Jo Walton: Among Others

There was a fairy up in the branches. It was wary. I’ve always noticed how much more fairies are like plants than anything else. With people and animals you have one standard pattern: Two arms, two legs, one head, a person. Or four legs and wool, a sheep. Plants and fairies, though, there are signs that say what they are, but a tree might have any number of branches, growing out anywhere. There’s a kind of pattern to it, but one elm tree won’t look exactly like the next, and might look completely different, because they’ll have grown differently. Fairies tend to be either very beautiful or absolutely hideous. They all have eyes, and lots of them have some recognisable sort of head. Some of them have limbs in a roughly human way, some are more like animals, and others bear no resemblance to anything at all. This was one of that kind. It was long and spindly, its skin like rough bark. If you didn’t see its eyes, which are kind of underneath, you’d take it for some kind of creeper draped with spider’s web. In the same way that oak trees have acorns and hand-shaped leaves and hazels have hazelnuts and little curved leaves, most fairies are gnarly and grey or green or brown and there’s generally something hairy about them somewhere. This one was grey, very gnarly indeed, and well over towards the hideous part of the spectrum.

Fairies don’t go much for names. The ones we knew at home we gave names, and they answered to them or not. They seemed to think they were funny. They don’t name places either. They don’t even call themselves fairies, that was us. They’re not big on nouns at all, come to think, and the way they talk ... Anyway, this fairy was completely strange to me, and I to it, and I didn’t have any names or passwords to give it. It was just looking at me, as if it might go bounding away at any moment, or fade back into the tree. Gender’s another iffy thing with fairies, except when it isn’t because they have long trailing hair full of flowers or a penis as big as the rest of their body or something like that. This one didn’t have any indication in that direction, so I think of it as it.

“Friend,” I said, which should be safe.

And then from total stillness it exploded into motion and speech. “Go! Danger! Find!” Fairies don’t exactly talk like other people. It doesn’t matter how much you want them to be Galadriel, they’re never going to make that kind of speech. This one said that and then vanished, all at once, before I could tell it who I was or ask it anything about the elms and if there was anything I could do. It felt as if I’d blinked, but I hadn’t. It’s always like that when they go quickly—gone between one heartbeat and the next, gone as if they’ve never been there.

Danger? Find? I have no idea what it meant. I didn’t see any danger, but I headed back to the school, where the bell was ringing for supper. I was one of the last in the line, but the food isn’t worth eating even when it’s hot. Danger didn’t find me and I didn’t find danger, at least not tonight. I drank my watery cocoa and hoped the fairy was all right. I’m pleased it’s here, even if it isn’t very communicative. It’s like a little piece of home.

This morning, I discovered what the fairy meant by “find” and “danger.” The post brought a letter from my mother.

I don’t know how finding the fairy let her know where I was. The world doesn’t work in a nice logical way. The fairies wouldn’t have told her, and while there were people who might have, they might have done it at any time. What I think is that she was looking for me. Being in a strange landscape and with all new stuff I’d have been hard to catch hold of—I have nothing but the cane and a handful of things of my own here, and the things of mine that she has will mostly be fading by now. But by opening my mind to call the fairy, I drew her attention. Maybe that made someone give her my address, or maybe she came to know of it directly. That doesn’t matter. You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic. That’s because it doesn’t happen the way it does in books. It makes those chains of coincidence. That’s what it is. It’s like if you snapped your fingers and produced a rose but it was because someone on an aeroplane had dropped a rose at just the right time for it to land in your hand. There was a real person and a real aeroplane and a real rose, but that doesn’t mean the reason you have the rose in your hand isn’t because you did the magic.

That’s where I always went wrong with it. I wanted it to work in a magical way. I expected it to work like it did in the books. If it’s like books at all, it’s more like The Lathe of Heaven than anything. We thought the Phurnacite would crumble to ruins before our eyes, when in fact the decisions to close it were taken in London weeks before, except they wouldn’t have been if we hadn’t dropped those flowers. It’s harder to get a grip on than if it did work the way it does in stories. And it’s much easier to dismiss, you can dismiss all of it if you have a sceptical turn of mind because there always is a sensible explanation. It always works through things in the real world, and it’s always deniable.

My mother’s letter is like that too, in a way. It’s barbed, but with barbs that wouldn’t really show if I showed it to someone else. She offers to send me pictures of Mor after I write back. She says she misses me but it was my father’s turn to look after me for a while, which is a construction of the situation that makes me want to strangle her. And the envelope is neatly addressed in her inimitable writing to Morwenna Markova, which means that she knows the name I am using.

I am frightened. But I would like the pictures, and I am fairly sure I am out of her reach.

Raining today.

I went into town, Oswestry, not much of a town, and bought shampoo for Sharon. She can’t use money on Saturday, because of being Jewish. I found a library, but it shuts at noon. Why would you have a library that shuts at noon on Saturdays? That’s just so English, honestly. There’s no bookshop, but there’s a Smiths with some books, just bestsellers but better than nothing.

I came back and spent the rest of my free afternoon in the library, being shocked at The Charioteer . It hasn’t struck me before that the men in Renault’s ancient Greek books who fall in love with each other are homosexuals, but I see now that of course they are. I read it furtively, as if someone would take it away from me if they knew what it was about. I’m amazed it’s in the school library. I wonder if I’m the first person to actually read it since 1959, when they bought it?

We are supposed to write home on Sunday afternoons. I have been writing to my father, Daniel, fairly long letters all about books except for a cursory hope that he and my aunts are well. He has written back in similar style, and sent me a parcel of the one book I really didn’t need, a hardcover three-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings . The paperback one I have was a present from Auntie Teg. He also sent me Dragonflight , which was “Weyr Search” and what happened immediately afterwards, Le Guin’s City of Illusions and Larry Niven’s The Flight of the Horse . It’s okay, but not as good as Ringworld or A Gift From Earth .

Today I composed a letter to my mother. I said I was well, and that I am enjoying lessons. I gave her my marks and class standing. I told her how my house is doing in hockey and lacrosse. It was a model letter, and in fact it is modelled on the letter my Irish friend Deirdre, who finds writing laborious, has written to her parents. I let Deirdre, whom I never call Dreary, copy my Latin translation in return. She’s actually very sweet—not very bright, and always using the wrong word, but very kind. She’d have let me copy her letter without any compensation, I think.