Among Others Read online

  Grampar liked the elephant, and Auntie Teg was really pleased with the dressing gown. She waited to open it until we went up to Fedw Hir and we had a little Christmas around the bed. They gave me a big red polo-neck pullover, and a soap-on-a-rope, and a book token. I didn’t tell them about the ear-piercing. There’s no point upsetting them needlessly. It had already been legally established that they have no rights with me—the fact that they brought me up counts for nothing. Any mother, however evil, and any father, however distant, that’s the court system, and aunts and grandparents nowhere.

  Grampar hates Fedw Hir, you can tell, and he wants to get home, but I don’t know how we can manage it when he can’t walk without help. Auntie Teg was talking about people coming in to get him up and put him to bed. I don’t know what that would cost. I don’t know how it could be arranged. It’s such an awful place, though. They’re supposed to be giving him therapy, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. So many of the others are so clearly just waiting to die. They look so hopeless. And he looked like that at first. When we went in he was sunk down in the bed, I expect having a nap, but he looked small and pathetic and only half-alive, not like Grampar at all.

  I was talking to him about when he taught us to play tennis, and we went up to the Brecon Beacons and played on the uneven ground up there and afterwards on flat ground it was easy. I remember the skylarks singing high above and the tufts of bracken and the funny tufted reeds we used to call bamboo shoots. (They’re not bamboo, really, not anything like, but we had a toy panda and we used to play that they were and he could eat them.) Grampar used to be proud of how fast we could run and how well we could catch a ball. He’d always wanted a boy, of course. It’s not that we wanted to be boys, it’s just that boys have so much more fun. We loved learning to play tennis.

  And I thought all that was wasted, all that time practising up there, because Mor is dead and I can’t run and neither can Grampar, not any more. Except it wasn’t wasted, because we remember it. Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time. I’m never going to win Wimbledon or run in the Olympics (“They never had twins at Wimbledon . . .” he used to say) but I wouldn’t have anyway. I’m not even going to play tennis for fun with my friends, but that doesn’t mean playing it when I could was a waste. I wish I’d done more when I could. I wish I’d run everywhere every time I had the chance, run to the library, run through the cwm, run upstairs. Well, we mostly did run upstairs. I think of that as I haul myself up the stairs to Auntie Teg’s flat. People who can run upstairs should run upstairs. And they should run upstairs first, so I can limp along afterwards and not feel I’m holding them up.

  We called in to see Auntie Olwen, and then Uncle Gus, and Auntie Flossie. Auntie Flossie gave me a book token, and Uncle Gus gave me a pound note. I haven’t forgiven Uncle Gus for saying what he said, but I took the money and said thank you. I’ve put it into the back pocket of my purse, where it can be a start on my emergency stash. There’s a very comfortable wing chair in Auntie Flossie’s. Otherwise, I found all the chairs very difficult. I don’t know why people make them so low. Library chairs are always a lovely height.

  SUNDAY 30TH DECEMBER 1979

  Leg a bit better, thank goodness. In fact it was well enough that as I was walking through the bus station an interfering busybody asked me why I needed a cane, at my age. “It was a car accident,” I said, which usually shuts people up, but not her.

  “You shouldn’t use it, you should try to manage without it. It’s obvious you don’t really need it.”

  I just walked on and ignored her, but I was shaking. It might seem as if I don’t need it, walking along on flat ground, but I need it if I have to stand still, and I really need it for stairs or broken ground, and I never know from one minute to another if I’m going to be the way I am today or the way I was yesterday, when I can hardly put my weight on my leg at all.

  “See, you’re walking really fast now, you don’t need it at all,” she called after me.

  I stopped and turned around. I could feel my cheeks burning. The bus station was full of people. “Nobody would pretend to be a cripple! Nobody would use a stick they didn’t need! You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that I would. If I could walk without it I’d break it in half across your back and run off singing. You have no right to talk to me like that, to talk to anyone like that. Who made you queen of the world when I wasn’t looking? Why do you imagine I would go out with a stick I don’t need—to try to steal your sympathy? I don’t want your sympathy, that’s the last thing I want. I just want to mind my own business, which is what you should be doing.”

  It didn’t do any good at all, except for making me a public spectacle. She went very pink, but I don’t think what I was saying really went in. She’ll probably go home and say she saw a girl pretending to be a cripple. I hate people like that. Mind you, I hate the ones who come up and ooze synthetic sympathy just as much, who want to know exactly what’s wrong with me and pat me on the head. I am a person. I want to talk about things other than my leg. I’ll say this for Oswestry: English standoffishness means I don’t get as much of that there. The people who have asked me about it there, both whether I really need it and what’s wrong, have been acquaintances, teachers, girls in school, the aunts’ friends on Boxing Day, people like that.

  It took me ages to calm down. I was still overheated and nervous when the bus went round the narrow corner to the bridge in Pontypridd. If it didn’t make it, I thought, if we all fell to our deaths, that awful woman would be the last person I talked to.

  I had lunch with Moira, which was my ostensible reason for going up to Aberdare today. Moira says my voice has got posher, which is absolutely horrifying. She didn’t say “more English” because she’s my friend and a kind person, but she didn’t have to say it. School must be rubbing off on me. I so don’t want to sound like the other girls there! I don’t know what to do about it. The more I think about it the odder my voice sounds in my ears, but I hadn’t noticed before, I was just talking. There are elocution lessons. Are there anti-elocution lessons? Not that I want to talk like Eliza, but I really don’t want to open my mouth and get filed as upper-class twit.

  Moira’s had a good enough term. It was surprisingly hard to find things to talk about. I can’t remember what we used to talk about; nothing, I suppose, gossip, school, the things we were doing together. Without that there isn’t much there. Leah’s broken up with Andrew and Nasreen is seeing him, and her parents are flipping out, apparently. Leah’s having a party on January 2nd, in the evening, so I’ll see them all there.

  After lunch I went out of Moira’s house onto Croggin Bog and walked across. Heol y Gwern is the only proper road across it, of course, but I went off that right away. Croggin, well, properly it’s spelled Crogyn, is big: It’s an upland bog, it’s the whole shoulder of the hill. There are older paths running through it, not as old as the Alder Road, but they’ve been there a long time. It’s a bad time of year for it, and it’s been a wet winter, but it isn’t really dangerous if you know the way, or even if you don’t if you follow the alders. Mor and I got really lost in Croggin Bog once, when we were quite small, and got out purely by alder-recognition. Anyway, it isn’t quicksands, it’s just wet and muddy. People are more scared of it than they need to be. There was also the time I went into it in the dark not long after Mor died and deliberately tried to get lost, but the fairies helped me out. They say marsh lights, willow-wisps, lead you astray and into the worst bits of bog, but that time they took me pointedly to the road right by Moira’s house. I went in dripping and Moira’s mother made me take a shower and dress in Moira’s clothes to go home. I was afraid of getting into trouble, but Liz was fighting with Grampar and didn’t even notice.

  There’s a good story about when they built those houses. They were building them along Heol y Gwern, and they started to build little short streets off it, into the bog, with new houses, because they wanted a proper estate
for people to live. The problem was that the bog didn’t want the houses. The real story, which I had from Grampar who remembers when it happened, is that they’d built the foundations for a house and they left it on the Thursday before Good Friday, and when they went back on the Tuesday after Easter Monday, they had completely sunk. The way I heard the story though, is that they’d built the whole house and when they came back after the weekend only the chimneys were sticking up above the bog. Ha! They stopped building up there after that and built the new estate in Penywaun instead, and I’m glad. I like the way the bog is, with the little stunted trees and the long grasses and rushes and sudden unexpected flowers and moorhens on the standing water and lapwings slow-flapping to guide you away from their nests.

  What I wanted today was a fairy, and there are often fairies on Croggin. I didn’t see a sign of one, and even when I came out of the bog by the river and into Ithilien I couldn’t find any. I checked Osgiliath and the other fairy ruins in the cwm on my way back to town, the long way around, on the dramroad. There’s an old smelter there, and some fallen cottages, or I think that’s what they are. It’s so hard to imagine them bustling and industrial. I did spot the occasional fairy out of the corner of my eye, but none of them would stop or speak to me. I remembered how Glorfindel wasn’t findable after Halloween. There have been other times like that, times we couldn’t find them, times when they don’t want to be found. They always found us. I tried calling for him, but I knew that was pointless. They don’t use names the way we do. I might wish it worked the way it does in Earthsea where names have summoning power, but it doesn’t, names don’t count, only things do. I do know, I think, how to call him with magic, but that wouldn’t be magic to prevent harm, so I didn’t really consider it for more than a second.

  I tried sitting down, though it was very chilly, and waiting for the pain in my leg to ease off, in case that was keeping them away. It wasn’t very bad today though. It shouldn’t have been that, I don’t think. It was too uncomfortable to sit for long, and there was a bit of rain in the wind. Going through town was miserable, all the shops boarded up that I can remember as active places, more all the time. The Rex is shutting down, there won’t be anywhere to watch films in Aberdare any more. There are tattered “for sale” signs everywhere. There’s litter lying on the streets and even the Christmas tree outside the library looks forlorn. I caught the bus back to Cardiff in time for dinner with Auntie Teg.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t find them. I really need to talk to them.

  TUESDAY 1ST JANUARY 1980

  Happy New Year.

  Nice to wake up this morning in Grampar’s house, and on my own.

  Auntie Teg has gone off somewhere with Him for New Year, which she pretty much always does. I could have gone too, she asked me, but I didn’t want to. I’d only be in the way. Yesterday morning we drove up to Aberdare and saw Grampar, and then she went off and I was promptly grabbed by Auntie Flossie. I had wanted to go to find the fairies, but instead I found myself enacting “Three French Hens” in Auntie Flossie’s New Year Party. The cheer was a little forced, and I found myself aching for bed long before midnight, but I’ve had worse days. I’ve collected another four pounds fifty in clenigs, and six chocolate coins. And I had half a glass of champagne at midnight. It was nicer than Daniel’s champagne, or maybe it’s one of those things that grows on you.

  I’m going to get up and cook myself breakfast and then have another try at finding the fairies. It’s a new year, maybe I’ll have better luck.

  WEDNESDAY 2ND JANUARY 1980

  Yesterday morning, I really wanted to find some fairies. For a change, I went up through Common Ake. It’s Heck’s Common really, called after a Mr. Heck, but everyone calls it Common Ake. It’s a common, it doesn’t belong to anyone, the way most of the country was before the Enclosures in the eighteenth century. It’s hard to imagine Aberdare as a farming valley with nothing really here except St. John’s, and only the main road running through from Brecon to Cardiff, no other streets at all, all the coal and iron undisturbed underground. I had to learn a modern poem in Welsh once for an Eisteddfod that ended “Totalitariaeth glo,” the despotism of coal. I picked up a little piece of coal as I went. They often find fossils in it when they’re digging it up, ancient leaves and flowers. It’s organic, it was an organic sludge pressed down by the rock to make seams of carbon stuff that burns. If it had been pressed more it would be diamonds. I wonder if diamonds burn, and if we’d burn them if they were as common as coal. To the fairies, they’d be the same, plants changed by time to rock. I wonder if fairies remember the Jurassic, if they walked among dinosaurs, and what they were then? None of them would have had human shapes. They wouldn’t have spoken Welsh. I rubbed the coal in my fingers, and it flaked a bit. I know what coal is, but I don’t know what fairies are, not really.

  There’s a spot on Common Ake we used to call the Dingly Dell. It’s one of the oldest of our names, older than the ones from The Lord of the Rings, and writing it down now I feel simultaneously slightly embarrassed and fiercely protective. The Dingly Dell is a place where there used to be a quarry or a surface mine or something and the ground drops abruptly on three sides, making a little amphitheatre. There are trees on the steep sides, and blackberry bushes. I think we went there first with Grampar blackberry picking when we were quite small, I remember eating more than I put in the basket, but then that went for most years. We felt quite bold when we first went all the way there on our own.

  Today the brambles were winter-dead, and the rowans leafless. A pale sun shone from a distant sky. A cheeky robin perched near me as I stepped in and cocked his head. They put robins on Christmas cards, and sometimes on Christmas cakes too, because they don’t go away in winter. “Hello,” I said. “How nice to see you still here.”

  The robin didn’t reply. I didn’t expect it to. But I was immediately aware that there was someone there. I looked up, expecting to see a fairy vanishing, hoping to see Glorfindel, but what I saw was Mor, standing back against the fallen leaves near the slope of the hill. She looked—well, she looked like Mor, obviously, but what I was really aware of right away was how she didn’t look like me. I hadn’t noticed that at half term, but now I did. I’ve grown, and she hasn’t. I have breasts. My hair is different. I am fifteen and a half, and she is still and always fourteen.

  I took a step towards her, and then I remembered her clutching me and dragging me towards the door into the hill, and stopped. “Oh Mor,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, any more than the robin. She was dead, and the dead can’t speak. As a matter of fact, I know how to make the dead speak. You have to give them blood. But it’s magic, and anyway, it would be horrible. I couldn’t imagine doing it.

  I talked to her although she couldn’t answer. I told her about the magic and about Daniel and his sisters and about getting away from Liz and about school and the book club and everything. The strange thing was that the more I was talking the further away she seemed, though she didn’t move, and the more different from me she was. Nobody could tell the difference between us, but of course we always were different. Since she’s been dead, I’d almost forgotten, or not forgotten, but not thought about her as her distinct self so much, more about the two of us together. I’d felt as if I’d been torn in half, but really it wasn’t that, it was that she had been taken away. I didn’t own her, and there were always differences, always, she was her own person and I’d known that when she was alive, but that had blurred in all the time since when she hadn’t been there to defend her own rights.

  If she’d lived, we would have become different people. I think. I don’t think we’d have been like the aunts and stayed together all the time. I think we’d always have been friends, but we’d have lived in different places and had different friends. We’d have been aunts to each other’s children. It’s too late for that now. I’m going to grow up and she isn’t. She’s frozen where she is, and I’m chang
ing, and I want to change. I want to live. I thought I had to live for both of us, because she can’t live for herself, but I can’t really live for her. I can’t really know what she’d have done, what she’d have wanted, how she’d have changed. Arlinghurst has changed me, the book club has changed me, and it might have changed her differently. Living for someone else isn’t possible.

  I couldn’t help asking her questions. “Can you go under the hill next year?”

  She shrugged. Clearly she didn’t know either. What happens under the hill? Where do the dead go? Where is God in all this? They talk about Heaven like a family picnic.

  “Are the fairies looking after you?” I asked.

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  “Good!” That made me feel a bit better. Living with the fairies in the Valley wasn’t the worst way of being dead I could imagine, not by a long way. “Why won’t they talk to me?”

  She looked puzzled and shrugged again.

  “Can you tell them about the aunts, and what they want to do?”

  She nodded, very definitely.

  “Can you ask them to talk to me? I’m so worried about doing magic and what it does.”

  “Doing is doing,” a voice said behind me, and I spun around and there was a fairy, one I’d never seen before, nut brown all over and knobbly like an acorn cup. His skin was all wrinkles and folds, and he wasn’t the shape of a person, more like an old treestump. The thing that astonished me was that he’d spoken in English, and that was exactly what he’d said, those very words. They’re cryptic enough, I suppose.