Jo Walton - Among Others

“On the half-past one train—but don’t you have to work?”

“I work mornings and go to college in the afternoons,” he said. “That’s how I came to see you in hospital, remember? I can skive off tomorrow afternoon if I want to. Nobody cares.”

“Skive” is like “mitch,” it means “skipping school.” That’s what they say around here. The first time I heard it I had no idea what it meant.

“You’ll care when it gets to the exams,” I said.

“I won’t even notice,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Gobowen railway station, all right?”

Greg drove me back to school, as normal. “So, I was right,” he said.

I blushed. I don’t think he saw in the darkness. “Sort of,” I admitted.

“Well, good luck.”

“Hot jets,” I replied.

Greg laughed. “I’ve always said that what Wim needs is a girlfriend who could quote Heinlein at him.”

Has he always said that? Or does he only think he always said that because I did the karass-magic? Greg existed before I did it. I know he did. I met him in the library. But he never said a word to me beyond not letting me join the first day and then taking my interlibrary loan cards. Was the book group, and SF fandom, there all the time, or did it all come into being when I did that magic, to give me a karass? Was there Ansible ? I know they think there was, that there were conventions going back to 1939, and certainly science fiction was there all the time. There’s no proving anything once magic gets involved.

I’m going to have to tell Wim. It’s the only ethical thing.

I set off from school with even more of a sense of escaping this week, even though it was raining, the kind of irresistible damp drizzle that gets through every crack. If I had clothes of my own here I could have changed into them before leaving, but I don’t so I couldn’t. Arlinghurst wants its girls to be recognisable at all times. If they could make us wear the uniform in the holidays they would. At least the coat is good and solid, and the hat might be awful but it does keep the rain off, mostly.

Wim was waiting in Gobowen station. It’s not much of a station, more like a bus shelter beside the line with a ticket machine and a couple of empty hanging baskets. He was sitting in the shelter with his feet up on the glass, folded up like a paperclip. His bike was chained to the railings outside, getting wet. There was a fat woman with a child sitting next to him, and a balding man with a briefcase, all in raincoats. Wim was wearing the same duffle coat as before. Next to him, the other people looked as if they were in black and white while he was in colour. He didn’t see me for a moment, then the balding man saw me and made a fuss about getting up to give me his seat, so Wim noticed and smiled and got up instead. It was funny, we were kind of shy with each other. It was the first time we’d been alone together since Saturday, and we weren’t really alone, they were there, but they didn’t quite count. I didn’t know how to behave, and if he did—and he should, as he’s had a lot more practice—he didn’t show it.

The train came, people got off, and then we got on. It was only a two-carriage train, and again full of people from North Wales with their funny singsong voices and yes/no questions. We managed to get a double seat because a nice lady moved across to give us one. We couldn’t really talk about anything, because she was sitting across from us, along with a worried young man with a cat in a carrier on his lap. The cat kept crying, and he kept trying to reassure it. It must be awful taking a cat to the vet on the train. Or maybe he was moving. He didn’t have much with him except the cat, but maybe you wouldn’t. Or perhaps, worst of all, he had to give the cat away, and he was taking it to a new home. If so, though, he’d probably have been crying too, and he wasn’t. The funny thing about the man with the cat was that Wim didn’t notice him at all. When I said something about him, after we were on the platform in Shrewsbury walking along, he didn’t know what I was talking about.

I don’t think Wim goes to Shrewsbury very often, for all that it’s so near. He didn’t know where anything was. He didn’t know there was a bookshop in Owen Owens. I had to go for acupuncture first, so I left him in a cafe—a shiny coffee bar, all chrome and glass, after he’d rejected the one with the nice booths where I went last time because it didn’t have real coffee. I never knew before Saturday that there were any kinds of coffee but Nescafe (or Maxwell House, but they’re the same), granulated coffee you make with boiling water. It seems a funny thing to be fussy about.

The acupuncture went well again. The acupuncturist says the traction might well have done it some violence (that’s the word he used) and been unwise. I’d use considerably stronger language than unwise, but I suppose it is my leg, and just any old leg to him. I looked at the chart the whole time I was on the table, memorising where the points are and what they affect. It could be really useful to know. Just pressing them might help. I can feel the magic, the “chi” when the pins are in, moving smoothly around my body with a jump like a spark-gap where the pain would be. I’m going to try it without needles and see if I can drain the pain out. The easiest thing would be to put it into something, like a rock or a piece of metal, but then anyone picking it up would get it. The acupuncture just drains it out into the world, as far as I can tell. Good trick if you can do it.

Afterwards I went back—faster down the stairs than up them!—to where I’d left Wim. I sat down opposite him. The coffee machine let out a blast of coffee-scented steam. “Let’s go somewhere else,” he said. “I’m sick of this place.”

Once we were out of there he cheered up. He held my hand, which was nice, though it would have been nicer if it had left me with a free hand. We went to the book department, and didn’t find anything, but it was nice to look and point things out to each other. He’s much more picky than I am, and also likes some things I don’t, like Dick. He despises Niven (!) and he doesn’t like Piper. (How can anyone not adore H. Beam Piper?) He’s never read Zenna Henderson, and of course they didn’t have any. I’ll borrow them from Daniel to lend to him.

After that, I insisted I would buy him lunch, though it was mid-afternoon by that time. I was starving. We found a fish and chip place with a sit-down part, and we sat down and ate fish and chips and white bread and butter, and I had truly awful tea so stewed it was dark orange, and Wim had a Vimto, which he said he hadn’t had since he was eight years old. That made him smile. He also ran his finger over the back of my hand, which was nicer than holding hands walking along, and much more comfortable. It made me feel all shivery.

The chip shop wasn’t full, so when we’d finished eating we ordered another Vimto and a lemonade—the tea was too awful even to pretend to drink. We sat there in the warm and dry while our coats steamed gently on the backs of our chairs. We talked about Tolkien. He compared it to Donaldson, and also to something called The Sword of Shannara which I haven’t read, but which sounds like a total crap ripoff. And then by degrees we got to talking about the elves. “They could be ghosts,” he said.

“The dead can’t speak. Mor couldn’t speak when I saw her.” I managed to say her name perfectly normally, without even a quiver.

“Maybe not when they’re newly dead. I had a thought about that. When they’re newly dead, they can’t speak, and they look like themselves. And you can make them speak using blood, like in Virgil, you said, right? Later, they draw life from things that are alive, animals and plants, and they get more like them, less like people, and they can speak, with that life.”