HP Widdershins, Part 8
I remain bewildered that I'm actually writing this bizarre thing.
HP Widdershins.
An illustrated, alternate universe, OOC fanfic by Didodikali.
Part One, in which Harry Potter grows a brain.
Part Two, in which Dudley Dursley grows a personality.
Part Three, in which Hermione Granger seizes the reins.
Part Four, in which Harry Potter speaks softly.
Part Five, in which Dudley opens packages.
Part Six, in which Hermione plays with fire.
Part Seven in which Hermione is screwed, blued, and tattooed. NC-17
And now, Part Eight, in which Dudley takes a call.
Nov 25
It was beginning to snow and, even with the streetlights coming on, there was no one hanging about outside to notice that I was being followed by an enormous, spotted feline with a big mouse in his jaws. My phone rang and I stopped to fish it out of my pocket and answer it. Crookshanks caught up to me and dropped his mouse on my shoe.
"Hermione?" I said.
"Yes..."
"I thought it'd be you. I think your cat can tell when you're going to call. He starts following me around with this expectant look on his face. You have got to come pick him up some time. He's getting desperate and he's trying to bribe me and I'm not having it," I said, kicking the mouse off of my trainer. "I can't believe you forgot him last time."
"Yes. Well, I'll certainly try to- to-" She trailed off into silence.
I frowned. Hermione is not usually either forgetful or equivocal when it comes to Crookshanks. "You all right?" I asked her. She said nothing, so I said, "What's going on? Where are you?"
"I- I don't know where I am exactly." Hermione was silent for a second and then she started talking, quickly, as if she needed to get everything in before her meter ran out. "We're in a- a big hole in the ground that I made myself. I suppose you'd call it a trench. We'll be here for a while. We're safe, I think. For the moment. Turns out I can't read Imperiused people within my own ranks after all, so our chocolate supplies got hexed to plasma right under my nose, and then it took us a while to tie down our unwitting plant, and we got surprised by Dementors while we were busy, so now I have the remnants of two teams and no more chocolate and we can't go back to get more because we need to stay here and wait for the signal, but-" Her voice was muffled like she had her hands cupped round the phone. "-my teams are not looking too good, and I can't think of anything else, my brain is chasing its own tail."
"Some kind of training exercise?" I asked, hoping hard.
She laughed bitterly. "Sorry. I shouldn't have bothered you."
I stepped out of the bracing wind, off the pavement and over to a park bench under a streetlamp. I dropped my gym bag on the bench and sat down. "No, no, it's okay," I said, "But what can I-"
"-A distraction. Anything. Just until- Just for a bit. Can you talk for a while? Look, just tell me a story."
"I don't know any stories," I said.
Her voice sounded strangled. "Okay. I'll-" No. Oh, no. She's going to hang up and call someone else.
"-that aren't true. Will that do? Can I say any old thing?" I asked. Crookshanks jumped up on the bench next to me and dropped his mouse on my knee.
"I'm just going to-" The phone crackled in my ear and then she said, "Can you hear me? Go ahead."
Right. What the hell am I going to say? Oh my god, there's a dead mouse on my knee. I picked Crookshank's mouse up by the tail and put it on my gym bag. Gym bag. There we go. "Well, uh. Here's hoping you like sports stories. I'm sort of in the middle of pulling a ringer. I haven't yet told the other people at the gym here about my boxing trophies, and they-"
She interrupted me, sounding slightly tinny and far away, "I'm sorry, boxing trophies? What? You're supposed to start at the beginning when you tell stories. And why didn't you tell me this before?"
"I thought you knew. I didn't talk about it because I didn't think vegetarian tree-huggers like you would be impressed by miniature aluminium totems to fisticuffs. They were right there behind my bedroom door at home. On a bureau. Couldn't really see them when I had the door open, and I suppose it usually was open when you were visiting, one foot on the floor and all that. ...Okay, so maybe I might have dumped laundry all over the top of that bureau... I'd sort of expected that Harry would have outed me though. He never mentioned it?"
"Harry doesn't talk about you."
"He doesn't?" That was vaguely disappointing somehow.
"Start at the beginning. How did someone like you even get into something like that?"
"What do you mean, 'someone like me'? I am not some effete intellectual like what you seem to- I mean, I'm exactly the kind of- Well, anyway, it wasn't even my idea. I got caught fighting in the halls one time too many and detentions didn't bother me, so finally they pulled me out of the regular gym class and sent me down to the boxing class with the intention that the older boys would beat the shit out of me and I'd learn my lesson and stop. They gave me the usual choice of standing up with someone right away to get my face pushed in, which gets your punishment over quickly in just one day and it's what most everybody there always chooses, or... I could do six weeks of hideous training with the boxing class. I had reason to get out of the regular gym class for a bit, so that's what I-"
"Usual choice, indeed. What a charming school. Reminds me of mine," she said. "Nevertheless, you're leaving things out. Why were you fighting in the halls? With whom? What was your reason to want to get out of the regular gym class."
"...You say that you can't read me over the phone, but then you do that, and you wonder why I don't believe you."
"So you are holding out on me."
I said, "All right, all right. Only two of my friends ended up in gym class with me, the default gym class for everyone who's not doing rugby or footie or cricket with the teams, while this arsehole joker, Jeremy, ended up with forty of his friends in the class. Jeremy was... um... a sex maniac? An exceedingly pathetic little pervert. Something like that. He decided that I had the closest thing to tits in the school -I was, uh, a lot heavier back then- and he started sneaking up on me and pinching me. I'm quite sure there was something seriously wrong with him, because I hit him a couple of times and shoved him in bins and such and he never learned, maybe he liked it, I don't know, he still kept on trying for me, thought it was funny. Finally I stopped waiting for him to tag me first before I'd retaliate, and I-- Is this doing any good, Hermione?"
"Yes. Please. Go on, Dudley."
She's either very persuasive or I'm just easy and like hearing her say my name. ...I wonder how much trouble she's really in...
"Okay. So I stopped waiting and I'd just belt him one whenever I was close enough to reach him. At dinner, between classes, in the toilets, whenever. Jeremy was faster than me and no one ever saw him start shit, but the teachers caught me messing with him several times and I always got the blame. And eventually I split his lip open and he was sent off to get stitches or plastic surgery or therapy or whatever, the poncy little shit, and I was almost expelled, but they sent me down to the boxing class instead, saying that'd serve me right. They had to swap around some of my other classes so I could do the whole six weeks detention, and blah, blah, blah. There you go. You happy? Can I get on with the bit that I like now?"
"I'm happy," she said around a muffled nervous giggle that didn't sound at all like her. "Go on. Don't skip ahead though. The boxing class is next."
"Christ, woman. Bossy much? Fine, the boxing class. I- You know, I'd quite liked the regular gym classes before. I wasn't so terrible that I'd get picked last, though I wasn't especially brilliant at anything either, but I was always up for having a laugh with my friends, tossing around a ball, doing something different every day."
"Restrain him before he gives us away. Here, use this." Hermione, sotto voce, and not directed into the phone. Not at me.
I pretended I hadn't heard her and said, "The boxing class was not a laugh. There were no fun ball games. They ran us back and forth, up and down, doing horrible, boring, very difficult exercises, and I was crap at running and I could not keep up with them at all. On the other hand that fucking arsehole, Jeremy, wasn't there and there were two coaches who were watching all the time, making sure it was all business, and it was all older boys who were too serious and intense to even look at me anyway. I could follow behind them and run until I couldn't move and no one would think that was a great opportunity to sneak up on me and- which was ...relaxing. Even doing crunches was rather nice and restful- mentally anyway."
Nothing but silence on the other end. I kept talking. "So six weeks later my punishment is done but I didn't go back to the regular gym class, I just kept going to the boxing class. No one noticed. So I'm still there eight weeks on, ten weeks on, I've learned their routines and I'm doing them on autopilot- badly, I still can't keep up, but no one's giving me any shit, no one's bothering me, I'm having quite a good time really, when I notice one of the coaches staring at me. We're doing one of those things where you run from one side of the gym to the other, touching the floor, changing direction, and I am miles behind everyone else. When I see that somebody's finally noticed I'm still there and I'm not supposed to be, I try to speed up and blend in with the ranks, but I don't manage to lose his attention, he's still watching me. And pretty soon I can't go anymore, I'm no sprinter, and I have to stop."
Nothing. Is she even still on the line? "Coach saunters over and jams his fingers in my neck. I'm too winded to tell him to get his fucking hands off me, or to shove him off, which is just as well, because he looks at his watch, he's just checking my pulse. 'Slow down,' he says, even though I've not been keeping up at all. 'Try to keep it a notch below terrified frothy racehorse, eh?' he says. 'Nice effort, though. Do we get to keep you then?' ...I don't know what to say to that. He starts telling me how all his heavyweights are in their last year and leaving school in a few months, all his juniors are lightweights, and he pokes me in the shoulder, shoves me hard and I don't move, and he has this odd, covetous look in his eye that I have never seen before and he keeps talking, and, and- you ever have your entire life redefined in a few words?"
"...Yes," she said. "I got a letter."
"Oh. Right," I said. "Lucky you, written down like that. I bet you still have that letter somewhere. I'll always end up paraphrasing to myself."
"I do have my letter still," she said. "Paraphrase to me. More," she commanded. And that sounded like her at last: bossy, insistent. Hungry.
More, I can do. More is what I am good at. I can run my mouth for forever. The phone had warmed up; it was a pleasant contrast to the chilly night air. I curled around it. Crookshanks, claws retracted, edged onto my lap.
~
I told Hermione how, after it was announced that I'd be allowed to stay, the older boys dragged me out to run two miles every morning with them. "The price of my joining them being that I had to do everything that they did, the afternoon workouts four times a week AND the morning runs, which were every morning, including weekends. I hadn't even known about that part. I'd not had to do the morning run as part of my detention, but I wasn't going back, so I had to do it. I- Well, I'll never be a sprinter. My stamina improved rather a lot though, they finally let me in to do some sparring, and it turned out the coach was right- I was built for the sport. Well, and he was a very good teacher, our coach was, too. Over the next few years I won quite a few trophies, lost a few more stone, won some more trophies, and then coach- uh- I think he got a little obsessed."
"By my last year I was the best on the team and pretty much the anchor of our competition efforts, and coach hadn't found any new boys to take my place, which was rather a pity because he wouldn't frigging leave me alone. I had things other than boxing on my mind: friends, computers, classes, revising, applying to uni, maybe finding some girls to talk to, all kinds of things, but coach had other ideas. He wanted me down to an average olympic level heavyweight fighting weight, wanted me to have a proper go. Coach had been right about everything before so I gave it a whirl for him. It was ...horrible.
"There weren't any more hours in the day for me to work out; coach's plan was counting calories. Jolly. I'd never done well on diets, and it was considerably worse while training full on, but I did as he said and gave it a proper go. I fell ill all the time, my temper was horrid, my friends were avoiding me, and once my school work started suffering I told coach I'd had enough. He accused me of malingering, piking out on him... and I quit. Right before this big important tournament, too. He was gutted. Think I broke poor coach's heart. I would have lost if I'd have stepped into the ring though, I know it. I'd lost more muscle and stamina than pounds, and I had no energy and no desire to do it anymore. Once out from under his thumb I slipped right back to what I thought my fighting weight was and then considerably past it before school was even out. And then I was accepted to uni, early, probably because the boxing on my application looked so good. And I still wasn't showing up for practice. Poor coach. He should get a dog, something nice and obedient that he won't find to be such a trial.
"So after a brilliant summer holiday spent programming and going to films with this odd but ever so pretty girl, I went off to uni. I had it in my head that I'd quit boxing, which was all very well until my housemates repeatedly caught me practicing combinations and footwork in the bathroom-"
"-Eh?" Hermione asked. "Caught you doing what?"
"Switching from right forward to left forward and back... Um. Shadowboxing. Jumping around by myself in front of the mirror. Or shop windows. Or -if things get really bad- anything mildly reflective. You can get away with making a fool of yourself once, even twice. People get busy. They forget. But you can't get away with it six times, twelve times, thirty times. I tried, but I just couldn't not- the baths are just too-- It's four meters of mirrored wall and plenty of space and it was mostly no one there and every time I walked in there I automatically fell into position and... and it looks really stupid, too. Augh. I couldn't help it. Just had too much energy to burn off or something. I gave it up and went and found the uni's boxing gym and joined in the hopes that'd make me too tired to embarrass myself continually in the baths." I was babbling. Maybe she wouldn't notice.
"Did it help?"
"Not really. Not until I started getting up earlier than everyone else so I could fit in two miles."
"You still run two miles every morning?"
"Enh. Yeah, took it up again. Kinda have to. Goes with the ensemble. It's not my favorite. Even now the only thing that will get me to run two miles every morning is the prospect of punching someone in the head later. ...Wow. That sounds even worse when I say it out loud."
I heard the sound of someone laughing, distant and tinny through the phone, and then Hermione saying, "Shush, Neville."
She had me on speakerphone? Since when did her phone have a speakerphone function? How many people have been listening to me? I felt my throat close up.
"Not you, Dudley. Go on. Please," said Hermione. Crookshanks looked up at me and sank his claws into my leg.
"Ow! Fucking cat! ...um. Yeah. Well. What's a few more people hearing this. Two teams you've got there, you said? Fourteen people who-"
"Nine," she said. "Nine left."
Fourteen minus nine is- "Oh. Sorry." Harry? She'd tell me if Harry-
"Nine is more than enough," she said, not to me.
What is she doing out there? I didn't wait for more prodding. I kept going.
~
I loved the uni's boxing club. It was crowded with newbies and only a small proportion of them were likely to stay on past a few weeks and meanwhile the coaches were running around desperately trying to prevent them all from hurting themselves, so beyond noticing that I didn't need any help, thanks, the trainers paid no attention to me. Very refreshing after that last year.
One of the newbies, a little tiny Asian chap who bounced up and down like a yappy little dog, still hadn't figured out how to tape his hands. The coaches kept overlooking him and his loose bandages and his wincing, and watching him splatter his knuckles made me wince too, so finally I went over and stopped him. I introduced myself, unwound him and started taping him up correctly. He said his name was Patrick. "You don't look like a Patrick," I said.
"You don't look like a Dudley," he said.
"Yes, I do. I couldn't possibly be any Dudlier."
"Oh. Well, in that case, I am the epitome of Patrickness." He grinned at me like a vampiric dingbat and I wasn't certain if he thought this was all very funny or if I'd insulted him.
I backed up and tried to be polite. "Uh-huh. What interested you in boxing?"
"Well, quite obviously I am meant to be a boxer. It is the sport of my people. Or so I have been informed. My family expect me to participate when I next go back to the old country."
"So you have been informed? Sweet family you got there. The old country... Would that be Ireland, Patrick?"
This was apparently an old chestnut of a joke to him and my using it caused him to tell me to call him 'Irish', and even worse, he started calling me 'English'. He also seemed to have got the idea that my squeamishness about watching people break their fingers meant that we were now friends. Ugh. He followed me around asking me questions after that, which made me feel like a chump because I was a newbie in that gym and had no cred there yet; he should have been asking the older guys but none of them paid him any attention. And he wasn't kidding, his family really were a slew of ferocious flyweights- he showed me the pictures. I got sucked into the project of seeing that he showed up well with them.
And he did have potential. The way he hopped up and down made me wonder if he'd be an inside fighter, but I didn't make bets on it based on his looks. I'd seen hot little energetic things turn all cold, deadly outside fighter in the ring, and everyone takes one look at me and assumes, wrongly, that I'm an outside fighter and far too slow to ever get inside someone's defense.
You just can't tell till you see someone stand up with someone else. And until I knew what sort of contender we had with Patrick, I couldn't advise him any further than the basics.
~
"Patrick stuck around longer than most of the other newbies, but unfortunately neither of us got to find out what style of boxer he was as there was no one in his weight class in the club and he couldn't persuade any of the almost-small-enough boxers to spar seriously with him. I couldn't blame them; it's no fun at all to stand up with someone that you outclass, even if they don't mind. I told Patrick he'd just have to bring in his own practice buddies. I told him if he was smart and wanted to win when he went back to the old country, that he'd pick out some partners at the very top end of his weight class. I kept my eyes open for him over the weekend, looking for students close to his size, but I didn't see any that weren't asthmatic little pushovers. I reckoned Patrick was shit out of luck."
"So much for my powers of divination. Next practice Patrick walks in with five beautiful Asian girls in tow, each one of them just a tad taller and heavier than him, all glowingly athletic. The entire club just stared. They had no idea what to make of girls in the gym. Regs had recently been changed so that girls could join, but no one expected that any girls actually would. But the girls were the exact right size for him and even if he could never have a legal match with girls, if they stuck around long enough to spar with him I could at least for once see what style Patrick was- and then we might maybe get somewhere with training, so I went over and helped Patrick set the girls up, showed them around, all that."
"Two weeks later we'd lost two of the girls who decided it wasn't for them after all, with only the runner, the tennis player, and the ninja left. Black belt. Brucella Lee. Whatever Hsu-li is."
"But the remaining girls claimed they like the training enough to try the sparring, so Irish- Patrick made the girls call him Irish, too- and I took them shopping for gear. Spending time with them outside of the gym environment, it became clear that Patrick had not miraculously found a bunch of women who were interested in boxing; he'd found a bunch of women who were interested in tearing him to shreds and so serious about it that they were willing to go to the gym four days a week, put in the two miles every day, and buy all the equipment. ...And he'd only known them for a few weeks. How does one inspire such passion in women? I had to know how he did it, it was certain to be very educational one way or another, even if it was a list of things to avoid. I watched them all very carefully in the shop."
"The girls were picking out mouthguards, going for the red ones. I wasn't going to say anything, I let Irish tell them that regulation mouthguards could be any colour but red and that if they wanted to participate in real competition bouts with other schools that they couldn't have red. They liked the red; they ignored him. 'Do I look like I've been feasting on your liver?' asked our ninja. Patrick told her that white would be more ladylike. 'Yeah. I'm having red,' she told him. But Hsu-li bought two, she secretly slipped a regulation one in with all the other stuff she was buying, and the other girls copied her."
"Right. So we finished shopping. I had Patrick in the front seat with their bags full of headgear and gloves all around his feet, and three incredibly gorgeous Asian girls, all wearing red mouthguards, crammed into the back of my car when-"
Hermione interrupted me. "-How absolutely fabulous, Dudley. And here I thought you were telling me a happy story." Her voice was dry and sarcastic, but she tossed the words out lightly, like the way you'd deliver a pitch to your best friend's little brother who'd never held a cricket bat before.
I was no rabbit, and after months of talking to her on the phone, I knew her style. I took her easy shot. "It is! It is a happy story! Oh. ...You mean for happy for you. Oh."
And the people there with Hermione broke up laughing. "You can really pick them, Hermione," someone said to her, but I had hit it- I could hear Hermione laughing, too. And then she stopped.
"Wait. Look. That's the signal," said Hermione and then the noises of the people around her stopped as well. The sound of her voice changed again, warmer and closer, as she removed the speaker-phone effect. "Right. That's it. Must go now. If I- Can you- Crookshanks?"
"All right," I said. "Yes."
"Okay. Thanks. For everything. Just perfect. Better than chocolate. Truly. I- I-" And she dodged in another direction and said, "I don't suppose you've got any last bits of advice?"
"Boxing advice? Much good that'll do you. Keep your hands up?"
"Haha. I'll keep that in mind. Well. Bye."
"Bye," I said.
"I love you," I said, too late, to the dial tone.
Crookshanks hooked a claw into my sleeve and pulled the phone down to his tufted ear. "Wow?" he said, and he sniffed at the phone and then turned his giant yellow saucer eyes up at me.
"Eh? Dunno what to tell you. We'll just have to see."
The cat howled. "Woe!"
I peeled his claws out of my thigh again. "Look, I'm sorry I forgot to give you a turn on the phone, but-"
"Woe! Woooooooooooooe! Woooooooooooooe! Wooooooooooooooooooooe!"
"Shush! You're not a kitten, you know. Try to act like it. Have some dignity, mate." Crookshanks ignored me and continued howling. "Shut it! She'll be fine! Fine!" I said over his shrieks.
Someone poked me in the back. I looked up. Patrick. Irish peered over my shoulder at Crookshanks- who wasn't disappearing as usual- and said, "Oi. What are you doing out here in the snow? We could use you inside. And what is that?"
I shut Crookshanks up by stuffing his mouse between his teeth. Patrick ran before me, shivering, as I carried the cat into the gym with me. The entire club stared at me when I walked in. Or they stared at the cat. Mostly at me. Their attention, variously smiling and interested and suspicious and annoyed, hit me like a brick wall. I glared back at them. "Mine. My cat," I said. "Don't touch."
I dropped my coat and stashed Crookshanks out of the way, but where I could still see him. I pulled out my gear and turned to see how far along in the practice we were. Crookshanks stayed where I put him, sitting in my gym bag, watching my phone. And nobody touched him. Nobody said anything. Like magic.
~
~
Next: Part 9.
HP Widdershins.
An illustrated, alternate universe, OOC fanfic by Didodikali.
Part One, in which Harry Potter grows a brain.
Part Two, in which Dudley Dursley grows a personality.
Part Three, in which Hermione Granger seizes the reins.
Part Four, in which Harry Potter speaks softly.
Part Five, in which Dudley opens packages.
Part Six, in which Hermione plays with fire.
Part Seven in which Hermione is screwed, blued, and tattooed. NC-17
And now, Part Eight, in which Dudley takes a call.
Nov 25
It was beginning to snow and, even with the streetlights coming on, there was no one hanging about outside to notice that I was being followed by an enormous, spotted feline with a big mouse in his jaws. My phone rang and I stopped to fish it out of my pocket and answer it. Crookshanks caught up to me and dropped his mouse on my shoe.
"Hermione?" I said.
"Yes..."
"I thought it'd be you. I think your cat can tell when you're going to call. He starts following me around with this expectant look on his face. You have got to come pick him up some time. He's getting desperate and he's trying to bribe me and I'm not having it," I said, kicking the mouse off of my trainer. "I can't believe you forgot him last time."
"Yes. Well, I'll certainly try to- to-" She trailed off into silence.
I frowned. Hermione is not usually either forgetful or equivocal when it comes to Crookshanks. "You all right?" I asked her. She said nothing, so I said, "What's going on? Where are you?"
"I- I don't know where I am exactly." Hermione was silent for a second and then she started talking, quickly, as if she needed to get everything in before her meter ran out. "We're in a- a big hole in the ground that I made myself. I suppose you'd call it a trench. We'll be here for a while. We're safe, I think. For the moment. Turns out I can't read Imperiused people within my own ranks after all, so our chocolate supplies got hexed to plasma right under my nose, and then it took us a while to tie down our unwitting plant, and we got surprised by Dementors while we were busy, so now I have the remnants of two teams and no more chocolate and we can't go back to get more because we need to stay here and wait for the signal, but-" Her voice was muffled like she had her hands cupped round the phone. "-my teams are not looking too good, and I can't think of anything else, my brain is chasing its own tail."
"Some kind of training exercise?" I asked, hoping hard.
She laughed bitterly. "Sorry. I shouldn't have bothered you."
I stepped out of the bracing wind, off the pavement and over to a park bench under a streetlamp. I dropped my gym bag on the bench and sat down. "No, no, it's okay," I said, "But what can I-"
"-A distraction. Anything. Just until- Just for a bit. Can you talk for a while? Look, just tell me a story."
"I don't know any stories," I said.
Her voice sounded strangled. "Okay. I'll-" No. Oh, no. She's going to hang up and call someone else.
"-that aren't true. Will that do? Can I say any old thing?" I asked. Crookshanks jumped up on the bench next to me and dropped his mouse on my knee.
"I'm just going to-" The phone crackled in my ear and then she said, "Can you hear me? Go ahead."
Right. What the hell am I going to say? Oh my god, there's a dead mouse on my knee. I picked Crookshank's mouse up by the tail and put it on my gym bag. Gym bag. There we go. "Well, uh. Here's hoping you like sports stories. I'm sort of in the middle of pulling a ringer. I haven't yet told the other people at the gym here about my boxing trophies, and they-"
She interrupted me, sounding slightly tinny and far away, "I'm sorry, boxing trophies? What? You're supposed to start at the beginning when you tell stories. And why didn't you tell me this before?"
"I thought you knew. I didn't talk about it because I didn't think vegetarian tree-huggers like you would be impressed by miniature aluminium totems to fisticuffs. They were right there behind my bedroom door at home. On a bureau. Couldn't really see them when I had the door open, and I suppose it usually was open when you were visiting, one foot on the floor and all that. ...Okay, so maybe I might have dumped laundry all over the top of that bureau... I'd sort of expected that Harry would have outed me though. He never mentioned it?"
"Harry doesn't talk about you."
"He doesn't?" That was vaguely disappointing somehow.
"Start at the beginning. How did someone like you even get into something like that?"
"What do you mean, 'someone like me'? I am not some effete intellectual like what you seem to- I mean, I'm exactly the kind of- Well, anyway, it wasn't even my idea. I got caught fighting in the halls one time too many and detentions didn't bother me, so finally they pulled me out of the regular gym class and sent me down to the boxing class with the intention that the older boys would beat the shit out of me and I'd learn my lesson and stop. They gave me the usual choice of standing up with someone right away to get my face pushed in, which gets your punishment over quickly in just one day and it's what most everybody there always chooses, or... I could do six weeks of hideous training with the boxing class. I had reason to get out of the regular gym class for a bit, so that's what I-"
"Usual choice, indeed. What a charming school. Reminds me of mine," she said. "Nevertheless, you're leaving things out. Why were you fighting in the halls? With whom? What was your reason to want to get out of the regular gym class."
"...You say that you can't read me over the phone, but then you do that, and you wonder why I don't believe you."
"So you are holding out on me."
I said, "All right, all right. Only two of my friends ended up in gym class with me, the default gym class for everyone who's not doing rugby or footie or cricket with the teams, while this arsehole joker, Jeremy, ended up with forty of his friends in the class. Jeremy was... um... a sex maniac? An exceedingly pathetic little pervert. Something like that. He decided that I had the closest thing to tits in the school -I was, uh, a lot heavier back then- and he started sneaking up on me and pinching me. I'm quite sure there was something seriously wrong with him, because I hit him a couple of times and shoved him in bins and such and he never learned, maybe he liked it, I don't know, he still kept on trying for me, thought it was funny. Finally I stopped waiting for him to tag me first before I'd retaliate, and I-- Is this doing any good, Hermione?"
"Yes. Please. Go on, Dudley."
She's either very persuasive or I'm just easy and like hearing her say my name. ...I wonder how much trouble she's really in...
"Okay. So I stopped waiting and I'd just belt him one whenever I was close enough to reach him. At dinner, between classes, in the toilets, whenever. Jeremy was faster than me and no one ever saw him start shit, but the teachers caught me messing with him several times and I always got the blame. And eventually I split his lip open and he was sent off to get stitches or plastic surgery or therapy or whatever, the poncy little shit, and I was almost expelled, but they sent me down to the boxing class instead, saying that'd serve me right. They had to swap around some of my other classes so I could do the whole six weeks detention, and blah, blah, blah. There you go. You happy? Can I get on with the bit that I like now?"
"I'm happy," she said around a muffled nervous giggle that didn't sound at all like her. "Go on. Don't skip ahead though. The boxing class is next."
"Christ, woman. Bossy much? Fine, the boxing class. I- You know, I'd quite liked the regular gym classes before. I wasn't so terrible that I'd get picked last, though I wasn't especially brilliant at anything either, but I was always up for having a laugh with my friends, tossing around a ball, doing something different every day."
"Restrain him before he gives us away. Here, use this." Hermione, sotto voce, and not directed into the phone. Not at me.
I pretended I hadn't heard her and said, "The boxing class was not a laugh. There were no fun ball games. They ran us back and forth, up and down, doing horrible, boring, very difficult exercises, and I was crap at running and I could not keep up with them at all. On the other hand that fucking arsehole, Jeremy, wasn't there and there were two coaches who were watching all the time, making sure it was all business, and it was all older boys who were too serious and intense to even look at me anyway. I could follow behind them and run until I couldn't move and no one would think that was a great opportunity to sneak up on me and- which was ...relaxing. Even doing crunches was rather nice and restful- mentally anyway."
Nothing but silence on the other end. I kept talking. "So six weeks later my punishment is done but I didn't go back to the regular gym class, I just kept going to the boxing class. No one noticed. So I'm still there eight weeks on, ten weeks on, I've learned their routines and I'm doing them on autopilot- badly, I still can't keep up, but no one's giving me any shit, no one's bothering me, I'm having quite a good time really, when I notice one of the coaches staring at me. We're doing one of those things where you run from one side of the gym to the other, touching the floor, changing direction, and I am miles behind everyone else. When I see that somebody's finally noticed I'm still there and I'm not supposed to be, I try to speed up and blend in with the ranks, but I don't manage to lose his attention, he's still watching me. And pretty soon I can't go anymore, I'm no sprinter, and I have to stop."
Nothing. Is she even still on the line? "Coach saunters over and jams his fingers in my neck. I'm too winded to tell him to get his fucking hands off me, or to shove him off, which is just as well, because he looks at his watch, he's just checking my pulse. 'Slow down,' he says, even though I've not been keeping up at all. 'Try to keep it a notch below terrified frothy racehorse, eh?' he says. 'Nice effort, though. Do we get to keep you then?' ...I don't know what to say to that. He starts telling me how all his heavyweights are in their last year and leaving school in a few months, all his juniors are lightweights, and he pokes me in the shoulder, shoves me hard and I don't move, and he has this odd, covetous look in his eye that I have never seen before and he keeps talking, and, and- you ever have your entire life redefined in a few words?"
"...Yes," she said. "I got a letter."
"Oh. Right," I said. "Lucky you, written down like that. I bet you still have that letter somewhere. I'll always end up paraphrasing to myself."
"I do have my letter still," she said. "Paraphrase to me. More," she commanded. And that sounded like her at last: bossy, insistent. Hungry.
More, I can do. More is what I am good at. I can run my mouth for forever. The phone had warmed up; it was a pleasant contrast to the chilly night air. I curled around it. Crookshanks, claws retracted, edged onto my lap.
~
I told Hermione how, after it was announced that I'd be allowed to stay, the older boys dragged me out to run two miles every morning with them. "The price of my joining them being that I had to do everything that they did, the afternoon workouts four times a week AND the morning runs, which were every morning, including weekends. I hadn't even known about that part. I'd not had to do the morning run as part of my detention, but I wasn't going back, so I had to do it. I- Well, I'll never be a sprinter. My stamina improved rather a lot though, they finally let me in to do some sparring, and it turned out the coach was right- I was built for the sport. Well, and he was a very good teacher, our coach was, too. Over the next few years I won quite a few trophies, lost a few more stone, won some more trophies, and then coach- uh- I think he got a little obsessed."
"By my last year I was the best on the team and pretty much the anchor of our competition efforts, and coach hadn't found any new boys to take my place, which was rather a pity because he wouldn't frigging leave me alone. I had things other than boxing on my mind: friends, computers, classes, revising, applying to uni, maybe finding some girls to talk to, all kinds of things, but coach had other ideas. He wanted me down to an average olympic level heavyweight fighting weight, wanted me to have a proper go. Coach had been right about everything before so I gave it a whirl for him. It was ...horrible.
"There weren't any more hours in the day for me to work out; coach's plan was counting calories. Jolly. I'd never done well on diets, and it was considerably worse while training full on, but I did as he said and gave it a proper go. I fell ill all the time, my temper was horrid, my friends were avoiding me, and once my school work started suffering I told coach I'd had enough. He accused me of malingering, piking out on him... and I quit. Right before this big important tournament, too. He was gutted. Think I broke poor coach's heart. I would have lost if I'd have stepped into the ring though, I know it. I'd lost more muscle and stamina than pounds, and I had no energy and no desire to do it anymore. Once out from under his thumb I slipped right back to what I thought my fighting weight was and then considerably past it before school was even out. And then I was accepted to uni, early, probably because the boxing on my application looked so good. And I still wasn't showing up for practice. Poor coach. He should get a dog, something nice and obedient that he won't find to be such a trial.
"So after a brilliant summer holiday spent programming and going to films with this odd but ever so pretty girl, I went off to uni. I had it in my head that I'd quit boxing, which was all very well until my housemates repeatedly caught me practicing combinations and footwork in the bathroom-"
"-Eh?" Hermione asked. "Caught you doing what?"
"Switching from right forward to left forward and back... Um. Shadowboxing. Jumping around by myself in front of the mirror. Or shop windows. Or -if things get really bad- anything mildly reflective. You can get away with making a fool of yourself once, even twice. People get busy. They forget. But you can't get away with it six times, twelve times, thirty times. I tried, but I just couldn't not- the baths are just too-- It's four meters of mirrored wall and plenty of space and it was mostly no one there and every time I walked in there I automatically fell into position and... and it looks really stupid, too. Augh. I couldn't help it. Just had too much energy to burn off or something. I gave it up and went and found the uni's boxing gym and joined in the hopes that'd make me too tired to embarrass myself continually in the baths." I was babbling. Maybe she wouldn't notice.
"Did it help?"
"Not really. Not until I started getting up earlier than everyone else so I could fit in two miles."
"You still run two miles every morning?"
"Enh. Yeah, took it up again. Kinda have to. Goes with the ensemble. It's not my favorite. Even now the only thing that will get me to run two miles every morning is the prospect of punching someone in the head later. ...Wow. That sounds even worse when I say it out loud."
I heard the sound of someone laughing, distant and tinny through the phone, and then Hermione saying, "Shush, Neville."
She had me on speakerphone? Since when did her phone have a speakerphone function? How many people have been listening to me? I felt my throat close up.
"Not you, Dudley. Go on. Please," said Hermione. Crookshanks looked up at me and sank his claws into my leg.
"Ow! Fucking cat! ...um. Yeah. Well. What's a few more people hearing this. Two teams you've got there, you said? Fourteen people who-"
"Nine," she said. "Nine left."
Fourteen minus nine is- "Oh. Sorry." Harry? She'd tell me if Harry-
"Nine is more than enough," she said, not to me.
What is she doing out there? I didn't wait for more prodding. I kept going.
~
I loved the uni's boxing club. It was crowded with newbies and only a small proportion of them were likely to stay on past a few weeks and meanwhile the coaches were running around desperately trying to prevent them all from hurting themselves, so beyond noticing that I didn't need any help, thanks, the trainers paid no attention to me. Very refreshing after that last year.
One of the newbies, a little tiny Asian chap who bounced up and down like a yappy little dog, still hadn't figured out how to tape his hands. The coaches kept overlooking him and his loose bandages and his wincing, and watching him splatter his knuckles made me wince too, so finally I went over and stopped him. I introduced myself, unwound him and started taping him up correctly. He said his name was Patrick. "You don't look like a Patrick," I said.
"You don't look like a Dudley," he said.
"Yes, I do. I couldn't possibly be any Dudlier."
"Oh. Well, in that case, I am the epitome of Patrickness." He grinned at me like a vampiric dingbat and I wasn't certain if he thought this was all very funny or if I'd insulted him.
I backed up and tried to be polite. "Uh-huh. What interested you in boxing?"
"Well, quite obviously I am meant to be a boxer. It is the sport of my people. Or so I have been informed. My family expect me to participate when I next go back to the old country."
"So you have been informed? Sweet family you got there. The old country... Would that be Ireland, Patrick?"
This was apparently an old chestnut of a joke to him and my using it caused him to tell me to call him 'Irish', and even worse, he started calling me 'English'. He also seemed to have got the idea that my squeamishness about watching people break their fingers meant that we were now friends. Ugh. He followed me around asking me questions after that, which made me feel like a chump because I was a newbie in that gym and had no cred there yet; he should have been asking the older guys but none of them paid him any attention. And he wasn't kidding, his family really were a slew of ferocious flyweights- he showed me the pictures. I got sucked into the project of seeing that he showed up well with them.
And he did have potential. The way he hopped up and down made me wonder if he'd be an inside fighter, but I didn't make bets on it based on his looks. I'd seen hot little energetic things turn all cold, deadly outside fighter in the ring, and everyone takes one look at me and assumes, wrongly, that I'm an outside fighter and far too slow to ever get inside someone's defense.
You just can't tell till you see someone stand up with someone else. And until I knew what sort of contender we had with Patrick, I couldn't advise him any further than the basics.
~
"Patrick stuck around longer than most of the other newbies, but unfortunately neither of us got to find out what style of boxer he was as there was no one in his weight class in the club and he couldn't persuade any of the almost-small-enough boxers to spar seriously with him. I couldn't blame them; it's no fun at all to stand up with someone that you outclass, even if they don't mind. I told Patrick he'd just have to bring in his own practice buddies. I told him if he was smart and wanted to win when he went back to the old country, that he'd pick out some partners at the very top end of his weight class. I kept my eyes open for him over the weekend, looking for students close to his size, but I didn't see any that weren't asthmatic little pushovers. I reckoned Patrick was shit out of luck."
"So much for my powers of divination. Next practice Patrick walks in with five beautiful Asian girls in tow, each one of them just a tad taller and heavier than him, all glowingly athletic. The entire club just stared. They had no idea what to make of girls in the gym. Regs had recently been changed so that girls could join, but no one expected that any girls actually would. But the girls were the exact right size for him and even if he could never have a legal match with girls, if they stuck around long enough to spar with him I could at least for once see what style Patrick was- and then we might maybe get somewhere with training, so I went over and helped Patrick set the girls up, showed them around, all that."
"Two weeks later we'd lost two of the girls who decided it wasn't for them after all, with only the runner, the tennis player, and the ninja left. Black belt. Brucella Lee. Whatever Hsu-li is."
"But the remaining girls claimed they like the training enough to try the sparring, so Irish- Patrick made the girls call him Irish, too- and I took them shopping for gear. Spending time with them outside of the gym environment, it became clear that Patrick had not miraculously found a bunch of women who were interested in boxing; he'd found a bunch of women who were interested in tearing him to shreds and so serious about it that they were willing to go to the gym four days a week, put in the two miles every day, and buy all the equipment. ...And he'd only known them for a few weeks. How does one inspire such passion in women? I had to know how he did it, it was certain to be very educational one way or another, even if it was a list of things to avoid. I watched them all very carefully in the shop."
"The girls were picking out mouthguards, going for the red ones. I wasn't going to say anything, I let Irish tell them that regulation mouthguards could be any colour but red and that if they wanted to participate in real competition bouts with other schools that they couldn't have red. They liked the red; they ignored him. 'Do I look like I've been feasting on your liver?' asked our ninja. Patrick told her that white would be more ladylike. 'Yeah. I'm having red,' she told him. But Hsu-li bought two, she secretly slipped a regulation one in with all the other stuff she was buying, and the other girls copied her."
"Right. So we finished shopping. I had Patrick in the front seat with their bags full of headgear and gloves all around his feet, and three incredibly gorgeous Asian girls, all wearing red mouthguards, crammed into the back of my car when-"
Hermione interrupted me. "-How absolutely fabulous, Dudley. And here I thought you were telling me a happy story." Her voice was dry and sarcastic, but she tossed the words out lightly, like the way you'd deliver a pitch to your best friend's little brother who'd never held a cricket bat before.
I was no rabbit, and after months of talking to her on the phone, I knew her style. I took her easy shot. "It is! It is a happy story! Oh. ...You mean for happy for you. Oh."
And the people there with Hermione broke up laughing. "You can really pick them, Hermione," someone said to her, but I had hit it- I could hear Hermione laughing, too. And then she stopped.
"Wait. Look. That's the signal," said Hermione and then the noises of the people around her stopped as well. The sound of her voice changed again, warmer and closer, as she removed the speaker-phone effect. "Right. That's it. Must go now. If I- Can you- Crookshanks?"
"All right," I said. "Yes."
"Okay. Thanks. For everything. Just perfect. Better than chocolate. Truly. I- I-" And she dodged in another direction and said, "I don't suppose you've got any last bits of advice?"
"Boxing advice? Much good that'll do you. Keep your hands up?"
"Haha. I'll keep that in mind. Well. Bye."
"Bye," I said.
"I love you," I said, too late, to the dial tone.
Crookshanks hooked a claw into my sleeve and pulled the phone down to his tufted ear. "Wow?" he said, and he sniffed at the phone and then turned his giant yellow saucer eyes up at me.
"Eh? Dunno what to tell you. We'll just have to see."
The cat howled. "Woe!"
I peeled his claws out of my thigh again. "Look, I'm sorry I forgot to give you a turn on the phone, but-"
"Woe! Woooooooooooooe! Woooooooooooooe! Wooooooooooooooooooooe!"
"Shush! You're not a kitten, you know. Try to act like it. Have some dignity, mate." Crookshanks ignored me and continued howling. "Shut it! She'll be fine! Fine!" I said over his shrieks.
Someone poked me in the back. I looked up. Patrick. Irish peered over my shoulder at Crookshanks- who wasn't disappearing as usual- and said, "Oi. What are you doing out here in the snow? We could use you inside. And what is that?"
I shut Crookshanks up by stuffing his mouse between his teeth. Patrick ran before me, shivering, as I carried the cat into the gym with me. The entire club stared at me when I walked in. Or they stared at the cat. Mostly at me. Their attention, variously smiling and interested and suspicious and annoyed, hit me like a brick wall. I glared back at them. "Mine. My cat," I said. "Don't touch."
I dropped my coat and stashed Crookshanks out of the way, but where I could still see him. I pulled out my gear and turned to see how far along in the practice we were. Crookshanks stayed where I put him, sitting in my gym bag, watching my phone. And nobody touched him. Nobody said anything. Like magic.
~
Next: Part 9.