Among Others (9 page)

James Tiptree, Jr. is a woman! Gosh!

I never would have guessed though. My goodness, Robert Silverberg must have egg all over his face. But I bet he doesn’t care. (If I’d written
Dying Inside
I wouldn’t mind how much of a fool of myself I made about anything ever again. It might be the most depressing book in the world, I mean it’s right up there with Hardy and Aeschylus, but it’s also just so brilliant.) And the Tiptree stories are good, too, though none of them quite up to “The Girl Who Was Plugged In.” I suppose I can see doing that so as to get respect, but Le Guin didn’t, and she got the respect. She won the Hugo. I think in a way Tiptree was taking the easy option. But think how fond her characters are of misdirection and disguise; maybe she is too? I suppose all writers use characters as masks, and she was using the male name as another layer. Come to that, if I was writing “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death” I might not want people to know where I lived either.

I was the only person not to get a bun today, not that I care. Even Deirdre got one from Karen. Deirdre looks at me in a strange puzzled way, which is actually worse than anything. I understand Tiberius’ reliance on Sejanus much better now. I also understand how he became peculiar. Being left alone—and I am being left alone—isn’t quite as much what I wanted as I thought. Is this how people become evil? I don’t want to be.

I wrote to Auntie Teg, trying to sound cheerful. I also wrote to my father, hoping I might persuade him to take me to see her, maybe, and see Grampar in hospital. They’re the only people I have left now.
He
wouldn’t want to see them, but I could and he could wait in the car. It would be really nice to see some people who like me. Five more days to half term and getting out of this place for a week.

M
ONDAY
22
^ND
O
CTOBER
1979

In chemistry today, Gill came and sat by me. It was very brave of her, actually, considering how everyone has been behaving. “So you don’t think I’m a voodoo leper?” I asked straight out at the end of class.

“I’m a scientist,” she said. “I don’t believe in any of that. And I know you got in trouble for sending me a bun.”

It was lunchtime, so we went to the dining hall together. I don’t care what people think. She says she doesn’t read fiction much at all, but she’ll lend me a book of Asimov’s science essays called
The Left Hand of the Electron
. She has three brothers, all older. The oldest one is at Oxford. They’re all scientists too. I like her. She’s restful.

The Magus
is very weird. I’m not sure whether I like it, but I can’t wait to get back to it and I keep thinking about it all the time. It’s not about magic, not really, but the atmosphere is just like. It’s an odd thing to read, because he’s always walking for miles across the thyme-scented island, like we used to do. We’d think nothing of walking miles on the dramroads, up to Llwydcoed, or to Cwmdare. We’d usually get a bus to Penderyn, but once we were there we’d walk out across the tops for hours. I loved the views from up there. We’d lie down on the grass and stare up to see the skylarks, and we’d pick up bits of wool the sheep had dropped and card them and give them to the fairies.

T
UESDAY
23
^RD
O
CTOBER
1979

Leg very bad today. I have days when I can sort of walk, and then other days. I suppose I could say days when stairs are bad and days when stairs are torture. Today is definitely one of the second kind. I got another letter, dammit. I need to burn them or something. They’re so malign they almost glow with it. I can see them out of the corner of my eye, though it might just be the pain doing odd things to me. Friday is half term. My father’s going to pick me up at six. He didn’t say where we’re going, but it’ll be away from here. I can’t take the letters, though of course I can’t leave them either.

I’m not at all sure about the end of
The Magus
. It’s even more ambiguous than
Triton
. Who would write the last two lines in Latin, which almost nobody can read? It’s a library book, but I have lightly pencilled in the translation over the page:

Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover, love.

So Alison will love him, I suppose, for whatever that’s worth. It wasn’t enough before. He only really wanted her when he thought she was dead.

In the last part of the book, back in London, when Nicholas wants back into the mystery, whatever it is, is just how I don’t want to be. I should never have tried to talk to that fairy. Let someone else do something about Dutch elm disease. It isn’t my problem. I have finished with saving the world, and I never expected it to be the slightest bit grateful anyway. I’ve got this stupid boring one-note pain droning on at me, and I understand Nicholas only too well there, because who wouldn’t want that? But also, I don’t want to be pathetic like him.

T
HURSDAY
25
^TH
O
CTOBER
1979

It wasn’t raining, for the first time in ages, and my leg was feeling a bit better, so I went out in the half hour after prep. I went down to the edge of the playing field by the ditch, where I saw the fairy before, and made a bonfire out of all the letters. It was almost dark, and it burned up very brightly at once, with only one match. I suppose it might have been the photograph paper, because she’d burned part before so it longed for fire. “Oft evil will doth evil mar,” as Gandalf put it. Oft, not always. You can’t rely on it, but it does seem to happen quite often.

I felt much better once they were on fire. A few fairies came out and danced around the flames, the way they always do. We used to call them salamanders, and igneids. They’re an amazing colour, where blue flicks over and becomes orange. Most of them were acting as if they couldn’t see me, or I couldn’t see them, but one of them was looking at me, kind of sideways. She turned the yellow of the spots on the elm bark when she saw me looking, so I knew she knew what I’d asked before. “What can I do?” I asked, pathetic, despite what I said yesterday about Nicholas.

They all vanished when I spoke, but they came back after a moment. They’re not quite like our home fairies. Maybe it comes of not having ruins to live in. Fairies always seem to prefer places the wild has crept back into. We did Enclosure in history recently. The whole country used to have shared wild common places—like Common Ake, I suppose, where the peasants could graze their animals and gather wood and pick blackberries. They didn’t belong to anyone in particular, but to everyone. I bet they were full of fairies. Then the landlords got the people to agree to enclose them and make them into proper tidy farms, and they didn’t realise how squeezed they’d be without the commons until the commons were gone. The countryside is supposed to have those veins of wild running through it, and without them it suffers. This countryside is deader than cities in some ways. The ditch and the trees are only there because this is a school, and the trees by the bookshop are the edge of an estate.

The fairies didn’t speak to me, not even a few words like the one on the tree. But the yellow one kept looking at me, cautiously, so I knew she had understood. Or rather I knew she had understood
something
. I can’t be sure what. Fairies are like that. Even the ones we knew well, the ones we’d given names and who talked to us all the time, could be odd like that sometimes.

Then they all vanished again, and the papers were going to ash—they burned fast, being paper—and Ruth Campbell caught me and gave me ten order marks for starting a fire. Ten! It takes three house marks to cancel out one order mark, which is unfair to begin with if you ask me. But over this whole term so far, I’ve earned forty house marks, for coming top or for excellence in marks. And I’ve had eleven order marks, so that’s the equivalent of cancelling out thirty-three of them. It’s a stupid system and I don’t care about it, but
honestly
does that seem fair by any measure?

The oddest thing is that Ruth was more upset about it than I was. She’s a prefect, and she’s Scott, so in giving me ten order marks she was hurting her own house, and she cares about it much more than I do. If you have ten order marks you get gated the next Saturday and can’t go to town, but as this week is half term that doesn’t count. I’d be all right anyway, as I have enough house marks to cancel out, but I’d better make sure that I don’t get caught like that again.

Oh, and I couldn’t have burned the school down. It was a tiny fire, under control, and I’ve been making little fires for years. I knew what I was doing. Even if I hadn’t, I was a long way from any buildings, the ground is waterlogged from all the rain, and the ditch is full of water. There were also a lot of wet leaves I could have scuffed over it if there had been the slightest danger, which there wasn’t. I accepted the order marks, because I definitely didn’t want the matter to be passed on to a teacher. Better to keep them out of it. Ruth also confiscated my matches.

It’s a great relief the letters are destroyed. I feel lighter altogether without them being there.

F
RIDAY
26
^TH
O
CTOBER
1979

All day in school there was an almost tangible sense of suppressed excitement. Everybody wants to get away. They were all talking about their plans for the week, showing off. Sharon got to leave this morning, lucky pup, because another thing Jews can’t do is travel on Friday nights or Saturdays. What happens if they do? It’s like having a pile of geasas.

A few girls got picked up straight from afternoon school. The others were watching out of the library windows to see what kind of cars they had and what their mothers—mostly mothers—were wearing. Deirdre got picked up by her older sister in a white mini. I don’t suppose she’ll ever live it down. The thing mothers are supposed to wear, it seems, is a burberry with a silk headscarf. A burberry is an upmarket brand of mackintosh.

Nobody asked me what my mother wears, because nobody is speaking to me. But it’s just as well. She wears every third thing in her wardrobe, and she cycles her clothes through it in some strange order only she understands. I don’t know if she does this because it’s magical or if she does it because she’s mad. It’s very hard to tell the difference. Sometimes she looks an absolute guy, and other times she looks perfectly normal. The normal times do usually seem to coincide with times when it would be useful—she looked demure and respectable in court, for instance, the last time I saw her. A long time ago when she kept the nursery school she always looked reasonable for a teacher—but Gramma was still alive then, and could keep her in check. But I’ve seen her wear her wedding dress to go shopping, and a winter coat in July, and be barely covered in January. Her hair is long and black and even combed and tamed it looks like a nest of snakes. If she wore a burberry and a silk scarf it would look like a disguise, a cloth dragged over an altar where something had been sacrificed.

My father arrived in a rush of parents, and nobody remarked about him to me. He looked like himself. I was back to glancing at him sideways I’m afraid. I don’t know why, it’s absurd really when we’ve been writing to each other like human beings all this time. He drove me back to the Old Hall.

“We’ll stay there tonight, then tomorrow I’ll take you to meet my father,” he said. The headlights lit the road far ahead. I could see rabbits bounding out of the way, and the skeleton tracery of branches illuminated for an instant and then dropping back into dark. “We’ll stay in a hotel. Have you done that before?”

“Every summer,” I said. “We’d go down to Pembrokeshire and stay in a hotel for two weeks. It was the same one every year.” I felt my voice thicken with a sob at the back of my throat thinking about it. It had been such fun. Grampar would drive us to different beaches, and to castles and standing stones. Gramma would tell us the history. She was a teacher, all my family were, though I was determined I wouldn’t be. She loved the holidays, when she didn’t have to cook, when she and Auntie Teg could relax and laugh together. Sometimes my mother came, and sat in cafes smoking and eating peculiar things. It was better on the years she didn’t come, obviously. But she was much more avoidable in Pembrokeshire, and smaller somehow. Mor and I had our own special games, and there would always be other children staying in the hotel who we’d organise into our games and into putting on an entertainment for the parents.

“Was the food good?” he asked.

“Wonderful,” I said. “We’d have special things like melon, and mackerel.” Delicious things we never had at home.

“Well, the food will be good where we’re going, too,” he said. “How’s the school food?”

“Appalling,” I said, and made him laugh with my description of it. “Is there any chance I could get down to South Wales?”