Among Others

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.
    S ATURDAY 22 ND S EPTEMBER 1979
    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?
    S UNDAY 23 RD S EPTEMBER 1979
    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.
    T UESDAY 25 TH S EPTEMBER 1979
    My letter brought results, by almost the next post. As she promised, she sent a photograph. It is one of the two of us on the beach, building a sand castle. Mor has her back to the camera, patting down the sand. I had been looking at the camera, or at Grampar who had been holding it, but you could no longer see anything but my silhouette, because I have been carefully burned out.
    W EDNESDAY 26 TH S EPTEMBER 1979
    School, as normal. Top of class in everything except maths, as normal. I went down to the ditch to look for fairies, because horses, stable doors, but didn’t see anything. The elms are still dying. Reading Out of the Silent Planet , which isn’t a patch on the Narnia books. Another awful letter. Stomach cramps.
    S ATURDAY 29 TH S EPTEMBER 1979
    You can never be sure where you are with magic. And you can never be sure if you’ve really done anything or if you were just playing. And in any case, I shouldn’t do anything at all like that, because it will draw her attention and I have too much of it already.
    Mor and I would go out on a summer day when it wasn’t raining and play. We’d play that we were knights, making desperate last stands to save Camelot. We’d play that we were on a quest. We’d have long conversations with the fairies where we knew we were saying both parts. It would be perfectly possible to edit the fairies out of these memories—though not of course Mor so I still couldn’t talk about them. I can’t talk about my childhood at all,