WEDNESDAY 26TH DECEMBER 1979
On the other hand, how do I know they’re evil? Why is that my assumption? Maybe they are exactly what they seem, except with a bit of magic, and they know nothing about me except the obvious. Maybe all they want is to make me into a nice niece. (A nice niece from Nice ate a nice Nice biscuit and an iced bun…) I know having those holes bored would take me away from magic. I’m sure they know that, or they wouldn’t be so adamant, but I’m not sure if they know I know about magic. Most people don’t. For most people, it would be no loss. Though it’s girls, boys mostly don’t get their ears pierced. Can men do magic? I’m sure they can, but I don’t seem to meet them. What I was thinking about vaccination, maybe they were thinking of it like that, to make me safe from the temptation of doing magic. I thought those earrings were to control me, but maybe they were to make me more like everyone else. They have a tame brother. Maybe they want a tame niece. In that case, they’d probably be okay with me going back to school and not trying again until half term, or even Easter. School is where they want me to be. School is insulated from magic, as I noticed right away, and I won’t do any anyway.
I do want to go back to Arlinghurst, even though it’s moronic and the food is awful and there’s no privacy at all, because I have started to build my karass there. I have the book club, I have the library—both libraries. I can put up with everything else. I have been putting up with it. And I want to get my O Levels, and my A Levels if possible. I want to go to university and finally meet some people I can talk to. Gramma said I would find equals there, that it was worth pressing on. She always said that when I was discouraged about maths or memorising Latin or something. Even if I get O Levels, well, O Levels are a qualification. Anyone without them is going to be assumed to be an idiot, and there won’t be any jobs for them except idiot jobs. Being a poet, that doesn’t matter, there aren’t any qualifications for that, but I’m going to need to do something to keep food in the oven, and I’d rather it was something fun. I need O Levels at the very least. I need to either go back to Arlinghurst, which means staying on such terms with the aunts that they’ll pay for it, or finding another school somewhere.
So anyway, yesterday.
I went down and apologised for running off—limping off is more like it. I explained that I appreciated they’d meant it kindly but the thought of having my ears pierced distresses me inordinately—they must have picked that up. They didn’t try to persuade me any more, and the earring box had been taken away from my other presents. They said that we’d forget about it, and they brought me some cold turkey and stuffing, which was dry but not too awful. Then we played Monopoly, which one of them won, though I gave them a good game.
The weird thing about Monopoly was that you could see how long they’d been playing together, the four of them. They all had favourite pieces which they instantly grabbed. Their pieces, when I occasionally had to move them a few squares on my side of the board to save leaning, were full of the magic of use and fondness. In the pieces, I could tell them apart for the first time. They always dress alike, but the dog, racing car and top hat know. The other weird thing about it was how we were sitting there playing it like a normal family, only not, because I don’t belong, but even leaving me out, they’re not. Normal families have different generations, and they’re all one generation. Normal families have married people. Daniel’s the only one of them to have married, and look who he picked! Normal families are not just forty-year-old children who are in charge now without having grown up. There were times in that game when they were squabbling with each other when I felt as if I was the oldest person at the table.