Among Others

worth dying, worth living on broken. If she’d done it, it would always have been the case that we’d loved our mother, that everyone did. I thought I knew how important it was, but I didn’t really.
    Morally, magic is just indefensible.
    I was going to say I wish I’d known that before, but I did really. I knew what happened after I threw the comb in the bog. I had thought about the bus. I knew about her. I should have applied that.
    S ATURDAY 8 TH December 1979
    Greg wasn’t in the library this morning, and only three books I’d ordered, none of them very exciting. It felt a bit flat. I walked down to the bookshop. It was spitting icy rain from a very low sky, the sort of rain that seems to come from all directions. An umbrella’s no use against it, not that I can use an umbrella anyway with a cane in one hand and a bag in the other. Going down the hill towards the bookshop and the little pond the wind was blowing directly into my face. It kept blowing my hat off. It wasn’t the sort of rain you can enjoy, you just have to squinch your face up and endure that kind of thing.
    At the bookshop I saw the ginger-haired girl. She was looking at the children’s books. She saw me as soon as I came in, because the door banged in the wind and so of course she looked up. She was carrying a huge canvas bag over her shoulder, and clutching a pile of carrier bags as well. “Hi,” she said, taking a step towards me. “I saw you at the book club but I didn’t get your name.”
    “Likewise,” I said, trying to smile and look friendly, trying not to think about what the magic might have done to her, to the world to make her like me. I could feel her looking at me and wondered what she thought about me. She didn’t look quite as awful with a black coat instead of the purple blazer. Her hair was still ginger, and very unruly, but it just looked like a bit of a mess instead of an explosion at a paint factory.
    “I’m Janine,” she said.
    “I’m Mori.”
    “Brill name. What’s it short for?”
    “Morwenna,” I said.
    Janine laughed. “That’s a bit of a mouthful. Is it Welsh?”
    “Yes it is. It means a breaking wave.” Actually, literally it means white sea , but that’s what it must mean, that’s what white sea is, the foam on the breaking wave.
    We stood there for a moment in amity but without anything to say. Then she said “I’m Christmas shopping. Only two weeks to go.”
    “I haven’t bought anything yet!” I said, suddenly realising. “Are you buying everyone books?”
    “Most of my family wouldn’t appreciate them,” she said. “But I thought I might buy the Earthsea books for Diane, after all the talk about them the other night.”
    “Don’t you have them already?” I asked.
    “Nope, read them out of the kids’ library,” she said. “Besides, I’ve had to make a rule about the others never touching my stuff, so I’m not about to start lending them books just when I’ve got it into their heads.”
    “I could buy my father a book,” I said. “I certainly have to buy him something. But it’s so hard to know what he has.”
    “What does he like?” Janine asked.
    “Oh, SF,” I said.
    “Is that how you started liking it?”
    “No. I didn’t meet him until quite a short time ago, and I’ve been reading it for ages.”
    “You didn’t meet your—” she began, and then stopped and looked away. She shifted her bags to her other hand, and when she spoke it was in a falsely casual tone. “Oh, you mean divorce?”
    “Yes,” I said, though in fact the actual divorce is only now going through. Daniel had disappeared without bothering with any of the legalities.
    “It’s nice that he likes SF,” Janine said, diplomatically.
    “Yes. It gives us something to talk about. It’s so weird meeting someone who is your father and a stranger at the same time.” This was the first time I’d said anything about this to anyone.
    “You must have been really small.”
    “Just a baby really,” I said.
    “My parents are getting divorced,” she said, very quietly, looking not at me but at the shelves. “It’s awful. They were fighting all the time, and now Dad’s living at Gran’s and Mum cries into the soup.”
    “Maybe they’ll make it up,” I said, uncomfortably.
    “That’s what I’m hoping. Dad’s agreed to come home for Christmas Day, and I’m hoping being in the family, seeing us all, Christmas, he’ll realise he loves her and not Doreen.”
    “Who’s