Jo Walton - Among Others

Deirdre’s poem has won the school level of the competition.

Despite the fact that I wrote it, I am mortified. Everyone expected me to win, and I expected it myself. What was wrong with my poem? I suppose Miss Gilbert is a traditionalist. Nobody has said anything, and I congratulated Deirdre with everyone else, but I feel publicly humiliated. (On the other hand, I did actually write it, and Deirdre at least knows that.)

Deirdre came up to me after prep and dragged me out into the grounds where we could talk without being heard. She started crying and being incoherent almost at once, but what she wanted, I think, was to say that I shouldn’t have given her my best work. Well, I didn’t. But she thinks I did because it won. It’s the first time she’s ever won anything. I don’t think she’s ever earned a house mark before, except maybe for scoring a goal. I told her she deserved it. She sat right next to me at breakfast and nobly offered me her sausage, which I accepted, not because it would have been an insult but because I was hungry.

Wordsworth are jolly proud of her. Sandra Mortimer, the House Captain of Wordsworth, a redhead whose eyes are pink-rimmed and watery, personally spoke to Deirdre, who almost died of the honour.

Reading The Shockwave Rider , Brunner. It’s very good, but it isn’t Stand on Zanzibar . I wonder what it’s like to have written your masterpiece, and to know you’ll never do it again?

This is the true and complete story of how Deirdre and I each got an order mark this morning.

We were in the shower, which is a long trench of tile with a dozen showerheads, with fairly feeble pressure and variably warm water. Give me a bath any day. There’s hot water, meaning water that isn’t icy cold, between seven and eight in the morning, and between seven and eight at night. There are also showers in the gym, which are obligatory after games, but they’re cold and mostly the girls just run through them and splash off any mud. Any serious washing gets done first thing in the morning or last thing at night. It must be lesbian paradise then, because there are always acres of female flesh jiggling about.

There were probably fifteen girls in there this morning, competing for the limited water. Deirdre and I had a showerhead and were relying on my leper status to keep it to ourselves. I saw Shagger casting a few glances towards us, as if she might be repenting her shunning. As I stepped out of the water flow to shampoo my hair, Deirdre said, laughingly, “You’re getting breasts.”

“Am not!” I said, automatically, even before looking down. Then I looked down, and saw that I sort of am. I’ve had sort of breast buds for ages, behind my nipples. Now that’s all my mother has, so I thought that would be all I had, but now they were swelling out and kind of pouching. Lots of the other girls in VC have quite jiggly breasts already. It doesn’t make as much of a distinction as whether you have pubic hair, which I have, much darker than the hair on my head, and periods, which almost everyone does by now. I’ve had periods for two years. I was afraid they’d stop me being able to see fairies, but they made no difference at all, whatever C. S. Lewis thought about puberty.

“You need a bra,” Deirdre said.

“Do not,” I riposted feebly. I pushed her out of the spray and rinsed my hair. As the shampoo was running down, I looked down at my incipient breasts. “Hey Dee, do you think they’re an awfully funny shape?”

She was laughing so much she could hardly catch her breath. People were starting to look to see what was so funny.

“No, really,” I said, quietly but vehemently. “They’re sort of pear shaped. Other people’s aren’t like that.” I looked around the girls in the showers, and none of them had breasts shaped the way mine were.

“They’re fine,” Deirdre said.

“Hey Dreary, what’s so funny?” Lorraine asked.

“Commie just made a great joke,” Deirdre said.

Some of the girls finishing in the shower and wrapping themselves in towels started to sing “Jake the Peg.” I glared at them, but it didn’t work because of the water.

Deirdre and I stood together under the falling water. “They’re fine,” she whispered. “They just look funny because you’re seeing them from on top. If you could see them straight on the way you see other people’s you’d see they’re the same.”

“In a mirror,” I said.

“You should say ‘looking glass,’ Karen says,” Deirdre said.

“Crap,” I said, using another word that school didn’t approve.

The only mirror is above the row of sinks in the toilets where we brush our teeth, and our hair. It’s a long strip of mirror fixed on the wall, with the light strip above it.

“Come on,” I said.

Deirdre giggled and grabbed her towel, and I grabbed mine and wrapped it around me like a cloak. I put my soap and my shampoo back into my sponge bag, because otherwise someone would steal it, or open the shampoo and pour it down the drain, that happened to me with my shower gel my first week, when I left it in the shower.

We went into the toilets, which were right next to the shower room. There was nobody there, which was easy to see because none of the toilet cubicles has doors. I put the sponge bag down and wrapped my towel around my head like a turban. That’s a useful skill which Sharon had taught me. If you give it a tuck, it just stays there. Sharon has long unruly hair and it keeps even that in place. So my towel was here and Deirdre’s was around her shoulders, and we were otherwise naked.

We saw at once that the strip of mirror was useless. It reflected our faces and necks, but nothing as low as our breasts.

“Maybe if we stood on something,” Deirdre said, looking around.

“There’s nothing,” I said. “Unless we stood on the toilet seats, and then we’d be too high.”

“Let’s try it,” she said.

So we shut two of the toilet seats and climbed onto them, and saw that we were too high, so we tried crouching to get the right angle, pretty much naked and balancing precariously and giggling, because it really was very funny. And that’s when one of the prefects came in to see what the noise was about.

Either my dream-protection didn’t work, or she isn’t sending the dreams, they’re just coming out of my subconscious.

I dreamed last night that my mother had a plan to separate us. She was going to live in Colchester in Essex and take Mor with her, because, she said, Mor was more biddable and I didn’t do what I was told, and because I’d argued so hard to stay. We were protesting and fighting and she was dragging Mor away physically and I was crying and clinging to her. In some ways it was the opposite of what happened in the labyrinth. I was trying to hold on to her and my mother was trying to drag her off, and she started changing into different things and I had to hold on to her. I couldn’t bear the thought of the separation, and I was planning to complain to everyone, the whole family, that it was unendurable and they couldn’t let it happen. They let my mother get away with so much because they don’t want to face the fact that she’s mad, I was thinking, and Mor was howling and holding on to me, when I woke up. For a second there was a huge sense of relief that it had all been a dream, and then an instant later the memory that the reality was far worse. People can come back from Colchester. (No idea why Colchester.) I don’t know what it means to be dead.

I’m reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth . It has so many lovely science-fictional reversal moments. It isn’t Childhood’s End or 2001 , but it’s just what I want today. There are a couple of Clarkes I’ve never found, and I’ve put them on this week’s list.