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“I will tell you a story now,” Sirius says one winter night.
“Bring it on,” says Remus who is lying on the carpet, trying to toss cards into a dusty old wizard’s hat. He is, however, terribly drunk, as is Sirius, and his aim is off by a mile, so two thirds of the pack is already littering the floor while the hat remains empty. Remus bites his tongue, closes one eye, takes a shot and misses.
“This story,” says Sirius, “is not about heroic feats.”
Remus frowns. “What? Heroic feats, you say?”
“Not about heroic feats,” Sirius corrects, shaking his finger. He is slumped in a chair with his feet resting in the small of Remus’s back. “This story… Oh, bugger it! It’s about when I was little.”
“Ah,” says Remus. He notices that the majority of cards end up to the left of the hat and decides to aim deliberately to the right in the hope of hitting his target.
The first time he ran away from home, Sirius was seven and felt like a grown man. It was October; the streets of London were wet with rain, but he quite liked them, walking by himself and completely free to stop and stare at the wondrous windows of Muggle shops if the fancy stroke him. He walked through every puddle and got his poncy trousers dirty to the knee, and he felt liberated, though of course he did not know the word back then.
He had a plan: to get to Liverpool and seek employment on a ship, lying about his age. He spent a couple of evenings studying his scrawny frame in the mirror and decided he could pass for a teenager if he just spoke in a deeper voice maybe. And as far as sailing skills went, he stole Bellatrix’s wand and was certain that he could easily trick the Muggles now. From Liverpool, he was planning to sail down to Africa and start a new life there. Sirius was an impressionable child.
Sirius says he always wanted to take the tube. Being a cunning little bugger, he trailed behind a respectable-looking lady to avoid being noticed by the police, and boarded the first train heading north. He was so excited he thought his tiny heart was going to leap out of his chest as he sat there among huge strangers in Muggle clothes. He still remembers that mad heartbeat thundering through his entire person.
When he felt that he went far enough, he got off the train and went to look around. He found himself in an unfamiliar neighborhood, on an empty street where half the streetlamps did not work, and a pub to the right looked definitely like a watering hole for sailors. It was called The Red Cockroach, which sounded promising, so Sirius went in.
At that point, Remus starts laughing like a maniac, and Sirius falls into indignant silence. “With your permission, good sir, I shall continue,” he says.
“You daft bugger!”
“Do tell me what you find so amusing.”
Remus hiccups and wipes off tears; his cards lie forgotten. “You took the tube to some shabby neighborhood and got into a pub called The Red Cockroach. Do carry on, please; I am dying to know how this story ends.”
“Well, if you shut the fuck up for a second, I’ll be able to finish,” says Sirius.
Right then. Wee Sirius went into the pub called The Red Cockroach, which turned out to be crowded with Muggles. Some were big and bearded men who looked like sailors; others were thin and bespectacled men with greasy hair; yet others were hairy, saggy-breasted lesbians, though back then Sirius did not know much about either breasts or lesbians. And all those enigmatic characters appeared to be in mourning for somebody as they all wore at least something black, patted each other on the backs a lot and wept quietly in their beer.
“You are full of shit, right?” says Remus. “There weren’t really any saggy-breasted, hairy lesbians.”
“Oh, shush, ye of little faith! When you tell me stories from your childhood, I don’t question whether you had three chickens or two, and whether one of them could have been a rooster, or if they were perhaps lesbian chickens.”
“They were chickens, for heaven’s sake!”
“So what? Does that mean they could not have been lesbians?”
Remus pauses, twiddling with the Queen of Hearts. She flutters her eyelashes at him and pouts when he does not notice. “I don’t know,” he says unsurely. “Could they have been?”
“Of course! Now let me finish the story.”
“Hm,” says Remus. “That’s disturbing. Carry on.”
Well, then, with your permission… When little Sirius Black stepped into the pub, all conversations stopped and all heads turned toward him. Sirius was not scared in the least and he stepped forward, unhesitant.
A pint please, he requested boldly, speaking in a deeper voice. Perhaps he could pass for a midget, he thought, since adult Muggles were somewhat larger up close than he remembered.
The barman squinted at him suspiciously and asked where his parents were.
At home, naturally, Sirius replied. But don’t you worry about that. Now how about that pint?
The barman asked whether his parents knew he was here.
“He was like you, Moony,” Sirius adds. “He just had to question everything.”
“Well…” says Remus.
“Yes, well, shut up. I’m telling the story.”
The barman wanted to call the police, but as he was the only sober person in the pub, he was in the minority. Sirius was seated beside a bear-like Muggle who was obviously the leader and given a pint so large he could barely lift it. The foam looked intriguing, so he took a sip and promptly spit everything out. The Muggles roared with laughter.
This is piss, said Sirius, trying to save the situation. Do you have any real beer here?
That amused the Muggles even further. The leader asked him what his name was; Sirius felt that he needed to keep his true identity secret and said that his name was Pollux. But they heard ‘Bollocks’ and found that rather funny as well.
Well, young Bollocks, said the bear-like leader. Are you a socialist? Because this is a private socialists’ pub, and no politically illiterate individuals are welcome.
Sirius replied that he most certainly was a socialist, and did any of them by chance know of a ship departing for Africa in the nearest future? They did not, but they bought him his first pint of Coca-Cola and said that he must drink it, as a true socialist, in memory of their fallen comrade.
“Ah,” says Remus, “the suspense is building. No doubt, the comrade was killed by vicious capitalists. Pray continue! This is fascinating.”
As a matter of fact, the comrade was killed by vicious capitalists, and don’t make any jokes about that either. They were saying their farewells to someone named Comandante Che Guevara, whom they all apparently were very fond of. So Sirius, being a respectful boy, drank his Coca-Cola while the leader – whose name was Bernie – explained socialism to him. Sirius liked his drink and liked Bernie, the first adult he was permitted to call by his name, and as an extension of those feelings he liked socialism as well. He imagined it to be a far-away country full of palms and tropical birds where there are no purebloods and no one has to be nice to their horrid aunts at Christmas parties, because everyone is equal.
“And that, dear Remus, is where my interest in politics stems from,” he concludes.
Remus rolls on his back, shaking off Sirius’s feet, and addresses the ceiling, which still bears golden stars from Christmas. “San Ernesto!” he prays. “Make this one over here shut up!”
“Oi! If you don’t like the story, that’s your problem. I’m going to criticize the one you tell me next.”
Remus throws the remaining cards at him; Sirius jerks backwards a little too hard and topples over along with his chair.