Among Others

brightness. I saw mice and rabbits and the occasional fairy scurrying off as the beams lit them. “No,” I said. “I don’t get a lot of chance to talk to people at all.”
    “Arlinghurst is a very good school in its way,” she said.
    “Not for people like me,” I said.
    “The last bus that runs past the school leaves at eight-fifteen,” she said. “They finished closer to nine tonight. I asked Greg as one librarian to another if he’d be able to give you a lift back regularly, and he said he would. As long as you’re in bed by lights out, that should be all right.”
    “It’s very nice of him. He’s very kind to ask me at all. You don’t think I talked too much?”
    Miss Carroll laughed, as the car swung between the elms into the school drive. “Maybe a little too much. But they certainly seemed interested in what you had to say. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
    I do worry about it though.
    T HURSDAY 6 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    The days are getting awfully short. It seems to be dark all the time. It’s dark until well after nine, which keeps me inside in the morning. I had been in the habit of going outside for a moment before breakfast, just to breathe. I didn’t go anywhere, just stepped outside by the cloakrooms and breathed for a moment before coming back into the din of breakfast. Breakfast is bread and margarine, as much as you want, and overcooked watery English scrambled eggs, with tinned tomatoes, which I don’t eat. On Sundays, and just occasionally on other days, we also have sausages, which seem like ambrosia. The staff don’t attend breakfast, so everyone always talks at the top of their voice, and of course that means everyone has to if they want to be heard. It sounds like a bear-pit, but more high-pitched. Sometimes I stand outside the cloakroom and I can hear it down the corridor, like those Eighteenth-century madhouses where people would go for entertainment to hear the lunatics howl. Bedlam.
    It’s also dark, or almost, by the time we’ve finished lessons. The lights are on, and the sun is well down. There’s still a little light in the sky, but there’s no doubt it’s night rather than day. I like to walk away from the school building and turn around and look at the lights, which seem orange in the twilight. It reminds me somehow of coming home from school with Gramma and Mor on some special day near Christmas, one of us holding each of her hands. Maybe her school had finished a day before ours and she’d come to meet us. We were still in the Infants, I expect we were about six. I just remember holding her hand and looking back at the lights with the sky not quite dark.
    It makes me melancholy to remember, but a little bit of the security and excitement comes through from the way I was feeling in the memory. Memories are like a big pile of carpets, I keep them piled up in one big pile in my head and don’t pay much attention to them separately, but if I want to, I can get back in and walk on them and remember. I’m not really there, not like an elf might be, of course. It’s just that if I remember being sad or angry or chagrined, a little of that feeling comes back. And the same goes for happy, of course, though I can easily wear out the happy memories by thinking about them too much. If I do, when I’m old all the bad memories will still be sharp, because of pushing them away, but all the good ones will be worn out. I won’t really remember that day with Gramma, which I already don’t remember properly, I’ll just remember all these short winter days in school, walking out alone and looking back at the lit windows.
    I’m sick of the dark. I know the turning year is part of life. I like seasons and seasonal fruit. The apples must be nearly done, and I expect there are bright orange tangerines in their fascinating purple wrappings with Spanish writing in Mrs. Lewis’s shop even now. (If I could smell a tangerine! Maybe on Saturday.) But I’m getting to hate the darkness at this time of year. I’m not allowed outside at lunchtime, which is the one time it is reliably light, even if it’s always grey and usually raining.
    The days will get longer again. Spring will come. But it seems a long time to wait.
    F RIDAY 7 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    Letter back from my father with the book club permission, and about time too! So I can go next week.
    I was thinking about the book club, and wondering who among them is in my karass, really. The gorgeous boy? (Must find out his name!)