Jo Walton: Among Others

I bought Samuel Delany’s Triton . I don’t know if my father has it already, I don’t care. It was 85p. The lady in the bookshop was really nice. She doesn’t read SF, but she tries to keep a good selection. It was nothing to a really good selection like Lears in Cardiff, but it wasn’t bad at all. I’m going to ask my father for pocket money so I can buy books. I’m also going to ask him to sign the library form. I’m pretty sure he will. I’m not so sure about Miss Carroll writing a letter.

Next door to the bookshop is a junk shop with three shelves of secondhand books, all of them old and battered. I bought Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle for 10p. I liked her Dalmatians books, especially The Starlight Barking , or “Klothes that Klank” as Mor used to call it. I didn’t know she’d written any historical fiction. I’ll keep it until I’m in the mood for a good siege.

That left me with 5p. There wasn’t anything there for 5p. The third little shop in the row is a bakery and cafe. I went in, because Sharon had asked me to buy buns. Now this is a thing people do. The way it works is that you buy the buns yourself, or get someone to buy them for you. Then you give the bag to the kitchen staff with instructions, and they get sent to the designated recipients after lunch on Sunday. The rule is you have to buy at least two, you can’t just buy for yourself. Popular girls have whole piles of different buns every week. Usually I don’t have any. Deirdre doesn’t have much money, and Sharon’s Jewish. But Sharon’s doing it this week, because she’s nice. I mean, it’s especially nice of Sharon to do it because she can’t even eat them. Jewish people have to have special food. Sharon’s special food seems much nicer than our school food. It comes on trays. I wonder if they’d give it to me if I told them I was Jewish? But what if I’m not Jewish enough and it killed me or made me sick? I should talk to Sharon about it before trying it. Anyway, Sharon wanted me to buy buns for me and Deirdre and Karen, who’s her other friend. So I bought buns, and they were 10p each or four for 35p, so I bought four, using my own fivepence. They were honey buns, and they were still warm from the oven and I walked over by the pond and ate one. It was absolutely delicious.

There’s a bench by the pond, and grass growing around it, and willows by the water, dipping down over it. The leaves on the trailing branches are turning yellow. I always think weeping willows is a good name for them, but then so is “sally willows.” Willows love water and alders hate water. There’s a road over Croggin Bog called Heol y Gwern, the Alder Road, because people planted alders along it to make a safe dry path. Neolithic people, they think. Certainly it was there before the Romans. It was a shock, reading the history of the valley. When I go back, I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it for granted the same way.

I sat on the bench by the willows and ate my honey bun and read Triton . There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.

I only just caught the bus back to school. I could see it at the bottom of the hill, and I wanted to run to catch it, I remember how it feels to run full pelt, and I wanted to do that, to lean down and just take great running strides. I almost did take one step like that, but when I put my weight on my leg wrong it feels like being stabbed. The bus driver saw me coming and recognised the uniform and waited. Lots of other girls from the school were on the bus, most of them from other forms. They nearly all know, or think they know, that I walk with a stick because my mother sticks voodoo pins into a doll. I got a seat to myself, but then Gill Scofield, who’s in my chemistry class, came and sat by me.

“What have you been doing to make you late?” she asked.

“Reading,” I told her. “I forgot the time.”

“Not meeting boys?”

“No!”

“Don’t sound so shocked, that’s what half the other girls on this bus have been doing. More than half. Look at them.” I look. Lots of them have the skirts of their gym slips folded down, and their lips are suspiciously red.

“That’s so tacky,” I said.

Gill laughed. “I want to be a scientist,” she confided.

“A scientist?”

“Yes. A real one. I was reading the other day about Lavoisier. You know?”

“He discovered oxygen,” I said. “With Priestley.”

“Well, and he was French. He was an aristocrat, a marquis. He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he’d keep blinking his eyes after his head was off, for as long as he had consciousness. He blinked seventeen times. That’s a scientist,” Gill said.

She’s weird. But I like her.

Finished Triton . It’s amazing. But the more I think about it the less I understand why Bron lied to Audri.

I used today’s letter writing time to send a “Good Luck” note to cousin Arwel Parry and a congratulations note to Uncle Rhodri.

Why did Bron lie to Audri?

On the one hand, Gramma and Grampar never mentioned sex at all. They must have done it, or they wouldn’t have had Auntie Teg and my mother, but I don’t think they did it more than twice. Then there’s the way they talk about sex in school and in church. And there’s no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it. Arwen’s just a sop to propriety. Or just a vessel for future half-elven High Kings of Gondor and Arnor. A prize. It would have been better for him to have married Eowyn—who was a hero, after all, in her own right—and just let the Numenoreans dwindle. (After all, look at us now!) So sex, necessary evil to produce children. That’s normal.

And when you look at those girls on the bus, and my mother and her boyfriends, and the girls who creep into each other’s beds at night and, well, ach y fi .

But on the other hand, I do have sexual feelings. And Triton , and Heinlein, and The Charioteer have made me think that actually sex itself is neutral, and it’s society demonizing it that makes it icky. And the whole sex-change thing in Triton , there must be a sort of spectrum of sexuality, with most people somewhere in the middle, drawn to men and women, and some off on the ends—me at one end and Ralph and Laurie at the other. One of the things I’ve always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.

From now on, I’m going to be positive about sex.

If the school was going out of their way to try to detach us from magic, they couldn’t organize things better. I wonder if that was someone’s original intention. I’m sure nobody here now knows a thing about it, but Arlinghurst has been running like this for more than a hundred years.

We do no cooking, we’re completely cut off from the food we eat, and the food is incredibly awful. Yesterday, for instance, dinner was spam fritters, totally tasteless mashed potatoes, over-boiled cabbage. For pudding, we had a dish of set custard with a half walnut in the middle, between six people. That’s called Hawaiian Delight. There’s a similar one we have at least once a week called Hawaiian Surprise, which is set custard with a half glace cherry. I don’t like glace cherries or walnuts, so I’m marginally popular for a moment whenever it’s served for not joining in the squabble over who gets it. I don’t like custard either, but sometimes I’m hungry enough to eat it. You couldn’t get worse food, or food more detached from nature, if you tried. If you have an apple, you’re connected to an apple tree. If you have a dish of set custard and half a glace cherry you’re not connected to anything.