by Jo Walton
“But what about the ethics?” I said. “Changing things for people without their knowing it? You may be able to see the consequences of what you do, but I can’t.”
“Doing is doing,” he said again. Then he wasn’t there, but there was a thump, and where he had been was a walking stick the same colour as he was, carved with a horse’s head handle.
I bent awkwardly to pick it up. It was the right height for me, and the handle fit my hand comfortably. I looked back at Mor, but she had gone too. The wind was blowing into the dell, rustling the dead leaves, but it was empty of presence.
I brought both sticks back to Grampar’s, the fairy one and my old one. I’m going to leave my old one, which was his anyway, and keep this one. I suppose it might vanish at sunrise, or turn into a leaf or something, but I don’t think so. It has a heft that seems to make that unlikely. I’ll tell people it was a Christmas present. I think perhaps it might have been. I like it.
Doing is doing.
Does it mean that it doesn’t matter if it’s magic or not, anything you do has power and consequences and affects other people? Because that might well be the case, but I still think magic is different.
Leah’s party tonight.
THURSDAY 3RD JANUARY 1980
Back in Auntie Teg’s. Hung over. I wish the water in Cardiff didn’t taste so dreadful. I brought a big bottle of Aberdare tap water back with me, but I have drunk it all.
We didn’t do anything at all today, just came back to Cardiff and sat around eating chocolate cake and petting Persimmon (for her allowed time) and reading. It was lovely. Auntie Teg looks as exhausted as I am.
Leah’s party last night was weird. There was punch, made with red wine and grape juice and tins of fruit cocktail, and later with added vodka. It tasted disgusting, and I think most of us were holding our noses and drinking it. I don’t know why I bothered. I got drunk, and I suppose it was nice to have soft edges instead of hard ones, but it just made me stupid really. People do it as an excuse, to have an excuse, so they can deny responsibility for their actions the next day. It’s horrible.
I don’t want to write about what happened. It’s not important anyway.
On the other hand, is this a complete and candid memoir or just a lot of angsty wittering?
It started off on the wrong foot. Nasreen was wearing a red sweater identical to mine, though she looked much better in it. “We’re twins!” she chirped enthusiastically, and then realised what she’d said and her face fell about a mile.
It’s not quite a year, just about nine months, since I was living here. We’ve all grown up in that time, and it’s as if they’ve learned some rules I haven’t learned. Maybe it’s because I was away, or maybe I was just reading my book under the desk the day when people were talking about how you do this stuff. Leah was wearing eyeshadow and lipstick—and even Moira was. Moira offered to put some on me, and she did, but we don’t have the same colour skin. I normally look like a white person, like Daniel I suppose, but when you put me next to someone who really is white, and Moira is exceptionally pale, you can see that the underlying colour in my skin is yellow, not pink. Grampar used to say every time one of us got a sunburn that we were ridiculously pale and we’d have to marry black men to give our children a chance, and he was right—compared to him especially and to the rest of our family, we were very pale. I don’t think you’d notice, if you didn’t know, that I had ancestors closer to Nasreen’s colour than Moira’s. But Moira’s makeup looked ridiculous on me anyway, and I wiped it all off.
Then I was talking to Leah about Andrew for ages, and afterwards to Nasreen about Andrew, for ages. Leah was over it, mostly, and interested in somebody else, an older boy called Gareth who has a motorbike. Nasreen was in the middle of a huge saga of fights with her parents about Andrew on which I had to be brought up to speed. Andrew doesn’t seem significant enough to make all that fuss about if you ask me. But nobody did ask me, so I spent a couple of hours making a fuss about him. When he arrived, which Leah’s parents had solemnly sworn to Nasreen’s parents he wouldn’t do, he spent the rest of the evening with his arm around her very self-consciously. Leah’s parents had gone out until eleven o’clock, to the theatre in Cardiff with her younger sister.
There were a number of people there I didn’t know very well. One boy tried to put his arm around me, and I let him. Why not, I thought, because I’d had a few glasses of the stupid purple punch by then, with its little floating half-grapes and bits of pear and peach. It’s nice to have someone near and warm. He was one of Gareth’s friends, so he must have been sixteen or seventeen. His name was Owen, and as far as I could tell he’d never read a book in his life and had no interests apart from motorbikes and girls and music. He likes the Clash, who I’ve never heard of, and Elvis Costello. Leah must like Elvis Costello too, because she was playing some very loudly. I really miss out on music because we’re not allowed any at school. I like the idea of Rock against Racism, but I don’t like the actual music very much. He asked me what music I liked and I said Bob Dylan, which disconcerted him totally. I could tell he’d heard of Dylan but didn’t know a thing about him. Oh well. He was a bit put off by the walking stick and left me alone for a bit after he saw it—I got up to go to the toilet. Later, after Moira had assured me he didn’t have a girlfriend and wasn’t he lovely—not a patch on Wim, I thought, and Wim has a brain, too.
Anyway, later Owen came back to me and started cuddling me again, and I didn’t stop him. I was enjoying it, in a very much physical-only way. The thing is, I know that the others at least pretend to be in love with their boyfriends while they’re going out with them. They’re sort of rehearsing for grown-up relationships. They’re temporarily exclusive, and playing at romance. I didn’t, don’t, want to play that game. Owen didn’t make me in the slightest bit breathless, nor did I especially like him. But he was warm and male and solid and interested, and he did make me curious and desirous of more body-contact. So when he suggested he show me his bike, I went outside with him. It was only a Moped, 50cc, but he was very proud of it and told me all sorts of things about it. I’m not even sure those things go up hills.
You’d have thought the night air would have sobered me up, but it seemed to make me more drunk. When he started kissing me I liked it, and kissed him back, which he seemed to find a bit disconcerting. (Maybe I was doing it wrong? Books do not say, but I was doing it exactly the way I have seen in films.) He had his arms around me and he started running them over me. Now this did make me a bit breathless, and actually very turned on.
So we went back inside and into a little room which is actually Leah’s father’s study. There’s a sofa in there and we sat down on that and started cuddling. It was dark—there was a light in the hall, but we didn’t put any lights on in there.
Why is writing about sex more private and worrying than writing about anything else? There are things in this book that could get me burned at the stake, and I don’t worry about writing them.
Anyway, we cuddled for a bit and then Owen put his hand inside my knickers, and I liked it, and I thought I was being selfish just sitting there and not reciprocating, so I put my hand on his leg, and moved it to his penis—and I know perfectly well what a penis is, I have had baths with my cousins, and played doctor with them as well, when we were young enough that there weren’t all these stupid rules of etiquette. Anyway, Owen had a penis just as you’d expect, and he was excited too, but as soon as I touched it, through his trousers, he took his hands off me and practically leapt away.
“You slut!” he said, standing up with his hands clenched defensively in front of it, as if he thought I was about to grab for it. Then he rushed out of the room. I sat there for a minute, my cheeks burning. I couldn’t understand it. I still can’t understand it. He wanted me. I thought he did. I thought I was acting like a normal person, but evidently not. There’s something I’m just not seeing about this even now, because I still do not get it.
Leah said to me whe
n I went back that I should watch out for Owen because he had wandering hands. Was I supposed to stop him? Was he expecting me to put up resistance instead of cooperating? That’s sick. The whole thing is sick, and I want nothing to do with it.
I want the infinite series of bars in Triton. Or even just the three real bars. That I could cope with. This is completely beyond me. At least I won’t ever have to see him again, probably.
FRIDAY 4TH JANUARY 1980
Into Cardiff this morning to spend my book tokens in Lears. I love Lears. It’s huge—two floors, with a whole wall of SF, and some American imports. I got another issue of Destinies and Red Shift and The Einstein Intersection and Four Quartets and Charisma by Michael Coney (who wrote Hello Summer, Goodbye) and, wonder of wonder miracle of miracles, a new Roger Zelazny book in the Chronicles of Amber series! I squealed out loud when I saw it. Sign of the Unicorn! It has a horrible yellow cover, but bless Sphere forever for publishing it and Lears for stocking it!
I would rather have Sign of the Unicorn than all the boys in the Valleys.
This afternoon we went for a run on the Beacons to see if the waterfalls were frozen. They weren’t, it isn’t anything like cold enough, though they do freeze for a few days some winters. There was no ice cream van in the layby, and Auntie Teg remarked on this as if she really thought there would be. I love the mountains. I love the kind of horizon they make, even in winter. When we went down again, towards Merthyr first and then over the shoulder of the mountain to Aberdare, where Auntie Teg walked, once, when she was still in school, it felt like nestling back down in a big quilt.
My new walking stick is still with me. Grampar is the only person who has noticed it, when we went to see him tonight on the way back. He said it’s hazel wood. I said I’d bought it in the market with Christmas money. He said it was a lovely piece of work and I should get a rubber ferrule to protect the end, and I could get one of those in the market too. He was looking much more alert today. Nobody could be doing more than Auntie Teg to try to get him out of there.
SATURDAY 5TH JANUARY 1980
On the train I read The Sign of the Unicorn, all of it in one gulp, so I can leave it with Daniel when I go back to school. The thing I really love about those books is Corwin’s voice, so very personal, making light of things, joking about them, and then suddenly so serious. I also love the Trumps and the Shadows, and the Hellrides through Shadow. (I think I’ll always call Kentucky Fried Chicken Kentucki Fried Lizzard Partes from now on.) I don’t think he has done as much with Shadow as he could. If you can walk through it and find shadows of yourself, there are lots of things you could do with that.
I finished it at Leominster, and after that read Four Quartets again and got drunk on the words. I could just copy out pages and pages of it. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what it means, but that’s part of the joy of it, putting the images together into coherence. There’s a story in there just the same as there is in “Young Lochinvar,” but it isn’t on the surface much at all. I’m so glad I have my own copy. I can read them again and again. I can read them again and again on trains, all my life, and every time I do I’ll remember today and it will connect up. (Is that magic? Yes, it is a sort of magic, but it is more just reading my book.)
Shropshire remains horribly flat and unmountained. It looks miserable in the January drizzle. The sky is so low you feel as if you could reach up and poke it. I can imagine feeling claustrophobic and acrophobic at the same time.
Daniel met me without any problem. He was early, sitting in the Bentley reading Punch when I came out of the station. He was very apologetic about not driving me to the station when I left. It’s so hard to know what to say. I could say it didn’t matter, even though it did. What difference does it make if he feels guilty after the fact? “Don’t apologise, just don’t do it again,” I said. He winced.
I had brought a Twelfth Night cake with me. I made it and Auntie Teg iced it. There was no direct and deliberate magic in it, except the thought of the Three Kings, and T. S. Eliot’s poem about them, but just the fact that we’d made it with her bowls and spoons and our hands made it magically real. I suppose the sisters noticed that, because they produced their own, and said I should take mine to school and give slices to all my friends. In school, it’s going to practically glow with magic. I didn’t say that. I ate their sawdust cake and smiled and tried being Nice Niece for all it’s worth. I made out that I was terribly excited to be going back to school and longing to know what the other girls got for Christmas.
It occurred to me sitting there eating tea and smiling so much my face felt sore, that they haven’t tried to do anything to me magically. I mean the earrings were an attempt, I suppose, but they tried to use their authority as adults and their physical ability to drive me to the shop and so on, they didn’t try to coerce me magically, or make it so I had always wanted earrings or anything. I wonder how much they know and how they learned it. Did they learn it from the fairies? Or from someone who learned it from the fairies? Theoretically, I could teach someone who had never seen a fairy all the magic that I know.
I was thinking about the Jurassic fairies in between reading Four Quartets, and I wondered if fairies are a sentient manifestation of the magical interconnectedness of the world. I remember once in Birmingham, when I was running away, I saw a fairy standing on the corner of the street. It was raining, and the pavement was wet and shiny, and there he was, looking quite unconcerned. I went up to him, he saw me, nodded and vanished. I saw that just where he was there was some grass growing through a crack in the pavement.
SUNDAY 6TH JANUARY 1980
I always forget how loud school is. My ears are ringing.
I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in bed last night. I intended to read it quickly to be able to thank Deirdre for it, but it turns out to be hilarious and also wickedly clever, so I could thank her sincerely, because I’d never in a million years have picked it up for myself, as it looks like total tosh. I wonder if the book group have read it?
What the other girls got for Christmas, notes for a Nice Niece to report: the richest ones got Sony Walkmans. They couldn’t bring them back to school, of course, because we’re forbidden music. Moira and Leah and Nasreen couldn’t believe that, they thought it the worst deprivation of all. They live with the radio on. Sony Walkmans are apparently very portable cassette tape players with headphones that fasten to your belt, so you can listen to a tape while walking along. I admit that is quite nifty, even if their choice of music might not be mine. Lots of them got music, even if they didn’t get a Walkman, lots of them mentioned records and tapes. Lorraine got a skateboard, and her brothers taught her how to use it. It’s apparently almost as good as skiing. Other popular presents include clothes, perfume, make-up kits with little mirrors in the lid—also banned in school, but some of them smuggled in anyway—and soap-on-a-rope, which makes me like mine a little less.
Deirdre admired my new walking stick. She asked if it was Irish. I said no, Welsh, which it is, and she said it must be a Celtic thing. I just agreed. She was glad I’d liked the book, and I was glad I really had. She was pleased with her soap set, or so she said.
I gave the cake to the kitchen and told them to give slices to all of Lower VC. It’s a big cake, and I could see that if they cut it thinly there ought to be enough. I didn’t care if people didn’t eat it. In fact, when it was handed round after supper, most people did eat it, though a few of them looked at me cautiously when they did. My thoughts about those kings bringing gold and frankincense and myrrh and the warning about Herod aren’t going to hurt them, but I can’t tell them that. Sharon gave her slice to Deirdre. I don’t know what Jews think about Jesus. Do they think he was just a weird kid that kings happened to go up to with presents and who mistakenly thought he was the Messiah? Or do they think he’s just a myth? I can’t ask Sharon, but I could ask Sam. Deirdre found the bean, in Shagger’s slice, and was thrilled to bits. The king bean and the poetry competition are probably
the only things she’s ever won. I don’t know if they do Twelfth Night cake in Ireland.
I can feel this place closing round me like quicksand.
Book club on Tuesday!
MONDAY 7TH JANUARY 1980
I went out to look back at the school and breathe this morning, and the grounds were full of fairies. I expected them to vanish as soon as they saw that I could see them, but they kept going about their business though they took no notice of me, barely moving out of my way. Most of them were the hideous warty kind, but there were some elf-maiden types among them. I tried speaking to them in Welsh and English but they ignored me. I wonder what’s up?
Letter from the hospital with an appointment for Thursday morning with a Dr. Abdul. I’ve shown it to Nurse and Miss Ellis, and I’ll go, though I can’t see what good it’ll do. My leg’s been a bit better this last few days anyway. The Orthopaedic Hospital is in Gobowen, which means a bus into town and then a bus out there.
Miss Carroll was very nice to me, inquiring about my holiday and whether I got any books. I asked if she did, and she did, books and book tokens, just like me. She’s not all that old. I suppose she wanted to become a librarian because she loves books and reading. I wouldn’t mind that, if I could be in a real library, but a school library would be horrible, especially here.
TUESDAY 8TH JANUARY 1980
Book club tonight!
This term’s book for English is Far From the Madding Crowd. I’ve been reading it all day when I have reading time. Hardy’s very long-winded, though not technically as long as Dickens. There’s a horrible scene where a fallen woman called Fanny Robin drags herself along a fence while actually giving birth. I think the rest of the book is too slight to support that scene. The happy ending is like a nightmare—Bathsheba and Gabriel Oak married and “whenever I look up, there you are, and whenever you look up, there I am.” Talk about stifling! Gramma liked Hardy, but I can’t. I’ve tried, but he’s too depressing and too trite at the same time. He makes things happen neatly, and sometimes they’re horrible things, but they’re always very pat. I hate that. He could have learned a lot from Silverberg and Delany.
