Among Others

by Jo Walton

  Today I went into Cardiff and bought books. The thing about Lears is that it has American books. Chapter and Verse is very nice, and I always go there too, but they don’t import. Then there are a number of second-hand bookshops. There’s the one in the Castle Arcade, the one on the Hayes, and the one by the casino that has porn in the back. I think I’m the only person who ever buys the books from the front. They always glare at me, as if I wanted to go into their stupid back room and buy their stupid porn. Or maybe they don’t want to sell the normal books from the front because now they’ll have to get more? I got The Best of Galaxy Volume IV for 10p, and it has a Zelazny story in it.

  Then in the evening we went up the valley to see Grampar. He’s out of hospital and in a nursing home called Fedw Hir. Everyone else there is a loony, practically. There’s a man who sits going “Blubba, blubba, blubba,” with his lips, and another one who cries out at intervals. It’s the most horrible depressing place I’ve ever seen in my life, all those old men with their jaws sunken and their eyes dull, sitting on their beds in pajamas and looking as if they’re in death’s anteroom. Grampar is one of the best there. He’s paralysed all down one side, but his other side is as strong as ever, and he can talk. His mind is all there, though his skin isn’t the right colour. His hair has always been grey, ever since I can remember, but now it’s white and there’s a patch in it that looks the colour of curdled milk.

  He can talk, though he didn’t have much to say. He’s hoping to come home soon, but Auntie Teg doesn’t think so, though she hopes to have him out for the day at Christmas. She wants me to come, and I said I only would if I don’t have to see my mother at all. I don’t know if we can manage that. Grampar was absolutely thrilled to see me, and wanted to know all about me and what I was doing, and that was awkward, of course. He won’t have Daniel’s name mentioned, not at all ever, he hasn’t let anyone mention it since Daniel abandoned my mother. So of course I can’t say anything about him. But I told him about school, leaving out quite how awful it is and how everyone hates me. I told him about my marks and about the library. He wanted to know if my leg was getting better, and I said it was.

  It isn’t. But I realise now it’s nothing. All right, it hurts, but I can walk about. I’m mobile. He’s just stuck there, though he gets some physical therapy, Auntie Teg says.

  When we were walking out, Auntie Teg, who goes there often, was saying goodnight to some of the other men, who she knows, and who either didn’t respond or responded inappropriately with howling and stammering. I couldn’t help thinking about Sam, who must be around the same age as these men, and his nice warm room and the piles of books and the electric samovar. He was a person, and these men were just refuse, really, the remains of people. “We have got to get Grampar out of there,” I said.

  “Yes, but it’s not that easy. He can’t manage on his own. I could come up at weekends, but he’d need a nurse. It’s very expensive. They’re hoping maybe in the spring.”

  “I could live with him and help,” I said, and for a moment it hung there like a little star of hope.

  “You need to be in school. And anyway, you couldn’t help him walk. He leans all his weight on the person supporting him.”

  She’s right. I’d fold up under that, my leg would give way and we’d both be on the floor.

  I should write to him. I can do that, nice cheery letters. Auntie Teg can read them out, it’ll give them something to talk about at visiting time. We have got to get him out of there. It’s incredibly grim. And I thought school was bad.

  TUESDAY 30TH OCTOBER 1979

  I went up the valley on the red-and-white bus today. It’s interesting. It goes on the old road all the way, up through the narrow streets of terraced houses, through Pontypridd, and all the way I could see horrible coal tips and slag heaps and ugly houses crammed together, and above them, the hills. When I got to Aberdare, I got off and walked up the cwm to the ruins we call Osgiliath. I don’t know what they really were. The trees were practically leafless, and there were a lot of wet leaves on the ground. It wasn’t actually raining, which was good, as I urgently needed to sit down by the time I got there. I hadn’t remembered how far it was. Or rather, I’d remembered it was about half a mile, the nearest of any of them to a bus stop, but still a long way for me to walk now.

  I wasn’t looking for fairies, especially. I just wanted to go there. But the fairies were there. Glorfindel was. They were waiting for me.

  I’d like to report our conversation as if it were like talking to Tolkien’s elves. “Long we have missed you and awaited your coming, Mori, long we have sought you in vain among the trees and palaces. Word came to us from a far country that you still walked the world, riven from your twin, so we waited yet in hope until today the breeze brought us news of your coming. Be welcome among us, for we have great need of you.”

  But it wasn’t like that. Sometimes Mor and I would play over a conversation with the fairies with me saying what they should have said in language like that. That speech is essentially what Glorfindel said, what he meant to say, only most of it wasn’t in words at all, and what was, was in Welsh and not that kind of words.

  Glorfindel’s beautiful. He looks like a young man, nineteen or twenty, dark-haired and grey-eyed. He wears a cloak of leaves that swirls around him, except that it isn’t really a cloak. It isn’t as if he could take it off.

  The fairies are very wise. Or rather, they know a lot. They’ve had a lot of experience. They understand better than anyone else how magical things work. That’s why it would have been such a disaster if my mother had got control of them. She would have used that knowledge to make herself powerful. They wouldn’t have been able to help doing it for her. I don’t know how it would have played out in the real world. I don’t suppose she’d really have become a dark queen, not exactly. But while she can’t ever try that again, she’s trying something else. I should have known.

  What Glorfindel wants is for me to go, tomorrow, up through Ithilien to Minos’s labyrinth, where he says the dead will walk. Tomorrow is Halloween. He said I need to take oak leaves and make a door for them to pass through. That will stop her getting hold of them. Fairies know a lot, but they can’t do a lot, they can’t really interact all that much with the world, they can’t affect things. They have to get other people to do it for them, and that means me. According to Glorfindel, he’d done as much as he could in making me get here this week. He hadn’t known where I was until I spoke to the fairy, and he couldn’t reach out until I’d burned the letters. But then he arranged things to bring me to him. (He rearranged the school timetable? All the school timetables? He arranged for Daniel to agree to let me come? He made me want to come to the cwm today? Sometimes I hate magic.)

  He said it would be easy, not like last time. No risk. The difficult thing is that I’ll have to be there at dusk. I thought that would be really hard, but when I lied to Auntie Teg and said I wanted to have tea with Moira from the Grammar School, she said she’d pick me up at seven and take me to Fedw Hir to see poor old Grampar again.

  Reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Spell Sword, which is fun so far.

  WEDNESDAY 31ST OCTOBER 1979

  Near thing, but not the way I expected at all.

  So the first thing was, it was a long loooong walk. No fairies were anywhere near me as I walked it. They hate pain, I don’t know why, but I’ve known it as long as I’ve known anything about them. Even a skinned knee or a turned ankle will send them scattering. The pain screaming out every step from my leg must have been enough to scare them off for miles around. It’s a good thing I set off early, to give it time to subside after I got there.

  King Minos’s labyrinth is right up the mountain, the Graig. It’s one of the highest ruins. It was a very old iron works, one of the first, and an iron ore mine, not a deep one, just a scratching and mostly filled in. What’s left of it really does look like a labyrinth, or a maze anyway. You have to thread your way through the walls, and though none of the
m are more than shoulder-height it does feel like following a maze pattern. The bit where the entrance to the diggings used to be is in the centre, and it’s a bit sunken, and there’s a kind of lane that leads down to it. I sat on the wall there and rested, leaning my cane up against the wall. It was spotting with rain, so I couldn’t read, though I’d brought my book, of course. It was Delany’s Babel 17, I’d been reading it on the bus. I’d brought oak leaves too, I picked them up on the way up through heavily wooded Ithilien. Glorfindel hadn’t said how many, but I’d kept stuffing them into my bag as I went. Oaks hang onto their leaves all winter, like mallorns, so it’s easy to find them.

  I was wearing my school coat, because I don’t have another any more. I hadn’t brought my coat when I’d run away. My school coat has the Arlinghurst badge on it, a rose, with the motto Dum spiro spero, which actually I rather like—while I breathe I shall hope. I heard a joke about a school deciding to have “I hear, I see, I learn” which translates as “Audio video disco.” I spent a little while thinking about that. At this distance, I could kind of like the motto. When I’m there, I feel I have to hate everything about it or I’m giving in. School seemed very far away as I sat there, coat notwithstanding. There’s something real and essential about the landscape in the valleys that makes everything else seem like a distant distraction.

  After a while the sun came out, feebly. The clouds were scudding across the sky at a tremendous pace, and I was looking across the valley from almost as high as they were. There aren’t many trees up there, just two spindly rowans clinging by the entrance to the old diggings. There were flocks of birds circling about, probably deciding which direction to migrate, marking patterns across the sky. After the sun came the fairies, peeping out at me behind walls, and at last Glorfindel.

  It’s very unsatisfactory writing down conversation with a fairy. Either I put it into proper words, which really is making it up, or I try to represent something that’s only partly in words with just those few words. And if I write it down like I did yesterday, it’s a lie. I’m saying what I want him to have said, when in fact what he said was a few words and a whole lot of feeling going along with that. How do you write that down? Maybe Delany could.

  We didn’t talk all that much, anyway. He sat beside me, and I could almost feel him. Then I could feel him next to me, which is beyond unusual, and then I started to have sexual feelings. I know, unthinkable, with a fairy. All the fairies came closer, then, which worried me and once I’d started worrying about it Glorfindel was as insubstantial as ever, though still right next to me.

  I remembered then that I do know stories about women who had sex with fairies, and every single one of those stories is about pregnancy. I looked at Glorfindel, and yes, he’s beautiful and . . . ineluctably masculine . . . and he was looking at me soulfully, and yes I would like to, but not if it means that. No way! Even if all the normal men I meet look at me as if I am dogmeat. And in a way, that would be incest too, with Glorfindel. More so.

  “Untouched?” he said, or something like that, I’m never absolutely sure what that word means. But I knew what he was talking about.

  “So far, I’ve fought off everyone who’s tried,” I said, sounding much fiercer than I intended, though it’s nothing but the truth, not that Daniel needed fighting exactly. “You know about Carl.”

  “Dead,” he said, with gloating finality. Carl is dead. He was a policeman, and he went to Northern Ireland, because the pay was better, and he got blown up. Or, to put it another way, I had asked Glorfindel how to get rid of him, and I stole his comb and sank it in Croggin Bog. That was when he was staying with my mother and he came into my room and sat too close and kept trying to touch me. I bit him, hard, and he hit me, but he backed off. I knew that wasn’t the end of it. I was still fourteen then. Dropping someone’s comb in a bog isn’t murder. I thought it had worked when he went away.

  Glorfindel just looked at me, and I knew he was my friend, as much as any of the fairies are, as much as they can be, being what they are. Lots of them don’t care about people or the world at all, and even the ones that do aren’t like people. I don’t know what it meant to him for desire to be in the air between us. His name isn’t really Glorfindel, he doesn’t even really have a name. He isn’t human. I felt very aware of that.

  The sun was sinking behind the hill we were sitting on, but it wasn’t really set yet; in the next valley it was still full daylight. But I suppose there’s always a next valley, all the way around the world until you get to tomorrow. Our shadows were very long. Glorfindel got up and told me to scatter the leaves in a spiral through the maze, ending at the two rowan trees. I did, and then I sat and waited as the light faded. I wasn’t sure if I was going to see anything, or whether it would be one of those times when I do what I’ve been told and it makes no sense and I never know whether it worked or what it did. The sky faded until it got to that point where there’s no colour left in anything but it isn’t dark. I started to think about how awful going back was going to be.

  Then they came walking up the dramroad out of the valley through the twilight. They were ghosts, I suppose, the procession of the dead. They weren’t pale kings and pale maidens, they were work-worn men and women—perfectly ordinary people, except for being dead. You’d never mistake them for living people. You couldn’t quite see through them, but they were even more drained of colour than everything else, and they weren’t quite as solid as they ought to be. One of the men I recognised. He had been sitting in Fedw Hir near Grampar making blubbing sounds with his mouth. Now he strode along easily with a spring in his step. His face was grave and composed, he was a man with dignity and purpose. He bent and picked up one of my oak leaves from the path and offered it like a ticket at the cinema as he passed between the two trees. I didn’t see anyone take it. I couldn’t see into the darkness at all.

  Some of the others were milling about at the entrance, they had come this far and were unable to get in, because of whatever my mother had done. When they saw the old man give the leaf, they started picking up the leaves. Then each passed through, one at a time. They were all very earnest and dignified, not speaking at all, taking their turns to go between the trees and vanish into the darkness. I don’t know whether they were going into the ground or under the hill or to another world or down to Acheron or what. There was a fat woman and a young man with a motorcycle helmet, who seemed to be together. All the dead saw each other, but they didn’t seem to see me or the fairies, who crowded to each side of the path, watching. The young man gestured for the woman to go ahead, and she did, solemnly, as if they were in church.

  Then I saw Mor. I hadn’t been expecting it at all. She was walking along quite unconcerned, a leaf in her hand as if she was playing some serious part in a game. I shouted her name, and she turned and saw me and smiled, with such gladness that it broke my heart. I reached out for her, and she for me, but she wasn’t really there, like a fairy, worse than a fairy. She looked afraid, and she looked from side to side, seeing the fairies, of course, lining the path.

  “Let go,” Glorfindel said, almost in my ear, a whisper so warm it moved my hair.

  I wasn’t holding her, except that I was. Our hands reached out and did not touch, but the connection between us was tangible. It glowed violet. It was the only thing with colour. It wasn’t visible normally, but if it had been for the last year it would have been trailing around me like a broken bridge. Now it was whole again, I was whole again, we were together. “Holding or dying,” he said in my ear, and I understood, he meant that I could hold her here and that would be bad, and I trusted him about that although I didn’t understand it, or I could go with her through that door to death. That would be suicide. But I couldn’t let her go. It had been so very hard without her all that time, such a rotten year. I’d always meant to die too, if dying was necessary.

  “Half way,” Glorfindel said, and he didn’t mean I was half dead without her or that she was halfway through or any of that, he meant that
I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find out how it came out.

  There may be stranger reasons for being alive.

  There are books. There’s Auntie Teg and Grampar. There’s Sam, and Gill. There’s interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head. There’s the distant hope of a karass sometime in the future. There’s Glorfindel who really cares about me as much as a fairy can care about anything.

  I let go. Reluctantly, but I let go. She clung. She held on, so that letting go wasn’t enough. If I wanted to live, I had to push her away, through the connection that bound us, though she was crying and calling to me and holding on as hard as she could. It is the hardest thing I have ever done, worse than when she died. Worse than when they dragged me off her and the ambulance took her away and let my mother go with her, smiling, but not me. Worse than when Auntie Teg told me she was dead.

  Mor was always braver than I was, more practical, nicer, just generally a better person. She was the better half of us.

  But she was afraid now, and lonely and bereft, and dead, and I had to push her away. She changed as she clung, so she was like ivy, all over me, and seaweed, tendrils clutching, and slime, impossible to shake off. Now I wanted to get her off I couldn’t, and even though she was changing I knew she was still Mor all the time. I could feel that she was. I was afraid. I didn’t want to hurt her. In the end, I put my weight down on my leg. The pain broke the bond, the same way it frightens the fairies. The pain was something my living body could do, the same as picking up oak leaves and bringing them up a mountain.

  She went on, then, or tried to but the twilight had became darkness, and couldn’t go through the door, it wasn’t there any more. She stood by the trees looking like herself again, and very young and lost, and I almost reached out for her again. Then she was gone, in an eyeblink, the way fairies go.