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…) I looked up at her as I wrote her name. She’s puttering about sticking labels in books at her desk. For all that she said she’s keeping her clients satisfied, she took me to the book club because of the magic. I know she did, and it makes me feel a little sick. Magic works on what’s there, so probably she liked me a little anyway, and noticed me. She got me The Republic. Though magic can make things happen before you do it. It can make things have happened. Maybe if I hadn’t done that magic, she wouldn’t have ordered the Plato. I don’t know if she likes me, really, or if it’s only the magic making her. If she doesn’t really like me, how can I like her back? How can it mean anything?
And of course, the same goes for the others, really. Is it really a karass, if I used magic to make it happen? It’s like making the bus come, all those people, all those days, all those lives changed, just to make the bus be coming at the moment I want it. Only it’s more than that, making them like me. Making them be my karass.
I didn’t think this through enough. I was thinking about a karass in too abstract a way, I didn’t think enough about the people, about manipulating them. I didn’t even know them, and I was doing it.
Is this how she started? My mother, Liz?
I wish I could talk to Glorfindel about this, or somebody who would understand. I don’t know if he would or not, but he’s the most likely to. I don’t understand why the fairies here are so unfriendly—uncaring is more like it. They should be getting used to me by now. When I go home after Christmas, I’ll find him and talk to him no matter what.