Among Others

countryside look cleaner and the towns dirtier.
    It’s also great to be wearing my own clothes. I was yesterday too, but I didn’t notice so much. But sitting here, on my own, looking out of the window, it’s really nice to be wearing jeans and my Tolkien t-shirt instead of that awful uniform.
    It’s funny, I write this whole thing mirror, so nobody could read it, but I want to write this next bit double mirror or something, in case, upside-down as well as backwards. The notebook locks. I’m lucky I can write mirror by just using my left hand. With all the practice I get, I’m almost as fast as I am right-handed.
    Anyway.
    Last night, after I finished writing in here, I read for a bit ( World of Ptaavs , Niven) and then put the light out. I fell asleep, but then later he , my father—I really should call him Daniel, it’s his name, and that’s what Sam calls him—Daniel came in, putting the light on and waking me. He was drunk. He was crying. He tried to get into my bed and kiss me, and I had to push him away.
    I know I said I was going to be pro-sex, but.
    In one way, it’s nice to think that somebody wants me. And touch is nice. Also sex, well, there is no privacy in school, so, but I’d had a chance the night before. (How long does it take? Masturbation is five, ten minutes tops. It never says, in books, how long. Bron and the Spike were at it for hours, but that was exhibition sex.) And I know from Time Enough For Love , which is very explicit on that, that incest isn’t inherently wrong—it’s not as if it really feels as if he’s family. I can’t imagine wanting to with Grampar, ugh! Ugh!!!
    But with him, Daniel, it really is just the consanguinity thing, because we’re strangers really. And that just means contraception, which I would want anyway. I’m only fifteen! And it’s illegal, I think, and it wouldn’t be worth going to prison for. But he seemed to want me, and who else is going to want me, broken as I am? I don’t want to be depraved, but I suppose I probably am. Anyway , I said no before I thought about it, because he was drunk and pathetic. I pushed him away, and he went to sleep in the other bed and snored, loudly, and I lay there thinking about Heinlein and that Sturgeon story in Dangerous Visions , “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” Great title.
    This morning, he acted as if it had never happened. We were back to not looking at each other, eating floppy bacon and cold fried eggs in the breakfast buffet in the hotel. He gave me the trainfare and another ten pounds for books. Even if I use some of it for food and busfare, I should be able to buy ten books at least. He’s very odd about money, sometimes acting as if he has none and then just handing it out like that. I have to go back to Shrewsbury next Saturday, because I have to be in school next Sunday night. But that is a week, a whole week away. He’s going to meet me in Shrewsbury station. And Auntie Teg is going to meet me in Cardiff station today. I rang her from Paddington. Meanwhile, I am between, between everything, between worlds, eating a Kit Kat and writing in here. I like trains.
    M ONDAY 29 TH O CTOBER 1979
    Half term is not the same time here as it is at Arlinghurst, everyone here was off school last week. Typical. So Auntie Teg is teaching, and all my friends are in school. I got here last night, ate one of Auntie Teg’s cheese pies, and fell asleep straight after dinner.
    Today I went into Cardiff and bought books. The thing about Lears is that it has American books. Chapter and Verse is very nice, and I always go there too, but they don’t import. Then there are a number of second-hand bookshops. There’s the one in the Castle Arcade, the one on the Hayes, and the one by the casino that has porn in the back. I think I’m the only person who ever buys the books from the front. They always glare at me, as if I wanted to go into their stupid back room and buy their stupid porn. Or maybe they don’t want to sell the normal books from the front because now they’ll have to get more? I got The Best of Galaxy Volume IV for 10p, and it has a Zelazny story in it.
    Then in the evening we went up the valley to see Grampar. He’s out of hospital and in a nursing home called Fedw Hir. Everyone else there is a loony, practically. There’s a man who sits going “Blubba, blubba, blubba,” with his lips, and another one who cries out at intervals. It’s the most horrible