Bloomsbury Children's Books

Coraline sighed. ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ she said. ‘I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?’

We moved into our flat in Littlemead, in the tiny Sussex town of Nutley, in the south of England, in 1987. Once upon a time it had been a manor house, built for the physician to the King of England himself, so I was told by the old man who had once owned the house (before he sold it to a pair of local builders). It had been a very grand house then, but it was now converted into flats.
Flat number 4, where we lived, was a good place, if a little odd. Above us, a Greek family. Beneath us, a little old lady, half blind, who would telephone me whenever my little children moved, and tell me that she was not certain what was happening upstairs, but she thought that there were elephants. I was never entirely sure how many flats there were in the house, nor how many of them were occupied.
We had a hallway running the length of the flat, as big as any room. At the end of the hall hung a wardrobe door, as a mirror.
When I started to write a book for Holly, my five-year-old daughter, I set it in the house. It seemed easy. That way I wouldn’t have to explain to her where anything was. I changed a couple of things, of course, swapped the position of Holly’s bedroom and the lounge.
Then I took a closed oak-panelled door that opened on to a brick wall, and a sense of place, from the drawing room in the house I grew up in.
That house was big and old, and it had been split in two just before we moved there.

But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more.

‘Silas. What’s a Macabray?’

Silas’s eyebrows raised and his head tipped to one side. ‘Where did you hear about that?’

‘Everyone in the graveyard is talking about it. I think it’s something that happens tomorrow night. What’s a Macabray?’

‘It’s a dance,’ said Silas.

‘All must dance the Macabray,’ said Bod, remembering. ‘Have you danced it? What kind of dance is it?’

His guardian looked at him with eyes like black pools and said, ‘I do not know. I know many things, Bod, for I have been walking this earth at night for a very long time, but I do not know what it is like to dance the Macabray. You must be alive or you must be dead to dance it – and I am neither.’

Bod shivered. He wanted to embrace his guardian, to hold him and tell him that he would never desert him, but the action was unthinkable. He could no more hug Silas than he could hold a

moonbeam, not because his guardian was insubstantial, but because it would be wrong. There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

His guardian inspected Bod thoughtfully, a boy in his new clothes. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. ‘Now you look like you’ve lived outside the graveyard all your life.’

Bod smiled proudly. Then the smile stopped and he looked grave once again. He said, ‘But you’ll always be here, Silas, won’t you? And I won’t ever have to leave, if I don’t want to?’

‘Everything in its season,’ said Silas, and he said no more that night.

And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.’
‘They kill themselves, you mean?’ said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid.
‘Indeed.’
‘Does it work? Are they happier dead?’
‘Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the

people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

‘Someone killed my mother and my father and my sister.’
‘Yes. Someone did.’
‘A man?’
‘A man.’
‘Which means,’ said Bod, ‘you’re asking the wrong question.’
Silas raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’
‘Well,’ said Bod. ‘If I go outside in the world, the question isn’t, “Who will keep me safe from him?” ’
‘No?’
‘No. It’s “Who will keep him safe from me?”

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.’

‘If I change my mind, can I come back here?’
And then he answered his own question. ‘If I come back, it will be a place, but it won’t be home any longer.’