A Chance Meeting
I finally cave and order the crab cakes, thinking that maybe her favourite appetizer will inadvertently act like some sort of homing device and hasten her arrival because if there is such thing as seafood radar, my sister has it.
The waiter is just setting the crab cakes down in front of me when I notice someone sweeping across the room. It’s Anna. I smile to myself as I stand up to welcome her, it’s the seafood radar. She’s only thirty-five minutes late this time. It’s not too bad considering the last time I managed to persuade her to get away from the office she’d been delayed by over an hour. Despite all of her great qualities and intelligence, Pug will never ever be on time.
“It’s almost a record for you,” I say with a grin as she sits down in a whirl of fresh air.
“I know, impressive isn’t it? It’s because you, my dear brother, have that affect on people, and the fact that I absolutely love these things! I’m positively famished.” She unfolds her napkin as I push the plate toward her.
“What affect do I have? Drawing people from far and wide with my magnetic personality?” I joke.
“No, you make people dash down the street in a blind panic because if left alone long enough, you’ll eat the restaurant out of every last one of these.” She wags her eyebrows and picks up her fork. “So what’s going on? What didn’t you want to talk about over the phone?”
Before she can even get a forkful of crab cake past her lips, my mouth is going a mile a minute as the words fly like a thoroughbred bolting from its gate. I tell her about everything, the mirror, the magical room, the house-elf, the notebook, Robert Vance Remington. I even show her the photograph of the three of us, my dad, Mum, and me, that I found that night. She just sits there taking it all in and listening silently like I knew she would.
It’s not until we were half way though our entrees when she finally speaks, “So you’re going back then.”
“What?” I almost drop my fork.
“Dean, if you keep dancing around the obvious as you’ve become so proficient in doing these past years, I’m going to have to haul you back out to Hyde Park again for another one of my therapy sessions.” She raises her eyebrows playfully, “Is that what you want?”
Pug was the one who had dragged me from my bed and thwarted my efforts at permanent hibernation after I’d returned from South America. We joke about it now like it was just all fun and games, but back then there was nothing remotely funny about the situation. She’s the reason why I’m probably not one of those guys who habitually drinks themselves into oblivion and wakes up in the gutter, wondering how the hell they got there.
“I don’t think thwacking me with your purse and telling me to stop being a selfish prat in the middle of a public place has anything to do with therapy,” I say casually as I twirl my spagatini around my fork and grin, “unless you’re talking about those poor kids who you severely traumatized with all of your yelling and carrying on.”
Pug pretends to look offended. “Well, you needed it. And I’m sure those kids thoroughly enjoyed the positively mad way you kept trying to walk away from me, veering around shrubs and benches and the like. I’m sure it was extremely entertaining.” She points her fork at me. “Now stop manoeuvring and answer my question.”
I train my features to remain perfectly blank and I say in my best robot-like voice, “No master, I do not want another therapy session, master.”
She rolls her eyes and huffs, “No Dean, when are you going to rejoin the world and be a wizard again?”
I just stare at her completely nonplussed. Go back?! To being a wizard?!
When I don’t say anything, she continues, “I know you. You’re the one who would scour the house months before Christmas, your birthday – heck, even my birthday – in order to find every last present. Mum ran out of hiding places by the time we were twelve so she started having Dad keep them at work and in the boot of the car –”
“I found the ones in the boot,” I say, unable to contain myself.
Pug holds up her hand and I know that I better not interrupt, at least not while she’s doing her lawyer closing argument act. “What I’m getting at here is that you’ve always been curious and tenacious. This information about your dad –”
“Birth father,” I correct her.
She gives me “the look” and I stuff my mouth with garlic bread and study my plate while she continues, “This information about your birth father is a huge deal. There’s no way you’re going to just let something this important go unresolved. It’s against your better nature.”
There’s a pause and I look up. It seems that Pug is waiting for me to supply her with more ammunition for her rant. Not really liking the direction in which this conversation has suddenly veered, I just shrug, which, to my dismay, suffices because she leans forward over her plate and says, “Dean, this is your family, your past. He was your father. Aren’t you the least bit curious about why he left?”
“He left because he didn’t want anything to do with Mum and me,” I say quickly and definitively.
Pug places her hand on my arm and says gently, “But what if he didn’t leave you…on purpose?”
I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. It’s almost as if she’s siding with him – a man she never met! Anna wasn’t there with Mum all those years; she didn’t watch as Mum would cry alone practically every year on August 17, November 26, and July 23 – his birthday, their anniversary, and the day he walked out on us. She didn’t know how hard it was for us before she met Gary – we were barely scraping by just to make the mortgage payments on the house. She had never spent sleepless nights wondering if she was the reason why her father had left.
I can feel myself beginning to loose control so I take a measured breath and concentrate on the flickering flame of light dancing on the tip of the candle that is sitting between us. Finally, I manage to say in a somewhat flat voice, “Leaving is always on purpose, Anna.”
She must know that as far as I’m concerned this conversation is over because I’ve given her my “I’m-serious-you-better-leave-me-alone” signal by calling her by her first name instead of using her nickname. However, to my irritation, she continues to push in that nosy sister sort of a way. “Why would someone who had absolutely no intention of coming back, leave a house-elf to tend to their belongings for over twenty years? Do you think that he really would’ve left that poor creature there on purpose?” She pushes the photograph toward me so it falls into a pool of light cast by the flickering candle. “Dean, look at that picture and tell me that’s a man who looks so dissatisfied with his life that he would just leave his family without a word, without even packing any of his belongings and disappear forever on his own accord.”
I can’t deny the fact that they look happy – we look happy.
“What about Mum? Don’t you think she still wonders what happened to him? If there was the slightest possibility of finding out exactly what happened, don’t you think that she’d do it? Don’t you think she deserves to know the truth?”
Anna has a way of deconstructing things (well, she’s a lawyer after all) and stripping them down to bare-boned arguments. She can make you see and think about things that you wouldn’t otherwise linger on either because you didn’t notice or you had purposefully ignored them. She has this annoying knack at seeing straight through all of the frilly words and the thick smog of excuses. My smoke screen is virtually useless against her. Heck, she might as well be a superhero with super x-ray intuition or whatever her anti-Dean smoke screen thing is.
But I guess that’s why I respect her and why I continually ask for her opinion. Because I know that she’ll give it to me straight even if I don’t want to hear it. No, especially if I don’t want to hear it which is exactly what’s happening right now. I had simply wanted to hear what she thought about all of this. I didn’t expect that it would morph into a discussion about a biblical quest for the golden, bloody truth.
“It won’t change anything. He’s the one who left.” I say determinedly, staring at the picture so hard that it blurs out of focus and is reduced to globs multi-colored smudges framed by light. It looks eerily like Bernard Cohen’s “In That Moment” that I had fallen asleep staring at the other night.
“Maybe not,” she taps Mum’s smiling face in the picture, “but it would be closure…for both of you.” She places her hand over mine and squeezes. “You’ll do it when you’re ready. I know it.”
I shake my head and blow air out of my mouth. Sometimes I really can’t believe her. I lean back in my chair and look her straight in the eyes. “Let’s just say, Anna, that I am, for some bizarre reason ‘ready’. How am I going to know? Is there going to be some huge sign from God or something? ‘Dean, it is time to find out what a…’” I cup my hands over my mouth and repeat my words like an echo, “‘…jerk…jerk…jerk…your…birth…birth…birth…f
Unfortunately, sarcasm is my self-defense mechanism, not humor which probably would be much more entertaining. After all, everyone likes the funny guy verses the one who is a gigantic prat. Sometimes I really hate myself.
“You’ll know when it’s time,” is all she says as she stares back at me evenly. “Just don’t forget to come back a visit us once in a while. Otherwise I’ll have to search you out and give you a good thwacking.” She holds up her purse and winks.
God, I can never stay mad at Pug no matter how hard I try.
We finish off dinner with less controversial topics and vow (as we always do) not to leave it so long before we find time to meet again. I walk her to the nearest tube station give her a long hug that I hope she understands is an apology for being such a jerk. She smiles, squeezes my arm, and then turns and walks quickly down the steps. I watch until her retreating back disappears into the throng of people just to make sure that she’s safe.
Tonight I decide that I’d rather walk instead of smash myself into the tuna can of humanity that is the London Underground. I’m heading off down the street when the clouds decide to expel the contents of their turgid bellies, and it begins to rain. No actually, rain is a much too gentle a word for the torrent that has swallowed London. The last time I experienced torrential rain was in Glasgow, Scotland when I swore that I will not complain about London again even if it rained “cats and dogs”. But complaining about this didn’t qualify for breaking a quasi-promise because this is beyond anything remotely cat or dog like. It would be much more accurate to say that it’s as if a gigantic fire hose had been turned on full blast. I go from being completely dry to soaking wet, and feel like I’m in danger of drowning by the way the rain is somehow mysteriously jumping up my nose.
How is it possible for rain to fall upward? I wonder as I pull my jacket closer and wrap my arms around my chest. I bend my head forward and hunch against the fists of rain pounding down on my shoulders. I nearly jumped in surprise when something hard jabs into my chest. I’m just about to reach into my front jacket pocket to remove the offending object, when I realize with amused astonishment that it’s my wand.
I have been carrying it around with me for the last couple of days and for reasons that are not yet clear to even me. I’m mulling this over as I round the corner of an alleyway just behind the famous St. Martin in the Fields. Pug had been trying to get me to attend concert after concert there ever since I’d returned from South America, but all last year I’d found reasons to be “busy”. However, in my reality, “busy” was just a synonym for “hiding away from the world”. But now I find myself thinking that a concert might be nice as well as spending more time with Pug and the rest of the family. Dinner was nice, wasn’t it? For the first time in recent memory I wonder how many other things I’ve missed while on my self-imposed exile to Self-Pity Island.
“When are you going to rejoin the world and be a wizard again?” I hear Pug’s words as clear as day.
Then it suddenly occurs to me that I am a wizard who, with a flick of my wrist, could cast a simple drying spell or mutter Impervious! and be rid of the annoyance of this dreadful downpour while enjoying Nelson’s Column, Trafalgar Square, and the National Portrait Gallery.
I find myself quietly laughing to myself, half in shocked disbelief and half in derision, as an image of me bolting through the streets of London with my trousers on fire materializes in my head. Considering that it’s been years since I’ve even thought about wands, magic, and incantations, let alone actually held a wand, igniting myself seems more probable than actually accomplishing a full-on drying spell, especially if my non-operative Lumos the other day was any indication of how much I am out of practice.
I make a mental note to ring Seamus and coerce him into flinging his wand around with me. After all, some extra swishing and flicking definitely couldn’t hurt. Then I snort to myself when I realize that I’ve just committed myself to asking Finnegan, who spent more time in detention for sending Flitwick careering across the room than he did snoring and drooling in Divination, for help with charms and spells.
I must be delusional, teetering on the margin of madness, two sandwiches short of a picnic…
Then I realize that Seamus is off the continent and out of contact. No wonder he didn’t answer his phone last night or the previous two days! He’d rung me last week and said something about his gran passing away and his mum being really upset and needing a holiday with the family. Bugger, what kind of friend am I if I can’t even remember to send him a sympathy card?!
If I’d only had an owl then I’d –
I stop myself mid-thought. It’s slightly alarming how easily that just slipped straight into the stream of my consciousness and in between regular, adjacent thoughts – like thinking about owl post and magical correspondence isn’t anything out of the ordinary.
I’m so caught up in my own musings that I don’t notice the figure walking toward me, at least not until the staccato of their footsteps echoing wetly down the alley snaps me back to the present. Being that I’m tall and, I’m told, look rather intimidating, I don’t often make it a habit to be overly concerned about my safety. However, the strangle mugging in Peru taught me to pay attention to my instincts and take notice of the details.
I narrow my eyes and squint through the sheets of rain at the figure approaching. There is something different about the way they are carrying themselves. This man is walking almost leisurely, without the sense of urgency one would have sloshing through an impossibly rainy night in the middle of a dark alleyway in London. I’m nearly past him when he reaches for his right arm and begins to withdraw something long and slender from his sleeve.
Corr, blimey! A bloody knife!
Before he can launch himself at me, I turn and ram my shoulder into his chest, shoving my would-be assailant roughly into the wall. Along with the “Umph!” of his breath evacuating his lungs, I hear what is probably his knife clatter to the ground.
“Don’t move!” I grunt as I grab his left arm and twist it behind him. Blood is pounding in my ears and my breath is expelling from my mouth in quick bursts. Suddenly, I’m back in that narrow, stone lined street in Peru with Esperanza…
“What the hell –?!”
His words disarm me as I become aware of the rain and the fact that I’m in London…alone. Involuntarily, I loosen my grip and suddenly my attacker twists around, sends me flying backwards where I land in a wet muddy mess of a puddle, but not before I kick my leg out, sweeping him off his feet and sending him crashing onto his side and into the gutter.
I’m pushing myself up when he thrusts out his hand and something skitters across the slick ground, through the air, and falls straight into his open palm. My eyes widen and I fumble in the front of my open jacket, hoping that I can stop him before it’s too late.
“INCARCER–”
“LUMOS!”
Then we are laying there, chests heaving, and staring at each other in blatant disbelief as the rain thunders down around us. Anyone who would’ve happened to walk by at that moment would’ve seen two grown men staring at each other like fools and pointing sticks at each other, looking for all intense and purposes like we are about to engage in a ragging battle of sword play.
My eyes dart from his face to my brightly glowing wand tip and back again. I don’t know if I’m more astonished by the fact I’ve just managed my first bit of deliberate and successful magic in years or that I’m lying in the middle of the stinking gutter in a rainstorm with the wand of a hostile wizard trained straight at me.
“Thomas? Dean…Thomas?”
I blink and then squint at the rain-soaked face staring back at me, but my mind fails to connect this person standing before me to a memory. “Do I know you?” I manage to choke out.
“Of course, Hogwarts…Hufflepuff…” he lowers his wand.
Hufflepuff…alright then, definitely not hostile… Then it hits me, and before I can stop myself, the words are out of my mouth, “Blimey, Macmillan what happened to you?”
Ernie Macmillan looks taken aback and slightly peeved as he moves to a sitting position and runs a hand through his wet hair. “What exactly are you implying by that.” It was a statement rather than a question, and I realize that he misinterpreted my astonishment for well…an astonished insult. He looks as if he’s about to rip my face off the way he begins to puff up like an angry blowfish.
“Chill out, mate, life’s way too short to be serious,” I say hauling myself to my feet and then extending my hand to help him up. “You just look…different.” I think ‘different’ is the most neutral sounding word for dropping about thirty pounds of roundness and growing half a foot.
Ernie grabs my hand and pulls himself up easily. “I don’t believe that I’m the one who needs to relax around here,” he says politely.
“Yeah, well that’s what a year of self-defense courses with the London Police will do,” I say as I gingerly rotate my shoulder. Man, did that ever hurt. When did Macmillan get so solid?
“Self-defense?” he says with mild interest as he turns and begins to fumble with his right sleeve. “So, is that what you call that then? It seemed more like seek and destroy Muggle style.”
“You do know that the best defense in a strong offense.” I begin to feel slightly put off as I realize that I’m likely going to have to justify my Muggle life to every bloody wizard and witch who crosses my path from now on. I start to build up my defence in preparation – wait, what did I just say to myself?
However, I’m jolted out of my thoughts when Ernie says with an air of superiority, “You are definitely more Muggle than wizard if you’re employing such clichés. I’m going to have to use the standard suite of Auror hexes just for that.”
“Auror, eh?” I say somewhat relieved that the whole barrage of why-would-you-want-to-leave-magic questions have been side-stepped for the time being.
He simply nodded, but I couldn’t help but notice that he looked quite pleased with himself.
“Ernie the Auror extraordinaire, I should’ve known.”
“Dean Thomas. And what exactly are you implying?”
The slightly huffy indignant voice is back. “Nothing,” I say casually, deciding that I’d rather start off on the right foot with the first wizard besides Seamus I’ve laid eyes on in years (well, that’s assuming one doesn’t consider assaulting and practically mud wresting a former classmate starting off on the wrong foot). “Hey, I think I’m the one who should be ticked off, considering you were just about to Stupefy me,” I retort.
“I was planning on Binding you,” Ernie says in a no nonsense voice.
“And what next, Obliviate me as well, I suppose?” I say dryly.
“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of the Conjunctivitis Curse followed by the Confundus Charm. Although a blasting curse is sometimes more effective,” he says thoughtfully as he surveys his now wet and filthy clothes. “However, Levicorpus is another effective way to immobilize an argumentative detainee, but it would require me to use Mobilicorpus, which is sometimes difficult to counter act with the Auror Anti-fleeing spells that are used during interrogation.” He looks up at me with a very serious expression.
I can only stare at him horrified.
Then that bastard starts to chuckle outright. “Chill out, Thomas, life’s way too short to be serious,” he manages to say in perfect imitation, Cockney accent and all.
The corners of my mouth tug upward, and before I know it, we’re both laughing like lunatics.
As it turns out, Ernie is headed to Chiquito’s right next to the Odeon where Hollywood stars have their premiers, and, being the Hufflepuff that he is, asks me to join him for a drink. I wonder if he’s beginning to feel guilty for just about hexing me into oblivion, but being that I just smashed his face into the wall and then side-swept him into a filthy gutter, I figure that buying him a drink is the least I can do. Besides, I never say no to a pint, and getting him to snap a drying spell out of that wand wouldn’t be so bad either.
As I tuck my wand back into my jacket head off into the rain with Macmillan, I can’t help but wonder how it is that I’ve managed to be away from the magical world for nearly five years without hearing from anyone except Seamus. And now within a matter of days I’ve discovered that my birth father was (or is) a wizard and then managed to get accosted by Ernie Macmillan in the middle of London.
I wonder if Pug was right after all – maybe this is my sign.
The waiter is just setting the crab cakes down in front of me when I notice someone sweeping across the room. It’s Anna. I smile to myself as I stand up to welcome her, it’s the seafood radar. She’s only thirty-five minutes late this time. It’s not too bad considering the last time I managed to persuade her to get away from the office she’d been delayed by over an hour. Despite all of her great qualities and intelligence, Pug will never ever be on time.
“It’s almost a record for you,” I say with a grin as she sits down in a whirl of fresh air.
“I know, impressive isn’t it? It’s because you, my dear brother, have that affect on people, and the fact that I absolutely love these things! I’m positively famished.” She unfolds her napkin as I push the plate toward her.
“What affect do I have? Drawing people from far and wide with my magnetic personality?” I joke.
“No, you make people dash down the street in a blind panic because if left alone long enough, you’ll eat the restaurant out of every last one of these.” She wags her eyebrows and picks up her fork. “So what’s going on? What didn’t you want to talk about over the phone?”
Before she can even get a forkful of crab cake past her lips, my mouth is going a mile a minute as the words fly like a thoroughbred bolting from its gate. I tell her about everything, the mirror, the magical room, the house-elf, the notebook, Robert Vance Remington. I even show her the photograph of the three of us, my dad, Mum, and me, that I found that night. She just sits there taking it all in and listening silently like I knew she would.
It’s not until we were half way though our entrees when she finally speaks, “So you’re going back then.”
“What?” I almost drop my fork.
“Dean, if you keep dancing around the obvious as you’ve become so proficient in doing these past years, I’m going to have to haul you back out to Hyde Park again for another one of my therapy sessions.” She raises her eyebrows playfully, “Is that what you want?”
Pug was the one who had dragged me from my bed and thwarted my efforts at permanent hibernation after I’d returned from South America. We joke about it now like it was just all fun and games, but back then there was nothing remotely funny about the situation. She’s the reason why I’m probably not one of those guys who habitually drinks themselves into oblivion and wakes up in the gutter, wondering how the hell they got there.
“I don’t think thwacking me with your purse and telling me to stop being a selfish prat in the middle of a public place has anything to do with therapy,” I say casually as I twirl my spagatini around my fork and grin, “unless you’re talking about those poor kids who you severely traumatized with all of your yelling and carrying on.”
Pug pretends to look offended. “Well, you needed it. And I’m sure those kids thoroughly enjoyed the positively mad way you kept trying to walk away from me, veering around shrubs and benches and the like. I’m sure it was extremely entertaining.” She points her fork at me. “Now stop manoeuvring and answer my question.”
I train my features to remain perfectly blank and I say in my best robot-like voice, “No master, I do not want another therapy session, master.”
She rolls her eyes and huffs, “No Dean, when are you going to rejoin the world and be a wizard again?”
I just stare at her completely nonplussed. Go back?! To being a wizard?!
When I don’t say anything, she continues, “I know you. You’re the one who would scour the house months before Christmas, your birthday – heck, even my birthday – in order to find every last present. Mum ran out of hiding places by the time we were twelve so she started having Dad keep them at work and in the boot of the car –”
“I found the ones in the boot,” I say, unable to contain myself.
Pug holds up her hand and I know that I better not interrupt, at least not while she’s doing her lawyer closing argument act. “What I’m getting at here is that you’ve always been curious and tenacious. This information about your dad –”
“Birth father,” I correct her.
She gives me “the look” and I stuff my mouth with garlic bread and study my plate while she continues, “This information about your birth father is a huge deal. There’s no way you’re going to just let something this important go unresolved. It’s against your better nature.”
There’s a pause and I look up. It seems that Pug is waiting for me to supply her with more ammunition for her rant. Not really liking the direction in which this conversation has suddenly veered, I just shrug, which, to my dismay, suffices because she leans forward over her plate and says, “Dean, this is your family, your past. He was your father. Aren’t you the least bit curious about why he left?”
“He left because he didn’t want anything to do with Mum and me,” I say quickly and definitively.
Pug places her hand on my arm and says gently, “But what if he didn’t leave you…on purpose?”
I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. It’s almost as if she’s siding with him – a man she never met! Anna wasn’t there with Mum all those years; she didn’t watch as Mum would cry alone practically every year on August 17, November 26, and July 23 – his birthday, their anniversary, and the day he walked out on us. She didn’t know how hard it was for us before she met Gary – we were barely scraping by just to make the mortgage payments on the house. She had never spent sleepless nights wondering if she was the reason why her father had left.
I can feel myself beginning to loose control so I take a measured breath and concentrate on the flickering flame of light dancing on the tip of the candle that is sitting between us. Finally, I manage to say in a somewhat flat voice, “Leaving is always on purpose, Anna.”
She must know that as far as I’m concerned this conversation is over because I’ve given her my “I’m-serious-you-better-leave-me-alone” signal by calling her by her first name instead of using her nickname. However, to my irritation, she continues to push in that nosy sister sort of a way. “Why would someone who had absolutely no intention of coming back, leave a house-elf to tend to their belongings for over twenty years? Do you think that he really would’ve left that poor creature there on purpose?” She pushes the photograph toward me so it falls into a pool of light cast by the flickering candle. “Dean, look at that picture and tell me that’s a man who looks so dissatisfied with his life that he would just leave his family without a word, without even packing any of his belongings and disappear forever on his own accord.”
I can’t deny the fact that they look happy – we look happy.
“What about Mum? Don’t you think she still wonders what happened to him? If there was the slightest possibility of finding out exactly what happened, don’t you think that she’d do it? Don’t you think she deserves to know the truth?”
Anna has a way of deconstructing things (well, she’s a lawyer after all) and stripping them down to bare-boned arguments. She can make you see and think about things that you wouldn’t otherwise linger on either because you didn’t notice or you had purposefully ignored them. She has this annoying knack at seeing straight through all of the frilly words and the thick smog of excuses. My smoke screen is virtually useless against her. Heck, she might as well be a superhero with super x-ray intuition or whatever her anti-Dean smoke screen thing is.
But I guess that’s why I respect her and why I continually ask for her opinion. Because I know that she’ll give it to me straight even if I don’t want to hear it. No, especially if I don’t want to hear it which is exactly what’s happening right now. I had simply wanted to hear what she thought about all of this. I didn’t expect that it would morph into a discussion about a biblical quest for the golden, bloody truth.
“It won’t change anything. He’s the one who left.” I say determinedly, staring at the picture so hard that it blurs out of focus and is reduced to globs multi-colored smudges framed by light. It looks eerily like Bernard Cohen’s “In That Moment” that I had fallen asleep staring at the other night.
“Maybe not,” she taps Mum’s smiling face in the picture, “but it would be closure…for both of you.” She places her hand over mine and squeezes. “You’ll do it when you’re ready. I know it.”
I shake my head and blow air out of my mouth. Sometimes I really can’t believe her. I lean back in my chair and look her straight in the eyes. “Let’s just say, Anna, that I am, for some bizarre reason ‘ready’. How am I going to know? Is there going to be some huge sign from God or something? ‘Dean, it is time to find out what a…’” I cup my hands over my mouth and repeat my words like an echo, “‘…jerk…jerk…jerk…your…birth…birth…birth…f
Unfortunately, sarcasm is my self-defense mechanism, not humor which probably would be much more entertaining. After all, everyone likes the funny guy verses the one who is a gigantic prat. Sometimes I really hate myself.
“You’ll know when it’s time,” is all she says as she stares back at me evenly. “Just don’t forget to come back a visit us once in a while. Otherwise I’ll have to search you out and give you a good thwacking.” She holds up her purse and winks.
God, I can never stay mad at Pug no matter how hard I try.
We finish off dinner with less controversial topics and vow (as we always do) not to leave it so long before we find time to meet again. I walk her to the nearest tube station give her a long hug that I hope she understands is an apology for being such a jerk. She smiles, squeezes my arm, and then turns and walks quickly down the steps. I watch until her retreating back disappears into the throng of people just to make sure that she’s safe.
Tonight I decide that I’d rather walk instead of smash myself into the tuna can of humanity that is the London Underground. I’m heading off down the street when the clouds decide to expel the contents of their turgid bellies, and it begins to rain. No actually, rain is a much too gentle a word for the torrent that has swallowed London. The last time I experienced torrential rain was in Glasgow, Scotland when I swore that I will not complain about London again even if it rained “cats and dogs”. But complaining about this didn’t qualify for breaking a quasi-promise because this is beyond anything remotely cat or dog like. It would be much more accurate to say that it’s as if a gigantic fire hose had been turned on full blast. I go from being completely dry to soaking wet, and feel like I’m in danger of drowning by the way the rain is somehow mysteriously jumping up my nose.
How is it possible for rain to fall upward? I wonder as I pull my jacket closer and wrap my arms around my chest. I bend my head forward and hunch against the fists of rain pounding down on my shoulders. I nearly jumped in surprise when something hard jabs into my chest. I’m just about to reach into my front jacket pocket to remove the offending object, when I realize with amused astonishment that it’s my wand.
I have been carrying it around with me for the last couple of days and for reasons that are not yet clear to even me. I’m mulling this over as I round the corner of an alleyway just behind the famous St. Martin in the Fields. Pug had been trying to get me to attend concert after concert there ever since I’d returned from South America, but all last year I’d found reasons to be “busy”. However, in my reality, “busy” was just a synonym for “hiding away from the world”. But now I find myself thinking that a concert might be nice as well as spending more time with Pug and the rest of the family. Dinner was nice, wasn’t it? For the first time in recent memory I wonder how many other things I’ve missed while on my self-imposed exile to Self-Pity Island.
“When are you going to rejoin the world and be a wizard again?” I hear Pug’s words as clear as day.
Then it suddenly occurs to me that I am a wizard who, with a flick of my wrist, could cast a simple drying spell or mutter Impervious! and be rid of the annoyance of this dreadful downpour while enjoying Nelson’s Column, Trafalgar Square, and the National Portrait Gallery.
I find myself quietly laughing to myself, half in shocked disbelief and half in derision, as an image of me bolting through the streets of London with my trousers on fire materializes in my head. Considering that it’s been years since I’ve even thought about wands, magic, and incantations, let alone actually held a wand, igniting myself seems more probable than actually accomplishing a full-on drying spell, especially if my non-operative Lumos the other day was any indication of how much I am out of practice.
I make a mental note to ring Seamus and coerce him into flinging his wand around with me. After all, some extra swishing and flicking definitely couldn’t hurt. Then I snort to myself when I realize that I’ve just committed myself to asking Finnegan, who spent more time in detention for sending Flitwick careering across the room than he did snoring and drooling in Divination, for help with charms and spells.
I must be delusional, teetering on the margin of madness, two sandwiches short of a picnic…
Then I realize that Seamus is off the continent and out of contact. No wonder he didn’t answer his phone last night or the previous two days! He’d rung me last week and said something about his gran passing away and his mum being really upset and needing a holiday with the family. Bugger, what kind of friend am I if I can’t even remember to send him a sympathy card?!
If I’d only had an owl then I’d –
I stop myself mid-thought. It’s slightly alarming how easily that just slipped straight into the stream of my consciousness and in between regular, adjacent thoughts – like thinking about owl post and magical correspondence isn’t anything out of the ordinary.
I’m so caught up in my own musings that I don’t notice the figure walking toward me, at least not until the staccato of their footsteps echoing wetly down the alley snaps me back to the present. Being that I’m tall and, I’m told, look rather intimidating, I don’t often make it a habit to be overly concerned about my safety. However, the strangle mugging in Peru taught me to pay attention to my instincts and take notice of the details.
I narrow my eyes and squint through the sheets of rain at the figure approaching. There is something different about the way they are carrying themselves. This man is walking almost leisurely, without the sense of urgency one would have sloshing through an impossibly rainy night in the middle of a dark alleyway in London. I’m nearly past him when he reaches for his right arm and begins to withdraw something long and slender from his sleeve.
Corr, blimey! A bloody knife!
Before he can launch himself at me, I turn and ram my shoulder into his chest, shoving my would-be assailant roughly into the wall. Along with the “Umph!” of his breath evacuating his lungs, I hear what is probably his knife clatter to the ground.
“Don’t move!” I grunt as I grab his left arm and twist it behind him. Blood is pounding in my ears and my breath is expelling from my mouth in quick bursts. Suddenly, I’m back in that narrow, stone lined street in Peru with Esperanza…
“What the hell –?!”
His words disarm me as I become aware of the rain and the fact that I’m in London…alone. Involuntarily, I loosen my grip and suddenly my attacker twists around, sends me flying backwards where I land in a wet muddy mess of a puddle, but not before I kick my leg out, sweeping him off his feet and sending him crashing onto his side and into the gutter.
I’m pushing myself up when he thrusts out his hand and something skitters across the slick ground, through the air, and falls straight into his open palm. My eyes widen and I fumble in the front of my open jacket, hoping that I can stop him before it’s too late.
“INCARCER–”
“LUMOS!”
Then we are laying there, chests heaving, and staring at each other in blatant disbelief as the rain thunders down around us. Anyone who would’ve happened to walk by at that moment would’ve seen two grown men staring at each other like fools and pointing sticks at each other, looking for all intense and purposes like we are about to engage in a ragging battle of sword play.
My eyes dart from his face to my brightly glowing wand tip and back again. I don’t know if I’m more astonished by the fact I’ve just managed my first bit of deliberate and successful magic in years or that I’m lying in the middle of the stinking gutter in a rainstorm with the wand of a hostile wizard trained straight at me.
“Thomas? Dean…Thomas?”
I blink and then squint at the rain-soaked face staring back at me, but my mind fails to connect this person standing before me to a memory. “Do I know you?” I manage to choke out.
“Of course, Hogwarts…Hufflepuff…” he lowers his wand.
Hufflepuff…alright then, definitely not hostile… Then it hits me, and before I can stop myself, the words are out of my mouth, “Blimey, Macmillan what happened to you?”
Ernie Macmillan looks taken aback and slightly peeved as he moves to a sitting position and runs a hand through his wet hair. “What exactly are you implying by that.” It was a statement rather than a question, and I realize that he misinterpreted my astonishment for well…an astonished insult. He looks as if he’s about to rip my face off the way he begins to puff up like an angry blowfish.
“Chill out, mate, life’s way too short to be serious,” I say hauling myself to my feet and then extending my hand to help him up. “You just look…different.” I think ‘different’ is the most neutral sounding word for dropping about thirty pounds of roundness and growing half a foot.
Ernie grabs my hand and pulls himself up easily. “I don’t believe that I’m the one who needs to relax around here,” he says politely.
“Yeah, well that’s what a year of self-defense courses with the London Police will do,” I say as I gingerly rotate my shoulder. Man, did that ever hurt. When did Macmillan get so solid?
“Self-defense?” he says with mild interest as he turns and begins to fumble with his right sleeve. “So, is that what you call that then? It seemed more like seek and destroy Muggle style.”
“You do know that the best defense in a strong offense.” I begin to feel slightly put off as I realize that I’m likely going to have to justify my Muggle life to every bloody wizard and witch who crosses my path from now on. I start to build up my defence in preparation – wait, what did I just say to myself?
However, I’m jolted out of my thoughts when Ernie says with an air of superiority, “You are definitely more Muggle than wizard if you’re employing such clichés. I’m going to have to use the standard suite of Auror hexes just for that.”
“Auror, eh?” I say somewhat relieved that the whole barrage of why-would-you-want-to-leave-magic questions have been side-stepped for the time being.
He simply nodded, but I couldn’t help but notice that he looked quite pleased with himself.
“Ernie the Auror extraordinaire, I should’ve known.”
“Dean Thomas. And what exactly are you implying?”
The slightly huffy indignant voice is back. “Nothing,” I say casually, deciding that I’d rather start off on the right foot with the first wizard besides Seamus I’ve laid eyes on in years (well, that’s assuming one doesn’t consider assaulting and practically mud wresting a former classmate starting off on the wrong foot). “Hey, I think I’m the one who should be ticked off, considering you were just about to Stupefy me,” I retort.
“I was planning on Binding you,” Ernie says in a no nonsense voice.
“And what next, Obliviate me as well, I suppose?” I say dryly.
“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of the Conjunctivitis Curse followed by the Confundus Charm. Although a blasting curse is sometimes more effective,” he says thoughtfully as he surveys his now wet and filthy clothes. “However, Levicorpus is another effective way to immobilize an argumentative detainee, but it would require me to use Mobilicorpus, which is sometimes difficult to counter act with the Auror Anti-fleeing spells that are used during interrogation.” He looks up at me with a very serious expression.
I can only stare at him horrified.
Then that bastard starts to chuckle outright. “Chill out, Thomas, life’s way too short to be serious,” he manages to say in perfect imitation, Cockney accent and all.
The corners of my mouth tug upward, and before I know it, we’re both laughing like lunatics.
As it turns out, Ernie is headed to Chiquito’s right next to the Odeon where Hollywood stars have their premiers, and, being the Hufflepuff that he is, asks me to join him for a drink. I wonder if he’s beginning to feel guilty for just about hexing me into oblivion, but being that I just smashed his face into the wall and then side-swept him into a filthy gutter, I figure that buying him a drink is the least I can do. Besides, I never say no to a pint, and getting him to snap a drying spell out of that wand wouldn’t be so bad either.
As I tuck my wand back into my jacket head off into the rain with Macmillan, I can’t help but wonder how it is that I’ve managed to be away from the magical world for nearly five years without hearing from anyone except Seamus. And now within a matter of days I’ve discovered that my birth father was (or is) a wizard and then managed to get accosted by Ernie Macmillan in the middle of London.
I wonder if Pug was right after all – maybe this is my sign.