Among Others

right to talk to me like that, to talk to anyone like that. Who made you queen of the world when I wasn’t looking? Why do you imagine I would go out with a stick I don’t need—to try to steal your sympathy? I don’t want your sympathy, that’s the last thing I want. I just want to mind my own business, which is what you should be doing.”
    It didn’t do any good at all, except for making me a public spectacle. She went very pink, but I don’t think what I was saying really went in. She’ll probably go home and say she saw a girl pretending to be a cripple. I hate people like that. Mind you, I hate the ones who come up and ooze synthetic sympathy just as much, who want to know exactly what’s wrong with me and pat me on the head. I am a person. I want to talk about things other than my leg. I’ll say this for Oswestry: English standoffishness means I don’t get as much of that there. The people who have asked me about it there, both whether I really need it and what’s wrong, have been acquaintances, teachers, girls in school, the aunts’ friends on Boxing Day, people like that.
    It took me ages to calm down. I was still overheated and nervous when the bus went round the narrow corner to the bridge in Pontypridd. If it didn’t make it, I thought, if we all fell to our deaths, that awful woman would be the last person I talked to.
    I had lunch with Moira, which was my ostensible reason for going up to Aberdare today. Moira says my voice has got posher, which is absolutely horrifying. She didn’t say “more English” because she’s my friend and a kind person, but she didn’t have to say it. School must be rubbing off on me. I so don’t want to sound like the other girls there! I don’t know what to do about it. The more I think about it the odder my voice sounds in my ears, but I hadn’t noticed before, I was just talking. There are elocution lessons. Are there anti-elocution lessons? Not that I want to talk like Eliza, but I really don’t want to open my mouth and get filed as upper-class twit.
    Moira’s had a good enough term. It was surprisingly hard to find things to talk about. I can’t remember what we used to talk about; nothing, I suppose, gossip, school, the things we were doing together. Without that there isn’t much there. Leah’s broken up with Andrew and Nasreen is seeing him, and her parents are flipping out, apparently. Leah’s having a party on January 2nd, in the evening, so I’ll see them all there.
    After lunch I went out of Moira’s house onto Croggin Bog and walked across. Heol y Gwern is the only proper road across it, of course, but I went off that right away. Croggin, well, properly it’s spelled Crogyn, is big: It’s an upland bog, it’s the whole shoulder of the hill. There are older paths running through it, not as old as the Alder Road, but they’ve been there a long time. It’s a bad time of year for it, and it’s been a wet winter, but it isn’t really dangerous if you know the way, or even if you don’t if you follow the alders. Mor and I got really lost in Croggin Bog once, when we were quite small, and got out purely by alder-recognition. Anyway, it isn’t quicksands, it’s just wet and muddy. People are more scared of it than they need to be. There was also the time I went into it in the dark not long after Mor died and deliberately tried to get lost, but the fairies helped me out. They say marsh lights, willow-wisps, lead you astray and into the worst bits of bog, but that time they took me pointedly to the road right by Moira’s house. I went in dripping and Moira’s mother made me take a shower and dress in Moira’s clothes to go home. I was afraid of getting into trouble, but Liz was fighting with Grampar and didn’t even notice.
    There’s a good story about when they built those houses. They were building them along Heol y Gwern, and they started to build little short streets off it, into the bog, with new houses, because they wanted a proper estate for people to live. The problem was that the bog didn’t want the houses. The real story, which I had from Grampar who remembers when it happened, is that they’d built the foundations for a house and they left it on the Thursday before Good Friday, and when they went back on the Tuesday after Easter Monday, they had completely sunk. The way I heard the story though, is that they’d built the whole house and when they came back after the weekend only the chimneys were sticking up