Among Others

Deirdre giggled and grabbed her towel, and I grabbed mine and wrapped it around me like a cloak. I put my soap and my shampoo back into my sponge bag, because otherwise someone would steal it, or open the shampoo and pour it down the drain, that happened to me with my shower gel my first week, when I left it in the shower.

We went into the toilets, which were right next to the shower room. There was nobody there, which was easy to see because none of the toilet cubicles has doors. I put the sponge bag down and wrapped my towel around my head like a turban. That’s a useful skill which Sharon had taught me. If you give it a tuck, it just stays there. Sharon has long unruly hair and it keeps even that in place. So my towel was here and Deirdre’s was around her shoulders, and we were otherwise naked.

We saw at once that the strip of mirror was useless. It reflected our faces and necks, but nothing as low as our breasts.

“Maybe if we stood on something,” Deirdre said, looking around.

“There’s nothing,” I said. “Unless we stood on the toilet seats, and then we’d be too high.”

“Let’s try it,” she said.

So we shut two of the toilet seats and climbed onto them, and saw that we were too high, so we tried crouching to get the right angle, pretty much naked and balancing precariously and giggling, because it really was very funny. And that’s when one of the prefects came in to see what the noise was about.

Thursday 15th November 1979

Either my dream-protection didn’t work, or she isn’t sending the dreams, they’re just coming out of my subconscious.

I dreamed last night that my mother had a plan to separate us. She was going to live in Colchester in Essex and take Mor with her, because, she said, Mor was more biddable and I didn’t do what I was told, and because I’d argued so hard to stay. We were protesting and fighting and she was dragging Mor away physically and I was crying and clinging to her. In some ways it was the opposite of what happened in the labyrinth. I was trying to hold on to her and my mother was trying to drag her off, and she started changing into different things and I had to hold on to her. I couldn’t bear the thought of the separation, and I was planning to complain to everyone, the whole family, that it was unendurable and they couldn’t let it happen. They let my mother get away with so much because they don’t want to face the fact that she’s mad, I was thinking, and Mor was howling and holding on to me, when I woke up. For a second there was a huge sense of relief that it had all been a dream, and then an instant later the memory that the reality was far worse. People can come back from Colchester. (No idea why Colchester.) I don’t know what it means to be dead.

I’m reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth. It has so many lovely science-fictional reversal moments. It isn’t Childhood’s End or 2001, but it’s just what I want today. There are a couple of Clarkes I’ve never found, and I’ve put them on this week’s list.

I wonder if there will be fairies in space? It’s a more possible thought in Clarke’s universe than Heinlein’s somehow, even though Clarke’s engineering seems just as substantial. I wonder if it’s because he’s British? Never mind space, do they even have fairies in America? And if they do, do they all speak Welsh, all over the world?

Friday 16th November 1979

Letter this morning. I haven’t opened it, and won’t.

In prayers today Deirdre said “resur-esh-kun” instead of “resur-ec-tion” at the end of the Creed. Thinking about that during the hymn, I was wondering about “the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come,” and how that relates to what I saw on Halloween. On the one hand, how much more likely resurrection if the dead process through the valley and descend into the hill. On the other, where is the religion? Where is Jesus? The fairies were there, but I didn’t see any saints or anything. I’ve been mouthing the Creed without ever thinking about it properly.