I burst out laughing at that, which, I’ll say this for her, she didn’t mind at all.
I rang Wim, and told him I’d made no progress yet. I’d better go and see if I can find Glorfindel tomorrow. I told Auntie Teg about Wim and she wanted to know everything—not what his father did and what A Levels he’s doing, but what he’s like. I told her he’s gorgeous and he sort of likes me. She wants to meet him. I said he wanted to come down, and she immediately started fussing about where he could have slept. Her funky brown sofas are much too short for visitors.
Monday 18th February 1980
I went up to the cwm. I didn’t tell Auntie Teg any lies, though I didn’t tell her all the truth either. I said I wanted to go up to the cwm and have a wander about on my own. I went up past the library. There’s never anybody about up there. I don’t know why not. The river runs along beside the dramroad, and it’s as pretty as anything, especially right now with the beech trees starting to come into leaf. There’s no colour like that very early green. There were big clouds in the sky, scudding along up the valley as if they had an urgent appointment in Brecon. In between the sun made everything almost glow with green.
When I came to Ithilien, Glorfindel was there, and Mor, and the fairy who gave me the stick, and loads of other fairies, many of whom I know quite well. I’m not going to get into this impossible thing where I try to record conversations again. What Glorfindel said was that I needed to open a gate so that Mor could live with them and be one of them, and also to give them a way to use the magic that they know. “Then are you ghosts?” I asked. I knew Wim would want to know the answer, and I wanted to know myself for that matter.
“Some,” he said.
Some of them are? “Then what are the rest?”
“Being,” he said.
Yes, well, I knew that. They are beings. They exist. They’re there and they know about magic and they live their lives that are not like our lives. But where did they come from? Are the ones who speak the ones who were human, once?
The gate he wants me to open has to be opened with blood, of course. And there’s something more, something I didn’t understand. I asked about my mother and he said she can’t hurt us, or she won’t be able to hurt us ever after I’ve done this. That definitely means I’m doing it to prevent harm. It’s not the place in the Labyrinth, thank goodness, because that’s a long trudge. It’s just down in the old Phurnacite. I can get the bus almost all the way there. Using blood for magic is always risky, but Glorfindel knows what he’s doing. He always has. The weird thing is that he knows it and yet needs me to do it, because he can’t really move things.
It was odd seeing Mor among the fairies like that, as if she was half a fairy already. I felt really strange. She seemed so remote. She wasn’t growing leaves or anything, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was.
This evening, I phoned Wim and told him everything as best I could. “What are the risks?” he asked.
“Well, getting too caught up in the magic, or making the magic wider than it should be.”
“What do you mean getting too caught up in it? You mean dying?” His voice sounded exasperated, at the other end of the line.
“I suppose I do.”
“You suppose! Look, I’m coming down.”
“There’s no need,” I said. “It’ll be fine. He knows what he’s doing.”
“You’re much more confident than I am.”
Telephone conversations are so inadequate, so lacking in expression and gesture and everything. I’m not sure I managed to reassure him properly.
The thing with dying, well, with death really, is that there’s a difference between being someone who knows they can really die at any time and someone who doesn’t. I know, and Wim doesn’t. That’s all there is to it. I wouldn’t wish on anyone that awful instant when I realised that the headlights coming towards us were real. But without that understanding people think there are dangerous things that can kill you, and everything else is safe. That’s just not the way it works. We were past the dangerous bit that we knew could kill us and just crossing the road. I don’t even think she wanted to kill us. We were more use to her alive.
I need to do it at sunset, which according to the Western Mail is half past five.
Tuesday 19th February 1980
I went up the valley on the bus after lunch. Auntie Teg had to go in to school for a meeting and then was coming up to meet me at Fedw Hir for seven o’clock visiting time. I got off the bus at Abercwmboi, by the ruins of the Phurnacite. I was early. I was wishing I’d arranged to do something else in the afternoon, like meet Moira and Leah and Nasreen. I thought about ringing them, but then I thought about Leah’s party, which is the last time I saw them, and how they weren’t really friends any more, just people I knew. They’d want to hear about Wim, and trying to talk about him in their terms would cheapen what I really feel about him.
There was a sign on the rusty iron railings at the top of the Phurnacite road. “Land Reclamation Project. Mid-Glamorgan County Council.” It lifted my heart, because it reminded me of the march of the Lords of Gondor. We had called this place Mordor, and it had fallen. There were no hell-flames now. Some of the trees were showing a little spring green. No fairies were about. My leg was hurting a bit, probably enough to keep them away.
The chimneys were cold and all the windows were broken. It was pathetic, a five-year ruin, not yet crumbled enough to seem like a fairy fortress. The sign about dogs was hanging at an angle. The dogs, if there ever had been dogs, were gone with the workers. The dark pool still looked evil, though there was grass around the edge now. I walked around to the other side of the factory where I could lift up my eyes to the hills and sat in one of the alcoves. I wanted to rest so that my leg would get down to a normal quiet background pain the fairies could put up with. I read A Touch of Strange, which is brilliant, and beautifully written, though a bit weird. It’s short stories. I’m glad at least one of the things Wim gave me is good.
After I’d finished it, instead of starting Gate of Ivrel, I tried to see if I could get the pain to go out of my leg the way acupuncture does. It isn’t really magic, except that it is. It’s not magic that reaches into the world and changes things. It’s all inside my body. I thought, sitting there, that everything is magic. Using things connects them to you, being in the world connects you to the world, the sun streams down magic and people and animals and plants grow from sunlight and the world turns and everything is magic. Fairies are more in the magic than in the world, and people are more in the world than in the magic. Maybe fairies, the ones that aren’t lost dead people, are concentrations, personifications, of the magic? And God? God is in everything, moving through everything, is the pattern that everything makes, moving. That’s why messing with magic so often becomes evil, because it’s going against that pattern. I could almost see the pattern as the sun and clouds succeeded each other over the hills and I held the pain a little bit away, where it didn’t hurt me.
Glorfindel came first, and then all the others behind him. I’d never seen such a parade of fairies, not even last year when we had to stop Liz. Looking at Glorfindel with my insight about magic and everything, I decided I should stop calling him that, stop trying to fit him into a pattern I’d found in a story. The name wasn’t his, not really, though names are such useful labels. The fairies were all around me, surrounding me, very close. Nobody had told me to bring anything special, and I hadn’t, but I was ready.