Among Others (14 page)

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.

S
ATURDAY
10
^TH
N
OVEMBER
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.

S
UNDAY
11
^TH
N
OVEMBER
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 wrote 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!

M
ONDAY
12
^TH
N
OVEMBER
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.)

T
UESDAY
13
^TH
N
OVEMBER
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?

W
EDNESDAY
14
^TH
N
OVEMBER
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.