Among Others (27 page)

There’s a good story about when they built those houses. They were building them along Heol y Gwern, and they started to build little short streets off it, into the bog, with new houses, because they wanted a proper estate for people to live. The problem was that the bog didn’t want the houses. The real story, which I had from Grampar who remembers when it happened, is that they’d built the foundations for a house and they left it on the Thursday before Good Friday, and when they went back on the Tuesday after Easter Monday, they had completely sunk. The way I heard the story though, is that they’d built the whole house and when they came back after the weekend only the chimneys were sticking up above the bog. Ha! They stopped building up there after that and built the new estate in Penywaun instead, and I’m glad. I like the way the bog is, with the little stunted trees and the long grasses and rushes and sudden unexpected flowers and moorhens on the standing water and lapwings slow-flapping to guide you away from their nests.

What I wanted today was a fairy, and there are often fairies on Croggin. I didn’t see a sign of one, and even when I came out of the bog by the river and into Ithilien I couldn’t find any. I checked Osgiliath and the other fairy ruins in the cwm on my way back to town, the long way around, on the dramroad. There’s an old smelter there, and some fallen cottages, or I think that’s what they are. It’s so hard to imagine them bustling and industrial. I did spot the occasional fairy out of the corner of my eye, but none of them would stop or speak to me. I remembered how Glorfindel wasn’t findable after Halloween. There have been other times like that, times we couldn’t find them, times when they don’t want to be found. They always found us. I tried calling for him, but I knew that was pointless. They don’t use names the way we do. I might wish it worked the way it does in Earthsea where names have summoning power, but it doesn’t, names don’t count, only things do. I do know, I think, how to call him with magic, but that wouldn’t be magic to prevent harm, so I didn’t really consider it for more than a second.

I tried sitting down, though it was very chilly, and waiting for the pain in my leg to ease off, in case that was keeping them away. It wasn’t very bad today though. It shouldn’t have been that, I don’t think. It was too uncomfortable to sit for long, and there was a bit of rain in the wind. Going through town was miserable, all the shops boarded up that I can remember as active places, more all the time. The Rex is shutting down, there won’t be anywhere to watch films in Aberdare any more. There are tattered “for sale” signs everywhere. There’s litter lying on the streets and even the Christmas tree outside the library looks forlorn. I caught the bus back to Cardiff in time for dinner with Auntie Teg.

I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t find them. I really need to talk to them.

T
UESDAY
1
^ST
J
ANUARY
1980

Happy New Year.

Nice to wake up this morning in Grampar’s house, and on my own.

Auntie Teg has gone off somewhere with Him for New Year, which she pretty much always does. I could have gone too, she asked me, but I didn’t want to. I’d only be in the way. Yesterday morning we drove up to Aberdare and saw Grampar, and then she went off and I was promptly grabbed by Auntie Flossie. I had wanted to go to find the fairies, but instead I found myself enacting “Three French Hens” in Auntie Flossie’s New Year Party. The cheer was a little forced, and I found myself aching for bed long before midnight, but I’ve had worse days. I’ve collected another four pounds fifty in clenigs, and six chocolate coins. And I had half a glass of champagne at midnight. It was nicer than Daniel’s champagne, or maybe it’s one of those things that grows on you.

I’m going to get up and cook myself breakfast and then have another try at finding the fairies. It’s a new year, maybe I’ll have better luck.

W
EDNESDAY
2
^ND
J
ANUARY
1980

Yesterday morning, I really wanted to find some fairies. For a change, I went up through Common Ake. It’s Heck’s Common really, called after a Mr. Heck, but everyone calls it Common Ake. It’s a common, it doesn’t belong to anyone, the way most of the country was before the Enclosures in the eighteenth century. It’s hard to imagine Aberdare as a farming valley with nothing really here except St. John’s, and only the main road running through from Brecon to Cardiff, no other streets at all, all the coal and iron undisturbed underground. I had to learn a modern poem in Welsh once for an Eisteddfod that ended “
Totalitariaeth glo
,” the despotism of coal. I picked up a little piece of coal as I went. They often find fossils in it when they’re digging it up, ancient leaves and flowers. It’s organic, it was an organic sludge pressed down by the rock to make seams of carbon stuff that burns. If it had been pressed more it would be diamonds. I wonder if diamonds burn, and if we’d burn them if they were as common as coal. To the fairies, they’d be the same, plants changed by time to rock. I wonder if fairies remember the Jurassic, if they walked among dinosaurs, and what they were then? None of them would have had human shapes. They wouldn’t have spoken Welsh. I rubbed the coal in my fingers, and it flaked a bit. I know what coal is, but I don’t know what fairies are, not really.

There’s a spot on Common Ake we used to call the Dingly Dell. It’s one of the oldest of our names, older than the ones from
The Lord of the Rings
, and writing it down now I feel simultaneously slightly embarrassed and fiercely protective. The Dingly Dell is a place where there used to be a quarry or a surface mine or something and the ground drops abruptly on three sides, making a little amphitheatre. There are trees on the steep sides, and blackberry bushes. I think we went there first with Grampar blackberry picking when we were quite small, I remember eating more than I put in the basket, but then that went for most years. We felt quite bold when we first went all the way there on our own.

Today the brambles were winter-dead, and the rowans leafless. A pale sun shone from a distant sky. A cheeky robin perched near me as I stepped in and cocked his head. They put robins on Christmas cards, and sometimes on Christmas cakes too, because they don’t go away in winter. “Hello,” I said. “How nice to see you still here.”

The robin didn’t reply. I didn’t expect it to. But I was immediately aware that there was someone there. I looked up, expecting to see a fairy vanishing, hoping to see Glorfindel, but what I saw was Mor, standing back against the fallen leaves near the slope of the hill. She looked—well, she looked like Mor, obviously, but what I was really aware of right away was how she didn’t look like me. I hadn’t noticed that at half term, but now I did. I’ve grown, and she hasn’t. I have breasts. My hair is different. I am fifteen and a half, and she is still and always fourteen.

I took a step towards her, and then I remembered her clutching me and dragging me towards the door into the hill, and stopped. “Oh Mor,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, any more than the robin. She was dead, and the dead can’t speak. As a matter of fact, I know how to make the dead speak. You have to give them blood. But it’s magic, and anyway, it would be horrible. I couldn’t imagine doing it.

I talked to her although she couldn’t answer. I told her about the magic and about Daniel and his sisters and about getting away from Liz and about school and the book club and everything. The strange thing was that the more I was talking the further away she seemed, though she didn’t move, and the more different from me she was. Nobody could tell the difference between us, but of course we always were different. Since she’s been dead, I’d almost forgotten, or not forgotten, but not thought about her as her distinct self so much, more about the two of us together. I’d felt as if I’d been torn in half, but really it wasn’t that, it was that she had been taken away. I didn’t own her, and there were always differences, always, she was her own person and I’d known that when she was alive, but that had blurred in all the time since when she hadn’t been there to defend her own rights.

If she’d lived, we would have become different people. I think. I don’t think we’d have been like the aunts and stayed together all the time. I think we’d always have been friends, but we’d have lived in different places and had different friends. We’d have been aunts to each other’s children. It’s too late for that now. I’m going to grow up and she isn’t. She’s frozen where she is, and I’m changing, and I want to change. I want to live. I thought I had to live for both of us, because she can’t live for herself, but I can’t really live for her. I can’t really know what she’d have done, what she’d have wanted, how she’d have changed. Arlinghurst has changed me, the book club has changed me, and it might have changed her differently. Living for someone else isn’t possible.

I couldn’t help asking her questions. “Can you go under the hill next year?”

She shrugged. Clearly she didn’t know either. What happens under the hill? Where do the dead go? Where is God in all this? They talk about Heaven like a family picnic.

“Are the fairies looking after you?” I asked.

She hesitated, then nodded.

“Good!” That made me feel a bit better. Living with the fairies in the Valley wasn’t the worst way of being dead I could imagine, not by a long way. “Why won’t they talk to me?”

She looked puzzled and shrugged again.

“Can you tell them about the aunts, and what they want to do?”

She nodded, very definitely.

“Can you ask them to talk to me? I’m so worried about doing magic and what it does.”

“Doing is doing,” a voice said behind me, and I spun around and there was a fairy, one I’d never seen before, nut brown all over and knobbly like an acorn cup. His skin was all wrinkles and folds, and he wasn’t the shape of a person, more like an old treestump. The thing that astonished me was that he’d spoken in English, and that was exactly what he’d said, those very words. They’re cryptic enough, I suppose.

“But what about the ethics?” I said. “Changing things for people without their knowing it? You may be able to see the consequences of what you do, but I can’t.”

“Doing is doing,” he said again. Then he wasn’t there, but there was a thump, and where he had been was a walking stick the same colour as he was, carved with a horse’s head handle.

I bent awkwardly to pick it up. It was the right height for me, and the handle fit my hand comfortably. I looked back at Mor, but she had gone too. The wind was blowing into the dell, rustling the dead leaves, but it was empty of presence.

I brought both sticks back to Grampar’s, the fairy one and my old one. I’m going to leave my old one, which was his anyway, and keep this one. I suppose it might vanish at sunrise, or turn into a leaf or something, but I don’t think so. It has a heft that seems to make that unlikely. I’ll tell people it was a Christmas present. I think perhaps it might have been. I like it.

Doing is doing.

Does it mean that it doesn’t matter if it’s magic or not, anything you do has power and consequences and affects other people? Because that might well be the case, but I still think magic is different.

Leah’s party tonight.

T
HURSDAY
3
^RD
J
ANUARY
1980

Back in Auntie Teg’s. Hung over. I wish the water in Cardiff didn’t taste so dreadful. I brought a big bottle of Aberdare tap water back with me, but I have drunk it all.

We didn’t do anything at all today, just came back to Cardiff and sat around eating chocolate cake and petting Persimmon (for her allowed time) and reading. It was lovely. Auntie Teg looks as exhausted as I am.

Leah’s party last night was weird. There was punch, made with red wine and grape juice and tins of fruit cocktail, and later with added vodka. It tasted disgusting, and I think most of us were holding our noses and drinking it. I don’t know why I bothered. I got drunk, and I suppose it was nice to have soft edges instead of hard ones, but it just made me stupid really. People do it as an excuse, to have an excuse, so they can deny responsibility for their actions the next day. It’s horrible.

I don’t want to write about what happened. It’s not important anyway.

On the other hand, is this a complete and candid memoir or just a lot of angsty wittering?

It started off on the wrong foot. Nasreen was wearing a red sweater identical to mine, though she looked much better in it. “We’re twins!” she chirped enthusiastically, and then realised what she’d said and her face fell about a mile.

It’s not quite a year, just about nine months, since I was living here. We’ve all grown up in that time, and it’s as if they’ve learned some rules I haven’t learned. Maybe it’s because I was away, or maybe I was just reading my book under the desk the day when people were talking about how you do this stuff. Leah was wearing eyeshadow and lipstick—and even Moira was. Moira offered to put some on me, and she did, but we don’t have the same colour skin. I normally look like a white person, like Daniel I suppose, but when you put me next to someone who really is white, and Moira is exceptionally pale, you can see that the underlying colour in my skin is yellow, not pink. Grampar used to say every time one of us got a sunburn that we were ridiculously pale and we’d have to marry black men to give our children a chance, and he was right—compared to him especially and to the rest of our family, we were very pale. I don’t think you’d notice, if you didn’t know, that I had ancestors closer to Nasreen’s colour than Moira’s. But Moira’s makeup looked ridiculous on me anyway, and I wiped it all off.