Among Others Read online

  They all vanished when I spoke, but they came back after a moment. They’re not quite like our home fairies. Maybe it comes of not having ruins to live in. Fairies always seem to prefer places the wild has crept back into. We did Enclosure in history recently. The whole country used to have shared wild common places—like Common Ake, I suppose, where the peasants could graze their animals and gather wood and pick blackberries. They didn’t belong to anyone in particular, but to everyone. I bet they were full of fairies. Then the landlords got the people to agree to enclose them and make them into proper tidy farms, and they didn’t realise how squeezed they’d be without the commons until the commons were gone. The countryside is supposed to have those veins of wild running through it, and without them it suffers. This countryside is deader than cities in some ways. The ditch and the trees are only there because this is a school, and the trees by the bookshop are the edge of an estate.

  The fairies didn’t speak to me, not even a few words like the one on the tree. But the yellow one kept looking at me, cautiously, so I knew she had understood. Or rather I knew she had understood something. I can’t be sure what. Fairies are like that. Even the ones we knew well, the ones we’d given names and who talked to us all the time, could be odd like that sometimes.

  Then they all vanished again, and the papers were going to ash—they burned fast, being paper—and Ruth Campbell caught me and gave me ten order marks for starting a fire. Ten! It takes three house marks to cancel out one order mark, which is unfair to begin with if you ask me. But over this whole term so far, I’ve earned forty house marks, for coming top or for excellence in marks. And I’ve had eleven order marks, so that’s the equivalent of cancelling out thirty-three of them. It’s a stupid system and I don’t care about it, but honestly does that seem fair by any measure?

  The oddest thing is that Ruth was more upset about it than I was. She’s a prefect, and she’s Scott, so in giving me ten order marks she was hurting her own house, and she cares about it much more than I do. If you have ten order marks you get gated the next Saturday and can’t go to town, but as this week is half term that doesn’t count. I’d be all right anyway, as I have enough house marks to cancel out, but I’d better make sure that I don’t get caught like that again.

  Oh, and I couldn’t have burned the school down. It was a tiny fire, under control, and I’ve been making little fires for years. I knew what I was doing. Even if I hadn’t, I was a long way from any buildings, the ground is waterlogged from all the rain, and the ditch is full of water. There were also a lot of wet leaves I could have scuffed over it if there had been the slightest danger, which there wasn’t. I accepted the order marks, because I definitely didn’t want the matter to be passed on to a teacher. Better to keep them out of it. Ruth also confiscated my matches.

  It’s a great relief the letters are destroyed. I feel lighter altogether without them being there.

  FRIDAY 26TH OCTOBER 1979

  All day in school there was an almost tangible sense of suppressed excitement. Everybody wants to get away. They were all talking about their plans for the week, showing off. Sharon got to leave this morning, lucky pup, because another thing Jews can’t do is travel on Friday nights or Saturdays. What happens if they do? It’s like having a pile of geasas.

  A few girls got picked up straight from afternoon school. The others were watching out of the library windows to see what kind of cars they had and what their mothers—mostly mothers—were wearing. Deirdre got picked up by her older sister in a white mini. I don’t suppose she’ll ever live it down. The thing mothers are supposed to wear, it seems, is a burberry with a silk headscarf. A burberry is an up-market brand of mackintosh.

  Nobody asked me what my mother wears, because nobody is speaking to me. But it’s just as well. She wears every third thing in her wardrobe, and she cycles her clothes through it in some strange order only she understands. I don’t know if she does this because it’s magical or if she does it because she’s mad. It’s very hard to tell the difference. Sometimes she looks an absolute guy, and other times she looks perfectly normal. The normal times do usually seem to coincide with times when it would be useful—she looked demure and respectable in court, for instance, the last time I saw her. A long time ago when she kept the nursery school she always looked reasonable for a teacher—but Gramma was still alive then, and could keep her in check. But I’ve seen her wear her wedding dress to go shopping, and a winter coat in July, and be barely covered in January. Her hair is long and black and even combed and tamed it looks like a nest of snakes. If she wore a burberry and a silk scarf it would look like a disguise, a cloth dragged over an altar where something had been sacrificed.

  My father arrived in a rush of parents, and nobody remarked about him to me. He looked like himself. I was back to glancing at him sideways I’m afraid. I don’t know why, it’s absurd really when we’ve been writing to each other like human beings all this time. He drove me back to the Old Hall.

  “We’ll stay there tonight, then tomorrow I’ll take you to meet my father,” he said. The headlights lit the road far ahead. I could see rabbits bounding out of the way, and the skeleton tracery of branches illuminated for an instant and then dropping back into dark. “We’ll stay in a hotel. Have you done that before?”

  “Every summer,” I said. “We’d go down to Pembrokeshire and stay in a hotel for two weeks. It was the same one every year.” I felt my voice thicken with a sob at the back of my throat thinking about it. It had been such fun. Grampar would drive us to different beaches, and to castles and standing stones. Gramma would tell us the history. She was a teacher, all my family were, though I was determined I wouldn’t be. She loved the holidays, when she didn’t have to cook, when she and Auntie Teg could relax and laugh together. Sometimes my mother came, and sat in cafes smoking and eating peculiar things. It was better on the years she didn’t come, obviously. But she was much more avoidable in Pembrokeshire, and smaller somehow. Mor and I had our own special games, and there would always be other children staying in the hotel who we’d organise into our games and into putting on an entertainment for the parents.

  “Was the food good?” he asked.

  “Wonderful,” I said. “We’d have special things like melon, and mackerel.” Delicious things we never had at home.

  “Well, the food will be good where we’re going, too,” he said. “How’s the school food?”

  “Appalling,” I said, and made him laugh with my description of it. “Is there any chance I could get down to South Wales?”

  “I can’t take you down as you suggested. But if you want to go on the train for a couple of days, that would be all right.”

  I wasn’t sure, because on the train I’d be trapped there and she was there, after all, and if she physically grabbed me I didn’t know what I’d do. But probably she wouldn’t come near me. She wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t do anything magic.

  At the Old Hall, when we finally got there, the aunts were all sitting in the drawing room. It’s not a room where people draw, with easels, it’s short for “withdrawing room,” where people withdrew for quiet conversation. They were hardly talking though. I kissed them, then a stop at Daniel’s bookshelves, and retired to bed with The End of Eternity.

  SATURDAY 27TH OCTOBER 1979

  I had no idea London was so big. It goes on for ever. It sort of creeps up on you and before you know it, it’s everywhere. There are outlying bits, with gaps in between, and then it gets just more and more built up.

  My father’s father’s name is Sam. He has a funny accent. I wonder if they call him Commie? He lives in a bit of London called Mile End, and he wears a skullcap but doesn’t look the slightest bit Jewish otherwise. His hair—and he still has a lot of it, even though he’s old—is all white. He wears an embroidered waistcoat, very beautiful but a bit threadbare. He’s awfully old.

  All the way in the car, my father and I had been talking about books. He hadn’t mentioned Sam except to say that’s whe
re we were going. I was more thinking about the hotel and about London, so it was almost a surprise when he got there. My father tootled the horn in a pattern, and the door opened and out Sam came. My father introduced us on the pavement, and he hugged me, and hugged my father too. I was a little alarmed at first, because he really isn’t at all like anyone I know, and not the faintest bit like Grampar. With my father and his sisters it’s quite easy to keep them at arm’s length, and even to keep thinking about them at arm’s length somehow, because they’re English, I suppose. But Sam isn’t English, not at all, and he just instantly seemed to accept me, whereas with them I always feel horribly on probation.

  Sam took us in, and introduced me to his landlady as his granddaughter, and she said she saw the resemblance. “Morwenna favours my family,” he said, as if he’d known me for years. “Look at the colouring. She looks like my sister Rivka, zichrona livracha.”

  I looked blank, and he translated, “May her memory be a blessing.” I like that. That’s a nice way to say that somebody’s dead that doesn’t stop the conversation. I asked him how to spell it and what language it was. It’s Hebrew. Jewish people always pray in Hebrew, Sam says. Maybe one day I’ll be able to say “My sister Mor, zichrona livracha,” just normally like that.

  Then he took us up into his little room. It must be odd to live upstairs in someone else’s house. I can tell he doesn’t have any money. I’d know even if I didn’t know. The room has a bed and a sink and one chair, and books all piled up everywhere. There’s a dresser, all piled with books, with a kind of electric samovar and glasses. There’s a cat, too, a big fat ginger-and-white cat called Chairman Mao, or maybe Chairman Miaow. She took up half the bed, but when I sat down on it, perched on the edge, she came and sat on my lap. Sam said—he said I should call him Sam—that meant she liked me, and she didn’t like many people. I stroked her, carefully, and she didn’t scratch me after a minute the way Auntie Teg’s Persimmon always does. She curled up and went to sleep.

  Sam made tea, for him and me. My father had whisky. (He drinks an awful lot. He’s gone down to the hotel bar now, drinking. He smokes a lot too. It would be unkind to say he has all the vices, in the circumstances, as he did help me get away and he is paying for me to go to school. It’s not as if he wanted me.) The tea came in glasses with metal holders, and didn’t have milk or sugar, which made it a lot nicer. It had a pleasant sort of flavour. I was surprised, because I don’t usually like tea at all and I was only drinking it to be polite. He got the water from the electric samovar, which he said kept the water at the right temperature.

  After a little while, I was looking at the books, and I saw The Communist Manifesto on top of one of the piles. I must have made a little noise, because they both looked at me. “I just noticed you have The Communist Manifesto,” I said.

  Sam laughed. “My good friend Dr. Schechter lent me that.”

  “I was reading it recently myself,” I said.

  He laughed again. “It’s a lovely dream, but it would never work. Look at what’s happening in Russia now, or Poland. Marx is like Plato, he has dreams that can’t come true as long as people are people. That’s what Dr. Schechter can’t understand.”

  “I’ve been reading about Plato too,” I said, because he’s in The Last of the Wine of course, and Socrates too.

  “Reading about Plato?” Sam said. “How about reading Plato?”

  I shook my head.

  “You should read him, but always keep arguing with him,” he said. “Now, I must have some Plato in English somewhere.” Then he started moving piles of books, with my father helping him. I would have helped too, but I couldn’t move with Chairman Miaow asleep on my knees. He had Plato in Greek, and Polish, and German, and I realised as he muttered his way through the piles that he could read all those languages, as well as Hebrew, and that even though his English was funny and quite strongly accented and he lived in this little rented room, he was an educated man. Seeing my father help him go through the piles, I saw that they were fond of each other, though they didn’t do much to show it. “Ah, here,” he said. “The Symposium, in English, and a good place to start.”

  It was a slim black Penguin Classics volume. “If I like it I can order more from the library,” I said.

  “You do that. Don’t be like Daniel here, always reading stories and no time for anything real. I’m the opposite. I have no time for stories.”

  “I have a friend in school who’s the same,” I said. “She reads science essays for fun.”

  It turned out that Sam has read some of Asimov’s science essays, and also owns a book he wrote about the Bible! “It’s a Jewish Atheist book about the Bible, so of course I own it,” he said.

  When it got dark, my father bustled up and insisted he’d take us out to eat. We went to a place quite near by, where we ate little pancakes called blinis with smoked salmon and cream cheese, which was absolutely delicious, perhaps the most delicious thing I’ve ever had. Then we had lovely dumplings with cheese and potato in them, which would have been the nicest thing I’d had for months if they hadn’t come after that lovely salty salmon, and then another sort of pancakes with jam inside. Everyone there knew Sam, and kept coming over to say hello and be introduced. It was a bit embarrassing at first, but I soon got used to it because Sam acted as if it was normal. I saw that he lived among these people as if they were family, he lived in community with them.

  I like Sam. I was sorry to say goodbye. I wrote down his address and gave him mine in school. I wanted to talk to him about being Jewish and what Sharon had said, and about my thought about being a rice Jew, but I didn’t want to with my father there. He made it awkward. It’s easier with Sam. For one thing, I don’t have to feel grateful to him, and for another, he doesn’t have to feel guilty about me.

  We drove to this hotel. It’s not a patch on the one where we used to stay in Pembrokeshire. It’s very anonymous. We’re sharing a room, which I didn’t expect, but as he went down to the bar almost at once, I’ve had the place pretty much to myself. The clocks go back tonight, so an extra hour of sleep!

  The Symposium is brill. It’s just like The Last of the Wine, though earlier, of course, when Alkibiades was young. That must have been a great time to be alive.

  SUNDAY 28TH OCTOBER 1979

  I’m on the train, the big intercity train from London to Cardiff. It goes indiscriminately through countryside and towns, running along its inevitable rail. I sit in the corner of the carriage and nobody takes any notice of me. There’s a cafe car where you can buy awful sandwiches and horrible fizzy drinks or coffee. I bought a Kit Kat, which I am eating very slowly. It’s raining, which makes the countryside look cleaner and the towns dirtier.

  It’s also great to be wearing my own clothes. I was yesterday too, but I didn’t notice so much. But sitting here, on my own, looking out of the window, it’s really nice to be wearing jeans and my Tolkien t-shirt instead of that awful uniform.

  It’s funny, I write this whole thing mirror, so nobody could read it, but I want to write this next bit double mirror or something, in case, upside-down as well as backwards. The notebook locks. I’m lucky I can write mirror by just using my left hand. With all the practice I get, I’m almost as fast as I am right-handed.

  Anyway.

  Last night, after I finished writing in here, I read for a bit (World of Ptaavs, Niven) and then put the light out. I fell asleep, but then later he, my father—I really should call him Daniel, it’s his name, and that’s what Sam calls him—Daniel came in, putting the light on and waking me. He was drunk. He was crying. He tried to get into my bed and kiss me, and I had to push him away.

  I know I said I was going to be pro-sex, but.

  In one way, it’s nice to think that somebody wants me. And touch is nice. Also sex, well, there is no privacy in school, so, but I’d had a chance the night before. (How long does it take? Masturbation is five, ten minutes tops. It never says, in books, how long. Bron and the Spike were at it for hours,
but that was exhibition sex.) And I know from Time Enough For Love, which is very explicit on that, that incest isn’t inherently wrong—it’s not as if it really feels as if he’s family. I can’t imagine wanting to with Grampar, ugh! Ugh!!!

  But with him, Daniel, it really is just the consanguinity thing, because we’re strangers really. And that just means contraception, which I would want anyway. I’m only fifteen! And it’s illegal, I think, and it wouldn’t be worth going to prison for. But he seemed to want me, and who else is going to want me, broken as I am? I don’t want to be depraved, but I suppose I probably am. Anyway, I said no before I thought about it, because he was drunk and pathetic. I pushed him away, and he went to sleep in the other bed and snored, loudly, and I lay there thinking about Heinlein and that Sturgeon story in Dangerous Visions, “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” Great title.

  This morning, he acted as if it had never happened. We were back to not looking at each other, eating floppy bacon and cold fried eggs in the breakfast buffet in the hotel. He gave me the trainfare and another ten pounds for books. Even if I use some of it for food and busfare, I should be able to buy ten books at least. He’s very odd about money, sometimes acting as if he has none and then just handing it out like that. I have to go back to Shrewsbury next Saturday, because I have to be in school next Sunday night. But that is a week, a whole week away. He’s going to meet me in Shrewsbury station. And Auntie Teg is going to meet me in Cardiff station today. I rang her from Paddington. Meanwhile, I am between, between everything, between worlds, eating a Kit Kat and writing in here. I like trains.

  MONDAY 29TH OCTOBER 1979

  Half term is not the same time here as it is at Arlinghurst, everyone here was off school last week. Typical. So Auntie Teg is teaching, and all my friends are in school. I got here last night, ate one of Auntie Teg’s cheese pies, and fell asleep straight after dinner.