Among Others

to rock. I wonder if fairies remember the Jurassic, if they walked among dinosaurs, and what they were then? None of them would have had human shapes. They wouldn’t have spoken Welsh. I rubbed the coal in my fingers, and it flaked a bit. I know what coal is, but I don’t know what fairies are, not really.
    There’s a spot on Common Ake we used to call the Dingly Dell. It’s one of the oldest of our names, older than the ones from The Lord of the Rings , and writing it down now I feel simultaneously slightly embarrassed and fiercely protective. The Dingly Dell is a place where there used to be a quarry or a surface mine or something and the ground drops abruptly on three sides, making a little amphitheatre. There are trees on the steep sides, and blackberry bushes. I think we went there first with Grampar blackberry picking when we were quite small, I remember eating more than I put in the basket, but then that went for most years. We felt quite bold when we first went all the way there on our own.
    Today the brambles were winter-dead, and the rowans leafless. A pale sun shone from a distant sky. A cheeky robin perched near me as I stepped in and cocked his head. They put robins on Christmas cards, and sometimes on Christmas cakes too, because they don’t go away in winter. “Hello,” I said. “How nice to see you still here.”
    The robin didn’t reply. I didn’t expect it to. But I was immediately aware that there was someone there. I looked up, expecting to see a fairy vanishing, hoping to see Glorfindel, but what I saw was Mor, standing back against the fallen leaves near the slope of the hill. She looked—well, she looked like Mor, obviously, but what I was really aware of right away was how she didn’t look like me. I hadn’t noticed that at half term, but now I did. I’ve grown, and she hasn’t. I have breasts. My hair is different. I am fifteen and a half, and she is still and always fourteen.
    I took a step towards her, and then I remembered her clutching me and dragging me towards the door into the hill, and stopped. “Oh Mor,” I said.
    She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, any more than the robin. She was dead, and the dead can’t speak. As a matter of fact, I know how to make the dead speak. You have to give them blood. But it’s magic, and anyway, it would be horrible. I couldn’t imagine doing it.
    I talked to her although she couldn’t answer. I told her about the magic and about Daniel and his sisters and about getting away from Liz and about school and the book club and everything. The strange thing was that the more I was talking the further away she seemed, though she didn’t move, and the more different from me she was. Nobody could tell the difference between us, but of course we always were different. Since she’s been dead, I’d almost forgotten, or not forgotten, but not thought about her as her distinct self so much, more about the two of us together. I’d felt as if I’d been torn in half, but really it wasn’t that, it was that she had been taken away. I didn’t own her, and there were always differences, always, she was her own person and I’d known that when she was alive, but that had blurred in all the time since when she hadn’t been there to defend her own rights.
    If she’d lived, we would have become different people. I think. I don’t think we’d have been like the aunts and stayed together all the time. I think we’d always have been friends, but we’d have lived in different places and had different friends. We’d have been aunts to each other’s children. It’s too late for that now. I’m going to grow up and she isn’t. She’s frozen where she is, and I’m changing, and I want to change. I want to live. I thought I had to live for both of us, because she can’t live for herself, but I can’t really live for her. I can’t really know what she’d have done, what she’d have wanted, how she’d have changed. Arlinghurst has changed me, the book club has changed me, and it might have changed her differently. Living for someone else isn’t possible.
    I couldn’t help asking her questions. “Can you go under the hill next year?”
    She shrugged. Clearly she didn’t know either. What happens under the hill? Where do the dead go? Where is God in all this? They talk about Heaven like a family picnic.
    “Are the fairies looking after you?” I asked.
    She hesitated, then nodded.
    “Good!” That made me feel a bit better. Living