Jo Walton: Among Others

“So, why have you walked out on Liz?” was Auntie Gwennie’s greeting to me.

“Because she’s insane and impossible to live with,” I said. You have to stand up to her, or she walks all over you. “What were the family doing thinking it was a reasonable place for me to live?”

“Humph. And how are you enjoying living with your good-for-nothing father?”

“I don’t see much of him, I’m away at school,” I said, which I admit was a bit of a cop-out.

We had, of course, managed to sort of keep it from Grampar that Daniel was involved at all, but of course now it all came out. Trying to get onto a calmer topic, Auntie Teg mentioned the plans she’s working on to get Grampar out of Fedw Hir in the summer holidays, when she’ll be able to fill in if the arrangements don’t work out. Auntie Gwennie immediately suggested that Auntie Teg should give up teaching and sell her flat and move back to Aberdare to look after Grampar full time. I don’t think so! If nothing else, imagine when he dies! I can’t believe people, selfish people too, like Auntie Gwennie, think other people ought to sacrifice themselves entirely like that. She says things, and you just stand there because you can’t believe that what she’s said really came out of her mouth. Grampar did tell her not to be so daft, that’s the only satisfaction.

However, Auntie Gwennie did tell one very funny story about how she lost her driving license, which I want to record. She’s eighty-two, remember. She was driving from Manchester, where her awful daughter lives, to Swansea, where she lives. She was on the Heads of the Valleys road, which is an A road, with two lanes in each direction, but not a motorway, and the speed limit is therefore sixty. She was doing ninety. A policeman stopped her—a young whippersnapper of a policeman, she said. “Do you know how fast you were going, madam?” he asked.

“Ninety,” she responded, accurately but unrepentently.

“Are you aware that the speed limit on this road is sixty?” he asked.

“Young man,” Auntie Gwennie said, “I have been doing ninety along this road since before you were born.”

“Then it’s high time you had your license taken away from you,” he said, fast as lightning, and he did it too, so she has to go on the train!

Unlike me, she hates trains. “I can’t abide trains. I hate Crewe station. I can’t bear changing platforms there. You have to go all the way to Platform 12 for the Cardiff train, up the stairs and then down them again! I’m never doing it again! No, Luke, this is the last time you’ll see me. I won’t come down to South Wales again until I die, and then it’ll be my coffin changing at Crewe!”

I burst out laughing at that, which, I’ll say this for her, she didn’t mind at all.

I rang Wim, and told him I’d made no progress yet. I’d better go and see if I can find Glorfindel tomorrow. I told Auntie Teg about Wim and she wanted to know everything—not what his father did and what A Levels he’s doing, but what he’s like. I told her he’s gorgeous and he sort of likes me. She wants to meet him. I said he wanted to come down, and she immediately started fussing about where he could have slept. Her funky brown sofas are much too short for visitors.

I went up to the cwm. I didn’t tell Auntie Teg any lies, though I didn’t tell her all the truth either. I said I wanted to go up to the cwm and have a wander about on my own. I went up past the library. There’s never anybody about up there. I don’t know why not. The river runs along beside the dramroad, and it’s as pretty as anything, especially right now with the beech trees starting to come into leaf. There’s no colour like that very early green. There were big clouds in the sky, scudding along up the valley as if they had an urgent appointment in Brecon. In between the sun made everything almost glow with green.

When I came to Ithilien, Glorfindel was there, and Mor, and the fairy who gave me the stick, and loads of other fairies, many of whom I know quite well. I’m not going to get into this impossible thing where I try to record conversations again. What Glorfindel said was that I needed to open a gate so that Mor could live with them and be one of them, and also to give them a way to use the magic that they know. “Then are you ghosts?” I asked. I knew Wim would want to know the answer, and I wanted to know myself for that matter.

“Some,” he said.

Some of them are? “Then what are the rest?”

“Being,” he said.

Yes, well, I knew that. They are beings. They exist. They’re there and they know about magic and they live their lives that are not like our lives. But where did they come from? Are the ones who speak the ones who were human, once?

The gate he wants me to open has to be opened with blood, of course. And there’s something more, something I didn’t understand. I asked about my mother and he said she can’t hurt us, or she won’t be able to hurt us ever after I’ve done this. That definitely means I’m doing it to prevent harm. It’s not the place in the Labyrinth, thank goodness, because that’s a long trudge. It’s just down in the old Phurnacite. I can get the bus almost all the way there. Using blood for magic is always risky, but Glorfindel knows what he’s doing. He always has. The weird thing is that he knows it and yet needs me to do it, because he can’t really move things.

It was odd seeing Mor among the fairies like that, as if she was half a fairy already. I felt really strange. She seemed so remote. She wasn’t growing leaves or anything, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was.

This evening, I phoned Wim and told him everything as best I could. “What are the risks?” he asked.

“Well, getting too caught up in the magic, or making the magic wider than it should be.”

“What do you mean getting too caught up in it? You mean dying?” His voice sounded exasperated, at the other end of the line.

“I suppose I do.”

“You suppose! Look, I’m coming down.”

“There’s no need,” I said. “It’ll be fine. He knows what he’s doing.”

“You’re much more confident than I am.”

Telephone conversations are so inadequate, so lacking in expression and gesture and everything. I’m not sure I managed to reassure him properly.

The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there’s a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn’t. I know, and Wim doesn’t. That’s all there is to it. I wouldn’t wish on anyone that awful instant when I realised that the headlights coming towards us were real . But without that understanding people think there are dangerous things that can kill you, and everything else is safe. That’s just not the way it works. We were past the dangerous bit that we knew could kill us and just crossing the road. I don’t even think she wanted to kill us. We were more use to her alive.

I need to do it at sunset, which according to the Western Mail is half past five.

I went up the valley on the bus after lunch. Auntie Teg had to go in to school for a meeting and then was coming up to meet me at Fedw Hir for seven o’clock visiting time. I got off the bus at Abercwmboi, by the ruins of the Phurnacite. I was early. I was wishing I’d arranged to do something else in the afternoon, like meet Moira and Leah and Nasreen. I thought about ringing them, but then I thought about Leah’s party, which is the last time I saw them, and how they weren’t really friends any more, just people I knew. They’d want to hear about Wim, and trying to talk about him in their terms would cheapen what I really feel about him.