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Written by an Australian who lives in the UK: may contain inadvisable levels of Suetiety. If anyone is interested, this is what Flinders St Ballroom looks like today if you're a Muggle, and this is the beach on which Hermione built the sandcastle for Rosie and Hugo. Any discrepancies between the Melbourne in this story and the one in the real world have been caused by a) the Australian Ministry of Magic b) Jeff Kennett or c) the coming of the Apocalypse.
Every few years, the Muggle newspapers run sad picture spreads of the old Flinders Street ballroom, crumbled Victorian glamour and high-colonial glory gone to seed. This is because every few years, a team of specially-selected station porters* are called into action. They spend an afternoon gently Transfiguring and Concealing-Charming and (where necessary) Obliviating the journalists into thinking that all they see at the top of the grand marble staircase is exposed brickwork, peeling plaster, rat-droppings, ruin and rain. This generally prevents Muggle Melbourne from coming to hear about what is in fact the largest public Floo facility in the Southern Hemisphere; disguised** and flourishing in the sleek old bluestone heart of the city.
Flinders Street Floo Station is Rosie’s last glimpse of Terra Australis Magus on a grey September evening. All graceful arching pillars and shadowy ceiling in peach and amber and gold, bright robes of travelling witches and wizards and sensible dark green of the Victorian Magical Transit Authority. A last glimpse of soft silver fog through the low square windows as she clings to her mother’s hand, and then everything is swept away in a swirl of deep blue flame.
International Floo travel is nothing to be afraid of these days: the hops are short (well, relatively) and sensibly-paced to avoid dehydration, disorientation and unexpected Transfiguration into gerbils***. They step out of the fire again in a modern concrete building just outside Darwin, polished granite floor and intense Cooling Charms on the whole building, and a strawberry-coloured tropical sunset pouring through the windows. Signs point them to the connecting fireplace, and Rosie tumbles through it with her little brother Hugo at her back.
It lets them out in a small wooden building in Kyoto, where through the sliding windows it’s suddenly a beautiful crisp Autumn afternoon. The politely efficient witch who’s manning the network gives them small cups of hot cocoa and cat-shaped biscuits to mark the halfway point of their journey. She then leads them to another room marked ‘Transfers and Connections: Europe’ in eighteen different languages, including Mermish, Gobbledegook and (Mum is pleased to see) Standard Elven. They step down into a black slate firepit and out again in the Ministry of Magic in Sofia, Bulgaria (Dad, who’s bringing up the rear with Hugo, gets very paranoid at this point for some reason). After having their documents checked for entry into the WEU, they step into another fire and out again to clear British wizarding Customs at Dover (Hugo’s pockets contain no plant or animal life, magical or otherwise: Mum made him turn them out onto the kitchen table before they left the house). The final hop, by which time all the fireplaces are beginning to blur together, is to the Ministry of Magic in London, where by some weird machination of terrestrial geography and magical transportation it’s now seven in the morning, five hours before they actually pulled out of Glen Eira Rd. ‘Better than Time Turners,’ Dad says, and Mum pokes him and says ‘Shut up, Ron, you’ll give them ideas’.
In Grandad Arthur’s office, Rosie changes into her new school robes, and Grandad takes everyone’s photographs with his brand new Muggle Fidgetal Camera. Not to be outdone, Dad goes to pick up his hire-car, and drives them all to King’s Cross in style. It doesn’t really hit her until she’s finally there on Platform 9 ¾. She looks into the permanently-worried green eyes of her twitchy cousin Albus****, and it’s like being smacked over the head with ten thousand miles of distance, all in one go. She gives him a thin bright smile and lays a reassuring hand on his shoulder, because if she’s scared then he must be terrified, but that’s the moment when she realises: there’s a full year ahead of them and there are things that Rosie is going to miss.
* Well, they certainly claim to be station porters, and the sheer unlikelihood of anyone voluntarily acknowledging any professional connection with privatised Melbourne transportation companies is usually enough for the Muggle journalists to let it go.
** Er, mostly disguised. There is the issue of the small gaggle of Wizarding teenagers who insist at all times upon sitting on the front steps of the Muggle station, drinking Butterbeer out of Coca-Cola bottles, smoking Gillyweed and generally making a public nuisance of themselves. Fortunately, from the early 1980s onwards these obnoxious youths have been generally mistaken by Muggle passers-by for members of the punk or Gothic sub-cultures, or, in extreme cases, for RMIT students.
*** Please don’t laugh. It has happened, at least twice, it isn’t very much fun for anybody and the paperwork it generates is awful.
**** You'd be nervous too, if your older brother was the acknowledged heir apparent to a considerable family legacy of tormenting younger siblings, your little sister (possibly in retaliation) had recently taken to breeding champion attack Jarveys, and you yourself had been forced to go through the first eleven years of your life answering to the name ‘Albus Severus’, which even in the wizarding world is more or less the nomenclatural equivalent of a ‘Hex Me’ sign.
Nobody’s made fun of her accent to her face since that first morning at the Ravenclaw breakfast table, when Scorpius Malfoy held his nose and loosened his vowels and asked her to ‘paaaaaarse the Vegemite, moite’. Fifteen seconds later, he was dodging an under-the-table hex from Lucy Weasley and then fifth-year prefect Cecile Jordan had harrangued him for eleven and a half minutes in a mix of cut-glass RP and razor-sharp Bajan until he burst into tears, hid behind the coffee-pot and announced that he hated them all and wished he’d asked to be in Slytherin.
But Rosie – once loud of voice, sarcastic of demeanour and profoundly smarty of pants – tends to check herself before she speaks, these days. A couple of snorts and sniggers, a brief overhead snatch of conversation – ‘Well, it isn’t as if the Weasleys were that far off being convicts in the first place’ – have finally succeeded where a lifetime of being called a suck-up and a smart-arse at her Muggle primary school, being reminded to use her indoor voice by her parents, and sat on (sometimes literally) by Hugo have failed. She’s young, and her speech is quickly tightening and coiling around the clipped consonants and rounded vowels favoured by the poshest of the purebloods, reshaping itself like a well-trained plant. In a few weeks’ time, she’ll speak to her family by firechat, and Hugo will commence teasing her for talking like a Pom (launching a process of two-way sibling-based accent-mockery that will continue for approximately the next forty-seven years). But in the meantime she tries not to speak in front of others whenever it can be avoided: how can any of them understand what it means to hate the sound of one’s own voice?
Three weeks before the end of term, the Potions teacher catches Rosie crying in a downstairs supply cupboard. Once she establishes that neither Peeves, Filch, Slytherins nor James Potter’s contraband experiments with Hysteria Charms are the cause of the child’s misery, she gets to the bottom of the issue: Rosie is upset because she thinks her Transfiguration and Charms marks still aren’t up to scratch. It takes her longer than the others to get the incantations right, because her pronunciations always seem to be slightly off, and the rest of the class have all levitated their feathers already and it isn’t fair.
Professor Chang looks into the snotty freckled face, and thinks of another eleven-year-old in another autumn, long ago, and it’s all she can do to bite back the smile. ‘Magic, Miss Weasley,’ she tells her, ‘tends to run at least as strongly on belief as it does upon perfect Received Pronunciation.’ And then, amusement in her eyes and Glasgow thick and warm in her voice, she adds ‘and whoever told you that the way you say the spells is wrong?’
The next day in Charms, Rosie levitates her feather all the way to the ceiling. Of course, she then gets distracted by Henrietta Kelmscott putting quills up her nose, and accidentally explodes it all over the front row of Hufflepuffs... but it’s the floating she remembers.
The last days of the Autumn term at Hogwarts are everything you dream of when you grow up in the Southern Hemisphere hooked on Narnia books* and American TV shows. Rosie runs around shrieking her head off with Henry and Albus and the other first-years in the first fall of silver-grey snow, and skids and spins like a red-haired-blue-scarved ballerina along the frozen castle paths. The trees in the Great Hall, placed with care by Professor Hagrid and trimmed by all the Charms classes in turn, are massive firs dripping with real icicles and smelling of the deep outdoors, not PVC plastic specials from David Jones. At the Christmas Feast, she attacks the rich heavy food with gusto, and thinks how much nicer brandy pudding tastes when you’re not picking and choking on it in thirty-five-degree heat.
Hugo’s down with dragon pox and Mum feels that the five-hop Floo trip is still too much for an eleven-year-old on her own, so Rosie spends the holiday at the Burrow, with her infinite troupe of cousins galloping in and out for company. Granny Molly gives her a bright purple Weasley jumper with a grinning koala knitted into the pattern and Rosie hates it, so she swaps with Albus (a suspect shade of brown with prancing reindeer). Together with Roxie and Freddy, they sneak out after dinner and make twenty-seven snow angels in the orchard behind the house, and this is Christmas the way she’s always known it should be.
And she doesn’t listen to the small quiet voice in her heart (quiet now, but it will grow louder with every year) that speaks of smooth bare freckled limbs and short pyjamas on Christmas morning. Of waking up in the sleepout on the back verandah and tearing through the house in the straw-coloured early morning light to sit by the Christmas tree, hung with Billywigs and tinsel, carefully switching on the eckeltrick lights. Of trying to keep Hugo quiet until their parents stumble awake, and then dodging flying wrapping paper and howls of excitement (and that’s just Dad). Of scoffing lollies for breakfast and riding new bikes (toy brooms are not the best idea in suburban Elsternwick) up and down the street. Of Christmas dinner made of fat tiger prawns and cold crisp coleslaw with mayonnaise and vinegar, fizzy Passiona in plastic glasses and stawberries with ice-cream for afters. Of warm soft backyard dirt beneath her toes as the sunlight turns to brassy gold in the late afternoon, slanting thick as honey through the box leaves. Of the first breath of cool evening as the stars come out, and the cicadas begin their seven-years-buried-song.
It must be so strange, says everyone who even remembers to think of it, Christmas in summer, just imagine. And Rosie thinks, you’re bloody witches and wizards aren’t you? If there’s one thing you should know how to do, it’s just imagine: if there’s one thing you should understand, it’s that strange and beautiful can often be the same thing.
* Mum had read the entirety of The Chronicles of Narnia to Rosie and Hugo before Rosie’s eighth birthday, making a careful point of telling them how misinformed Professor Lewis had been on the subject of witches. It had never really had the desired effect: Hugo had always been marginally on the side of the ogres and ettins, and Rosie had always felt a sneaking sort of sympathy for Eustace.
She doesn’t have the problems James and Albus do, of course. If the Prophet or the Quibbler take any notice of her, it’s in a strictly ancilliary capacity. She doesn’t even have to take the heat for being the-first-non-Gryffindor-Weasley-in-six-generations-oh-Merlin-the-horror – her cousin Lucy, specky and square-jawed, top of the school at History of Magic and DADA, carried off that dubious honour six years before. But there is still a certain amount of unwanted attention. In her experience of externally-imposed identities to date, she’s never had to deal with being anything more stressful than Rosie-the-Loudmouth, Rosie-the-Good-At-Maths, and on one or two occasions Rosie-the-Oh-God-Can’t-You-Do-Something-About-Your-Little-Brother,-Please-Mummy-Is-Trying-To-Translate-These-Documents. Becoming Rosie-the-Australian on a semi-full-time basis takes some getting used to.
Most of all, she’s sick of telling the bloody story, over and over again, to any beamingly curious Hufflepuff or solicitous Gryffindor who thinks ‘So why did you come to school here?’ is an original and intelligent conversation-starter over the Herbology bench or the Potions cauldron. They all want the potted history, they all want the there-and-back-again, summed up in a neat and tidy fifty words or less.
‘My grandparents moved to Australia during the War. When it was over, they didn’t feel like coming back to Britain, so my Mum and my Dad moved there to be closer to them. But they wanted me to go to Hogwarts with my cousins, so now I’m here.’
There are only so many times you can recite that litany before either letting the boredom and mischief take over, or considering some sort of tattoo.
‘My parents sent me here so I could use my inborn Colonial Vigour to take the Quidditch world by storm, and one day play Beater for Puddlemere United.’ This one is best said deadpan, when caught reading a book at the back of the the stands during compulsory attendance at House Quidditch matches.
‘I moved here for the weather.’ Self-explanatory.
‘For the food.’ Ditto.
‘For the handsome Gryffindor prefects.’ This one comes with the added advantage that it can be sarcastic or otherwise, as the situation and company dictacte.
And then there are the gaps in the story, the parts they never stop to ask about, and she’s never sure what’s best kept silent and what needs to be told.
‘Well, y’know, my mother was seventeen years old and scared out of her mind by the very real possibility that Voldemort would brutally murder her Muggle parents, or capture and torture them in order to get to her best friend and brutally murder him. So she Obliviated them and gave them new identities, and she thought she’d send them to the safest, most boring place she could think of (which happened to be the one with over two hundred varieties of poisonous snakes and spiders, so go figure). Only it was the first time she’d ever done it and she sort of gave it a bit too much zap, and after the war was over they never really got their memories back again. So she couldn’t talk them into moving back to the UK, and she ended up dragging our Dad halfway across the world to be with them, and she still flinches every time they call other ‘Wendell’ and ‘Monica’, and that’s why my brother and I have names straight out of the 1940s. Pass the beetle eyes?’
On second thoughts, she reflects, perhaps she’d better stick with Gryffindor jokes.
Some years from now, when they’re adults grown, most people will agree that while Ron and Hermione’s daughter inherited her mother’s brains and her father’s moodiness, their son went in exactly the opposite direction. It takes living in a house full of Ravenclaws, all cool intellect, geeky one-up-manship and ridiculously complicated puns, for Rosie to realise how much she misses Hugo’s terminal gullibility and (underneath the mischief) profoundly good heart. She tells herself firmly that she doesn’t miss his five-Wheeze-a-week joke-playing habit, his muddy football socks on the bathroom floor or his habit of yomping up and down the corridor like a herd of Erumpents, and occasionally she gets herself to believe it.
She sees little flashes of him sometimes, more often in her Gryffindor cousins and classmates than in the boys in her own house. Hugo earnestly trying to explain to Dad the superiority of AFL to Quidditch, then feeling horribly guilty and attempting to make up for it by hanging a Chudley Cannons poster next to the Footscray one in his room. Hugo curled up in front of the gas heater in deepest, darkest July, a Paul Jennings novel carefully tucked inside his copy of ‘Hogwarts: A History For Children’. Hugo swimming in Port Phillip Bay, dark head bobbing through the waves like a sleek little seal, and hopping like a jumping bean over the burning white sand. Hugo playing the Donkey in their primary school nativity play, and taking great pride in not spilling the girl playing Mary, even when his ears flopped into his eyes and he nearly crawled straight into the manger.
She and Mum had made him a Hogwarts once, during one of their beach walks. It had been very early spring, and the sky was the colour of mirror glass and howling with that Melbourne September wind, the one that comes screaming straight up from Antarctica and pins even the most determined of Muggle dog-walkers behind the sea-wall. They’d spent what seemed like hours to seven-year-old Rosie huddled behind Mum's Shielding Charm building up the turrets: Gryffindor Tower, Ravenclaw, Astronomy, the Headmaster’s Tower, scraping out a deep basin for the Lake and planting a sprig of driftwood to represent the Whomping Willow. Four-year-old Hugo had been content to putter at the edges, patting sand onto the castle walls, until the moment when Mum had scanned up and down the beach, furtively, once twice three times, and then pulled out her wand. With a whispered ‘aguamenti’ she’d filled the lake with water, and nudged the Willow with her wand-tip to make it move. The children had laughed and clapped in delight when she made two shells, one small and brown and one larger with a firey blob of red at its tip, dance across the sand and march through the castle door.
‘This is where you’ll be going, one day,’ Mum had told them, and the words This is where you belong hung unspoken until they were whipped away by the wind.
But the thirty-first of March sees a freezing snap and a sudden grand snowfall, as if Hogwarts itself is trying to make it up to them for the sogginess of the past three months. When all four House Captains challenge each other to a no-holds-barred snowball war on the last weekend of term, there are to be no survivors left standing. It’s the last snow of the season, so they’re playing April Rules: the combatants have stocked up on pellets of charmed dye from Wizarding Wheezes, and anyone who gets hit with a snowball will be spending the next week or so with indelibly blue, green, scarlet or yellow eyes, skin and hair. It gets worse than that, too – tradition dictates that an April Rules snowball victim can be ordered to perform menial tasks by any undyed member of the house whose colours they bear until the term ends or the dye wears off, whichever comes first. Headmistress McGonagall pretends not to notice this objectionable custom, while Professors Longbottom and Chang have been known to surreptitiously distribute antidotes if they feel that things are shading into bullying – however, it’s generally considered a point of honour to refuse.
Rosie is crouched behind the half-rotten stone wall near Professor Hagrid’s cottage, fresh out of dye pellets and hiding out from the screeching, many-coloured chaos in the field below. She spots a lone blue-scarved figure emerging from the melee, slip-slide-stumbling up the hillside away from a double-barrelled attack from two giant lolloping Gryffindors. She can just about make out her cousin James’ ginger hair, and at this distance the dark-haired one could be Caractacus Corner or Aadam Finch-Fletchely-Patil. They’re both twice the size of the Ravenclaw kid they’re chasing, and before she thinks about what she’s doing, Rosie jumps to her feet. The boy – she thinks it’s a boy, under the blue hat and fur-collared robe – looks up at her in what she takes to be mute appeal, his features a blur at this distance as James (she can’t see his face either, but she knows he’s grinning viciously) reaches out to grab his collar. And then somehow, fumbling with mittens and sleeves, she’s got her wand out, swish and flick, and is bawling ‘LEVICORPUS’ at the top of her voice.
Her accent is still so much thicker when she shouts.
Whizzing upside-down, up and out of the arms of his pursuers, the Ravenclaw boy lands in a soft crumpled heap in the snow at her feet. He bounds up immediately, indignant, pale grey eyes huge in his sweaty scarlet face.
‘Weasley!’
‘Fuck me!’
Oh, splendid. She would go and give her position away to rescue the likes of Scorpius bloody Malfoy. The Gryffindor boys, momentarily backfooted by the unexpected display of aerial gymnastics (good job Scorpius had his school trousers on underneath his robes), have wheeled around and are shambling through the snow towards them, smiling like wolves. And then Scorpius shoves his hand towards her.
Rosie pulls hers back, confused. ‘Take it, stupid!’. He grabs her left mitten and forces something small and solid into her hand, and Rosie has time, just time, to realise that it’s a handful of blue dye pellets – the last in the Ravenclaw arsenal, they will later discover, and almost the last in the game. One breath to grab snow, one breath to aim, and then they’re pasting the oncoming Lions with blue-charmed snowballs, side by side. In that moment, their faces are set in identical snarls of determination: the smiles will come later.
Gryffindor goes down, sixty-five casualties to Ravenclaw’s thirty-two. Rosie sits next to Scorpius at breakfast the next morning, as James Potter himself serves them tea and crumpets while singing the Greatest Hits of Celestina Warbeck with murder in his blue-stained eyes. Somehow, after that day, Vegemite and transfers to Slytherin are never mentioned again.
‘Still can’t believe you’re going home to winter, rather than summer’ Henry says sympathetically, slinging her own bag over her shoulders.
‘I completely fail to see the point of living in Australia,’ Albus adds ‘if you don’t even get to have nice weather.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ Rosie tells them. ‘Football, ice-skating at the Docklands, hot Milo’ – Albus makes a face at this, he’s tasted it on visits – ‘and getting to be smug at my little brother, who’s stuck in school until December.’
‘Plus, possibly taking two winters in a row will finally do something about those freckles,’ Scorpius observes, and is firmly swatted over the head with Rosie’s coat for his impudence.
‘Oi, Raven-nerds!’ James sticks his head into the compartment, ‘Year’s over: it’s time for me to start acknowledging your existence again.’ With an apologetic wave, Albus allows himself to be towed away down the platform, and then with a sigh Scorpius shoulders his trunk and follows, marching off towards a pair of scowling purebloods who acknowledge him with matching glares. Henry hugs Rosie tightly around the shoulders, and then bounds away to a pop-eyed Muggle woman surveying the scene around her with equal measures of curiosity and terror.
Rosie is the last to step off the train. One foot on the ground and one on the running board, she scans the crowd for tall-greying-red-hair and heavy-brown-frizz, and they’re not there, they’re not there, they’re there, oh, they’re there, and oh, oh, standing at her mother’s elbow, jumping up and down a little in excitement, is freckles-and-brown-curls, too. She plunges down into the crowd, swimming through it like the roughest waves, and she has just time to think This, this is where I belong before they sweep her up into their arms.