Jo Walton - Among Others

There may be stranger reasons for being alive.

There are books. There’s Auntie Teg and Grampar. There’s Sam, and Gill. There’s interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head. There’s the distant hope of a karass sometime in the future. There’s Glorfindel who really cares about me as much as a fairy can care about anything.

I let go. Reluctantly, but I let go. She clung. She held on, so that letting go wasn’t enough. If I wanted to live, I had to push her away, through the connection that bound us, though she was crying and calling to me and holding on as hard as she could. It is the hardest thing I have ever done, worse than when she died. Worse than when they dragged me off her and the ambulance took her away and let my mother go with her, smiling, but not me. Worse than when Auntie Teg told me she was dead.

Mor was always braver than I was, more practical, nicer, just generally a better person. She was the better half of us.

But she was afraid now, and lonely and bereft, and dead, and I had to push her away. She changed as she clung, so she was like ivy, all over me, and seaweed, tendrils clutching, and slime, impossible to shake off. Now I wanted to get her off I couldn’t, and even though she was changing I knew she was still Mor all the time. I could feel that she was. I was afraid. I didn’t want to hurt her. In the end, I put my weight down on my leg. The pain broke the bond, the same way it frightens the fairies. The pain was something my living body could do, the same as picking up oak leaves and bringing them up a mountain.

She went on, then, or tried to but the twilight had became darkness, and couldn’t go through the door, it wasn’t there any more. She stood by the trees looking like herself again, and very young and lost, and I almost reached out for her again. Then she was gone, in an eyeblink, the way fairies go.

It was a long walk back in the dark, alone. Every step I was afraid of meeting my mother, come to see what had gone wrong with her plan to get them all. It was because of Mor she could try it, I see that now, because Mor was her daughter, her blood. I kept thinking that I couldn’t run, and she could. Mor felt further away than ever. The fairies had all fled the pain, naturally. Even Babel 17 , which was right there in my bag, felt a long way away. But Auntie Teg was waiting with the car, and Grampar at Fedw Hir, so pleased to see me, he’d have been heartbroken if I’d gone on. The bed was empty where the man had been making the blubba blubba noises, they’d already taken his empty body away. He was lucky to be able to go tonight. People who die in November have to wait a whole year. Like Mor. What happened to her? Will she have to wait until next year?

The more I think about it, the less I understand about what happened. Does every valley have an opening like that? How about people who die in flat places? Is it actually old, older than the ironworks, or did the ironworks open it up where before it was smooth hillside? And where did they go? And was that really them, all of them? And what about Mor? Where is she now? Did my mother get her after all? Will the fairies help her? What about the rowan trees? I never heard that the rowan is the tree of death—that’s supposed to be the yew, the graveyard yew. But it was oak leaves, dry gold oak leaves. There’s one left in my bag. It doesn’t mean someone got left out, Mor had one, and there were still leaves crunching on the ground when I left, I brought more than enough. I thought I shook them all out, but there was one inside the back cover of Babel 17 . What an odd book! Does language really shape the way it’s possible to think? I mean, like that?

I only seem to have questions today.

I was knackered, and my leg was unmentionable, so I stayed in and read all day. Then I made dinner for Auntie Teg for when she came home from school—baked mushrooms with onions and cheese and cream, and jacket potatoes with more cheese, and peas. She said how nice it was, and that she supposed men got that every day, if they had a wife, and what she needed wasn’t a husband who would expect that but a wife who would do it. It was lovely to be cooking with actual food. There’s something so grounding about it. It’s not that I was doing any magic, beyond the magic it is to take big flat mushrooms and raw potatoes and turn them into something totally delicious. I was just making dinner. But I wonder how much of cooking for someone else is magic anyway, more than I know about. I think it might all be. Auntie Teg’s dishes don’t like me any more than Persimmon does. The knives and peelers don’t cut me, but they turn awkward in my hands. They know I’m not the person supposed to be using them.

There’s supposed to be a Heinlein fantasy novel called Glory Road . That would be something! I wonder if Daniel has it? If not, there’s always blessed interlibrary loan.

I went up to Aberdare again on the bus today. There wasn’t so much as a sniff of Mor or any fairy, though I kept getting the feeling they were disappearing as soon as I looked for them and appearing just where I couldn’t see them. That’s a game, of course, but I didn’t want to play it. I wanted answers, though I should know how impossible it is to get straight answers from them, even when they want something, which clearly they don’t just at the moment.

I went to Grampar’s house. I still have the front door key, though it’s stiffer than ever, and terribly hard to get in. Auntie Teg keeps it clean, but it was kind of dusty and unused-smelling even so. It’s a very little house, crammed in between two others. When Auntie Florrie lived there it didn’t have a bathroom, the bath was in the kitchen, and the toilet was a ty bach , outside. It was like that when my great-grandparents lived there too. My grandfather put in proper plumbing when he moved back in. I quite liked the bath in the kitchen, next to the coal fire. It was surprisingly cosy. But I used to hate going outside to the toilet, especially at night.

He moved in there after Mor died to get away from my mother. Everyone runs away from her. I didn’t officially ever live there. I officially lived with her. I even sometimes spent some time living with her, when she insisted, but mostly I didn’t, while Grampar was all right. I had my own bedroom, with my bed from home and the blue box. Most of my books and clothes were in her house, but I found a woolly jumper of Mor’s and my denim shorts with a lion on, and a copy of Destinies . Destinies is an American science fiction magazine that comes in paperback books, and they stock it in Lears and I love it. I bought the new one—”April-June”—there on Monday. I’m saving it to read on the train.

So I left a few books. I know I won’t be able to get them until Christmas, but they’re really piling up, and I’m pretty sure I won’t want to re-read the ones I left any time soon. There isn’t much room at school. Anyway, even if I miss them, I like them being there. If Grampar gets well enough to come out of Fedw Hir and go home, I can go home too. Daniel doesn’t actually care, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. I feel as if I don’t actually live anywhere, and I hate that. The thought that there are eight books on the windowsill in my room in alphabetical order is comforting. It’s magic, too, it’s a magic link. My mother can’t get in there, and even if she could, they’re books. You can’t do magic with books unless they’re very special copies—and if she could, she already has all the rest of mine. She has all too much of mine, but there’s no way of getting it from her.

If I defeated her again, and I think I did, will she want revenge? It wasn’t at all like last time. It’s weirdly anticlimactic, especially since I can’t find Glorfindel to ask him the nine million questions I have.