And now she stood before her mother. She had grey eyes and dark hair.
‘Hello,’ her mother said.
‘Hello,’ said Mirabelle.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘I’m Mirabelle.’
‘Mirabelle. That’s a lovely name. My name’s Alice.’
‘I know,’ said Mirabelle.
Piglet
Piglet sees everything now.
He sees the people of Rookhaven.
He sees Alfie Parkin approaching the baker’s, clutching a bunch of flowers. He can hear Alfie’s heart beating fast just before he opens the door. He can see the look of delight on Amy’s face when the door opens.
He sees Mr and Mrs Smith working in the greengrocer’s. Mr Smith stops what he’s doing for a moment and stares at the photo of his sons on the wall. Mrs Smith goes to him, and squeezes his hand.
He sees Dr Ellenby sauntering up the main street. People salute him as he passes by and he greets them warmly in return. Then Dr Ellenby stops with his hands in his pockets and looks around at the village, and Piglet can see the pride in his eyes.
He sees the Fletchers by the river. Mrs Fletcher is sitting on a picnic blanket. She watches Mr Fletcher and Freddie bait their fishing hooks. Mr Fletcher ruffles Freddie’s hair and Mrs Fletcher smiles.
Piglet can see the house too. He can see Enoch looking out over the estate, a faint look of satisfaction on his face. He sees Eliza in front of her dressing table, examining her make-up in the mirror. Dotty and Daisy are dancing and singing in the Room of Knives, and Piglet can tell the ravens aren’t impressed but they tolerate it.
And because Piglet doesn’t belong to time and space, because Piglet is different, he also sees the house at a different time, at a time when he was younger.
He sees Odd, Jem and Tom hiding behind a bush. He sees Mirabelle tentatively approaching a woman sitting on a bench. He can hear Mirabelle’s heart pounding.
Now Piglet rolls over. He is very tired from all his recent exertions, and he just wants to rest for a bit. But before he goes to sleep Piglet smiles as he thinks of Mirabelle and the woman.
Because now Piglet knows what love is.
The End
Author’s Note
I love monsters. I always have.
When I was young, I devoured everything containing monsters. When it came to books, movies and comics, monsters were all I cared about. I liked movies about ants and spiders turned into giants after exposure to radiation. I liked stories about robots running amok. I liked comic-strip stories about dinosaurs. For me, monster stories were a distraction from everyday life, the boredom of things like school, and growing up in a town where there was nothing to do. One of my favourite stories when I was young was about a slime monster that came from the bottom of the ocean to devour the unsuspecting inhabitants of a small town. I couldn’t have been happier. It fulfilled the two most important criteria for me: the monster looked horrible, and it ate people.
I liked monsters because they were simple, uncomplicated, and you could recognize them for what they were straight away.
Except they aren’t, and you can’t.
As I got older, I realized that there was more to monsters than meets the eye. Sometimes a monster isn’t just a monster. Sometimes a monster is a metaphor for a specific fear. The giant spiders and ants transformed by radiation were all metaphors for humanity’s fear of the nuclear age. The voracious slime monster I’d read about as a child was a metaphor for a fear of the unknown.
Then there were the complicated monsters. Monsters like King Kong, who I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for, as he toppled from the Empire State Building. The tragic figure of Frankenstein’s monster in the old black-and-white movies with his plaintive ‘Alone, bad . . . friend, good’. He was simply yearning for companionship in a world that was hostile to his very existence. These were monsters in terms of their appearance, but they were far from simple.
When I started writing this book I wanted to write about monsters, but I wanted there to be more to them. I wanted people to be able to empathize and sympathize with them. Slime monsters devouring people are all well and good, but my monsters needed to have another dimension beyond their appearance.
As usual I started with fragments, bits and pieces, strange images, and odd disconnected phrases. I created a family of monsters, because for some reason, I always end up writing about family. Two young girls appeared. I realized they were both lost and alone, and so I ended up writing about friendship, because for some reason, I always end up writing about friendship.
Then I had an image of a huge locked door, deep in the bowels of a grand old house, and I wondered what if there was a monster that the monsters themselves were afraid of? So, I asked myself why they would be afraid of such a creature. I had the answer almost immediately.
Now I had my story.
I found myself writing not just about the family, but about real monsters, because as I’ve gotten even older I’d realized that real monsters do exist. They aren’t the types that come to your bedroom window in the middle of the night with vampire fangs. They aren’t clawed, slavering beasts that howl at the moon. These were monsters who spread hate and fear through whispers and lies. Deceitful creatures who look like us, but who in their own insidious way, turn ordinary people into monsters themselves.
This is a story about monsters.
Monsters can be simple, they can be complicated. They can breathe fire and have three heads, and we can be frightened of them and empathize with them.
I love monsters. I always have.
But I like to keep an eye out for the real ones.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank everyone at Macmillan Children’s Books for their help in getting my book into the world and into
