The real difference is that we’re not of different classes. Wim and I are both of a class that expects to go to university. I don’t know what his father does, but that his mother works in the hospital kitchens while I go to school here is irrelevant. Well, maybe not irrelevant, but not the point. Anyway, I’m not sure if Wim is my boyfriend, and even if he is it isn’t at all the thing they’re talking about with their serious and not serious. I’m only fifteen. I’m not sure I ever want to get married. I’m neither messing around while waiting nor looking for some “real thing.” What I want is much more complicated. I want somebody I can talk to about books, who would be my friend, and why couldn’t we have sex as well if we wanted to? (And used contraception.) I’m not looking for romance. Lord Peter and Harriet would seem a pretty good model to me. I wonder if Wim has read Sayers?
But that’s also almost irrelevant, because there’s also the ethical thing of the magic. I should probably tell him, and then he’d hate me, anybody would.
I’ve asked Nurse to make me a doctor’s appointment. She didn’t ask what for.
Wednesday 6th February 1980
Zelazny meeting last night. Wim thinks Zelazny’s the greatest stylist of all time. Brian thinks style is unimportant compared to ideas, and he thinks Zelazny’s ideas are ordinary, except for Shadow. It’s funny how people divided on that one. I think if we’d voted for whether style matters or only ideas, the division would have been really different from whether Zelazny has good ideas. I think he does, and I think both matter, which isn’t to say that the Foundation books suck because they have no style, or Clarke either. Zelazny can get where he’s all style and no substance—I can’t forget Creatures of Light and Darkness after all, which almost put me off him forever. But mostly he keeps the balance.
We talked about Amber and what’s going to happen, and we talked about the kind of wisecracking voice he uses in those and in Isle of the Dead and This Immortal and we talked about whether it was actually science fiction or fantasy. Hugh thinks the Amber books are fantasy, and so is Isle of the Dead, because despite the aliens and everything, worldbuilding is talked about in such magical terms. “That’s condemning him for being poetic!” Wim said.
“Saying it’s fantasy isn’t condemnation,” Harriet said.
So, a good meeting. Afterwards Wim said to Greg, “Do you have a recent Ansible?”
There’s a magazine, a “fanzine” called Ansible! It’s for information about what’s going on in the SF fan world, it’s funny, and it’s so exactly what I would have called it that I love the author, Dave Langford, sight unseen without meeting him. Ansibles are from The Dispossessed and they’re faster-than-light communication devices. Brilliant. All the details about Albacon in Glasgow at Easter were in Greg’s copy, and I copied them down, and all I have to do now is get the money from Daniel when I see him, probably at half term, which is at the end of next week, and send it off.
Walking out of the library, Wim held my hand. “Are you sure I can’t see you until Saturday?” he said. “Will you be locked up in school the whole time?”
“Well yes, apart from going to Shrewsbury Thursday afternoon for acupuncture,” I said.
“What time are you going?” he asked.
“On the half-past one train—but don’t you have to work?”
“I work mornings and go to college in the afternoons,” he said. “That’s how I came to see you in hospital, remember? I can skive off tomorrow afternoon if I want to. Nobody cares.”
“Skive” is like “mitch,” it means “skipping school.” That’s what they say around here. The first time I heard it I had no idea what it meant.
“You’ll care when it gets to the exams,” I said.
“I won’t even notice,” he said. “I’ll meet you in Gobowen railway station, all right?”
Greg drove me back to school, as normal. “So, I was right,” he said.
I blushed. I don’t think he saw in the darkness. “Sort of,” I admitted.
“Well, good luck.”
“Hot jets,” I replied.
Greg laughed. “I’ve always said that what Wim needs is a girlfriend who could quote Heinlein at him.”
Has he always said that? Or does he only think he always said that because I did the karass-magic? Greg existed before I did it. I know he did. I met him in the library. But he never said a word to me beyond not letting me join the first day and then taking my interlibrary loan cards. Was the book group, and SF fandom, there all the time, or did it all come into being when I did that magic, to give me a karass? Was there Ansible? I know they think there was, that there were conventions going back to 1939, and certainly science fiction was there all the time. There’s no proving anything once magic gets involved.
I’m going to have to tell Wim. It’s the only ethical thing.
Thursday 7th February 1980
I set off from school with even more of a sense of escaping this week, even though it was raining, the kind of irresistible damp drizzle that gets through every crack. If I had clothes of my own here I could have changed into them before leaving, but I don’t so I couldn’t. Arlinghurst wants its girls to be recognisable at all times. If they could make us wear the uniform in the holidays they would. At least the coat is good and solid, and the hat might be awful but it does keep the rain off, mostly.
Wim was waiting in Gobowen station. It’s not much of a station, more like a bus shelter beside the line with a ticket machine and a couple of empty hanging baskets. He was sitting in the shelter with his feet up on the glass, folded up like a paperclip. His bike was chained to the railings outside, getting wet. There was a fat woman with a child sitting next to him, and a balding man with a briefcase, all in raincoats. Wim was wearing the same duffle coat as before. Next to him, the other people looked as if they were in black and white while he was in colour. He didn’t see me for a moment, then the balding man saw me and made a fuss about getting up to give me his seat, so Wim noticed and smiled and got up instead. It was funny, we were kind of shy with each other. It was the first time we’d been alone together since Saturday, and we weren’t really alone, they were there, but they didn’t quite count. I didn’t know how to behave, and if he did—and he should, as he’s had a lot more practice—he didn’t show it.
The train came, people got off, and then we got on. It was only a two-carriage train, and again full of people from North Wales with their funny singsong voices and yes/no questions. We managed to get a double seat because a nice lady moved across to give us one. We couldn’t really talk about anything, because she was sitting across from us, along with a worried young man with a cat in a carrier on his lap. The cat kept crying, and he kept trying to reassure it. It must be awful taking a cat to the vet on the train. Or maybe he was moving. He didn’t have much with him except the cat, but maybe you wouldn’t. Or perhaps, worst of all, he had to give the cat away, and he was taking it to a new home. If so, though, he’d probably have been crying too, and he wasn’t. The funny thing about the man with the cat was that Wim didn’t notice him at all. When I said something about him, after we were on the platform in Shrewsbury walking along, he didn’t know what I was talking about.
I don’t think Wim goes to Shrewsbury very often, for all that it’s so near. He didn’t know where anything was. He didn’t know there was a bookshop in Owen Owens. I had to go for acupuncture first, so I left him in a cafe—a shiny coffee bar, all chrome and glass, after he’d rejected the one with the nice booths where I went last time because it didn’t have real coffee. I never knew before Saturday that there were any kinds of coffee but Nescafe (or Maxwell House, but they’re the same), granulated coffee you make with boiling water. It seems a funny thing to be fussy about.