Among Others

gave me a big red polo-neck pullover, and a soap-on-a-rope, and a book token. I didn’t tell them about the ear-piercing. There’s no point upsetting them needlessly. It had already been legally established that they have no rights with me—the fact that they brought me up counts for nothing. Any mother, however evil, and any father, however distant, that’s the court system, and aunts and grandparents nowhere.
    Grampar hates Fedw Hir, you can tell, and he wants to get home, but I don’t know how we can manage it when he can’t walk without help. Auntie Teg was talking about people coming in to get him up and put him to bed. I don’t know what that would cost. I don’t know how it could be arranged. It’s such an awful place, though. They’re supposed to be giving him therapy, but it doesn’t seem to do any good. So many of the others are so clearly just waiting to die. They look so hopeless. And he looked like that at first. When we went in he was sunk down in the bed, I expect having a nap, but he looked small and pathetic and only half-alive, not like Grampar at all.
    I was talking to him about when he taught us to play tennis, and we went up to the Brecon Beacons and played on the uneven ground up there and afterwards on flat ground it was easy. I remember the skylarks singing high above and the tufts of bracken and the funny tufted reeds we used to call bamboo shoots. (They’re not bamboo, really, not anything like, but we had a toy panda and we used to play that they were and he could eat them.) Grampar used to be proud of how fast we could run and how well we could catch a ball. He’d always wanted a boy, of course. It’s not that we wanted to be boys, it’s just that boys have so much more fun. We loved learning to play tennis.
    And I thought all that was wasted, all that time practising up there, because Mor is dead and I can’t run and neither can Grampar, not any more. Except it wasn’t wasted, because we remember it. Things need to be worth doing for themselves, not just for practice for some future time. I’m never going to win Wimbledon or run in the Olympics (“They never had twins at Wimbledon…” he used to say) but I wouldn’t have anyway. I’m not even going to play tennis for fun with my friends, but that doesn’t mean playing it when I could was a waste. I wish I’d done more when I could. I wish I’d run everywhere every time I had the chance, run to the library, run through the cwm, run upstairs. Well, we mostly did run upstairs. I think of that as I haul myself up the stairs to Auntie Teg’s flat. People who can run upstairs should run upstairs. And they should run upstairs first , so I can limp along afterwards and not feel I’m holding them up.
    We called in to see Auntie Olwen, and then Uncle Gus, and Auntie Flossie. Auntie Flossie gave me a book token, and Uncle Gus gave me a pound note. I haven’t forgiven Uncle Gus for saying what he said, but I took the money and said thank you. I’ve put it into the back pocket of my purse, where it can be a start on my emergency stash. There’s a very comfortable wing chair in Auntie Flossie’s. Otherwise, I found all the chairs very difficult. I don’t know why people make them so low. Library chairs are always a lovely height.
    S UNDAY 30 TH D ECEMBER 1979
    Leg a bit better, thank goodness. In fact it was well enough that as I was walking through the bus station an interfering busybody asked me why I needed a cane, at my age. “It was a car accident,” I said, which usually shuts people up, but not her.
    “You shouldn’t use it, you should try to manage without it. It’s obvious you don’t really need it.”
    I just walked on and ignored her, but I was shaking. It might seem as if I don’t need it, walking along on flat ground, but I need it if I have to stand still, and I really need it for stairs or broken ground, and I never know from one minute to another if I’m going to be the way I am today or the way I was yesterday, when I can hardly put my weight on my leg at all.
    “See, you’re walking really fast now, you don’t need it at all,” she called after me.
    I stopped and turned around. I could feel my cheeks burning. The bus station was full of people. “Nobody would pretend to be a cripple! Nobody would use a stick they didn’t need! You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that I would. If I could walk without it I’d break it in half across your back and run off singing. You have no