Jo Walton - Among Others

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?”

“I can’t take you down as you suggested. But if you want to go on the train for a couple of days, that would be all right.”

I wasn’t sure, because on the train I’d be trapped there and she was there, after all, and if she physically grabbed me I didn’t know what I’d do. But probably she wouldn’t come near me. She wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t do anything magic.

At the Old Hall, when we finally got there, the aunts were all sitting in the drawing room. It’s not a room where people draw, with easels, it’s short for “withdrawing room,” where people withdrew for quiet conversation. They were hardly talking though. I kissed them, then a stop at Daniel’s bookshelves, and retired to bed with The End of Eternity .

I had no idea London was so big. It goes on for ever . It sort of creeps up on you and before you know it, it’s everywhere. There are outlying bits, with gaps in between, and then it gets just more and more built up.

My father’s father’s name is Sam. He has a funny accent. I wonder if they call him Commie? He lives in a bit of London called Mile End, and he wears a skullcap but doesn’t look the slightest bit Jewish otherwise. His hair—and he still has a lot of it, even though he’s old—is all white. He wears an embroidered waistcoat, very beautiful but a bit threadbare. He’s awfully old.

All the way in the car, my father and I had been talking about books. He hadn’t mentioned Sam except to say that’s where we were going. I was more thinking about the hotel and about London, so it was almost a surprise when he got there. My father tootled the horn in a pattern, and the door opened and out Sam came. My father introduced us on the pavement, and he hugged me, and hugged my father too. I was a little alarmed at first, because he really isn’t at all like anyone I know, and not the faintest bit like Grampar. With my father and his sisters it’s quite easy to keep them at arm’s length, and even to keep thinking about them at arm’s length somehow, because they’re English, I suppose. But Sam isn’t English, not at all, and he just instantly seemed to accept me, whereas with them I always feel horribly on probation.

Sam took us in, and introduced me to his landlady as his granddaughter, and she said she saw the resemblance. “Morwenna favours my family,” he said, as if he’d known me for years. “Look at the colouring. She looks like my sister Rivka, zichrona livracha .”

I looked blank, and he translated, “May her memory be a blessing.” I like that. That’s a nice way to say that somebody’s dead that doesn’t stop the conversation. I asked him how to spell it and what language it was. It’s Hebrew. Jewish people always pray in Hebrew, Sam says. Maybe one day I’ll be able to say “My sister Mor, zichrona livracha ,” just normally like that.

Then he took us up into his little room. It must be odd to live upstairs in someone else’s house. I can tell he doesn’t have any money. I’d know even if I didn’t know. The room has a bed and a sink and one chair, and books all piled up everywhere. There’s a dresser, all piled with books, with a kind of electric samovar and glasses. There’s a cat, too, a big fat ginger-and-white cat called Chairman Mao, or maybe Chairman Miaow. She took up half the bed, but when I sat down on it, perched on the edge, she came and sat on my lap. Sam said—he said I should call him Sam—that meant she liked me, and she didn’t like many people. I stroked her, carefully, and she didn’t scratch me after a minute the way Auntie Teg’s Persimmon always does. She curled up and went to sleep.

Sam made tea, for him and me. My father had whisky. (He drinks an awful lot. He’s gone down to the hotel bar now, drinking. He smokes a lot too. It would be unkind to say he has all the vices, in the circumstances, as he did help me get away and he is paying for me to go to school. It’s not as if he wanted me.) The tea came in glasses with metal holders, and didn’t have milk or sugar, which made it a lot nicer. It had a pleasant sort of flavour. I was surprised, because I don’t usually like tea at all and I was only drinking it to be polite. He got the water from the electric samovar, which he said kept the water at the right temperature.

After a little while, I was looking at the books, and I saw The Communist Manifesto on top of one of the piles. I must have made a little noise, because they both looked at me. “I just noticed you have The Communist Manifesto ,” I said.

Sam laughed. “My good friend Dr. Schechter lent me that.”

“I was reading it recently myself,” I said.

He laughed again. “It’s a lovely dream, but it would never work. Look at what’s happening in Russia now, or Poland. Marx is like Plato, he has dreams that can’t come true as long as people are people. That’s what Dr. Schechter can’t understand.”