by Jo Walton
It was a long walk back in the dark, alone. Every step I was afraid of meeting my mother, come to see what had gone wrong with her plan to get them all. It was because of Mor she could try it, I see that now, because Mor was her daughter, her blood. I kept thinking that I couldn’t run, and she could. Mor felt further away than ever. The fairies had all fled the pain, naturally. Even Babel 17, which was right there in my bag, felt a long way away. But Auntie Teg was waiting with the car, and Gram-par at Fedw Hir, so pleased to see me, he’d have been heartbroken if I’d gone on. The bed was empty where the man had been making the blubba blubba noises, they’d already taken his empty body away. He was lucky to be able to go tonight. People who die in November have to wait a whole year. Like Mor. What happened to her? Will she have to wait until next year?
THURSDAY 1ST NOVEMBER 1979
The more I think about it, the less I understand about what happened. Does every valley have an opening like that? How about people who die in flat places? Is it actually old, older than the ironworks, or did the ironworks open it up where before it was smooth hillside? And where did they go? And was that really them, all of them? And what about Mor? Where is she now? Did my mother get her after all? Will the fairies help her? What about the rowan trees? I never heard that the rowan is the tree of death—that’s supposed to be the yew, the graveyard yew. But it was oak leaves, dry gold oak leaves. There’s one left in my bag. It doesn’t mean someone got left out, Mor had one, and there were still leaves crunching on the ground when I left, I brought more than enough. I thought I shook them all out, but there was one inside the back cover of Babel 17. What an odd book! Does language really shape the way it’s possible to think? I mean, like that?
I only seem to have questions today.
I was knackered, and my leg was unmentionable, so I stayed in and read all day. Then I made dinner for Auntie Teg for when she came home from school—baked mushrooms with onions and cheese and cream, and jacket potatoes with more cheese, and peas. She said how nice it was, and that she supposed men got that every day, if they had a wife, and what she needed wasn’t a husband who would expect that but a wife who would do it. It was lovely to be cooking with actual food. There’s something so grounding about it. It’s not that I was doing any magic, beyond the magic it is to take big flat mushrooms and raw potatoes and turn them into something totally delicious. I was just making dinner. But I wonder how much of cooking for someone else is magic anyway, more than I know about. I think it might all be. Auntie Teg’s dishes don’t like me any more than Persimmon does. The knives and peelers don’t cut me, but they turn awkward in my hands. They know I’m not the person supposed to be using them.
There’s supposed to be a Heinlein fantasy novel called Glory Road. That would be something! I wonder if Daniel has it? If not, there’s always blessed interlibrary loan.
FRIDAY 2ND NOVEMBER 1979
I went up to Aberdare again on the bus today. There wasn’t so much as a sniff of Mor or any fairy, though I kept getting the feeling they were disappearing as soon as I looked for them and appearing just where I couldn’t see them. That’s a game, of course, but I didn’t want to play it. I wanted answers, though I should know how impossible it is to get straight answers from them, even when they want something, which clearly they don’t just at the moment.
I went to Grampar’s house. I still have the front door key, though it’s stiffer than ever, and terribly hard to get in. Auntie Teg keeps it clean, but it was kind of dusty and unused-smelling even so. It’s a very little house, crammed in between two others. When Auntie Florrie lived there it didn’t have a bathroom, the bath was in the kitchen, and the toilet was a ty bach, outside. It was like that when my great-grandparents lived there too. My grandfather put in proper plumbing when he moved back in. I quite liked the bath in the kitchen, next to the coal fire. It was surprisingly cosy. But I used to hate going outside to the toilet, especially at night.
He moved in there after Mor died to get away from my mother. Everyone runs away from her. I didn’t officially ever live there. I officially lived with her. I even sometimes spent some time living with her, when she insisted, but mostly I didn’t, while Grampar was all right. I had my own bedroom, with my bed from home and the blue box. Most of my books and clothes were in her house, but I found a woolly jumper of Mor’s and my denim shorts with a lion on, and a copy of Destinies. Destinies is an American science fiction magazine that comes in paperback books, and they stock it in Lears and I love it. I bought the new one—“April–June”—there on Monday. I’m saving it to read on the train.
So I left a few books. I know I won’t be able to get them until Christmas, but they’re really piling up, and I’m pretty sure I won’t want to re-read the ones I left any time soon. There isn’t much room at school. Anyway, even if I miss them, I like them being there. If Gram-par gets well enough to come out of Fedw Hir and go home, I can go home too. Daniel doesn’t actually care, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. I feel as if I don’t actually live anywhere, and I hate that. The thought that there are eight books on the windowsill in my room in alphabetical order is comforting. It’s magic, too, it’s a magic link. My mother can’t get in there, and even if she could, they’re books. You can’t do magic with books unless they’re very special copies—and if she could, she already has all the rest of mine. She has all too much of mine, but there’s no way of getting it from her.
If I defeated her again, and I think I did, will she want revenge? It wasn’t at all like last time. It’s weirdly anticlimactic, especially since I can’t find Glorfindel to ask him the nine million questions I have.
I couldn’t lock the front door again. I locked it from inside and went out the back, then put the back door key in through the letterbox. I’ve told Auntie Teg, who’ll be the next person to come in.
I saw Moira and Leah and Nasreen after they got out of school this afternoon. They asked me what Arlinghurst was like, and I didn’t tell them, except for superficial things. Leah has got a boyfriend, Andrew who used to be so good at maths in Park School when we were all little. I said that and Moira said some of us were still little. She’s had a growth spurt. I wonder if I will. I’ve been the same height since I was twelve, when we were the tallest in the class, but now almost everyone has passed me. They told me all the gossip. Dorcas, who always used to be top in French and Welsh and whose parents are some kind of nutty religion, Seventh-day Adventists or something, has got pregnant. Sue has left because her parents were moving to England. It felt really normal, but also really weird, as if I was just pretending.
Back to Shrewsbury tomorrow, just when they’re going to be out of school and we could have done something together.
SATURDAY 3RD NOVEMBER 1979
The Crewe train is much smaller than the London train. It has a corridor and little carriages that seat eight, on sort of benches across from each other. There’s a luggage rack up above, and black and white photographs of places—in my carriage Newton Abbot, which I’ve never heard of. I wonder where it is? It looks nice. For most of the way I had the carriage to myself, though a middle-aged lady and her two children got on in Abergavenny and off in Hereford. They didn’t bother me much. Most of the time I alternated looking out of the window and reading, first my Destinies and then I started Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, which I also bought in Lears.
The train runs up the Welsh border. Once it gets away from Cardiff and Newport it’s all hills and fields as it goes up through the borders. The sun was in and out, in a fitful autumnal way, with that odd autumn afternoon light that looks almost like an underwater colour. The clouds made patches of darkness on the mountains, and when there was a patch of sun the grass seemed almost luminous, as if you could read by it. You can see the Sugarloaf from the train. Well, it’s a very distinctive mountain. We used to go to Abergavenny sometimes, and there was a song we’d sing in the car, “Over the hills to Abergavenny, hoping the weather’ll be fine.” It gave me a warm feeling to see
it, even just the railway station and the hills behind. I’ll mention going through it to Grampar when I write. After Abergavenny the train crosses the border into England somewhere, because Hereford is in England, and Ludlow definitely is. Ludlow is a little market town. It looks a lot like Oswestry, from the train, but a bit warmer.
The last stop before Shrewsbury is Church Stretton. A lot of people came into my carriage then, and my beautiful corner where I’d felt so comfortable all the way became a bit crowded. My heart sank a bit too. I’d managed to enjoy the journey up to that point without thinking about where I was ending up.
Daniel wasn’t waiting in Shrewsbury station. I’d thought he’d be on the platform, but he wasn’t. I went out through the barrier and stood in the car park. I thought about getting a bus but I didn’t have the faintest idea what bus I’d want or where it would go from. That’s another thing, in the Valleys I know where all the buses go, and their routes, and which ones are useful to me. Red-and-whites go to Cardiff, and the dark-red ones are locals. It’s easy to think about knowing the dramroads and the way things fit together, but I’d never thought how useful it is to know buses, until I was standing there and felt so stuck. I had my bag, and a bag of books too, and I wasn’t exactly weighed down with luggage but it wasn’t nothing.
I had two pounds ten left of the ten pounds. (That might not seem like much, but I had bought a lot of books.) I went back into the station, where there’s a W. H. Smiths and bought a map, a pink-covered one inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map of Shrewsbury and district. (I always thought it was “ordinance,” but apparently not. Ordnance. What a funny word, and what a funny concept too. They surveyed the whole country for military logistics, and now they sell anyone the maps. Well, I wasn’t planning to invade.) I went back out into the car park and sat down on a bench. I found Mickleham, where the Old Hall is, and thought that a bus to Wolverhampton would probably go near there, when Daniel got there after all. I was relieved to see the black Bentley draw in. I folded the map up and put it away, but he saw it.
“I see you’ve bought a map,” he said.
“Maps are very interesting, really,” I said, embarrassed, though it was him who ought to be embarrassed, being late. I got into the car. He threw a cigarette butt out of the window and drove off. He shouldn’t do that, even in a car park. It’s a bad habit. It could start a fire. I felt thoroughly disapproving of him.
I think I’ll buy as many Ordnance Survey maps as I can. They’re arranged in logical squares. I could collect the set and get the whole country, eventually. Then I’d always be able to find my way, and know where places are in relation to other places. Though they wouldn’t do me much good if they were at home when I happened to be somewhere. I’ll just have to be organised and put the map for where I’m going, and the maps around it maybe, into my bag when I go out.
Shrewsbury is where we bought my uniform. It’s a town, not a city, and it all seems to be built of the same rose-pink-coloured stone.
We went back to the Old Hall for high tea. It’s afternoon tea if you have tea and cakes and scones and little sandwiches, but high tea if there’s something hot and substantial as well. In this case it was a hot dish with pasta and cheese and ham, but everything else was cold. The sandwiches were tuna and cucumber, ham and parsley, and cheese and pickle. I liked them a lot. The scones were as dry as the Kalahari. They also fell to crumbs when you put butter on them. I could make better scones when I was four. I didn’t say so, but maybe next time I’ll tell one of the aunts (I still can’t tell them apart) that I’d like to have a try at making some. It seems the sort of thing they might approve.
They talked about nothing but school, and expected me to contribute with current news about teachers and how the houses are doing. They were in Scott, all three of them, and they care a lot more about it than I do. I don’t understand them one bit. They’re grown up and they have their own house—and it’s a jolly nice house too. But they don’t do anything. They don’t read, and they don’t work and they don’t make anything. They organise jumble sales for church. Gramma used to do that, and she was teaching full time as well. They keep the house nice, but that’s not a full-time job for three people. They pay my father to manage the estate and the money, so they don’t do that. They’re rich, reasonably rich, I think, but they don’t go anywhere or do anything, they just sit there eating awful scones and talking with real enthusiasm about the time Scott won the Cup. I’m not sure exactly how old they are, but they were born before 1940, so they’re at least forty, and they still care about a stupid house they were in at school. They weren’t just pretending, so as to be interesting to me. I can tell the difference. They were talking to each other far more. Why do they stay there? And why didn’t any of them get married? Maybe they hate children. They certainly seem to find me a trial, but that doesn’t count; if they’d wanted to they could have had nice upper-class English children of their own and trained them not to be surly.
Daniel has Glory Road and Waldo and Magic, Inc., which he says are both Heinlein fantasies. He has also lent me Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword. I’m still reading the Callahan stories, which are amazingly sweet, not much like Telempath, but I’m enjoying them.
Tomorrow church, then lunch with the aunts, then back to school, dammit.
MONDAY 5TH NOVEMBER 1979
I remember how far away school felt from the labyrinth, but the second I got back it was totally pervasive and as if I’d never been away.
It’s funny how insignificant the reportable parts of my half term are. It was only a week, but so much happened in it compared to a school week that it might have been a year. But when I was asked about it in French Conversation first period this morning I could only say “Je visite mon grandpere dans Londres et je visite mon autre grandpere dans Pays de Galles.” Two visits to grandfathers, that’s all, and all Madame said was that it should be en not dans. I sink into school as into a warm bath, and it closes over my head. Even if I could tell them about Halloween and Glorfindel and the dead I wouldn’t.
Glory Road is deeply disappointing. I hate it. I stopped reading it and read Gill’s book of Asimov science essays in preference, that’s how much I hate it. I love Heinlein but he clearly doesn’t get fantasy. It’s just stupid. And nobody saying “Oh, Scar” would be heard as “Oscar,” it’s not even plausible. It’s almost as bad as its cover, and that’s saying something, as the cover is so bad that Miss Carroll raised her eyebrows at it from her librarian desk on the other side of the room. It’s funny how Triton, which is all about sex and sociology, has a cover of a spaceship exploding, while Glory Road, which does mention sex here and there but is actually a stupid adventure story, has a cover like that.
There’s some poetry competition thing. Everybody seems to think I’ll win it as a foregone conclusion.
I miss the mountains. I didn’t miss them before, except in thinking how unattractively flat it was here. But now I have been home and had them around me for a while, I miss them actively, more than my living family, more than being able to shut the toilet door. It’s not really flat here, it rolls, and I can see the mountains of North Wales in the distance when it’s clear. But I miss having the hills tucked up around me.
TUESDAY 6TH NOVEMBER 1979
Fireworks and a bonfire last night in the school grounds. I saw some of the fire-fairies clustering. Nobody else saw them. You can only see them if you already believe in them, which is why children are the most likely to. People like me don’t stop seeing them. It would be insane of me to stop believing in them. But lots of children do when they grow up, even though they’ve seen them. I’m not a child any more, though I’m not grown up either. I have to say I can’t wait.
But my cousin Geraint, who’s four years older than me, saw the fairies when playing with us in the cwm. He was eleven or twelve, and we were seven or eight. We told him he should close his eyes and when he opened them he’d see them, and he did. He was amazed by them. He couldn’t talk to them, because
he only spoke English, but we translated what he said, and what they said. We must have been eight, because I remember freely translating what they said into purest Tolkien, and we didn’t read The Lord of the Rings until we were eight. At that point, when we were about that age, we were always looking for someone else to play with, and preferably a boy, because in books that’s the group you have to have to go into another world. We thought the fairies would take us to Narnia, or Elidor. Geraint seemed like a good candidate. He saw the fairies, and he was awed by them. He liked them, and they liked him. But he lives in Burgess Hill, near Brighton, and he only spent summers in Aberdare, and the next summer he couldn’t see them, he said he was too old to play, and he remembered what had happened as if it had been a game where we’d been pretending to be fairies. All he wanted to do was play football. We ran away and left him in the garden with his stupid ball, disconsolate, but he didn’t tell the grownups we’d abandoned him. He said at dinner that he’d had a very nice day playing. Poor Geraint.
I had a letter this morning, which I haven’t opened, and also a letter from Sam. He asked how I liked the Plato, and if I’d found any more, and he writes just the way he speaks. I’ll write back on Sunday. There isn’t any Plato in the school library. I asked Miss Carroll, and she says they don’t teach Greek so there’s no call for it. I might have a problem with interlibrary loan, as I don’t know translators, or even all the titles. But I can order the ones listed in The Symposium of course, so I’ll do that.
Penguin are the best of any publisher about listing other titles, even if they didn’t publish them. I have a whole pile of things to order on Saturday, because Up the Line has a whole long list of Robert Silverbergs. Also, I am going to order Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains. Sylvia Engdahl wrote this totally brilliant book called Heritage of the Star, and Puffin, who are Penguin, brought it out and I read it. It’s about people living with lots of superstitions but also some technology they think is magic, and they’re oppressed by Scholars and Technicians and anyone who thinks wrongly is called a Heretic. And actually they’re colonists on another planet but they don’t know, and it’s just brilliant. In the story, there’s a promise that when they can know, when everything will be all right, they’ll go “Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains,” and there’s a sequel with that title, but I’ve never seen it anywhere, though I’ve been looking for a long time.