Chapter Text
Hermione
I come upon the casting before dawn, freeze in its cool, pale reflection amongst the rain-pocked puddles on the wet pavement. A plaster knock-off in a curiosity shop window, stage-lit from below. A behemoth of bleached-bone white against velvet green.
They stand hip to hip, the boy and the girl, the corner of the same drape covering the Y of her thighs flapped over, wind-stuck to cover his sex, as well. She clutches him, tendre, one hand wrapping his waist, the other cradling his head as he turns from her, his one clenched fist roughly pulling the curls of her hair, his other palm raised and open between them, ready to push, to force her face from his.
A jolt of sudden recall, then an eddy of memories. The looming original at Woburn Abbey. Me, age nine, looking up at it, my own hands clasped behind my back, forever an unfailingly good girl who knew not to touch. Never touch. Until I met a boy who seemed always about to die, and I couldn’t keep my ruddy hands off him.
I look into the face of Caunus, his features warped, repulsed by this, his sister, Byblis, his mouth open in rebuke.
I check the twist of my bun, swipe the damp from my cheeks, walk on.
….
Bouncing lights and the hiss of tread displacing water. The first of the day’s delivery vans prowl along, pass me by, an unbothered pack of migrating beasts. A block ahead, strands of bulbs flare to outline the red awning of a café, and I slow my pace, slip back, mind the old habits.
“Not first. People remember who’s first through the door.”
Pre-dawn drizzle, late November, the edge of a grocer’s car park in Slough. Under the cloak, the reek of night watch that never quite rinsed off the skin - woodsmoke, damp wool. There hadn’t been sun for days, nor food. My fingertips caught at the stitches of Harry’s jumper.
“And I’m less noticeable. Let me...”
There hadn’t been any sun for days, and anyone who looked at him would be struck, would easily remember his face…
“Let me…”
Cheese on toast, and an apple apiece. He’d stretched out and slept like an exhausted child, after. Dead still, lips just parted, jumper wadded, the small of his back bared to the meagre warmth my magic could sustain. I put the locket in the billycan on the table, made myself stare at fairy tales, but breathed as he breathed. I spread a blanket over him in the gloaming, sat in the triangle of the tent’s opening, faced the wet, unyielding night outside. I dabbed up errant raindrops with the toe of my sock, listened to the torrent’s endless ebbs and builds well past midnight.
A growing boy…I remember thinking…needs his sleep.
Implied was he’d survive the night. He’d survive the war, reach his full height and breadth.
I’d stopped growing by sixth year, figured it didn’t much matter if I ever slept, again.
It had been the strangest day, the fear somewhere beyond the solid wall of rain, and the sadness numbed to nothing. Just his breath and mine, together and in time, the flickering blue, and the trace of apple sweetness lingering like a friendly ghost upon my lips.
It happened, but Harry will never remember it this way.
Perhaps I won’t remember it this way much longer, myself. Perhaps everything is re-written in time, memories of dreams of memories.
Leave it… seems to come from all around. The treads’ hiss. The jingle of the café’s bell. Lay it down. Let it go.
I squint, pass without pause beneath the bright awning lights, whisper to myself, “Not yet. No.”
………………
It’s easier to walk this city in the dark, easier to pretend I’ve never been here before. I pick a bench in the museum’s courtyard, cast a quick drying spell, sit, sag in the cloud-muted light spreading in the eastern sky.
We once sat together on a different bench across the way. Bright mid-day, my parents and I, Mum on one side of me figuring over a cheque register, Dad on the other loading a fresh roll of film into his 35 mm camera. Back home, in the old house, the pictures had been tucked into a green leather album that sat on the coffee table. Dozens of shots of chateaus and lavender fields, country cottages and the Paris lights. Mum is young and pretty, and I am a poor thing, all big teeth and frizzed hair and awkward adolescent brow.
It must be vexing, this clod of a girl they no longer quite care for lingering amongst their mementos. If I could rearrange the chemicals on the paper to blur myself away, I would, but I’ve never seen the old albums in the new house, assume they are in some untouched box in the attic. Out of sight, out of mind.
So said.
All I do is think about things I can no longer see.
I close my eyes against the bench across the way, try to believe in best intentions. I don’t think this is the gift they’d intended to give. I wasn’t supposed to have to sleep in my coat, or constantly forget to eat, or lose all track of the calendar. I was supposed to have been with Ron, together, for a grand, romantic week in Paris. We would have slept too late and eaten too much and I would have wanted to go places and do things he didn’t care about and wouldn’t pretend to care about, and then we would have fought and made up, and then spent the bulk of the trip doing whatever he wanted because it was, after all, a terrible hassle for him to be here, so far from home, in the first place.
Or maybe not. Maybe it would have been lovely in ways I can’t imagine.
Maybe I can only imagine it one way because I’m who would have made it so.
The thought clots, and, at once, I’m too tired for even this bench and wishing for an out-of-the-way corner under a portico, out of the rain, where I can lean into the cold stone, wedge my head in the join and sleep, disappear into the dream, fade out of the eastern light.
I touch my fingers to the empty, wet concrete beside me, remind myself I don’t have to do this. There’s no one to stop me going back to the cold-blowing vent, my sliver of the white bed. I’m the only one imagining that seeing a bad copy of one sculpture is a portent to seek out another.
I already know how the story ends. I don’t have to see it realized in stone.
Except, I do. Rarely does one have the chance to stare into a mirror without seeing one’s own face.
My charms keep me mostly dry and unnoticeable, and I linger as morning comes, collect rain from the bench in the creases of my fingertips, eyes closed. Here, floating in the in-between, almost asleep, a half-dream of my body, sat in a bed, my hands covering my eyes, my cheeks, three silver swords, one each sunk through my skull, my throat, my heart.
A stroke of my hair as he guides me down. He says, Let go, petite poupée.
Iced silver swords pin both hands, right then left, then each foot to the bed. Razor points pierce both my eyes.
He says, They are only cold cinders in familiar shapes, now. Let go.
No pain, only capture. His thumb on my lips, pushing through, sweeping across my tongue.
My fingertips in the wet, the cold. Not blood, but rain. Just rain. I open my eyes, watch the museum’s earliest attendees filter into the courtyard, catalogue the brightest umbrellas.
……..
She doesn’t draw crowds or even second glances. Bared breasts aside, she’s a rather dull composition, listless and un-dynamic, easily passed by on the way to more interesting tableaus. Displayed low, she stretches horizontal, partially nude, of course, but draped from hip to ankle. She is beautifully rendered - the stone belly beneath her navel carved to look soft, easily caught through lips to suck to teeth, the line of her curved waist ascending to champagne glass breasts, the right obscured by a hand, her fingertips just touching the flesh above her cursed heart. Her head is heavy, pulls her wilted neck over the wedge of her shoulder, and when I try to mimic the lay of it, I can feel in the alignment of the bones: this is how one settles down to die.
Only she didn’t die.
“BIBLIS CHANGÉE EN FONTAINE,” the plinth says.
The naiads couldn’t comfort her, and they couldn’t leave her to die, so they gave her over to the earth and her own suffering, let her dissolve into her own tears at the edge of the forest where she’d collapsed, where, to this day, her grief is still bubbling to the surface, still drenching the ground.
We are not the same. Byblis didn’t understand what she’d been about with her brother until it was too late. My Latin’s not polished enough to know whether it’s the translator’s pity or Ovid’s own, but she is depicted as an innocent, unaware to have been acting out “the lying semblance of a sister’s love” every time she was driven to reach for Caunus. “Her love went astray,” they say, as if the love were its own unique, willful being, a form operating autonomously outside her body. As if it slyly slipped a leash, somehow worked out the latch to its cage.
As if the love wasn’t part of her mind. As if it wasn’t a mere notion to be strangled, easily transmuted into a dozen other things.
It can be done.
We are not the same. Byblis was undisciplined. She talked herself into pursuing her brother against all good sense, and was correctly rejected for being foolish and wrong. I was foolish, but right. I don’t have a brother. I had a friend who needed help, so I helped. I stayed when I was supposed to stay, and didn’t linger about when it was time for me to back away. I pursued exactly who I’d been meant to pursue, and when Ron finally chose me, I was exactly as happy as everyone thought I should be.
Her fingertips press to her heart, but in this last moment, finally self-aware, her face is a void. And she’s too lovingly sculpted for me to think it a sudden lapse in skill. The sculptor knew. It’s Byblis at the very end of herself, resigned.
So, not quite a mirror, no.
Not yet.
……..
The patisserie’s curved window glitters in jewel tones, sky blue topaz blending to apple ruby red to Beurré Bosc gold. It’s a rustic display, tarte aux pome and le tart au poire on staggered stands, the whole fruits piled in plentiful array about the wooden bases.
Apples and pears. Teddy asleep in the crook of my arm. Slices of time reheated and re-served until I finally figure it out. Memories of dreams of memories.
Teddy and I under the tree, cloud-watching and changing nappies on flyable Sunday afternoons. We sat on a quilt under an oak at the edge of the orchard. I fed him sliced pear and apple and raisins. I stacked blocks for him to crash through and said “Yaaaay,” over and over, then stretched out beside him, faced up toward the sun, pointing, counted black dashes racing far above, one, two, three. I recited Harry and the Hungarian Horntail every time, quieter and quieter, until Teddy settled, one block upheld, rotating in his fingers, until his eyes closed, until the block lay on his chest, and his warm, fruity breath puffed an even rhythm against my shoulder.
That last Sunday, I taught Teddy the difference between “cat” and “rat” with the blocks on the quilt. And, when everyone was back on the ground, Harry had knelt between Teddy and I, and said, “Show me again,” and on cue Teddy had slammed down the ‘C’ block then laughed and laughed, and Harry had shouted, “Brilliant!” And it had only been a short display, no more than a minute at most, before Ginny said, “This clever boy deserves cake,” then hefted him up and made off toward the house. Harry scrambled up to follow her, and Ron had gone along chattering beside him, and I stayed back to gather the blocks and refold the quilt and unwind all the ‘next Sundays’ I’d planned. When I got back to the house, everyone’s attention had been properly re-focused, and I knew that had been the last of the quilt afternoons.
Harry was planning to buy Teddy a proper, big-boy broom this Christmas. Another black dash, racing far above. I look into the sky, a reflex, though I’ll never watch any of them fly again, and the tops of the buildings framing the blue above fuzz out gray then twist round and round, and there’s nothing steady near to reach for, but my hand outstretches, anyway.
……
The woman at the cosmetics counter says, “Pardonne-moi, vous étiez…” and, “oui, cello-ci. Bien sûr.” She stares at my money in her hand, confounded, and, after ten long seconds and a ‘Madame’ from me which she doesn’t seem to hear, I take the small bag from where she placed it, leave without receipt or change.
………….
The door is heavy, gnarled, a frieze of ancient, oiled carvings I can’t make sense of in the moonless night. Blue and green glass panes sag, ripple, glow, backlit by scattered embers inside. I move to touch one and my fingers pass straight through the illusion, and somewhere the words form, I knew it was too beautiful to be true.
And it’s not a door at all, but only dense, dark smoke, and a hand clasps my fingers and pulls me through, holds on until he is behind me, tall, my arm pulled to wrap around myself, his chest tight to my shoulders. He draws my lids down with two fingers as he whispers close to my ear, What good are these eyes that can only look back…
I still need to see…I think to say.
The empty air around you, where your darlings used to be?
His touch trails the same path as two tears dripping down my cheeks, my neck, then conjoins, broadens, his whole, wide palm flattens, swipes an arc over my chest, a movement like a schoolboy using a felt block to lift chalk dust from a slate, before he writes his own letters across with his fingertip, slowly spells his name into my skin.
I Will Be until the end, he says.
Blue and green glass panes. Too beautiful to be true. The warm light behind, a fool’s bait.
His hand around my throat. My pulse slogs against the line of his thumb as I lean into it, knowing this is sheer indulgence, just a moment’s theater, before I wake up alone, freely breathing.
…….
The shower is warm, at least. I sit on the corner of the bed after, stare at the bag on the table and squeeze the water from my hair with a pillowcase, presumably to “smooth down the frizz.”
I am not entirely untouched by ageless, feminine wisdom. It arises at the most random moments, supposed common knowledge, true or not, passively absorbed whilst living in the girls’ dorm.
Eternal absolutes, handed down. Things like, ‘boys go feral for the scent of cinnamon, vanilla, and a bit of smoke.’
‘One’s everyday lippie should match the colour of one’s nipples.’
‘For school skirts, knee socks are better than tights, but stockings are better than knee socks.’
‘The bigger the shoe, the thinner the thigh.’
‘A bold a lip or a bold eye, but never both.’
I twist the hair up, firm, pin it in place. I spread the damp pillowcase across the back of the room’s chair to dry, pick up the small bag set beside the watermarked paper and good pen, empty the contents onto my palm. It feels good in my hand, the branded box protecting the tube inside, and I’m hesitant to open it, to spoil its pristine new edges with even the slightest wear.
“70 Rouge Coromandel” it says on the bottom of the box, then again on the bottom of the tube. There’s no way around using the mirror for this, so I step over, lean in, avoid catching my own eyes so it’s not my lips, not my hand drawing the colour against the soft flesh. I am Lavender in sixth year, doing the thing I’ve done hundreds of times before, the way I’ve always done it. Bow to corner, bow to corner, two sweeps along the lower lips’ line, then the middle, and press together. Full coverage. I am Lavender if she’d lived, correcting a slight imperfection with the tip of my little finger, and I’m going out into the night to gustily embrace the new year, and as long as I only look at my lips in this mirror I won’t see the wrong face, or the wrong hair, or the whole, empty room stretched out behind me.
We were never friends, but if I could channel her spirit through my body tonight, I would. She could take over and have at the world, and I might watch from inside, see how it’s done.
”Dear…” on the top of the page, just there, within reach. I uncap the pen, scrawl “Happy New Year from Paris!” diagonally across the page, press a red, bold-lip kiss above the black scythe heart.
……..
Every place is thronged, swarming, impenetrable. I stroll the pavement, a clear glass head slashed with red, riding along the interchanging crowds.
It’s easy to guide myself away from every entrance. I’m too underdressed for this one, too unfashionable for that one, too obviously alone for all the rest. Packs of young men roll by, kitted out to pull. Groups of smokey-eyed girls clasp their coats closed around their bare necks. Couples exit cabs, arrive for their reservations. Hour after hour. I keep my own eyes up, look into every passing face, an experiment. I slip into an unmanned door to an unremarkable wine bar, order “vin blanc s’il vous plaît,” then, waiting for the barman to fill the Chardonnay glass he set before me, ask the fellow to my left for the time. His gaze drops to his watch, then his drink, and then he turns back into earnest conversation with his mate to the other side. The barman is busy serving a cluster of customers several stools down, and I wait the length of two songs, then three, run a finger tip down the stem of my dry, empty glass, then leave.
……..
The three silver ice buckets are random in the hallway, presumably included as part of some holiday hotel package, as I find one has been placed by the door to my room, as well. Chilled champagne on ice. Two flutes. I smile over it. A perfect end to a romantic week in Paris.
The clock reads 10:52, the only light in the room. I set the bucket on the dresser, fumble to raise the shade. Street light over gold facets. My lip print is a thin, red pool under a black scratch on the side of the ice bucket.
“Happy New Year from Paris!”
Indeed.
I’ve only ever been served champagne, have never opened a bottle. The foil tears away unevenly in my unsteady hands, drifts off the dresser top in the breeze from the vent, falls, confetti pieces flashing to the floor. I know to ease the cork out gently, pour the liquid down the inside of the flute, no foam. The tickle of the bubbles to my nose signals ‘celebrate,’and my mouth twists into a conditioned smile and I drag the room’s chair over to the window’s corner, tink my flute against the pane then sit, look over the expanse of the roof across the street.
Somewhere tonight, almost everyone I’ve ever loved is alive and well, and so I will drink to that. The first sip fizzes over my tongue, cool and lively, and I whisper, “I always forget what it’s like,” then toss the remainder of the flute back in one go. No reason to maintain an illusion of decorum, here, and midnight approaches.
It’s sort of nice here at the window’s corner, behind the path of the cold-blowing vent. The drink has gone straight to my head. My pulse ticks in my gums. I haven’t eaten since…I don’t know, and I think another flute full is in order to fill the stomach and greet the new year properly.
I stand, unpin my hair, pretend its weight tumbling down is a whole, new, opaque skin slipping into place. The skin of Minnie, of Helene. Eris. Skin to draw the eye. Not whatever this is I have now. I glimpse a clown mouth in the mirror, look away, grab the ice bucket, set it on the floor within easy reach beside the chair.
Sitting in my coat by the window, I refill my glass, take a long draw. And now the lights outside are haloed, and my toes are quite numb, and I slip off my shoes, pull my feet into the seat of my chair, and it hits me I’ve had a few pounds of wool spread over my lap the last couple of months, and so of course I’m cold, now it’s gone.
No, can’t think of all that. Can’t think of what I’d been waiting for. More champagne should take care of it. After all, it’s not the cold making me uncomfortable, it’s knowing that I’m cold, and, by George, enough of these little bubbles can erase it right out of my mind.
Bold lip print on the flute. Dear me. All that anxiety for nothing. Play-acting brazenness and channeling the dead, and I couldn’t even get the time of day.
Ron would have found this entire situation very funny. He would have laughed at me, and he’d have been right. He would have called me mental, and said I didn’t need lipstick, and all that sort of stuff never really suited me, anyway. All the things he’s said before. Things with which I mostly agree, but, still, hearing them always picked at something inside I can’t name.
We were always going to end, undone by hundreds of unnameable somethings. I miss him, but I don’t wish he was here.
Refill the flute. Tink it against the pane. There’s something wrong with me, and he got away just in time. I’ll drink to that.
I slump back into the chair, bottle propped on my chest, head drooping onto the wedge of my shoulder. I can’t feel the cold anymore, can’t feel anything much at all but my pulse in my teeth and the stillness of my own hands.
No, can’t think of it. I lift the bottle, overfill the flute to the very tip top, suck away what beads down the side, then gulp the entire pour.
I can’t read the clock, and the lights far away swell, wobble. I slump, back, rest my head on the wedge of my shoulder, like how one settles down to die.
“Happy New Year from Paris,” I whisper.
……..
Surfaceless red ocean I can’t help but inhale, fathoms deep. I wake choking, bow forward, push to my feet. The ground slips, pops, tears through my sock, my skin, and I bolt away from the place of the pain, pure instinct, an animal pierced by arrows.
Toes, not heel, toes toes. Shoulder against the heavy bathroom door, knees, then back on the floor, leg draped over, foot dripping into the tub.
Pounding gums, my head. I blink in the low yellow light, think breathe as the corners of the room roll over above. I close my eyes, have to remember…
Champagne. The flute pinging bell-clear against the window pane. Careful, now, careful. Clumsy hands will only make it worse. The shard slips from my blood-slick fingertips, lands noiselessly against the fiberglass, and the sickly panic is creeping and I need something cool against my face so I lie back again, roll to press the floor’s tile to my cheek.
I’ve Dittany in my bag and a keen urge to vomit when I move. There’s no one to help me clean up, so best to just be still here on the floor, mind my pulse, slow the dripping, the rotations of my brain.
Fine shape, Hermione, on the floor and bleeding. Every fibre is sick or hurt, and when the tears come, just this once, I let go, shaking silently in the low yellow light . I mourn it all out onto the tile, grieve for everything I didn’t know I still needed, long gone. My mum, tending me gently. Ron, joking “Well, what’d you do that for,” before peeling me off the floor. Harry, knowing he’d eventually come back round, because, though I might never have meant as much as everyone else, I’d always meant something...
Blood-sticky fingers hover. Still. Stay still. Let them dry. Don't need the extra stains on my coat, assuming I don’t die tonight draining out into this tub. And if I do…
I sob out a twisted little laugh at the note they’ll find, the profound last sentiments I’ll have left behind.
“Dear
Happy New Year from Paris!”
A red, bold-lip print.
A tiny, black heart.