Among Others (19 page)

I do worry about it though.

T
HURSDAY
6
^TH
D
ECEMBER
1979

The days are getting awfully short. It seems to be dark all the time. It’s dark until well after nine, which keeps me inside in the morning. I had been in the habit of going outside for a moment before breakfast, just to breathe. I didn’t go anywhere, just stepped outside by the cloakrooms and breathed for a moment before coming back into the din of breakfast. Breakfast is bread and margarine, as much as you want, and overcooked watery English scrambled eggs, with tinned tomatoes, which I don’t eat. On Sundays, and just occasionally on other days, we also have sausages, which seem like ambrosia. The staff don’t attend breakfast, so everyone always talks at the top of their voice, and of course that means everyone has to if they want to be heard. It sounds like a bear-pit, but more high-pitched. Sometimes I stand outside the cloakroom and I can hear it down the corridor, like those Eighteenth-century madhouses where people would go for entertainment to hear the lunatics howl. Bedlam.

It’s also dark, or almost, by the time we’ve finished lessons. The lights are on, and the sun is well down. There’s still a little light in the sky, but there’s no doubt it’s night rather than day. I like to walk away from the school building and turn around and look at the lights, which seem orange in the twilight. It reminds me somehow of coming home from school with Gramma and Mor on some special day near Christmas, one of us holding each of her hands. Maybe her school had finished a day before ours and she’d come to meet us. We were still in the Infants, I expect we were about six. I just remember holding her hand and looking back at the lights with the sky not quite dark.

It makes me melancholy to remember, but a little bit of the security and excitement comes through from the way I was feeling in the memory. Memories are like a big pile of carpets, I keep them piled up in one big pile in my head and don’t pay much attention to them separately, but if I want to, I can get back in and walk on them and remember. I’m not really there, not like an elf might be, of course. It’s just that if I remember being sad or angry or chagrined, a little of that feeling comes back. And the same goes for happy, of course, though I can easily wear out the happy memories by thinking about them too much. If I do, when I’m old all the bad memories will still be sharp, because of pushing them away, but all the good ones will be worn out. I won’t really remember that day with Gramma, which I already don’t remember properly, I’ll just remember all these short winter days in school, walking out alone and looking back at the lit windows.

I’m sick of the dark. I know the turning year is part of life. I like seasons and seasonal fruit. The apples must be nearly done, and I expect there are bright orange tangerines in their fascinating purple wrappings with Spanish writing in Mrs. Lewis’s shop even now. (If I could smell a tangerine! Maybe on Saturday.) But I’m getting to hate the darkness at this time of year. I’m not allowed outside at lunchtime, which is the one time it is reliably light, even if it’s always grey and usually raining.

The days will get longer again. Spring will come. But it seems a long time to wait.

F
RIDAY
7
^TH
D
ECEMBER
1979

Letter back from my father with the book club permission, and about time too! So I can go next week.

I was thinking about the book club, and wondering who among them is in my karass, really. The gorgeous boy? (Must find out his name!) He looked at me seriously with his beautiful eyes. And even if he’s wrong about some fairly fundamental things, he is prepared to listen. I feel a little shiver when I think about him looking at me. How about those three with the purple blazers, who are my own age? (Must find out their names too, but with a less burning urgency.) I’d certainly like to get to know them better, and they are interested in books. I’ll try to talk to them next time. Harriet? I didn’t connect with her much, but she’s very intelligent. Brian? Keith? I don’t know. The others, who I didn’t really meet properly? Too early to tell. Greg? Maybe. Miss Carroll? (Alison…)

I looked up at her as I wrote her name. She’s puttering about sticking labels in books at her desk. For all that she said she’s keeping her clients satisfied, she took me to the book club because of the magic. I know she did, and it makes me feel a little sick. Magic works on what’s there, so probably she liked me a little anyway, and noticed me. She got me
The Republic
. Though magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened. Maybe if I hadn’t done that magic, she wouldn’t have ordered the Plato. I don’t know if she likes me, really, or if it’s only the magic making her. If she doesn’t really like me, how can I like her back? How can it mean anything?

And of course, the same goes for the others, really. Is it really a karass, if I used magic to make it happen? It’s like making the bus come, all those people, all those days, all those lives changed, just to make the bus be coming at the moment I want it. Only it’s more than that, making them like me. Making them be my karass.

I didn’t think this through enough. I was thinking about a karass in too abstract a way, I didn’t think enough about the people, about manipulating them. I didn’t even know them, and I was doing it.

Is this how she started? My mother, Liz?

I wish I could talk to Glorfindel about this, or somebody who would understand. I don’t know if he would or not, but he’s the most likely to. I don’t understand why the fairies here are so unfriendly—uncaring is more like it. They should be getting used to me by now. When I go home after Christmas, I’ll find him and talk to him no matter what.

Is using magic inherently bad? Is it if it’s for yourself? Am I supposed to leave myself totally vulnerable to her using it against me, then? Or was it only the karass magic that was bad, and the protection was okay? Or—always the trap with magic—was it all going to happen anyway and I only think the magic did it? No, look at the timing. It was my karass magic, and I think maybe it brought the whole book club (that’s been meeting for months) into existence. I never saw anything about it before, and I go to the library all the time. Maybe those people wouldn’t even exist. Maybe Harriet—who is the oldest—maybe her parents wouldn’t have had her, maybe her whole life, sixty years or more, exists just so there could be a book club and I could have a karass, so we could sit there discussing
The Lathe of Heaven
, which is the perfect book for this, and whether it’s like Dick.

Gosh I do hope it isn’t like Dick. Like Dick doesn’t bear thinking about.

I don’t want to be like her.

I won’t use magic any more, or anyway, just to protect myself and other people and the world. It’s better to be like George Orr than have her win. I don’t know what she’s doing. There have been no more dreams, and no more poisonous letters either. I’m sort of worried that this means she’s planning something worse.

What she really wants is to set herself up as a dark queen. I don’t know how that would have worked, but that’s what she wants. (She has read LOTR, and I don’t know if she read it identifying with all of the evil people and hoping the good ones wouldn’t resist their temptations, but I know she has read it because the first time I read it, it was her copy. This proves that just reading it isn’t enough. After all, the devil can quote scripture.) She wants everyone to love her and despair. That’s not a sane goal, but it’s what she wants. This is not what I want. What would be the point? It’s bad enough thinking about making Miss Carroll (who stopped shelving to smile at me when she saw me looking over at her) like me.

How could anyone want a world of puppets?

We were so right to stop her, and it really was worth it, worth dying, worth living on broken. If she’d done it, it would always have been the case that we’d loved our mother, that everyone did. I thought I knew how important it was, but I didn’t really.

Morally, magic is just indefensible.

I was going to say I wish I’d known that before, but I did really. I knew what happened after I threw the comb in the bog. I had thought about the bus. I knew about her. I should have applied that.

S
ATURDAY
8
^TH
December 1979

Greg wasn’t in the library this morning, and only three books I’d ordered, none of them very exciting. It felt a bit flat. I walked down to the bookshop. It was spitting icy rain from a very low sky, the sort of rain that seems to come from all directions. An umbrella’s no use against it, not that I can use an umbrella anyway with a cane in one hand and a bag in the other. Going down the hill towards the bookshop and the little pond the wind was blowing directly into my face. It kept blowing my hat off. It wasn’t the sort of rain you can enjoy, you just have to squinch your face up and endure that kind of thing.

At the bookshop I saw the ginger-haired girl. She was looking at the children’s books. She saw me as soon as I came in, because the door banged in the wind and so of course she looked up. She was carrying a huge canvas bag over her shoulder, and clutching a pile of carrier bags as well. “Hi,” she said, taking a step towards me. “I saw you at the book club but I didn’t get your name.”

“Likewise,” I said, trying to smile and look friendly, trying not to think about what the magic might have done to her, to the world to make her like me. I could feel her looking at me and wondered what she thought about me. She didn’t look quite as awful with a black coat instead of the purple blazer. Her hair was still ginger, and very unruly, but it just looked like a bit of a mess instead of an explosion at a paint factory.

“I’m Janine,” she said.

“I’m Mori.”

“Brill name. What’s it short for?”

“Morwenna,” I said.

Janine laughed. “That’s a bit of a mouthful. Is it Welsh?”

“Yes it is. It means a breaking wave.” Actually, literally it means
white sea
, but that’s what it must mean, that’s what white sea is, the foam on the breaking wave.

We stood there for a moment in amity but without anything to say. Then she said “I’m Christmas shopping. Only two weeks to go.”

“I haven’t bought anything yet!” I said, suddenly realising. “Are you buying everyone books?”

“Most of my family wouldn’t appreciate them,” she said. “But I thought I might buy the Earthsea books for Diane, after all the talk about them the other night.”

“Don’t you have them already?” I asked.

“Nope, read them out of the kids’ library,” she said. “Besides, I’ve had to make a rule about the others never touching my stuff, so I’m not about to start lending them books just when I’ve got it into their heads.”

“I could buy my father a book,” I said. “I certainly have to buy him something. But it’s so hard to know what he has.”

“What does he like?” Janine asked.

“Oh, SF,” I said.

“Is that how you started liking it?”

“No. I didn’t meet him until quite a short time ago, and I’ve been reading it for ages.”

“You didn’t meet your—” she began, and then stopped and looked away. She shifted her bags to her other hand, and when she spoke it was in a falsely casual tone. “Oh, you mean divorce?”

“Yes,” I said, though in fact the actual divorce is only now going through. Daniel had disappeared without bothering with any of the legalities.

“It’s nice that he likes SF,” Janine said, diplomatically.

“Yes. It gives us something to talk about. It’s so weird meeting someone who is your father and a stranger at the same time.” This was the first time I’d said anything about this to anyone.

“You must have been really small.”

“Just a baby really,” I said.

“My parents are getting divorced,” she said, very quietly, looking not at me but at the shelves. “It’s awful. They were fighting all the time, and now Dad’s living at Gran’s and Mum cries into the soup.”

“Maybe they’ll make it up,” I said, uncomfortably.

“That’s what I’m hoping. Dad’s agreed to come home for Christmas Day, and I’m hoping being in the family, seeing us all, Christmas, he’ll realise he loves her and not Doreen.”

“Who’s Doreen?”

“She’s a girl that works on the petrol pumps in his garage,” Janine said. “She’s his girlfriend. She’s only twenty-two.”

“I really hope he decides to come back,” I said. “Look, why don’t we go next door and sit down and get a cup of tea? We can come back in here and buy books afterwards.”

“Okay,” Janine agreed.

We sat in the window where I usually sat. There’s never anyone in there on a Saturday morning, I don’t know how they keep going. I ordered tea and honey buns for both of us, and two honey buns to take back to school for me and Deirdre tomorrow. “How did you find out about the book club?” I asked.