Among Others

I will defend against all comers as the best single author short story collection of all time, ever, and John Boyd’s The Last Starship from Earth , which I’d been in the middle of at the time and which hadn’t stood up to re-reading as much as one might hope. I have read, though I didn’t bring it with me, Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit , and the comparison between Anna bringing a new toy instead of the loved Pink Rabbit when they left the Third Reich has been uncomfortably with me whenever I’ve looked at the Boyd recently.
    “Can I—” I started to ask.
    “You can borrow any books you want, just take care of them and bring them back,” he said. I snatched the Anderson, the McCaffrey, the Brunners. “What have you got?” he asked. I turned and showed him. We both looked at the books, not at each other.
    “Have you read the first of these?” he asked, tapping the McCaffrey.
    “Out of the library,” I said. I have read the entire science fiction and fantasy collection of Aberdare library, from Anderson’s Ensign Flandry to Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness , an odd thing to end on, and one I’m still not certain about.
    “Have you read any Delany?” he asked. He poured himself a whisky and sipped it. It smelled weird, horrible.
    I shook my head. He handed me an Ace Double, one half of it Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany. I turned it over to look at the other half, but he tutted impatiently, and I actually looked at him for a moment.
    “The other half’s just rubbish,” he says, dismissively, stubbing out a cigarette with unnecessary force. “How about Vonnegut?”
    I have read the complete works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to date. Some of it I have read standing up in Lears bookshop in Cardiff. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is very strange, but Cat’s Cradle is one of the best things I’ve ever read. “Oh yes,” I said.
    “What Vonnegut?”
    “All of it,” I said, confidently.
    “ Cat’s Cradle ?”
    “ Breakfast of Champions , Welcome to the Monkey House …” I reeled off the titles. He was smiling. He looked pleased. My reading has been solace and addiction but nobody has been pleased with me for it before.
    “How about The Sirens of Titan ?” he asked, as I wound down.
    I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of it!”
    He set down his drink, bent down and got the book, hardly looking at the shelves, and added it to my pile. “How about Zenna Henderson?”
    “ Pilgrimage ,” I breathed. It is a book that speaks to me. I love it. Nobody else I’ve met has ever read it. I didn’t read it from the library. My mother had it, an American edition with a hole punched in the cover. I don’t even think there is a British edition. Henderson wasn’t in the library catalogue. For the first time, I realised that if he is my father, which in some sense he is, then long ago he knew her. He married her. He had the sequel to Pilgrimage and two collections. I took them, very uncertain of him. I could hardly hold my book pile one-handed. I put them all in my bag, which was on my shoulder, where it always is.
    “I think I’ll go to bed and read now,” I said.
    He smiled. He has a nice smile, nothing like our smiles. I’ve been told all my life that we looked like him, but I can’t see it. If he’s Lazarus Long to our Laz and Lor, I’d expect to have some sense of recognition. We never looked anything like anyone in our family, but apart from the eye and hair colour I don’t see anything. It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.
    T HURSDAY 6 TH S EPTEMBER 1979
    My father drove me to school. In the back seat was a neat suitcase I never saw before, in which, one of the aunts assured me, was all the uniform, neatly laid out. There was also a leather satchel, which she said is school supplies. Neither of them were scuffed at all, and I think they must be new. They must have cost the earth. My own bag held what it had held since I ran away, plus the books I have borrowed. I clutched it tightly and resisted their attempts to take it from me and put it with the luggage. I nodded at them, my tongue frozen in my mouth. It’s funny how impossible it would be to cry, or show any strong emotion, with these people. They are not my people. They are not like my people. That sounded like the first lines of a poem, and I itched to write them down in my notebook. I got into the car, awkwardly. It was painful. At least