Among Others (26 page)

Auntie Teg lives in a little modern flat in a neat modern estate. It was all built about ten years ago, I think. There’s a little curving parade of shops, including a terrific bread and buns shop, and blocks of six flats, each three floors high, set out with grass in between them. Her flat is a middle one. It isn’t—I mean, I’d hate to live there. It’s very new and clean and smart but it has no character and the rooms are all rectangular and the ceilings are very low. I think Auntie Teg chose it because it was what she could afford at the time and a safe place for a single woman. Or maybe because she wanted to make her own place something really different from home, with modern furniture and no magic. She had always, logically, sensibly, associated magic and fairies and everything like that with my mother, who is four years older than she is. Auntie Teg therefore wants nothing to do with them, any more than she does with Liz. She lives on her own with her beautiful but incredibly spoiled cat Persimmon. Persimmon goes out through the window, jumping down to the awning over the front door and from there to the ground. She can’t get back in that way, though, she comes up the stairs and cries outside the front door.

I like the flat and don’t like it at the same time. I admire it being so clean and neat with floppy brown Habitat sofas (too low for me, especially today), and blue-painted tables. I can see that the heat-grilles are efficient. When she first bought it, a little while before Gramma died, we were both terribly impressed with how modern it is. But really, I just prefer old things and clutter and fireplaces, and I suspect Auntie Teg does too, though nothing would make her say so.

“My” room here is small, with a bed and bookshelves with Auntie Teg’s art books on them. There’s a terrific pair of pictures by Hokusai on the wall—they’re clearly part of a story. One is of two Japanese men looking frightened fighting a giant octopus; the other is of the same two men laughing and cutting their way through a huge spider-web. I don’t know their names and I don’t know their stories, but they have tons of personality and I like lying here looking at them and imagining their other adventures. Mor and I used to tell each other stories about them. Auntie Teg bought them in Bath, along with the brown and cream Moroccan blanket that hangs on the wall in the lounge.

Lying here writing this, every so often Persimmon cries outside the door to come in to my room. If I don’t open it, she keeps on doing it. If I do get up and hobble over to the door, every step a minor victory, she walks in, looks at me disdainfully, then turns around and leaves. She’s a tortoiseshell cat with a white chin and stomach. She sees fairies—in Aberdare where there are fairies, obviously, not here. I’ve seen her see them and turn the same look of disdain on them as she does on me, while keeping a wary eye to make sure we don’t get up to anything. Auntie Teg has done an oil painting of her lying in front of the Moroccan blanket—the colours are wonderful together—where she looks like the loveliest gentlest most beautiful cat. In reality she likes to be petted for about thirty seconds, after which she turns on you and attacks your hand. I’ve had more bites and scratches from Persimmon than from all the other cats in the world put together, and Auntie Teg often has scratch marks on her wrists. Having said that, she adores her and talks to her in baby talk. I can hear her cooing now, “Who’s the best? Who’s the best cat in the world?” She might be in the running for most beautiful, with her lovely markings and aristocratic carriage, but I think the
best
cat would have better manners.

We’re going up to see Grampar tomorrow. It’s not like at half term, Auntie Teg isn’t in school. It’s not going to be easy to get time to go to find the fairies, though she is going away for a few days over New Year and I should have a chance then. Auntie Teg isn’t old, only thirty-six. She has a boyfriend, a secret boyfriend. It’s very tragic actually, a bit like
Jane Eyre
. He’s married to a madwoman, and he can’t get divorced from her because he’s a politician, and anyway he feels an obligation to her because he married her when she was young and pretty and sparkling. In fact, he was Auntie Teg’s childhood sweetheart and kissed her on the way back from her twenty-first birthday party. Then he went to university and met his mad wife, though she wasn’t mad yet, and married her, and only later realised that he’d really loved Auntie Teg all along, and by then it was clear that his wife was mad. I’m not sure this version is quite accurate. For instance, his wife’s father was someone who could help him get a parliamentary seat. I wonder if there was some self-interest going on. And would it really ruin his career to get divorced and remarry? It would much more ruin it if it came out that he was involved with Auntie Teg. However, she says she’s happy as she is, she likes living alone with Persimmon and having a few days with him now and then.

I got to help make dinner. You can’t imagine the pleasure of wiping mushrooms and grating cheese when you haven’t had a chance to do it for a long time. Then eating food you have cooked, or help cook, always tastes so much better. Auntie Teg makes the world’s best cauliflower cheese.

It’s also very nice to relax and be looked after for a bit.

S
ATURDAY
29
^TH
D
ECEMBER
1979

Not much of this year left. Good. It’s been a rotten year. Maybe 1980 will be better. A new year. A new decade. A decade in which I shall grow up and start to achieve things. I wonder what the eighties will bring? I can just remember 1970. I remember going out into the garden and thinking that it was 1970 and that it sounded like yellow flags flying, and saying that to Mor and she agreed, and running up and down the garden with our arms stretched out, pretending to fly. 1980 sounds more rotund, and maroon. It’s funny how the sounds of words have colours. Nobody except Mor ever understood that.

Grampar liked the elephant, and Auntie Teg was really pleased with the dressing gown. She waited to open it until we went up to Fedw Hir and we had a little Christmas around the bed. They gave me a big red polo-neck pullover, and a soap-on-a-rope, and a book token. I didn’t tell them about the ear-piercing. There’s no point upsetting them needlessly. It had already been legally established that they have no rights with me—the fact that they brought me up counts for nothing. Any mother, however evil, and any father, however distant, that’s the court system, and aunts and grandparents nowhere.

Grampar hates Fedw Hir, you can tell, and he wants to get home, but I don’t know how we can manage it when he can’t walk without help. Auntie Teg was talking about people coming in to get him up and put him to bed. I don’t know what that would cost. I don’t know how it could be arranged. It’s such an awful place, though. They’re supposed to be giving him therapy, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. So many of the others are so clearly just waiting to die. They look so hopeless. And he looked like that at first. When we went in he was sunk down in the bed, I expect having a nap, but he looked small and pathetic and only half-alive, not like Grampar at all.

I was talking to him about when he taught us to play tennis, and we went up to the Brecon Beacons and played on the uneven ground up there and afterwards on flat ground it was easy. I remember the skylarks singing high above and the tufts of bracken and the funny tufted reeds we used to call bamboo shoots. (They’re not bamboo, really, not anything like, but we had a toy panda and we used to play that they were and he could eat them.) Grampar used to be proud of how fast we could run and how well we could catch a ball. He’d always wanted a boy, of course. It’s not that we wanted to be boys, it’s just that boys have so much more fun. We loved learning to play tennis.

And I thought all that was wasted, all that time practising up there, because Mor is dead and I can’t run and neither can Grampar, not any more. Except it wasn’t wasted, because we remember it. Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time. I’m never going to win Wimbledon or run in the Olympics (“They never had twins at Wimbledon…” he used to say) but I wouldn’t have anyway. I’m not even going to play tennis for fun with my friends, but that doesn’t mean playing it when I could was a waste. I wish I’d done more when I could. I wish I’d run everywhere every time I had the chance, run to the library, run through the cwm, run upstairs. Well, we mostly did run upstairs. I think of that as I haul myself up the stairs to Auntie Teg’s flat. People who can run upstairs should run upstairs. And they should run upstairs
first
, so I can limp along afterwards and not feel I’m holding them up.

We called in to see Auntie Olwen, and then Uncle Gus, and Auntie Flossie. Auntie Flossie gave me a book token, and Uncle Gus gave me a pound note. I haven’t forgiven Uncle Gus for saying what he said, but I took the money and said thank you. I’ve put it into the back pocket of my purse, where it can be a start on my emergency stash. There’s a very comfortable wing chair in Auntie Flossie’s. Otherwise, I found all the chairs very difficult. I don’t know why people make them so low. Library chairs are always a lovely height.

S
UNDAY
30
^TH
D
ECEMBER
1979

Leg a bit better, thank goodness. In fact it was well enough that as I was walking through the bus station an interfering busybody asked me why I needed a cane, at my age. “It was a car accident,” I said, which usually shuts people up, but not her.

“You shouldn’t use it, you should try to manage without it. It’s obvious you don’t really need it.”

I just walked on and ignored her, but I was shaking. It might seem as if I don’t need it, walking along on flat ground, but I need it if I have to stand still, and I really need it for stairs or broken ground, and I never know from one minute to another if I’m going to be the way I am today or the way I was yesterday, when I can hardly put my weight on my leg at all.

“See, you’re walking really fast now, you don’t need it at all,” she called after me.

I stopped and turned around. I could feel my cheeks burning. The bus station was full of people. “Nobody would pretend to be a cripple! Nobody would use a stick they didn’t need! You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that I would. If I could walk without it I’d break it in half across your back and run off singing. You have no right to talk to me like that, to talk to anyone like that. Who made you queen of the world when I wasn’t looking? Why do you imagine I would go out with a stick I don’t need—to try to steal your sympathy? I don’t want your sympathy, that’s the last thing I want. I just want to mind my own business, which is what you should be doing.”

It didn’t do any good at all, except for making me a public spectacle. She went very pink, but I don’t think what I was saying really went in. She’ll probably go home and say she saw a girl pretending to be a cripple. I hate people like that. Mind you, I hate the ones who come up and ooze synthetic sympathy just as much, who want to know exactly what’s wrong with me and pat me on the head. I am a person. I want to talk about things other than my leg. I’ll say this for Oswestry: English standoffishness means I don’t get as much of that there. The people who have asked me about it there, both whether I really need it and what’s wrong, have been acquaintances, teachers, girls in school, the aunts’ friends on Boxing Day, people like that.

It took me ages to calm down. I was still overheated and nervous when the bus went round the narrow corner to the bridge in Pontypridd. If it didn’t make it, I thought, if we all fell to our deaths, that awful woman would be the last person I talked to.

I had lunch with Moira, which was my ostensible reason for going up to Aberdare today. Moira says my voice has got posher, which is absolutely horrifying. She didn’t say “more English” because she’s my friend and a kind person, but she didn’t have to say it. School must be rubbing off on me. I so don’t want to sound like the other girls there! I don’t know what to do about it. The more I think about it the odder my voice sounds in my ears, but I hadn’t noticed before, I was just talking. There are elocution lessons. Are there anti-elocution lessons? Not that I want to talk like Eliza, but I really don’t want to open my mouth and get filed as upper-class twit.

Moira’s had a good enough term. It was surprisingly hard to find things to talk about. I can’t remember what we used to talk about; nothing, I suppose, gossip, school, the things we were doing together. Without that there isn’t much there. Leah’s broken up with Andrew and Nasreen is seeing him, and her parents are flipping out, apparently. Leah’s having a party on January 2nd, in the evening, so I’ll see them all there.

After lunch I went out of Moira’s house onto Croggin Bog and walked across. Heol y Gwern is the only proper road across it, of course, but I went off that right away. Croggin, well, properly it’s spelled Crogyn, is big: It’s an upland bog, it’s the whole shoulder of the hill. There are older paths running through it, not as old as the Alder Road, but they’ve been there a long time. It’s a bad time of year for it, and it’s been a wet winter, but it isn’t really dangerous if you know the way, or even if you don’t if you follow the alders. Mor and I got really lost in Croggin Bog once, when we were quite small, and got out purely by alder-recognition. Anyway, it isn’t quicksands, it’s just wet and muddy. People are more scared of it than they need to be. There was also the time I went into it in the dark not long after Mor died and deliberately tried to get lost, but the fairies helped me out. They say marsh lights, willow-wisps, lead you astray and into the worst bits of bog, but that time they took me pointedly to the road right by Moira’s house. I went in dripping and Moira’s mother made me take a shower and dress in Moira’s clothes to go home. I was afraid of getting into trouble, but Liz was fighting with Grampar and didn’t even notice.