Among Others (35 page)

“Hold the stone, and look at the flowers, and at the reflection of the flowers in the water,” I said to Wim, quietly, not that it made much difference how loudly I spoke. “Now look at me.” When he looked at me I put my hands on the sides of his face. I was trying to give him confidence. He wanted so much to believe, to see one. His skin was warm and just slightly rough where he needed to shave. Touching him made me feel more breathless than ever.

“He wants to see you,” I said to the fairies, in Welsh. “He won’t do any harm.”

They didn’t reply, but they didn’t vanish either.

“Now look to your left,” I said to Wim, letting go.

He turned his head slowly, and he saw her, I could tell he did. He jumped. She regarded him curiously for a moment. I wondered for a second if she’d enchant him and lead him away into wherever it is they go when they vanish, like Tam Lin. He put out his hand towards her, and she vanished, they all did, like lights going out.

“That was an elf?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“If you hadn’t said so, I’d have thought it was a ghost.” He sounded shaken. I’d have liked to have touched him again.

“They’re not all that human-looking,” I said, which was an understatement. “Most of them are kind of gnarly.”

“Gnomes?” he asked.

“Well, sort of. The thing is you read things, and you see things, and they’re not the same. To read about it, it all makes so much more sense, with Seelie and Unseelie courts, with gnomes and elves, but it’s not like that. I’ve been seeing them all my life, and they’re all the same whatever they are and whatever they look like. I don’t really know what they are. They talk, well, the ones I know do, but they say odd things, and only in Welsh. Usually. I met one who spoke English at Christmas. He gave me this stick.” I tapped it in the mud. “They don’t call themselves elves, or anything. They don’t have names. They don’t use nouns very much.” It was such a relief to have someone to talk to about this! “I call them fairies because that’s what I’ve always called them, but I don’t really know what they are.”

“So you don’t know what they are, not really?”

“No. It’s not the sort of thing. What I think is that people have told a lot of stories about them and some of them are true and some of them are made up from other stories and some of them are muddled. They don’t tell stories themselves.”

“But if you don’t know, then they could be ghosts?”

“The dead are different,” I said.

“You know? You’ve seen them?” His eyes were very wide.

So I told him about Halloween and the oak leaves and the dead going under the hill, which meant I had to tell him about Mor. I was getting cold by this time. “So how did she die?” he asked.

“I’m freezing,” I said. “Can we go back to town and maybe get a hot drink?”

“I won’t see any more elves or whatever today?”

I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see them now. “Look carefully by the puddle,” I said.

He turned his head slowly again and saw, I think, one of the gnarled gnome-like ugly fairies that isn’t human at all except for the eyes. He blinked.

“Did you see it?” I asked.

“I think so,” he said. “I saw its reflection. If it’s there and you can see it, why can’t I see it? I believe you, I really do. I saw the other one.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s ever such a lot I don’t know about them. I can’t see them if they don’t want me to.”

The fairy was smiling in an unpleasant way, as if it could understand. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’m getting chilled through.”

It was hard to stand up from the wall, and hard to walk for the first few steps. Sitting on walls is better for my leg than standing up, but not very good for it all the same. Wim offered to help, but there’s nothing that helps, really. He put his hand on my arm, my other arm, my left arm. “Can I at least take your bag?” he asked.

“If you have a bag, you could take the books,” I said. “But I have to keep the bag.”

“Are you telling me your bag is magic?” he asked.

We both looked at my bag, bulging with library books. You couldn’t find anything less magic looking if you tried. “It’s sort of part of me,” I said, feebly.

He didn’t have a bag, but he took some of the library books anyway and carried them under his arm. “Now,” he said, as we came out of the woods. “Some real coffee, not that Nescafe swill.”

“What do you mean, real coffee?” I asked.

“In Marios, they have real filter coffee. They make it from coffee beans. You can smell them grinding it and roasting it.”

“The smell of coffee is great. The taste, however, isn’t,” I said.

“You’ve never had real coffee,” he said, confidently and correctly. “Wait and see.”

Marios was one of the brightly lit neon cafes in the high street where the girls from school hang out with their local boyfriends. The tables were full of them. We went to sit at the back where there was a small table free. Wim ordered two filter coffees. There was a juke box playing “Oliver’s Army,” very loudly. It was horrible, but at least it was warm. He put my library books on the table, and I put them back into my bag.

“How did she die?” he asked again, when we were sitting down.

“This isn’t the place,” I said.

“The wood wasn’t the place and this isn’t the place?” Wim asked. He put his hand on my hand, where it was lying on top of the table. I gasped. “Tell me about it.”

“It was a car accident. But really it was my mother,” I said. “My mother was trying to do something, some huge magic, to get power, to take over the world I think. The fairies knew and they told us what to do to stop it. She tried to stop us, and one of the things she did was to try to use things that weren’t real, things coming at us. We just had to keep on. I thought we’d both die, but it would have been worth it, to stop her. That’s what the fairies said, and that’s what we were prepared for, both of us. There were all those things that were magic, that were illusion. I thought it was like that, when I saw the lights, but it was a real car.”

“Jesus, how awful for the driver,” Wim said.

“I don’t know what he saw, or what he thought,” I said. “I wasn’t in any state to ask.”

“But you stopped her? Your mother?”

“We stopped her. But Mor was killed.”

The waitress interrupted me by putting two red cups of black coffee down on the table. One of them was slopped into the saucer, onto the packets of sugar. Wim paid, before I could offer to.

“And then what happened?” he asked.

I couldn’t, of course, tell him about those awful days after Mor was killed, the bruise on the side of her face, the days when she was in a coma, the time when my mother turned off the machine, and then afterwards when I started to use her name and how nobody challenged me, though I’m sure Auntie Teg knew, and probably Grampar too. We might have been identical, but we were different people after all.

“My grandfather had a stroke,” I said, because however unbearable that was it was the next bearable thing to say. “I found him. They used to call it elfshot. I don’t know if she made it happen.”

I tried my coffee. It was horrible, even worse than instant coffee if that was possible. At the same time, I could see how it could become an acquired taste if I tried hard to like it. I’m not sure it would be worth the effort. After all, it’s not as if it’s good for you.

“So what are you going to do about her?” Wim asked.

“I don’t think I need to do anything. We stopped her. Her last chance was Halloween.”

“Not if your sister didn’t go under the hill like she was supposed to. Not if she’s still there. She could use that again. You have to do something to really stop her. You have to kill her.”

“I think that would be wrong,” I said. The other girls from school were all getting up, and I knew it must be time for the bus.

“I know she’s your mother—”

“That has nothing to do with it. Nobody could hate her more than I do. But I think killing her would be the wrong thing to do. It feels wrong. I could talk to the fairies about it, but if it would have helped, I think they would have told me to do it already. You’re thinking about it in the wrong sort of way, as if it was a story.”

“This is just so damn weird,” he said.

“I’m going to have to go. I’ll miss the bus.” I stood up, leaving the rest of my coffee.

He gulped his own coffee. “When will I see you?”

“Tuesday, like always. For Zelazny.” I smiled. I was looking forward to that.

“Sure, but on our own?”

“Next Saturday.” I shrugged my coat on. “It’s the only time there is.”

We started walking out of the cafe. “They don’t let you out of there at all?”

“No. They pretty much don’t.”

“It’s like prison.”

“It is in a way.” We walked down to the bus stop. “Well, Tuesday then,” I said, as we reached it. The bus was there, and the girls were pouring onto it. And then—no, this needs to be on a line of its own.

And then he kissed me.

T
UESDAY
5
^TH
F
EBRUARY
1980

It took me until today to finish writing up what happened on Saturday.

I’m not sure I really like
The Number of the Beast
. There’s a lot to like about it, but it’s all over the place as far as plot goes, and as far as location goes as well. I’ve never read Oz or the Lensmen, and I’m not quite sure what they were doing there.

Apart from that, the main excitement has been that all the girls who were on the bus have been asking me nonstop about “my boyfriend,” where I met him, what he’s like, what he does, and so on and on and on. Some of them who were in the cafe know about his reputation and have warned me about him—what, seventeen-year-old boy had sex with girlfriend, shock horror! It’s such a weird mixture of puritanical and prurient. The girls who have local boyfriends say they’re not serious about them, and some of them have what they call serious boyfriends at home. What they mean by serious is just what Jane Austen would have called an eligible parti, a boy of the same class who they might marry. They’re slumming with the local boys, and the local boys mostly know that. It’s vile, they’re vile, the whole thing is vile and I don’t want to think about Wim in the same breath as that.

The real difference is that we’re not of different classes. Wim and I are both of a class that expects to go to university. I don’t know what his father does, but that his mother works in the hospital kitchens while I go to school here is irrelevant. Well, maybe not irrelevant, but not the point. Anyway, I’m not sure if Wim is my boyfriend, and even if he is it isn’t at all the thing they’re talking about with their serious and not serious. I’m only fifteen. I’m not sure I ever want to get married. I’m neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some “real thing.” What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn’t we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I’m not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?

But that’s also almost irrelevant, because there’s also the ethical thing of the magic. I should probably tell him, and then he’d hate me, anybody would.

I’ve asked Nurse to make me a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t ask what for.

W
EDNESDAY
6
^TH
F
EBRUARY
1980

Zelazny meeting last night. Wim thinks Zelazny’s the greatest stylist of all time. Brian thinks style is unimportant compared to ideas, and he thinks Zelazny’s ideas are ordinary, except for Shadow. It’s funny how people divided on that one. I think if we’d voted for whether style matters or only ideas, the division would have been really different from whether Zelazny has good ideas. I think he does, and I think both matter, which isn’t to say that the Foundation books suck because they have no style, or Clarke either. Zelazny can get where he’s all style and no substance—I can’t forget
Creatures of Light and Darkness
after all, which almost put me off him forever. But mostly he keeps the balance.

We talked about Amber and what’s going to happen, and we talked about the kind of wisecracking voice he uses in those and in
Isle of the Dead
and
This Immortal
and we talked about whether it was actually science fiction or fantasy. Hugh thinks the Amber books are fantasy, and so is
Isle of the Dead
, because despite the aliens and everything, worldbuilding is talked about in such magical terms. “That’s condemning him for being poetic!” Wim said.

“Saying it’s fantasy isn’t condemnation,” Harriet said.

So, a good meeting. Afterwards Wim said to Greg, “Do you have a recent
Ansible
?”