Anyway, later Owen came back to me and started cuddling me again, and I didn’t stop him. I was enjoying it, in a very much physical-only way. The thing is, I know that the others at least pretend to be in love with their boyfriends while they’re going out with them. They’re sort of rehearsing for grown-up relationships. They’re temporarily exclusive, and playing at romance. I didn’t, don’t, want to play that game. Owen didn’t make me in the slightest bit breathless, nor did I especially like him. But he was warm and male and solid and interested, and he did make me curious and desirous of more body-contact. So when he suggested he show me his bike, I went outside with him. It was only a Moped, 50cc, but he was very proud of it and told me all sorts of things about it. I’m not even sure those things go up hills.
You’d have thought the night air would have sobered me up, but it seemed to make me more drunk. When he started kissing me I liked it, and kissed him back, which he seemed to find a bit disconcerting. (Maybe I was doing it wrong? Books do not say, but I was doing it exactly the way I have seen in films.) He had his arms around me and he started running them over me. Now this did make me a bit breathless, and actually very turned on.
So we went back inside and into a little room which is actually Leah’s father’s study. There’s a sofa in there and we sat down on that and started cuddling. It was dark—there was a light in the hall, but we didn’t put any lights on in there.
Why is writing about sex more private and worrying than writing about anything else? There are things in this book that could get me burned at the stake, and I don’t worry about writing them.
Anyway, we cuddled for a bit and then Owen put his hand inside my knickers, and I liked it, and I thought I was being selfish just sitting there and not reciprocating, so I put my hand on his leg, and moved it to his penis—and I know perfectly well what a penis is, I have had baths with my cousins, and played doctor with them as well, when we were young enough that there weren’t all these stupid rules of etiquette. Anyway, Owen had a penis just as you’d expect, and he was excited too, but as soon as I touched it, through his trousers, he took his hands off me and practically leapt away.
“You slut!” he said, standing up with his hands clenched defensively in front of it, as if he thought I was about to grab for it. Then he rushed out of the room. I sat there for a minute, my cheeks burning. I couldn’t understand it. I still can’t understand it. He wanted me. I thought he did. I thought I was acting like a normal person, but evidently not. There’s something I’m just not seeing about this even now, because I still do not get it.
Leah said to me when I went back that I should watch out for Owen because he had wandering hands. Was I supposed to stop him? Was he expecting me to put up resistance instead of cooperating? That’s sick. The whole thing is sick, and I want nothing to do with it.
I want the infinite series of bars in Triton. Or even just the three real bars. That I could cope with. This is completely beyond me. At least I won’t ever have to see him again, probably.
Friday 4th January 1980
Into Cardiff this morning to spend my book tokens in Lears. I love Lears. It’s huge—two floors, with a whole wall of SF, and some American imports. I got another issue of Destinies and Red Shift and The Einstein Intersection and Four Quartets and Charisma by Michael Coney (who wrote Hello Summer, Goodbye) and, wonder of wonder miracle of miracles, a new Roger Zelazny book in the Chronicles of Amber series! I squealed out loud when I saw it. Sign of the Unicorn! It has a horrible yellow cover, but bless Sphere forever for publishing it and Lears for stocking it!
I would rather have Sign of the Unicorn than all the boys in the Valleys.
This afternoon we went for a run on the Beacons to see if the waterfalls were frozen. They weren’t, it isn’t anything like cold enough, though they do freeze for a few days some winters. There was no ice cream van in the layby, and Auntie Teg remarked on this as if she really thought there would be. I love the mountains. I love the kind of horizon they make, even in winter. When we went down again, towards Merthyr first and then over the shoulder of the mountain to Aberdare, where Auntie Teg walked, once, when she was still in school, it felt like nestling back down in a big quilt.
My new walking stick is still with me. Grampar is the only person who has noticed it, when we went to see him tonight on the way back. He said it’s hazel wood. I said I’d bought it in the market with Christmas money. He said it was a lovely piece of work and I should get a rubber ferrule to protect the end, and I could get one of those in the market too. He was looking much more alert today. Nobody could be doing more than Auntie Teg to try to get him out of there.
Saturday 5th January 1980
On the train I read The Sign of the Unicorn, all of it in one gulp, so I can leave it with Daniel when I go back to school. The thing I really love about those books is Corwin’s voice, so very personal, making light of things, joking about them, and then suddenly so serious. I also love the Trumps and the Shadows, and the Hellrides through Shadow. (I think I’ll always call Kentucky Fried Chicken Kentucki Fried Lizzard Partes from now on.) I don’t think he has done as much with Shadow as he could. If you can walk through it and find shadows of yourself, there are lots of things you could do with that.
I finished it at Leominster, and after that read Four Quartets again and got drunk on the words. I could just copy out pages and pages of it. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what it means, but that’s part of the joy of it, putting the images together into coherence. There’s a story in there just the same as there is in “Young Lochinvar,” but it isn’t on the surface much at all. I’m so glad I have my own copy. I can read them again and again. I can read them again and again on trains, all my life, and every time I do I’ll remember today and it will connect up. (Is that magic? Yes, it is a sort of magic, but it is more just reading my book.)
Shropshire remains horribly flat and unmountained. It looks miserable in the January drizzle. The sky is so low you feel as if you could reach up and poke it. I can imagine feeling claustrophobic and acrophobic at the same time.
Daniel met me without any problem. He was early, sitting in the Bentley reading Punch when I came out of the station. He was very apologetic about not driving me to the station when I left. It’s so hard to know what to say. I could say it didn’t matter, even though it did. What difference does it make if he feels guilty after the fact? “Don’t apologise, just don’t do it again,” I said. He winced.
I had brought a Twelfth Night cake with me. I made it and Auntie Teg iced it. There was no direct and deliberate magic in it, except the thought of the Three Kings, and T. S. Eliot’s poem about them, but just the fact that we’d made it with her bowls and spoons and our hands made it magically real. I suppose the sisters noticed that, because they produced their own, and said I should take mine to school and give slices to all my friends. In school, it’s going to practically glow with magic. I didn’t say that. I ate their sawdust cake and smiled and tried being Nice Niece for all it’s worth. I made out that I was terribly excited to be going back to school and longing to know what the other girls got for Christmas.
It occurred to me sitting there eating tea and smiling so much my face felt sore, that they haven’t tried to do anything to me magically. I mean the earrings were an attempt, I suppose, but they tried to use their authority as adults and their physical ability to drive me to the shop and so on, they didn’t try to coerce me magically, or make it so I had always wanted earrings or anything. I wonder how much they know and how they learned it. Did they learn it from the fairies? Or from someone who learned it from the fairies? Theoretically, I could teach someone who had never seen a fairy all the magic that I know.