Among Others

burned letters, and I have put them on the windowsills. I think that if she tried to come through the stones would rise up as sheets of rock and block the way, making the windows solid with the wall. Really it should be a whole row of stones, or a line of sand or something. The real trouble with that is that there are eleven other girls sleeping in this dorm, and any of them will see just a little odd pebble and not care about disturbing it, or actively want it gone. I’ll have to check them every night before I go to sleep, and somebody is going to notice sooner or later. I suppose I could tell them, but all this scary stuff has worked all too well already.
    She couldn’t get through stained glass, for what good that is.
    I am going to have to get some stuff together and do some real protection magic, even without talking to the fairies first. I’m afraid to, but not as afraid as I am of her coming into the room when I’m asleep and holding me frozen like that. I couldn’t move at all, and I really tried.
    T UESDAY 27 TH N OVEMBER 1979
    It’s funny how it’s hard to concentrate on reading in a waiting room. On the one hand, I really want nothing more than to pull down inside a book and hide. On the other, I have to keep listening for them to call my name, so every sound distracts me. Everyone here is sick, which is very depressing. The notices are about contraception and diseases. The walls are a bilious green. There’s a leaflet about getting your eyes tested. Maybe I should.
Looking out of the window, a list of everything I see while waiting:
2 scruffs
1 man with sheepdog—a lovely sheepdog, in beautiful condition.
6 people on bikes.
12 doughy housewives with 19 kids.
4 unaccompanied school age kids.
4 young couples.
1 baby in a pushchair, pushed by a woman in a puce dress.
1 tatty old man in jeans—what was he thinking? Jeans are for young people.
1 man parking a motorbike.
Millions of cars.
2 businessmen.
1 taxi driver.
1 man with a moustache and his wife.
2 blonde women in matching green coats, who came past twice, once in each direction. Maybe sisters?
1 pair of middle-aged twins. (I sort of hate to see twins, though I know it doesn’t make sense.)
1 pompous man in a dinner jacket. (At lunchtime?)
1 man in a pink shirt. (Pink!)
A skinhead carrying a dragon tankard. (He stopped outside the window and I got a good look at it.)
1 business woman, in a pin-striped suit with a briefcase. (She looked very groomed. Would I like to be her? No. But most of everyone I saw.)
6 teenagers in gym clothes running a race.
8 sparrows.
12 pigeons.
1 unaccompanied black-and-white dog, probably mostly terrier, that lifted a leg against the motorbike. He went off alone, looking jaunty and sniffing at everything. Maybe I’d like to be him.
People who notice me:
1 man in a denim shirt, who waved.
    Funny how unobservant people are generally.
    When it finally got to be my turn, the doctor was very gruff. He didn’t have much time for me. He said he’d recommend me to the Orthopaedic Hospital and get my x-rays sent there. I had to wait all that time surrounded by snuffling children and decrepit old people for two minutes of the doctor’s attention. I missed physics for that?
    However, I bought two apples and a new bottle of shampoo, and I went back via the library and managed to return three books and pick up four, so I count it a successful trip to town.
    Waiting for the bus back to school, I was thinking about magic. I wanted the bus to come, and I wasn’t exactly sure when it was due. If I reached magic into that, imagined the bus just coming round the corner, it isn’t as if I’d be materialising a bus out of nowhere. The bus is somewhere on its round. There are two buses an hour, say, and for the bus to be coming right when I wanted it, it must have started off on its route at a precise time earlier, and people will have caught it and got on and off at particular times, and got to where they’re going at different times. For the bus to be where I want it, I’d have to change all that, the times they got up, even, and maybe the whole timetable back to whenever it was written, so that people caught the bus at different times every day for months, so that I didn’t have to wait today. Goodness knows what difference that would make in the world, and that’s just for a bus. I don’t know how the fairies even dare. I don’t know how anyone could know enough.
    Magic can’t do everything. Glory couldn’t help