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The road south is long. Sirius has driven it twice in his life, both times in the back of the Bentley, both times in a stiff collar, both times not looking out of the window. He’s looking out of the window now. The M25 is the colour of wet slate and is dotted with lorries; the sky is pale and uninterested. Somewhere just past Watford he realises he’s got no plan for the next ten hours of his life, never mind the next ten years, and that this should frighten him more than it does.
The seven thousand pounds is in a building society account in his name. The seven thousand was, until February, not technically anybody’s, parked in trust with the family solicitors. Now it’s his. The Vauxhall cost a hundred. He’s got six thousand nine hundred pounds and a half-tank of petrol and a packed bag and a name he hasn’t yet decided whether to keep. The first one, Sirius, is fine. The other one—Black—he’s less sure about. Black is what the woman at the bank had written down when he’d opened the account, and he had watched her write it and felt nothing he could have explained.
He keeps thinking, the money’s not clean.
The money is Alphard’s, which is the best he could ever have hoped for. But Alphard’s money is Black money, and there’s no way around it. The Blacks made theirs the old way—in Lancashire mills nobody wanted to look at too closely, in Caribbean estates nobody put in writing afterwards, in shipping in the 18th century, which nobody discusses at the table at Christmas. Sirius had been told about most of this in pieces and then told to forget it. He hadn’t forgotten; he’d filed it. He’d been able to use the silver knife at the Easter dinner table only by pretending the silver had grown in the ground instead of how it really had come in the possession of his family: bought with dirty money.
Alphard’s seven thousand had come, in the end, from the same ground.
Sirius wouldn’t be in the car if he hadn’t taken it; that’s the bit he keeps having to walk around. He couldn’t have gotten out. He couldn’t have bought the Vauxhall, the petrol, the bedsit he’s got to find by tonight, the meals he’s got to eat next week. He’d been holding out for Alphard’s money the way a man holds out for a passport. Without it, his rebellion was a tantrum; with it, his rebellion’s a life. He’s hated this knowledge for six years. He’s also lived for it.
He pictures his mother and father both this morning, when his bed is found made, and his drawers are found empty, and they understand, finally, that the money Alphard left him hasn’t been spent on records and cigarettes after all, like they’d expected him to do. It’s been spent on a car. It’s been spent on opening a door.
He’s used their money against them. He’s used their money to leave them. None of that makes their money his.
He drives.
He stops once, at a service station outside St Albans, for a coffee and a sausage roll. He hasn’t had a service-station sausage roll before. He’s had sausage rolls made by the Black family cook at family functions, and he’s had the kind the Potters had on hand on Boxing Days, but he’s never had one wrapped in greaseproof paper in a Little Chef, eaten standing up in a car park in the cold while the lorries idled, and it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten. He gets two more. He then gets a bottle of Coca-Cola the size of his forearm. He drinks it leaning against the bonnet of his car, watching a family of four crossing the car park, and he can hear his mother in his head saying that drink will rot your teeth and he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care.
He gets back in the car. He puts the radio on. He plays something loud enough that he can’t think over it.
The bedsit’s on the second floor of a terrace in Camden that smells like cat piss. The landlord’s a Greek man who calls him son and doesn’t ask his age, which Sirius is grateful for. The rent’s forty pounds a week. He signs the agreement in the name on his driving licence, which is the only name he’s got documents for. He’ll work out what to do about the name later.
He puts the bag down in the middle of the room and looks around.
The room’s the size of his old bedroom halved. There’s a window onto the street; there’s a sink. There’s a bed that’s been slept in by other people and that has a stained mattress, the source of which Sirius tries very hard not to identify. There’s a chest of drawers he doubts he’ll ever fill. There’s a gas ring; the landlord shows him how to bleed it. There’s a bare bulb in the ceiling the landlord’s been meaning to put a shade on. By the looks of it, he’s been meaning to put a shade on it since the early 1980s.
Sirius sits down on the bed.
The street outside’s doing what London streets do. Someone’s laughing about something on the pavement. A bus stops nearby and pulls away. The traffic’s got a different sound from the traffic at home—denser, more layered, more confident of itself.
He puts his head in his hands.
He cries, briefly, into his palms, for something he won’t name even here. Then he washes his face at the sink with a flannel he’s brought from home (from the Lupin household, oatmeal-coloured, smelling of fabric softener—taken without permission, kept like a relic), and he goes out to find a phone box and a chippy, in that order, because that’s what one does in London when one’s seventeen and free.
He doesn’t call James. He doesn’t call Remus. He doesn’t call Peter. He certainly doesn’t call Regulus.
He doesn’t know why he doesn’t. He stands in the box with the receiver in his hand and ten pence in the slot, and he can’t get the numbers out of his fingers. Perhaps it’s because if he speaks to any of them he’ll have to be Sirius again, and he is, in this moment, in this bedsit, outside the chippy, somebody nobody’s met yet. He’s enjoying the not-having-been-met. He’s going to have to be met again at some time, by people who knew him before, and he wants, just for tonight, to be only the person standing in the box.
He puts the receiver back. The ten pence drops back out.
He keeps it for later.
The first weeks are a soft kind of madness. He hadn’t known what he was going to do once he stopped driving. He’d had the whole journey to imagine it, and once he was actually in the bedsit, sitting on a stranger’s mattress, he discovered that he had imagined nothing.
So he eats; that’s the first thing he makes up for. Walburga had been a believer in austerity at table—small portions, no condiments, no fizzy drinks at the meal, no chocolate after Lent—and the result is that at seventeen, Sirius has never eaten properly in his own house in his life. Now he does. He eats at the chippy on Camden Road five nights of the first week. He has cod and chips with mushy peas and a saveloy and a tub of curry sauce and a can of Coca-Cola, and on the second night, he has the same again, but with a battered sausage instead, and on the third night, he discovers the existence of the deep-fried pickled egg, and on the fourth night, he has two of them.
He buys a four-pack of Coke from the corner shop. He drinks them in his bedsit one after the other, in his bed, with the bulb off, watching the streetlight through the curtain, and he feels obscene and triumphant. He’d only ever had Coke at the Potters’, and only one bottle at a time, on a Saturday afternoon, when Mrs Potter would shake her head at how quickly he drank it. Now he has it whenever he likes. He has Coke in the morning. He has Coke in the bath. He has Coke and a Mars bar for breakfast on the third day, and he sits on the edge of the bed swinging his legs while he eats it, because it’s something a child does, and he was never allowed to do that, or to even be a child.
He spends fourteen pounds on a CD player from a charity shop in Kentish Town and another fifteen on three CDs—Oasis, Radiohead, The Stone Roses—and he plays them on the bedsit floor with the volume up loud enough that the woman upstairs bangs on the floor twice. He buys a curry. He then buys several more of them. He buys a pizza. He buys a kebab, which Walburga would faint to know, because they’re foreign, and he eats it sitting on the front steps of the bedsit at half past one in the morning watching the drunks come out of the pub.
He buys himself a leather jacket from Camden Market that’s too big in the shoulders and almost certainly nicked. He buys himself a battered pair of Doc Martens. He buys himself a packet of Marlboro Reds, the proper red, not the Lights they used to scrounge off Dorcas’s brother, and he smokes one walking down Inverness Street and feels like a main character in a film.
He pierces his own ear with a sewing needle, badly, in the bedsit mirror, and bleeds onto the sink. It gets severely infected, and he has to go to urgent care later that night, but he doesn’t care. He’s never been so happy.
This is, all of it, paid for with Alphard’s money. He’s aware of that. He’s aware that every sausage and every can of Coke and every CD and every Marlboro is a small piece of the same Black money he is supposed to be running from. He’s aware, very much so. He also doesn’t care. He’s spent seventeen years not being able to want things. He’s going to want everything for a while. He thinks his mother would weep to see him eating a disgusting pickled egg in the rain, and he uses that thought to swallow.
He gets a job in the third week. He doesn’t strictly need to—the seven thousand will last him a year and a bit if he’s careful, longer if he isn’t an idiot—but he can’t bear the bedsit during the day, and he can’t bear the thought of the money running out without anything coming in. He gets to stocking shelves at a nearby Sainsbury’s, which pays one pound eighty an hour and doesn’t ask too many questions. He works the evening shift because the evening shift pays more, and because the evening shift means he doesn’t have to be alone in the bedsit through the long, late hours, listening to other people having lives through the wall.
He sends a postcard to James in the fourth week. It says only: I’m alive. I'm safe. Tell R and R and P. Please — S. He doesn’t put a return address on it; he’s not ready. He’s afraid James will write back and he’s afraid James won’t write back, and he doesn’t yet know which he is more afraid of.
The money’s never out of his head, even while he’s spending it.
He remembers Alphard a great deal. Alphard had been the only Black who’d ever let him be a child—the lazy son, the disappointment with his hands always in his pockets, the one who had laughed at Walburga to her face at family lunches and not been struck for it because he was older than her. Alphard had given him a pound coin every birthday until he was nine. Alphard had taken him to see The Phantom Menace at the Odeon when Sirius was little, and bought him popcorn the size of his head, and let him put his feet up on the seat in front. Alphard had died of a heart attack at fifty-one in his Brighton flat, surrounded by paperback thrillers and an unfinished crossword and one cat called Mrs Thatcher, and had left every penny he had to his oldest nephew without ever asking the oldest nephew if he wanted it.
Sirius wants it. Sirius can’t afford not to want it. Sirius had been wanting it for six years. He hates that he wants it.
The Black money’d bought him violin lessons and Latin tutors and a school uniform with his initials on the cuff. It’d bought him the Bentley rides and the silver knife and the rosary ornament his mother threw at the dog that one time. It’d bought him a house with seven bedrooms and a chapel down the road where the priest knew his Christian name. It’d bought him every nice thing he’d ever owned. It’d also bought him every awful thing he’d ever owned, which is to say, himself.
He can’t disentangle them; he’s tried. There is no version of Sirius Black that exists without the Black money—without the Latin tutor, the violin teacher, the books on the shelves of the library at home, the trips abroad in school holidays, the easy fluency in three things he never had to work for. He is, he’s begun to suspect, made of the money. He can’t pretend he isn’t. He can’t pretend he hasn’t been spoiled.
It’s the worst word he knows.
Spoiled. Spoiled like a peach left out on a sill; turned, gone wrong, still bearing the shape of the thing it was supposed to be. Spoiled like a child given everything, and so unable to bear the loss of anything. The word keeps surfacing as he walks back home from his evening shift through the orange streetlight, the air smelling of takeaway and exhaust. He’s been spoiled, and he’s got out, and he’s still spoiled, and he’s going to spend the rest of his life being a spoiled boy who got out and pretending he isn’t.
Even his leaving was bought.
Even his freedom is theirs.
Still, he can feel it, underneath the shame, when he isn’t looking at it directly: he’s free. He keeps having to stop in the middle of streets to register the fact of it, like a dog testing the door of a kennel that’s been left ajar. He can do anything. He can stay out until four in the morning. He can buy a record at half past eleven on a Tuesday night and play it twice through before bed. He can swear at the top of his voice in his own room. He can leave the dishes in the sink. He can not go to Mass on Sunday—he sleeps right through the first Sunday in the bedsit, and wakes up at one in the afternoon with the bedsheet over his face, being afraid that Walburga will walk through the door any minute to drag him to church, and lies there for a long time listening to the bells of some Camden church through the window, and then he turns over and goes back to sleep, and the world does not end.
He buys himself a proper breakfast at a café on Parkway the next Sunday. Two eggs, two sausages, two rashers of bacon, beans, fried bread, and a slice of black pudding because the woman behind the counter says it’s good. He doesn’t like the black pudding. He eats it anyway, on principle, because Walburga would have died sooner than let him eat it. He has a mug of tea the size of his face. The woman calls him love when she puts the plate in front of him, and he has to take a sip of tea immediately to cover what his face does at the word.
He gets a library card. He’s not allowed to vote yet—he is only seventeen and a quarter—but he gets a library card and he stands in front of the issuing librarian feeling, absurdly, more legitimate than he has ever felt in his life. He takes out four books. He doesn’t finish any of them; he just wants to take them home and have them on the chest of drawers, like a stash. He has never in his life owned books he chose for himself. The library books aren’t exactly his, but he doesn’t care. They are in his room, on his furniture, in his name.
He has six thousand seven hundred and forty pounds left, and he has a library card, and he has a CD player and a bag of unopened crisps and a leather jacket and a pierced ear and a key to a door he can lock from the inside, and he thinks, very privately, that he might be alive for the first time.
In his second month, he stops at a fishmonger’s window on the high street because there’s a child there with her father. The child is about four years old and has her hand inside her father’s hand. She’s pointing at the lobsters in the tank, very solemnly. The father is bending down, listening. The child says something Sirius can’t hear, and the father laughs and ruffles the back of her hair and bends and kisses the top of her head.
Sirius watches them for too long. He has to remind himself to keep walking.
It’s something he hasn’t let himself think about before. It catches him sideways: I won’t have that. He thinks it before he has time to defend himself against thinking it. He thinks it with the same dull surety he’s been used to thinking other things he hasn’t let himself name. He won’t have a child whose head he bends to kiss. He won’t have a child who points solemnly at a lobster. He won’t have a child at all, probably, because the thing he is, the thing his mother prayed about, the thing he had felt in his fingers on the back of Remus’s neck and on the softness of Remus’s lips and tongue on a January night five months ago, doesn’t, in the world that Sirius understands the world to be, lead to children. He doesn’t even know whether he wants them. He suspects he might. He suspects he might have wanted them very much, in a different version of his life. He suspects, in the version of his life where he’d grown up in the Potter house instead of the Black one, he would have wanted them so much he would have ached.
He stands on the pavement, and the dread comes up under his ribs like cold water.
It’s not only that he won’t have children. It’s that he won’t have anything that follows. He won’t have a name to pass on, because he’s going to be the last Black who ever uses the name without flinching, and even he’s going to stop using it soon. He won’t have someone to be old in the company of, probably. He won’t have a house with photographs on the walls. He won’t have grandchildren to bring around on Sundays. He’s, by leaving, signed himself out of every shape his life was supposed to take, and he hasn’t yet signed himself into any of the shapes it could take instead, and he doesn’t yet know if there are shapes it can take instead, for someone like him, in 2004, in a Camden bedsit, at seventeen years old.
He’s got out of a small dark place and into a larger dark place.
At least he chose this one.
He passes a phone box; he doesn’t go in. He hasn’t called anyone yet, and he’s starting to suspect he isn’t going to, because he’s starting to suspect he’s come to London not to be free but to disappear, and that disappearing is one of the only things he’s allowed.
He imagines Regulus in his bedroom at half past five in the morning, holding Brideshead Revisited. He’s the one who’ll have it, Sirius decides. He’ll have the name. He’ll have the house. He’ll have the children—Regulus will get married, Regulus will be allowed to, Regulus is, as far as Sirius knows or anyone has ever asked, normal—and he’ll have small dark-haired children in matching coats coming down the aisle at Christmas, and Walburga will live to see them, and they’ll call her Grandmama and put their cold cheeks against her cold cheek for kisses. Regulus will have the dynasty.
Sirius is glad. He’s glad. He wants Regulus to have it.
And in the same instant, in the same breath, in a way so quick he almost can’t catch it: I hope it ruins him.
He flinches against himself. He keeps walking.
By the third month, he’s got a routine. He’s got the evening shifts. He’s got a notebook he writes in sometimes. He’s got a guitar he’s bought second-hand from a man in a pub for thirty pounds; it’s missing a string, but he’s figuring out three chords a week. He’s begun to think, sometimes, in the very small hours of a Tuesday morning when the bedsit’s quiet, that he might one day be a person who makes music. He has, by this point, written seven extremely bad songs. One of them is about a road. One of them is about a chapel. One of them is about a boy he doesn’t name. He doesn’t show them to anyone; he doesn’t even sing them aloud. He plays them three times each and then turns the page.
The unnamed boy comes to him more than anybody, which is saying something, because he thinks about James and Peter constantly. He misses James like a limb, the way only James can be missed, with the dull surprise of reaching for someone who isn’t there. He thinks about James at breakfast, where James would have made him laugh; he thinks about James on the bus, where James would have made up stories about the other passengers; he thinks about James in the evening shift, where James would have been a disaster in the best possible way and got them both sacked. He thinks about Peter sitting cross-legged on James’s floor with a packet of crisps, which is where Peter spent most weekends, and he thinks about how Peter must have heard the news last and tried not to show how much it hurt him to be last to know. He thinks about the postcard he sent and how James will have folded it and not known what to do with it.
But Remus...he thinks about in a different way.
Remus he thinks about at night, after the Coke-induced sugar rush is gone and the light is off, lying on the stained mattress, watching the bedsit ceiling. Remus, he thinks about in the bath, when he has run the water too hot, and the steam softens the edges of the room. Remus, he thinks about on the night bus, looking at the dark windows and seeing his own face in them and remembering that the last time someone had touched his face, that someone had been Remus.
There is a pub in Soho that Sirius has walked past twice now on his way home from the night bus. The first time, he hadn’t known what it was. The second time, he had clocked the rainbow flag in the window and the two men kissing under a lamp on the pavement outside, and he had walked another half a mile before he had been able to think clearly again. He hasn’t gone in; he is too afraid. But he has slowed down outside it both times, and he has, once, let himself picture it. Picture going in. Picture not going in alone.
In the picture, Remus is there. In the picture, Remus has his coat off, and his sleeves pushed up. In the picture, there is music loud enough that nobody talks much, and Remus is leaning against a wall, and Sirius is leaning against Remus, and Sirius is kissing him in a room where everybody else is also kissing somebody else, other boys kissing boys and girls kissing girls, and nobody is looking, and nobody cares. Nobody would care. That is the picture. That is the thing the picture gives him that nothing in his real life has ever given him.
He lets himself have the picture for about thirty seconds at a time, and then he puts it away, because he can’t afford to keep it out.
Remus wouldn’t come. Remus wouldn’t, even if Sirius asked; Sirius is fairly sure of that now. He left in March without saying goodbye, and he has sent one postcard since to James, signed S., and he has not given a phone number or an address or a way back in, and Remus is the kind of person—Remus is a careful person, a person who has watched his own mother love a careless man, a person who has been gently disappointed by people his whole life and has stopped being surprised by it. Remus would not get on a train to a faraway city to kiss a boy who hadn’t told him he was leaving. Remus would think yes, alright at the news of Sirius being in London, the same yes, alright as the night Sirius hadn’t said, and he would close the door very carefully and go on with his life.
Sirius knows this; Sirius believes he knows this. He lets himself imagine the pub anyway, because the imagining of it costs nothing, and because it is the only way he has yet found to be in a room with Remus Lupin and be allowed to want him.
Maybe one day. Maybe in a different version of all this. Maybe when he has something to offer Remus besides a bedsit and an infected ear and six thousand pounds of money Remus wouldn’t take.
He keeps the picture small. He keeps walking.
Despite all of this, he’s, very privately, beginning to suspect that he’s going to be alright. He doesn’t trust the suspicion. He keeps it in a small dry place inside himself where he can’t look at it too often, in case looking at it puts it out. He’s no longer crying every night. He is, in fact, beginning to find that whole days go past where he doesn’t cry at all. He’s beginning to find he likes the bus.
He’s beginning to find, in short, that he’s not, as it turns out, only what was done to him. Maybe he’s also what he does next. Maybe the money’s allowed to be the boat, and not the destination. Maybe a spoiled boy can become an unspoiled man.
He doesn’t quite believe it, but he’s closer to believing it than he was when the Nova hit the M25 at six o’clock on a March morning, and he counts that as progress.
He posts another postcard at the end of the third month. This one says: I live in Camden. Working evenings. I’ve got a guitar. Please don’t worry about me. — S. He still doesn’t put a return address, but he writes Camden, this time.
He writes Camden, and he posts it before he can change his mind, and he walks the long way back to the bedsit through the spring evening, his hands in his pockets, the streetlights coming on one after the other along the road, and somewhere inside him, in the small place, the suspicion shifts a little, like an animal turning in its sleep.
A boy can be a boat too.
A boy can be the thing that money buys the freedom of.
He keeps walking.
