Among Others

I was knackered, and my leg was unmentionable, so I stayed in and read all day. Then I made dinner for Auntie Teg for when she came home from school—baked mushrooms with onions and cheese and cream, and jacket potatoes with more cheese, and peas. She said how nice it was, and that she supposed men got that every day, if they had a wife, and what she needed wasn’t a husband who would expect that but a wife who would do it. It was lovely to be cooking with actual food. There’s something so grounding about it. It’s not that I was doing any magic, beyond the magic it is to take big flat mushrooms and raw potatoes and turn them into something totally delicious. I was just making dinner. But I wonder how much of cooking for someone else is magic anyway, more than I know about. I think it might all be. Auntie Teg’s dishes don’t like me any more than Persimmon does. The knives and peelers don’t cut me, but they turn awkward in my hands. They know I’m not the person supposed to be using them.

There’s supposed to be a Heinlein fantasy novel called Glory Road. That would be something! I wonder if Daniel has it? If not, there’s always blessed interlibrary loan.

Friday 2nd November 1979

I went up to Aberdare again on the bus today. There wasn’t so much as a sniff of Mor or any fairy, though I kept getting the feeling they were disappearing as soon as I looked for them and appearing just where I couldn’t see them. That’s a game, of course, but I didn’t want to play it. I wanted answers, though I should know how impossible it is to get straight answers from them, even when they want something, which clearly they don’t just at the moment.

I went to Grampar’s house. I still have the front door key, though it’s stiffer than ever, and terribly hard to get in. Auntie Teg keeps it clean, but it was kind of dusty and unused-smelling even so. It’s a very little house, crammed in between two others. When Auntie Florrie lived there it didn’t have a bathroom, the bath was in the kitchen, and the toilet was a ty bach, outside. It was like that when my great-grandparents lived there too. My grandfather put in proper plumbing when he moved back in. I quite liked the bath in the kitchen, next to the coal fire. It was surprisingly cosy. But I used to hate going outside to the toilet, especially at night.

He moved in there after Mor died to get away from my mother. Everyone runs away from her. I didn’t officially ever live there. I officially lived with her. I even sometimes spent some time living with her, when she insisted, but mostly I didn’t, while Grampar was all right. I had my own bedroom, with my bed from home and the blue box. Most of my books and clothes were in her house, but I found a woolly jumper of Mor’s and my denim shorts with a lion on, and a copy of Destinies. Destinies is an American science fiction magazine that comes in paperback books, and they stock it in Lears and I love it. I bought the new one—”April-June”—there on Monday. I’m saving it to read on the train.

So I left a few books. I know I won’t be able to get them until Christmas, but they’re really piling up, and I’m pretty sure I won’t want to re-read the ones I left any time soon. There isn’t much room at school. Anyway, even if I miss them, I like them being there. If Grampar gets well enough to come out of Fedw Hir and go home, I can go home too. Daniel doesn’t actually care, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. I feel as if I don’t actually live anywhere, and I hate that. The thought that there are eight books on the windowsill in my room in alphabetical order is comforting. It’s magic, too, it’s a magic link. My mother can’t get in there, and even if she could, they’re books. You can’t do magic with books unless they’re very special copies—and if she could, she already has all the rest of mine. She has all too much of mine, but there’s no way of getting it from her.

If I defeated her again, and I think I did, will she want revenge? It wasn’t at all like last time. It’s weirdly anticlimactic, especially since I can’t find Glorfindel to ask him the nine million questions I have.

I couldn’t lock the front door again. I locked it from inside and went out the back, then put the back door key in through the letterbox. I’ve told Auntie Teg, who’ll be the next person to come in.