Among Others

by Jo Walton

  So I did that, and then I bought four honey buns to go, with my own money this time. One for Deirdre, one for Sharon, though of course she won’t be able to eat it so I’ll get that one too, one for me, and one for Gill. Last week I had Sharon’s bun, and this week she’ll have mine. It’s more for the symbol than the actual bun, though goodness knows the actual buns are nice. I’m not buying one for Karen, because Karen calls me Hopalong, which I hate more than any of the other names. Commie’s almost affectionate, and Taffy’s inevitable, but using Crip or especially Hopalong means hostility.

  Then I asked the bakery girl about the pond. “Is it a park?”

  “A park, love? No, it’s the edge of the estate.”

  “But there’s a bench by the pond. A park bench.”

  “Council put that there for people to sit, like. By the road, that belongs to the council, so I suppose it might be a park, but not a proper park with flowers. But what you see behind, those trees and that, that’s part of the estate, and you’d find a No Trespassing sign before long, reckon, because there are pheasants. We hear them banging away over there in August.”

  So it’s an estate with a country house, managed and with game keepers and things, but left half-wild for the pheasants. I bet there are fairies all over it.

  SUNDAY 14TH OCTOBER 1979

  I got a telling-off after lunch, and an Order Mark, my first. Apparently it’s not done to give buns to girls not in your house or form, unless they’re a relation. And Gill, while she is in my chemistry class, isn’t in my house or form, so I’m not supposed to be friendly with her, and my giving her a bun is considered deeply suspicious, and possibly lesbian. I think from the way some of this got said that Gill may well be a lesbian. Fine. I have no problem with that. I’m not one, but I’m definitely with Heinlein and Delany on this.

  Even Deirdre and Sharon thought I shouldn’t have given Gill the bun. Deirdre tried to make excuses for me, saying I didn’t understand because I hadn’t been here long enough, and maybe all the chemistry had addled my brain.

  I will never understand this place.

  MONDAY 15TH OCTOBER 1979

  I didn’t write back again. But she keeps on writing to me and sending photographs like that. I get one or two every week. I am so desperate for the glimpses of Mor that I keep opening the letters, and I can never quite not read them. I save them until I am in the library, because I can’t bear everyone to see me reading them. Then today Lorraine Pargeter had a bad cold and came into the library and saw me looking at one of the cut-out photographs. Lorraine is a big-boned blonde stupid girl, captain of the form hockey team and a fly half for the house one. She’s certainly called me names and pinched me, but she stopped the others trying to trip me coming out of the showers, so I don’t feel especially antagonistic to her. Today her nose is very red and she looks truly miserable not to be out on her favourite games pitch. I heard her asking the teacher if she could wrap up and go out and watch.

  “What’s that, Morwenna?” she asked. I didn’t want her to know I cared, which she would if I hid it, so I flicked it across the table to her. She picked it up and looked at it. It was a picture of the two of us getting prizes at school speech day, except with me burned out, as usual.

  “My mother’s a witch,” I said, casually.

  Lorraine gasped, and dropped the picture. “Is it voodoo?” she whispered.

  I have been wondering that myself. I don’t know how these things work, and well, you just try looking it up. What does it mean to burn someone out of a picture? What could it do? What consequences could it have? I reached for my wooden charm, but of course it isn’t there, I can’t wear it with my uniform. I have a rock in my pocket and I reached for that. I don’t know if it helps, but it certainly is comforting. I touched the wooden library desk, which has been smoothed by time and hundreds of hands.

  “Sort of,” I said, quietly. “She burns me out, but I seem to be all right.”

  “But you’re right there,” Lorraine objected, loudly enough that Miss Carroll glanced over at us.

  Lorraine, naturally, doesn’t know about Mor. I haven’t mentioned her because firstly it’s personal, secondly I can’t stand sympathy, and thirdly I can’t stand teasing about it even more. People teasing me about Mor could cause me to lose my temper with them. “Oh, really?” I said, and reached for the picture. “I hadn’t looked at that one yet. Usually it’s me she burns. But I’m protected. It would be awful if she started going after my friends.”

  Lorraine gasped and moved away from me to sit on the other side of the library, pretending to read Gone with the Wind. For the rest of today, “Let them fear me as long as they obey me” has been working even better than normal, but Deirdre and Sharon have been keeping their distance too, which is going to get awfully lonely.

  TUESDAY 16TH OCTOBER 1979

  You know, class is like magic. There’s nothing there you can point to, it evaporates if you try to analyse it, but it’s real and it affects how people behave and makes things happen.

  Sharon probably has more money than any of the other girls in our form. We’re the Lower Fifth, which is so meaningless in any normal context that it makes me cross to think about it. They start counting at “Upper Third.” In theory, there exists some platonic Lower School that starts at First, with seven-year-olds. In fact, there’s no such thing, and I deduce it only from the existence of these ridiculous numbers. By the time they get to the sixth, lower and upper, they’re on the same system as the rest of the world that goes from one to four in Junior School and one to six in Secondary School. Arlinghurst is, you notice, running from one to six like an ordinary Secondary School, just counting stupidly.

  We’re specifically Lower VC. There’s an A and a B too, but we’re not streamed, heaven help us, that would be wrong. Only in fact we are, because Gill and the whole chemistry group is A, and they are definitely brighter. I should be in A on my marks, but they don’t move people except at the end of term. Miss Carroll, the librarian, has told me they have said I would be moved to A at Christmas, except for having upset the timetable, which means I’ll stay where I am with the dunces until next September. She said this as if I’d learn a valuable lesson about keeping my place, but I’m glad I fought for chemistry. I wish I’d held out for biology as well.

  The house system is separate from the forms. The forms run horizontally, the house systems run vertically. Girls from all three forms in each year are in all four houses. The houses compete with each other for cups—perfectly real silver cups that are kept in the Hall. The houses are called after Victorian poets. I’m in Scott. The others are Keats, Tennyson and Wordsworth. No Shelley and no Byron, I suppose because they have faintly disreputable auras. Gramma was fond of all of those poets except, ironically, Scott. The form system controls lessons, and the house system everything else—games particularly, but also the system of points gained or lost for behaviour. We’re supposed to care intensely about our houses and their relative standing, and look out for other people in our houses, whatever their form. Needless to say, I do not give a damn about this. It’s a granfalloon in the purest sense, and I am enduringly grateful to Vonnegut for giving me the word.

  Anyway, I was trying to talk about class. In Lower VC, which are the only girls I know well, Sharon’s family have the most money. She goes on foreign holidays more often than most girls, her father is a surgeon, they have a big house and a big car. But classwise, she rates quite low, because she’s Jewish and that makes her different, and because of the other intangible class thing that’s like magic. She doesn’t have a pony, though they could easily afford one. They have a swimming pool, but not a pony, because her parents’ priorities are different. She goes skiing at Christmas, but she goes to Norway, because her parents won’t go to Germany or Switzerland.

  Julie’s parents don’t have much money at all. Her uniforms were her sister’s. They have an old car. But her sister is Head Girl, and her mother was a prefect, and won a tennis cup for Wordsworth, wh
ich is her house too. They put Julie in Wordsworth because her mother and her aunts and her sister were in Wordsworth. There’s an old black-and-white photograph of Julie’s mother and the cup in the Games Room. And the label under that picture says “The Hon. Monica Wentworth,” because Julie’s mother’s father is a viscount. Julie isn’t an Hon., but she scores higher classwise than anybody else because her mother is. It’s not just that, it’s the combination of the Hon. and the cup and the school tradition. And Julie’s not all that clever, but she’s good at games, which is a lot more important.

  There’s a fat giggly girl in the Upper Fourth who’s Lady Sarah. Her father is an earl. I think Julie would defer to her opinion, but I’m not sure. Class isn’t pure snobbery, it’s lots of things. But everyone cares about it madly. One of the first questions they asked me was about what kind of car my father has. “A black one” didn’t go down too well. They couldn’t believe I didn’t know. I didn’t say I’d only seen it a couple of times and I didn’t like cars much anyway. It turns out it’s a Bentley—I wrote and asked—which is an acceptable kind of car. But why do they care? They want to be able to place everyone very precisely. Of course, they quickly saw that I came nowhere—no pony, no title, and Welsh. I got points for the kind of house my father lives in—it’s fathers they’re interested in. Some of the girls have divorced parents—poor Deirdre does, for instance—but even if they live with their mother, it’s the father that counts.

  Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn’t subject to scientific analysis, and it’s not supposed to be real but it’s pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic.

  WEDNESDAY 17TH OCTOBER 1979

  When I am grown up and famous, I will never admit to having attended Arlinghurst. I’ll pretend never to have heard of it. When people ask where I was educated, I’ll leave it out.

  There are other people like me out there. There is a karass. I know there is, there can be.

  THURSDAY 18TH OCTOBER 1979

  This school is enough to make anyone a communist.

  I read The Communist Manifesto today—it’s very short. It would be like living on Anarres. I’ll take that over this any day.

  FRIDAY 19TH OCTOBER 1979

  I loved Mor, but I never appreciated her enough. I never really understood how wonderful it was to always have someone to talk to who would know what you were talking about, and someone to play with who understood the kind of things I wanted to play.

  Only one more week of school before half term.

  SATURDAY 20TH OCTOBER 1979

  Blessed interlibrary loan. They’ve found Purposes of Love and The Last of the Wine for me!

  I took back last weeks’s eight books. I also got out five other things by authors I know and The Magus. I’ve never heard of the author (Fowles) but hey, a book about a wizard!

  I ordered twenty-eight books, from lists on title pages. The librarian, the man, looked a little taken aback, but didn’t make a fuss about it.

  It was raining stair-rods, and almost all the leaves are off the trees. I went to the bakery cafe again, because the other girls don’t go there and they’re all over the proper cafes in town. Afterwards I walked over to look at the water and the swan hissed at me. My shoes were sinking into the mud at the edge, but I went on under the trees, looking for fairies. There were one or two, but hard to see, and not inclined for conversation, which is a pity, because apart from a letter from my father I haven’t had any at all this week.

  SUNDAY 21ST OCTOBER 1979

  James Tiptree, Jr. is a woman! Gosh!

  I never would have guessed though. My goodness, Robert Silverberg must have egg all over his face. But I bet he doesn’t care. (If I’d written Dying Inside I wouldn’t mind how much of a fool of myself I made about anything ever again. It might be the most depressing book in the world, I mean it’s right up there with Hardy and Aeschylus, but it’s also just so brilliant.) And the Tiptree stories are good, too, though none of them quite up to “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” I suppose I can see doing that so as to get respect, but Le Guin didn’t, and she got the respect. She won the Hugo. I think in a way Tiptree was taking the easy option. But think how fond her characters are of misdirection and disguise; maybe she is too? I suppose all writers use characters as masks, and she was using the male name as another layer. Come to that, if I was writing “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death” I might not want people to know where I lived either.

  I was the only person not to get a bun today, not that I care. Even Deirdre got one from Karen. Deirdre looks at me in a strange puzzled way, which is actually worse than anything. I understand Tiberius’ reliance on Sejanus much better now. I also understand how he became peculiar. Being left alone—and I am being left alone—isn’t quite as much what I wanted as I thought. Is this how people become evil? I don’t want to be.

  I wrote to Auntie Teg, trying to sound cheerful. I also wrote to my father, hoping I might persuade him to take me to see her, maybe, and see Grampar in hospital. They’re the only people I have left now. He wouldn’t want to see them, but I could and he could wait in the car. It would be really nice to see some people who like me. Five more days to half term and getting out of this place for a week.

  MONDAY 22ND OCTOBER 1979

  In chemistry today, Gill came and sat by me. It was very brave of her, actually, considering how everyone has been behaving. “So you don’t think I’m a voodoo leper?” I asked straight out at the end of class.

  “I’m a scientist,” she said. “I don’t believe in any of that. And I know you got in trouble for sending me a bun.”

  It was lunchtime, so we went to the dining hall together. I don’t care what people think. She says she doesn’t read fiction much at all, but she’ll lend me a book of Asimov’s science essays called The Left Hand of the Electron. She has three brothers, all older. The oldest one is at Oxford. They’re all scientists too. I like her. She’s restful.

  The Magus is very weird. I’m not sure whether I like it, but I can’t wait to get back to it and I keep thinking about it all the time. It’s not about magic, not really, but the atmosphere is just like. It’s an odd thing to read, because he’s always walking for miles across the thyme-scented island, like we used to do. We’d think nothing of walking miles on the dramroads, up to Llwydcoed, or to Cwmdare. We’d usually get a bus to Penderyn, but once we were there we’d walk out across the tops for hours. I loved the views from up there. We’d lie down on the grass and stare up to see the skylarks, and we’d pick up bits of wool the sheep had dropped and card them and give them to the fairies.

  TUESDAY 23RD OCTOBER 1979

  Leg very bad today. I have days when I can sort of walk, and then other days. I suppose I could say days when stairs are bad and days when stairs are torture. Today is definitely one of the second kind. I got another letter, dammit. I need to burn them or something. They’re so malign they almost glow with it. I can see them out of the corner of my eye, though it might just be the pain doing odd things to me. Friday is half term. My father’s going to pick me up at six. He didn’t say where we’re going, but it’ll be away from here. I can’t take the letters, though of course I can’t leave them either.

  I’m not at all sure about the end of The Magus. It’s even more ambiguous than Triton. Who would write the last two lines in Latin, which almost nobody can read? It’s a library book, but I have lightly pencilled in the translation over the page:

  Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover, love.

  So Alison will love him, I suppose, for whatever that’s worth. It wasn’t enough before. He only really wanted her when he thought she was dead.

  In the last part of the book, back in London, when Nicholas wants back into the mystery, whatever it is, is just how I don’t want to be. I should never have tried to talk to that fairy. Let someone else do something about Dutch elm disease. It isn’t my problem. I have finished with saving the world, and I never expected it to be the slightes
t bit grateful anyway. I’ve got this stupid boring one-note pain droning on at me, and I understand Nicholas only too well there, because who wouldn’t want that? But also, I don’t want to be pathetic like him.

  THURSDAY 25TH OCTOBER 1979

  It wasn’t raining, for the first time in ages, and my leg was feeling a bit better, so I went out in the half hour after prep. I went down to the edge of the playing field by the ditch, where I saw the fairy before, and made a bonfire out of all the letters. It was almost dark, and it burned up very brightly at once, with only one match. I suppose it might have been the photograph paper, because she’d burned part before so it longed for fire. “Oft evil will doth evil mar,” as Gandalf put it. Oft, not always. You can’t rely on it, but it does seem to happen quite often.

  I felt much better once they were on fire. A few fairies came out and danced around the flames, the way they always do. We used to call them salamanders, and igneids. They’re an amazing colour, where blue flicks over and becomes orange. Most of them were acting as if they couldn’t see me, or I couldn’t see them, but one of them was looking at me, kind of sideways. She turned the yellow of the spots on the elm bark when she saw me looking, so I knew she knew what I’d asked before. “What can I do?” I asked, pathetic, despite what I said yesterday about Nicholas.