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.