Coraline

and Coraline went down to their flat for tea. It was a Monday. On Wednesday Coraline would go back to school: a whole new school year would begin.
    Miss Forcible insisted on reading Coraline’s tea leaves.
    ‘Well, looks like everything’s mostly shipshape and Bristol fashion, lovey,’ said Miss Forcible.
    ‘Sorry?’ said Coraline.
    ‘Everything is coming up roses,’ said Miss Forcible. ‘Well, almost everything. I’m not sure what that is.’ She pointed to a clump of tea leaves sticking to the side of the cup.
    Miss Spink tutted and reached for the cup. ‘Honestly, Miriam. Give it over here. Let me see  . . . ’
    She blinked through her thick spectacles. ‘Oh dear. No, I have no idea what that signifies. It looks almost like a hand.’
    Coraline looked. The clump of leaves did look a little like a hand, reaching for something.
    Hamish the Scottie dog was hiding under Miss Forcible’s chair, and he wouldn’t come out.
    ‘I think he was in some sort of fight,’ said Miss Spink. ‘He has a deep gash in his side, poor dear. We’ll take him to the vet later this afternoon. I wish I knew what could have done it.’
    Something, Coraline knew, would have to be done.
    That final week of the holidays, the weather was magnificent, as if the summer itself were trying to make up for the miserable weather they had been having by giving them some bright and glorious days before it ended.
    The crazy old man upstairs called down to Coraline when he saw her coming out of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible’s flat.
    ‘Hey! Hi! You! Caroline!’ he shouted over the railing.
    ‘It’s Coraline,’ she said. ‘How are the mice?’
    ‘Something has frightened them,’ said the old man, scratching his moustache. ‘I think maybe there is a weasel in the house. Something is about. I heard it in the night. In my country we would have put down a trap for it, maybe put down a little meat or hamburger, and when the creature comes to feast, then – bam! – it would be caught and never bother us more. The mice are so scared they will not even pick up their little musical instruments.’
    ‘I don’t think it wants meat,’ said Coraline. She put her hand up and touched the black key that hung about her neck. Then she went inside.
    She bathed herself, and kept the key round her neck the whole time she was in the bath. She never took it off any more.
    Something scratched at her bedroom window after she went to bed. Coraline was almost asleep, but she slipped out of bed and pulled open the curtains. A white hand with crimson fingernails leapt from the window-ledge on to a drainpipe and was immediately out of sight. There were deep gouges in the glass on the other side of the window.
    Coraline slept uneasily that night, waking from time to time to plot and plan and ponder, then falling back into sleep, never quite certain where her pondering ended and the dream began, one ear always open for the sound of something scratching at her windowpane or at her bedroom door.
    In the morning Coraline said to her mother, ‘I’m going to have a picnic with my dolls today. Can I borrow a sheet – an old one, one you don’t need any longer – as a tablecloth?’
    ‘I don’t think we have one of those,’ said her mother. She opened the kitchen drawer that held the napkins and the tablecloths, and she prodded about in it. ‘Hold on. Will this do?’
    It was a folded-up disposable paper tablecloth covered with red flowers, left over from some picnic they had been on several years before.
    ‘That’s perfect,’ said Coraline.
    ‘I didn’t think you played with your dolls any more,’ said Mrs Jones.
    ‘I don’t,’ admitted Coraline. ‘They’re protective coloration.’
    ‘Well, be back in time for lunch,’ said her mother. ‘Have a good time.’
    Coraline filled a cardboard box with dolls and several plastic dolls’ teacups. She filled a jug with water.
    Then she went outside. She walked down to the road, just as if she were going to the shops. Before she reached the supermarket she cut over a fence into some wasteland, and along an old drive, then she crawled under a hedge. She had to go under the hedge in two journeys in order not to spill the water from the jug.
    It was a long, roundabout looping journey, but at the end of it Coraline was satisfied that she had not been followed.
    She came out behind the dilapidated old tennis court. She crossed over it to the meadow where the long grass swayed. She found the planks on