Jo Walton - Among Others

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.

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.

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.

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.