by Jo Walton
The poetry competition is nationwide. Everyone in Arlinghurst has to write a poem, then they’ll pick the best from each form to send in. I can’t believe people really think I’ll win. All right, realistically, I’d win out of Lower VC, or even all of Form V, probably, because the academic standards here are not especially high. But out of all the fifteen-year-olds in the whole country? No way. The best one in the school is going to be awarded fifty house points. That’s made everyone as keen as mustard. The best hundred in the country are going to be published in a book, and the best one wins a hundred pounds and a typewriter. I’d really like a typewriter. Not that I can type, but you have to send typewritten submissions to magazines.
Deirdre came sidling up to me at lunch, and sat down one seat away from me, as if casually, but doing it so badly that lots of people noticed. She looked frightened, poor dab, but resolute. “My mother told me I should stick up for you,” she whispered.
“Good for your mother,” I said, in a normal tone.
“Will you help me with my poem?” she asked.
So I’m going to help her write a poem at prep, which will probably mean writing it. I haven’t written mine yet, though there’s plenty of time, I have until Friday.
THURSDAY 8TH NOVEMBER 1979
I wrote Deirdre’s poem, and I was quite pleased with it. But yesterday as I was sitting here reading Waldo and Magic, Inc. (which are two quite different novellas), Miss Carroll came over with a pile of modern poetry books, which she said she thought I might like to look at.
It seems poetry has moved on since Chesterton. Who knew? Clearly not Gramma, and nobody in any schools I’ve been to. I’d seen one stanza of one poem by Auden, that Delany quoted, and not even heard T. S. Eliot’s name, or Ted Hughes’s either. I got quite drunk on Eliot and was late for Latin and got an order mark. I got revenge by translating Horace just like Eliot, and she couldn’t say anything, because it was also accurate.
I’ve written a poem for the competition. I don’t feel very confident of it. I’ve mastered the Chestertonian, I really have, but I don’t feel as if I’ve had time to master this. It’s about nuclear war and Dutch elm disease and how we should actually be getting into space while we can.
There’s apparently a long T. S. Eliot poem called Four Quartets which the school doesn’t have. I’ll order that on Saturday as well. According to Miss Carroll, T. S. Eliot worked in a bank when he was writing The Waste Land because being a poet doesn’t pay.
“Oh dark, dark, dark . . . those are pearls that were his eyes . . . With these fragments have I shored up my ruins.”
FRIDAY 9TH NOVEMBER 1979
It doesn’t seem so terrible that the elms are dying when it’s autumn and all the trees seem dead.
Another letter. I’m going to have to burn them again. I almost want to know if she’s said anything about what I did. I’d like to have confirmation. Though I know it worked.
I handed my poem in. Miss Lewes looked at it but didn’t say anything. Miss Gilbert, who teaches English to the Sixth Form, will be judging.
I’m hoping there’ll be some books waiting for me at the library tomorrow, because I’m almost through with what I have. I’m reading Nine Princes in Amber again.
I keep dreaming about Mor. I dream she’s drowning and I don’t save her. I dream I push her in front of the car instead of trying to pull her away. It hit both of us. I have a reminder of that in every step I take, but not in my dreams. I dream I’m burying her alive in the centre of the labyrinth, throwing earth down on top of her while she struggles and it gets in her hair.
It was a year ago today. I’ve been trying not to think about it, but it keeps ambushing me.
SATURDAY 10TH NOVEMBER 1979
Going into town on the bus, the anticipation of the library filled me with delight. It almost made the wet grey streets nice, but not quite. It was drizzling, and the sky was very low and flat.
The librarian, the man, was a little startled at how many books I wanted to order, but he just gave me a pile of blanks and had me fill them in myself. Lots of books were waiting for me! Then I went down to the bookshop and bought Four Quartets, Ted Hughes’s Crow and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsinger. I also bought a box of matches.
I did not buy a book called Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to “Tolkien at his best.” The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post, a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn’t a comparison anyone could make, except to say “Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.” I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea. I expect Lord Foul’s Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Silmarillion.
The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings, is that it’s perfect. It’s this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It’s not, I’m pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything. I remember finishing The Hobbit and handing it to Mor and saying “Read it. It’s pretty good. Isn’t there another one of these around here somewhere?” And I remember finding it—stealing it from my mother’s room. When the door was open, the light from the corridor fell on the shelves R and S and T. We were always afraid to go further in, in case she was hiding in the darkness and grabbed us. She did that once, when Mor was putting back The Crystal Cave. When we took one of her books, usually, we ruffled the shelf so it wouldn’t show. But the one-volume Lord of the Rings was so fat that it didn’t work. I was terrified she’d see. I almost didn’t take it. But either she didn’t notice or she didn’t care—I think she might have been away with one of her boyfriends.
I haven’t said what I wanted to about the thing about it.
Reading it is like being there. It’s like finding a magic spring in a desert. It has everything. (Except lust, Daniel said. But it has Wormtongue.)
It is an oasis for the soul. Even now I can always retreat into Middle Earth and be happy.
How can you compare anything to that? I can’t believe Stephen Donaldson’s hubris.
SUNDAY 11TH NOVEMBER 1979
I climbed out of the dorm window in the middle of the night last night and made a circle and burned the letters in it. Nobody saw me. I made the circle out of things that were lying around, leaves and twigs and stones, and I put in the oak leaf, my piece of wood, and my pocket rock, which comes from the beach in Amroth. I could feel it working, I felt as if I was under an umbrella. I read the letters first. I wanted to know what she’d said. I might as well not have bothered. The only thing she said about what I did was “You were always the one who was most like me,” which is—well, a snowman is more like a cloud than a lump of coal, but neither of them are much alike. I folded the letters into a pagoda and set them on fire. I didn’t look at the pictures, but I saw there were some.
I stirred the ashes, so there was nothing left at all. Then I took the pocket rock and held it up under the moon (a three-quarter moon, I don’t know if that’s right) and tried to make it a protection against bad dreams. I don’t know if it worked. I took the leaf and my piece of wood back.
I climbed back in and got into bed. Everyone else was asleep. The moonlight was on Lorraine’s face. She looked strangely beautiful, and also distant, as if she was dead, as if she’d been dead for centuries and she was a marble statue of herself on her tomb.
The only problem with this is that if she keeps sending letters, I’m going to have to keep burning them. But late at night is definitely safer, from a school point of view, than when people are around.
Deirdre gave me a bun—an iced bun from Finefare, really sticky and sweet. They come in a packet of six, so she gave them to quite a lot of people, but I really appreciated the gesture. It’s nice not to feel like a total pariah.
I wro
te to Daniel about Callahan’s Place and Stephen Donaldson’s hubris. I wrote to Sam about Plato, and told him about ordering more. I told him about The Last of the Wine as well, because even if he doesn’t like novels usually he might like that. I wrote to Grampar about going through Abergavenny and about missing the mountains and about all the ball games they play here and how I’d enjoy them if I could run. I can remember running. My whole body remembers. It’s a kinetic memory, if that’s the word. It was a bit of a lie to say I’d enjoy the games. I enjoy sitting in the library reading, and I hate the way the games are so important to the girls while being totally trivial really. What I enjoy is throwing a ball and running and catching, not agonising about the score.
What is it with me and Anne McCaffrey and getting the second book first? Dragonsinger is the sequel to something I’ve never seen called Dragonsong! I read it anyway. It’s oddly light compared to the other two. It’s set in Pern, rather than being about Pern, if that makes sense. I would like a fire-lizard. Or a dragon, for that matter. I’d come swooping in on my blue dragon and she’d breathe fire and burn down the school!
MONDAY 12TH NOVEMBER 1979
Deirdre’s poem has won the school level of the competition.
Despite the fact that I wrote it, I am mortified. Everyone expected me to win, and I expected it myself. What was wrong with my poem? I suppose Miss Gilbert is a traditionalist. Nobody has said anything, and I congratulated Deirdre with everyone else, but I feel publicly humiliated. (On the other hand, I did actually write it, and Deirdre at least knows that.)
TUESDAY 13TH NOVEMBER 1979
Deirdre came up to me after prep and dragged me out into the grounds where we could talk without being heard. She started crying and being incoherent almost at once, but what she wanted, I think, was to say that I shouldn’t have given her my best work. Well, I didn’t. But she thinks I did because it won. It’s the first time she’s ever won anything. I don’t think she’s ever earned a house mark before, except maybe for scoring a goal. I told her she deserved it. She sat right next to me at breakfast and nobly offered me her sausage, which I accepted, not because it would have been an insult but because I was hungry.
Wordsworth are jolly proud of her. Sandra Mortimer, the House Captain of Wordsworth, a redhead whose eyes are pink-rimmed and watery, personally spoke to Deirdre, who almost died of the honour.
Reading The Shockwave Rider, Brunner. It’s very good, but it isn’t Stand on Zanzibar. I wonder what it’s like to have written your masterpiece, and to know you’ll never do it again?
WEDNESDAY 14TH NOVEMBER 1979
This is the true and complete story of how Deirdre and I each got an order mark this morning.
We were in the shower, which is a long trench of tile with a dozen showerheads, with fairly feeble pressure and variably warm water. Give me a bath any day. There’s hot water, meaning water that isn’t icy cold, between seven and eight in the morning, and between seven and eight at night. There are also showers in the gym, which are obligatory after games, but they’re cold and mostly the girls just run through them and splash off any mud. Any serious washing gets done first thing in the morning or last thing at night. It must be lesbian paradise then, because there are always acres of female flesh jiggling about.
There were probably fifteen girls in there this morning, competing for the limited water. Deirdre and I had a showerhead and were relying on my leper status to keep it to ourselves. I saw Shagger casting a few glances towards us, as if she might be repenting her shunning. As I stepped out of the water flow to shampoo my hair, Deirdre said, laughingly, “You’re getting breasts.”
“Am not!” I said, automatically, even before looking down. Then I looked down, and saw that I sort of am. I’ve had sort of breast buds for ages, behind my nipples. Now that’s all my mother has, so I thought that would be all I had, but now they were swelling out and kind of pouching. Lots of the other girls in VC have quite jiggly breasts already. It doesn’t make as much of a distinction as whether you have pubic hair, which I have, much darker than the hair on my head, and periods, which almost everyone does by now. I’ve had periods for two years. I was afraid they’d stop me being able to see fairies, but they made no difference at all, whatever C. S. Lewis thought about puberty.
“You need a bra,” Deirdre said.
“Do not,” I riposted feebly. I pushed her out of the spray and rinsed my hair. As the shampoo was running down, I looked down at my incipient breasts. “Hey Dee, do you think they’re an awfully funny shape?”
She was laughing so much she could hardly catch her breath. People were starting to look to see what was so funny.
“No, really,” I said, quietly but vehemently. “They’re sort of pear shaped. Other people’s aren’t like that.” I looked around the girls in the showers, and none of them had breasts shaped the way mine were.
“They’re fine,” Deirdre said.
“Hey Dreary, what’s so funny?” Lorraine asked.
“Commie just made a great joke,” Deirdre said.
Some of the girls finishing in the shower and wrapping themselves in towels started to sing “Jake the Peg.” I glared at them, but it didn’t work because of the water.
Deirdre and I stood together under the falling water. “They’re fine,” she whispered. “They just look funny because you’re seeing them from on top. If you could see them straight on the way you see other people’s you’d see they’re the same.”
“In a mirror,” I said.
“You should say ‘looking glass,’ Karen says,” Deirdre said.
“Crap,” I said, using another word that school didn’t approve.
The only mirror is above the row of sinks in the toilets where we brush our teeth, and our hair. It’s a long strip of mirror fixed on the wall, with the light strip above it.
“Come on,” I said.
Deirdre giggled and grabbed her towel, and I grabbed mine and wrapped it around me like a cloak. I put my soap and my shampoo back into my sponge bag, because otherwise someone would steal it, or open the shampoo and pour it down the drain, that happened to me with my shower gel my first week, when I left it in the shower.
We went into the toilets, which were right next to the shower room. There was nobody there, which was easy to see because none of the toilet cubicles has doors. I put the sponge bag down and wrapped my towel around my head like a turban. That’s a useful skill which Sharon had taught me. If you give it a tuck, it just stays there. Sharon has long unruly hair and it keeps even that in place. So my towel was here and Deirdre’s was around her shoulders, and we were otherwise naked.
We saw at once that the strip of mirror was useless. It reflected our faces and necks, but nothing as low as our breasts.
“Maybe if we stood on something,” Deirdre said, looking around.
“There’s nothing,” I said. “Unless we stood on the toilet seats, and then we’d be too high.”
“Let’s try it,” she said.
So we shut two of the toilet seats and climbed onto them, and saw that we were too high, so we tried crouching to get the right angle, pretty much naked and balancing precariously and giggling, because it really was very funny. And that’s when one of the prefects came in to see what the noise was about.
THURSDAY 15TH NOVEMBER 1979
Either my dream-protection didn’t work, or she isn’t sending the dreams, they’re just coming out of my subconscious.
I dreamed last night that my mother had a plan to separate us. She was going to live in Colchester in Essex and take Mor with her, because, she said, Mor was more biddable and I didn’t do what I was told, and because I’d argued so hard to stay. We were protesting and fighting and she was dragging Mor away physically and I was crying and clinging to her. In some ways it was the opposite of what happened in the labyrinth. I was trying to hold on to her and my mother was trying to drag her off, and she started changing into different things and I had to hold on to her. I couldn’t bear the thought of the s
eparation, and I was planning to complain to everyone, the whole family, that it was unendurable and they couldn’t let it happen. They let my mother get away with so much because they don’t want to face the fact that she’s mad, I was thinking, and Mor was howling and holding on to me, when I woke up. For a second there was a huge sense of relief that it had all been a dream, and then an instant later the memory that the reality was far worse. People can come back from Colchester. (No idea why Colchester.) I don’t know what it means to be dead.
I’m reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth. It has so many lovely science-fictional reversal moments. It isn’t Childhood’s End or 2001, but it’s just what I want today. There are a couple of Clarkes I’ve never found, and I’ve put them on this week’s list.
I wonder if there will be fairies in space? It’s a more possible thought in Clarke’s universe than Heinlein’s somehow, even though Clarke’s engineering seems just as substantial. I wonder if it’s because he’s British? Never mind space, do they even have fairies in America? And if they do, do they all speak Welsh, all over the world?