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“Mum?”
The front room was empty as they stepped inside the house, the only faint sound coming from behind the kitchen door, a muffled scraping of bowls and clanging of spoons.
Ginny continued through to the kitchen, swinging the door wide for Harry to follow behind her.
“Oh, hello dears,” her mum said, putting the spatula down. She wiped her hands on her paisley apron before making her way over, pulling them each into a hug. Behind her, the dishes carried on cooking without interruption, as a spoon continued to idly stir a simmering pot and a brush flicked its way over a tray of pastries, evenly coating each crescent with an egg wash.
The Burrow was oddly still otherwise, almost unnaturally so. The silence buzzed with an expectant hum, that almost eerie quiet that comes before an impending swarm of bodies and voices and activity.
“Where is everyone? Where’s Dad?
“You two are the first ones here,” her mum said, picking the spatula back up and resuming her task of spreading mint-coloured icing over a large square cake. “Your dad’s out the back. In his shed, of course.” She rolled her eyes, but the affectionate turn of her lips belied any hint of annoyance.
Ginny turned towards the back door, swiping her finger through the icing to taste it on her way past. Her mum ignored her, well accustomed to such things by now.
She didn’t bother knocking on the door of the shed - no one ever did. It took her dad a few moments to realise they were there. He was sitting on the low stool by the bench, hunched over a black handheld gadget. Around him, appliances and contraptions lay idle, save for the gentle flick of an alarm clock as it ticked over to a new minute.
“Hi Dad.”
“Oh!” he said, spinning around and jumping up off his stool. “Ginny! Harry! Come look.” He waved them over towards the back of the shed.
Ginny gave him a quick squeeze once she reached him. “Happy birthday.”
“Thanks sweetheart.” He smiled at her briefly and quickly returned the hug before hurriedly ushering her again to the rear of the shed.
There in the centre of the back wall was a large black box, its dark glass front reflecting a distorted version of themselves and the cluttered space around them.
“Ron and Hermione gave it to me yesterday, a bit of an early present. It was all Hermione’s doing of course, she figured it out.” He spoke rapidly, a childish glee lighting up his face.
“Look!” he said, waving the black gadget she had seen him tinkering with when she walked in. He pointed it towards the screen and pressed a button. The screen instantly lit up and a second later red and golden beams were revolving and zooming out to reveal a globe, while a dramatic overture filled the shed. He looked over at both her and Harry, his eyes searching for their reactions as his grin grew impossibly wider.
“Merlin, Dad. This is incredible!”
“Safe to say Hermione wins best present,” Harry said, impressed.
“They even gave me a whole box of these disc things,” her dad said, pointing to a small wooden crate with what looked like a couple dozen little thin plastic cases neatly lined up inside.
“DVDs,” Harry said helpfully.
Her dad nodded giddily. “They said we can’t get normal tellovision here, the magic interferes too much with the beam, something like that. Hermione’s still working on it,” he said. “But we have these disc things - DVDs - for now, and there’s even a little machine that sucks the disc in, and then you can watch it on the tellovision.”
The image on the TV had continued to play out while he was talking, eventually stopping on a still image of two men laughing.
“So what have you got?” Ginny asked, making her way over to browse the contents of the crate.
“Plenty. Hermione and Ron picked out-”
“Arthur!” Her mum’s shrill voice sounded from outside the shed door. She refused to step foot inside Dad’s shed. ‘Sometimes I figure I’m better off not knowing what’s in there,’ her mum had told her once.
“I need a little help getting things all set up. Would you mind, Arthur?”
Her dad smiled at her apologetically. “Best I go and help your mum. Help yourselves,” he said, gesturing to the selection of disc cases. “You know how to work it, Harry?”
“I should be able to figure it out.”
“Wonderful.” her dad grinned at them one more time before slipping out of the shed.
“What’s he got there?” Harry asked.
Ginny turned back to the crate and started riffling through it, picking out cases and looking at them quizzically before returning them to their spot and continuing on.
“Vicar of Dibley, Titanic...” Ginny read out, her back to Harry. “Something called ER, French and Saunders, Home Improvement - Merlin, this isn’t some show about how to build a house or something, is it? ’Cause Dad will do it, you know, and Mum’ll go spare-”
“No, it’s just a funny show. I reckon your Dad will like that one.”
“Oh, okay,” she said, already moving on to the next one. “Ooooh!” She spun around to face him, grinning widely as she held up a case for him to see.
“Really?” He raised an eyebrow. “They gave your dad that ?”
“Are you kidding? A Muggle show about a young witch? Dad will lose his mind over it!” She was surprised he wasn’t already watching it when they got there.
“Yeah, alright. I see what you mean.”
Ginny didn’t turn back to the crate this time. Instead, she stood there patiently, her smile fixed at him.
“We’re watching this one, aren’t we?”
She nodded unapologetically.
“Fine,” he sighed. He pushed off from the bench and took the disc from her as he rolled his eyes, any hint of ridicule negated by the amused smirk he failed to hide.
“The remote?” he called over his shoulder.
“The… what?”
“Oh, sorry,” he looked around, quickly spotting the black plastic stick on the stool and holding it up to her. “This thing.” He turned back to the smaller black machine, which was now slowly spitting out a shiny disc.
Ginny settled herself into the weathered tan recliner chair that her dad had repositioned to face the screen. She watched as Harry pushed the disc into the machine and scrutinised several of the buttons on the remote. Just a few moments later, the screen came back to life, an image of a young blonde girl appearing on the screen alongside a list of sorts.
The black stick thingy still in his hand (she’d already forgotten what he had called it), Harry walked over to the recliner and sank into it, lifting Ginny’s legs and placing them back down to rest across his lap.
It wasn’t her first time seeing a television, of course. In the years since the war ended, she had increasingly ventured out into the Muggle world, and it was impossible to do so without being exposed to the large screens that Muggles seemed fixated on. The television had also been on a couple of times when she went to Hermione’s parents’ house, either the Muggle news or some kind of game show, Hermione had called it. And they had been to Muggle pubs that showed sports games on big screens fixed to the wall, never with any sound. But this, sitting down and watching a television show from beginning to end, was different. Familiar, in a way. But new.
She sank a little deeper into the chair and let her head fall back against Harry’s shoulder. He leaned into her a little more, his arms draped casually over her legs. Content, she returned her attention to the black whirring screen where the blonde girl was hovering, asleep, over her bed.
‘Her sixteenth birthday started five minutes ago ,’ came an unseen woman’s voice. ‘Oh look, Hilda, she’s levitating, right on schedule.’
‘Let’s wake her up and tell her she’s a witch,’ another woman (presumably Hilda) said.
“Sixteen!” Ginny said in disbelief. “How can she not know she’s a witch until she’s sixteen?”
Harry gave a short laugh. “It’s just a show, Ginny. If you want to watch it, you’re just gonna have to ignore these things.”
She huffed a little and returned her attention to the screen, trying to lose herself in the story. It didn’t take long. There was something captivating about the absurdness of it all, and the teenage struggles that seemed to transcend worlds.
When the shed door opened only a few minutes later, she ignored the interruption, but Harry turned around, looking back towards the door.
“Oh, hey.”
“Look at you two, spending Dad’s birthday holed up in the shed like a couple of unsociable gits,” Ron said.
“Well no one else was here yet, were they?” Ginny called back, distracted, gaze still fixed ahead.
“What are you two watch-” Hermione began to ask before she cut herself off. “Oh, I should have guessed.” Ginny didn’t have to look at her to know that she was smiling in that slight smuggish way that she often did.
“Did you used to watch this?”
“Not really,” Hermione said, leaning against the bench which Ron was now perched on top of. “I was already at Hogwarts when it began. But Mum and Dad were quite excited when it was first on TV, so I watched a couple of episodes with them. But I haven’t watched it since.”
“The talking cat freaked her out,” Ron said helpfully.
Harry raised an eyebrow. “The talking cat freaked you out?”
“Yes. Animals shouldn’t talk, Harry!”
“So after all the shit that you’ve seen and done, it’s a talking feline that scares you?”
Ron laughed and Hermione lightly slapped his chest with the back of her hand.
“It was a few years ago, to be fair,” she said pointedly. “But yes, talking animals give me the creeps. Mum read me a book about a young witch when I was little, and there was a talking cat in the story. It gave me nightmares.”
“Were you scared of normal cats?” Ginny asked, attention completely on Hermione now as the show continued unnoticed in the background.
“Of course not. But I kept thinking about it, that first week after I got my Hogwarts letter. I asked Professor McGonagal about it the night of the feast, actually. I asked her if there really were talking cats.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. She just laughed.”
“She would,” Ginny said, while Harry and Ron snorted.
“What about you, Harry?”
“What? Was I scared of talking cats?”
“No,” Hermione huffed. “I mean, have you seen Sabrina before?”
Ginny shifted in the chair to look up at Harry, curious.
“Sure, Hermione. My aunt gathered us all around the TV together to watch a show about a young witch living among Muggles. ‘Wholesome entertainment’, I believe she called it.”
“Ok,” Hermione muttered, looking just a little sheepish. “I get the point.”
They eventually fell silent and continued to watch the screen, where the girl, Sabrina, was fumbling her way through a class in which they were supposed to be cutting up a dead frog. Ginny had at times wondered what Muggle students learnt at school, but this wasn’t exactly what she had imagined.
“If it isn’t the woman of the hour,” she heard George call out in greeting as the door of the shed slammed shut behind him. “You set an impossible standard you know, Hermione. I may as well just concede defeat and not bother with presents for Dad from now on.”
“You never do anyway,” Ron said.
George simply shrugged in agreeance and nudged Ginny’s elbow off the arm of the couch, perching himself on the only part of the couch that was now free.
The five of them sat there, watching curiously. The show held hints of the familiar, but Ginny found there was little she could relate to in the way the story exaggerated what she guessed was the novelties of magic. She’d never had to hide her magic, never had to come to terms with the reality of a new world. But navigating the awkwardness of school and teenagehood, and desperately guarding secrets from her peers - these were all things she knew too well.
“How come they have no wands? Seems like a bit of an oversight,” George said.
“Right?” Ginny interrupted. “It’s all bonkers George, they have no idea.”
“How would they?” Harry asked.
George ignored him, turning to Ginny instead. “So why are you watching it then?”
“Why are you?”
He paused for a moment. “Fuck, you’re right.” He stood up and turned away. “I’m done.”
They came and went over the next hour, a rotating door of brothers and girlfriends and her dad. But still Ginny and Harry sat there, content, squished together in the chair. Harry showed characteristic patience with her and her rhythm of questions and comments - “Is that what they really learn at school? What IS the deal with that cat? What the hell are those stupid things those dancer girls are throwing around?"
They tuned in and out of the show as it carried on playing, sometimes watching in silence with whoever was in the shed at any given minute, or all laughing as they picked apart the many, many holes in the show’s take on magic.
Bill was the last of her brothers to stop by the shed. Although the nearly empty bottle in his hand suggested he’d arrived at the Burrow some time ago.
“You two going to come out and see everyone?” he asked.
“Don’t need to,” Ginny said. “They’ve all been coming in here to see me.”
“You know they’re not actually coming to see you, right? That thing,” he tilted his head towards the screen, “is the real drawcard.”\
“Lies,” Ginny whispered. “It’s all lies.”
Harry sniggered. Bill shook his head before asking her about the training camp she was heading to in a couple days’ time, successfully drawing her attention away from the screen.
Eventually, the last of their companions left and it was just the two of them, still curled together, still watching.
“It’s funny,” Harry said, his gaze still fixed on the screen.
“What is? This show?”
“No, the show’s kinda lame. I mean, it’s funny sitting here with you now, watching TV like this… I used to watch TV when I was a kid, when the Dursleys had it on. But I never watched it with anyone, if you get what I mean. Dudley would have mates over and they’d watch it together, but it’s obviously not something I ever did. It’s funny that it’s only now, now that I’m a wizard…” He trailed off, but he didn’t need to finish the sentence for Ginny to know what he meant. It’s only now that he’s a wizard that he’s able to do something so typically Muggle.
But Ginny didn’t think it was funny at all.
“Dudley never got to watch television with me though,” she said, wrapping her arms around him a little tighter, burying her head into his chest a little deeper. “So I’d say you got the better deal after all.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said, placing a kiss on the top of her head. “I did.”
And on the screen the story continued. A world somewhat like hers, with witches and wizards, but with a whole lot less magic.