Among Others

above the bog. Ha! They stopped building up there after that and built the new estate in Penywaun instead, and I’m glad. I like the way the bog is, with the little stunted trees and the long grasses and rushes and sudden unexpected flowers and moorhens on the standing water and lapwings slow-flapping to guide you away from their nests.
    What I wanted today was a fairy, and there are often fairies on Croggin. I didn’t see a sign of one, and even when I came out of the bog by the river and into Ithilien I couldn’t find any. I checked Osgiliath and the other fairy ruins in the cwm on my way back to town, the long way around, on the dramroad. There’s an old smelter there, and some fallen cottages, or I think that’s what they are. It’s so hard to imagine them bustling and industrial. I did spot the occasional fairy out of the corner of my eye, but none of them would stop or speak to me. I remembered how Glorfindel wasn’t findable after Halloween. There have been other times like that, times we couldn’t find them, times when they don’t want to be found. They always found us. I tried calling for him, but I knew that was pointless. They don’t use names the way we do. I might wish it worked the way it does in Earthsea where names have summoning power, but it doesn’t, names don’t count, only things do. I do know, I think, how to call him with magic, but that wouldn’t be magic to prevent harm, so I didn’t really consider it for more than a second.
    I tried sitting down, though it was very chilly, and waiting for the pain in my leg to ease off, in case that was keeping them away. It wasn’t very bad today though. It shouldn’t have been that, I don’t think. It was too uncomfortable to sit for long, and there was a bit of rain in the wind. Going through town was miserable, all the shops boarded up that I can remember as active places, more all the time. The Rex is shutting down, there won’t be anywhere to watch films in Aberdare any more. There are tattered “for sale” signs everywhere. There’s litter lying on the streets and even the Christmas tree outside the library looks forlorn. I caught the bus back to Cardiff in time for dinner with Auntie Teg.
    I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t find them. I really need to talk to them.
    T UESDAY 1 ST J ANUARY 1980
    Happy New Year.
    Nice to wake up this morning in Grampar’s house, and on my own.
    Auntie Teg has gone off somewhere with Him for New Year, which she pretty much always does. I could have gone too, she asked me, but I didn’t want to. I’d only be in the way. Yesterday morning we drove up to Aberdare and saw Grampar, and then she went off and I was promptly grabbed by Auntie Flossie. I had wanted to go to find the fairies, but instead I found myself enacting “Three French Hens” in Auntie Flossie’s New Year Party. The cheer was a little forced, and I found myself aching for bed long before midnight, but I’ve had worse days. I’ve collected another four pounds fifty in clenigs, and six chocolate coins. And I had half a glass of champagne at midnight. It was nicer than Daniel’s champagne, or maybe it’s one of those things that grows on you.
    I’m going to get up and cook myself breakfast and then have another try at finding the fairies. It’s a new year, maybe I’ll have better luck.
    W EDNESDAY 2 ND J ANUARY 1980
    Yesterday morning, I really wanted to find some fairies. For a change, I went up through Common Ake. It’s Heck’s Common really, called after a Mr. Heck, but everyone calls it Common Ake. It’s a common, it doesn’t belong to anyone, the way most of the country was before the Enclosures in the eighteenth century. It’s hard to imagine Aberdare as a farming valley with nothing really here except St. John’s, and only the main road running through from Brecon to Cardiff, no other streets at all, all the coal and iron undisturbed underground. I had to learn a modern poem in Welsh once for an Eisteddfod that ended “ Totalitariaeth glo ,” the despotism of coal. I picked up a little piece of coal as I went. They often find fossils in it when they’re digging it up, ancient leaves and flowers. It’s organic, it was an organic sludge pressed down by the rock to make seams of carbon stuff that burns. If it had been pressed more it would be diamonds. I wonder if diamonds burn, and if we’d burn them if they were as common as coal. To the fairies, they’d be the same, plants changed by time