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Curls of perfumed steam rose off the bathwater in the candlelight, sending an aroma of lavender into the humid room. The mirror was clouded and her freckled skin was pink from the heat of the water, wet tendrils of hair clinging over her neck and shoulders. Occasional drips from the tap or the gentle splash of water as she shifted were the only sounds.
‘Muuuuum!’ came a distant call. Sounded like James.
Her eyes flickered open instinctively and she sighed.
‘Muuuum!’
‘WHAT?’ she bellowed back, her voice reverberating against the tiles.
There was a long pause. ‘Whaaat?’ James called back.
‘I SAID “WHAT?”’ She waited, the ringing silence after her shout almost painful in the tiled bathroom. ‘COME HERE AND TELL ME!’
‘Whaaaat?’
‘COME-’
‘Muuuum!’
‘Oh for fuc-’
There was a slight rush of disturbed water as she rose, seizing a towel irritably as she dripped soapy water onto the bathmat.
‘Muuuu-’
‘I’M COMING!’
She wrapped her hair in a fluffy pink towel, wrapped the blue towel around her a little tighter, and opened the door of the steamy bathroom. The rush of cold air from the rest of the house hit her at once, but she strode quickly out, leaving wet footprints as she went.
She reached her eldest son’s room, rapped quickly on the door and stuck her head in without waiting for his response. She was hit with pounding music, walls plastered with posters, and the distinct smell of a room that had not had the windows opened in several days. ‘What, James?’ she said irritably. ‘I was in the bath.’
‘Do you know where my Quidditch gloves are?’
She closed her eyes for a moment, and released a sharp burst of breath. When she opened her eyes, her son was still sat on the floor surrounded by a halo of mess and a half-filled trunk, a comic in one hand and a handful of broken quills in the other.
She cast a glance around the room, took two long strides, and snatched up a discarded Quidditch robe, streaked with mud and smelling strongly. Beneath it were two leather gloves.
‘Ah, cheers,’ he said lazily.
‘Did they not leap out at you?’ she asked sarcastically as she chucked them over. ‘Honestly, James, if you’d just tidied up a bit-’
‘But you’re so much quicker at finding stuff than me-’
‘I was in the bath!’
‘I didn’t know - you didn’t have to get out.’
She sighed, and stalked out of his room; she was tempted to slam the door behind her to show him how annoying it was, but somehow doubted he would get the message anyway.
She returned to the bathroom, now less steamy than before, and got eagerly back into the warm water. Her mind drifted to wonderful blankness as she soaked, her eyes closing to the hypnotic, rhythmic drip of the tap.
Lily’s panicked, hurried, frantic voice sounded up the stairs. ‘Mum! Mum! Gavin’s stuck on the roof of Dad’s study again-’
‘Oh, bloody hell.’
She rushed out of the bath, bundled her wet hair into a towel and pulled her dressing gown onto her still soapy body. She spent a very cold, very uncomfortable quarter of an hour coaxing a yowling Gavin back through the window of Lily’s room, off the mossy roof of Harry’s study that had, at some point, been added onto the dining room and now stuck out of the house.
‘You should just leave him,’ said James unhelpfully, loitering at the door. ‘Dad does - says if he can get onto it he can get off-’
‘Dad forgets that Gavin can’t see very well!’ argued Lily, who seemed close to tears. ‘He could fall!’
‘Well cats always land on-’
‘Thank you, James, we’ve got it from here,’ said Ginny pointedly, still clicking her fingers at Gavin, who seemed highly distressed. ‘I’m just going to use magic,’ she muttered.
‘Mummy, no!’ shrieked Lily, ‘it really upsets him, he gets all stressed-’
‘He’s stressed as it is, Lils-’
‘Help him!’
Eventually, the elderly cat leapt into sprightly and braver action and returned through the window as Ginny waved a bag of treats at him. As she stomped back to the bathroom, she wondered if Harry’s method, which she had previously called cruel, had something in it after all.
Still it was good to sink back into the bath - she had not been aware of how cold she had been by that open window until she was gasping as she lowered herself into the hot water, the initial slight scald deliciously relaxing. The heat seemed to melt away even her irritation at the cat, and as she lay her head back and closed her eyes, she found herself falling into a happy memory, of James, must have only been a few months past a year, squealing with excitement and pointing every time he saw Gavin. ‘-At!’ he’d shout, and they’d beam and say yes it’s the cat, and his pigeon-toed little toddle as he tried to follow the increasingly irritable tabby around-
A terrible, raw screaming and a great crashing sort of sound interrupted her glorious daydream violently. She jerked with such shock at the sudden noise that water sloshed over the side of the bathtub, and for a moment her heart pounded in fear. She sat up, shivering though the water was still warm, as screams like nails on a blackboard mingled with distorted chainsaws.
‘FASTER THAN A NIMBUS, TERRIFYING DARKNESS-’
‘Al,’ she growled, and she rose out of the bath again, this time reaching for her dressing gown, her wand tucked loosely in the pocket. She suspected this would not be a quick interruption.
If it was loud in the bathroom, it was deafening in the hallway, and she dreaded to think what the noise level was behind her son’s door. She could see the brass doorknob vibrating. She thumped her fist on the door. ‘Al! Albus! ALBUS!’
‘MASTER OF DARK MAGIC, I’M PULLING YOUR WAND-’
There was no chance of him hearing her with the racket that was close to making her ears bleed; she winced as another terrible, throat-tearing scream sounded.
‘TWISTING YOUR SMILE, SMASHING YOUR WALLS-’
‘ALBUS!’ she bellowed, and she rattled the doorknob. This seemed to do it; the door opened slightly, and her face was hit with the roar of the atrocious music. It made her flinch, but as she blinked and adjusted to the barrage of sound she saw her son's surly face at the door.
'Turn that down!' she shouted, though she might have whispered it for all the good it did, she couldn’t even hear it in her own head. He said something back to her, his lips moving soundlessly, his shoulders lifting slightly into a defensive, careless shrug. She huffed, reached for her wand, and pointed it at the gramophone in the corner. The sudden silence almost hurt, ringing in her ears.
‘I was listening to that!’
‘So was everyone else. Bloody hell, Al, you’ll do damage to your ears - you’ll damage the ears of everyone in Devon.’
‘It’s not that bad, you’re just old.’
She ignored the jibe, because she had just looked over her son’s shoulder. James’s room had been an explosion of mess, but he had at least slowly been placing things into the open trunk; Albus still had piles of books and clothes on top of his, his telescope still carefully positioned at the window. ‘You need to pack,’ she reminded him. ‘I want everyone having an early night, we need to be up at the crack of dawn.’
‘Not me, I’m not going,’ he said promptly, with the kind of finality that told Ginny that he had turned his music up impossibly loud just so that he could point this out to her.
‘Al,’ she said wearily.
‘I’m not,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t make me. I could be home schooled instead, or go somewhere else-’
She pushed open the door, and he offered no resistance, letting her step over the threshold and guide him to the bed. There, she sat him down, and he instinctively leaned against her as she sat beside him, his rapid talking betraying his illusion of not caring.
‘-I shouldn’t have to be completely miserable just for the sake of appearances, it’s not fair, I hate everyone there-’
‘Not everyone-’
‘All right, no, not Scorpius, but everyone else is so stupid, Mum, I’m sick of them all staring at me constantly and you’d think by now they’d stop being surprised that I’m not good at Defence and don’t want to be on the Quidditch team-’
‘Al, I know you’re having a tough time, but I think you need-’
‘So I’ve decided I’m not going, I refuse, you can’t make me get on the train.’
She waited for a moment, gathering her thoughts, and then spoke, with the same calming voice she used on Harry sometimes. ‘You’re finding your own way, your own identity, and I think you are getting there, gradually, aren’t you?’ She nodded towards the telescope by the cobwebbed window. ‘No match for the astronomy tower, is it?’
He stared at it for a while. ‘No,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘But-’
‘And I know other students can be annoying - teenagers are really annoying, Al.’
‘Cheers,’ he said sarcastically, and he looked so much like Harry for a moment that she had to bite back a grin.
‘They are! Not you and your brothers and sister, obviously-’
‘They are-’
‘-But it’s just a hard time for everyone, trying to figure out what they want and who they are and how to be. And they can be silly and cruel and thoughtless - I really don’t think it would be any different in another school, Al, another school would still just be full of teenagers. Unless it’s the same person repeatedly?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not anyone in particular, not really.’
‘Well, then. And Scorpius would be so sad without you there - if we homeschooled you, I think you’d both just be lonely and miserable.’ She held him for a few moments, her thumb rubbing over his arm as she gripped him tight, her cheek pressed against his soft, dark hair. She felt him sigh. ‘How’s Scorpius’s mum doing?’ she asked quietly.
‘Still the same, I think.’
‘He probably needs a good friend with him this year,’ she said, pausing slightly.
Albus seemed to be pausing too. ‘Dad-’
‘Don’t worry about him,’ said Ginny swiftly. ‘But Al, I can’t really believe that you want to be homeschooled.’
‘No, not really,’ he admitted.
‘Well then,’ she said, and she kissed him on the head. ‘Pack, please - and we’ll talk more about how to make this year easier for you. I think you do need to put some effort in, though, Al-’
He spluttered indignantly. ‘Effort? I-’
‘Why don’t you join the astronomy club? Dad and I were so thrilled with what Professor Sinistra wrote-’
He pulled away from her and rolled his eyes. ‘Just full of nerdy Ravenclaws-’
‘It’s that attitude, Al, that right there, you need to be more open minded, I just-’ She stopped herself, and held up her hands. ‘I’ll stop. We’ve been through it all before. But you need to pack, Al, because whatever we decide in the long run, you’re down to attend school tomorrow, and we will be going to Kings Cross.’
‘Without me,’ he said.
‘With you,’ she said firmly. ‘I mean it, Al. Just pack, at least. For me. You can’t just skip school because it’s not fun. You’ve got your O.W.Ls next year.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ he muttered.
‘Pack first, then think,’ she told him, and rose. ‘I’m going back to my bath - you know the volume on the gramophone isn’t allowed to go louder than-’
‘Can’t you just put an impenetrable charm on my room for me?’ he called as she walked away.
‘No - if something happened, we wouldn’t know anything about it or be able to get in quickly,’ she said, as she always did when the request was made.
He would pack, she knew. And he would come with them tomorrow, she knew that too. Because actually, when it came to it, she was not the parent he really wanted to argue with about it all.
She returned to the bathroom with her mind whirring with worry. Some part of her was always worrying; it seemed to have been switched on during her pregnancy with James and never truly let go, but Al really had a tendency to bring it to the forefront.
Her bathwater had gone a bit cold, so she drained it a little and topped it up with more warm water, chucking in a few more bubbles as well. Her brow furrowed slightly as she considered her middle child, and the way she swung so endlessly between sympathy and frustration with him.
She closed her eyes as she lay back into the bath, and wondered what the right way was to tell a child that in order to make friends they should probably avoid loudly disparaging everyone else; as his mother, she could see that he was defensive, that he was in pain, that his mere appearance placed him under the same spotlight that Harry had been under. But Harry had had Ron and Hermione, and they had been enough, and, she was sorry to say, a miserable childhood behind him. Even when Hogwarts had been bad for him - and it had been, at times, as she often had to remind him - it had still been better than before.
There was a rapid hammering at the door, and Lily’s shrill voice sounded with piercing rage.
‘MUM! Mu - SHUT UP, JAMES - Mum, James ate all the cheese broomsticks AGAIN and I was saving them for the train and now I’m going to STARVE-’
Ginny could not hear what her son retorted with through the door, could only hear a mumble of words with a scoffing tone, but she certainly heard her daughter’s enraged response.
‘EVERYTHING ON THAT FLIPPING TROLLY ROTS YOUR TEETH!’ There was hammering on the door again. ‘Muuuuuuum! Come and tell him-’
‘I’m a growing boy!’ came James’s distant voice. Ginny sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose.
‘Yeah, growing OUTWARDS-’
‘OK…’ Ginny muttered, rising out of the bath once more. She could hear James’s indignant splutter as she wrapped the towel around her, and opened the door just as Lily was rattling off a list of what, she assumed, was everything James had eaten recently.
‘Stop it, both of you,’ she said sharply.
They briefly fell silent, Lily with her fist still raised to rap her knuckles on the now open door, James leaning awkwardly to see round the top of the stairs, holding onto a bannister to steady himself, rather than simply take a few more steps. The silence did not last; there was an explosion of sound once more.
‘He eats everything, Mum, we can never save anything nice in this house-’
‘Why does she get to lay claim to things, they’re for all of us, I didn’t know she’d reserved them-’
‘He didn’t even ask, just scoffed the lot-’
‘What does she want me to do? Vomit them back up? I’ve said sorry-’
‘I’m going to be SO HUNGRY-’
‘I don’t care, I don’t care,’ Ginny called, raising her hand and closing her eyes once more. ‘Just… James, you have got to stop raiding the pantry every evening, if you’re hungry the fruit bowl is-’
‘-A waste of counter space,’ he muttered, and she threw him a look until he fell sheepishly silent once again.
‘Lily, you need to chill out, it’s not the end of the world. Dad and I will buy you something from M&S on our way through the station-’
‘We won’t leave early enough for that, we never do-’
‘Well let’s really try this year,’ she said patiently, though she knew full well her daughter was probably right. ‘Can I get back to my bath?’
Lily blinked, as though it had not occurred to her, despite knocking on the bathroom door, that her mother might be in the middle of bathing. ‘Oh… yeah, sorry.’
Ginny raised her eyebrows, gave a nod, and returned back into the warmth of the bathroom.
She washed her hair and added oils, she held her leg, pink from the hot water, up to rest her heel on the cold tap while the enchanted razor did it’s work, she made vague plans for the rest of the evening, and much firmer ones for the chaos that was likely tomorrow morning. After they dropped the kids off, she decided, she’d persuade Harry to take a little bit more time off work and go and get a coffee with him. Just the two of them. At one of those cosy little cafes that took coffee much too seriously. They already had their nice dinner planned for the evening and she was sure that would quickly move into passion, but she liked the thought of them just sitting and having a little chat - Harry was always so sweetly emotional after the kids were gone - over some pastries and coffee.
Though, she reminded herself, she might well need that time and those pastries to calm him down if Al kicked up a fuss.
There was a knock at the door. ‘Mum?’ came a cautious voice.
‘Is anyone bleeding, James?’ she asked, without opening her eyes.
‘No…’
‘Crying?’
‘No…’
‘Is it something you could maybe deal with on your own?’
There was a very long pause. ‘Yeah,’ he said eventually.
‘All right then,’ she said, with finality, and at last there was silence again.
***
When she finally got to leave the bath on her own terms, she checked in on the children to find that Lily was fully packed, James claimed to be done (though she pointed out several crucial items still lying in plain view), and Albus had done nothing more than open the lid of his trunk before returning to lounging on his bed listening to death metal.
‘Pack,’ she ordered.
‘I’m not going!’ he insisted, though he dragged himself up and started grumpily throwing his socks into the trunk.
She left him to it, and headed downstairs to prepare her notes and research ahead of the match on Tuesday, a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit in hand. Every now and then she would glance at the clock, for Harry was late home and he had dinner waiting for him in the aga, but as his clock hand was still reassuringly at ‘work’ rather than ‘hospital’ or ‘mortal peril’ she wasn’t particularly worried.
At last, as the wireless played the last few moments of The Bowmans, Harry entered, mumbling his hello. He was wincing slightly as he dumped his heavy looking messenger bag on the armchair, a blue bruise over one red-looking eye. ‘What happened to you?’ she exclaimed.
‘Oh, a suspect kicked off when we charged him, the usual - have we got any bruise balm?’
‘Shouldn’t you go to St Mun-’
‘Nah, Healer Gower doesn’t work Sundays and I don’t want to deal with that other one that covers him - what’s his name, the young one-’
‘Healer Jupp?’
‘That’s the one - too enthusiastic. Exhausting.’
She hummed in understanding, and summoned the potion kit from the kitchen. ‘I think it’s in there,’ she said, as Harry caught it. ‘You should still get it checked though, I don’t like how red it is on your eyeball.’
‘Yeah, I’ll swing by the hospital after we’ve dropped the kids off tomorrow if it’s still bad,’ he said, sitting heavily beside her, removing his glasses, and unscrewing the tin lid of the bruise balm. ‘How are they, are they all packed?’
‘Al’s on strike, says he’s not going.’
Harry’s lazy, casual demeanour changed at once. ‘He’s going,’ he said irritably, his voice slightly raised. ‘He knows he’s going, I don’t know why he’s pissing about making things harder-’
‘If he’s still not packed, I’ll charm it all tomorrow morning before we leave,’ she said soothingly.
‘There’s still going to be a massive argument though, isn’t there?’
‘Probably,’ she said, and as he seemed to have forgotten in his annoyance, she reached into the tin, scooped up some of the pale yellow balm on her fingers, and started gently applying it to his black eye. ‘Try to stay above it, though, Harry, he’s jus-’
‘I know, I know,’ he said carelessly, his eyes closing at her touch. He gave a great, heavy sigh and slouched back, his head resting against the back of the sofa as she applied the balm. ‘Sorry.’
‘Just… patience,’ she reminded him.
‘Yeah.’
They were silent for a few moments, just the reassuring swing of the pendulum of the clock, the distant thud of music from James’s room, the purr of the cat from the other sofa. Beneath her fingers, Harry’s skin was healing, the blue and purple yellowing and then vanishing beneath the balm.
‘You smell nice,’ he murmured gently, his eyes still closed.
She smiled at him. ‘I had a nice long bath.’
‘Good. You deserve it.’
‘It was interrupted about five times.’
Now he grinned, slow, resigned amusement crossing his face. ‘Of course it was. Ah well - this time tomorrow all will be quiet and well.’
‘I know, won’t it be dull? What will I complain about?’
‘Me?’ he suggested.
‘I was thinking Gavin,’ she said.
His eyes flickered open and he looked over at the cat on the other sofa, sitting like a loaf of bread with his paws tucked in and his eyes thin, grumpy looking yellow slits. ‘What’s poor Gavin done?’ he asked.
‘Oh, he’s just always getting under my feet - and I’m pretty sure he talks about me behind my back.’
Harry hissed. ‘He can be pretty judgy.’
‘Exactly - a bit rich from someone who leaves dead rodents on the bed.’
‘Those are gifts and you should be grateful.’
‘Well I’m not.’
Harry’s shoulders were trembling a little with his silent laughter; the white of his eye was still red but the green of them shone brightly with mirth.
'He's a good cat, leave him alone.'
'One of the bath interruptions was because he got stuck up on the roof again-’
‘Just leave him there, he figures it out eventually-’
‘Yes, but Lily worries.’
‘Of course she does,’ he said fondly. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t get your uninterrupted bath,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow you can have one.’
‘Won’t be the same,’ she said. She finished applying the balm and set the tin on the coffee table, and then squeezed his hand. ‘Will you knock on the door every five minutes with problems for me to fix for me?’
‘Of course I will,’ he promised. ‘Anything you want.’