He also said that maybe she writes about the scientific process so well in The Dispossessed, despite not being a scientist, because she understands that creativity isn’t all that different across fields. He and Brian agreed that she did get the scientific process right, and everyone deferred to them about that, so they must be something scientific. I didn’t like to ask what. I’d already been talking too much, as I said. I kept thinking of things to say and ask, and thinking I’d said too much and should let other people speak, and then thinking of more things I just had to say, and saying them. I hope I didn’t totally bore everyone.
The gorgeous boy—I must find out his name next time!—kept his eyes fixed on me when I was talking. It was quite disconcerting.
The most interesting thing anyone said though was said by one of the boys in purple blazers. I had said that Le Guin’s worlds were real because her people were so real, and he said yes, but the people were so real because they were the people the worlds would have produced. If you put Ged to grow up on Anarres or Shevek in Earthsea, they wouldn’t be the same people, the backgrounds made the people, which of course you see all the time in mainstream fiction, but it’s rare in SF. That’s absolutely true, and it’s very interesting, and I couldn’t help jumping in again to say that it fit back with The Lathe of Heaven and what happens to people in the different worlds, and whether a grey person in a world of grey people was inherently a different person from a brown one in a mixed race world.
I don’t know when I had such a good time, and if it wasn’t for worrying that I talked too much I’d say it was a total success. There’s a thing—I’ve noticed it often. When I first say something, it’s as if people don’t hear me, they can’t believe I’m saying it. Then they start to actually pay attention, they stop noticing that a teenage girl is talking and start to believe that it’s worth listening to what I’m saying. With these people, it was much less effort than normal. Pretty much from the second time I opened my mouth their expressions weren’t indulgent but attentive. I liked that.
Afterwards, Keith asked who was coming to the pub. The gorgeous boy went, and Harriet, and Greg, but not the teenagers in school blazers, and not me, because I had to go back to school. Everyone said goodbye to me, but I got all awkward and tongue-tied again saying goodbye and hoping to see them next week.
Miss Carroll had a word with Greg, and then we got back into her car and she drove back to school. “You don’t get a lot of chance to talk to people about things that matter to you, do you?” she asked.
I stared out at the night and the dark. In between the traffic lights at the bottom of town and the school, there’s nothing to make light but the occasional farmhouse, which means car headlights seem an intrusion of brightness. I saw mice and rabbits and the occasional fairy scurrying off as the beams lit them. “No,” I said. “I don’t get a lot of chance to talk to people at all.”
“Arlinghurst is a very good school in its way,” she said.
“Not for people like me,” I said.
“The last bus that runs past the school leaves at eight-fifteen,” she said. “They finished closer to nine tonight. I asked Greg as one librarian to another if he’d be able to give you a lift back regularly, and he said he would. As long as you’re in bed by lights out, that should be all right.”
“It’s very nice of him. He’s very kind to ask me at all. You don’t think I talked too much?”
Miss Carroll laughed, as the car swung between the elms into the school drive. “Maybe a little too much. But they certainly seemed interested in what you had to say. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
I do worry about it though.
Thursday 6th December 1979
The days are getting awfully short. It seems to be dark all the time. It’s dark until well after nine, which keeps me inside in the morning. I had been in the habit of going outside for a moment before breakfast, just to breathe. I didn’t go anywhere, just stepped outside by the cloakrooms and breathed for a moment before coming back into the din of breakfast. Breakfast is bread and margarine, as much as you want, and overcooked watery English scrambled eggs, with tinned tomatoes, which I don’t eat. On Sundays, and just occasionally on other days, we also have sausages, which seem like ambrosia. The staff don’t attend breakfast, so everyone always talks at the top of their voice, and of course that means everyone has to if they want to be heard. It sounds like a bear-pit, but more high-pitched. Sometimes I stand outside the cloakroom and I can hear it down the corridor, like those Eighteenth-century madhouses where people would go for entertainment to hear the lunatics howl. Bedlam.
It’s also dark, or almost, by the time we’ve finished lessons. The lights are on, and the sun is well down. There’s still a little light in the sky, but there’s no doubt it’s night rather than day. I like to walk away from the school building and turn around and look at the lights, which seem orange in the twilight. It reminds me somehow of coming home from school with Gramma and Mor on some special day near Christmas, one of us holding each of her hands. Maybe her school had finished a day before ours and she’d come to meet us. We were still in the Infants, I expect we were about six. I just remember holding her hand and looking back at the lights with the sky not quite dark.
It makes me melancholy to remember, but a little bit of the security and excitement comes through from the way I was feeling in the memory. Memories are like a big pile of carpets, I keep them piled up in one big pile in my head and don’t pay much attention to them separately, but if I want to, I can get back in and walk on them and remember. I’m not really there, not like an elf might be, of course. It’s just that if I remember being sad or angry or chagrined, a little of that feeling comes back. And the same goes for happy, of course, though I can easily wear out the happy memories by thinking about them too much. If I do, when I’m old all the bad memories will still be sharp, because of pushing them away, but all the good ones will be worn out. I won’t really remember that day with Gramma, which I already don’t remember properly, I’ll just remember all these short winter days in school, walking out alone and looking back at the lit windows.
I’m sick of the dark. I know the turning year is part of life. I like seasons and seasonal fruit. The apples must be nearly done, and I expect there are bright orange tangerines in their fascinating purple wrappings with Spanish writing in Mrs. Lewis’s shop even now. (If I could smell a tangerine! Maybe on Saturday.) But I’m getting to hate the darkness at this time of year. I’m not allowed outside at lunchtime, which is the one time it is reliably light, even if it’s always grey and usually raining.
The days will get longer again. Spring will come. But it seems a long time to wait.
Friday 7th December 1979
Letter back from my father with the book club permission, and about time too! So I can go next week.
I was thinking about the book club, and wondering who among them is in my karass, really. The gorgeous boy? (Must find out his name!) He looked at me seriously with his beautiful eyes. And even if he’s wrong about some fairly fundamental things, he is prepared to listen. I feel a little shiver when I think about him looking at me. How about those three with the purple blazers, who are my own age? (Must find out their names too, but with a less burning urgency.) I’d certainly like to get to know them better, and they are interested in books. I’ll try to talk to them next time. Harriet? I didn’t connect with her much, but she’s very intelligent. Brian? Keith? I don’t know. The others, who I didn’t really meet properly? Too early to tell. Greg? Maybe. Miss Carroll? (Alison…)