Chapter Text
It wasn’t the first time there’d been a row over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive, and it wouldn’t be the last. Mr Vernon Dursley had been dragged out of sleep at some ungodly hour by a long, mournful hooting from his nephew Harry’s bedroom, and he’d been building up to this since the kettle went on.
‘Three times this week!’ he bellowed down the table. ‘Three! If you can’t keep that bird quiet, I’ll chuck it out myself!’
Harry tried, for what felt like the hundredth time, to explain.
‘She’s bored,’ he said. ‘She’s used to being out. If I could let her fly at night, just for an hour...’
‘Do I look like I came down in the last shower?’ snarled Uncle Vernon. A piece of fried egg trembled in his moustache. ‘I know exactly what happens if that owl gets out.’
He and Aunt Petunia exchanged one of their dark looks, the kind they’d been exchanging over Harry’s head since he was old enough to notice. Harry opened his mouth to argue, and whatever he’d been going to say was lost under a belch from the Dursleys’ son Dudley that went on long enough to rattle the cutlery.
‘More bacon.’
‘There’s more in the pan, sweetums,’ said Aunt Petunia, gazing at her enormous son with wet eyes. ‘We’ve got to build you up while we’ve got you. I don’t trust that school food...’
‘Rubbish, Petunia. I never went short at Smeltings,’ said Uncle Vernon heartily. ‘Dudley gets plenty. Don’t you, son?’
Dudley, who was so large that his bottom spilled over both sides of the kitchen chair, grinned, and swung round to Harry.
‘Pass the pan.’
‘You’ve forgotten the magic word,’ said Harry irritably.
He hadn’t meant anything by it. He’d have said the same thing to anyone. But the effect on the rest of the family was extraordinary. Dudley gasped and went over backwards off his chair with a crash that shook the floor. Aunt Petunia gave a little shriek and clapped both hands over her mouth. Uncle Vernon was on his feet, with the veins standing out at his temples like cords.
‘WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU,’ Uncle Vernon thundered, spraying the tablecloth, ‘ABOUT SAYING THE M WORD IN THIS HOUSE?’
‘What, malignant?’ Harry said dryly, as that was exactly what he thought about the Dursleys.
He regretted it the moment it was out.
‘HOW DARE YOU THREATEN DUDLEY!’ roared Uncle Vernon, and he brought his fist down so hard the toast rack jumped.
‘I wasn’t threatening him, Uncle Vernon,’ Harry said patiently and calmly, despite how highly strung the Dursleys were being.
‘I WARNED YOU! I WILL NOT HAVE YOUR ABNORMALITY SO MUCH AS MENTIONED UNDER THIS ROOF!’
Harry looked from his uncle, who’d gone the colour of a plum, to his aunt, who was trying to haul Dudley up off the lino and not managing it.
‘All right,’ said Harry. ‘All right...’
He kept his voice low and level, the way you’d talk to a dog that had its hackles up. The truth was that he’d done it on purpose. Not the magic word; that had been an accident. But the malignant, yes. He’d done that.
Something had come back from Hogwarts with him that hadn’t gone up there in September. The same stubborn streak that had kept him on a bucking broomstick and taken him down through the trapdoor and up against Voldemort had come home to Privet Drive in his trunk, and it had opinions about the Dursleys. Sometimes, for no better reason than that he loathed them more than he’d ever loathed anything, Harry would try it on with them. He’d say the one thing that would set Uncle Vernon off and then stand very still while the bull came at him, and step out of the way at the last second, like a man with a red cloth. There was a thrill in it. But he could admit, as his uncle sat back down breathing like a winded rhinoceros, that the Dursleys were already strung as tight as piano wire, and that what he was doing wasn’t helping.
Uncle Vernon watched him out of the corners of his small, sharp eyes for the rest of the meal. He’d been watching Harry like that ever since Harry had come home for the holidays, the way you’d watch a parcel that had started ticking. Because Harry wasn’t a normal boy. He was about as far from a normal boy as it’s possible to get.
Harry Potter was a wizard. A wizard with one year of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry behind him, and if the Dursleys were miserable to have him home, they couldn’t have been half as miserable as Harry was to be there.
He missed Hogwarts like a toothache. He missed the castle, with its shifting staircases and its ghosts and its passages behind the tapestries. He missed his lessons, or most of them; he could have managed without Snape, the Potions master. He missed the post arriving by owl, and the feasts in the Great Hall, and his four-poster in the tower, and going down to Hagrid’s hut at the edge of the Forbidden Forest for excellent tea and equally as dreadful rock cakes And he missed Quidditch, with its six tall hoops and its four flying balls and its fourteen players on broomsticks, more than he’d have thought it possible to miss a game.
And there was something else he missed, which he wouldn’t have admitted to Ron, or Hermione, or to himself if he could help it. He missed Dracina Malfoy. Not Malfoy, exactly. He missed the twinkle that had come into her silver eyes when he’d knelt down beside her on the common-room floor, with Hermione’s Body-Bind holding her stiff as a plank, and told her he accepted her apology. He’d thought about that twinkle more often than was sensible. It had been aimed at him. Nobody had ever aimed anything like it at him before.
He shook the thought off. He had enough to be getting on with.
Every one of Harry’s spellbooks, along with his wand, his robes, his cauldron and his top-of-the-range Nimbus Two Thousand, had gone into the cupboard under the stairs the moment he’d walked through the front door, and Uncle Vernon had put a padlock on it. What did the Dursleys care if Harry lost his place on the house team because he hadn’t been near a broom all summer? What was it to them if he went back without a line of his homework done?
And it had come to Harry, over the long weeks of this summer, exactly why so many witches and wizards wanted nothing whatever to do with Muggles, and why they’d gone to such lengths to wall themselves off. He’d never understood it at Hogwarts. Hermione’s parents were Muggles, and they sounded perfectly nice. But he’d spent six weeks in a house where having a wizard in the family was a matter of the deepest shame, where the word itself couldn’t be said, and he understood it now. He wished he could wall himself off too. Uncle Vernon had gone so far as to padlock Hedwig into her cage, in case she carried a message to anybody in the wizarding world, and Harry had come to think that, if it had been the other way round, he’d have been tempted to do the same to Uncle Vernon.
Harry looked nothing like the rest of the family, and it was one of the few things about him that he was grateful for. Uncle Vernon was a fat old boy with about as much neck as he had respect for Harry. His moustache was enormous, and whatever he ate or drank seemed to end up in it, so that Aunt Petunia had him groom it at the hall mirror every morning like a prize shrub. Aunt Petunia herself was bony and horse-faced, with a long neck she used for looking over the garden hedge at the neighbours, which she kept clipped to exactly the right height for the purpose. Dudley was blond and pink and porky, and had managed to combine the worst of both his parents into one dismal lump, and they’d spoilt him to the bone.
It had struck Harry more than once that Dudley and Dracina Malfoy would have got on like a house on fire. Both of them were arrogant, both of them were cruel, and both of them were convinced, to the marrow, that they were better than everybody else in the room. It was that likeness, in the end, that had made him refuse her hand in Madam Malkin’s and again on the train. He’d looked at her and seen Dudley in a long blonde wig. And nothing she’d done all year had given him a reason to change his mind. He was sure of that. Nearly sure.
A year ago, almost to the day, Harry had found out what he really was. He’d been carried off to Hogwarts, to a place where nobody shouted at him, where nobody called him a freak, where nobody came at his head with a frying pan or a rolling pin or the flat of a hand, where he had Ron and Hermione, where the whole world was the kind of thing you only found in fairy tales, and he’d never wanted to leave it. But he had to leave it. Every summer, for as long as he was at school, he’d have to come back here, and he hated that with a hatred that surprised him. Before Hogwarts he hadn’t known any different. He’d never had a thing to compare Privet Drive with. Now it was like the Mirror of Erised all over again. The whole wizarding world had shown him something better, close enough to touch, and then the train had pulled into King’s Cross and he’d had to walk away from it. So there was nothing to do but seethe quietly and count the days until September.
The Dursleys hadn’t even remembered that today was Harry’s twelfth birthday. He hadn’t expected much. They’d never once given him a proper present, let alone a cake. But to let it go by without a single word...
At that moment Uncle Vernon cleared his throat with great importance.
‘Now. As we all know, today is a very important day.’
Harry looked up. He hardly dared believe it.
‘This could well be the day I close the biggest deal of my career,’ said Uncle Vernon.
Harry went back to his toast.
Of course, he thought. The dinner party. His uncle had talked of nothing else for a fortnight. Some rich builder and his wife were coming to dinner, a builder and his wife who both had very big noses, and Uncle Vernon had set his heart on a huge order out of them. Uncle Vernon’s firm made drills.
‘Vernon, dear. Aren’t they...’
‘Yes, my darling. And that’s why we need to put our personal feelings aside for the sake of the business. This is very important. Especially you, Harry! I know how you can be about... those people.’
Harry shrugged. He hadn’t the faintest idea what Uncle Vernon meant. It was Vernon and Petunia who’d warned him about "those people" in the first place,
‘I think we’d better run through the schedule one more time,’ said Uncle Vernon. ‘Everyone in position by eight. Petunia, you’ll be...?’
‘In the lounge,’ said Aunt Petunia at once, ‘ready to welcome them graciously into our home.’
‘Good, good. Dudley?’
‘I’ll be at the door.’ Dudley put on a horrible, simpering little smile. ‘May I take your coats, Mr and Mrs Mason?’
‘Oh, they’ll adore him!’ cried Aunt Petunia.
‘Very good, Dudley,’ said Uncle Vernon. He swung round on Harry. ‘And you?’
‘I’ll be in my bedroom, making no noise and pretending I’m not there,’ said Harry tonelessly.
‘Exactly,’ said Uncle Vernon, with relish. ‘I’ll bring them through to the lounge, introduce you, Petunia, and see to the drinks. At quarter past eight...’
‘I’ll announce dinner,’ said Aunt Petunia.
‘And Dudley, you’ll say...’
‘May I take you through to the dining room, Mrs Mason?’ said Dudley, holding out a fat arm to a woman who wasn’t there.
‘My perfect little gentleman!’ sniffed Aunt Petunia.
‘And you?’ said Uncle Vernon viciously, to Harry.
‘I’ll be in my room, making no noise and pretending I’m not there,’ said Harry dully.
‘Precisely. Now. We’ll want a few compliments at the table. Petunia, any thoughts?’
‘Vernon tells me you’re a marvellous golfer, Mr Mason... Do say where you found that dress, Mrs Mason...’
‘Perfect. Dudley?’
‘How about, "We had to write an essay on our hero at school, Mr Mason, and I wrote about you."’
It was too much for Aunt Petunia, who burst into tears and flung her arms round her son, and it was too much for Harry, who had to dive under the table so that none of them would see him laughing.
‘And you, boy?’
Harry came up with his face as straight as he could get it.
‘I’ll be in my room, making no noise and pretending I’m not there,’ he said. whilst they bloody grovelled to people Harry suspected were closely related to Goblins, People that THEY told him to be wary of in the first place. Harry thought. Bloody thick Dursleys.
‘Too right you will,’ said Uncle Vernon forcefully. ‘The Masons know nothing about you, and that’s how it’s going to stay. When we’ve eaten, Petunia, you take Mrs Mason through for coffee, and I’ll steer the conversation round to drills. With any luck I’ll have it signed before the News at Ten. This time tomorrow we’ll be looking at villas in Majorca.’
Harry couldn’t get very excited about that. He didn’t suppose the Dursleys would like him any more in Majorca than they did in Little Whinging.
‘Right. I’m off into town for the dinner jackets, mine and Dudley’s. And you,’ he snarled at Harry, ‘keep out of your aunt’s way while she’s cleaning.’
Harry went out through the back door. It was a brilliant, hot day, and the lawn was so bright it hurt. He crossed it and dropped on to the garden bench. At least, he thought, with the dinner party to fuss over, the Dursleys would leave him alone today. That was something. He sang under his breath, which was as sad a thing as he’d done all summer.
‘Happy birthday to me... happy birthday to me...’
No cards. No presents. And he’d spend the evening pretending he didn’t exist. He stared into the hedge and felt lonelier than he’d ever felt in his life, and he’d had some practice.
More than anything at Hogwarts, more even than Quidditch, Harry missed his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. And here his thoughts went sour, because the whole summer long he hadn’t had one letter from either of them. Not one. It made no sense. Ron had said, more than once, on the train and on the platform, that Harry must come and stay. Harry had the green Weasley jumper on now, in July, because he liked wearing it, and it was still the best-made thing he owned, and he’d have liked the chance to tell Mrs Weasley so again. But neither of them, it seemed, had cared enough to send so much as a line.
And the voice was there. The old one, the one that sounded like all three Dursleys at once and had spent eleven years telling him exactly what he was. It had been quiet at Hogwarts, for the most part. Now it was ringing like a bell. You always knew. Nobody ever liked you. They only pretended, because you were there. Now you’re not there, they can stop. It was getting harder and harder not to believe it. There was nothing in Privet Drive to set against it. No owls. No letters. Nothing at all to prove that the last year hadn’t been a dream he’d had in the cupboard under the stairs.
A dozen times at least he’d been on the point of taking the padlock off Hedwig’s cage by magic and sending her off to Ron and Hermione with a letter. It wasn’t worth it. Underage wizards weren’t allowed to use magic outside school. Harry hadn’t mentioned this to the Dursleys. He knew perfectly well that the only reason he wasn’t locked in the cupboard with his wand and his broomstick was their terror of waking up as dung beetles, and for the first fortnight back he’d rather enjoyed muttering nonsense under his breath and watching Dudley tear out of the room as fast as his fat legs would go. But the silence from Ron and Hermione had cut him so far off from everything that even that had stopped being fun. And now they’d forgotten his birthday.
He’d have given anything for a letter. From anyone. Even Dracina Malfoy. Even a sneering one, three lines long, that called him Pottyhead. He’d have read it twice. Harry reminded himself, quite sharply, that Malfoy was his arch-enemy, and not somebody to be sitting on a bench thinking wistfully about, twinkle or no twinkle, and he was not going to think about the twinkle. That was the thought of a stupid, attention-starved boy. He sat and didn’t think about it for some time.
Not that the year had all been fun. At the very end of it Harry had stood face to face with Lord Voldemort himself. Voldemort might be a wreck of what he’d been, but he was as terrifying as ever, and as cunning, and as set on getting his power back. Harry had slipped through his fingers a second time, and only just, and even now, weeks later, he’d wake in the night soaked in sweat, wondering where Voldemort was, and seeing that chalk-white face, and those wide, mad, red eyes...
Harry sat up very straight.
He’d been staring into the hedge without seeing it. And the hedge was staring back. Two enormous green eyes had appeared among the leaves.
He was on his feet before he knew it, and at that moment a jeering voice came floating over the lawn.
‘I know what day it is,’ sang Dudley, waddling towards him.
The huge eyes blinked once and were gone.
‘What?’ said Harry. He didn’t take his eyes off the spot.
‘I know what day it is,’ Dudley said again, coming right up to him.
‘Wow, Dudley. You can finally count to seven. Maybe even look at a calendar. That remedial work at Smeltings is paying off. Uncle Vernon’s money is finally being put to good use. Good on you.’
‘It’s your birthday,’ sneered Dudley, who hadn’t understood a word of it. ‘So how come you haven’t got any cards? Haven’t you even got friends at that freak place?’
Dudley and Dracina really were very alike, Harry thought. She’d have said it with better grammar, and the nose in the air, but it would have been the same jab in the same place.
‘Oh dear, Dudley. Better not let your mum hear you talking about my school,’ said Harry coolly.
Dudley hitched up his trousers, which were working their way down his backside.
‘What’re you staring at the hedge for?’ he said suspiciously.
‘You read those Lord of the Rings books, yeah?’
Dudley gave him a blank look, and Harry remembered that Dudley never read anything at all, and hadn’t done since the Dursleys had the Sky satellite dish put up and he’d discovered WWF.
‘Never mind, Dudley. I’m trying to turn this bush into an Ent. It’ll help Aunt Petunia with the gardening.’
Dudley went backwards so fast he nearly sat down. His fat face had gone grey.
‘You c-can’t. Dad said you’re not to do m-magic. He said he’d throw you out of the house, and you’ve got nowhere else to go, you haven’t got any friends to take you...’
‘I’m being nice about it, Dudley. Just trying to help your dear Mum out. Might as well start now. Jiggery pokery!’ said Harry in a fierce voice. ‘Hocus pocus... squiggly wiggly...’
‘MUUUUUUM!’ Dudley howled, and he fell over his own feet twice on the way back to the house. ‘MUUUUM! He’s doing you know what!’
Harry paid for that. He paid for it at once, and dearly. Neither Dudley nor the hedge had come to any harm, so Aunt Petunia knew well enough that he hadn’t really done anything, but she still came out of the back door swinging the frying pan, suds and all, and Harry had to duck.
He ducked very well. That was one thing you could say for Quidditch. A term of Fred and George belting Bludgers at his head had done wonders for his reflexes, and next to a Bludger a soapy frying pan was nothing at all. The pan went over him with a foot to spare, and he came up out of the crouch and had a second, just one, of being pleased with himself. Then he remembered that there was nobody to see it. Nobody at all. And the bitterness came back worse than before.
Aunt Petunia found him work. She found him a great deal of work, and told him he wouldn’t eat again until it was done. Dudley lay about on a sun lounger with a stack of ice-creams and watched, and Harry cleaned the windows, washed the car, mowed the lawn, edged the flowerbeds, pruned and watered the roses, and repainted the garden bench he’d been sitting on. The sun beat down on the back of his neck until it burned.
He knew he shouldn’t have let Dudley get to him. But Dudley had only said out loud what Harry had been thinking all morning. Maybe he hadn’t got any friends at Hogwarts after all.
Wish they could see famous Harry Potter now, he thought savagely, forking manure on to the flowerbeds with his back on fire and the sweat running into his eyes.
It was half past seven before Aunt Petunia called him in, and by then he could barely lift the fork.
‘Get in here! And walk on the newspaper!’
He went gladly into the shade of the kitchen, which had been scrubbed until it gleamed. Tonight’s pudding stood on top of the fridge: a great mountain of whipped cream heaped with sugared violets. A joint of pork was spitting in the oven.
‘Eat quickly! The Masons will be here any minute!’ snapped Aunt Petunia, and she pointed at the kitchen table, where two slices of bread and a lump of cheese were waiting for him.
That was his lot, then. And perhaps, Harry thought, he’d better get used to it again, for his own sanity’s sake. It was easier if you didn’t expect any better.
Aunt Petunia was already in her salmon-pink cocktail dress. Harry washed the manure off his hands and bolted his supper, and she whisked the plate out from under the last mouthful.
‘Upstairs! Hurry!’
As he passed the living-room door he caught a glimpse of Uncle Vernon and Dudley in bow-ties and dinner jackets, like two sacks of flour somebody had dressed for a wedding, and something hot went through him. He’d dug their garden all day on two slices of bread. He’d been shouted at and swung at and told to pretend he didn’t exist in the house he’d grown up in. If only he could show them. Really use it on them, just once. Make them sorry for every single thing they’d ever done to him. He stood in the hall with his fists clenched and felt the thought go through him like a current.
Then the doorbell rang, and Harry went up the stairs three at a time.
‘Remember, boy,’ Uncle Vernon hissed after him from the foot of them. ‘One sound...’
Harry crossed the landing on tiptoe, slipped into his bedroom, shut the door behind him, and turned to throw himself down on the bed.
The trouble was, there was already somebody sitting on it.