Archive of Our Own

I.

St. Mungo’s Hospital
January 1992

From the heart of the darkness came the tender high notes which begin a symphony. Delectable voices. What was at first just a tearjerking sway of sensitive and mournful sounds — crescendoes, arias, drones, drums — transformed before him and grew wings. Sound soared. He felt metaphysically flayed before its completeness and perfection. The crowd roared its exhausted near-coital appreciation whilst some percussionist on the triangle or another metallic high tone kept irrepressible time. To lead into the first movement’s melancholic tones an oboe soloed and was joined quickly by a deep, warbling bass saxophone. Their conversation moved him near tears. It reflected a sense of birth, love, loss, pain, and death in poetic tones. It was so nakedly emotional he could nearly hear the human speech it evoked:

“ — bereavement counselor will be made available for you and your children, and — ”

“Not all my children.”

“ — I’m sorry, what?”

“Those two are my children. They’re not all my children.”

A French horn cleared its glorious throat. “Well, the counselor will be made available for everyone.”

“Should I call the other wives?”

“Um, anybody you think might want to be… with him now, yes, please call them. And tell them they might hurry.”

“Hurry, really?”

“Lynda, his heart’s stopped twice. It could happen again at any moment.”

He was awed by the delicacy and humanism of the exchange and applauded with the crowd as it died away with percussive notes that suggested the gentle closing of a door. Immediately following, the flutes and clarinets swept in with a flurry of delightful little whispers volleying from either side of the grand stage.

“I thought he was only ever married to your mom.”

“He was but — you know our mom.”

“I dunno, do I?”

“She’s got a mean sense of humor.”

“Oh. I never noticed before.”

“It only comes out when she’s really stressed out.”

In the pause the percussion filled the room with deep churning sound.

“I thought she hated him and couldn’t wait for him to die,” said a clarinet mournfully.

“She doesn’t really.”

“She pretends she does?”

“Why?”

He yearned to answer this question — to shout the solution from the distant loge. And yet he was glued to his seat by the sheer weight of emotion.

“I dunno.”

“Grownups are bloody weird,” said a flute.

Abruptly — with a blood-tingling sense of surprise he liked — the oboe cut back into the conversation. “Watch your tongue,” it said. Any chastisement had been stripped from the lovely voice. “Tulip, your mum’s coming.”

“But I want to stay!”

“She’s just coming to be with us now.”

One of the percussionists executed a shocking spate of noise like a chair scraping tile.

“Is he dying,” said one of the clarinets. The player’s skill so nuanced and sensitive it was clear the question was rhetorical and the answer already understood.

The oboe responded with a weary honesty. “He has been, honey.”

“But it’s really happening now.”

The profound virtuosity of this orchestra was most evident in their pauses, he thought. The emotional weight in the silent moments could nearly rival that conveyed by the sound itself. Not to mention their timing and synchronicity was incredible: the players allowed tension to build to the point of breaking before the oboe responded with, “Yes, it’s really happening now.”

“But — ”

The little interjection came from a soft, boyish clarinet. The players paused again, waiting for it to finish its thought. One of the flutes helped it along with gentle encouragement. A swath of strings washed across the tableau, evoking tears. Percussion clattered and scraped; a chair fell over. He was on the edge of his own seat with bated breath.

“Elise, go see if you can get Laika on the phone.”

The flute’s voice this time was loud and cutting. “I’m not leaving!”

“El, honey, please — ”

“Mom, she doesn’t want to be here, she said so. She said hospitals misalign her chakras. She didn’t even want Cormac to come until you… talked her into it.”

“That’s one way to put it…”

Strings washed the scene. One of the flautists had switched to a piccolo to cut the sweeping tones with hiccuping sobs. The oboe had been playing a low soothing line throughout until it seemed to get fed up with such a muted theme and returned to the foreground with a vengeance.

“Death is part of life,” it announced, abruptly, almost a shout. As though it were trying to convince itself of this fact’s veracity.

“Mom — ”

“ — Darrell, honey, if you had taken one single biology class as I suggested you would know this.”

“What do you mean, like, like how mushrooms and bugs and things eat c-corpses — ”

“That is what I mean when it comes to basic physical reality. There’s nothing scary about it.”

“But it’s disgusting.”

“We’re disgusting, honey; bodies, guts, it’s all disgusting. But it’s part of life. Death is what makes life precious.” She paused. In the silence only the triangle player went on beeping. It was pretty postmodern to have such a high tone as the piece’s heartbeat. “How about you all say something you love about your father,” the oboe said.

The flutes and clarinets all responded at once, clamoring to be heard. From his seat in the high loge he realized he was weeping. As though hearing and returning his emotional extremity the strings cut in with doleful stabs and soaring tones while the bass underpinned the melodies with a low drone. He found himself wishing the piece would never end. It seemed possible there were layers of complexity to it he had not yet realized — as though perhaps in the next room there was another orchestra playing another story, and in the room beyond that, and in the room beyond that…

He was certain the next movements would possess equivalent or at least comparable beauty. Such was apparent from the skill of this orchestra. He wondered what would happen at the end. The lights would come up. He wondered what the room would look like when they did. Then he wondered why he didn't know, because he had been in this room for a long time. Clearly at some point he had sat down in it. But he was not sure what he would see when he could see again. The orchestra standing and bowing. Perhaps he would see their faces. Then they would file off into the wings behind the stage in practiced flanks, to a continued standing ovation from the adoring audience. But then what would happen to him? Would he see them again?

The lights would come up and he would leave this room. Perhaps he would find another orchestra playing in another room. Perhaps there would be nothing at all. Perhaps there would be no sound at all. An eternity of silence. His heart leapt. Sensitively, so did the tempo of the piece.

“What’s that?”

“Darrell — ”

“I’m going to get the doctor.”

Clarinet exeunt. Percussion scraped, grated, slammed.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“That sound is his heartbeat, Tu,” said the flute.

“So his heartbeat — ”

“It’s faster.”

It was incredible how his emotional and physical reactions seemed to mirror and match that of the orchestra. The emotional value of music, he enthused, really could not be overestimated. He recalled working in the lab in undergrad listening to Double Nickels on the Dime. Pipetting samples from petri dishes to fingernail-thin slides and peering at them under a microscope, stoned, watching the cells twitch and move… “Our band could be your life…” At the station beside him was a girl who had the patience to take her gloves off to flip the cassette, rolling her eyes. She would pretend to be miffed about it but then he would catch her tapping the heel of her Dansko clogs to the tune against the sterilized tile. Gestures like this one were how he knew she loved him. Or at least, he had said that in his vows.

Percussion scraped and slammed again. The clarinet had returned at the head of a renewed charge of blustery brass to lead the piece to thrilled crescendo. Desperately he hoped against hope this was not the end. It seemed it would have to be the end, or otherwise the beginning of something else. He sensed perhaps somewhere outside of memory he had already heard quite a few movements and his seeming need to hear another was a purely selfish desire without regard for what the musicians had been through.

After the sensitivity of the full piece the bull-in-a-china-shop aggression of the brass seemed gauche and cliche.

“Vitals?”

“Stabilizing — ”

The clarinets and the flutes were muttering to one another in a corner, nearly bulldozed by the overblown trumpets and trombones. The oboe inserted its surprised tones first delicately and then confrontationally into the fray — “What’s happening?”

“Miss, please step back — ”

“Not until you tell us what’s happening!”

The lights came up slowly, illuminating the musicians in smudged, bleary light, first just shades, pale strange colors, then forms, eyes, faces: the brass stern and faceless in lab coats; behind them four children, two of whom might qualify as teenagers, and at the back of it all like a timpanist with her arms folded tightly across her chest and her eyes aflame a tall black woman in a turtleneck and jeans. She was watching him intently and at last she saw him. The gold bands in her braids caught the thin whitish light. She leaned toward him and the children did too, through the menhiric phalanx of the white-coated brass. He heard the sound happening elsewhere with a psychedelic tape-echo delay.

“Myron?”

Her hand clasped his ankle beneath the soft white sheet. He recalled his body.

“Dad?”

“Dad?”

“Dad?”

“Dad?”

--

II.

Kensington, London
April 1992

“I thought you were dead,” said Boardman. He sounded disappointed. Wagtail had let him select the location for their meeting, figuring that he might feel more secure with a modicum of control over the reconciliation proceedings with someone who had once (albeit under the influence of hippogriff horn) told the Wizarding music press he hoped Boardman died of dragon pox. Admittedly he didn’t remember doing it and it was one of the quips he most regretted, not that those were in short supply. And not that it mattered to Boardman, who seemed genuinely disappointed to see them alive, albeit much diminished. The double pneumonia which had nearly killed him had made off with some absurd percentage of his body mass. He had been meaning, before the illness, to lose some weight, but not this much. Clearly he had made some kind of Faustian bargain without remembering, but that was hippogriff horn for you, or at least in toxic quantities. And anyway, adding insult to injury, Boardman had already ordered some kind of rabbitlike vegan spread and eaten half of it. Wagtail sat down; their boot-toes touched, and Boardman jerked his foot away. He wasn’t even thirty, Wagtail recalled, studying him. He looked a little prematurely aged around the eyes, but perhaps it didn't do to talk about that so soon. Anyway youth was wasted on the young.

“My heart stopped twice,” Wagtail told him, unearthing the menu from under Boardman’s crudite plate. “You probably heard… premature information.”

“I wrote to Lynda.”

“Yeah, she said. She said to say thank you.”

“Are the kids alright?”

“Only the oldest really understand — have you even met my kids, Boardman?”

His brow twisted, which made him look younger. He looked like he was deciding whether or not to be cruel and/or exactly how cruel to be. But he only said, “I’ve met your older daughter.”

“Elise.”

“Yes, Elise.”

“She preferred your band to mine, you know. She still does.”

Boardman grinned. To the supreme ire of W.R.W. and any other Wizarding music mag who had initially thought they might position him as a wholesome heartthrob, he looked least handsome smiling. His teeth, which were neither particularly good nor particularly bad, transformed the sharp-boned face from fey to feral. The smile seemed to suggest that behind those teeth there might be more teeth. “So you did want to bury the hatchet,” he said.

“I also wanted to give you some of my guitars.”

One of Boardman’s eyebrows cocked halfway up his forehead. “What? Why?”

“I’m dead the minute I get sick again. They’ve told me — I’ve tanked my liver. Another casualty of this lifestyle of abandon. Which — as you know, has some side effects, such as anti-sociality…”

“Or jealousy,” Boardman filled in, damnably catching on, “bloody-mindedness and poor gamesmanship and that.”

“Jealousy, eh?”

Boardman nodded. It would have seemed solemn were it not for the last sharp edge of that damned savage grin. But he was never going to get Wagtail to admit the Hobgoblins were the superior band. He wasn’t his daughter — she had more of Lynda’s contrariness than his own stubbornness.

“What guitars are you giving me,” Boardman said, reaching across the table for the ashtray.

“The blue Jag and the white Rickenbacker bass. But you have to give one to Childermass.”

“I have a roomful of things for him now from assorted well-wishers,” Boardman said, lighting a cigarette, “who prefer said expressions of… solidarity or gratitude be filtered through me then stoop to contact him in prison.”

“You know I can’t very well send him a bloody white Rickenbacker bass in fucking Byberry, Boardman!”

He was unrattled by this, though the older couple at the next table were. “Ras,” he said. “Please call me Ras.”

“I can’t send him something like that in prison, Ras,” Wagtail told him, collecting himself.

“Why not? He has my guitar.”

“Your best bloody one?”

“That isn’t even your best one!”

Boardman collected himself too. Wagtail wondered what kind of depression medicine he was on. Wizards had not necessarily improved upon the modern Muggle pharmaceuticals, but certain specialized potions were widely debated and cooked up in the cauldrons of hippies and mystics across the country. Certainly Boardman could afford the best, whether or not it worked. “I can hang onto it for Jack,” he said. “It sounds like you want him to have the Rick.”

“It’d look good with him playing it, don’t you think?”

Looking at it, sitting in its case in his attic like an unloved child, crouching on the floor, ankles going numb, woozy, sick, every jostle of every cell a reminder of his manifest and now-self-evident impermanence, he’d been reminded of the white Doc Martens Jack Childermass used to wear on stage at the beginning of the Hobgoblins’ tenure, when Wagtail had snuck on occasion into Poveglia or D&R through the green rooms to conduct what Tremlett called Opposition Research. Boardman and Childermass of course were younger, and, one might argue, better-looking, or at least they had been then, for certain audiences, given Wagtail’s obvious cornering of the silver fox market. There was also their enviable sexual tension, which Wagtail couldn’t for the life of him summon with any of his bandmates. They weren't hideous, he told himself, but he’d known them for too long, and a single sloshed makeout with Tremlett in grad school had thoroughly negated any urge to explore further. Perhaps worst of all, Jack and Ras were better-dressed, owing simply to the fact of their then-brokeness (or, in Ras’s case, then-nonliquidation of family assets) and, no doubt, Imani Rose and Flora St. James’s influence. Hence Jack’s boots, which Wagtail had always stubbornly envied. He had gone so far as to try on a pair himself on the Portobello Road before becoming extremely embarrassed and running out of the store with his own shoes untied.

As Nancy Sinatra had implied, the power of a boot rested in the walk with which one carried it. There was simply no mimicking the thick sole exaggerating the stride of Childermass’s birdlike legs. On Wagtail they looked like clown shoes. Stick to the loafers and the debauched professor look, Lynda had told him, avoiding eye contact, when they met up shortly thereafter to exchange the children.

He’d stood up, knees cracking, and closed the case on the white Rickenbacker. His head spun. As had become a near-hourly occurrence since having left the hospital, he blinked away nostalgia. His clear vision settled on the blue Jag and he decided not to consider why the sight of it invoked Boardman, to save time.

“They reminded me of you two, is all,” he told Ras. “I never play them, so. I don’t want them to be lonely.”

“It’s really quite thoughtful of you, Myron.”

He didn't think Boardman had ever before called him by his first name. “Will you play it?” he asked.

“Yeah. I mean, not in front of anyone, probably, because Amortentia’ll never bankroll another solo tour.”

The pre-pneumonia Wagtail would have said something snide about the fact that Ras’s solo tour had tanked and so had the album. Perhaps how its poor performance should have been unsurprising, because it was really quite bad.

“Shame,” said the post-pneumonia Wagtail. “You thought about a new record label?”

“Doesn’t seem worth it without songs.”

“So you’re not — ”

“It’s the sedatives,” said Ras. So that was one way to do it. “But — it’s rather either or.”

“Either — ”

“Either no songs or no will to live.”

“Hell of a bargain.”

“Yes — but. Well, quite frankly it feels like a normal sort of artist’s bargain. Did you know Van Gogh’s antidepressants might’ve allowed him to see the color yellow more vibrantly?”

“What — no.”

“So I’m waiting for what my version is. Perhaps it’s coming.”

“Perhaps there isn't one.”

“Let me fake it a little longer, why don't you…”

The waitress brought a plate of smoked salmon toasts and a pot of fragrant mint tea with two tiny cups. Wagtail didn’t know how to feel about the seeming fact that Boardman had ordered for him.

“I meant to tell you something,” he told Boardman while the waitress poured their tea in the Moroccan style.

“What is it?”

He waited until she’d gone away. He touched his cup but the tea was too hot to drink. The tube passed underground, shaking the surface of the amber liquid, spiraling jewel-bright mint leaves. “It’s — you might take this with a grain of salt which will soon become obvious.”

“But what is it?”

“When I woke up, I heard the doctors speaking to Lynda, then I heard Lynda and the kids talking.”

It was good, he realized, that he was practicing on someone less important before he told his children or his bandmates or, for that matter, Lynda herself.

“At first I couldn’t tell they were voices. They sounded like instruments — it sounded like an orchestra warming up. You know, like in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’”

“Sure.”

“The point is, it was like hearing sound for the first time. It was like I’d never heard music before and then — ”

“Death is silent,” Boardman interjected. “Is that what you’re saying?”

There was a smear of cream cheese at the corner of his mouth but he was deadly serious.

“Basically — I think. I think that’s what I’m saying.”

Boardman ate another smoked salmon toast. It gave him the appearance of a ruminating cow. “Interesting conclusion,” he said, looking away across the rainy square through the wide windows.

“Thought I’d tell you.”

Boardman touched the corner of his mouth thoughtfully, but in doing this he discovered the cream cheese. “Well, I appreciate it,” he said.

“The point is I’m bloody sorry.”

“For god’s sake Myron. Whatever for.”

“All those utterly ridiculous things I said.”

Boardman shrugged. “If you hadn’t, W.R.W. would have scrounged up some other band that would have.”

“Maybe so. I do still wish it wasn't me.”

From across the table Boardman seemed to appraise him for sincerity, as though this were the most absurd and suspect thing he had yet said. His eyes scanned Wagtail’s face left to right, as though he were reading something. Wagtail had noticed this before but such close quarters magnified its unsettlingness — magnified Boardman’s general unsettlingness. He wasn’t quite from Earth. “I accept your apology,” he said. “I would extend one of my own — ”

“It’s unnecessary.”

He blinked a few times owlishly. “I’d still — I could’ve responded to all those jabs of yours with, you know, more stoicism.”

“I started it.”

“Yes. But still.” He picked up the ornate little cup of mint tea and looked into it as though it were a spyglass. “You might want to write to Jack.”

“How is he holding up?”

“As well as can be expected.” Ras seemed to mull it over for a moment before reaching for another cigarette from the pocket of his fur-lined tweed coat, slung over the back of his chair. He was staring out the window into the square so intently that Wagtail nearly turned to see what he was looking at. “He’s rather upset with me to tell you the truth.”

“What about?”

He stuck the cigarette against his lip and clicked his lighter a few times before it worked. “What sort of blood have you got?”

“Um, AB Negative.”

“Really?”

“What?”

“I mean, it’s the rarest type, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not what I mean anyway. I mean, have you got pure blood or half blood or — ”

For a moment he caught himself wondering how safe it was to tell Boardman. Lynda was Muggle-born which put Elise and Darrell’s magic blood quantum at a quarter, if blood purist groups had already started calculating to such extremes. He lowered his voice, attentive to the other diners, though Boardman hadn’t been. “I’ve half blood,” he said.

Boardman nodded slowly, considering. “Jack’s parents are Muggles,” he said carefully. “I think it took me a long time to understand why he takes… things… personally.”

By things he could have meant anything from microaggressive jabs to outright slaughter. Wagtail recalled the excruciating memory of sitting quietly in the corner, clasping his hands together between his knees, whilst Lynda calmly explained to Darrell that he was going to have to be extraordinarily deferential to police officers of both the Muggle and magical ilk. Being the boy’s father and not having thought to say anything through the veil of his own privilege should have been the kind of wake-up call that it turned out required a near-death experience. “Because it is personal,” he told Boardman.

“Well I know that now…”

“Hmm,” said Wagtail, so he wouldn’t say, do you?

“I might’ve been more understanding, I think.”

These kinds of conversations were best reserved for private settings, or at least in Wagtail’s mind. At least in 1992. It didn’t do to talk casually about blood status these days, even in a predominately Muggle part of London. “Maybe,” Wagtail said, trying to steer conversation away. “And the wizarding press are certainly no help.”

“Certainly not. They delight in… debate. As though it were a debate!”

This was even worse, Wagtail thought, kicking himself. He attempted a still-more-obvious pivot: “And how are the girls?”

This time, thankfully, Boardman got it. “Very well,” he said. “They’ve started a band with Sal from C.V. and this American kid called… Grant or something…”

“How does that make you feel?”

Boardman froze in the act of lifting the last smoked salmon toast to his mouth. “Have you become some kind of psychoanalyst?”

“Just curious.”

“Why?”

He mulled over telling Boardman the truth. He decided on a roundabout iteration. “I need to have a conversation with the rest of the band.”

“What kind of conversation?”

“Aren’t you full of questions.”

“Well you don’t have to answer — ”

“I wanted to know how you feel because — I think I should tell them to go on without me. But I know it’ll make me jealous.”

“Why without you?”

“What did I just — I won’t survive another illness. My youngest kids are five and six and the twins are thirteen. I owe them, you know, the valiant attempt.”

Boardman studied him with the left-to-right reading again, as though to ascertain if this was true. Ponderously he raised the cup of mint tea to his lips. Clearly it was still too hot because his brow twisted in discomfort when he swallowed. “They sent me a test pressing,” he said, “the girls did. The record comes out next month. It’s called Severe Asceticism. This is all confidential, of course.”

“Of course.”

“It sounds bloody good. And it's just the girls on the record so who even knows how it’ll sound with the band. Probably fucking massive.”

“Are you jealous?”

“No. They couldn’t’ve given those songs to me and Jack. We would have… destroyed them.”

“Rather ego free, are they?”

“God, no, but it’s a different kind of ego, I suppose, one, or two, that — well, there was no room for it really, in the band, which I regret.”

One of the things Wagtail had been mulling over in the hospital, in the frequent lows (visualizable as the troughs between waves) bisecting carefully measured painkiller doses, was the crushingly likely probability that he had been a cunt. Not only to Lynda, which was of course obvious, and arguably more justified because Lynda tended to give as good as she got in that arena. He had come, belatedly, slipping into this suffering place where time spread out at the atomic level, couldn't blink, eyes bared toward the ceiling as in some kind of medieval torture, to the realization that he had been an egomaniacal fascist to the rest of the band solely because he could sing least objectionably. Upon reaching the acceptance phase with this, he had wondered if perhaps he was also a cunt in secondary school, where he had long mythologized himself as a put-upon outsider. He mentioned this to the doctor, who had made a note and increased some dosage of something which facilitated the stopping-thinking-about-it.

He wondered if Boardman too had had this realization belatedly. Probably his realizing it at all was the result of extensive therapy.

“Are you ever going to make another record,” Wagtail asked him.

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I guess it depends.”

“Would you — you know, when Jack — ”

“Myron, in all honesty, I don’t know if, when he gets out, if he’ll speak to me, let alone write with me. And the girls — I could never ask them to come back now. I’d never ask and they never would. So when you ask about another record, it would be another record of just me. And the last record was proof that I am capable of shit on my own — ”

“That’s not fair,” Wagtail tried. “There were some… great ideas…” But Boardman looked at him so incredulously across the table that he felt he had to say, “Sorry.”

“Maybe the universe is telling us both something,” Boardman said, settling back in the chair. “We had a hell of a run, didn’t we?”

Wagtail wondered why he was so disappointed. Perhaps he had wanted this to end in a fight. Instead the resignation was like a cold bruise. From behind the counter one of the cooks was watching them. They didn't talk much more. Boardman insisted on covering the check, and he paid their bill in crisp pound notes. They went outside together into the needling rain and walked to the Tube.

“Let me call you sometime,” Boardman said as they waited on the platform. Standing, his slouch — hands tucked deep in the pockets of the tweed and fur coat — seemed pathetically pronounced. “Maybe — you know, when I have trouble writing, I tend to be a bit fatalistic.”

A bit? Wagtail didn’t say. “Fine,” he said.

“Want to start a band?”

The train was coming up out of the tunnel with such a visceral, possessing roar of light and wind and sound Wagtail almost thought it reminded him of being resuscitated by defibrillator. Beside him on the platform Boardman had that deadly serious face on again, this time without the distracting cream cheese smear. “What?” Wagtail asked, certain he’d misheard.

“Thought I’d ask,” Boardman yelled over the roar of the train.

They shook hands and Boardman got on the train. He stood against the opposite door though there were plenty of seats available and unearthed from the pockets of the coat a paperback compendium of Sherlock Holmes stories. The doors closed and the arterial flow moved on again.

Wagtail stepped back against the corrugated tin wall and forced himself to think about how he was going to get home.

--

III.

Linton, Scotland
August 1992

Tremlett, to his credit, took the spiel in stride. But when it was over he just said, “Hmm.”

Wagtail had not quite crossed over the threshold of the stone cottage cum picturesque ruin on the Scottish Borders. He was wringing his drenched hat between his fists and the rain refracted off the crooked flagstone walkway to lick at his heels. In the kitchen Tremlett turned toward the wood stove, which was emitting steady heat. Beneath the collar of his oversize fisherman’s sweater the elaborate shapes of the floral back tattoo he'd gotten as a drunk undergrad — Wagtail wheeling himself across the shop just-as-shitfaced and hysterically laughing to the artist’s vengeful ire — was just visible. “Listen,” Wagtail said, realizing perhaps he should have waited the span of a cup of tea before unleashing the spiel, “should I come in or…”

“Of course you should come in,” said Tremlett. “It’s bloody raining.”

Wagtail came in and closed the door. He’d been to the cottage before but still nearly brained himself on the low beams, which Tremlett had painstakingly exposed for some reason.

“Tea,” he said. Though the kettle was already on.

“Sure.”

“There’s sheep cheese in the icebox.”

“Sheep — right.”

“It’s bloody regular cheese, Myron, just — you’ve probably had it before without even knowing.”

“But you didn’t say bloody regular cheese. You said sheep cheese.”

“Everything’s made of sheep out here,” said Tremlett brightly.

“I suppose there’s sheep’s milk for the tea then.”

“Goat’s milk, actually…”

Wagtail had always vaguely admired how Tremlett had dealt with fame by completely retreating from any kind of spotlight except when he was contractually obligated to occupy it. It had functionally destroyed their friendship, which for a time had seemed like both an unstoppable force and an immovable object. To wit, Wagtail’s jokes about Tremlett’s being an archetypal Scotsman had not used to fall quite so flat.

“Listen, Don — ”

“Am listening,” said Tremlett, in infuriatingly patient tones.

“I don’t want to die again. Or, you know, not permanently. I didn’t like it.”

Tremlett sucked his teeth. “You ought to start a religion.”

We already have, Wagtail didn’t say. “It’s rather a devil’s bargain,” he said, realizing with disappointment that he was quoting Boardman. “Of course I wish there was some other way.”

“We could stop touring,” said Tremlett, kind of wistfully. Wagtail had suspected he’d felt this way for years. “Just be a recording type project like the late Beatles.”

“I spoke to Mitzi. It’s not fiscally prudent.”

“Do you,” Tremlett tried slowly, “particularly need more money.”

He was not unshocked by this pronouncement. After all, it wasn’t like they had much. “I have four kids,” he said.

“Not really an answer — ”

“Yes, I do need more money. I don’t live on a bloody farm — ”

Tremlett fixed him with the imminent-bloodshed Highlander gaze. But he only said, “Cream and sugar?”

“You mean goat milk and sugar.”

“It’s beetroot sugar, to be precise.”

Wagtail agreed, begrudgingly. Tremlett prepared the tea and they attempted to retire to the den only to find the warmth from the woodstove hadn’t quite permeated the cottage entire and all the other rooms were frigid cold. Instead they sat together at the kitchen table and Tremlett produced the sheep cheese. Wagtail hated that it tasted good. Tremlett didn’t say anything. For someone who had once broken every window on their tour bus in a drunken stupor, he had remarkably mellowed with age.

The tea finished, Tremlett said, “I think you should do whatever you need to do to survive.”

“That makes it sound — ”

“Like a matter of life and death? You’ve just told me it is.” He collected the dishes and Wagtail almost asked him not to get up. But he had only done it for something to do with his hands. “That’s why I said I wouldn’t do the trappings of it anymore.”

“Trappings…”

“Yes, that I would only do the necessaries. No… parties and signings and things. Write the parts, record, tour, wizarding wireless, one photoshoot, in bed by midnight. I thought it was that or death. It would’ve been a different sort. Choking on vomit or something.”

Wagtail studied him. Since he had quit drinking and retreated to the country there had been something about different about him which had frustrated Wagtail too much to identify. He realized now it was that Tremlett’s eye contact had substantially improved. It was bright and steady and clear. His eyes were brown, which Wagtail hadn’t really noticed until it was pointed out in Wizarding Rock Weekly’s annual Hunks issue, circa 1984. He had studied the issue with a scholar’s intent given Tremlett had ranked a full six places higher than himself, which he found infuriating, to Lynda’s extreme amusement. “It's the tattoo,” Lynda had said.

“It’s — what?”

“His tattoo. It’s sexy.”

“He’s a horticulturist! It’s a tribute to his undergraduate thesis about… orchid reproduction!”

“Do you hear yourself! Oh my god!”

He’d long wondered if Lynda held a candle for Don, but that was probably just projection because he himself had slept with at least two of Tremlett’s ex-girlfriends. It had gone unchallenged and undiscussed, thankfully, Wagtail had thought then, because Tremlett’s drinking problem had precluded his attention to pretty much anything else.

Still, because it was true, he had to say, “I didn’t realize it was quite so bad.”

“Well, it was.”

Tremlett had gone to rehab some seemingly ridiculous amount of times before it stuck. Greater than five, but less than ten.

“You didn’t tell me,” Wagtail said inanely.

Tremlett’s left eyebrow cocked halfway up his forehead. “You weren’t exactly listening.”

--

The rain blew off in the high winds. Tremlett disappeared into the basement, whose door, left ajar, seemed to breathe with the possessed lungs of peat mummies and bog corpses, and emerged with a spare pair of Wellington boots, which necessitated stuffing with an extra pair of socks before they would fit Wagtail’s smaller feet. Then they went out together into the cloud-blown fields.

“What happened to your greenhouses,” Wagtail asked him.

“Hailstorm wrecked them. Been growing the fragile things in the basement at home.”

“Like what?”

“Orchids. Cannabis. Um, kale.”

Of this list, kale was most surprising. Tremlett had been growing orchids — and hemp — in absurd locations since undergrad. They had been roommates second year at the College of Magical Biology in Sheffield and Tremlett had magically extended the space under his bed so as to cultivate ghost orchids in a meticulously controlled environment. His single room junior year and onward had been a kind of jungle greenhouse to the extent he was obliged to regulate the temperature and humidity around his bed. Both for his own sleeping comfort and so that he might be able to get laid without suffering heat exhaustion.

“Ollivander’s is buying certain pressed flowers from me now,” Tremlett said. “And we’ve started talking about roots… but in order to do any of that I would have to hire someone.”

“Darrell needs a job.”

“Your son doesn’t want to come and live out here in the middle of nowhere and besides he’s fourteen years old.”

“We had jobs when we were thirteen!”

Tremlett signed. “The issue is — there are plenty of qualified individuals. Or of course there’s your boy. There’s also the fact that I have appreciated being alone.”

He recalled being very stoned in that dorm room in Mortimer Black Hall circa 1978 talking about Celestina Warbeck’s latest high-profile breakup. “I can’t imagine why someone would want to be famous,” Tremlett said, staring intently into the middle distance. And all Wagtail, who spent a good 90% of his every waking hour imagining being famous, could say in response was, “Hmm.”

“It felt good being looked at at first,” Tremlett went on. “Then it didn’t anymore rather quickly. Or at least — well I don’t know what it felt like to you.”

Pre-pneumonia Wagtail had never not loved being looked at. Post-pneumonia Wagtail had found the nature of those looks different and had roundly detested every single one.

“I wish you had told me this whole endeavor was so traumatic,” Wagtail said, probably not kindly.

Tremlett shrugged. “It's complicated. Because it is also without question what we are meant to be doing.”

His knees cracked when he crouched in the peat. Wagtail at first didn't see the tiny blue wildflower he had stopped to investigate. He was so skilled with the magic of botany and horticulture that he didn’t need to use a wand to harvest the plant whole from the dense soil. “What is that,” Wagtail asked him.

“Blue fritillary. The rarest wildflower in the United Kingdom. It’s extremely controlled because it has a variety of Dark uses.”

He tucked the flower gently into a canvas bag he unfolded from the pocket of his mudstained work pants. “That thing has Dark uses?” Wagtail asked incredulously.

“Oh, yes.”

“Like what?”

“It’s used in all these necromancy spells.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry,” said Tremlett, in those infuriatingly gentle tones. “I sell it to a very reputable potionmaker.”

“So you’re contributing to… reputable necromancy?”

Tremlett glared and walked on, boots squelching in the muddy bog. This was the kind of place, Wagtail realized, where one was stalked by hinkypunks. “You can do other things with them,” Tremlett said, “which you might’ve known if you’d taken a single herbology class.”

“Okay. I thought you agreed to stop guilting me about that in 1979.”

They walked on like travelers after the end of the world. In this contextualization of reality he was glad he was with Tremlett, who could probably identify edible plants and trap marsh birds. Eventually he started noticing the flowers himself and stopping to harvest them, though less neatly than Tremlett had managed. The rain started moving in again, clouds stretching through the high grass in cottony tendrils, and they turned back toward the cottage again.

“I don’t think you should break up the band,” Tremlett said when the cottage was in sight. It had started to rain in thick intermittent drops.

“It wouldn’t be breaking it up. It would be going on without me.”

“Nonsense.”

He turned and looked at Tremlett. Something about his face in the shadow of his raincoat’s hood made him seem very young. “You’re the only one who can sing,” Tremlett said. But there was something behind his voice.

The morning after their first sold-out show was the morning before they were both obliged to take the exams they would have to pass to graduate with masters’ degrees in herbology and magical creature behavior, respectively. Wagtail had come to, eyes and mouth crusty, head basically a trash compactor, when Tremlett had gotten in his bed, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He was still wearing his t-shirt from the night before and his sweat had dried in a ring of salt around the neck. He smelled like a locker room after a particularly hard-fought midsummer Quidditch game. His hangover seemed to permeate Wagtail’s consciousness, but then it was certain Wagtail’s own had permeated his. No point in even asking him what he was doing. They watched the minutes count down between snatched fits of sleep, until Wagtail’s alarm sounded a great rift of excruciating light into both their skulls and they went to face the test.

“I think perhaps selfishly,” Tremlett said, “if I could face it so can you.”

“But you didn’t — ”

“I was an alcoholic, Myron. I tried killing myself.”

“You did?”

It was raining hard now with a sound like a rattling snare drum on the hood of Wagtail’s borrowed raincoat. As in many of his interactions with Tremlett since the beginning/end, or at least since the change, since the demonic evolution of their band and devolution of their friendship, he wasn’t sure whether to be devastated or violently pissed off.

“In probably the most half-assed possible way,” Tremlett said, “and, you know — ”

“You were drunk.”

“I was. It was a low bridge.”

“It was a — what!”

“Let’s just go inside. You know, I thought there would have to be horrible metal pieces and things, I guess, in the water… It was in Hull.”

“What were you doing in Hull?”

“Am not quite sure. But let’s just go inside, please.”

They went in. Tremlett took his raincoat off and unloaded the canvas bag of blue fritillary flowers into the elbow-deep ceramic sink, where he set about rinsing the crud from the bulbs and the struggling blooms.

“Anyway, after that was the time that rehab stuck,” he said. “Would you put the kettle on?”

Myron was obliged to light the stove with a match, which took him several minutes because his hand was shaking and they kept going out. Outside the rain lashed the window above the sink. Tremlett was watching the flowers with supreme calm but he was chewing the inside of his lip tightly inside his mouth as he always did when something was trying him.

“If I really wanted to do it I could have,” Tremlett said for some reason. “You can be very sure with plants. It was just — a gesture.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get bloody tetanus. Or worse.”

“Yes. Lucky about a lot of things. That’s it, you know…”

He turned from the sink. His hands were dirty. Some of the drunk eighteen-year-old virtuosic orchid cultivator, raised in a squalid bothy in the Hebrides, soliloquizing on soil types in oft-incomprehensible Scottish dialect, courted since Hogwarts graduation by all the reputable magical nurseries, infinitely more content to strum the two chords (G and A) he could play on guitar in his Sheffield dorm, was in the years-drawn, worry-lined face. In school they had made a famously odd pair. It was rare that students from such disparate tracks spent such substantial quantities of time together. It was rarer still that anybody started a band at all in biology college.

“We were really quite lucky,” Tremlett said. “We’ve been really quite lucky this whole time.”

“Is that why you say — ”

“It’s difficult to imagine, if I survived, if you survived, if we met each other at all, if we made it so far with the band, all that, that there isn’t — some kind of reason why.”

Wagtail studied him. “Maybe you should start a religion.”

“We already have,” Tremlett said, turning back to the sink, “and you came back from the dead just now…”

In his broad worn hands the flowers seemed almost impossibly delicate, like candy or toys. When he had finished cleaning the plants he washed his hands with rough-hewn hippie bar soap he probably made himself in the basement and then dried them so contemplatively and for such a long time with the dishtowel that Wagtail finally asked him, “What is it?”

Tremlett turned toward him and their eyes met. “Shall we play a little music,” he said. “I’ve just the one guitar but there’s a synth somewhere I think I can magic into playable condition.”

“I don’t know, Don.”

“We’ll just do some of the old standards,” Tremlett said. His reedy voice now bore an unfamiliar note of desperation. “You used to like to do the Kinks — ‘Twentieth Century Man’…”

“I should really — actually you know, look at the time.”

For a precious moment Wagtail thought — hoped — he would bar the door. He seemed to still himself against it by folding his arms over his chest. Wagtail studied him, then the door. It was raining heavily now out on the gray moor. “I won't stop you,” Tremlett said.

--

IV.

Hammersmith, London
November 1992

It took him a little while to feel up to it again, but when he was, Lynda brought Elise and Darrell over on a Friday afternoon. She didn’t really need to escort them over, because they could have taken the weekend train from Hogwarts and the tube from Kings’ Cross, or so they insisted, milling about out front in the frostbitten wreckage of overgrown summer grass, unearthing the most colorful fallen leaves. Lynda ignored this except for a begrudging roll of her bright hazelish eyes, which Wagtail would later reflect on with a longing affection. She was working on a big contract for the Ministry that she couldn’t speak about, and hadn’t been sleeping much. When the kids went in the house, no doubt to find Wagtail’s most expensive guitar and try to play Nirvana songs on it, she said, “Mitzi called.”

“Really.”

“She said she couldn’t get a hold of you.”

He had had a Muggle technician come over to install Caller ID, and he had meticulously worked out a similar spell to put on his barely-used Floo. Both improvements had made it refreshingly easy to ignore any and all undesired contact, especially that from his record label, which was perhaps the most undesired of all.

“What did she want?”

“What does Mitzi ever want.”

Lo and behold, from inside he heard the telltale gouging strums of Elise attempting “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Then Darrell’s insistent, “It doesn’t go like that!”

“There’s some charity show,” Lynda continued over the kids’ clamor. “Raising money for a long-overdue AIDS ward at St. Mungo’s. Ras Boardman put it together. He called too, actually, because he couldn’t get a hold of you; do you even have a phone in here, Myron?”

“Got Caller ID,” Wagtail told her, trying to grow his shoulders to prevent her curious peering around him into the house, which he had not bothered to vacuum in… who could say. “Boardman called you?”

“You know his sister is on the Wizengamot. No doubt she can get the Floo address of just about any Ministry contractor.” Lynda settled her hands on her hips. “It has been quite a long time since anybody — well, since I was like your go-between and unofficial manager.”

“Sorry about that, Lynda.”

“Quite all right. I’m used to it. Anyway they want you to play — they want the whole band to play. I told them both not to get their hopes up.”

“Good on you. Thanks for that.”

“For the record though, I think you should.”

She shifted her weight from foot to foot in her beat-up Chelsea boots, having adopted the standing-ground stance he recognized from their divorce negotiations and the angry times preceding, days (weeks, months, years) in which she had hated him and he had hated her, perhaps with good reason he couldn’t quite call to mind anymore, it after all having happened to a different person, in a different time, with the kids asleep upstairs, before Tulip and Cormac and their mums, or, come to think of it, perhaps not necessarily before Tulip’s mum, that being perhaps the reason Lynda had thrown the sugar bowl from their wedding china at him, or not necessarily at him, her having been Ravenclaw Chaser after all, considering he knew her aim was truer than Elvis Costello’s and the bowl had shattered against the wall just beside his head, zinging past his ear like a gunshot…

As the pre-pneumonia Wagtail had then, he tried to keep his voice, in the initial blows, a little airy, noncommittal: “You heard what the doctors said.”

“They said you can’t keep drinking and you’d do well to take care of your health. And no more hippogriff horn. They basically said, no drugs, go vegan. They didn’t say, quit your career and your whole life.”

“God,” Wagtail groaned, “Vegan.”

“No more cured meats. I’ve been telling you that. They’re worse than cigarettes. And no more cigarettes!”

Earlier that very day he had gone round the store to get things for the kids for the weekend, constituting a veritable smorgasbord of assorted cured meats and cheeses, knowing they didn’t get those things at Lynda’s house, though they probably had figured out how to wheedle them from the kitchens at Hogwarts. He had also bought a pack of cigarettes, though he had managed to cut back substantially since the illness given his special new awareness of his lungs.

“I wouldn’t be able to stand you if you didn’t have the band in your life,” Lynda said. “This petulant moping is really getting to me.”

“Thought you couldn’t stand me anyway.”

“I don’t want you to die,” Lynda told him. Only she could say something like this as though she were reflecting on the weather. “I never have, though I know I probably said I did when we were getting divorced. I also don’t want you to have a death of the soul, which is arguably worse.”

“Why?”

“You’re the father of my children.”

“But — ”

“But nothing. I love them, obviously; you’re half of them, obviously.”

“We’ve been shit to each other.”

Lynda’s eyebrow cocked halfway up her forehead. “Don’t give me this — near-death-experience self-reflective bullshit.”

“I’m being honest!”

“It’s just so corny, so cliche, Myron…”

He supposed one of the reasons he’d loved Lynda, the past tense seeming not quite true but not quite false either, was her staunch feeling that all typical romantic gestures were innately pathetic demonstrations of what she had once called “toxic heteropatriarchal monogamy culture.” For instance he had never given her flowers, in part because he knew nothing about flowers, as Tremlett had never hesitated to point out. They had gone on their honeymoon kayaking in the fjords in Norway, then to a heavy metal festival illuminated by flaming swords and the midnight sun.

“No fucking cured meats,” Lynda reminded him. “Not for the kids either, okay?”

“Fine.”

She smiled, knowing he was lying, and clasped his arm between elbow and shoulder. Not quite a kiss on the cheek but much improved physical contact given histories. “See you Sunday,” she said.

“See you Sunday.”

He watched her go down the walk and out to the street. He watched her until she turned the corner, knowing she knew he was watching, because she kept her back very straight and her head very high, or maybe she just always walked like that, and he hadn’t bothered to notice. The gold bands in her braids caught the thin light through the low windblown clouds. When she was gone the street seemed very empty, void of some precious color or light, though it was late afternoon and the sidewalks were crowded with people on their way home from work. Eventually he went back inside to find his children had also discovered his most expensive bass and were working on the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”

“C sharp minor,” Wagtail told them, sitting beside Elise at the kitchen table. Darrell was leaning up against the fridge, plucking at the bass strings with Sharpie-shaded fingernails. “B minor shape on the fourth fret.”

He watched Elise’s little fingers struggle into the bar. Clasped his hands together to keep from helping her. She had tucked a bruised orange leaf behind her ear and its color cast a little shadowy light against the high bridge of her cheekbone.

“Da,” Darrell said from the floor, “wanna play the lead bit with us?”

“When you get the rhythm down,” said Wagtail, so he wouldn’t have to.

“Sounds much better with the lead bit,” said Elise. She gave her brother a sneaky look she probably thought Wagtail didn’t see. He wondered if they had discussed this with their mother on the tube ride over.

“Who all’s playing this gig,” he asked Elise and Darrell, knowing they’d heard about it. “The charity gig.”

“Saint Rose and the Sluagh.”

“Is that a band?”

“Da.”

“It’s two bands.”

“Do you even pay any attention to anything anymore at all?”

That was barbed. Elise had known it would hurt.

Darrell, the elder by ten minutes, was more diplomatic: “Saint Rose is Flora and Imani from the Hobgoblins’ new band. And the Sluagh — ” He was probably butchering the Gaelic, but who knew — “is from Dublin.”

“Are they any good?”

Elise and Darrell looked at each other again. Beside the orange leaf, Elise’s eyebrow slowly elevated, all too much like her mother’s tended to. 

“Stop doing your funny twin thing and use your words,” Wagtail said, not without a pleading tone. He had been figuring since the illness, at the coldest and the most strange, when things began to hurt, mentally or physically, or at the dark nadir of looming mortality that sometimes possessed him when he woke up in the night, that someday he would experience that same shift that blindsides any man, when one looks to one’s children and asks them what to do, after a lifetime having it the other way around. Had not quite thought he would succumb to it so soon, perhaps, but it was in his kids’ nature, as he’d understood even semiconscious, hearing them at the melodic charge of the symphony which was life, hearing them now, hearing their music, in which was an answer to his question, in which had been since before he’d even asked it.

His children broke into tandem grins and giggles. “Go get your guitar, dad,” Darrell said.