Among Others

by Jo Walton

  “What good could it possibly do?” the third finished.

  Even this kind of thing doesn’t bother Sam. “I think we should try it. What harm could it do? Morwenna’s a sensible girl, I think.”

  He had found a place in Shrewsbury, and written the address down. He wanted to go there right away, but the sisters managed to persuade Daniel that we should phone for an appointment. He made an appointment for tomorrow morning.

  Sam spent the afternoon in my room, talking to me. He’s an old man and he’s had a strange life—imagine finding out your whole family had been killed. It would be as if Wales sank under the sea this minute and only I was left out of everyone. Well, Cousin Arwel’s in Nottingham, but just the two of us out of everyone I grew up with. It was just like that for Sam. When he went back after the war they were all gone and strangers were living in his house, and the neighbours pretended not to know him. He saw his mother’s bread-bin on the neighbour’s table, but she wouldn’t even let him have that.

  “And they mean nothing to you,” he said.

  “Not nothing.”

  “They’re strangers. Even I am a stranger. But my family were your cousins. They’re talking, different governments have been talking for years about giving some compensation. But how can anyone compensate me for my family? How can they give you back your cousins that you never knew, and your cousins who were never born, the ones who would be your age now?”

  That made me feel it. I could write a poem about that. “Hitler, give me back my cousins!”

  I think Sam’s a bit sad that I’m not Jewish, that his descendants won’t be. But he didn’t say so, and he isn’t reproachful about it at all. He said he didn’t stay in Poland because he could feel the dead everywhere, as if they could come around any corner. I understand that. I almost talked to him about magic, then, about the thing I did to have a karass, about Mor wandering around with the fairies. I might have if there had been time. But Daniel came in and said they should be going to catch the train, so I said goodbye.

  Sam kissed me, and he put his hand on my head and said a blessing in Hebrew. He didn’t ask, but I didn’t mind. At the end of it he looked at me and smiled his wrinkled old smile and said, “You’ll be all right.” It was remarkably reassuring. I can hear it now. “You’ll be all right.” As if he could know.

  I can smell the snowdrops. I’m so glad he came.

  TUESDAY 22ND JANUARY 1980

  Sam was right about the acupuncture.

  It is, in fact, magic. The whole thing is. They call it “chi,” but they don’t even pretend it isn’t magic. The man who does it is English, which surprised me after all the fear of wily orientals the aunts tried to put into the procedure. He was trained in Bury St. Edmunds, which is in the Fens, near Cambridge, by people who had been trained in Hong Kong. He had framed certificates, like a doctor. On the ceiling was a map of the acupuncture points of the human body. I got to look at it a lot, because most of the time I was lying on the table with huge enormous needles stuck in me, not moving.

  It doesn’t hurt at all. You can’t feel them, even though they’re really long and they’re really stuck in you. What did happen was that when the last one went in, the pain stopped, like turning off a switch. If I could learn to do that! One of them, in my ankle, he put in slightly the wrong place first, and I did feel it, not real pain, but like a pinprick. I didn’t say anything, but he immediately moved it to a spot a fraction of a centimeter to the side and I couldn’t feel it. It’s body-magic plain enough.

  Even if it just turned the pain off for the hour I was there, it would have been worth the thirty pounds, to me anyway. But it wasn’t. I’m not miraculously cured or anything, but I hobbled up the stairs to his room and I walked down them, no worse than before they put me on the rack. He wants me to go every week for six weeks. He said that today he was just doing what he could for the pain, but if he saw me regularly he might be able to see what was wrong and do something about it. He admired my stick—I’ve been using the fairy one, as it seems to give me more strength than the metal one, as well as being less ugly.

  “Take me back to school,” I said to Daniel as we walked back to the car. A pale wintry sun was shining and the rose-gold buildings of Shrewsbury were flushed with it. If we’d set out right away, I could have been in school in time to go off to book club as normal after prep.

  “Not until we see how you are tomorrow,” he said. “But how about a Chinese meal, as Chinese medicine seems to agree with you?”

  So we went to a restaurant called the Red Lotus and ate spare ribs and prawn toast and chicken fried rice and chow mein and beef in oyster sauce. It was all delicious, the best food I’ve had for years, maybe ever. I ate until I was full to bursting. While we were eating I told Daniel about the convention in Glasgow, Albacon, this year’s Easter-con, and about what Wim had said about the Worldcon in Brighton and how he’d met Robert Silverberg and done nothing but talk about books for five days. He said he didn’t think his sisters would let him get away at Easter, but he agreed that I could go, and said he’d pay!

  In a way, I would like to rescue Daniel from his sisters. He has been good to me, and I suppose it might be his duty as a father, but why should he feel any of that? I would like to rescue him, but I don’t think I can, and I think that trying would provoke war with them, whereas if they think I won’t interfere they might leave me alone. Trying to rescue Daniel I might entangle myself. I am my own priority here, I have to be. They’re not going to agree to him going to Glasgow. It’s good that they agreed to acupuncture and a meal in a Chinese restaurant, and they probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for dear old Sam.

  With the bill, they brought us fortune cookies. Mine said “All is not yet lost,” which I thought very cheerful. It’s just like the line in the Aeneid, Et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, “even these things it will one day be a joy to recall.” At first, you think how awful, and then you realise that it’s true, and not a bad thing. Daniel’s just said “You like Chinese food,” which is undeniable. Getting one that said “You are an awful father” would have been unkind.

  In the car, when I was putting my seat belt on, Daniel looked at me seriously. “You still seem to be feeling the benefit of the acupuncture.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “You should come once a week for six weeks, the way he said.”

  “Okay.” I finished fiddling with my seatbelt. Daniel threw his cigarette end out of the window.

  “I won’t be able to come to school and collect you and drive you here and back, not every week. Maybe sometimes.”

  I could immediately see that they wouldn’t let him. He put the car in gear and pulled out of the car park, and all the time I didn’t say anything, because what could I say.

  “There’s a train,” he said after a while.

  “A train?” I’m sure I sounded sceptical. “There isn’t a railway station. There might be a bus.”

  “There’s a railway station in Gobowen. When my sisters went to Arlinghurst they went to it, and were collected there by the school. Everyone used trains then.”

  “Are you sure it’s still there?” But it wasn’t in the long list of Flanders and Swann “Slow Train” stations that had been closed by Beeching, so it probably was.

  “It’s on the route to North Wales, to Welshpool and Barmouth and Dolgellau,” he said. The only one of those places I’d heard of was Dolgellau, where Gramma and Grampar had been to visit an old vicar who’d moved there, before I was born. North Wales is like another country. You can’t even get there from South Wales, you have to go to England and out again, at least if you want to go on trains, or on good roads. I suppose there are roads through the mountains. I’ve never been there, though I would like to.

  “All right,” I said. “That means a bus into town and a bus out to Gobowen, and then a train.”

  “I’ll be able to take you sometimes,” he said, lighting yet another cigarette. “What would be the best day?”


  I thought about it. Definitely not Tuesdays, because I might not get back in time for the book club. “Thursdays,” I said. “Because Thursday afternoons I just have religious education and then double maths.”

  “It seems from your marks that maths is the thing you least ought to miss,” Daniel said, but with a smile in his voice.

  “Honestly, it doesn’t matter if I’m there or not, it just doesn’t go in. The maths I do know I know from phys and chem. Maths class might as well be taught in Chinese. It makes no sense to me. I think that bit of my brain is missing. And if I ask her to explain again, it doesn’t make any more sense.”

  “Perhaps you ought to have extra tutoring in it,” Daniel suggested.

  “It would be money down the drain. I just can’t do it. It would be like teaching a horse to sing.”

  “Do you know the story about that?” he asked, turning his head, and incidentally blowing smoke at me, yuck.

  “Don’t kill me, give me a year, and I’ll teach your horse to sing. Anything might happen in a year, the king might die, I might die, or the horse might learn to sing.” I summarised. It’s in The Mote in God’s Eye, which is probably why it was in his mind.

  “It’s a story about procrastination,” Daniel said, as if he was the world’s expert in procrastination.

  “It’s a story about hope,” I said. “We don’t know what happened at the end of the year.”

  “If the horse had learned to sing, we’d know.”

  “It might have become the origin of the Centaur legend. It might have gone to Narnia, taking the man with it. It might have become the ancestor of Caligula’s horse Incitatus who he made a senator. There might have been a whole tribe of singing horses and Incitatus was their bid for equality, only it all went wrong.”

  Daniel gave me a very strange look, and I wished I’d saved this for people who would appreciate it.

  “Thursdays, then,” he said. “I’ll call and arrange it when we get home.”

  If it was a story about procrastination, it would have a solid moral about the man dying at the end of the year. I like to imagine their survival.

  And at year’s end they broke the stable door.

  The man and horse, together, gallop yet

  Beyond the sunset’s end, the pounding hooves,

  Both harmony and beat for their duet.

  WEDNESDAY 23RD JANUARY 1980

  A tiny sprinkle of snow this morning, not enough to wet a Hobbit’s toes, and melted before breakfast.

  I am back in school, which is noisier than ever, so noisy it echoes.

  The Dream Master turns out to be a novel version of “He Who Shapes,” which is a variation on, or the other way around, Brunner’s Telepathist. I don’t know which was written first, but I read the Brunner first. The very idea of working with dreams is odd. The Dream Master is a good book, but a very unsettling one. You wouldn’t guess it was written by the same person who wrote the Amber books, which are such fun.

  People seem a lot friendlier to me than before. Sharon said hello and welcome back when I went into English after lunch. Daniel insisted on seeing how I was after I woke up, and didn’t drive me back until mid-morning. I’m still the same. The cold made my leg do its rusty weathercock thing, but that’s so much better than it was before the acupuncture that I almost don’t care.

  I haven’t forgiven Sharon for turning her back on me. I’ll be polite and nice, but I won’t go out of my way not to call her Shagger when everyone else does. Deirdre, however, who stuck by me, gets my everlasting loyalty, and the word “Dreary” will never pass my lips. Oddly, though I am limping worse than ever, everyone seems to be calling me Commie today. Maybe going into hospital had given them a new respect for me. Nobody has come around gushing though, thank goodness.

  It’s really nice to see Miss Carroll again. She doesn’t bother me when I’m reading, or writing in here, but she always has a few kind words when I pass her desk. I’d got almost used to this library, all the wood, and the lovely bookshelves, but seeing it now I am struck again with how brill it is. I’d like to have a room like this in my own house, when I have a house one day, when I’m grown up.

  Isle of the Dead is very odd. I love the idea of making worlds, and the alien gods, and the aliens, and the whole setup. I’m just not sure about the actual story.

  THURSDAY 24TH JANUARY 1980

  Tonight we are going to see The Tempest in Theatre Clwyd in Mold. Nobody else seems the faintest bit excited about this, so I act as if I don’t care either. Deirdre says she hates Shakespeare. She has seen The Winter’s Tale and Richard II, when they were set plays, and she hated both of them. This makes me think the company might be awful, because Richard II at least should be terrific acted. “Sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.”

  The new friendliness seems to be lasting. Did they think I was faking it with the leg before? Or has something else happened? I deal with it in an offhand way, as if it’s normal, but always cool to them, because if I give away anything they could throw it in my face.

  I am reading The Lord of the Rings. I suddenly wanted to. I almost know it by heart, but I can still sink right into it. I know no other book that is so much like going on a journey. When I put it down to write this, I feel as if I am also waiting with Pippin for the echoes of that stone down the well.

  FRIDAY 25TH JANUARY 1980

  The first thing that was wrong with the Touring Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest was that they cast a woman as Prospero. She was very good, but the play just doesn’t work with a mother. The whole thing is set up with male in opposition to female: Prospero and Sycorax, Caliban and Ariel, Caliban and Miranda, Ferdinand and Miranda. Though I suppose doing it that way made Prospero and Antonio a male/female thing. I suppose the way it really didn’t work was in Prospero and Miranda’s relationship. It didn’t work as mother and daughter to me, at least, not and keep Prospero sympathetic. I read him as a man who is remote, and good to bother with a toddler, but a woman like that would be too unnatural for sympathy. Which isn’t to say I think women should be stuck with childrearing, but—how interesting that what comes out as doing the best he could in a man looks like neglect in a woman.

  Though Prospero was in fact neglectful however you look at it. He must have been the world’s most crap Duke of Milan, and he would be again. I can certainly sympathise with spending your whole time in the library reading your book instead of bothering with what you’re supposed to be doing. But there’s absolutely no indication that he won’t do the exact same thing once they get back. In fact, he’ll be worse, because he’ll want to catch up on everything his favourite authors have written while he was stuck on the island. Antonio was probably a much better Duke. Sure, he was a conniving bastard, but he’d keep everyone happy because it would be to his own advantage. The people were probably horrified to see Prospero back, drowned books or not.

  Very little of this will be going into my formal response essay on seeing the play. But what’s really not going in is what I thought about the fairies, which is that they were brilliant, and surprisingly lifelike.

  Ariel did not speak, she sang all her lines. She was wearing something white, maybe a bodystocking, with veils all around that drifted about when she moved or gestured. She had a shaved head, also with a veil. When she went free at the end, all the veils fell away and we saw her face for the first time, and her expression was most convincingly like a fairy. I wonder if the actress knows any? Singing was a good way of getting across how oddly they communicate, well done Shakespeare, well done Touring Company. Shakespeare must have known fairies, probably quite well. He just did what I do and translated the things they say into the things they would have said.

  Caliban, well, what is Caliban? I read it thinking he was a fairy, fishy and warty and odd. But seeing it made me think. His mother, Sycorax, was a witch. We don’t know about his father. We don’t see Sycorax at all. Was Prospero his father? Is he Miranda’s half-brother? Or was he
there when they got there, as he says, offering welcome, to be made into a servant? He wants to rape Miranda (“I had peopled else this isle with Calibans”), but that doesn’t make him human, or his mother either, necessarily. He could be human, or half human, he’s pokable and hittable in a way fairies aren’t. There was a lot of hitting and cringing last night. What I believed about that particular Caliban, about (I have the programme) Peter Lewis’s Caliban, was that he was between worlds. He didn’t know where he belonged.

  Shakespeare must have known some fairies. I know I said this about Tolkien, and actually I do still think Tolkien did as well. I think lots of people do.

  What I love about Shakespeare is the language. I came home on the coach quite drunk on it, and had to ask Deirdre to repeat everything she was saying because I hadn’t caught it the first time. I don’t know what she thought. We had a conversation about what Miranda and Ferdinand’s married life would be like, and how she would cope with Italy after an island. Would it keep on seeming a brave new world? Deirdre thought it would as long as she was in love. Can you imagine though, confronting a whole world when you have only known three people, two of them not quite people and one of them remote Prospero? Imagine coping with fashion and servants and courtiers! Deirdre thought Prospero very cruel not to teach her. But maybe teaching her magic would have been more cruel.

  Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his books because you can’t bring magic back home with you. If he had brought it back, would he have become like Saruman? Is it power that corrupts? Is it always? It would be nice if I knew some people who weren’t evil and used magic. Well, there’s Glorfindel, but I’m not sure fairies count. Fairies are different. The other interesting contrast with Prospero is Faust.

  Letter from Daniel saying the acupuncture is arranged for Thursdays and paid for, saying he’d written to the school asking for me to be allowed to go, and enclosing ten pounds for trainfare and lunches. When I get change, I’ll put half of it into my running away/emergency fund.