by Jonathan Coe
‘Go away, Peter,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you following me.’
‘It’s a free country, isn’t it?’ Peter insisted, in his whiny voice. ‘I’ll stand where I want to.’
‘Fine,’ said Claire, stomping off at a quicker pace. She couldn’t stop him being there, but she wasn’t going to talk to him.
The only other person standing on this side of the track was Mr Drummond, the head teacher. Another person she didn’t like! He was a cold, unfriendly man whose very presence seemed to cast a dark shadow over the school every day. This afternoon he nodded to her and said, ‘Hello, Cathy,’ which was typical. He never managed to remember who she was.
The race began. Amanda Gifford was also taking part. She was one of four or five girls who were almost as fast as Aggie. It was a very close thing. With only two hundred yards to go, there was almost nothing to choose between the four girls at the front. They were still running together in a tight bunch. And then there was a collision. From a distance, it just looked as if two of the girls had bumped into each other, but Claire saw the whole thing close up. She could see that Aggie had been pulling into the lead, when Amanda deliberately ran into her and pushed her off the track. Aggie had tripped and almost fallen over, and even though she recovered her balance and carried on running, she had lost precious seconds, and had no chance of winning the race after that. She came in fifth.
‘Did you see that?’ Claire asked, furious, turning to Mr Drummond. He stared at her with a blank look in his eyes, and said something like, ‘Shocking,’ but he didn’t seem to mean it. In any case, Claire didn’t wait to hear any more. Without stopping to ask Peter if he had also seen the incident, she ran at full speed back to the other side of the track. She quickly spotted Amanda Gifford (who had come second) and grabbed her by the shoulder.
‘You pushed my friend!’ she said. ‘You stopped her from winning the race.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Amanda replied.
Afterwards, Claire found it hard to say exactly what happened next. Her memory smudged the events of the next few minutes into a blur. All she knew was that there was a fight, a terrible fight. By the time two of the teachers had pulled them apart, Claire had a livid, bloody scar down one side of her face, and Amanda was bleeding from her nose and her lip. Their mothers had rushed over and the other parents were staring at them both in silent amazement (secretly pleased that somebody else’s children – not their own – had brought about this disgrace). Sports Day – one of the most keenly anticipated days in the school calendar – had been reduced to chaos.
Mr Drummond demanded to see both children first thing the next morning.
When she got to his office, Claire found that Peter Lewis was loitering outside.
‘Not you again!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I saw what happened yesterday,’ Peter explained. ‘I thought you might want me to come and back you up.’
Claire looked at him. It was nice of him to offer to help, she supposed, but there was something about Peter that really annoyed her. It was probably his horn-rimmed glasses, or the braces on his teeth, or his shrill little voice which always reminded her of fingernails being scraped along glass.
‘No thank you,’ she said.
‘Well anyway, there’s something you should know,’ he said. ‘I don’t think Mr Drummond’s going to believe you, because—’
But Claire had already stopped listening, and was knocking on the door of Mr Drummond’s office.
The meeting was a disaster.
Claire accused Amanda of deliberately pushing her friend off the track. Amanda said that she had done no such thing. And then Mr Drummond, after listening to them accusing and insulting each other for a few noisy minutes, intervened and took Amanda’s side.
‘What you seem to forget, Cathy,’ he pointed out, ‘is that I was there. Standing right next to you. I saw the whole thing as well. And it’s my considered opinion that nothing untoward took place.’
When she tried to protest he simply talked over her, and said that the way she had attacked Amanda was unforgivable. To add insult to injury, he suspended her from school for the rest of the week.
Claire left the office, her face burning red and her cheeks wet with tears. Peter was still standing outside.
‘Are you OK?’ he said, offering her a tissue.
She took the tissue and wiped the tears away.
‘I did try to warn you,’ he said.
‘Warn me about what?’
‘Mr Drummond and Amanda’s father are mates,’ he explained. ‘They both sit on the town council, for one thing. And every Saturday morning they play golf together. I’ve seen them.’
Claire stared at him. She didn’t know what to say, and in the end just blurted out defiantly: ‘Yeah, I knew that.’
But she hadn’t known it, of course. That evening, she sat for a long time on her bed, thinking about this turn of events as she hugged Tiger close to her chest. The light was beginning to fade but she didn’t turn her bedside lamp on. She sat there, thinking, until it was quite dark. She didn’t even notice that night had fallen.
So, she thought, this is how the world really works. A girl had done something wrong, a girl had cheated, and her friend had suffered for it. And then, when Claire had tried to put things right, nobody had let her. She had been telling the truth, but a powerful man had contradicted her – had told a lie – for no other reason than because he wanted to keep on the right side of another powerful man. She had been so certain that he would believe the truth. Truth was the most important thing in life, wasn’t it? She had always thought so. But apparently it wasn’t. Not to some people.
She had never been more depressed in her life. As the black mood stole over her, she turned on her bedside lamp, took the fragment of mirror out of its drawer, and looked accusingly at its surface. It seemed more than usually smudged and dirty today. So dirty, in fact, that she could hardly see anything in it at all, apart from a very blurred and shadowy reflection of her own face. She angled the mirror so that she could see the face of Tiger, but the mirror didn’t make him look at all like a real tiger tonight. Crossly, she pushed her toy out of bed onto the floor. Then she put the mirror away again, turned out the light, rolled over onto her side and stared for a long time into the darkness.
FIVE
Two more years went by, and in that time Claire left her primary school, which was a relief, as she had really started to hate Mr Drummond. After he had pretended not to believe her about the Sports Day story, she began to notice that he was like this all the time. He never tried to be fair and was never concerned about the truth. Every decision he made was based on self-interest. His only goals were to keep the boys and girls in line and consolidate his own power as headmaster. As a result he was feared, but not respected. In fact Claire was not the only person who hated him – not by any means.
When she went to a new secondary school, though, she somehow managed to get separated from Aggie, who went to a different one, closer to her house. And so gradually, as often happens, they drifted apart and stopped seeing each other.
Claire didn’t like her new school much either. For one thing Amanda Gifford and Peter Lewis were still in her class: there seemed to be no getting rid of them. And she didn’t manage to make a new best friend to replace Aggie. She became quite a solitary girl. Nobody really took much notice of her.
Oddly enough, the person who was most friendly to her, during this time, wasn’t one of the other children at all, but one of the teachers. Mrs Daintry taught history and for some reason (perhaps simply because she was such a good teacher) this soon became Claire’s favourite subject, and the one she was best at. The other children found it boring to think about the past. They were only interested in the present moment, and what was going to happen next in their own lives. But Mrs Daintry told them all once that history always repeats itself, and that one of the best ways of understanding what is happening now is to read about what
’s happened before, and Claire knew exactly what she meant. From then on, she found it fascinating to hear about the empires which had risen and fallen because of the arrogance of a handful of people, the great wars and battles which sometimes seemed to have been fought over nothing at all, the conflicts and crises which had been provoked down the ages because someone had been too greedy or too hungry for power. It seemed to her that the great theme of history was the search for justice, the struggle to ensure that everybody in the world was given a fair chance to do well and to make the most of their lives, but again and again things went wrong, people kept making the same mistakes, and the weak were not able to defend themselves because it was always the rich and powerful people who determined the course of events. Her mind kept going back to the Sports Day, two years ago, when she had tried to stand up for her friend and Mr Drummond wouldn’t listen because he had his own goals to pursue. Claire realised that she had learned an important lesson that day and that she could learn the same lesson by looking at the never-ending roster of similar stories which made up human history: a history which seemed continuously to repeat itself in spiralling patterns.
*
One day in the holidays just before Christmas, much to her own surprise, Claire found herself sitting in the front room of Mrs Daintry’s house, sipping tea and eating ginger biscuits. She’d been invited over for tea and had been expecting to find other children there, but she was the only one. The ostensible reason for the visit was so she could borrow a book about the rise of the Nazis (which was the period they were studying at the moment) but she was starting to suspect there was more to it than that, because Mrs Daintry kept changing the subject and asking much more personal questions.
‘Are you happy at school, Claire?’ she said at one point.
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘And what about home – is everything OK between your mum and dad?’
‘I suppose so,’ she said, again – although actually her parents had been arguing all the time recently, and she had begun to spend a lot of evenings alone in her bedroom to get away from them when they started yelling at each other.
‘You’re looking so thin, these days,’ said Mrs Daintry. ‘You are eating properly, aren’t you? We don’t want you becoming unwell.’
‘I’m fine, really,’ said Claire. The questions were making her uncomfortable and she was glad when half an hour had gone by and she felt she could leave without appearing too rude.
Before leaving she asked if she could use Mrs Daintry’s toilet. Like all the other rooms in the house, it was clean and nicely decorated but there seemed to be something a bit sad about it. Apparently Mrs Daintry used to be married herself but then her husband had left her for a much younger and prettier woman and now she lived on her own. Here in the loo almost everything was immaculate – polished tiles, soap and hand towels arranged just so – which made it surprising to see something on the shelf by the window that didn’t seem to belong there: a dirty old fragment of glass, which on closer inspection turned out to be a piece of broken mirror.
Now, it’s a strange thing, but ever since the Sports Day incident, Claire had not looked at her own fragment of mirror once. If she thought about it at all, it seemed to belong to a different part of her life altogether, a much more childish one, when she used to play a silly game which involved pretending to see fairy-tale castles and tigers and eagles where in reality there was only her parents’ house and an empty grey sky. That was all in the past, as far as she was concerned, and could never be brought back. She had no idea why Mrs Daintry should have a similar-looking piece of mirror in her otherwise-spotless bathroom, but when Claire picked it up and looked at it, she felt a powerful sense of familiarity. The surface was so dirty that she couldn’t make out any reflections, but just the weight and feel of it in her hand was enough to fill her with nostalgia, and she suddenly felt a terrible longing to go back to her parents’ house and take her own mirror out of its drawer and look into it again.
And so, after washing her hands, she said goodbye and thank you to Mrs Daintry as quickly as possible, and set off towards home at a rapid pace.
Before she got there, however, she had three different encounters.
The first one should have been nice, but was actually just a bit embarrassing and sad. Mrs Daintry lived in The Dales, and since her house was so close to Aggie’s Claire couldn’t resist walking that way. It was just getting dark, and golden lamplight was beginning to spill out from people’s windows onto the pavements. Some of the houses in Aggie’s street were in poor condition but not hers: it really stood out, because the door was painted a rich, dark red, it had a lovely shiny golden door-knocker and, beneath that, a Christmas wreath adorned with plastic red holly berries and all sorts of dangling golden ornaments. At the top of the door were two little panes of glass, and the soft, yellowish light she could glimpse through these and through the front windows of the house made her want to go inside and warm herself by the log fire she knew would be burning in the cosy front room. She thought about knocking on the door to say hello but she was too shy. So she turned round instead but, just as she was leaving, she saw Aggie herself coming down the street towards her. She had another girl with her, who was black and tall and very pretty.
‘Claire?’ said Aggie, looking amazed but giving her a big hug. ‘What are you doing here? This is my friend Miriam.’
After that they talked for a few minutes in a really awkward and stumbling way. It was clear that Aggie and Miriam were going inside the house but they didn’t want to invite Claire in with them. So they were soon saying their goodbyes and making vague promises to keep in touch. (The kind of promises you know are never going to be kept.) And then Claire was on her way home again.
As she passed through the centre of town and was walking down the main street, she saw a bunch of people from school coming towards her. And not just any bunch of people, but the coolest, most unfriendly bunch of all. Amanda Gifford wasn’t with them, thankfully, but they were all friends of hers – including David Knightley, the tallest, most popular, best-looking boy in her whole year, who had never so much as glanced in her direction, let alone spoken to her. Claire felt her stomach twist into a tight knot of anxiety, and she went stiff with mortification as the group approached. She looked down and kept her eyes fixed on the pavement. As they brushed past her, she thought she had got away with it, thought she had survived the encounter without provoking any comment, but then she heard one of the girls say a horrible thing – ‘Do you think there’s a face somewhere beneath all that acne?’ – and the others all laughed and chuckled meanly. Claire felt the blood rushing to her face. Her cheeks stung with the shame of it and she strode onwards, her shoulders hunched and her hoodie pulled as tightly around her as it would go.
As she reached the corner of the street, just outside one of the big banks, Claire had the third of her encounters. She heard a voice calling to her: ‘Hey darling, what’s the rush?’ It was George, the homeless man who seemed to spend most of his life there, next to the row of cashpoint machines. Most people were afraid of George, because he had long hair and a huge grey beard and yellow teeth and a red face, all of which made him look a bit scary, but Claire had spoken to him a few times and found that there was actually nothing scary about him at all. Sometimes she stopped to chat with him for a few minutes and sometimes she even gave him some money or went into the supermarket next door to get him some biscuits or a chocolate bar, although she often felt that all he really wanted her to buy was another of the miniature whisky bottles which he always kept by his side. Today she ignored him, in any case, and hurried past. She didn’t want to speak to him or to anyone else any more.
As usual, Claire’s parents ignored her when she got home, and she did not take off her hoodie until she got upstairs to her bedroom. Then she opened her wardrobe, which had a mirror fixed to the inside of the door. She pulled off the hood and looked closely at her face. The girl had been right. Her skin was terrible.
She was covered in horrible red spots, some of which had turned into scabs. Why was this happening to her? It had begun a few months ago and there seemed to be nothing she could do about it. Her mother told her it was ‘all part of growing up’, which was no help at all. It did not stop her thinking that she was turning into the most hideous-looking person she had ever seen in her life.
And so now, frantically, she rummaged through the junk that had accumulated in her bedside drawer in search of the old broken mirror, and eventually she found it, her fingers closing on the scrap of green velvet cloth in which she had last wrapped it all that time ago. Sitting down on her bed, she unfolded the velvet and took out the jagged, star-shaped object. It was pretty dusty. She wiped it with her sleeve. Then she drew a deep, nervous breath, and looked into the mirror.
At first she did not look into it directly. She turned it at different angles and looked at various reflections of her bedroom. When she saw that these reflections were basically no different from what she could see every day, with her own eyes, she felt a tremor of disappointment, but also – in a strange way – a certain relief. So it had been nothing but her imagination, after all. It was just an ordinary mirror – and a very dirty and misshapen one, at that. How could she ever have believed otherwise? There was no such thing as magic. Everybody knew that!
Finally she turned the mirror so that it was pointing directly at her own face.
And this time it was different. The same grey-blue eyes stared back at her, but her face was not the same. There were no spots, none at all. Her skin was pale and creamy and quite unblemished. This was her own face, yes, but at the same time one that she hardly recognised. This face was beautiful.
SIX
Claire began to carry the mirror around with her again. She took it wherever she went. Not just because it seemed to show her own face the way she wanted it to be, but because in the glimpses it offered of all the other things around her, so many of them appeared to be somehow brightened and improved.