Among Others

with the fairies in the Valley wasn’t the worst way of being dead I could imagine, not by a long way. “Why won’t they talk to me?”
    She looked puzzled and shrugged again.
    “Can you tell them about the aunts, and what they want to do?”
    She nodded, very definitely.
    “Can you ask them to talk to me? I’m so worried about doing magic and what it does.”
    “Doing is doing,” a voice said behind me, and I spun around and there was a fairy, one I’d never seen before, nut brown all over and knobbly like an acorn cup. His skin was all wrinkles and folds, and he wasn’t the shape of a person, more like an old treestump. The thing that astonished me was that he’d spoken in English, and that was exactly what he’d said, those very words. They’re cryptic enough, I suppose.
    “But what about the ethics?” I said. “Changing things for people without their knowing it? You may be able to see the consequences of what you do, but I can’t.”
    “Doing is doing,” he said again. Then he wasn’t there, but there was a thump, and where he had been was a walking stick the same colour as he was, carved with a horse’s head handle.
    I bent awkwardly to pick it up. It was the right height for me, and the handle fit my hand comfortably. I looked back at Mor, but she had gone too. The wind was blowing into the dell, rustling the dead leaves, but it was empty of presence.
    I brought both sticks back to Grampar’s, the fairy one and my old one. I’m going to leave my old one, which was his anyway, and keep this one. I suppose it might vanish at sunrise, or turn into a leaf or something, but I don’t think so. It has a heft that seems to make that unlikely. I’ll tell people it was a Christmas present. I think perhaps it might have been. I like it.
    Doing is doing.
    Does it mean that it doesn’t matter if it’s magic or not, anything you do has power and consequences and affects other people? Because that might well be the case, but I still think magic is different.
    Leah’s party tonight.
    T HURSDAY 3 RD J ANUARY 1980
    Back in Auntie Teg’s. Hung over. I wish the water in Cardiff didn’t taste so dreadful. I brought a big bottle of Aberdare tap water back with me, but I have drunk it all.
    We didn’t do anything at all today, just came back to Cardiff and sat around eating chocolate cake and petting Persimmon (for her allowed time) and reading. It was lovely. Auntie Teg looks as exhausted as I am.
    Leah’s party last night was weird. There was punch, made with red wine and grape juice and tins of fruit cocktail, and later with added vodka. It tasted disgusting, and I think most of us were holding our noses and drinking it. I don’t know why I bothered. I got drunk, and I suppose it was nice to have soft edges instead of hard ones, but it just made me stupid really. People do it as an excuse, to have an excuse, so they can deny responsibility for their actions the next day. It’s horrible.
    I don’t want to write about what happened. It’s not important anyway.
    On the other hand, is this a complete and candid memoir or just a lot of angsty wittering?
    It started off on the wrong foot. Nasreen was wearing a red sweater identical to mine, though she looked much better in it. “We’re twins!” she chirped enthusiastically, and then realised what she’d said and her face fell about a mile.
    It’s not quite a year, just about nine months, since I was living here. We’ve all grown up in that time, and it’s as if they’ve learned some rules I haven’t learned. Maybe it’s because I was away, or maybe I was just reading my book under the desk the day when people were talking about how you do this stuff. Leah was wearing eyeshadow and lipstick—and even Moira was. Moira offered to put some on me, and she did, but we don’t have the same colour skin. I normally look like a white person, like Daniel I suppose, but when you put me next to someone who really is white, and Moira is exceptionally pale, you can see that the underlying colour in my skin is yellow, not pink. Grampar used to say every time one of us got a sunburn that we were ridiculously pale and we’d have to marry black men to give our children a chance, and he was right—compared to him especially and to the rest of our family, we were very pale. I don’t think you’d notice, if you didn’t know, that I had ancestors closer to Nasreen’s colour than Moira’s. But Moira’s makeup looked ridiculous on me anyway, and I wiped