal chambers she had been looking at in the mirror downstairs. Her single bed stood against one wall, with its drab, dark green coverlet; and sitting on top of it, looking back at her with his plaintive, unmoving brown eyes, was her favourite toy – the thing she probably loved most in all the world – a small, fluffy, orange-and-black-striped tiger who many years ago she had decided to call (without too much effort of imagination) Tiger.
Claire held up the mirror to see whether its reflection offered any improvement upon reality.
Again, she could hardly believe what it showed her. Instead of the small, mean little window, looking out over her scrap of back garden, she could once again see an expanse of shimmering turquoise ocean, dappled with sunlight and framed by a shapely arched window which had no glass in it at all. Her bed was transformed into a magnificent four-poster, with the top of each post surmounted by a beautiful wooden carving of a seashell. The flowing, ocean-blue velvet curtains were dotted with a vivid pattern of tiny red, yellow and orange fish. The bank of pillows and cushions stacked up at one end were decorated with the same pattern, and they looked incredibly soft and inviting. In fact Claire would have wanted to throw herself onto the bed in a rapture immediately if she had not been stopped short by the sight of the astonishing creature which appeared to lie stretched out, full-length, on the silky bedclothes. It was an enormous tiger, its flanks covered in soft, long, reddish-golden fur, which Claire could see moving slowly up and down as the superb creature breathed in and out with heavy, sleepy breaths. Its eyes were closed in sleep, but when Claire angled the mirror so that she could look clearly at its face, the animal seemed to sense that it was being watched, because it raised its head and blinked at her and then, instead of growling or snarling in warning, as a wild tiger would probably have done in real life, it rolled over slightly and reached out its paws in a languid, affectionate movement, just like a cat that has been woken from sleep by its owner.
‘Oh, you beautiful, beautiful thing,’ Claire murmured, staring more and more intently into the mirror, and almost beside herself with frustration that she could not actually reach out to touch the creature and bury her face and hands in its fur.
How could something that she could see so clearly not be real? How could the mirror be showing things that were twice as exciting, a hundred times more magical than the dull, workaday world that was all around her? Claire didn’t understand. All she knew was that she had chanced, that day, upon a gift that was rare and wonderful, and that was surely going to change her life. For that whole day, and for the rest of the school holidays, she scarcely once put the mirror down. She even began taking it to bed, where she would sleep with her arms wrapped around Tiger, after taking one final, disbelieving look at his gigantic reflection in the mirror, and dream all night long that she could feel the warmth of a tiger’s body – twice as big as her own – lying pressed up gently beside her, the sound and the throb of his purr sending her quickly into the deepest sleep she had ever known.
FOUR
Two years went by.
In that time, Claire grew used to the idea that the mirror was part of her life. She came to believe that she would never be able to find a way into the world that it reflected – the world that was so much brighter and more colourful and more glorious than her own. This was a disappointment to her, of course, but she reconciled herself to it. There was nothing else she could do, after all, and in the meantime she felt lucky to have the privilege and the pleasure (the secret pleasure) of being able to look into the mirror whenever she wanted. She kept it carefully wrapped in a piece of green velvet in the drawer of the table beside her bed.
Usually Claire would take the mirror with her whenever she and her parents went out. They grew used to seeing it, and didn’t ask any questions when Claire would sit in the back of the car, for instance, gazing in private wonder at the vast, beautiful landscape reflected in the mirror as she turned it this way and that. Sometimes, in the earliest days, she might catch a glimpse of a unicorn running out shyly from between the distant trees, or a griffin or even a flame-spouting dragon soaring through the skies overhead. Meanwhile she felt sorry for her mother and father, who looked out of their car window and could only see the grey and uniform buildings of their home town or the dull, unchanging contours of the motorway.
Very occasionally, she would even take the mirror to school. When she did this, what she saw reflected was a recognisable version of her own school, but with certain differences. In fact, as the years had gone by, she found that the nature of all the reflections in the mirror had been changing, although it was happening so slowly and subtly that she barely noticed it at first. Gradually, the sandcastle and all its magnificent grounds had started to fade and shift, and what replaced it were the familiar surroundings of her own house, the well-known shapes of her garden, but in each case somehow transformed, made more welcoming and delightful. This change in the reflections – the loss of her vibrant, colourful fantasy world – did not affect her profoundly: it felt perfectly natural to Claire, although it did leave her with a certain sense of melancholy. It was the same with her school buildings. The ones she saw in the mirror were clearly the same buildings, but there were differences: in the mirror, they seemed somehow cleaner, and brighter, and more spacious. The expressions on many of her teachers’ faces were kinder and wiser. Her other classmates had a more lively glint in their eyes, more colour in their complexions, looked altogether happier and more healthy. These differences intrigued her, but still, Claire did not bring the mirror to school very often.
The town where she lived was called Kennoway, and right on the edge of it (a long way from Claire’s house) was a district called The Dales. This was where Claire’s best friend Aggie lived. Her full name was Agnieszka and her mum and dad were Polish. They had come from Poland a few years ago and lived in a few different places before settling down in The Dales, which had quite a distinctive feel to it, compared to the rest of the town. The houses were old and a bit run-down but Claire still liked them. They had more character than the modern ones on her own estate. The shops were older, too, and there weren’t any of the supermarkets or chain stores you found in the main part of Kennoway. There were a couple of cafés and restaurants but they, too, had been there for years and were run by local families. Aggie liked living there as there were lots of other Polish families in the area, as well as Romanians, Indians, Pakistanis, Afro-Caribbeans and all sorts of other interesting people. Claire’s parents told her it was a dangerous place and she should be extra careful when visiting, but she couldn’t really see what they meant and always felt perfectly safe when she went there. Not that she and Aggie ever did anything really exciting. Usually they would buy some chocolate and something to drink from the newsagent on the corner of the street where Aggie lived, then walk over to a spot called the Village Square – probably because once, years ago, The Dales had been a separate village, not part of Kennoway itself. Like the rest of The Dales, the Village Square was a bit shabby, but it had some nice shops and cafés on three sides, and a big stone fountain in the middle which sometimes worked. It was a good place to sit and chat, anyway.
Claire and Aggie would talk about all sorts of things, but one of their favourite topics was Amanda Gifford, the richest and most obnoxious girl at their school. Claire and Aggie had both disliked her from the very first day that they’d met. Her father ran a big construction company, and they lived in an enormous house with a swimming pool out in the countryside, way beyond the confines of the town. Every day she was driven to school by her chauffeur in a Range Rover that was so big it could barely fit down some of Kennoway’s narrow roads, so that the smaller cars had to get out of the way and climb up onto the pavement. The win
dows of the car were tinted, which meant that Amanda could see out, but nobody could see in. In the back of the car, so the rumours went, were a TV set and a fridge full of fizzy drinks.
Most of the time Amanda ignored Claire. She had her own circle of friends, and they weren’t interested in someone like her. But one summer, towards the very end of the school year, something happened which meant that they could no longer be merely indifferent to each other. Something happened which turned them into enemies.
It happened on Sports Day. This was a big, impressive occasion for which all of the teachers and most of the children’s parents would turn up, if they could get time off work. Today Claire’s mum was there and so was Amanda Gifford’s mother. She had arrived in the Range Rover and even Claire had to admit that she looked incredibly glamorous in her sleeveless top and tight denim skirt. She was probably about forty but she dressed – and looked – as if she was twenty-five.
Claire was only taking part in a couple of the races; she was not very good at athletics. But Aggie was one of the best runners in their year, especially over long distances. She was expected to win the 800 metres.
It was one of the last races to be run that day. Aggie had asked Claire to stand on the far side of the track, away from most of the spectators, so that she could cheer her on as she approached the last part of her final lap. As Claire made her way over there, she realised that she was being followed. She turned and saw that a boy called Peter Lewis was tagging along behind her. She sighed. Peter was a pain. He followed her everywhere and was always trying to persuade her to become friends with him. Why was he doing this now? He didn’t have any special reason to stand on this side of the track, far from everybody else. He was only doing it because she was.
