I miss Grampar. It’s not that I’d have a lot to talk to him about really, like Sam, it’s just that he’s an essential part of life. He fits into my life. Grampar and Gramma brought us up, and they didn’t need to really, they could have left us with my mother, only they never would.
Grampar taught us about trees, and Gramma taught us about poetry. He knew every kind of tree and wildflower, and taught us to tell trees from their leaves first, and later from their buds and bark so we would know them in winter. He taught us to plait grass too, and to card wool. Gramma didn’t care about nature so much, though she’d quote “With the kiss of the sun for pardon and the song of the birds for mirth, one is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on Earth.” But it was the words she loved really, not the garden. She taught us to cook, and to memorise poetry in Welsh and English.
They were a funny couple in a way. They didn’t agree about all that much. Often they exasperated each other. They didn’t even have all that many interests in common. They met doing amateur dramatics, but she loved plays and he loved being on the stage. Yet they loved each other. The way she used to say “Oh, Luke!” in a fond and exasperated way.
I think she felt confined by her life. She was a teacher, and a mother and a grandmother. I think she would have liked more poetry in her life, one way or another. She certainly encouraged me to write it. I wonder what she would have thought of T. S. Eliot?
Monday 26th November 1979
I woke up in the night—this was not a dream. I woke up and I couldn’t move at all, I was absolutely paralysed, and she was in the room, hovering over me, I know she was. I tried to cry out and wake someone but I couldn’t. I could feel her coming nearer, coming down over my face. I couldn’t move or speak, there was nothing to use against her. I started repeating the Litany Against Fear from Dune, in my head, “Fear is the mind killer, fear is the little-death,” and then she was gone and I could move again. I got out of bed and went to get a drink of water and my hand was shaking so much that I poured half of it down my front.
If she can get in, another time she might kill me.
The fairies here won’t talk to me, and I can’t write to Glorfindel or Titania and ask them how to stop her. Even if Daniel lets me go there for Christmas, that’s a month, well, close enough.
I have got two little stones I used in part of the circle last time I burned letters, and I have put them on the windowsills. I think that if she tried to come through the stones would rise up as sheets of rock and block the way, making the windows solid with the wall. Really it should be a whole row of stones, or a line of sand or something. The real trouble with that is that there are eleven other girls sleeping in this dorm, and any of them will see just a little odd pebble and not care about disturbing it, or actively want it gone. I’ll have to check them every night before I go to sleep, and somebody is going to notice sooner or later. I suppose I could tell them, but all this scary stuff has worked all too well already.
She couldn’t get through stained glass, for what good that is.
I am going to have to get some stuff together and do some real protection magic, even without talking to the fairies first. I’m afraid to, but not as afraid as I am of her coming into the room when I’m asleep and holding me frozen like that. I couldn’t move at all, and I really tried.
Tuesday 27th November 1979
It’s funny how it’s hard to concentrate on reading in a waiting room. On the one hand, I really want nothing more than to pull down inside a book and hide. On the other, I have to keep listening for them to call my name, so every sound distracts me. Everyone here is sick, which is very depressing. The notices are about contraception and diseases. The walls are a bilious green. There’s a leaflet about getting your eyes tested. Maybe I should.
Looking out of the window, a list of everything I see while waiting:
2 scruffs
1 man with sheepdog—a lovely sheepdog, in beautiful condition.
6 people on bikes.
12 doughy housewives with 19 kids.
4 unaccompanied school age kids.
4 young couples.
1 baby in a pushchair, pushed by a woman in a puce dress.
1 tatty old man in jeans—what was he thinking? Jeans are for young people.
1 man parking a motorbike.
Millions of cars.
2 businessmen.
1 taxi driver.
1 man with a moustache and his wife.
2 blonde women in matching green coats, who came past twice, once in each direction. Maybe sisters?
1 pair of middle-aged twins. (I sort of hate to see twins, though I know it doesn’t make sense.)
1 pompous man in a dinner jacket. (At lunchtime?)
1 man in a pink shirt. (Pink!)
A skinhead carrying a dragon tankard. (He stopped outside the window and I got a good look at it.)
1 business woman, in a pin-striped suit with a briefcase. (She looked very groomed. Would I like to be her? No. But most of everyone I saw.)
6 teenagers in gym clothes running a race.
8 sparrows.
12 pigeons.
1 unaccompanied black-and-white dog, probably mostly terrier, that lifted a leg against the motorbike. He went off alone, looking jaunty and sniffing at everything. Maybe I’d like to be him.
People who notice me:
1 man in a denim shirt, who waved.
Funny how unobservant people are generally.
When it finally got to be my turn, the doctor was very gruff. He didn’t have much time for me. He said he’d recommend me to the Orthopaedic Hospital and get my x-rays sent there. I had to wait all that time surrounded by snuffling children and decrepit old people for two minutes of the doctor’s attention. I missed physics for that?
However, I bought two apples and a new bottle of shampoo, and I went back via the library and managed to return three books and pick up four, so I count it a successful trip to town.
Waiting for the bus back to school, I was thinking about magic. I wanted the bus to come, and I wasn’t exactly sure when it was due. If I reached magic into that, imagined the bus just coming round the corner, it isn’t as if I’d be materialising a bus out of nowhere. The bus is somewhere on its round. There are two buses an hour, say, and for the bus to be coming right when I wanted it, it must have started off on its route at a precise time earlier, and people will have caught it and got on and off at particular times, and got to where they’re going at different times. For the bus to be where I want it, I’d have to change all that, the times they got up, even, and maybe the whole timetable back to whenever it was written, so that people caught the bus at different times every day for months, so that I didn’t have to wait today. Goodness knows what difference that would make in the world, and that’s just for a bus. I don’t know how the fairies even dare. I don’t know how anyone could know enough.
Magic can’t do everything. Glory couldn’t help Gramma’s cancer, though he wanted to and we wanted him to. It may reach back into time, but it can’t make Mor alive again. I remember when she died and Auntie Teg told me and I thought, She knows, and I know, and other people are telling other people and more and more people know and it spreads out like ripples on a pond and there’s no undoing it without undoing everything. It’s not like falling out of a tree and nobody seeing but the fairies.