Among Others

order marks you get gated the next Saturday and can’t go to town, but as this week is half term that doesn’t count. I’d be all right anyway, as I have enough house marks to cancel out, but I’d better make sure that I don’t get caught like that again.
    Oh, and I couldn’t have burned the school down. It was a tiny fire, under control, and I’ve been making little fires for years. I knew what I was doing. Even if I hadn’t, I was a long way from any buildings, the ground is waterlogged from all the rain, and the ditch is full of water. There were also a lot of wet leaves I could have scuffed over it if there had been the slightest danger, which there wasn’t. I accepted the order marks, because I definitely didn’t want the matter to be passed on to a teacher. Better to keep them out of it. Ruth also confiscated my matches.
    It’s a great relief the letters are destroyed. I feel lighter altogether without them being there.
    F RIDAY 26 TH O CTOBER 1979
    All day in school there was an almost tangible sense of suppressed excitement. Everybody wants to get away. They were all talking about their plans for the week, showing off. Sharon got to leave this morning, lucky pup, because another thing Jews can’t do is travel on Friday nights or Saturdays. What happens if they do? It’s like having a pile of geasas.
    A few girls got picked up straight from afternoon school. The others were watching out of the library windows to see what kind of cars they had and what their mothers—mostly mothers—were wearing. Deirdre got picked up by her older sister in a white mini. I don’t suppose she’ll ever live it down. The thing mothers are supposed to wear, it seems, is a burberry with a silk headscarf. A burberry is an upmarket brand of mackintosh.
    Nobody asked me what my mother wears, because nobody is speaking to me. But it’s just as well. She wears every third thing in her wardrobe, and she cycles her clothes through it in some strange order only she understands. I don’t know if she does this because it’s magical or if she does it because she’s mad. It’s very hard to tell the difference. Sometimes she looks an absolute guy, and other times she looks perfectly normal. The normal times do usually seem to coincide with times when it would be useful—she looked demure and respectable in court, for instance, the last time I saw her. A long time ago when she kept the nursery school she always looked reasonable for a teacher—but Gramma was still alive then, and could keep her in check. But I’ve seen her wear her wedding dress to go shopping, and a winter coat in July, and be barely covered in January. Her hair is long and black and even combed and tamed it looks like a nest of snakes. If she wore a burberry and a silk scarf it would look like a disguise, a cloth dragged over an altar where something had been sacrificed.
    My father arrived in a rush of parents, and nobody remarked about him to me. He looked like himself. I was back to glancing at him sideways I’m afraid. I don’t know why, it’s absurd really when we’ve been writing to each other like human beings all this time. He drove me back to the Old Hall.
    “We’ll stay there tonight, then tomorrow I’ll take you to meet my father,” he said. The headlights lit the road far ahead. I could see rabbits bounding out of the way, and the skeleton tracery of branches illuminated for an instant and then dropping back into dark. “We’ll stay in a hotel. Have you done that before?”
    “Every summer,” I said. “We’d go down to Pembrokeshire and stay in a hotel for two weeks. It was the same one every year.” I felt my voice thicken with a sob at the back of my throat thinking about it. It had been such fun. Grampar would drive us to different beaches, and to castles and standing stones. Gramma would tell us the history. She was a teacher, all my family were, though I was determined I wouldn’t be. She loved the holidays, when she didn’t have to cook, when she and Auntie Teg could relax and laugh together. Sometimes my mother came, and sat in cafes smoking and eating peculiar things. It was better on the years she didn’t come, obviously. But she was much more avoidable in Pembrokeshire, and smaller somehow. Mor and I had our own special games, and there would always be other children staying in the hotel who we’d organise into our games and into putting on an entertainment for the parents.
    “Was the food good?” he