Archive of Our Own ^beta

Żywy, zostanę dla mej ojczyzny umarły,

I myśl legnie zamknięta w duszy mojej cieniu,

Jako dyjament w brudnym zawarty kamieniu.

Dziady, Adam Mickiewicz

Living, I shall be dead to these dear lands,

And all I think shall lie within my soul,

A diamond locked within its shell of coal.

Forefathers' Eve, Adam Mickiewczicz, transl. Dorothea Prall Radin and George Rapall Noyes

The memory of her is composed of shiny fragments, like a vandalized mosaic, or like something brittle that’s been dropped on the floor.

The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood

1.

‘The charges against the accused are as follows,’ Judge Selwyn reads out. ‘That she did knowingly, deliberately and in full awareness of the illegality of her actions read an Unspeakably Confidential File she had no clearance to read, on the fourth of April at twenty-seven minutes past eleven, which constitutes an offence under Section 7 of the Ministry of Magic’s Working Code. That she did knowingly, deliberately and in full awareness of the illegality of her actions disclose the content of the aforementioned file to unauthorized persons on the following day at forty minutes past midnight, which constitutes an offence under Paragraph A of the Decree Against Disclosure of Classified Information.

‘You are Audrey Pluta of 373-375 Mare Street, Hackney, London?’

2.

Chloroform.

3.

Her first (and last) winter in a Hackney attic-room Audrey sleeps through with her feet cold. The bedclothes slip up, glue to her thighs and stomach, leaving ankles and heels bare for the bites of January wind. She dreams of it: she is on a boat with her mother and a laminated paper-card. The moon is wide. The waves are high. They break and spill into the boat, carrying sea-weed, jellyfish, crabs, dead girls, dead men. Clean up, her mother says. Clean up. Audrey kneels, her knees and elbows in the sticky bloody mass. She throws pulps of it out, into the sea, into the river, into the dark, but crumbs stay under her nails, in the hollows between her fingers, in the life-lines of her palms. Her throat is tight and her tongue is twisted: she opens her hands before her mother’s eyes, unable to say a word. Clean up, her mother says. Clean up. The boat is rocking – there is no moon – hard rain hits Audrey’s cheeks. The sea is freezing and it makes her fingers white and blue. A dark shape – a holy man, a dementor – interlaces his fingers with hers and pulls her down, down, down.

She wakes up fighting for breath.

4.

In the wake of the Battle of Hogwarts, there are many subtle alternations in the Ministry of Magic’s body of employees. Senior Undersecretary leaves for the premature retirement in the Azkaban. So does the Minister himself. So does a significant number of Deputy Heads. So does, at last, the Chief Archiver, Geoffrey Winchester, whose manner of running the archives has revealed itself to be less than satisfying. There are rumours of files removed, fabricated, disclosed and witheld, the treatment of each depending on Malfoy-and-Merlin-knows-who-else’s fancy.

The post is taken by Edna Spektor, a former Senior Archiver and a creature of posture so mean and fame so ill that they prompt a suspiscion of her being, in fact, a half-goblin. Ms Spektor’s (unexpectantly short) reign lasts three years. She begins with the Senior Archivers, arguing they are relicts of the ancien regime, unfit for the demanding post-war reality. Senior Archivers leave and the odds of anyone taking over Ms Spektor’s place as the Chief Archiver are gone. Then, Ms Spektor turns her attention to the youths. They are promoted to the newly-vacant posts and encouraged vigorously to pursuit their academic careers in order to become Masters and Doctors of their subjects and bring glory to the Archives, for what Ms Spektor wishes quietly.

The concept is met with varying attitudes. A few follow Ms Spektor’s suggestion and become a rare presence at the Archives, always busy with a such-and-such scroll, sporting the air of scholars on whose mind are matters of the higher realms. The others, who have chosen the Archives precisely not to do anything particularly exhausting, politely or less politely ignore whatever Ms Spektor says.

One, an abominably lazy individual, Norah Li of Documents of Public Life – which she calls dopples when she has no energy to pronounce all the syllables what is always  – states she will consider the academia if Ms Spektor finds her an assistant. The assistant is found and Ms Li takes to practing a look of a worn-out intellectual in her mirror.

Then, there is a reaction of Nathaniel King. Mr King, a most specific employee, is a ghost. He, as a cautionary tale told each aspiring Ravenclaw goes, has lost his youth and eventually life writing an ever-unfinished doctorate. To be reminded of it, an object loathsome to Mr King’s mind, is perceived by him at first, as a joke in a bad taste and later, as a threat. He considers his collegues, fired for what appears only a row of numbers on the birth certificate. How unjust!, Mr King laments to all who are willing to lend him a sympathetic ear.

Those are not many. A favourite of Mr King’s is Ms Li’s new assistant, a newly-hired milky-faced and fresh out of Hogwarts, Audrey Pluta. Interested in all gossip or talk remotely resembling it, she nods and gasps, as Mr King dwells on the nuances of Ms Spektor’s most offesnsive actions.

Ms Spektor, self-satisfied and unaware, goes on to installing doors to her private office – previously with an open view on the Archives, now guarded by a heavy pair, impossible to move without breaking  sweat. She deems it a gentle signal of her status – for status she has, has she not?

Then, she takes on decorations. She buys paintings in the auctions, sculptures, fanciful perpetum mobiles, a minuscule set of organs. Thus occupied, she doesn’t take a mark of a certain effect her decisions regarding the staff of the Archives have. With all Senior Archivers gone and all competent or deterimined enough employees buried under parchment, she is left with only one being capable of decoding the signatures, and sorting the files coming into the Archives into those to be put on the shelves and those to be forwarded downstairs, to the Unspeakbles’ Archive.

The said being is, unfortunately, Nathaniel King. As Ms Spektor soon discovers, it is a dangerous thing to have a man, and a ghost to add, on such post, antagonizing her, the Chief Archiver, and all she represents. The pervasive sense of injustice being done unto him renders Mr King unpredictable. All his life and afterlife, Mr King has been a peaceful, if somewhat absent-minded soul and desire for vengeance tasted in such a mature age, is fatal. When on one April day a file comes from one of the very top floors, Mr King makes an error in the sorting.

Instead of contacting the Unspeakables, he puts the file in Ms Pluta’s desk, devising it to be a pleasant surprise to her, since she demonstrates such a profound and abiding passion for details of lives others than hers.

5.

Audrey has an interview with Ministry’s Chief of Staff in January. She is young and has no experience, the Chief of Staff – a balding man with three chins and dead eyes – states in a tone fit best for a funeral parlor. As he speaks, his fingers waver restlessly, twirling a wedding ring on the table. Afraid to fall asleep to a montone lull of the Chief’s words, all three or more syllables long, Audrey imagines him in a church with his bride. The priest, the lilies, the ribbons and laces, coloured by the sunlight dripping from the stained glass windows.

‘Audrey,’ the Chief of Staff stops with the twirling. ‘Translates to virtuous, doesn’t it?’ It doesn’t. Meaning Audrey has found in the Dictionary of Names was noble. ‘After a famous muggle actress?’

‘Mum is a fan.’

‘Unlike the father.’

‘No, dad is – well, he is dead.’

‘Oh, I am most profoundly –‘

‘It’s fine. It’s fine’

Audrey leaves sure to get the acceptance letter. The Chieff appeared to be a man who would hire a girl because of a faux pas he had made interviewing her. What a dweeb. She would get the job, anyway. A voice in her head, the sharp voice of her mother, asks why she lied – and twice – if she was so certain. One was a lie out of courtesy. Simply what the English do. Another was a lie out of necessity. Audrey forces herself to accept such explanation and before she steps into the Atrium, she forgets. She dreams of her job: the journals of statesmen and stateswomen at her hand, full of rich detail and incident.

6.

As an assistant to Norah Li, Audrey has no access to whatever shameful secrets were written in journals and letters the Archives hold. Nathaniel King, whose favourite she makes an effort to be, sometimes lets her glance at such-and-such file, but it isn’t enough to satisfy her appetite. She does have a plan: if only Li gets Spektor’s permission, Audrey will do the dirty work and let Li claim the praise. Li agrees, hoping it will deter Spektor’s attention from the matter of a non-existent doctorate of hers. When Spektor hears of daring innovation changing the face of dopples’ collection, her immediate answer is yes and why haven’t they done it already?

Audrey sets out with her wand and a convoluted spell she found in an out-dated paper on Grindewald-era spies. It activates a mechanism in containers on which it is casted: all of its contents are regularly transported to a given place at a given hour. Audrey casts it at ministerial dustbins, granting herself a dose of official and semi-official papers for five evenings in the week. The dustbins, a new presence and Granger’s concept, have replaced inflaming charms the Ministry’s employees used to deal with their litter before. It has taken a few minor and one major fire for the reform to be accepted, but now all paper-planes read and answered land in the dustbins, what leads them directly onto Audrey’s desk.

Together come Styrofoam packages with left-overs of spinach lasagne, but knowledge must have its price. The papers, unfortunately, are less scandalous than she thought. There are several animations of cats engaged in what is perceived as entertaining activities, some caricatures, numerous death threats.

Audrey’s most interesting finding to date is an exchange of notes between Percy Weasley and a head of Public Relations Office: the reforms reducing pureblood privilege he is introducing with Granger and Minister Shacklebolt are unpopular among the public. Back in 1998, they fired the employees who co-operated with You-Know-Who’s regime. It is a large and unappeased group who was easily convinced by purebloods – luckier in appearances, connections and money, and unfireable, as they would like to remain – that the three are the Ministry’s plague and to be rid of. Following the popular demand, the Daily Prophet drags Shacklebolt, Granger and Weasley in the mud, as it does any reforms they proposed. You know how the unemployed are, Sir, writes PR office. Audrey nods (she doesn’t know: not with a job at eighteen), and turns to the next paper-planes. Look out Sir, because they watch your every step. (Forgive honesty) you have neither Minister Shacklebolt’s power, nor Granger’s history – you’re the vulnerable one.

How exciting.

7.

A rumour goes Narcissa Malfoy and Rita Skeeter have been on speaking terms at Hogwarts. It’s hard to tell who was using whom. Now, you can imagine a meeting after years: furnished with enough sentimentalities to make a proposition of patronage over Rita’s newest biography pass easily.

8.

The file is on her desk, buried in mélange of unfolded paper planes, greased serviettes and pieces of parchment of varying scope: all what ministerial dust-bins contain. Audrey, as is her habit, with one swift movement of her wand, lifts the pile and directs it into her just-opened bag, indiscriminate and unaware (her witness will build the defense on the fact).

It’s late and she is tired, yawning and cursing under her breath, because she knows she will have to go through the pile, now heavy on her arm, before she comes to the Archives tomorrow. She would have done it here, if she hadn’t fallen asleep – if she hadn’t slept badly – if she had moved out of Hackney – if she hadn’t moved there at all. There are bells ringing under her skull, as if it was the hour of the Resurrection.

She has run out of pain-killers a week ago and she can’t buy new ones. They’re a brand of product which is only slightly too expensive to be bought when needed, what makes it even more – she doesn’t know the word, not at such hour and in such state. Humiliating would do. Infuriating, if she cared for dignity.

She tries to transfer her mood onto external conditions: it is the Archives, she reasons. The Archives at midnight (it wasn’t midnight), the rustle of thousands and thousands of pages, too similar to an old man’s whisper. As if at night, when borders are blurring in the liquid moonlight, the dead had voices. As if the past could spill into present and flood them all.

An image comes to Audrey’s mind, an afterimage, weathered and unclear. A dark shape floating in the water. Her, drowning. A familiar shiver runs down her spine and she begins to run: straight, turn to left, to the elevators, up, up, up, finally in the Atrium. Inhale and exhale. Rationalize: you are tired and vulnerable to what is but a half-remembered nightmare. Get your shit together. You’re bloody eighteen. The emerald flames in the fireplace dry her cheeks.

Audrey gets out at the Leaky Cauldron, because her own flat isn’t connected to the Floo. There is no fireplace: only a rusty radiator, leaking too often to make a joke out of it. She nods her head at the Old Tom – when is he going to die already, she wonders and scolds herself immediately – and at Abbott, whose face is rounder and redder with each month spent behind the bar. Audrey disapparates, probably startling a dozen of clients sitting at the nearest tables.

It’s a war thing: nerves following any loud noises. But Audrey isn’t there to feel guilty – she is in her Hackney flat, her Hackney attic-room. How she adored it when she got the keys. No money to pay for it, then. No job. She spent the first months either avoiding or confounding the landlord, and once, she erased his memory. Well, she had to – he has threatened her with the police.

But she loved her attic-room, with pigeons flying in and out as they pleased, with creaking floor, with the pipes singing, chanting Gregorian hymns. It took time for her to see the shit pigeons made, the stains on the ceiling and the dark fungus in her bathroom. There is a saying: tight, but mine. Audrey repeated it, until the words became a meaningless cluster of sounds, a soothing mantra and a default set of tongue and teeth.

She takes the only chair at the only table and turns the bag upside down, not bothering to empty it more carefully. Here fly papers, serviettes and parchments. Here flies the file. She notices it, now. A dull-coloured folder with a black ink signature in the top right corner. It means it isn’t a history-file – a map or a new-found journal, or a pack of letters. Those don’t have such a neat, regular format, nothing so perfectly rectangular, nothing with a signature. If it isn’t a history-file, then it has been produced for the archival purposes only: nothing stolen from Lady So-and-So’s cellar, but a piece of ministerial job. Therefore, must be boring. Why would anyone put it in Audrey’s desk?

She weighs it in her hand and grimaces: it’s thick. Cursing, she gets up and goes to a kitchen – a kitchenette? A corner of her attic-room where the fridge and the microwave are – to make herself coffee, because like hell she will read it without a dose of caffeine. She opens the window – the sound of the machine makes her awake enough to feel sick with the natural scent of the room.

It’s always the cats. Audrey has none. She supposes the black-clothed crone from the second floor – the one who always carries a prayer book with her – brings her own to Audrey’s when Audrey isn't there. It could be, Audrey engages in the vision, there are holy pictures on the walls of the crone’s flat and to protect their honourable eyes, she takes her cats elsewhere – takes them, when they are – Audrey doesn’t know the exact word and the coffee is ready – lustful. The crone takes those cats to Audrey’s room, with the key from the landlord who still dislikes her, so they can screw in Audrey’s beautiful IKEA bed. The only piece of furniture she bought, a steely-blue miracle out of Anne Shirley’s life, the only element succeesful at sustaing the illusion of romance living in the attic-room is supposed to be.

So entertained, Audrey returns to the table. She examines the signature, but the problem is she has been employed in the Archives for three months and has no idea – no fucking idea, are her exact thoughts – what it means. She is aware there are different kinds of files: the files which can be brought into the reading room for the visitors with reader’s cards, the files which cannot be brought there, but which Audrey can read, the files only Senior Archivers can read, the files only the Chief Archiver can read and then, the Unspeakably Confidential files no one can read. She takes a sip of her coffee and tells herself she shouldn’t open it.

The first page reads:

The correction of the file 4759A (produced 17.08.1994).

9 .

Audrey leaves Ealing in October, ignoring the danger of being homeless, moneyless and jobless in the winter. She is a fresh Ravenclaw, graduate a brilliant witch, with a row of EEs and Os to prove it. And the last summer in Ealing almost kills her – or so she believes. The six months, spent in her mother’s flat, a clean and empty space so sterile Audrey feels she makes a mess by being there alone – this has done it for her, then in 1998. She has been waiting to leave since. She asks for money she knows her mother has collected for the very purpose. It is a laughable sum: all you could scrape working in a local library.

‘You abandon me, then,’ says Audrey’s mother, sipping tea. No milk and no sugar, as she always has it: black and bitter. Audrey has made it to say goodbye or, to apply a less modern concept, to honour the woman who has given birth to her. She had no trouble finding the teapot, the teacups, the teaspoons. Always in their respectable places, objects in Audrey’s mother’s flat are. Those places are unaltered by time. It makes Audrey feel as if she too was unaltered. Unaltered, unchanged and ungrown. Always five, always cold, always with her tongue in a twist.

There is a pattern on the bottom of her teacup. Future doesn’t look like anything. Neither does past, if Audrey is honest with herself. Past is a dark shape, floating in the water. A shape you don’t want to surface. She pushes it back and refocuses on her mother’s words: you abandon me. Dry and a possible joke. Dead-panned. A dead pan. What a strange language.

‘You always feel abandoned, or so you tell me,’ Audrey replies and smiles. ‘I never help you. I am a true prodigal daughter: it is only fitting that I leave.’

Her mother’s brow furrows. God is a troublesome subject. So is what is related to him. Audrey’s mother goes to the Church for the Sunday Mass and doesn’t rest on the principal holidays. For the Resurrection at dawn and for the Midnight Mass on Christmas, Audrey’s mother always goes. So Audrey used to do: wearing a dress with shining buttons and a white collar, and laced leather shoes, she followed her mother into the cavern of Church of Our Lady Mother, filled with blue incense-smoke and glossy flower-petals, where the portrait of Holy Mary, golden and solemn, hung together with the rosaries brought by faithful generations. Votive offerings, thank-you gifts, among them that of Audrey’s mother, sea-scented beads carved in pine wood.

There was one priest, who always drove himself to ecstasy and others to sleep, and when he cried with his own words, they winked to each other, Audrey and her mother. And when he spoke harshly of women who lived without their husbands, Audrey’s mother got up and clasped Audrey’s hand, and left. You, Audrey has learned, have a choice to say no, if you don’t agree. And so Audrey said. And so she does now.

Audrey’s mother says nothing. She holds the teacup in her thin, pink fingers – those are tired fingers, fingers of a person who has always done her dishes by hand and who hasn’t always had gloves, and who used to stand long in the biting wintry air, waiting for a poorly-stored shop to open – and bows her head. Her hair is silver and a sunlight smudging it makes it into a halo. Audrey falls into her seat: a true prodigal daughter to a true heroine of a mother. Audrey’s Bible is hazy at best and she can’t tell Deborah apart from Ruth apart from Sarah. They all spill onto her mother. Once, she carried Audrey across the sea. In her own hands, in her pink frost-bitten fingers. To a green and pleasant land, to a promised land. How can you be a daughter to a heroine?

‘Urszula,’ Audrey’s mother says.

‘No, I’m not –‘

10.

Thirteen and waiting for the letters from her friends, she returns home for holidays to realize her home isn’t a home anymore. There has never been a Julia in an Ealing flat of a Polish woman and her Polish daughter. The words which spill from her tongue are in English. Her mother’s answers in Polish are whispers of a willow, of a river, of a sea. The sound is strange in the ears of the girl who has lived with Phoebe and Astoria, and Charlotte, and Romilda. How was your year, her mother asks and Julia knows no word in which she could explain it to her mother: her magic, her light, her dizziness – how to make a woman her mother is understand? Julia doesn’t know. She doesn’t go to the Saturday classes. She doesn’t go to church.

‘Why?’ her mother asks.

‘I grow out,’ Julia tries. ‘Out of being Urszula. I changed.’

‘You are lazy,’ her mother decides. ‘You would like only to lie on your back all summer. I didn’t raise you to be a lazy person. Human body is made for work. No work makes it sick.’

‘I’m not –‘

Julia’s voice breaks. Her mother waits a moment and leaves, her sensibly short heels clicking, her rosary rattling in a pocket of her coat. Tired, Julia lies on the floor, legs and arms thrown apart. A jellyfish on the shore. She stares at the white ceiling, at the white walls, all empty and clean. Through an open window, the ringing of the bells calling for the Mass falls in.

During the Eucharist, Julia’s mother always kneels, her hand clasped together, her head bowed low, eyes on the dusty stone, not daring to touch a figure of Holy Mary with a reverent gaze. It might be, Julia wonders, drowsy with a July afternoon, because her mother had no ring on her frost-bitten finger. Urszula has always imagined her father to be dead, but Julia doesn’t know. She opens her eyes. To pick her mother apart, to study her, to examine – no, it would be to make an angel fall. She buries it down and forgets, but when her mother returns, she can’t look her in the eye.

Her mother and her aren’t friends, afterwards. Julia doesn’t tell her dreams to her and doesn’t ask for stories: those stories were too sad, anyway. A house built on bones, her mother said. Any house in Warsaw. Julia is fed up with such stories. Urszula, her mother has said, was a name of a dead girl her father-poet wrote laments for. Julia is fed up with laments. She remembers the purple-green faces. The boy who asked if she was a spy. Julia is fed up with it all.

A storm-wind sweeps through a room with all windows closed. A teacup falls from the table. Clean up, her mother says later. Clean up.

11.

The book is published on the first of May and the head-lines it makes are half-a-page large. A Secret Book of Secrets, the poster in Flourish and Blotts says. Percy Weasley: From Misery To Ministry is the swirling title, a rusted-gold cut against the black material of the cover, above the photograph of a man with his face stone-cold, mouth set in a thin line, eyes invisible behind the glasses catching the sun. Queues form in the afternoon and by the evening, customers have to wait outside of the store. On the following day, Rita Skeeter makes an appearance, welcomed with applause.

‘It has been an enormous challenge,’ she says as the cameras snap and flicker. ‘But, once I have learned of the crime Percy Weasley’s past held and the disgraceful manner in which it had been kept out of the public’s view, without judgment – without any form of justice, I daresay,’ the people are nodding. ‘There was no other choice possible. I had to reveal the truth, because the truth is what we deserve,’ there are shouts. The owner of Flourish and Blotts is hiding behind the counter.

‘There obviously could be no campaign,’ Rita continues, resting in an arm-chair someone has transfigured a book-case into. ‘How would I promote a book which stood in such a conflict with Ministry’s agenda, with – let us keep it vague – the agenda of the most powerful people in magical Britain,’ The breaths are sucked in. ‘How do I promote my book without them stopping me? Let me tell you, there will always be decrees found to a hamper and hinder a journalist’s work. A journalist’s mission. But now it is too late, isn’t it?’ The cheers are loud.

A girl, unnoticed by the crowd, touches Rita’s arm. When Rita turns, the girl raises her eyebrows. They are dark, like her eyelashes are dark and like the hair on her forearms is dark. The banana blond bob on her head doesn’t fit her. Not yet.

‘Ah, yes,’ Rita says, her lips stretched and her eyes wide open. ‘I would like to give my special thanks to my personal assistant who gathered,’ the girl is watching, her eye-lids lowered and only the whiteness of her knuckles, her hands tugging her cuffs, betraying her emotions, ‘Who gathered the material of exceptional significance, and without whom,’ Rita dugs her magenta nails into the handrails. ‘Without whom there would be no book to speak of. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce her.’

The girl steps into the spotlight. Her smile is full of teeth.

12.

By April of 2001, Romilda refuses to appear wherever Astoria might be present. On the night Audrey owls the other three, Charlotte can’t come: family trouble. Audrey stares at the willowy letters and wonders if a blow of wind would change their shape: a water-surface appears more solid. She can’t phantom a single reason for which Charlotte would have a trouble with her family: her people are smooth-mouthed, gentle-handed, easy-mannered folk who, if troubled, make an appointment with a therapist and get a prescription for a bottle full of pastel-coloured pills. It is what Charlotte’s mother has done after their first elections.

To be rejected by Charlotte stings. Audrey crumples the letter into a ball and throws it into a dustbin where it falls between empty boxes after frozen pizza from Tesco and wet coffee filters. She regrets it a second later: with Astoria and Romilda fallen out – a nuclear fallout it has been – their friendship is fragile. A crumpled letter can break it. But Audrey doesn’t find her wand to summon it back, to straighten it, to clean it, to put it in the grey-carton box with the other letters, with wilted flowers, with polaroid photographs.

On a such night, Audrey can’t make herself do it. What she needs is a yes to her invitation, a word to shut the damn noise in her head down, to stuff the trumpets angels have invented to play tonight, let their faces grow into red balloons, let them choke. To get out of her attic-room, with its cat-stink, with its rummaging pipes, with the crone downstairs and the tuberculosis sufferer behind a thin wall, coughing his fucking lungs out – and Audrey doesn’t care for the blood, only for silence she can’t have – and with the folder on her table, the papers scattered, the mug knocked and the coffee splattered on the table, dripping on the floor.

A crime scene, no less. Audrey needs, fucking needs to get out of there. Tight but mine doesn’t mean anything with the suffocating volume of the knowledge spilling from the file. She can’t breathe in there. Through the open window, she hears Hackney. Drunk yelling, hysteric laughter, glass smashed, heels screaming. Father-killings. Not patricides: for a patricide, you must have a scenery and some class, like – fuck, no.

In Hackney, all you get is a massacre.

The place she keeps her pain-killers when she has them is violently empty. Where the fuck are those owls, she paces around her room and it is a short round to go through – nothing to be tried of, but she is sweating. Her clothes glue to her skin. She takes her glasses off and presses her fists to sockets – the world doesn’t disappear. How cruel. She is drowning.

Then, a screech after a screech and a flutter of wings. Hallelujah, Audrey says out loud, hallelujah. Both Phoebe and Astoria say yes. To drinking at Phoebe’s – Romilda out, late night at St Mungo’s. Audrey is close to tears when she disapparates (not because she fears drinking in a company of two Slytherins).

13.

‘To whom did you disclose the contents of the file, Ms Pluta?’

‘To Astoria Greengrass and – and Phoebe Vane.’

‘Why?’

14.

[A polaroid photograph glued to a page.

Five girls on a warm day. They aren’t wearing uniforms. All are smiling. In the middle there is the dark one, her eyes ablaze and her smile bright against the colour of her cheeks, of her neck, hands clasped with a girl next to her: the one in robes, her head lolled to the other’s head, small cherry lips touching the other’s ear, flushed with the secrets she is telling. To the left of the pair, there is the dark one’s twin: a faded reflection of her robustness. Where the first shines, the second hides. Her hair is mouse brown and neatly braided, her lipstick beige, her powder of a lightening kind. Leaning forward, she connects her opaque eyes with the eyes of the last girl to the right: a scrawny bird-like creature made of angles and empty spaces, her eyes behind the glasses, a corner of her mouth moved upwards. The gaze of the opaque eyes is reaching. Between her and the middle pair, there is the prettiest girl: a fruit of careful cultivation, her teeth straight, her skin smooth, her hair shining. She is looking less favourably only in comparison with the girl to her left: her bones, it is visible, are thicker and their order isn’t one you would see in the row of portraits. There is no one stealing her glances and no one whispering to her ear. Her smile is widest.

The photograph is signed. From left to right: Phoebe, Romilda, Astoria, Charlotte, Julia; June 1995. On the back-side, there is a note: do remember & tell all our darling R had to date a Creevie for a WEEK to get the photo taken.]

15.

In March, Romilda gets a leave. She has been coming home at dawn for the last half-a-year, bags under her eyes growing heavier and darker, worn like badges for self-sacrifice. When she fainted, the Head Healer told her off: take rest, Romilda, you can’t brew a coughing potion in such a state – she repeats it to them, loud and fire-eyed – what a wanker. Absolutely, says Charlotte and pats Romilda’s hand. Phoebe doesn’t bother with it – she is writing, uncaring of her sister’s anger beside her and the loud pub they are all in, her eyes on the page, feather running in her hand. What are you writing, Audrey asks, murmurs into Phoebe’s ear to make sure Phoebe will hear. She does and gives only a half-smile in return. It is enough for Audrey, who settles more comfortably on Phoebe’s side.

They pick at their fish and chips. Years before, it has always been Charlotte to choose the place: you could trust her to know only those establishments which provide clean tables, polite service and menus printed on the right paper. If you couldn’t pay, Charlotte would. It made her smile: both to decide where they eat and to provide for it. Now, they go wherever Romilda goes what usually is an ostentatiously indecorous pub: a hook to Astoria’s eye with Charlotte’s as collateral. But they all go for compromises with Romilda now. A war-heroine, she is. She has a tapestry of war-bruises where all the other can show are scars after vaccines and childhood small-pox.

‘One would imagine there are worse miseries,’ Astoria speaks and Audrey realizes she hasn’t said a word for the last hour. She tenses: silence is against Astoria’s nature. Phoebe’s feather wavers for a moment and runs on, her ink-work mattering more. Charlotte clutches a dirty napkin with her clean hands done for her by a woman in a candy-coloured uniform with a sugar-sweet smile.

Romilda lets a breath out. She has fought, she has bled, she has lived through a ruin. What Astoria has done? Astoria has turned her face into a mask and closed her eyes when Romilda came with an enchanted Galleon in her hand. A Charon’s obol: a one-way ticket to the underworld and a waste of metal for the living. To live was Astoria’s intention. Self-preservation instinct, she calls it. Cowardice, calls it Romilda. The space between those words is where they battle. They draw frontiers – Romilda never goes to the shop at Knockturn Astoria’s people run and Astoria never visit St Mungo’s like Charlotte or Phoebe do. They aim bullet-like truths at each other. They are hard: Romilda harder than Astoria, full of rage, standards and relics at her disposal.

‘One would imagine there are worse miseries than a week off.’ It is a paraphrase of many remarks Romilda has made regarding Astoria’s life. They are all aware of it. Audrey’s and Charlotte’s eyes narrow as if they were afraid of being blinded by the explosion. ‘To me it sounds well,’ Astoria goes on, her voice light as air. ‘And it agrees with my plans. I am coming down to our summer house – no one had a chance to go there since the war,’ the word hangs above the table, but Astoria doesn’t pause, ‘We need to inspect the old hovel, see if it stands still or if the storms have finally torn it apart as we all know they once will,’ she forms her lips into a smile: a short-lived flower, withered before it blooms.

‘Oh, but I can’t go,’ Charlotte pouts.

‘Me neither,’ says Phoebe. ‘Busy.’

‘Well, so it is me, Julia and Romilda.’

Audrey watches them: Astoria finishing her trick and offering it to Romilda in the form of a dare. To reject a challenge is to act like a coward – at least in Romilda’s books. Lately, her books are full of such rules.

‘I'll be there,’ Romilda says.

‘Delightful,’ Astoria replies with a smile suggesting there has never been a choice. She falls back on her seat, allowing her eye-lids to drop and the colour from her cheeks to pale, fed with her success. Romilda doesn’t say another word, mad and deprived of the object of her madness. What they are left with is Charlotte’s chatter concerning her mother, her father, a few other muggle politicians – a subject of nobody’s particular interest, but presented in a form elegant enough to sustain the illusion: they are a pack of friends, their eyes bright and their spirits high. There has never been any war.

16.

The first time Urszula saw them, they were twelve and it was a golden June day: trees heavy with honey-scented blossoms and air filled with buzz of bees. The water in the lake was warm and green, and Urszula – if she narrowed her eyes – could catch the sight of dragonflies, glimmer of their scales and wings easy to confuse with the sunlight sliding across the water.

They came in laughter and dropped onto the ground, pushing and pulling each other’s shirts, unbothered with the green marks left where their knee-socks and skirts touched the blades of grass. The colours of their ties clashed, red and yellow, and green, but they didn’t mind. A Slytherin had her head on a Gryffindor’s lap – the Gryffindor played with her hair, speaking to a Hufflepuff. Urszula couldn’t make out the words. The other Slytherin, the Gryffindor’s twin, leaned against the tree’s trunk and slept: shadow of leaves ran across her cheeks, ever-shivering with the light wind. The Hufflepuff opened her bag and took out four bottles of pink lemonade – they opened it with their wands and drunk, and the glass-shine was blinding to Urszula’s eyes.

The sleeping girl hadn’t been asleep: the moment the Hufflepuff touched her, her eyelids fluttered up. The Gryffindor emptied her bottle first and yelled of a game. The other laughed and made space for the bottle to spin. How strange, Urszula thought, was to tell each other’s secrets in the open sun. How strange was to have anybody to tell them to. They couldn’t stop laughing. The Gryffindor took the dare and had to run laps around the lake: one, two, three. She sent the Hufflepuff to a group of boys laying across it. The Hufflepuff blushed, but went. The not-sleeping Slytherin had picked a daisy and now was plucking the petals off. Her skirt was full of  it. She chose the truth, but Urszula couldn’t hear it. Then, the other Slytherin took a dare. Urszula couldn’t hear anything. The Slytherin gave a peck to the Gryffindor.

They laughed, laughed, laughed. Urszula sunk in the grass, the bark brushing against her back and felt the heat pressing on her stomach, pulling her eyelids down. When she closed her eyes, the shifting arabesques under her eyelids were lemonade-pink.

17. 

They have scary stories to tell each other when they are fifteen. They don’t need to make up any: all it takes to be terrified is to open the newspapers. The difference between the terror of what is true and the terror of what is imagined is why they tell those stories: they tell them to be able to laugh at the chill running down their spines. From the air mattresses floating on the surface of a swimming pool between a stain of French sun and a shadow cast by Charlotte’s people’s holiday house, newspapers’ monsters appear as unreal as those they invent with a fluorescent drink in their hand.

Charlotte’s father poured them, making them swear not to tell Charlotte’s mother. When he had been young, he said, his uncles and cousins had had him drunk regularly. A shame to let such a tradition die. Julia wasn’t sure if Charlotte’s mother would care: all she did was to argue with MP So-and-So over her telephone and then argue with her husband – no, I am not shrill – what, a joke? – grow the fuck up, Henry – but, to be fair Henry himself spent most of his time telephoning, distinguishing himself from his wife only in his voice being significantly lower and his words less markedly pronounced.

When he left, Charlotte, wrinkling her nose, said:

‘He only likes to be liked,’ she put the glass aside. ‘But he doesn’t do it too well.’

Julia, her eyes closed and face exposed to the sun, wondered if Charlotte was any different from her father: bringing them all there, to her French maison, showering them with rich chocolate, sweet fruit and bubbling drink. How pleased she was to watch them jump into her swimming pool, screaming and pushing each other – Romilda laughing at Astoria’s disdain of chlorine water’s taste. Propped on the elbow, Julia stared at Charlotte, knees pressed to her chest, her too-long body exposed by a smart swimming suit bought in a shop Romilda or Phoebe wouldn’t be allowed to work in – not with such face, honey. Bathing in the sunlight, her shining hair curling on her neck, Charlotte was sulking. Julia wasn’t sure how she felt, seeing Charlotte on the verge of bursting with tears. It would be in her style, to cry into a drink with her toes tipping a surface of a swimming pool in France.

What Charlotte did was to say:

‘How about we tell some stories to kill the time?’

And so now they are, crammed together on two sun-beds, their thighs pressed together, sticky with sweat. An umbrella hides them from the sun, but they are flushed and dizzy all the same. Could be the drinks. Romilda and Astoria have their fingers inter-laced – nails painted with one polish; they were playing with the cosmetics yesterday – Charlotte sits on the ground, her legs stretched and her back against the umbrella’s pole and Julia is on the other sun-bed together with Phoebe.

Astoria is telling the story:

‘There is a house on an island,’ she begins.

‘Would it be Greengrass House on Salaman Island?’, asks Romilda.

‘Hush. There is a house on an island, no matter where. There is nothing but the house: the house and grass, and rocks, and thick fog. All you hear is screams of seagulls and crush of waves,’ Astoria’s voice loses its colour and becomes monotone, sea-like. Julia rests her head on Phoebe’s arm and lets her eyelids drop. The house Astoria is speaking of obviously is Greengrass House on Salaman Island, but it doesn’t bother anyone. To demand of Astoria to know anything of anyone else but herself would be too much.

They had been there last summer: on a deserted rocky island where they were seeing ghosts in each other - it was the weather, the strange summer of the Hebrides. Julia can see it: them, knees deep in the grey sea, skipping rocks and waiting for splashes of water, never seen and sometimes unheard, drowned in the fog. One such morning, they saw two dark figures slowly emerging from the fog and they all tried to have a good laugh – who would expect Dementors there, after all? Azkaban was close, but lovely girls of thirteen didn’t meet any Dementors, anywhere – correct? Julia’s heart sunk deep into her chest at the sight, too familiar: a dark shape, surfacing. She didn’t dare to look until Phoebe whispered into her ear it was only a pair who worked in Greengrasses’ shop: a boy and a girl, poorly masking their shock at seeing Astoria and her friends there. The girl didn’t seem well, washed out of all colour and trembling, clutching at the boy’s velvet sleeve. He bowed and kissed their hands – his mouth felt like a squashed fly – and asked if they didn’t know of the dangers such young creatures were exposed to, all alone on a foggy Island. Astoria exclaimed she did certainly hope for some danger – but what kind of danger could Klaus possibly mean? And he told them a story, a story Astoria is repeating now in France, a story of a howling beast of Salaman Island.

Julia wonders at a story she would tell: all she has is what her mother once said when Julia asked her to terrify her. Her mother said: ‘Imagine there was a graveyard where your house now stands. If you open the floor in the basement and dig a hole, you will find bones.’ Then, Julia told her to stop. She didn’t sleep well afterwards. She doesn’t like her mother’s stories.

‘Julia,’ Astoria calls her. ‘I’m done. Your turn.’

‘I’ll pass. Tell me yours.’

18.

Salaman Island in March of 2001 is the exact image of what Audrey remembers from five years before: slippery paths of rain-soaked rocks cutting through the plain of colourless grass, meandering between contorted trees which bear bitter fruit, arriving at the doorstep of a house set in grim stone, its windows few and narrow, its chimneys always cold. When they stepped inside, a pack of girls thirteen years old, it excited them to pass under sharp arches, to touch harshly finished ornaments, to hear their steps echo: at the time, grief of a haunted house was exotic – a mystery to pore over for a month and never more. Now they are here, only three of them and the breath of the house is like a cob-web which Audrey is afraid won’t ever get off her hair.

They live in the house and become it ghosts: communicating in half-sentences, sighs and uncertain gestures. Astoria passes from one room to another with a rustle of robes, impossible to ignore. Romilda is out: somewhere at the shore, swimming in the freezing water, coming back with her teeth shaking and her lips blue – beating her body down gives her a self-whipping’s monk’s pleasure. Audrey doesn’t leave the musty cellar: in weak light, she reads stale letters and examines bleached photographs, devouring years of history made by the Greengrasses. The meals are prepared by a house-elf Astoria has taken from her London house: a half-blind creature prone to mistaking sugar and salt. All is well, Astoria jokes, until it mistakes sugar and arsenic. No laughter follows.

There are moments – Audrey sees some of them – when Astoria and Romilda forget themselves: they glance at each other and let themselves smile; Astoria turns from a window and comes closer to Romilda, seated next to a fire-place; Romilda raises her eyes and opens her mouth; she asks if Astoria remembers when or if Astoria still has a – and then her voice trails off. She blinks and her features harden again, and her eyes turn to fire. Astoria’s smile falls – Audrey sees it fall every damn time, because Astoria hasn’t learned yet – and she goes back to the window, and sighs. Then, Audrey returns to a letter or a journal. Lives of other people are an occupation she is glad for: anything to escape from the silence stretched between Astoria and Romilda.

Grace and Klaus re-emerge from the fog: identical to Audrey’s memories – Grace sick, Klaus masking his wariness with an ugly smirk. Astoria has them accompany her in her aimless wandering, each on one of her arms. Audrey sees them when she goes upstairs to make blood run in her legs again – it stopped, from kneeling on the cellar’s floor. They make a strange group: Astoria in the middle, her hair pinned with needles, carefully modelled locks falling on her forehead, tissue of her robe richly embroidered with golden and silver threads, its colour shifting with each step – you can never tell what it is. On her sides, Klaus and Grace, laces at their sleeves yellowed, ribbons under their chins frayed. Too self-aware to touch Astoria’s elbows, they are hovering close to her: two ghosts more.

Romilda comes back with a slam of the door and a string of curses – at the wind, at the water, at all Salaman Island is – cut off when she stands on Audrey’s side and sees the view.

‘They stay here too?’ she asks.

‘No,’ says Astoria. Klaus coughs. ‘What is it?’

‘I would dare to remind you, Miss, of a, ah, a special occasion – tonight,’ he says.

‘I’m well aware of it, Klaus. You and Grace must leave soon, don’t you?’

‘Indeed we must.’

They leave before the dinner – as plates appear on the table, the echo of their disapparition mixes with the roar of the sea.

‘What was he talking about?’ Audrey asks munching her bite of meat.

‘The beast,’ Astoria gives her a serene smile. ‘The beast is out tonight.’

‘Your story,’ Romilda says. ‘A real thing?’

‘Flesh and blood,’ their knives scream against their plates. ‘Would you like to see it?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t imagine you’d be afraid.’

‘I’m not.’

‘So you say.’

‘You don’t get to call me afraid, Astoria.’

‘Well, if you act like it –‘

‘Jesus. I’ll go – I’ll go and see it, just shut up.’

Audrey leaves the table and idly considers praying.

When she goes back to the cellar, to the affairs long gone, she lies on the floor. Here too she hears the sea, pushing at the island, waves crushed by rocks. There’s the sea-smell everywhere: the salt, the fish, the birds. They were thirteen, they were hunting for shells there – they put their hands into mouldering sea-weed, stretching their fingers down, hoping to touch it, a hard and oval shape, with a pearl in it.

All they found was a jellyfish: alive when Phoebe saw it first. She called Audrey and told her to go back to the house and find a fork. Then, she tore the jellyfish open, picking its minuscule organs up close to her eyes – see, Julia? – and she packed it into a plastic bag she had in a pocket. In her room, she had a piece of carton and a roll of tape, and she put the jellyfish onto the carton, gluing it with the tape. Why, Audrey asked. Because I wanted to see how it worked, said Phoebe. Because it was only a jellyfish and it didn’t feel anything, I did no harm, simple beings don’t know pain. And Audrey said – she said: I’m sorry I can’t have my jellyfish to do the same. No, two jellyfishes would be pointless – but a crab. Oh, let us find a crab. His body will be harder, but we have wands.

The waves crush against the rocks. Audrey imagines the sea, the cold and dark water – the shape surfacing – her own body, drowned. Audrey opens her eyes.

‘Phoebe,’ she breathes and touches a burnt-out dot on her inner palm. She is safe. Phoebe is safe.

Has the sun set yet? They wouldn’t know – nothing comes through the fog. She waits until she hears a howl.

19.

Long before Urszula said a word to the other three, she spoke with Phoebe. They met in the library, both escaping their Common Rooms with armfuls of books. It was Phoebe to take a seat at Urszula’s table – an act Audrey will later regard as unusual – and to say:

‘How many essays has Binns made you write? It looks like a ton.’

‘These aren’t mine,’ Urszula replied and bit her tongue. What she had just said would be enough to give her a detention – but she was so unused to be asked questions, to be paid any attention – you could make her tell you anything if you made sweet eyes at her. ‘You mustn’t tell,’ she dropped her voice to whisper.

‘I wouldn’t,’ the girl said gravely. ‘But I am curious – why are you writing essays which aren’t,’ she tactfully didn’t finish, only waved her hand.

‘Oh, you see, we Ravenclaws have a – a network,’ Urszula hesitated, but the girl had her eyes wide open and lips parted – she was so eager to hear whatever Urszula said. ‘We write each other’s essays. Fatima writes Herbology, Owaine writes DADA,  and so on. I write three – four – History of Magic essays, but I don’t have to write those two, and Astronomy, and Numerology.’

‘Won’t it upset your marks on O.W.L.S.?’

‘Please, we don’t bother with subjects we’re going to drop – why would we? I don’t need to fill my head with Umbridge’s garbage. And I make extra-research for the subject which interests me.’

‘And it works?’

‘It so does,’ Urszula grinned. ‘I am – I am brilliant at it. The others, they only give you a plan with raw material, but I can write it all proper. It’s a trick I learned – copying people’s writing and their voice. Takes some practice, but now I can – I mean, I can write an essay for you, if you show me some you’ve already got.’

The girl ignored the suggestion, but the look she had on her face made up for it: in her eyes, Urszula was large.

‘It does sound smart. Your idea?’

‘Oh, no,’ Urszula giggled. ‘I mean, I had some – but it was Orla who proposed it,’ she hoped the girl didn’t hear the venom Urszula instinctively poured into the name. ‘She’s a leader and – well, and nobody listens to what I say, anyway –‘ Urszula was blinking rapidly. ‘I don’t have a problem with it – it’s fine, but – uh. I – I wouldn’t set up a network.’

Urszula tried to anchor herself with the text she has been reading, but the lines were blurring.

‘Then, History of Magic is your subject?’ the girl’s voice cut through the fog. ‘Why?’

‘It’s, ah –‘ Urszula fought the heaviness pressing on her throat. ‘I like it. I – I like stories, I like to read, I like to be someone who isn’t me.’ She glanced at the girl, terrified of the words which had spilled from her lips. ‘You – you know.’

‘I do,’ said the girl. ‘I do.’

20.

A satellite state might have been a name for a revolving kingdom of the Moon, but it isn’t. A satellite state was designed before any man or dog came into space. Tehran, three man and a map. I wonder if they used a pencil. Or did they use a cartographer? Would you be so kind and correct those borders. Here and here. Done. Dismissed.

It’s a parable. There were more notes in re-composition of the world. For example, an order to burn a city and make it into wasteland. You see, those who fought there imagined they would win and greet the army victorious. They would draw maps. Nothing of the kind. The maps needed to be drawn, but there were no hands to held a pencil. Might such city be anything, but a city of a satellite state?

If you want facts. First, Red Army is a wonder: it can invade you and free you, or do both to you, no second apart. Second, to gift freedom is to become responsible: it should come as no surprise Soviet Union came to be responsible for many. Third, responsible is a tricky word: it might mean making country a Moon kingdom, or anything as real.

21.

Sixteenth of March, 1958. Jadwiga Pluta is born.

Fourth of February, 1982. Jadwiga gives birth to Urszula.

1983. Polish Security Police arrests Jerzy Popiełuszko. Radio Free Europa has been broadcasting his sermons. The Party didn’t approve. In the Party’s artistic vision there is no place for criticism and encouragement of resistance. The clergy intervenes. Popiełuszko is pardoned and released.

Nineteenth of October, 1984. Jerzy Popiełuszko stops his car. In the other one, there are three Polish Security Police officers.

Thirtieth of October, 1984. In Vistula, a body surfaces.

Third of November, 1984. People bury Popiełuszko. Laminated paper-cards with a photo of his injured body and a prayer are given out in churches. Jadwiga Pluta brings the card home. Urszula sees it.

Fifteenth of May, 1987. Jadwiga Pluta carries her daughter through the sea from Poland to Sweden. There are airports.

22.

Her first memory was an image printed on a laminated paper-card. A photo of a body, beaten and drowned, recovered and flowered, put in an open coffin and followed by hundreds of thousands. Her first memory was remembering it, when she found it at three, at four, at five. Any time she saw it, her eyes watered and a thorn spiked her heart, like on the holy pictures Fathers and Sisters gave her. The photo scared her: she imagined the body of the man, a dark shape floating in the water, resurfacing. She would like to throw the card, to tear it, to flush it down the toilet. Her mother told her not to. You don’t profane a holy picture of a holy man, Urszula. All she could do was to hide it: in her pillow-case, in her sock, in her backpack. It always resurfaced. She forgot and there it always was. The colours were bright. She was three, four, five. She was five and her mother took her to the seashore where a boat was: they went in and they were at the sea. In the tempest, she let the paper-card fly out of her hands. Holy Spirit. It was appropriate: the sea was great and awesome. To lose a holy picture here was not to profane it.

Later, she will regret she didn’t choose the fire to ruin it: she would see the ashes and she would know it is gone. When you lose anything at the sea, you never know if it won’t return. Seas vomit bodies. Memories vomit ghosts.

23.

The home in England they came to was in Ealing. The woman who ran it was named Barbara, but she asked Jadwiga and Urszula to call her Basia. Urszula didn’t like her: her name alone, taken after Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners, black-faced and unpleasant. A large woman, swelling under her clothes, with loud laughter and orange lips. Urszula’s adored mother was beautiful: slender and silent, a saint. Her fingers were rosy, because she had been queuing for a piece of chocolate for Urszula, at five in the morning. Barbara’s hands were flour-white, like rolled fat. When Urszula said it to her mother, her mother was mad: how Urszula dared to offend a woman who has taken them in out of her heart’s kindness? Urszula supposed heart’s kindness is what you say of people who had no luck elsewhere, but she kept it to herself.

Barbara not only offered them a spare bedroom in her house: she gave Urszula dresses and school-books of her own older daughters, and she tried to teach her English. Urszula refused all: she wouldn’t wear those dresses and she wouldn’t read those books, and she wouldn’t say those strange words, lisping-words. When she and her mother went to church, she prayed to go home. She didn’t understand why they were there.

Barbara took her to a park where other children were. They twittered among each other and Urszula couldn’t understand a single word. There was hot burning in her stomach. Unfair, she said. You need to learn, her mother replied, to go to a school. Basia’s girls were in school – you don’t want to be a lazybones, do you? Urszula tried to learn. She watched films with princesses and witches, and she mimicked their voices. Her favourite was Alice in Wonderland. Alice beat the Queen of Hearts and went home: Urszula prayed.

At school, there were more children she didn’t understand. They laughed and she was sure they laughed at her. The anger crept under her skin like a snake – it was a sin, after all – and it lashed out. In the Art class, when she drew a boat drowning in the sea and they took the drawing from her, and pointed at it with their fingers, and made weird lisping noises. Tips of her fingers were burning, the storm-wind swept through her and when she screamed, windows broke and tubes of paint exploded on the tables, marking their faces purple and green. The teacher telephoned Barbara who came with Urszula’s mother to take her home. Barbara wasn’t mad, but she asked many questions and they had to move out.

Urszula didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what to ask.

‘It was my fault,’ she said. ‘I listened to the snake.’

‘Next time, don’t,’ her mother replied. ‘Next time you are angry, you hold the snake tight, and you picture Archangel Michael cutting its head off with a fire-sword. No anger more. Touch the feathers of his wings. They are very soft.’

Urszula imagined the feathers – swan’s feathers, because swans were beautiful and white, and their wings were strong, and their songs killed – and the coal-hot knot inside her body unfolded melting into mellow and warm softness.

 ‘What did I do?’ she asked. ‘Was it me?’

‘Yes. You are magic. Your father was, too,’ her mother said and it was the only time Urszula heard anything of her father. ‘You will learn it when you are older.’

Her mother found a job in a library: a silent and dusty place, but more like home than their new flat. There was nothing in their new flat: only walls and a bed. Easier to clean, Urszula’s mother said. In the library there were pictures on the walls and plants on the windowsills. There were curtains in the windows, billowing when a wind blew through. Urszula liked to watch them billow – they were like waves. She flipped the pages of fairy tale books, and learned the words. She listened to the children in her class. She didn’t like them and they didn’t like her: a weirdo. The paints girl.

There was another school Urszula went to on Saturdays: a room in a red-brick building where there were portraits of the war-men, and maps hung, and a sketch of Frederic Chopin, and a red shield with a white eagle on it, crowned. They were taught to be Polish there: Urszula didn’t understand it, because the other children there, who spoke Polish worse than her, were better in the class still. They knew history she didn’t and they recognized Revolutionary Etude after the first note. To Urszula, the piano sounded like rain. The teacher there gave her a book of history, and told her to read it so she would know what she was. How strange, Urszula thought, to be a book, but she didn’t say it. When she came home, her mother wanted to see it: when she read, the shadows grew on her face.

Urszula was afraid to ask.

‘Lies,’ her mother said. ‘They taught me lies. At school, lies. At work, lies. A country made of lies. Here, you see,’ she showed Urszula a photo of an empty forest. ‘There are the men the Soviets killed – nobody speaks of it, no, no. They wrote their own histories. And they made us swallow it. And it is like a poison. It makes you sick – it makes you rot. Our country is rotten.’

Urszula didn’t ask anymore. Her mother’s words echoed in her ears like bells, and in the church, she prayed to forget. She couldn’t: like a paper-card with a holy man dead, like his wet aching body, the dark shape in the water, it resurfaced and resurfaced, and stuck to Urszula’s hands. A book so she knew what she was – was she rotten, then? What did it make her? Was her body worse? She stared in the mirror: could you see in her eyes what she was? Could you see the poison? She had lived there for five years with no knowledge it was no place to live. Why, she wouldn’t believe there were no queues in other countries, no empty shelves where there should be cheese and meat. It was how things were. Now they told her it was not. Only on the other side of the Iron Curtain – on the wrong side.

When she had painted those faces purple and green, they had been scared. Did they see it? What did they see? When they laughed at her – were they right?

The Saturday classes tired her. It was unbearably sad to be Polish. It choked her. Their history was a drowned man: it crushed your wrist and you must have loved it, and because you loved it, you allowed it to pull you down. Urszula didn’t. She envied English their history: a story of the empire over which the sun never set. Glory, victory, progress. No partitions. No lost wars. No cities turned to dust. Unpoisoned.

Her mother went to visit Barbara and Urszula went with her. She watched the films there: her favourite was Cinderella, and she prayed for a fairy god-mother. She was older: her favourite was My Fair Lady, and she prayed for a doctor.

24. 

When she turns eighteen, she makes the change official: to Audrey. Not Julia: she cares for the ilusion that she chooses the name. Her old documents are shred to ribbons. She burns them.

25.

Phoebe and Urszula began with a poor joke: Binns was giving a lecture on a goblin’s uprising which, he said, nobody expected. ‘The Spanish Inquisition,’ muttered Urszula.

There was no one next to her to whom it might have been directed: in October of her third year, Urszula was still friendless. There were girls with whom she exchanged hellos in the corridor or with whom she studied in the Common Room – nothing more. She was accepted as a constant feature in the background, a peculiar bird-like shape, a mouth to put generously offered sweets into and to pull funny foreign words out. The only role left for her was the one of an obnoxious jokester who tried to make friends with anybody who could hear her: she didn’t have the guts to be it yet, but the hours lonely spent made her reservations less and less of a matter. She could picture it: the weirdo, the new Loony Lovegood, the appreciated comic relief. It made her cheeks burn.

She heard the first giggle and turned: it was a Slytherin. The shock nearly made her fall from the chair. She hadn’t expected a Slytherin to catch a phrase from a very muggle comedy. The girl winked at her and Urszula recognized the face: she had seen her on a June afternoon four months ago. Before she tried to stop it, the rush of lemonade-pink warmth went through her body and she beamed, alight with the memorized image: part of her heart had been buried in the ground then and there, and part of the June charm she was carrying now.

The girl smiled back.

26.

The library sessions with Phoebe became an element of Urszula’s schedule. They hide at the end of the winding row of the bookcases filled with the volumes of centaurs’ philosophy – untouched by anyone for centuries – where in silent murmur of turned pages and croak of wooden shelves, they were together, backs pressed to the opposing walls, legs stretched, knees touching. They wrote their essays and chattered in the intervals: Urszula spoke of herself and Phoebe spoke of her friends. Those stories mesmerized Urszula – a concept of a pack of friends, of four girls sharing dreams and secrets, was an abstract to her: an only child and, as she sometimes imagined, the loneliest girl in the world. She demanded from Phoebe to be told all, all Phoebe could say of Romilda, Astoria and Charlotte. Phoebe obliged, trading stories for Urszula’s memories. So Urszula told her of Ealing, of her mother, of the church – and Phoebe drunk the words from Urszula’s lips. She said Urszula is a genius story-teller and Urszula’s heart somersaulted. What of Phoebe? Oh, there’s nothing to tell. But her friend, once… And so Urszula learned.

When Romilda and Phoebe’s father left – with another woman he met – Romilda found out where he lived and made holes in his new car’s wheels. With Romilda, Phoebe says, it’s either love or hate. If you wrong her, she will hunt you down and smother you. She doesn’t look smothering-like, Urszula protests – not with her bracelets ringing on ankles and wrists, her chapstick smiles, her glossy magazines.

‘Well,’ Phoebe shrugged. She didn’t like to speak of Romilda a lot (it was too much like speaking of herself).

Astoria’s people had a fascinating shop: a Knockturn shop, but not where you bought cursed jewellery or ordinary poisons – you had enough of that at Borgin’s. To a Greengrass, you came with a secret. If you sold one, you were magnificently paid. To buy one, you needed to have another and a substantial sum of money. There came all governors and governesses, runaway squibs and werewolf-bitten children, to buy a new life for a peek at their family’s skeletons. There came the politicians on the turning points of their careers to collect all dirt stuck to their name. Over-ambitious second sons and daughters, socially aspiring secretaries, avenging heirs – all came to a Greengrass. Impossible, Urszula said – but true, Phoebe answered. The Greengrasses loved it, the power of knowledge.

‘Because knowledge is power,’ Phoebe said.

‘No, knowledge is knowledge,’ Urszula laughed. ‘Tell me more of Astoria.’

The Greengrasses loved their shop – more than they did love their daughters. Mr Greengrass didn’t care for them and Mrs Greengrass examined the girls as she would examine potential secret-bearers: she had an eye of a butterfly-collector, wondering where and how to pin those two down. Daphne, Astoria’s older sister, took the combination of neglect of her father and thoughtless malice of her mother for signs of dissatisfaction, and imagined she would enchant them into attentive and affectionate if she became perfect enough. She played the piano until her fingers numbed, conjugated Latin verbs until they melted into monotonous melody, brew her potions incessantly – impressing her tutors only. Mr and Mrs Greengrass were amused, wondering after whom did the silly girl take such a strange nature, and returned to their secrets. Lacking fortunes of their peers, they weren’t able to hire a new tutoring set for their other daughter and so Astoria was taught by people blinded already with her older sister’s excellence.  It made Astoria a contrary girl: instead of piano, she demanded a trombone, she didn’t care for Latin and was bored by potion-brewing. She was idle and, to appease the tutors, sometimes copied a page from a volume found in the library, claiming it indeed was her who translated Suetonius’ words, not Balbinus Malfoy. Daphne violently disapproved, to Astoria’s great delight. Arriving at Hogwarts – already instructed by Daphne to make proper acquaintances only – she declared herself a friend to mudbloods and spent her first ride on the Express in the compartment filled with the cream of English muggleborn youth.

‘There, she met Charlotte.’

‘Oh, Charlotte. I know nothing of her.’

She was a daughter of two politicians who met at the Downing 10, both a part of the Prime Minister’s staff. The story went, Charlotte’s father – a pureblood squib, promised a share of his heritage if he excluded himself from the Society and changed his surname, for what a horror it would be, to have a muggle bearing the same name a Noble and Ancient House commanded – had been hired as a Special Advisor on the Wizarding Matters, irremovable from the Downing 10, as the only employee knowledgeable enough and with the Prime Ministers’ trust. Charlotte’s mother, a muggle without the clearance to information permitting awareness of the situation, and a seventies woman in politics, hated mysterious Mr Ayers who to her appeared to be on a high post without any reasons but his being a man with an Oxbridge air around him. Mr Ayers in turn was delighted to hint his far superior knowledge as frequently as he could. The rivalry between the two had been a subject of gossip and bets. It heightened when the first Wizarding War broke out. Mr Ayers almost lived at the Prime Minister’s, to Miss Lutwidge’s fury. The war, appearing to muggles nothing but series of unexplainable disasters easily attributable to their own government, brought the fall of Mr Ayers' and Miss Lutwidge’s boss, dragging them down with him. The two rats on a sinking ship, bound by circumstance and necessity, they allowed a misshaped friendship to form between them, and run  deep – or hot – enough for Mr Ayers to suggest that Miss Lutwidge would know all he did if she only married him – what, according to the wizarding law, was true however strangely it sounded to Miss Lutwidge’s ears. The wedding eventually occurred – hastened by Mr Ayers who, witnessing the war tearing his people apart might have realized what a fragile thing it was to be alive and breathing, and rivalling with Miss Lutwidge. The new Mrs Lutwidge-Ayers was appropriately shocked when confronted with an unknown state. A secret country within a country she found more inexplicable than magic.

‘And then what?’ Urszula asked, her essay forgotten. The stories Phoebe told her were the best gossip she has ever heard.

Mr and Mrs Lutwidge-Ayers were incorrigible people: birth of their daughter didn’t put an end neither to their career nor to the ruthlessness with which they marched forward the top of the British government. Charlotte, from birth an element of their campaigns, the golden baby of the Whitehall power couple, was brought up like a precious variety of an orchid, or a breed of canary, measured and controlled, expected to be a match for her parents. At the same time, she had heard them fire twenty people during a one five-minute telephone call and she had watched the fights involving all glassware to be found in the kitchen, Mrs Lutwidge-Ayers accusing her husband of being an incompetent arse and Mr Ayers shifting the blame to a maniacal hysteric his wife was. Young Charlotte became convinced her parents must have been wickedly miserable people and she had to somehow make up for it.

‘Must be exhausting,’ Urszula said.

‘Makes her a valuable friend,’ said Phoebe.

‘How do you know all this?’

Phoebe dropped her gaze at the essay Urszula wrote in the exact copy of Orla Quirke’s writing.

‘A trick I learned.’

27.

Phoebe went on with the story:

Of the girls Astoria spent her journey to Hogwarts with, only Charlotte dared to speak to her after the Sorting. Out of charity, if nothing else – because Astoria had no other friends, refusing to integrate herself into the pureblood community of her house. If she tried, she would have never done it like impeccable Daphne did. And Daphne had to make an effort to succeed, the poorest pureblood of her year, the fact of which Pansy Parkinson reminded her whenever she had the chance. After Daphne’s first holidays, the pallor of her skin she took such pride in was a reason for Pansy’s mocking – had Daphne not a chance to get some tan? Daphne had not, stuck for a month in a London house, and then for another on Salaman Island, untouched by sunlight. The next summer Daphne spent on the roof of Greengrasses’ residence, waiting for her skin to turn to gold. Astoria was next to her, a parasol in her hands – if Daphne sunbathed, Astoria was determined to rest in shadows. And so in shadows she stood when sorted to Slytherin – befriending a Hufflepuff rather than her housemates.

‘And you?’ Urszula asked.

‘I am not,’ Phoebe had a rare moment of hesitation. ‘Flashy. She didn’t notice me – not until somebody told me to look out for the mudblood, I guess.’

As soon as Astoria learned of Phoebe’s existence, Phoebe had no moment of rest. Astoria would question her endlessly on the matters of muggle horoscopes – how do they compose them with no schools of Divination? – on music – how do they magnify the sound of their instruments? – on art – how do they paint without magic? Unmoving pictures? How abnormal, how wonderful. Meanwhile Charlotte sat by, swallowing her jealousy like a good girl she was. Astoria was ecstatic to have a true mudblood friend – she often forgot how offensive the word was – and Charlotte slowly realized Phoebe was in greater need of Charlotte’s possible gifts, living in the flat of surface area comparable to this of Astoria’s drawing room. Soon, Phoebe began to be fed Swiss chocolate and offered ostrich feathers.

‘Doesn’t it bother you, how Charlotte is?’

‘No, why?’

‘Just – nothing, go on.’

Only Romilda didn’t accept Astoria. At Gryffindor Tower the whispers of Chamber of Secrets were still loud. The upperclassmen were ready to point poor Ginny Weasley. They said she slept with a handkerchief stuffed in her mouth not to wake up the other girls. Ms Pomfrey gave her a bottle of Dreamless Potion to drink, but nothing worked on the nightmares Ginny Weasley had – and it all was the Slytherins’ fault. The sight of her twin there, friendly with a pureblood, made Romilda’s muddy blood boil. Whenever she passed by Phoebe and her friends, she made a show of being charming to Charlotte and ignoring Astoria.

‘It was breaking Charlotte’s heart,’ Phoebe said.

What Romilda didn’t calculate was how stubborn Astoria was. In one Transfiguration class, she asked Phoebe to switch seats with her, only a moment before McGonagall marched in, and leaving Romilda no time to react. Without a word uttered in Astoria’s direction, Romilda pulled out a harlequin she had stolen from her mother’s bookshelf and set out to reading. Astoria joined in, following over Romilda’s arm. Soon they were both flushed and giggling – Romilda once forgot herself to such extent she asked Astoria if it would be alright to turn a page. Only hearing what she herself had said, she huffed and turned it anyway. It produced a lame effect, because Astoria’s reply was please, yes. Of course, McGonagall was no teacher to ignore such outright violation of the rules: she paused in the middle of a lecture on transfiguring a spoon into a tulip and asked if Miss Vane and Miss Greengrass would care to pass her the book they were so enjoying.  Romilda and Astoria were petrified. Romilda waited for Astoria to lie her way out of detention – as any self-respecting Slytherin was expected to do. What Astoria did was to set up the book on fire.

‘No,’ Urszula squealed.

‘She did. There’s still a black circle on the desk if you look for it.’

‘Aren’t Slytherins the cunning ones?’

‘Oh, she was,’ Phoebe smiled. ‘She knew it’d won Romilda.’

A truce was made. As they were cleaning the Owlery, their friendship was solidified. Afterwards, you wouldn’t be able to tear them apart. When Sirius Black broke into the Gryffindor Tower and they were sent to sleep in the Great Hall, Romilda and Astoria curled together in a one sleeping-bag. In the summer, they both went crazy because of separation and wrote to each other daily. In their second year, they sneaked into the Yule Ball –no one would ask the age of two girls if they made enough of an impression – in the robes Astoria ordered from home: purposefully antediluvian to embarrass ever-fashionable Daphne, were she to see them.

‘And they weren’t caught?’

‘No – and they wouldn’t shut up about it for the rest of the year.’

They went to Romilda and Phoebe’s for Easter – the first Easter with their father gone – and it was Astoria who helped Romilda track him down and then escape when alarm in the car set off. They flew on Astoria’s broomstick over Brighton, sunk in clouds and came back more similar to wet rats than to twelve years old girls, only to spend the remainder of the holiday fighting off the fever. But they were smiling like lunatics: did you see how I ruined it, yeah, it was a Porsche – only arseholes have Porsches, very true, and how we almost landed in the sea, oh shit yes, you were so scared, was not, were too, was not, were too.

‘What idiots.’

‘I know.’

‘But – I bet it must be great to have such a person in a world, a person to steal horses with.’

Phoebe stared at her from above her essay – and Urszula couldn’t say what was the look in her eyes, opaque and shaded.

28. 

When Urszula was finally introduced to the girls – (Phoebe revealed her like a magician would reveal the white rabbit: ta-da!, you would never guess what I have found) – she didn’t get on with them like she imagined she would: Phoebe’s stories didn’t make Urszula more confident or comfortable with the other three. Instead, she couldn’t look them into eye. It was as if she has peeped through a key-hole of their bedrooms and seen them naked, and never got caught. Astoria asked what her name was.

‘Urszula.’

‘What?’ she laughed.

‘Ula,’ Urszula offers her the shortening. ‘U-L-A.’

‘You-el-ey?’

‘No – it would be Julia.’

‘Julia – I will call you Julia. And the surname?’

‘Pluta.’

‘Like Pluto? Julia Pluto. A spy’s name,’ Astoria said with glee and the others laughed. Urszula glanced at Phoebe, uncertain. Phoebe rolled her eyes.

Of course, Astoria must be satisfied to have a spy-friend with an unpronounceable name Daphne has never had. You can only imagine how much she would like Julia to tell more of Urszula’s story, how she would adore to drag the dark shape out of the water and have it lie exposed in the sun, its bewitching morbidity exposed.

For a moment, Julia is angry: there has been a boy who asked her if she was a Soviet spy – one who transfigures herself into a little girl to lure little boys into a trap and eat them – and she told him she wasn’t Russian, but he was never convinced – and when Astoria compliments her on her spy’s name, she doesn’t understand. Phoebe told Julia of Astoria’s old family, roots tangled with lords and earls, her history pure and English, begun with Saxons. She would never be accused of being a spy – a foreigner. But then, Julia’s anger melts, falls into soft feathers. She is thirteen. She laughs.

‘So, you’re Phi’s friend,’ says Romilda, her head still on Astoria’s lap. ‘Good – Phi needs to be taken care of and I can’t do it all the time, right?’ she smiles at Julia. ‘She’s like a porcelain doll.’ Her smile is warm, but Julia doesn’t understand. Whatever Phoebe is made of, it isn’t porcelain – no matter how unassuming she makes herself appear. Later, Phoebe will explain to Julia that she permits Romilda to see her as such. Worried that Phoebe will break, Romilda doesn’t notice the sharp edges Phoebe has. But, Julia will ask, doesn’t she regret being unknowable to her own sister? No – not at all. Let Romilda see herself as the naughty twin, Phoebe says. She likes it so.

Charlotte offers Julia her own bottle of pink lemonade.    

‘Next time, I’ll tell papa to send five.’

Julia settles in the armchair and takes a gingerbread man from the plate on the table. She loosens herself and she speaks, and laughs with them – but deep down, there are the secrets Phoebe has told her (eating her marrow like worms).

29.

Once, Julia takes a volume of centaurs’ philosophy and reads:

‘”The activities of knowing and desiring have at their core the same delight of reaching.” What do you make of it?’

Phoebe, stretched next to Julia, their heads on their bags – too hard pillows – and their feet leaning against the wall, their eyes set on the white landscape behind the window, sighs.

‘I make – I say, you can love only a person you don’t know. Once you learn him – or her – you are bored.’

‘Yeah,’ Julia murmurs, caressing the soft cover of the volume. ‘People are like riddles. They are fun as long as unsolved.’

‘Sadly, people are simple riddles. Simple beings,’ Phoebe says. ‘Not you, obviously.’

‘You neither.’

Julia glances at Phoebe, her eyes reflecting stones and snow. She has entertained this thought before: she is somehow superior to the others and therefore justified in examining their secrets, herself remaining hidden. It must be because of her being a foreigner – having a history different to theirs, a dark shape floating in the water. There is a glass wall separating her from the English and she imagines the wall to be a top-wall of a box they are enclosed in like little fish or snails: she is an eye above them. She has a right to dissect their mysteries.

30.

Phoebe’s friends become Julia’s friends over Astoria’s questions – was there a revolution? Was there blood? Did you see a spy? Or a dead body? You did? How did he die? – and Charlotte’s gifts, and Romilda being Romilda – let me see your horoscope, Jules, oh, I see a great love. If Julia is to pinpoint the turning point, it is the Valentines’ day. Astoria comes to Ravenclaw’s table, resolute and with a plan on her lips: she gives Julia a pack of Daphne’s letters and asks Julia to write a Valentine note from Daphne to one Theodore Nott, as kitschy as possible within the realm of plausibility. Julia happily obliges.

They observe the delivery from behind a pillar: Theodore Nott stands up and marches towards where Daphne, Pansy Parkinson and her Malfoy are seated, all blasé and bored in a manner only the aristocrats can be and Daphne tries to mimic. Laughter bubbles in Julia’s chest when she sees it disrupted and because of her own making, too. Theodore Nott shoves the note into Daphne’s face and leaves. Boys, Charlotte murmurs disapprovingly. Daphne doesn’t succeed at hiding the note in her pocket. Pansy snatches it and passes to Malfoy who, awful smile plastered to his face, reads it out loud, with appropriate intonation and gestures to accompany the content.

‘I might be crying,’ Astoria says, crying.

‘Your sister doesn’t look too well,’ says Charlotte.

‘You’re a star, Jules.’

And Phoebe has a look as if she was about to tell Julia how smart Julia is, how brilliant, a true wonder-maker – and Julia feels warm. She, if asked now, would fabricate a hundred of Valentines. Afterwards, she turns from Phi’s friend to our girl, Julia; our spy, Julia Pluto; our con-artist Juliet – Astoria never stops coining new names for her. Next June, Julia is with them and can hear what truths they tell and dares they give. Next summer, she goes to Salaman Island.

31.

Julia has Astoria and Romilda, and Charlotte pieced out: their fathers and mothers, and traumas stuck onto a cardboard, colourful circles and arrows marking the cause and the effect. The Phoebe cardboard is empty: all she has is Phoebe’s silence and opaque eyes. She has never seen her naked. She has never seen her without her paint on: once, she was permitted to see a box of Phoebe’s cosmetics. It was large – Julia’s only clue to the riddle Phoebe is.

32.

They are fourteen and bored. The moment Julia has seen them first, she would never imagine girls of their kind to be bored: in their smiles there was a promise of eternal carnivals. Now her sight is clearer: they are three ordinary girls (Phoebe always to be something else). Julia is attracted Astoria’s semi-ancient family and Charlotte’s money, and Romilda’s boldness, but sometimes all those girls are is a configuration of half-formed bodies thrown onto grass, sweating on the last day of summer, paper bags from Diagon Alley scattered between their ankles, pink lemonade in their bottles too warm to drink.

‘I think I am in love,’ Romilda proclaims.

‘You’re confusing love with sunstroke,’ Astoria sighs and gets hit with the last number of the Witch Weekly. It opens on the long article on Harry Potter. Swiftly, as it has been opened there many times before. ‘Potter?’ Astoria asks.

‘He’s fit.’

‘And a hero,’ Charlotte adds quietly.

Julia doesn’t say Potter is also rich and famous, and mysterious – a tragedy his life is has an appeal, especially to bored fourteen years old girls.

The next day they are on Hogwarts Express, Romilda has them accompany her when she asks Potter to share their compartment. He rejects the offer for the sake of a chubby Gryffindor boy with an ugly plant and Loony Lovegood, whom Julia notices on his side with some surprise. The failure doesn’t bother Romilda. When Potter is made captain of the Quidditch team and the date of the try-outs is set, Romilda makes them all go with her to the pitch – all but Charlotte, already accepted onto Hufflepuff team. At the sound of the whistle Romilda only drools and flails, sending the other three into fits of laughter. They don’t get on the team. Told off, they go to the tribunes and watch the other candidates, loudly commenting the faults of each. Autumn day is slowly ending, the smell of fruit – must be plums – heavy in the air and the balloon silk falling into their hair. Romilda doesn’t shut up: look at him, she says, he’s so dreamy. But when Ginny Weasley flies out, her red hair burning in the golden sunset light, her body small and hard, pressed to the broomstick, Romilda falls silent. Astoria stares at Romilda staring at Ginny. Phoebe and Julia’s eyes connect: do you see it? They do.

The following months Romilda fills with reports on what Harry Potter does or says, but doesn’t mention with a word the hours she wastes following Ginny Weasley. When finally pushed into the corner by Phoebe, she explains she makes sure Ginny doesn’t hook up with Potter – a real threat, she says, since he saved her from the Chamber, a real threat since she can hex anyone and is the best Chaser, and has such a voice. Made for war-cries and psalms, Julia whispers to Phoebe. A joke.

As soon as Slughorn’s party is announced, Romilda engages in the study of Potter’s eating habits, wondering what would be the best method to slip a Love Potion in. Reluctantly, Charlotte makes a few suggestions – would Harry Potter refuse a white truffle? – and Phoebe and Julia contribute, considering it a decent problem for them to examine. Astoria doesn’t speak, but once the matter is settled, she is the one to order the potion. The day an owl drops it into Romilda’s porridge, they skip Charms and hide themselves in a deserted gallery in the western wing where they open the bottle, all anxious to learn the odour it holds for them. Julia’s is parchment, incense and sea-weed. Phoebe doesn’t tell hers. Neither does Astoria.

‘Honeysuckle and rainy air,’ Romilda says. ‘And some perfumes?’

The potion doesn’t work and Ginny’s brother almost dies. They are in the bathroom, over windowsills and facing the mirrors, when Ginny Weasley enters: pale and without her usual lazy grin. Romilda slips and draws a scarlet smudge on her chin. Ginny Weasley opens the tap and splashes her face with cold water, wetting the ends of her hair and the collar of her shirt, unbuttoned at the top with a tie hanging loose from her neck.

‘Hi, Ginny –‘ Romilda says, smearing the scarlet on her cheek with her finger. Ginny blinks. ‘I am sorry – I didn’t want to, uh –‘

‘Don’t listen to her,’ Phoebe interrupts. ‘We had confounding charms with Flitwick and  she’s still,’ she makes a circle with her finger next to her temple. Ginny nods and leaves, wiping her hands into her skirt.

‘You’re mad,’ Astoria doesn’t smile. ‘You could get expelled and what for?’

They are fourteen and quick to forget: before spring is in the full bloom, the memory fades and they’re unbothered – only sometimes Romilda stiffens seeing the Weasley boy, only sometimes she turns strangely serious and tries to talk morals – but it is sometimes, only. They laugh at her ashen face when she announces that Potter and Ginny did hook up. Astoria offers they sneak into Gryffindor Tower and replace Weasel’s shampoo with a balding potion, but Romilda only shakes her head. Astoria steals the shampoo, anyway. The label says Honeysuckle. She puts it back.

In May, Romilda hears from Ginny Weasley that Potter has a Hungarian Horntail tattoo.

In June, Albus Dumbledore dies.

33.

There are resin-scented trees in the corridors, their branches heavy with crystal balls, glided fairies bound on the top. There are holly and ivy garlands hung under ceilings. There is mistletoe with its white small fruit pinned to jambs. The armours have been enchanted to echo the carols in sonorous and solemn voices of long-lost knights. The painted lords and ladies have been forced to smile, wider sweethearts, wider, you wouldn’t like to burn – would you? Come here, lad and get your wand ready, the lady is cold.

Julia and Phoebe leave. The Hogwarts Express passes through snow-caped hills and dark forests, and villages of old stone, smoke puffing out of the chimneys, people at the fireplaces, singing and smiling truly, unaware of the train behind their windows, carrying hundreds of children too quiet for their age, their eyes too weary, their faces too thin. Julia and Phoebe don’t speak.

They are reading. Julia is trying to, but can’t. The words on the page are swimming together and the meaning is gone: they are only dark shapes on a piece of parchment, wavering like wrinkles on a lake, like light on a river. Before her is no longer a text, but Romilda and Charlotte, and Astoria. At Hogwarts. Only four months ago they wouldn’t believe if you said they were to be separated.

It didn’t take long. They were only fifteen, only girls, only fragile. In September, they tried to pretend: Astoria was not like other Slytherins, not like other purebloods, Romilda said. When Romilda came back bruised from DADA lesson, Astoria cleaned the blood. There was blood. When a large seventh-year Slytherin pushed Romilda onto the wall – she was a mudblood and had no right to inhale the air a pureblood exhaled – Astoria hexed him, and they were bruised and bloody together, lips quivering, but eyes victorious. Daphne will kill me, Astoria laughed. It was October. Astoria broke – she broke – Julia wasn’t sure when. Her smile narrowed, her eyes darkened. Phoebe didn’t like to say what was to be heard and seen in Slytherin Common Room.

I’m not flashy, Phoebe said – Julia has seen her fading into the shadows, making herself invisible, a shadow of a girl, no word, no breath coming from her. I switched off, Phoebe said. Some ancient magic, she said, magic of belief: I made myself non-existent – I hardly knew my name. I was almost gone, I – Julia has never seen her cry. Astoria, Phoebe said, wasn’t capable of it. She was flashy. She caught attention. She broke. Daphne been on her, Phoebe said, had a tantrum. If you go with her, Daphne told her, it hurts both of you, all of you. You are pureblood and you will always be. A friendship with a mudblood isn’t an eccentricity to indulge in. It isn’t pianos and trombones anymore. It’s war, it’s war, it’s war. Don’t you see the looks Crabbe gives you? Don’t you know what he can do?

By November, Astoria wasn’t speaking to any of them. Wasn’t seeing, wasn’t hearing. If they passed each other in the corridor, Astoria closed her eyes. But Romilda didn’t care. She went after her: she followed her into dungeons, onto the threshold of her Common Room. Astoria, come on, Astoria, you’re better, Astoria, but you must remember – Astoria never replied. Romilda clutched her elbow and forced an enchanted galleon into her hands: they will hide you, Romilda said, if you go with me, there is a safe place. No Daphne there, no Carrows, no Death Eaters. Astoria’s eyes were blank and her fingers were numb: she let the galleon fall.

She must have been seen with a golden glimmer in her hands, because on the next DADA lesson, Astoria was asked to step forward and to use Crucio on a volunteer from Gryffindor: Ginny Weasley, caught a week before with a wand in her hand and the inscription Dumbledore's Army, still recruiting cut in the wall. Astoria performed the spell. Charlotte, present in the class, left the room paper-faced and glass-eyed. From the next day on, she and Romilda weren’t to be seen. Astoria went crazy, Phoebe said, she was restless, her knees twitching, her fingers trembling. Her notes, Phoebe said, were a mess. She drew labyrinths, pools of ink, lines running nowhere. She went to Pomfrey and, with a finger pointed to her chest, she said: I have a hole here, do you see. And Pomfrey gave her potions, and Astoria emptied the bottles, and she forced herself into a harder structure, more like a mirror. We Slytherins, Phoebe said, aren’t sick long.

Afterwards, Julia has seen Romilda once. She and Ginny Weasley were in the corridor just after dusk. Their faces were in shadows. With their wands they wrote, Dumbledore’s Army, still. A spark flied onto Julia’s sleeve and burnt through with a sting. She was scared.

She and Phoebe are leaving. They are leaving until Hogwart Express brakes and their breaths turn to steam. Ice-lace grows on the window. Then, a shuffle and a scream.

‘Phoebe.’

‘I know. Where are we?’

Julia wrestles with the window. She opens it.

‘On a bridge.’

‘Do you see an end?’

‘No.’

‘Fuck. OK, count to three with me – one – two – three – breathe. What are we doing?’

‘If we jump –‘

‘We must jump.’

‘We can transfigure our trunks into a – a raft.’

‘We can’t. The trunks alone will do. If we empty them, the air inside will pull them up.’

‘Yes – this is – yes.’

They stand up, reach for their trunks and throw the insides on the floor. Their clothes, their magazines, their cosmetics, their favourite blankets and worn-out plush toys. Phoebe goes first. Julia passes her trunk over. But Phoebe’s is too large.

‘Phoebe –‘

‘Just leave it and go!’

She falls on the ground and hisses when cold gravel brushes against her knees. Phoebe grabs her wrist – so hard it hurts – and they run, the trunk between them, to the edge – Julia feels her blood freeze in her veins, her legs stiffen – there are dark shapes in the corner of her eyes and she can’t help but glance at them – the lake they are going to jump in, Julia will drown in it – like the holy man has drowned – her body will resurface, white and blue and bruised – there will be a Mass for her soul and a lament sung – her mother –

The wind hits her and pushes the air out of her lungs. The lake is growing rapidly and in a moment, they fall into the freezing water. Julia doesn’t feel her hands. She is afraid she is letting go of the trunk – she draws her wand and lights a fire, and burns her palm, just to feel anything –

‘Christ!’ she screams. She burns. She hurts. She is alive.

34. 

[A letter, glued to a page.

U, WAR OVER. Y-K-W gone. We won. Romilda alive. Charlotte alive. No sight of Astoria yet. Come tomorrow (fourth) to Leaky C for a butterbeer. Love, P.

The letter is burnt at the edges.]

35.

Romilda speaks of war what is to say, she speaks of Ginny Weasley. Her stories are strange, spilling from the lips she used to apply chapstick to. Here she is, a sixteen years old girl with a subscription to the Witch Weekly and a collection of harlequins on her shelf, saying: we fucked him up – she means her, Ginny and a Death Eater. A triangle Julia has never imagined to see her form. Then, she has never imagined Romilda to become the girl Julia now shares a table with: her hair cut short, her fingers and ears naked – only a pink dot marking her former habit of earring-wearing – her face bare and undone.

It was half-a-year lived through in the Room of Requirement: unreal, she says. You forget mirrors there. Why would you care for your hairstyle? All they had was basic hygiene and Hog’s Head food. Some whiskey if Aberforth liked you. It changes you, Romilda says. Hardens you. You become a person. Without classes, without the school-going mess – you fight and you think. What is important – no, not important – what is vital? She and Ginny Weasley got close. She’s a hero, Romilda says. You can only hope. She fought in the final battle. Romilda didn’t. Too young. They forced her to leave. All she had was a single Death Eater, a scream she shared with Ginny.

‘Charlotte, you killed any?’ Phoebe asks and Julia winces. She has noticed it, too. Over their half-a-year which they passed cut out of the world, aware only of the fact there is a war fought to answer the question whether their lives are of any worth, Phoebe’s letters grew bitter. Uncoated. What she does now is she takes a fork and stabs Charlotte in the middle of her soft jelly-like body. Charlotte bits her lip, but doesn’t let a moan out. Julia wonders if Phoebe is noting the results.

‘No,’ Charlotte says in a small voice. ‘I didn’t fight.’

‘How’s your make-up?’ Phoebe twists the fork.

‘I –‘ Charlotte glances at Romilda who gives her a smile: Charlotte is approved. ‘It helped me. Next to it all, it was a piece of normal life. It was like a ritual to make me alright. It did.’

Phoebe nods. Julia predicts her conclusions: Charlotte is conditioned to feel good if she performs any act of femininity – obviously, whatever form of anxiety she has suffered from, the make-up helped. Before Phoebe has a chance to continue with her experiment – how precise she is, Julia marvels – Astoria comes to the table.

She looks ravishing. Julia would be more sympathetic if she didn’t.

‘What’s with the clothes, Rom?’ she asks, taking the seat. Her voice is only a note off its natural sound. ‘You robbed a Nirvana’s groupie?’

Romilda doesn’t blush. If anything, she is proud to be wearing a dirty shirt and leather – martyr’s clothes, Julia realizes: a cilice. Astoria’s rich robes signify her sin.

Joan of Arc and Jezebel go to a bar. The punchline doesn’t make anyone laugh.

‘I had no time,’ Romilda says unrepentant. ‘To make myself pretty. I fought in a war.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Astoria shrugs. ‘Yesterday you did. But the war is history and now is now.’

‘So we hit restart and forget whatever has happened?’

‘Why don’t we?’

Romilda laughs. It’s hollow and sharp. Julia hasn’t known you can make laughter into a weapon.

How interesting.

‘It has happened. All of it. War. What you did. What you didn’t do – you can’t erase it. You can’t seriously expect us to –?’

‘Listen – I’m sorry, yes? I am.’

Julia glances at Phoebe – Phoebe is watching Romilda and Astoria. Fascinated, too.

‘You tortured a girl.’

‘It was either me or her.’

‘Then it should be you. It was me. I did – you saw what they did to me – you saw and you said “beasts” and I believed it meant something to you, but what you did – what you did ‘

‘Please,’ Charlotte whispers from her seat. ‘Please, don’t argue. Please. We are friends. Let’s stay friends.’

‘She left us,’ Romilda points at Astoria. ‘She left you.’

‘So would you,’ Astoria says. ‘So would you, if you were where I was and heard what I did. Don’t act as if you are holy. You were lucky,’ she is loud now and the glass at the table is shaking, and the people are watching her rise. ‘To be a Gryffindor – lucky to have people who look at you and say “she’ll make a nice hero”. Those people made you. And if not for – not for Ginny Weasley – yes, I have a right to say her name – if not for her, you’d be nothing – you’d run, like Phoebe and Julia did – like they all did. If you only didn’t do all your crush–‘

‘Shut up –‘

‘You both,’ Charlotte explodes, a glass angel brought into a gun-fight. Her hands are shaking and her mascara is running down her cheeks. There are Madonnas who do such a trick: their tears leave marks on the marble. ‘You both shut up and sit down, and behave yourself. We aren’t those people who break off because of their grudges. We are not.’

They do as told. Charlotte takes out a cosmetic bag and opens it with a click. She wipes the tears with a floral-patterned paper towel; she powders her cheeks; she reapplies the mascara. Julia wonders how often has she done it in the Room of Requirement. How often in her own house, a Holland Park meringue with enamel-black doors and smooth pillars to guard it, inhibited by two rats eating each other. Does it help? Is the glass less broken once you’re done? Julia hopes for it. They are only sixteen.

36.

Audrey hears a howl and then, a door slammed: Romilda leaving.

She wants to see it. She doesn’t want it to be real, but she wants to see it. When she comes into the hall, silence is all there is. They must have both left. Clutching her wand, Audrey goes outside into the howling night. Wind shakes her – she can’t move. There are shapes behind the fog: three shapes. Two humans and a beast Audrey cannot name. It leaps forward – a scream – a flash of light. Audrey runs to where it should be, but she slips on the rock and gets lost in the fog. When she comes there, she sees a girl – a wolf – a werewolf – fallen, blood spilling from a wound on its – hers? – head. Astoria and Romilda come from the dark.

‘It attacked,’ Romilda mumbles. ‘I had no – I didn’t know – I just –‘

‘Did she kill –‘ Astoria swallows.

Audrey touches the beast’s neck.

‘No.’

‘Good,’ Astoria says. ‘Good. We wouldn’t manage without Grace.’

‘Your shop-girl’ Audrey hears herself say. ‘Is a fucking werewolf?’

‘So it happens.’

‘I didn’t want to –‘

‘It’s fine, Romilda. You only knocked her out.’

‘But why – why is she here?’

‘No need for hysteria, Julia. We send Grace to the Island on full-moons so she can run free.’

‘What of her home – her  – her family?’

‘We are it,’ Audrey opens her mouth, but she can’t find the words. How familiar. ‘Romilda, stop crying.’

‘I did it,’ Romilda says, her eyes on blood droplets shining on the rocks. ‘I hurt a – a – a girl, I hurt a girl.’

Astoria takes out a handkerchief and wipes Romilda’s cheeks. The space between their bodies is scarce.

‘I told you: self-preservation instinct,’ her voice is soft, words almost lost between the waves. ‘It is in your nature to protect yourself. There are no morals when you fight for survival. You,’ Astoria closes the gap between them. ‘You must understand now. We are – we are all – quite the same. Now you know.’

The wind whipping Audrey’s skin is wild enough to break the trees in the half.

‘You made me do it,’ Astoria freezes. ‘All of it, you made me. You – you tricked me into it, you wanted me to hurt her.’

‘Only to show you –‘

‘You’re sick,’ Romilda’s voice shakes. ‘I – don’t ever – let me go,’ she slips away from Astoria’s numb embrace. ‘I will never – I don’t want to –‘ she takes a step back, and another, and another, her eyes now on Astoria, reflecting the full moon. ‘She isn’t the beast. You are.’

She disapparates.

Astoria opens and closes her hands, grasping air where cloth and body have just been. Audrey now sees the torn fabric and shred skin where the beast – Grace – has attacked. Her teeth close on Astoria’s arm and Astoria screams. Romilda doesn’t think: it is all instinct, saving Astoria from the beast.

‘I am not,’ Astoria says. ‘I am not – am I?’                          

37.

Let us try and imagine a satellite-state as a person, a moonstone boy. He lives in his house, but he isn’t free. He is alive, but he is dead to the world. His name is nowhere to be found. Sometimes, he forgets he exists. Yet, he fights. For years, he fights.

Or: Bartemius Crouch Jr. under Imperius his father casted.

38.

August, 1993. Bartemius Crouch Jr. wins the fight and takes his father for a slave.

April, 1994. Percy Weasley has been enjoying the privileges of Mr Crouch’s replacement for months, now. The letters of Mr Crouch trouble him, but he doesn’t wish to bother the Minister with it. They are all busy.

Twenty-third of May, 1994. Bartemius Crouch Sr. escapes the spell.

Twenty-fourth of May, 1994. Bartemius Crouch Sr. is a bone in the ground, courtesy of his son.

Twenty-fourth of June, 1994. Cedrik Diggory is a body. Another rises from a cauldron.

39.

August, 1994. Percy Weasley is subjected to Inquiry regarding his involvement in the Crouch case. A rapport is made and coded as file 4759A . Percy Weasley is promoted to a Junior Undersecretary.

June, 1998. Ministry of Magic begins the revision of all files produced between 1992 and 1998. The public isn’t informed.

March, 2001. File 4759A is found inaccurate. Hermione Granger agrees to revise it.

40.

[A letter glued to a page.

DARLING JULIA

How’s the house arrest? Must be dreadfully dull – my holidays with Family positively are. We are somewhere in France, but nowhere near the Interesting Stuff – think less Paris & more sea & rocks. Much like Ye Olde Times with you & the ladies – if you substitute you & them with the shining presence of the sunbeam my sis is. Oh, what do I hear from her, Julia. The Greengrass name in Wizengamot! What scandal! What blah blah blah! I tell her she’ll get wrinkles from making the funny thing with her nose she does when shes mad & she throws her hands in the air & leaves – my fav golden girl, whatever would I do without her to entertain me? Do find yourself a sister, Julia love.

The Greengrasses themselves Don’t Bother Much, as per usual. Sis used to be the child full of Angst, but now shes too Grown Up for it, so I consider taking over the role – what do you think? Oh papa & mamma, you should have showered me with your Affections & it’s your fault I’m involved with a sentenced criminal (this would be you) & cue to door-slamming – it might make the hols more fun. I hold you responsible for my Exile to The Dullest Part of France, you know – Daph might be hysterical, but I do agree to have one’s name mentioned in the court is a teeny problem, esp. if one has a Discreet Business to run. If it won’t die out soon, I’ll have to sell my rubies and whatnot (I don’t have Rubies!) & one day you’ll find me On The Streets, reading strangers’ future from their hands – then, I’d have to die my hair black (gypsies are quite dark, aren’t they?) & it’d be Ruinous. So lets hope I’ll be back at my drawing room soon, artfully poised on the chaise longue with a box of I’m-sorry-I’m-a-twat bonbons from you. Honestly, why didn’t you Obliviate yourself if you knew they were going to pump Veritaserum in you? You do need practice, esp. if you intend to continue your career as a defendant.

What’s else there? Not much! Oh, I’m such a tease – I have a Secret for you, sweet Julia who’s always prying her sweet nose into Other’s People’s Business (so pleasant it is to remind oneself of others’ faults – makes one feel almost Virtuous – not wholly, that’s reserved for Charlotta only). So, the Secret. I’m most certain you were DYING to know how Grace, the Werewolf (werewolfess? werewolfette? do help, you have such interesting ideas when it comes to English) made it to the Greengrass’ shop, eh? I pestered the Greengrasses to tell me (oh papa & mamma, do tell, it’s my shop & my werewolfette as much as yours, you know Daphne doesn’t bother with it & Being In The Trade, so I’ll inherit it, etc, etc) & I found the truth – you do believe in truth, don’t you Julia? You’re such a relict, really – the truth being, Miss Grace of Knockturn 702 was born Miss Miranda Crabbe of Crabbe House & got bit at the wee age of 8 & was rid of, namely – sent to the Greengrasses (a secret being a living girl – a living girl as a skeleton in your closet – isn’t it what you, preciously morbid Julia, call Poetic?). Ofc, the Greengrass man was supposed to kill her, but the Greengrass woman suggested making her our shop-girl – eye for profit she has, although I do suspect she revels in the concept of having a CRABBE being her SHOP-GIRL (I do revel myself, Florymonde Crabbe was such a git & imagine me telling her ‘your cousin WORKS at my SHOP, Florymonde dear, for FREE and is a WEREWOLF(ETTE)’ & you do remember, Jolie-Julie, she once declared it degrading to have ever SEEN a werewolf? Ha, if I could only tell her). So Miranda-Grace lives in our house & never leaves, cept on a full moon when she goes on the Island – what I have known for some time. Here’s the story. Was it any good? (Is it less dreadfully dull? I do try to be amusing, you know.)

Now I have you in my power thanks to my Scheherezading, I need to ask – what are you up to with our dear Phoebe (Phillis Vain, they wrote in the newspaper, you seen? PHILLIS VAIN. I swear, I would sue them if I cared for any human being as much as for myself – which we know I don’t, as I’m a Slytherin, but if were to care for 1, it’d be a Vane). She tells me you ignore her letters! Rude, Julia! Badly done! Where are your manners? Do not tell me you have Grudges now. Well, I suppose you do. You and St. Romilda should set up a club. Ha, ha. But Honestly – you do understand: you come to Phoebe’s distressed (and we both know where you work, so if you’re distressed by work & shan’t tell, it must classified – no sophisticated deduction here) & get sloshed – you must have known she wouldn’t miss the chance. Esp. since Skeeter is Terrible and used Phoebe to do all her work & then signed it herself. Her last dozen articles are all Phoebe’s. Phoebe needed a Breakthrough like air. What were you expecting??? Enlighten me, for I cannot phantom this.

Charlotta also tells we should Not Argue and Be Friends. I second. Coz, if you leave your Polish Mudggleborn blah blah behind – nobody has it easy. & if your policy is No Forgiveness Ever, then what I should do? If I offend you, will I be crossed out, too? It makes me look at my fellow Slytherins with growing fondness, coz those people at least have some Distance. & you know I love you mad girls, but hell, you do make me & Phoebe feel like shit sometimes. & I’m getting tired. (Yes, it is emotional blackmail. WHAT WERE YOU EXPECTING, TIMES TWO.)

Just get your act together & invite Phoebe over to be pretentious together. Charlotte would say it’s enough for one friendship here to break. But I wouldn’t, coz I’m not a weenie.

KISSES FROM YOUR DASHING ASTORIA]

41.

(Charlotte doesn’t send a letter. She calls. The telephone in Audrey mother’s flat is an ancient thing what makes it easier for Audrey to pretend she doesn’t hear Charlotte’s crying. I’m so sorry, Charlotte says. If I only have been there with you all, I wouldn’t allow – Audrey doesn’t reply, because she agrees. But, there is a matter with my family. My dad, he– it would be kind to stop Charlotte from speaking and to tell her it’s fine, but Audrey has been under house arrest for two months and she aches to know anything. Felix Felicis,Charlotte says, for years. A squib, but not impotent when it comes to Potions. Drunk before a job interview at Downing 10, drunk before a dinner with Miss Lutwidge. He grew anxious. Won’t a younger man take it all? There are younger men, there is his wife’s assistant whose stare Mr Ayers doesn’t like. There are younger men, but there wouldn’t be any luckier. How often, Audrey asks, making herself un-fascinated. Before the war, it was weekly. And then, no shopping at Diagon Alley for him. What then? Charlotte doesn’t quite – here she swallows a sob – quite know. Mrs Lutwidge-Ayers found out, obviously. He tried to get it from black market and inhuman merchants followed him to Holland Park. And now? Not a divorce. It would wreck them, Charlotte says. They kiss on the stairs of Parliament and dance at balls in embassies, but at home there’s not a word between them.

Just a matter with my family, Charlotte says. She tried to write a letter, but ink is easily turned into stream if you mix it with tears. Audrey doesn’t know what to do with the news – with the secret. It spikes her heart like a thorn.)

42.

There is a girl with a secret asleep on the floor of the flat you and your sister share. You don’t want your sister to see it: she would wake her up and you don’t want the girl to be awaken. What you do is you find chloroform in your sister’s stock – how good it is to have a Healer in a family – and you make sure the girl won’t wake up for long. You apparate with her to her flat – to call it a flat is too generous, but why not be generous? Besides, you have seen your own share of unpleasant rooms. There, you transport the girl onto her bed, cocoon her with sheets and pile the pillows under her head. What you are looking for is on the table, next to a knocked mug. You put the folder in your bag first. Then you hesitate and you put it back on the table. For a moment, it is there, as if never touched. You cast a spell and put two folders in your bag. You disapparate. The copied folder you hide and the original you don’t touch anymore.

You stop to analyse the situation: if you stroll into the Archives and give the folder to anybody it will be too odd to be ignored. Won’t it be? You wonder. You might worry your cuffs as you do when you are solving a problem. You have some money and what you lack, you steal – you say you borrow and you will be able to pay back soon – from your sister. You disapparate again, now to Knockturn. A Polyjuice Potion can be used in too many manners which are illegal to be easily bought elsewhere. The bottle you buy – a large one, if it is to take you through the day – is criminally expensive. With a lighter wallet and a heavier pocket, you apparate back to the girl’s flat. By then, you are tired. Apparitions have never been your forte and there is something with the concept of crossing space so swiftly your muggleborn mind has never got used to. You are sick. But you aren’t the one to resign from your plans because of some dizziness. You take hair from the girl’s brush – you know she doesn’t have any pets – and you drink the potion. There, your skin shivers and your bones dance. The veins on your wrists surface. You paint a new face: you know the moves. You’d make one hell of an actress, with your all-catching gaze and your supple body, able to be anybody. Then, the clothes. Whether you change the underwear – perfectionism, perversion, you name it – is a guess. Her working uniform is thrown on the only chair: you take it. You put the glasses on. With the original folder put in her bag, you leave.

The Archives are a riot on the only day you work there. In the morning, two Unspeakables arrive and demand the file from Edna Spektor – you notice how she wraps herself in cloth in a poor taste, from the bulky neck to short legs and you recognize it, because you know what it is: to be ashamed of your body. Edna Spektor is mad: what file? Do they imply she doesn’t fulfil her duties? How dare they? You smile behind your new small hand, masterfully controlling your gestures.  A well-trained parrot you are. When the Unspeakables leave, you go to Nathaniel King whom you recognize form the stories told. A ghost, a friend, a file-sorter. You are smart: you apologize first, shifting the blame from him to yourself. You make it easy for him to admit he has given the folder to you. He admits. You give the folder back. He passes it to Edna Spektor, now proven wrong, and afterwards, you both share a laugh. You cover your mouth. You cover your mouth.

You leave when the girl would leave – you know her habits – and you apparate back to your flat. The Polyjuice Potion is wearing off and you can see yourself emerging from inside her. You might not be happy to see it – you might not like your face. The girl is an idiot, but her face is white like apple-tree blossoms, like cottage cheese, like picket fence: a comfort you don’t have. When your body is back, you take care of it: the foundation, the powder, the shadows, the shades. It takes you time. It’s art, real magic, what you can make of yourself given time and enough cosmetics. But you need to go, again, and you need to ready yourself for hard negotiations. Your boss doesn’t like you being late. And you being absent for a full day – she won’t like it at all. How will you present what you achieved?  It will work, anyway. You will give the folder to your boss, but not before she promises you a raise and appropriate recognition. You won’t allow to be treated like a simple fetch-it: but you are too smart to argue with it without an ace up your sleeve. Now you have it. You will win – you always do – and you will have two months to prepare yourself for the costs of the victory. To name it “costs” is to assume you do care for it – for the girl you have found asleep.

There is a hope you do.

43.

(Weatherby.

Audrey reads the book – and throws it into the wall, and goes to the kitchen for a cup of bitter tea, and pictures soft feathers before she reads again. What comes of it in those pale hours between dreaming and waking, is not the gore of a human body turned into a bone. Not the man out of his mind, running through the trees, running from the killer, his son.

Those are the stories for the others, for those who were missing a hook which they might slide into Percy Weasley’s flesh to bring him down from the Ministry, like a fish, like a jellyfish. The man who got too much too fast, who got drunk on borrowed power, who never told a word of Mr Crouch’s strange illness, who as good as killed Cedrik Diggory. There is more. Stories stolen from Ministry, stories bought from housewives of Ottery St. Chaphole (such a strange boy, yes, I can recall some incidents, always cold-blooded, how much do you pay, again?), from Percy Weasley’s less successful schoolmates (like a stone, Percy, work, work, work, rules, rules, rules, and ambitious like a snake, too), from Penelope Clearwater (threw his family away for the Ministry – threw me away, they told him I was a threat – they meant a mudblood).

What comes to Audrey is this: Weatherby. A made-up word. Weatherby, like weathered, for example a young man who’d overwork himself nightly. Or weather, a topic for a polite, but boring person to touch. Or weather-by, like go by or pass by, if you don’t notice him, in his second-hand robes, with a paper-cup full of undrunk tea. Weatherby. A surname given by Crouch Sr. himself, like a baptism. A neat, mild surname, nothing to do with Weasley: loud, weird, failing. He might have preferred the other one.

Audrey considers him, a young man of eighteen – her age – with double surnames. She imagined him responsible for her house arrest and for that, she had rage in her. It melts into her un-sugared tea, into a salt taste on her tongue. Eighteen. Weasley-Weatherby.)

44.

Here’s why, Your Honour.

With a pen, not a tape I stuck myself not to cardboard, but to paper. The result is for your consideration. It is a jellyfish. A simple being. Me.

Ealing, June-November 2001

P