Jo Walton - Among Others

After the bookshop, I checked out the shelves in the junk shop and bought a couple of things there too. I had so many books I could hardly walk at this point, and of course my leg was terrible. It always is when it rains. I didn’t ask to have my good leg replaced by a creaky rusty weathervane, but then I suppose nobody does. I would have made much greater sacrifices. I was prepared to die, and Mor did die. I should think of it as a war-wound, an old soldier’s scars. Frodo lost a finger, and all his own possibility of happiness. Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo. But that doesn’t matter. My mother isn’t a dark queen who everyone loves and despairs. She’s alive, all right, but she’s trapped in the nets of her own malice like a spider caught in its own web. I got away from her. And she can’t ever hurt Mor now.

I went into the bakery and sat down on one of the tables by the window and ate a Cornish pasty and a honey bun and played with a pot of tea. I don’t like tea, and coffee is worse, it smells fine but it tastes disgusting. In fact I only drink water, though if I absolutely have to have something I can drink lemonade. I prefer water. But a pot of tea is fiddly and nobody can tell if you’ve finished it, especially if you haven’t drunk any, and it gives you an excuse to sit and read and rest for a while.

So I did that, and then I bought four honey buns to go, with my own money this time. One for Deirdre, one for Sharon, though of course she won’t be able to eat it so I’ll get that one too, one for me, and one for Gill. Last week I had Sharon’s bun, and this week she’ll have mine. It’s more for the symbol than the actual bun, though goodness knows the actual buns are nice. I’m not buying one for Karen, because Karen calls me Hopalong, which I hate more than any of the other names. Commie’s almost affectionate, and Taffy’s inevitable, but using Crip or especially Hopalong means hostility.

Then I asked the bakery girl about the pond. “Is it a park?”

“A park, love? No, it’s the edge of the estate.”

“But there’s a bench by the pond. A park bench.”

“Council put that there for people to sit, like. By the road, that belongs to the council, so I suppose it might be a park, but not a proper park with flowers. But what you see behind, those trees and that, that’s part of the estate, and you’d find a No Trespassing sign before long, reckon, because there are pheasants. We hear them banging away over there in August.”

So it’s an estate with a country house, managed and with game keepers and things, but left half-wild for the pheasants. I bet there are fairies all over it.

I got a telling-off after lunch, and an Order Mark, my first. Apparently it’s not done to give buns to girls not in your house or form, unless they’re a relation. And Gill, while she is in my chemistry class, isn’t in my house or form, so I’m not supposed to be friendly with her, and my giving her a bun is considered deeply suspicious, and possibly lesbian. I think from the way some of this got said that Gill may well be a lesbian. Fine. I have no problem with that. I’m not one, but I’m definitely with Heinlein and Delany on this.

Even Deirdre and Sharon thought I shouldn’t have given Gill the bun. Deirdre tried to make excuses for me, saying I didn’t understand because I hadn’t been here long enough, and maybe all the chemistry had addled my brain.

I will never understand this place.

I didn’t write back again. But she keeps on writing to me and sending photographs like that. I get one or two every week. I am so desperate for the glimpses of Mor that I keep opening the letters, and I can never quite not read them. I save them until I am in the library, because I can’t bear everyone to see me reading them. Then today Lorraine Pargeter had a bad cold and came into the library and saw me looking at one of the cut-out photographs. Lorraine is a big-boned blonde stupid girl, captain of the form hockey team and a fly half for the house one. She’s certainly called me names and pinched me, but she stopped the others trying to trip me coming out of the showers, so I don’t feel especially antagonistic to her. Today her nose is very red and she looks truly miserable not to be out on her favourite games pitch. I heard her asking the teacher if she could wrap up and go out and watch.

“What’s that, Morwenna?” she asked. I didn’t want her to know I cared, which she would if I hid it, so I flicked it across the table to her. She picked it up and looked at it. It was a picture of the two of us getting prizes at school speech day, except with me burned out, as usual.

“My mother’s a witch,” I said, casually.

Lorraine gasped, and dropped the picture. “Is it voodoo?” she whispered.

I have been wondering that myself. I don’t know how these things work, and well, you just try looking it up. What does it mean to burn someone out of a picture? What could it do? What consequences could it have? I reached for my wooden charm, but of course it isn’t there, I can’t wear it with my uniform. I have a rock in my pocket and I reached for that. I don’t know if it helps, but it certainly is comforting. I touched the wooden library desk, which has been smoothed by time and hundreds of hands.

“Sort of,” I said, quietly. “She burns me out, but I seem to be all right.”

“But you’re right there,” Lorraine objected, loudly enough that Miss Carroll glanced over at us.

Lorraine, naturally, doesn’t know about Mor. I haven’t mentioned her because firstly it’s personal, secondly I can’t stand sympathy, and thirdly I can’t stand teasing about it even more. People teasing me about Mor could cause me to lose my temper with them. “Oh, really?” I said, and reached for the picture. “I hadn’t looked at that one yet. Usually it’s me she burns. But I’m protected. It would be awful if she started going after my friends.”

Lorraine gasped and moved away from me to sit on the other side of the library, pretending to read Gone with the Wind . For the rest of today, “Let them fear me as long as they obey me” has been working even better than normal, but Deirdre and Sharon have been keeping their distance too, which is going to get awfully lonely.

You know, class is like magic. There’s nothing there you can point to, it evaporates if you try to analyse it, but it’s real and it affects how people behave and makes things happen.

Sharon probably has more money than any of the other girls in our form. We’re the Lower Fifth, which is so meaningless in any normal context that it makes me cross to think about it. They start counting at “Upper Third.” In theory, there exists some platonic Lower School that starts at First, with seven-year-olds. In fact, there’s no such thing, and I deduce it only from the existence of these ridiculous numbers. By the time they get to the sixth, lower and upper, they’re on the same system as the rest of the world that goes from one to four in Junior School and one to six in Secondary School. Arlinghurst is, you notice, running from one to six like an ordinary Secondary School, just counting stupidly.

We’re specifically Lower VC. There’s an A and a B too, but we’re not streamed, heaven help us, that would be wrong. Only in fact we are, because Gill and the whole chemistry group is A, and they are definitely brighter. I should be in A on my marks, but they don’t move people except at the end of term. Miss Carroll, the librarian, has told me they have said I would be moved to A at Christmas, except for having upset the timetable, which means I’ll stay where I am with the dunces until next September. She said this as if I’d learn a valuable lesson about keeping my place, but I’m glad I fought for chemistry. I wish I’d held out for biology as well.