Among Others

by Jo Walton

  I think she felt confined by her life. She was a teacher, and a mother and a grandmother. I think she would have liked more poetry in her life, one way or another. She certainly encouraged me to write it. I wonder what she would have thought of T. S. Eliot?

  MONDAY 26TH NOVEMBER 1979

  I woke up in the night—this was not a dream. I woke up and I couldn’t move at all, I was absolutely paralysed, and she was in the room, hovering over me, I know she was. I tried to cry out and wake someone but I couldn’t. I could feel her coming nearer, coming down over my face. I couldn’t move or speak, there was nothing to use against her. I started repeating the Litany Against Fear from Dune, in my head, “Fear is the mind killer, fear is the little-death,” and then she was gone and I could move again. I got out of bed and went to get a drink of water and my hand was shaking so much that I poured half of it down my front.

  If she can get in, another time she might kill me.

  The fairies here won’t talk to me, and I can’t write to Glorfindel or Titania and ask them how to stop her. Even if Daniel lets me go there for Christmas, that’s a month, well, close enough.

  I have got two little stones I used in part of the circle last time I burned letters, and I have put them on the windowsills. I think that if she tried to come through the stones would rise up as sheets of rock and block the way, making the windows solid with the wall. Really it should be a whole row of stones, or a line of sand or something. The real trouble with that is that there are eleven other girls sleeping in this dorm, and any of them will see just a little odd pebble and not care about disturbing it, or actively want it gone. I’ll have to check them every night before I go to sleep, and somebody is going to notice sooner or later. I suppose I could tell them, but all this scary stuff has worked all too well already.

  She couldn’t get through stained glass, for what good that is.

  I am going to have to get some stuff together and do some real protection magic, even without talking to the fairies first. I’m afraid to, but not as afraid as I am of her coming into the room when I’m asleep and holding me frozen like that. I couldn’t move at all, and I really tried.

  TUESDAY 27TH NOVEMBER 1979

  It’s funny how it’s hard to concentrate on reading in a waiting room. On the one hand, I really want nothing more than to pull down inside a book and hide. On the other, I have to keep listening for them to call my name, so every sound distracts me. Everyone here is sick, which is very depressing. The notices are about contraception and diseases. The walls are a bilious green. There’s a leaflet about getting your eyes tested. Maybe I should.

  Looking out of the window, a list of everything I see while waiting:

  2 scruffs

  1 man with sheepdog—a lovely sheepdog, in beautiful condition.

  6 people on bikes.

  12 doughy house wives with 19 kids.

  4 unaccompanied school age kids.

  4 young couples.

  1 baby in a pushchair, pushed by a woman in a puce dress.

  1 tatty old man in jeans—what was he thinking? Jeans are for young people.

  1 man parking a motorbike.

  Millions of cars.

  2 businessmen.

  1 taxi driver.

  1 man with a moustache and his wife.

  2 blonde women in matching green coats, who came past twice, once in each direction. Maybe sisters?

  1 pair of middle-aged twins. (I sort of hate to see twins, though I know it doesn’t make sense.)

  1 pompous man in a dinner jacket. (At lunchtime?)

  1 man in a pink shirt. (Pink!)

  A skinhead carrying a dragon tankard. (He stopped outside the window and I got a good look at it.)

  1 business woman, in a pin-striped suit with a briefcase. (She looked very groomed. Would I like to be her? No. But most of everyone I saw.)

  6 teenagers in gym clothes running a race.

  8 sparrows.

  12 pigeons.

  1 unaccompanied black-and-white dog, probably mostly terrier, that lifted a leg against the motorbike. He went off alone, looking jaunty and sniffing at everything. Maybe I’d like to be him.

  People who notice me:

  1 man in a denim shirt, who waved.

  Funny how unobservant people are generally.

  When it finally got to be my turn, the doctor was very gruff. He didn’t have much time for me. He said he’d recommend me to the Orthopaedic Hospital and get my x-rays sent there. I had to wait all that time surrounded by snuffling children and decrepit old people for two minutes of the doctor’s attention. I missed physics for that?

  However, I bought two apples and a new bottle of shampoo, and I went back via the library and managed to return three books and pick up four, so I count it a successful trip to town.

  Waiting for the bus back to school, I was thinking about magic. I wanted the bus to come, and I wasn’t exactly sure when it was due. If I reached magic into that, imagined the bus just coming round the corner, it isn’t as if I’d be materialising a bus out of nowhere. The bus is somewhere on its round. There are two buses an hour, say, and for the bus to be coming right when I wanted it, it must have started off on its route at a precise time earlier, and people will have caught it and got on and off at particular times, and got to where they’re going at different times. For the bus to be where I want it, I’d have to change all that, the times they got up, even, and maybe the whole timetable back to whenever it was written, so that people caught the bus at different times every day for months, so that I didn’t have to wait today. Goodness knows what difference that would make in the world, and that’s just for a bus. I don’t know how the fairies even dare. I don’t know how anyone could know enough.

  Magic can’t do everything. Glory couldn’t help Gramma’s cancer, though he wanted to and we wanted him to. It may reach back into time, but it can’t make Mor alive again. I remember when she died and Auntie Teg told me and I thought, She knows, and I know, and other people are telling other people and more and more people know and it spreads out like ripples on a pond and there’s no undoing it without undoing everything. It’s not like falling out of a tree and nobody seeing but the fairies.

  WEDNESDAY 28TH NOVEMBER 1979

  Gill sneaked into the dorm last night to bring me her scientist book. She sat on my bed, and as we were talking she put her arm behind me, as if casually, but I could see how carefully she was doing it, and that she was looking at me all the time. I jumped up and said she ought to go, but Sharon gave me a very strange look afterwards and I think she saw. Could I have done something to encourage Gill? Or anyway, to make her think I might be interested in her in that way? It’s very awkward, as she’s one of the very few people who are actually talking to me. I think I need to talk to her, but not in the dorm! And I’m afraid to say I want to talk to her privately in case she takes that for more encouragement, which would be hurtful when it turned out not to be.

  In I Capture the Castle, which isn’t what I expected it to be at all, there’s a bit where the heroine is in love with one man and a different man is in love with her, and she thinks she’ll make do with him, maybe, but she also knows it won’t work and it’s pointless and she doesn’t want to hurt him. The way she feels about it and not wanting to hurt him is a bit like I feel about Gill and this. I honestly don’t think it would be any different if it was a boy who was my friend. I’ll say this to Gill when I get the chance. Maybe Saturday, or tomorrow after chem?

  One of the stones was knocked off the windowsill, but I put it back. This is only a temporary fix, but it’s holding for now. No more visitations.

  THURSDAY 29TH NOVEMBER 1979

  Terrible dreams. I really do need to do something about this. I can’t go on this way. I’ll do it tonight if it’s not raining.

  Why aren’t I like other people?

  I look at Deirdre and her life is completely unruffled. Or does it just seem that way to me? She came up to me at break and drew me aside and said, “Sha
gger said that she saw Gill coming on to you,” and she looked at me entirely trustingly.

  “Shagger may have seen that, but I’m not interested in Gill and I mean to tell her so,” I said.

  “It’s wrong,” Deirdre said, utterly sure.

  “I don’t think it’s wrong if both people want it, but in this case, I don’t.”

  Deirdre looked confused and backed away, but later she offered me a Polo mint to show there were no hard feelings. I should buy her a bun for Sunday.

  No chance to talk to Gill after chem. I think she may have been avoiding me. Maybe we don’t need to have a conversation after all.

  FRIDAY 30TH NOVEMBER 1979

  I got up in the deep heart of night and did magic. I climbed down the elm into the grounds, found the circle I’d made last time, and put it back together. The moon was making fitful appearances through the clouds. I didn’t make a fire this time.

  I don’t want to write down what I did. I have a superstitious feeling about it, that it would be wrong, that I shouldn’t even have said so much as I have said. Maybe I should write it not just backwards but upside-down and in Latin? I think I know now why people don’t write real magic books. It’s just too difficult to put words around it when you’ve made it up yourself. Even so, even at the end I still felt as if I didn’t really know what I was doing and I was improvising like mad. It’s so different from doing what you’ve been told to do and you’re pretty sure will work. The moon has always been my friend. But even so.

  Always before, they’d told us what to do. Glorfindel had told us about throwing the flowers in the water, told me about sinking the comb in the bog. Standing there in my circle I felt very inexperienced, and as if I was half playing and it couldn’t possibly work. Magic is very weird. I kept looking up through the bare branches at the moon in the clouds and waiting until it was clear for a moment. I made up a sort of poem to sing, which at least helped me get into the right frame of mind.

  I was using things I remembered and things I was making up and things that seemed to fit. I was trying to do a magic for protection, and to find a karass. I had an apple—I’d had two and kept them together for a few days so they were used to each other, even if they didn’t come from the same tree, and then I ate one of them, so it was part of me, and I used the other one. Apples connect to apple trees and the tamed growing world, and to Eden and the Garden of Hesperides and Iduna and Eris—and also once I kept an apple in my desk, in the grammar school until it got ripe and riper and then soft and bruised and was a sweet-smelling sack of sap, and only when it started to mildew on the outside did I throw it away. That was a strong connection. In Ancient Persia, and now in some parts of India I think, they practice “sky burial” where they put dead bodies out on platforms and the birds eat them and they decay in sight. It must make for strong magic, but it must be terrible when there’s someone you know and you can watch them falling apart like that. Cremation might not be magical, but at least it’s clean.

  Anyway, I also cut my finger a little bit and used blood, I know it’s dangerous, but I also know it’s powerful.

  I saw the fairy who spoke to me that first time here, up in the tree. There were other eyes in the branches, but I didn’t recognise any of them and they didn’t speak. I don’t know how to make friends with them and get them to trust me. They’re different from our fairies, wilder, further from people.

  Even with all that feeling like left luggage I have, even with Halloween, I have never felt so much like half a person as I did last night. It felt as if an arm had been cut off, as if I was accustomed to holding things in both hands and now I had to struggle along with one, only magically. And yet—I didn’t try to do a healing on that. I didn’t even think of it until now. Or on my leg either. I wonder if I could? It feels as if it’s dangerous to try, that even trying what I did was dangerous, trying for a karass. Maybe I shouldn’t have extended it beyond the protection, which I really needed to do. Doing magic for things you want yourself isn’t safe. Glorfindel told me that. Most of what I want I can’t have for years, if at all. I know that. But a karass shouldn’t be impossible, should it? Or too dangerous to try for?

  Of course, it’s impossible to know whether it worked. That’s always the problem with magic. One of the problems. Among the problems . . .

  I’m exhausted today. I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he’s snoozeworthy at the best of times. I keep yawning. But maybe tonight I will sleep without dreams. We’ll see.

  SATURDAY 1ST DECEMBER 1979

  Today in the library, the male librarian stopped me. “You ordered Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “There’s never been a British edition, so I’m afraid we can’t get that for you.”

  “Ah,” I said, disappointed. “Thank you anyway.”

  “I’ve noticed you’ve been doing a lot of interlibrary loans,” he said.

  “She said, the librarian said it would be all right,” I stammered. “She said it was free because I’m under sixteen.”

  “There’s no problem, you order as many books as you want and we’ll get them for you,” he said.

  I relaxed and smiled at him.

  “I just noticed that a lot of them are SF, and I wondered if you’d like to join our Tuesday evening SF book club.”

  A karass, I thought. Magic does work. My eyes filled up with tears and I couldn’t speak for a moment because I was choking on them. “I don’t know if they’ll let me come in from school,” I said, ungraciously. “What time is it?”

  “We start at six, and usually go on until about eight. It’s right here in the library. I understand that the process for girls from Arlinghurst who want to go to outside classes or educational activities is that they need a parent’s signature, and a teacher or a librarian’s signature.”

  “They agreed about the library,” I said.

  “They did.” He smiled at me. He’s going a bit bald on top, but he’s not very old, and he has a lovely smile.

  “And it would be very educational,” I went on.

  “It certainly would,” he agreed. “I don’t know if you could get a signature by this Tuesday, when we’re discussing Le Guin, but the Tuesday after we’re discussing Robert Silverberg, who I’ve noticed you seem to like.”

  I wrote down the information about it and collected my books and went and sat in the bakery cafe so happy I could sing. A karass, or the start of one! Oh I hope I can get there this Tuesday! I only haven’t ordered any Le Guin from the library because I’ve read it all already, or at least I think so. I’d have a lot to say about her. A karass! Epic! I could sing with delight.

  SUNDAY 2ND DECEMBER 1979

  Miss Carroll has signed the form for me to leave school for the book club! She says I’d have to have all my prep done ahead, but that’s no trouble. She said they’d see it would be no trouble from my marks, but my marks had better not drop because of the book club. I said they certainly wouldn’t. She asked if I’d liked the Tey, and I said I had enjoyed it a lot, which is true.

  Carpenter says in the Inklings book that Lewis meant Aslan to be Jesus. I can sort of see it, but all the same it feels like a betrayal. It feels like allegory. No wonder Tolkien was cross. I’d have been cross too. I also feel tricked, because I didn’t notice all this time. Sometimes I’m so stupid—but Aslan was always so much himself. I don’t know what I think about Jesus, but I know what I think about Aslan.

  I wrote to Grampar and Auntie Teg, telling them about the book club. And I wrote to Daniel begging him to sign the book club thing. I’m pretty sure he will. I also told him about the Aslan/Jesus conflation thing because it would be interesting to see what he thinks, and I asked him again about going home for Christmas. I told Grampar I’d try to.

  I had a conversation with Gill, finally. It was pouring buckets, so people were doing dancing in the hall instead of games this afternoon, and she was hanging back instead of going to change afterwards, while I
was coming out of the prep room where I’d been writing letters. She didn’t say anything directly, but I said “Gill, I don’t know if I’ve got the wrong idea here, but I wanted to say I like you as a friend, but I’m not interested in a physical relationship with you.”

  “You said you didn’t like boys,” she said.

  I had too, I remembered it. “That doesn’t mean I like girls,” I said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, I think most people are interested in both, but I don’t seem to be. Sorry. I expect I’m just peculiar.”

  This was all in the doorway to the prep room, and someone came up behind me and pushed past then, and Gill just waved and ran off to change. I hope it’s all right. It does make things so complicated!

  MONDAY 3RD DECEMBER 1979

  Letter from Daniel with another ten pounds and saying they want me at the Old Hall for Christmas but I can go down to South Wales for a few days afterwards. Feh. Why do they want me there? What good am I to them? I’d much rather go and help Auntie Teg with Grampar, especially if he really can come out for the day. They’ve never shown any sign at the Old Hall of anything but wanting to be rid of me as soon as they can. Daniel, well, I don’t know what to think about him. I’m grateful he took me out of the Children’s Home, but school isn’t all that much better. He seems to want a connection, after not having one all that time. But I’m sure he and his sisters would have a better time if I wasn’t there. And what on earth can I give them? I can’t just give them a box of chocolates if I’m actually going to be there on Christmas Day. It’ll be excruciating. Oh well, at least I can go down to South Wales afterwards I suppose.