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After Dumbledore has stopped me from going home to celebrate with… just kept telling me… what I don’t want to hear – what didn’t happen, I find myself under our balcony. No, it’s not our balcony.
It’s not me. Someone standing in November dusk, staring at a handsome Victorian building, at the fifth-floor windows – dark – and the balcony – small, as if not real at all. The outcome of the expanding charm would not be visible from here, not even for a wizard. And perhaps the charm is gone – along with the wizard who used to live here with another – no: with a foolish, trusting, suspectable werewolf.
He first chose to live with James.
“Your turn to move to my place!”
So excited, he’s as beautiful as ever, with fluffy snowflakes gathering in his hair, and his hair hanging over the collar of his brand-new jacket, black leather.
Still wearing Muggle clothes, he’s rushed to join us at breakfast after taking a night train from London. I’ve missed him so while he’s spent Christmas and New Year’s at the Potters’ – his home for a full year now. And been worried since James returned without him, said he went down on his own because of his uncle’s will.
“Did you have to meet your…?” Peter blurted it out, with his mouth full of toast.
“No, don’t you dare mention them! Got it all arranged with far nobler creatures: goblins at Gringotts. I needn’t see even Alphard, since he’s dead.”
That was hardly an ingenious joke. Laughing himself, anyway, he raised his goblet of pumpkin juice for a toast. “To that old bugger! He succeeded, too: got blasted out of the fucking family tree. Maybe because he promised to take care of my property when I escaped. Sent my trunk here back then.”
I doubt he ever told the others that when helping him run away, Alphard also gave him his cloak and a Galleon – meant for a Knight Bus ride to his house in Kensington.
“And when he dies, he takes care of it like this! Did he leave you everything?”
“No. Half to Andromeda. My half’s a vault with a decent bit of gold, and the house.”
When we’re trudging through the slush towards the woods, where they’re going to change shape, because he’s missed romping as dog, Peter goes on questioning him. “So you’re moving to the house he left for you?”
“No.” He shakes the hair from his face, trying to hide a shiver. I catch his eyes, and we’re perhaps sharing the memory of the words in his mind when he was fleeing: I won’t. I won’t. “He was a true bugger. I don’t want that house. The goblins can sell it for me, and I’ll buy a flat: two bedrooms.”
His arm brushes mine, as I’ve stumbled too close. He glances at me, bends to lift up the end of my scarf, which has been trailing behind without my noticing. As he flings it around my neck, his cold fingers touch my cheek. And that’s when he says it – turns away and says it. “Move to my place!” He says it to James.
Turning his back to the building, this fool continues to stare up – now at treetops, at high branches which used to almost reach the expanded balcony. Tears prick his eyes, but there’s nothing flowing down his cheeks yet, and he can remember a time when there were people he could be happy for – people from whom he wanted to hide at least a part of his disappointment, even despair. Now these trees are bare, but the images of leaves remain, having emerged in his mind first when painted by the same voice which once called him more than human.
Only a week left of summer term, but he’s been impatient. This time he’s Apparated to London and back to Hogsmeade. Upon receiving his owl we’ve sneaked out for the slow, luminous evening, so as to meet him: Peter in his rat form, the three of us under the invisibility cloak until we reach the outskirts of the village. Yes, lovely, clever Lily’s one of us now.
So proud, he leans his hips and elbows on the fence surrounding the Shrieking Shack, holding a Muggle cigarette. The pack’s under the sleeve of his white t-shirt.
I’ve figured out an excuse to go right up to him, to touch him. “Are these new jeans so tight that you can’t keep anything in the pockets?” I do manage to wriggle a finger into a front pocket.
He takes a drag, barks a laugh when exhaling, and places the cigarette between my lips, then pushes me on the chest. “I’ve bought something else, too. Finally, my own place!”
Playing with the thought of kissing him, I’ve glanced at the others. Peter’s looked pointedly away from the two of us, while James doesn’t need to: he’s hardly got his eyes and hands off Lily so as to greet whom he calls his brother – again, after his slow process of forgiving him for what we call the Willow Incident.
“Well, it’s a decent enough house, sturdier than it looks, I wager,” Peter says thoughtfully, nodding towards the Shack. “And must have some sentimental value for you, too.” Or you two? And he laughs at his own joke so hard that maybe it makes no difference whether we all find it funny.
“I considered… seriously considered buying this place here...” This time he’s almost missed a beat, but not quite, never quite. (Poor Peter, who’ll never get the better of him!) “At least for our final year. But Dumbledore won’t sell. And I prefer London, after all.”
Trying not to cough, cherishing the bitter taste of his breath, I’ve settled beside him against the wall. He takes the cigarette back when I offer it to him, but he doesn’t resume smoking. A frown appears as soon as James speaks up.
“Why? I thought you’d had enough of places like Grimmauld… Sorry!” I’m afraid James does it on purpose, in order to make fun of – and to still reprove him for – the casual, insufficient way he, according to James, first apologised for the Incident. James means to do this gently: he doesn’t know how hard and why exactly just hearing that name affects this rebel of the Black family. “And Kensington, too,” James adds, smirking to him.
As he’s crushing the half-smoked fag under his foot, my eyes get fixated at his boots: heavy for the summer weather, and with leather straps and metal rings at the ankle.
“I’m not surrendering all of London for them. We need to be there to train and work as Aurors. And there’s the whole of the Muggle capital: everything that’s new and exciting is down there. I’m buying a motorbike, too.”
“It’s fine with all those Muggle motors and more you’ve discovered.” I lift my gaze when Lily cuts in with her uplifting voice, in a tone as bright as the early-summer nature around us: glowing, warbling, breathing out odours. I’m suddenly aware of it all, reaching out to connect with it together with him, thanks to what she reminds us of when continuing, “But you’ve learnt to love woods and fields, too. To enjoy recognising a bird or a plant...”
She’s not saying it but I suppose she knows: I’ve taught him. I’ve revealed to him the secret of birches and rowans turning – into torches to light up morning escapades to frozen lake shores. We’ve practised elaborate whistles, adapting birds’ language to our furtive signals. His freedom has started here, and now he revels in contact to the earth and what grows from it. Even at the moment the dog in him is restless, eager to leave this talk and his new attire, too, and rush away wild, biting the air with its enticing smells.
“There’s nature in the city, too.” Fiddling with his next, unlit fag, he starts regaining the pride in his voice. “That’s why I like even Kensington, not the house I sold, but Kensington Gardens. An amazing place! Sweet chestnuts, Indian bean trees, a weeping beech where a famous Peter once slept, another rat I guess. And other rodents and fairies, and birds: robins, herons, starlings, all kinds of tits...”
“Even if you care for tits so much, you could as well come to live in Oxford.” I strain to sound playful. “There’s a village named Wolvercote that’s supposed to be a very birdy place.”
It still feels like boasting when I refer like this to Dumbledore’s promise that I could get to one of the Magical Colleges. And it’s still hard to trust that a Hogwarts certificate will change what I was told at the Registry three months ago: I’ve come of age – to be without any status of wizard. I’m too vulnerable. I have to brace myself for whatever he chooses to say.
“You can always Apparate from Oxford to visit us. Or find a London flat and Apparate to your college.” He says it too flippantly, and there’s no way I could respond.
“All right. To London!” James punches him on the shoulder. He’s full of energy and of trust that everything will turn out perfect. “All of us! Too bad we must stay here for another year.”
“But you can move in for this summer, too. You don’t have any sheep flocks or other farm work waiting.”
And I’ve been waiting for him to come and see his wolf as a shepherd. Peter, too, frowns at the reference to his father’s farm.
“And after leaving Hogwarts we can share the place as two bachelors.” Perhaps there is a tension behind his confident wording. He hopes that by accepting this offer James will confirm his full forgiveness, his full, renewed trust. “If you don’t marry immediately.”
“He won’t, if he means to marry me.” Lily grins, then pecks James on the cheek. “I’ll start my career first – and I’ve planned to share with Alice.”
Peter looks reconciled now. “So tell us finally what it’s like, this place you bought!” Now he sounds simply curious, and his round face is smooth, childish, trustful. “And where is it? Not in Kensington?”
“No, not there. But it’s a good Muggle neighbourhood, and an elegant old building, Victorian. There’s a big green square – fields, they call it. And trees right in front of my balcony. Birches.”
Here his speech has slowed down, grown soft, too. He’s been looking at the cigarette between his fingers, and he now offers it to me. But this one is still unlit, and he clicks the Muggle lighter but leaves it for me to put the fag in my mouth.
“Downy birches. The furry kind,” he adds with a gentle, sad smile, stealthily stroking my chin.
The fool’s hand strokes a tree trunk, which glows, not quite white, in the gloom. They’re cold – the hand and the birchbark. This is not the first chill.
“I’ll light the fire.” So pleased, starting to sing in his rough voice, he steps to the hearth and draws out his wand. I join him, so as to warm up my hands. There really are flowers to place in the vase we bought – once, not today.
Today, the other two Animagi and the Beauty, and this Beast, too, have come to his flat just for a visit, for celebration. Eleven months after the first, perhaps worst chill, which forced me to seek shelter here and move in for ten months without his invitation. (When the birches, now golden, burst into leaf again I’ll return for seven more months.) Today the best I could do about a birthday present was to pilfer some of those glorious late-blooming perennials in the park: a few crimson flag lilies, just for a small bunch.
“Not Our House!” James and Peter protest in a duet – also acknowledging that this one used to be our song, sickening to them with its sentimentality, even in our mocking version.
“With two cats in the yard life used to be so hard,” I sing with emotion.
And the two of us holler in disharmony, “We chased them both away with howls and barks.”
No, that time and place are too near. He can’t bear staying longer.
He crosses to what is called Fields. This used to be an affluent area, where a wizard, too, could be proud to live. Let alone a werewolf. And he’s the only one of the trusting friends whom the wizard left to live. Now homeless people gather at this large grassed square, and he’s just one of them.