“Take me back to school,” I said to Daniel as we walked back to the car. A pale wintry sun was shining and the rose-gold buildings of Shrewsbury were flushed with it. If we’d set out right away, I could have been in school in time to go off to book club as normal after prep.
“Not until we see how you are tomorrow,” he said. “But how about a Chinese meal, as Chinese medicine seems to agree with you?”
So we went to a restaurant called the Red Lotus and ate spare ribs and prawn toast and chicken fried rice and chow mein and beef in oyster sauce. It was all delicious, the best food I’ve had for years, maybe ever. I ate until I was full to bursting. While we were eating I told Daniel about the convention in Glasgow, Albacon, this year’s Eastercon, and about what Wim had said about the Worldcon in Brighton and how he’d met Robert Silverberg and done nothing but talk about books for five days. He said he didn’t think his sisters would let him get away at Easter, but he agreed that I could go, and said he’d pay!
In a way, I would like to rescue Daniel from his sisters. He has been good to me, and I suppose it might be his duty as a father, but why should he feel any of that? I would like to rescue him, but I don’t think I can, and I think that trying would provoke war with them, whereas if they think I won’t interfere they might leave me alone. Trying to rescue Daniel I might entangle myself. I am my own priority here, I have to be. They’re not going to agree to him going to Glasgow. It’s good that they agreed to acupuncture and a meal in a Chinese restaurant, and they probably wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for dear old Sam.
With the bill, they brought us fortune cookies. Mine said “All is not yet lost,” which I thought very cheerful. It’s just like the line in the Aeneid, Et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, “even these things it will one day be a joy to recall.” At first, you think how awful, and then you realise that it’s true, and not a bad thing. Daniel’s just said “You like Chinese food,” which is undeniable. Getting one that said “You are an awful father” would have been unkind.
In the car, when I was putting my seat belt on, Daniel looked at me seriously. “You still seem to be feeling the benefit of the acupuncture.”
“I am,” I said.
“You should come once a week for six weeks, the way he said.”
“Okay.” I finished fiddling with my seatbelt. Daniel threw his cigarette end out of the window.
“I won’t be able to come to school and collect you and drive you here and back, not every week. Maybe sometimes.”
I could immediately see that they wouldn’t let him. He put the car in gear and pulled out of the car park, and all the time I didn’t say anything, because what could I say.
“There’s a train,” he said after a while.
“A train?” I’m sure I sounded sceptical. “There isn’t a railway station. There might be a bus.”
“There’s a railway station in Gobowen. When my sisters went to Arlinghurst they went to it, and were collected there by the school. Everyone used trains then.”
“Are you sure it’s still there?” But it wasn’t in the long list of Flanders and Swann “Slow Train” stations that had been closed by Beeching, so it probably was.
“It’s on the route to North Wales, to Welshpool and Barmouth and Dolgellau,” he said. The only one of those places I’d heard of was Dolgellau, where Gramma and Grampar had been to visit an old vicar who’d moved there, before I was born. North Wales is like another country. You can’t even get there from South Wales, you have to go to England and out again, at least if you want to go on trains, or on good roads. I suppose there are roads through the mountains. I’ve never been there, though I would like to.
“All right,” I said. “That means a bus into town and a bus out to Gobowen, and then a train.”
“I’ll be able to take you sometimes,” he said, lighting yet another cigarette. “What would be the best day?”
I thought about it. Definitely not Tuesdays, because I might not get back in time for the book club. “Thursdays,” I said. “Because Thursday afternoons I just have religious education and then double maths.”
“It seems from your marks that maths is the thing you least ought to miss,” Daniel said, but with a smile in his voice.
“Honestly, it doesn’t matter if I’m there or not, it just doesn’t go in. The maths I do know I know from phys and chem. Maths class might as well be taught in Chinese. It makes no sense to me. I think that bit of my brain is missing. And if I ask her to explain again, it doesn’t make any more sense.”
“Perhaps you ought to have extra tutoring in it,” Daniel suggested.
“It would be money down the drain. I just can’t do it. It would be like teaching a horse to sing.”
“Do you know the story about that?” he asked, turning his head, and incidentally blowing smoke at me, yuck.
“Don’t kill me, give me a year, and I’ll teach your horse to sing. Anything might happen in a year, the king might die, I might die, or the horse might learn to sing.” I summarised. It’s in The Mote in God’s Eye, which is probably why it was in his mind.
“It’s a story about procrastination,” Daniel said, as if he was the world’s expert in procrastination.
“It’s a story about hope,” I said. “We don’t know what happened at the end of the year.”
“If the horse had learned to sing, we’d know.”
“It might have become the origin of the Centaur legend. It might have gone to Narnia, taking the man with it. It might have become the ancestor of Caligula’s horse Incitatus who he made a senator. There might have been a whole tribe of singing horses and Incitatus was their bid for equality, only it all went wrong.”
Daniel gave me a very strange look, and I wished I’d saved this for people who would appreciate it.
“Thursdays, then,” he said. “I’ll call and arrange it when we get home.”
If it was a story about procrastination, it would have a solid moral about the man dying at the end of the year. I like to imagine their survival.
And at year’s end they broke the stable door.
The man and horse, together, gallop yet
Beyond the sunset’s end, the pounding hooves,
Both harmony and beat for their duet.
Wednesday 23rd January 1980
A tiny sprinkle of snow this morning, not enough to wet a Hobbit’s toes, and melted before breakfast.
I am back in school, which is noisier than ever, so noisy it echoes.
The Dream Master turns out to be a novel version of “He Who Shapes,” which is a variation on, or the other way around, Brunner’s Telepathist. I don’t know which was written first, but I read the Brunner first. The very idea of working with dreams is odd. The Dream Master is a good book, but a very unsettling one. You wouldn’t guess it was written by the same person who wrote the Amber books, which are such fun.
People seem a lot friendlier to me than before. Sharon said hello and welcome back when I went into English after lunch. Daniel insisted on seeing how I was after I woke up, and didn’t drive me back until mid-morning. I’m still the same. The cold made my leg do its rusty weathercock thing, but that’s so much better than it was before the acupuncture that I almost don’t care.
I haven’t forgiven Sharon for turning her back on me. I’ll be polite and nice, but I won’t go out of my way not to call her Shagger when everyone else does. Deirdre, however, who stuck by me, gets my everlasting loyalty, and the word “Dreary” will never pass my lips. Oddly, though I am limping worse than ever, everyone seems to be calling me Commie today. Maybe going into hospital had given them a new respect for me. Nobody has come around gushing though, thank goodness.