Among Others

now. “Look carefully by the puddle,” I said.
    He turned his head slowly again and saw, I think, one of the gnarled gnome-like ugly fairies that isn’t human at all except for the eyes. He blinked.
    “Did you see it?” I asked.
    “I think so,” he said. “I saw its reflection. If it’s there and you can see it, why can’t I see it? I believe you, I really do. I saw the other one.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s ever such a lot I don’t know about them. I can’t see them if they don’t want me to.”
    The fairy was smiling in an unpleasant way, as if it could understand. “Let’s go,” I said. “I’m getting chilled through.”
    It was hard to stand up from the wall, and hard to walk for the first few steps. Sitting on walls is better for my leg than standing up, but not very good for it all the same. Wim offered to help, but there’s nothing that helps, really. He put his hand on my arm, my other arm, my left arm. “Can I at least take your bag?” he asked.
    “If you have a bag, you could take the books,” I said. “But I have to keep the bag.”
    “Are you telling me your bag is magic?” he asked.
    We both looked at my bag, bulging with library books. You couldn’t find anything less magic looking if you tried. “It’s sort of part of me,” I said, feebly.
    He didn’t have a bag, but he took some of the library books anyway and carried them under his arm. “Now,” he said, as we came out of the woods. “Some real coffee, not that Nescafe swill.”
    “What do you mean, real coffee?” I asked.
    “In Marios, they have real filter coffee. They make it from coffee beans. You can smell them grinding it and roasting it.”
    “The smell of coffee is great. The taste, however, isn’t,” I said.
    “You’ve never had real coffee,” he said, confidently and correctly. “Wait and see.”
    Marios was one of the brightly lit neon cafes in the high street where the girls from school hang out with their local boyfriends. The tables were full of them. We went to sit at the back where there was a small table free. Wim ordered two filter coffees. There was a juke box playing “Oliver’s Army,” very loudly. It was horrible, but at least it was warm. He put my library books on the table, and I put them back into my bag.
    “How did she die?” he asked again, when we were sitting down.
    “This isn’t the place,” I said.
    “The wood wasn’t the place and this isn’t the place?” Wim asked. He put his hand on my hand, where it was lying on top of the table. I gasped. “Tell me about it.”
    “It was a car accident. But really it was my mother,” I said. “My mother was trying to do something, some huge magic, to get power, to take over the world I think. The fairies knew and they told us what to do to stop it. She tried to stop us, and one of the things she did was to try to use things that weren’t real, things coming at us. We just had to keep on. I thought we’d both die, but it would have been worth it, to stop her. That’s what the fairies said, and that’s what we were prepared for, both of us. There were all those things that were magic, that were illusion. I thought it was like that, when I saw the lights, but it was a real car.”
    “Jesus, how awful for the driver,” Wim said.
    “I don’t know what he saw, or what he thought,” I said. “I wasn’t in any state to ask.”
    “But you stopped her? Your mother?”
    “We stopped her. But Mor was killed.”
    The waitress interrupted me by putting two red cups of black coffee down on the table. One of them was slopped into the saucer, onto the packets of sugar. Wim paid, before I could offer to.
    “And then what happened?” he asked.
    I couldn’t, of course, tell him about those awful days after Mor was killed, the bruise on the side of her face, the days when she was in a coma, the time when my mother turned off the machine, and then afterwards when I started to use her name and how nobody challenged me, though I’m sure Auntie Teg knew, and probably Grampar too. We might have been identical, but we were different people after all.
    “My grandfather had a stroke,” I said, because however unbearable that was it was the next bearable thing to say. “I found him. They used to call it elfshot. I don’t know if she made it happen.”
    I tried my coffee. It was horrible, even worse than instant coffee if that was possible. At the same time, I could see how it could become an acquired taste if I