-Another HP SI Fic~ This one's quite unique as our MC Malcolm is self inserted as a bloody friendly ghost, being a Dad and all he takes care of lil' Harry and pretty much fixes all!
Sypnosis: "Fix it" said the Fates. "Fix what? With what tools and skills?" I asked. Being dead was only the first of the obstacles. And then I found myself in an understairs cupboard listening to a little boy quietly sobbing. Oh. Fix THAT. In which a sarcastic old git is dropped into the awful childhood of Harry Potter. SI, no sh.i.p.s. Rated M for foul language and canon-level abuse.
Rated: M
Words: 187K
Posted on: m.fanfiction.net/s/13436100/1/Ghost-of-Privet-Drive (AndrewWolfe)
PS: If you're not able to copy/paste the link, you have everything in here to find it, by simply searching the author and the story title. It sucks that you can't copy links on mobile (´ー｀)
-I'll be putting the chapter ones of all the fanfics mentioned, to give you guys a sample if you wan't more please do go to the website and support the author! (And maybe even convince them to start uploading chapters in here as well!)
Chapter 1-2 (exceptional)
I was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt about that. Oh, none of the paperwork was signed yet - I hadn't stopped breathing, for one thing - but for all practical purposes I was as dead as a doornail.
We make jokes about lorries and their loads and Final Destination, but the reason that those jokes get made is that, from time to time, drivers make mistakes, equipment fails, and, as the vernacular has it: Shit Happens.
This shit happened on a late autumn evening on the M62, one of the more unpleasant bits of motorway driving England has to offer. I was on my way home from dropping my youngest off for her final year at university, crossing the pennines in driving rain with a hint of sleet, traffic not quite so bad as all that but still requiring attention, when I became the punchline of the joke.
A four-tonner flatbed with a crapload of steel fabrications on it. Me, checking my mirrors for a clear moment to pass it, chuckling about Final Destination. Windscreen awash. Whatever happened, happened with my eyes momentarily off it. Eyes front again and the wipers are back at the start and the view is blurred.
Squoosh goes the wiper. Clear goes the windscreen. Slam goes the brake on instincts honed for the Emergency Stop part of the driving test, lo these thirty years ago. Maybe, if I'd not done that, a couple of hundred kilos of rolled steel joist wouldn't have come through the windscreen and, as it turned out, me.
Discontinuity.
Consciousness returns and I can't breathe. Nothing new, asthmatic since forever and I hadn't helped matters along by smoking all those years. The van's on its side, and I'm pinned like a specimen butterfly to my seat.
Best will in the world, I'm going to receive medical attention in ten minutes or so. By which time all they'll be able to do is certify life extinct at the scene. I've never been a medical professional, but I know 'completely f.u.c.k.i.e.d' when I see it. Or, as the case may be, I'm bleeding it all over the upholstery of a rented van.
I give up. My eyes blur with tears - watering with the pain, if you want to insist on manliness on my behalf, I'm past bloody caring - and nobody hears my last, panted words.
"F.u.c.kin' bollocks."
It really doesn't feel like a time for eloquence.
The. End.
-oOo-
Except, f.u.c.k my little wooden clogs. It's *not*. The end that is. There's a time of blackness, of nothing, the sensory equivalent of a line of asterisks on a printed page. Then there's a swirl and an odd sense of movement and I'm somewhere.
Doesn't feel like a dream, lacks that sense of unreality. Looks like a dream, all twisted perspective and nothing quite the way it ought to be, a collage of familiarity twisted into a strange setting. Something like a workroom, textile stuff, I had a summer job once, as a student, with the costume department of a theatre company and it's got that same explosion-in-a-fabric-mill air about it. Rolls of fabric and half-finished clothes everywhere, tools and machines rearing out of the debris here and there. One of them looks like a loom of all things.
I say somewhere, but I don't seem to be some thing. I'm just a point-of-view, seeing all this stuff and hearing, somewhere, the whirr of sewing machines. No smells, no sense of touch. Not even a sense of my own body.
Probably a good thing, given the condition it was in the last time I was aware of it. As sensations to experience go, bleeding to death on the hard shoulder of the M62 is pretty terrible. Zero stars, would not recommend. So *that* is a sense I still have: humour. Not that my sense of humour is fit for polite company after nearly thirty years of being a dad. I feel a chilly and distant sadness that I'm not going to see them ever again. No stupid nerd jokes, no long hikes over the fells with the kids and the dog, no pride as they come home enthused for what they've learnt, no commiseration over the struggle to get jobs in an economy the tories have been shitting on from a great height all these years.
I'm sure I'd be shedding tears if whatever this is included something to shed tears from: for all that I'm seeing, there aren't any eyes to go with it. A mercy, really, because if any death is going to make you grieve it's your own. So very much of human emotion comes from the glands, after all, and my glands are probably being recorded for evidence by a traffic officer who'll be needing a stiff drink later.
MOIRAI.
What?
MOIRAI.
This is not being said to me. This is being dropped in my consciousness like a dollop of jam in semolina pudding. Not altogether unpleasant as such, but nothing I'd actually choose for dessert.
MOIRAI. My attention - what there is of it, in this loopy and distorted mess of haberdashery - is forcefully yanked into close up on a needle, darning a frayed hole in what looks like tapestry. MOIRAI.
Right, time to start thinking. Moira. Greek. Fate, allotted portion, destiny. Moirai the personifications thereof. Been a long time, but I remember that much. I can remember Lachesis and Atropos, what's the other one? No matter. Look again at what's around me, what's in front of me. I realise I recognise all of it. Whatever I'm experiencing, it's built from my memories. The haberdashery is a mix of the place I worked, and the mess that resulted from sisters and wives and girlfriends in a sewing and/or knitting project frenzy. (And they get all pissy when you clean a carburettor in the sink… although that was the unlamented ex-wife, and fair dos, I was mostly doing it to be pissy with her. This was in the pre-therapy days when I didn't understand why I was so angry all the time and didn't have constructive - more constructive, at any rate - ways of handling it.)
So. Why am I being shown a collage of -
MESSAGE. COMMAND. A flash of Mazarin at Casale, one of the many pictures of the event I've seen. Why that? It was one of the ballsier moves of early modern diplomacy, one I picked up by the way at uni as background to the Peace of Westphalia and subsequent Public International Law, it ended up quite famous at the time, lots of pamphlets and broadsides about it, with suitably dramatic woodcuts. Jules Mazarin, before he was Cardinal of France, rode into the middle of an about-to-be battlefield with a blank piece of paper and announced a peace treaty. Which got the armies to stop fighting long enough for a real treaty to be drawn up and signed.
COMMAND. Mazarin again, the darning-needle again.
Why, it's almost like someone is trying to talk to me. Thinking back, once we got off the name, the next words were … fuzzy. Ringy. Full of harmonics and overtones. Like they're not just the words they are, but also the words they're trying to be. Lots of words are like that. Subtext tells you a lot if you're paying attention, even more if you're professionally trained and acculturated to it. Hated my time as a lawyer - the company you end up keeping ranges from disagreeable to vile - but the skills are … I'm rambling.
Apparently dying doesn't cure bad habits.
Someone or something is trying to communicate with me. Is this my scrambled, dying brain trying to make sense of what the paramedics are saying to me?
NO. MOIRAI.
Well, that was emphatic. I suppose that simple declarative sentences are too much to hope for?
The scene shifts to the sight of a firehose trying to fill a small bucket. Is this some "form you are comfortable with" bollocks, then?
MOIRAI. This time, there's a sense of amus.e.m.e.nt. And three part harmony. It's some kind of absurd dying dream in which mythology is trying to talk to me, I reckon. I feel strangely OK with this. The alternative, that there really is a tri-partite personification of fate, the daughters of Old Night, whose spinning, cutting and weaving govern the very gods themselves, and they're talking to me instead of letting me get on with f.u.c.k.i.n.g dying? Absurd.
It's not even like they've had the decency to show up in their classical art depiction of scantily-clad women. Or their renaissance art depiction of n.a.k.e.d women. Which would certainly fit in better with the dream aspect of this whole thing. And be nicer to look at than the surrealist clothiers' workshop that has come back while I've been musing.
MOIRAI. MESSAGE. COMMAND. REPAIR. Again with the darning needle.
F.u.c.k it, might as well play along. "You're going to need to be more specific. What am I commanded to repair? With what skills?" I mean, sure, I've got your basic functioning-a.d.u.l.t skillset for fixing stuff that can be fixed with the 'order a new part off the internet' method, I've been servicing my own motors since I was a teenager, and grew up in a family of builders, engineers and generally handy individuals so I picked up a thing or two on my way to becoming a lawyer. Carrying out a divine mandate to fix things may require someone with, you know, actual skills.
MESSAGE. Again, Jules Mazarin. In context with the question about skills? I suppose it might mean that the actual skills I need are the lawyers' stock-in-trade of bullshit, bluff, persuasion, advocacy and allied trades as exemplified by one of the most famous negotiating scams in the history of diplomacy, but if the Fates need that sort of thing what's stopping them, you know, hiring someone whose practising certificate isn't several years lapsed?
COMMAND. REPAIR. NEEDLE. With a definite sense of exasperation to it, this last. Like I'm missing the bleedin' obvious. Which is, in context, shut up and do as you're told, mortal, you are Our tool in this, fail not in this charge at your peril. Et f.u.c.k.i.n.g cetera.
The image of the fire hose into the bucket, except this time the hose is shutting off and there's some water in the bucket.
Apparently, communicating entirely in dream images and a six word vocabulary leaves lots of room for sarcasm.
I have room for some sarcasm of my own. Sure, I'm having a conversation with myself - this is all the hallucination of a dying brain, right? Unless I've been rescued and they've got me on the really good drugs - but that's all the more reason not to have at the underlying absurdity of the thing. If you can't be critical of your own thinking, whose can you be critical of?
"Leaving out the lack of detail as to what I'm supposed to be fixing, how am I supposed to do anything while I'm, you know, dead?"
MOIRAI. This time with an over-tone of gleeful, mocking laughter. And a snatch of the Mummy - the good one, not the hammed-up Hammer House original or the in-name-only re-make - specifically the bit where Imhotep is sinking into the black goo.
Death is only the beginning.
"Well, that was -"
And everything goes black.
-oOo-
I'm still weightless, formless. A thoroughly disinheriting sensation, it has to be said. It's dark, but it's not the dark of no light, but the dark of a room with the lights off. Feels somehow small. I can't smell or feel anything, have no mouth to taste, but I can hear. And it no longer feels like I'm dreaming. I never got the hang of lucid dreaming - for want of effort to even find out if I even have the ability - so reality still feels real to me. And this feels real. Small, dark space. Somewhere outside it I can hear a telly blaring. Judging by the theme tune, someone's watching a re-run of Bergerac. I had no idea it was still playing anywhere, I've not heard that theme tune since I was a kid. It's distant, though. Not in the next room, somewhere else in the house.
Certainly not loud enough in here to cover up the fact that there's a child in here, sniffling. An upset child. And that, frankly, will not do.
"Hey there, kid. What's up?" I've no idea if I can be heard - after the frankly bizarre conversation I've just had without a mouth to speak the words, it feels like it's worth a try. I go for my best there-there-tell-dad-all-about-it tone.
"Who's there?" Definitely a kid, sounds like a little boy, anywhere from three to puberty. Bit of a hitch in the voice. He's whispering, which isn't a good sign. An upset child alone in the dark who won't call out for help when a strange voice speaks to him? I've no idea what I can do about this, but at the very least someone's going to get a talking-to.
I whisper too. Kid wants to be quiet, I'll play along. "Me, kid. Not sure who I am right now." Nothing like dying to give you an identity crisis, after all. And, when all's said and done, I'm nothing but a voice in the dark. Like a ghost. Ghost? Run with it. "I think I might be a ghost? A friendly ghost, I should say."
"Uncle says there's no such thing." Still a bit of a hitch in the voice, but a note of intrigue too. That's good, I can work with that. My usual tactic was dad jokes until the tears stopped and we could work on the actual problem, but curiosity will do the job just as well. He's still whispering, though, which is still not a good sign. Especially since whoever he doesn't want to be heard by has the telly up nice and loud. At least, I'm assuming that the cheesy 80s detective drama fan is the problem, but let's wait and see.
"Well, I thought there was no such thing too, but look at me now. I bet your uncle will change his tune when he's a ghost, I certainly have."
That gets me a small, slightly hiccupy giggle. Result! "He'd be a great big fat ghost."
"Likes his pies, does he?"
"Yeah, an' buns, an' cream cakes, an' sweeties. He's really fat. My cousin's the same."
"Your aunt too?"
"No, she's on a diet. She's always on a diet."
"She grumpy all the time?" I've known plenty of slaves to the bathroom scales in my time, and they're not usually much fun to be around. Pretty sure it's the constant low blood sugar that does it.
"Yeah. Who're you the ghost of, anyway?"
If I had a mouth, I'd be smiling. I can't quite hear a smile in the little fella's voice quite yet, but we're making progress. "Oooh, now that's a good question. Let's see, I was fifty years old, I'd retired early from being a solicitor - that's someone who works with courts and laws and business deals - and I had three children all grown up and I had a crash on the motorway. And I died, and then it went all weird, and now I'm a ghost here with you. Why are we whispering, by the way?"
I don't get an answer right away. I wish I could see youngster's face because a silence at this point could mean anything and kids communicate more with their expressions and body language than they do with their words.
After a while, another sniff. "My mummy and daddy died in a car crash. Are they ghosts too?"
Right this moment I could sing hymns of praise and gratitude that I don't have a heart, because it would be absolutely breaking in f.u.c.k.i.n.g bits for my new friend. "I don't know. Grown-ups don't know everything, I'm sorry to say, kid. And I've only been a ghost a few minutes, so I don't know much about how it works yet. You're the first person I've met since I - since the accident. I bet if your mum and dad could come and be ghosts here with you, they'd totally do it. I know I want to go see Peter, John and Emily but I haven't figured out how yet."
"Are they your children?"
"Yep. And I love them very much and I'm sure your mum and dad love you, wherever they are. So, how about we remember our manners and tell each other our names?" I'm pretty sure I'm not going to give my right name. I can see our conversation ending up in a child psychiatrist's office at some point and the last thing my grieving family need is this bizarre situation drawn to their attention. Hey, just because I don't have the necessary glandular apparatus to feel emotions, doesn't mean I don't remember and understand them.
"'kay. What's your name, ghost?"
Smart kid. He's treating the strange voice in the dark with suspicion, as well he ought. "Well, I think I'm going to pick a new name. You get a new name when you're born, I think I should have a new name while I'm dead. I'm going to pick Malcolm Reynolds. You ever seen Firefly on the telly?"
"Not 'llowed t' watch telly," his whisper just got even smaller. "Telly's not f' freaks."
Well, that's just shitty. Not allowed telly is bad enough - obviously, kids need limits and encouragement to get off their arses and run around yelling, vital part of childhood is your running around and yelling - but telling a little kid he's a freak? As soon as I figure out how to haunt, I am going to make someone's life an utter misery until they repent. That's for the future, though, I've got an upset child in front of me. "That the rule in this house, kid?"
Silence.
"Is that a yes? Can't see you nodding, it's dark in here."
"Yes." That whisper was hissed out. Oh, well done, my young apprentice. You should be angry about this.
"Well, first of all, it's just the rule in this house. Everyone has different rules in their houses, and the rule in this house? It. Is. Stupid. Too much telly is bad for you, but no telly at all is just stupid. And why do they call you a freak?"
"'s my name."
My turn for the long silence. I'd guessed that I was talking to a young child, early years primary school at the latest. I revise it down to pre-school years, because no way does anyone send a child to school thinking his name is freak. Even the worst know to cover up what they're doing to the children in their doubtful care, and that would be a dead giveaway. When we get some light in here I'm checking for bruises. In my cold and chilly way I am angry about this, I just want to know whether I need to dial that up to murderous rage. Half-formed plans flash through my mind, but I can't really figure anything out until I know what I can do. Priorities!
"Right," I say, "you know how I said they had stupid rules in this house? This is also stupid. Your mum and dad did not name you freak. I reckon we need to find out what your name really is. Don't know how yet, but I was pretty clever while I was alive so even if I can't do anything, I can whisper in your ear and help you along the way. Sound like a plan?"
"Don't know." Dejected. Accepting he's beaten before we've begun.
"Neither do I, kid, but we're going to have fun finding out, aren't we?"
Just sniffles. I don't think trying to jolly him along with promises of great things would help; if it turns out that all I can offer is a helpful voice in his ear then it's better than nothing. More than I got at this age, certainly. And bad as my childhood was, I was at least allowed to know my actual f.u.c.k.i.n.g name.
"Whatever happens, kid," I say, "I'm going to be at least a friendly voice in your ear, which is more than you had. It's going to take time, and probably hard work, so I won't say 'cheer up'. What I want you to do is be brave, kid."
"K." comes the quiet little sniffle. Seriously, if there are bruises on this kid then I'm going to find the local council childrens' services department and straight up possess the biggest, most case-hardened social worker I can find. That's if I can possess people, which remains to be seen. I'm definitely going to give it a f.u.c.k.i.n.g good try.
"Now, is this your uncle's house we're in?"
"Yes."
"You think you can curl up in here and try and take a nap? I'm going to go and do a bit of haunting. Spook about the place quiet-like, see if I can find out your real name."
"Don't!" he's back to hissing again. "They'll blame me! If they see a ghost they'll say it's freakishness!"
This rings alarm bells in my mind. Big, loud, scary ones. If these people are seeing things and blaming the kid for them, they're not just abusers but psychotic abusers. Not that I'm going to share that with a small child, he's hearing voices after all. He doesn't know I'm actually real. "Well, I'll just have to be sneaky. Tell you what, though, do we have a light in here? Do you know where the switch is? I might be invisible, after all."
I hear scrabbling and the clack of a pull-switch knob being knocked against a wall, more scrabbling, and then click and a bare bulb comes on.
What we've got here is a skinny little boy, eyes screwed up against the sudden light, tear-tracks down his face, shaggy mop of black hair, and pyjamas about three sizes too big. They're not feeding him right, he's four or five years old and all the puppy fat is gone. I was a scrawny little git at that age - fussy eater, and a mother who couldn't cook worth a bollocks - but I at least looked healthy. No visible bruises, for which small mercy I am appropriately thankful. "Can you see me, kid?" My viewpoint is down around his face level, and it's not much more effort than thinking to move about. Not quickly, but I can get about. I back up a bit.
"No," he says, opening his eyes up in narrow slits, his arm still stretched up to hold the pull-cord for the light. We're in an under-stairs storage cupboard of some sort, vinyl tile floor, unpainted plaster, a shelf of cleaning products and the household hoover. And a baby's cot mattress on the floor, the sort with the wipe-clean cover on it. The f.u.c.kers make him sleep in here? There's not even a blanket or a pillow, never mind a duvet. Which, okay, not so bad in a small space in a centrally-heated house, but damn. I'm seeing the literary parallel and I am not f.u.c.k.i.n.g impressed. It's not actually the first time I've seen something like this: I did a stint as a local government lawyer and the Childrens' Services lawyers were just up the hallway. One of their 'frequent fliers' was a father who dragged his poor kid into his Star Trek fandom activities, about the only thing about him that wasn't a symptom of his massive psychiatric unfitness to be a parent.
"Okay, light back off, it's hurting your eyes." The light goes right back off. I'm hoping I won't discover that someone expressing ordinary decent care for his comfort surprises him. "If I'm going to help you, I need to go scout about a bit, find out what's going on."
"Why?" Aaand I just found out it surprised him. I've really got to find out how to take action as a ghost. If this isn't what the weird dream was ordering me to fix, tough shit. Whatever that was about can f.u.c.k.i.n.g wait.
"I'm not your daddy, son. But I am a daddy. And since my children are all grown up and can look after themselves, you're just going to have to put up with me looking after you. Savvy?"
"What's savvy mean?"
"It means 'understand'"
"K. And, um, I savvy. Um. Mister Reynolds sir."
"Good kid. Now, you curl up there and try and get a nap, I'm off to snoop about, but I'm not going to leave the house so if there's a problem I'll hear and I'll be right back. And call me Mal, we're going to be best friends."
"Not my daddy?"
"Not quite. I'll do as much of the stuff that daddies do for their children as I can, but I can't do all of it 'cos I'm a ghost. So just friends, savvy?"
"Savvy!" That was almost out loud. That's the spirit, kid! Well, strictly speaking I'm the spirit, but this isn't the time for pedantry.
"Shiny. Now get your head down and nap, I've got spooky ghostly stuff to be getting on with. I'll be watching over you, just relax. All floppy like a rag doll and sleep will come nice and easy."
"Savvy." He actually yawns.
I go silent and wait a couple of minutes as his breathing settles down nice and regular. If he's shamming sleep, he's loads better at it than any of mine ever were. It's a bit sad that something that'd scare pretty much any other kid seems to reassure this one.
Right. I concentrate on rising up through the stairs. Time to see what's f.u.c.kin' what around here.
First things first. The house I'm in is of fairly recent construction by English standards - I'm guessing Home Counties somewhere from the kid's accent. Houses built as entire estates, several streets at a time to a handful of standardised designs, were a thing that came in in the late sixties - I grew up in a house much like this in the early seventies. Fashions came and went in them and this one, if I'm any judge, is a mid to late seventies model. Still got its original storage heaters and bloody awful obscured-glass front door. I can see that it's still light out, looks like a late summer evening, and the street-lights will be coming on soon.
Inside, the decor's wildly out of date. Flocked vinyl wallpaper, magnolia-gloss woodwork and I haven't seen carpet that vile since about 1990. In the borderline-condemned student digs in Oxford that my favourite weed dealer lived in. Brown with orange highlights and a repeating geometric pattern of interlocking diamond shapes. It's all fastidiously clean and surprisingly well-maintained for its age, though.
The walls are adorned with framed photos. I'm able to identify lard-arse and lard-arse junior which means the scrawny bint with the hairdo she's clearly been overcharged for is the dieting aunt. The kid under the stairs isn't included, which fits with him being the abused orphaned poor relation. I can't tell by looking which side of the family he's nephew to these two on; none of them look like blood relations. There's something else off about the pictures, though I can't put my finger on quite what. The rest of what's hanging on the walls is the kind of tat people put up to try and crack on they're of refined sensibility. Cheap prints in gaudy frames. The usual suspects of Constable, Turner and Clayton Adams (which is to say all of their dullest, most unchallenging work, even the greatest of artists phone it in on occasion) are in evidence, and what I suspect are a couple of Preraphaelites, not that I could ever tell the buggers apart. And, of course, Monarch of the Glen, because what collection of tedious biscuit-tin-and-jigsaw-puzzle art would be complete without bloody Landseer. Still, I'm not here to be an art snob.
The hallway - and that dates the house, more recent builds don't waste quite this much space, you get a vestibule inside the front door and a bit of space at the bottom of the stairs - is otherwise unremarkable. Three doors: I'm guessing living room (the sound of the telly gives that one away), dining room and kitchen. And, of course, the stairs up. The only incongruous detail is that there's a land-line phone in the hallway by the front door, and it looks like an original-vintage Trimphone, with the rotary dial and everything. I'm actually old enough to remember a time when they were considered modern and stylish. It makes me wonder what I'm dealing with, here. I mean, I might install one of those if I picked one up in easily-reconditioned nick, because they're a rather nifty slice of technological history, but then I've never been one to hide my full-frontal nerdity.
Maybe they're just really committed to the retro decor? It's unimportant. After brief internal debate I decide to check upstairs first. While the kid assures me I'm invisible, I don't want to test that until after I've gathered all of the information I can without risking being seen.
Upstairs is four bedrooms: the master bedroom (with actual chintz curtains, no less), a guest bedroom (whose bed has an actual candlewick bedspread of the kind my grandmother retired from actual bedding duty in about 1978 and bowls of pot pourri on every vaguely level surface), a kid's bedroom with a fat kid snoring in it surrounded by evidence of him being a spoilt bastard and your traditional fourth bedroom-in-name-only that appears to be being used as some kind of combined storage and junk room. The bathroom, with its pistachio-green tiling and sanitary ware, I decide to leave for later close inspection. I could probably make it a daily thing, a Two Minute Hate on aesthetic grounds alone. On top of it all, it's a household full of squeezers-from-the middle when it comes to toothpaste. Forced-labour re-education for the bloody lot of them would be a good start.
Anyway. Family of four in a four bedroom house? Making the kid sleep under the stairs is nothing but spite. Sure, I'm clearly in the home of authentically crazy people with a vintage decor and furnishings fetish - they don't even have duvets on the beds, for crying out loud, an amenity I remember having by the late seventies. Hang on, did I see - I go back in and check. The telly in the kid's bedroom is a CRT model. And next to it there's a holy shit it's an Atari 2600. They've given a kid who can't be more than six or seven an actual no-shit museum piece as a toy to play with. While keeping their other kid in conditions that suspects in police custody would rightly complain about.
F.u.c.k's sake.
Again I'm glad I'm disembodied through all of this. I'd be in a towering fury by this point as opposed to the cool, calm consideration I'm giving things. Running, it has to be said, through a mental checklist for getting a Prohibited Steps Order under the Children Act 1989. Application ex parte in judge's chambers and then turning up unannounced with a social work team and a van full of the biggest uniforms the local nick had on hand. He seems like a nice kid, any potential fosterers would find him a pleasure to have in their family. Especially with his friendly ghost giving him helpful advice about eating his greens and doing his homework. If nothing else, getting the poor kid out of this crime-against-good-taste of a house would be a step in the right direction. It's not his home, that's for sure.
The friendly ghost bit is probably also something I should be chucking a bit of radge over, if I'm honest with myself. Although with hindsight it would have put my suicidal periods in a bit of perspective if I'd known that it wasn't a ticket to sweet, sweet oblivion.
Back downstairs and I Rentaghost my way through the dining room - surprisingly tasteful, with what might well be actual heirloom furniture - and the kitchen, which continues the vintage theme. Dating from the period just before fitted kitchens and standard base units with worktops became a thing. I'm relieved to see that the general cleanliness extends to a decent standard of food hygiene. I can't tell what they've got in the fridge and the cupboards, though. It's dark inside.
Right. Time to see how well my picture of these people matches the reality.
I pause at the door to the living room, the sound of the telly thumping at the door. Whoever this is, they're more in to Bergerac than I ever was. From the sound of things there's a car chase on. The kid was worried about me getting spotted, and going in through the door is the obvious move. If there's some way I can be seen even when I can't see myself, doing the obvious is going to put the risk up to the highest it can be.
Through the wall? Doesn't let me recce the room before moving in and I want to know where the telly, and with it all eyeballs in the room, actually is. The window, then, is the obvious choice. The curtains should be drawn, after all, but I'll be able to peep through. Out the front door, then - noting the expensive and heavyweight locks they've put on a glass door because that makes sense - and a quick look at the neighbourhood. Your standard suburban cul-de-sac, one each. A dozen houses on a gently curved road with a turning circle at the bottom end. All built to the same design, which was a thing they did back when these were built, because planning officers didn't yet have a tick-box on their checklists for 'actual houses rather than soul-destroying extruded dwelling units'. There's a surprising lack of modifications, extensions and - it seems like the neighbourhood for it - york-stone cladding. Godawful identikit neighbourhoods like this were a big driver of the DIY boom, after all, as people turned them from units into houses into homes.
There are neighbourhood watch signs on the lampposts and a - wait. The cars in the driveways are all old. Ford Granadas and Vauxhall Cavaliers, the sort that made up about half of every company car fleet. My dad had a succession of them, and most of them ended up as recycled scrap due to unsentimental fleet management practises. Very few of these sorts of cars were driven by people who actually owned them. I could buy one slightly demented vintage car enthusiast on a street, but - a quick count - six of them? The other houses appear to be using their semi-integral garages for keeping their cars in, another oddity. I mean, if you've got your car in the garage, where do you keep your huge piles of acc.u.mulated junk?
Lard-arse, apparently, favours a 1980s-looking 5-series BMW, which actually makes some sense as a vintage car. If you can afford to keep it on the road, that is. But it does bring the total of vintage car enthusiasts on this street to seven. Out of twelve. And they are definitely enthusiasts, all of these motors are in good, like-new nick. I'm picturing them all out on Sunday afternoons with buckets and sponges and exotic car waxes, complaining to each other about the difficulty of getting pre-fuel-injection motors serviced. The Stepford Petrolheads.
If I had a head at this point I'd've shook it. I'm getting distracted because this house, this neighbourhood, is not just weird but recursively weird. It looks odd at a distance and then when you focus on the details you find that it's just as odd close up. The important thing is finding out about the people, not just their stuff. Even if I was fully corporeal, I'd not be able to do anything until the appropriate authorities were open for business, so time taken in reconnaissance is doubly not-wasted.
I don't feel like I have an incorporeal body like something out of Ghostbusters, but I'm arbitrarily designating the point I'm seeing from as my head. I seem to have the same field of vision as I had when I had actual eyes, at any rate, and I kept those in my head after all. So I gently and gingerly poke my head in through the window - windowsill covered in Royal Doulton and Lladro tat, naturally - and the (rouched and swagged rose velvet) curtains and get my first look at Fat Uncle and Dieting Aunt.
He's filling a brown velvet armchair and she's on the sofa. He's made entirely of rancid lard and moustache, sandy-blonde and no obvious grey. Head's too small for the fat neck and the rest of him is blubber all the way down. Fat fingers are dabbling in a tin of shortbread on the occasional table next to his chair where he also has a bottle of mass-market blended scotch. I move closer and look at the hands. Yep. Clubbed fingers. Bloaty-boy is eating and boozing his way in to an early grave. Barely in to his thirties if I'm any judge of wrinkles and thread-veins, but he's less healthy than some seventy-year-olds I've known.
She, on the other hand, is sitting primly with a magazine of some sort in one hand and what is more than likely a G&T in the other. She's the direct complement of her husband, in as much as she's malnourishing herself into premature ageing. Early thirties, could pass for fifty in the wrong light. Whatever her natural colour is, it's covered up by a salon dye-and-highlights job and a perm that was last fashionable in the 1970s. On professional football players.
The art of conversation is clearly lost in contemplation of whatever Jim Bergerac is doing in this episode - she's pretending not to be watching but sneaking glances in best housewife-with-a-celebrity-crush style. I don't doubt she's an avid fan of Magnum PI, Lovejoy, and Dempsey and Makepeace on the same basis. Any s.e.x.u.a.l attraction has long since fled the bedroom upstairs, I shouldn't wonder. Even if Fat Uncle can even find the wretched thing amid the rolls of gut, he hasn't the cardiovascular oomph to get it up.
Time for an experiment. I move in to the middle of the room and get right in front of the telly. No reaction. Definitely invisible, which takes a load off my mind. I'll work on whether they can hear me in a bit. Right now, let's look at the coffee table. Mail, Express, Telegraph and Financial Times, not just drawing a picture of the politics of this household but colouring it in and mounting it in a handsome presentation frame. Tories, and unreconstructed Thatcherite tories at that, with which even the possibility of me mustering any sympathy for these two evaporates like Brexit promises.
Hang on. Hang right the f.u.c.k on. I've read the titles off those newspapers and glossed over the design, and it's all wrong. None of them have looked like that in decades. The pictures are in black-and-white, for crying out loud. A closer look. They're dated 31st July 1985.
Okay. Occam's razor time. Which is the simplest explanation that fits these facts? Is it that I've manifested in a neighbourhood of eerily-consistent retro fetishists in the house of a couple who carry it to the point of reproduction newspapers on the coffee table? Or that dying and coming back as a ghost also included a time travel component?
One of these presupposes that there's something I don't know about how time works for the spirits of the recently departed. Which, yeah. I'm working on less than an hour's experience here. The other flies in the face of everything I know about how human beings work, on which subject I've got nearly fifty years time-in-grade. And, if we add in the surreal visions I had while I was dying (or just after I died, I don't really have any way to tell) then my being under orders to fix the tapestry of fate gives the time-travel bit of it quite the freight of plausibility, don't it?
It definitely makes it harder vis a vis the abused child part. Victoria Climbie and Baby P are nearly two decades in the future at this point, and the law reforms that would make what these two f.u.c.ks are up to actually illegal won't happen until after the next change of government. Child abuse, after all, is a problem of the underclass, so there's no funding or legislative time for stopping it. (And, because child abuse is a problem of the underclass, nobody's going to believe it goes on in the kind of household that has a BMW in the driveway.)
I still need to confirm the time-travel bit, and it happens along as conveniently as BBC programming: Bergerac ends and, after a few trails for shows I can't recall watching at the time, and Threads, which I very much remember because the imminent possibility of nuclear holocaust makes an impression, on comes the Nine O Clock News. Presented by Julia Somerville, which surprises me. She's still working in broadcast news in 2019, I didn't think she got on the telly this early.
The news itself is a collage of half-remembered history. Apartheid era South Africa showing their collective arse, and the Common Market - which won't be the EU for a few years yet - disagreeing about how to deal with them. Ronald Reagan might be dying of cancer, on which matter I know more than his doctors as at this date. He isn't. The inquiry into the Bradford FC stadium fire (about which I remember little more than the schoolyard sick jokes, it was a more robust time) has created some fuss and Thatcher is giving off about it. Lacking context - I wasn't paying attention at the time and it's been thirty-five years - I'm mostly baffled by the headlines of what was clearly a slow news day. There's a Shuttle mission in orbit, and both sides are expressing high hopes for the Fourth Test of this year's Ashes series, with Botham in particularly ebullient form. But then, when was he ever not?
I can't remember who won that year. This year, I suppose, but the Aussies won't be quite the juggernaut they were - will be - in the 90s and beyond, so it could be an England win. Fat Uncle is giving off about it, though, since apparently level-pegging with a win and a draw each on three Test matches is clearly below the standards he personally expects from English Cricket. Like he'd last more than two f.u.c.k.i.n.g overs at the crease, even in the more gentlemanly atmosphere of the professional game. The game I grew up with - north country working class cricket - would see him carried off the field after the second or third ball. Likely missing teeth and with an almost certain concussion.
Nursing yet another reason to disdain the fool, I'm barely paying attention as the news comes to an end and this pair of delightful specimens start conversing and I almost miss the names they address each other by.
Vernon.
And Petunia.
What the double-jointed haemhorraging f.u.c.k?
This is carrying fandom a bit - no it's not. Those books won't come out for a few years yet. This right here is a scene out of actual fiction. Feels real, though. Simulated reality? Apart from my own personal but still subjectively real existence, it's indistinguishable from actual reality, so no point arguing the toss. Proof by solipsistic fatalism is going to have to do.
They're shuffling about and making as if to retire for the night - ludicrously early, but it is a school night and I've plenty of other reasons to despise these two - so if I'm going to get any more information I need to get a wiggle on while the lights are on. There's a letter-rack on the mantelpiece with unanswered correspondence in it. Couple of bills, a rates notice. The address is clearly visible: Mr. and Mrs. V. Dursley, 4, Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey. With, as it happens, a TW postcode, so we're nearer London than not.
So, I'm definitely not in Kansas anymore. Again with the gratitude for no hormones and glands, because this is definitely the right time for hysterical giggling. That kid under the stairs is Harry James Potter and he's a wizard.
That theory that everything, no matter how absurdly fictional, is real somewhere? It just acquired my own personal anecdotal data point.
F.u.c.k. Me. Standing.
NOTES: I've absconded with the central conceit from The Evil Overlord List by Boomvroomshroom (on this site and AO3 to my certain knowledge, don't know if it's posted elsewhere) which I recommend to one and all. The obvious difference between that story and this is the time period - I've stuck firmly to the books, although I'll be correcting JKR's cavalier approach to dates as I go - and the character the voice is helping: Harry, rather than Tom.
As to the muggle-world history and details I refer to, there are a couple of places where I'm going with purely what I remember rather than checking details as I write the first draft, on the basis that if I really was hurled back into a fictional past, I'd have to wait ten years for search engines to be invented, never mind Google.
Not least of which errors, in this chapter, is that the child protection laws are very different to the ones I learned. At this particular date, I had just finished my third year of secondary school and was getting ready to buckle down for my GCSEs (muggle OWLS). Which is why I'm dead flat wrong about the law and practise of child protection in the mid 80s. It's also why none of the news made sense: in 1985 I was more focussed on homework, pickup games of cricket in the park, and friday night Call of Cthulhu marathons with my friends.
Chapter 2
The address is clearly visible: Mr. and Mrs. V. Dursley, 4, Privet Drive, Little Whinging.
So, I'm definitely not in Kansas anymore. Again with the gratitude for no hormones and glands, because this is definitely the right time for hysterical giggling. That kid under the stairs is Harry James Potter and he's a wizard.
That theory that everything, no matter how absurdly fictional, is real somewhere? It just acquired my own personal anecdotal data point.
F.u.c.k. Me. Standing.
Well, I can't stand - float, rather - around being all gobsmacked. I'm a ghost, no gob to be smacked in, for one thing.
Hang on. If this is running by Harry Potter rules, I'm not actually a ghost, am I? Harry would be able to see me, squibs would be able to see me. I'd be able to interact with my environment, at least to the extent of turning the taps on if I was haunting a bathroom. Whatever I am, it's either something that's unknown to the wizards or at least something that didn't make it in to the books.
That I might be in the movie version I don't consider for a moment. I've only seen four human beings so far and none of them look like their actors, the house in the movie is a completely different architectural style - which is all wrong for the dates in the books, as it happens - and I've never seen any of the movies more than once whereas I've re-read the books several times and so I'm hoping my knowledge is actually apropos. If Harry gets on that train in six years' time and meets Emma Watson, though, all bets are off.
And get a clear distinction between canon and fanfiction drawn in your mind, I remind myself. Unless you see incontrovertible evidence that there's more deviation from the books than just your presence.
I can't even entirely rely on my knowledge of the muggle world for more than the superficialities. This version of it has at least three, possibly four towns that don't exist in my world and while the generalities are unlikely to be much different, the specifics might well be. And I have absolutely no way of telling the difference: to pick an example I just saw on the news, if England win the Ashes this year is that the way it happened in my 1985 or not? I honestly can't remember.
I'll have to pay close attention to the news in any event. I grew up in a world that as far as I knew didn't have a secret society of mages hiding away from the world and only interacting as little as they possibly could. This one does, and there have to be at least some butterfly effect differences. If I can get Harry in front of a history of Nazi Germany I should be able to spot some differences, since it's a period I know pretty well and Grindelwald running amuck in that neck of the woods is bound to have made some difference I can spot.
Or maybe it won't have. It has to be said, the history of Europe from 1914-1945 in my own world would actually make a lot more sense if there really were sinister wizards behind the scenes with mind-control spells. Some of the decision-making was breathtakingly demented, and that's without the Thule Society and their Ariosophical beliefs in the descent of the Aryan peoples from extraterrestrial electric goddesses and their unfortunate interactions with subhuman r.a.p.e-monkeys. Which isn't any kind of joke: that was a real thing that people took seriously enough in early 20th century Germany to form debating societies and print newsletters about. Doesn't have to be wizards behind the scenes, of course, they'd just invented meth and were selling it over the counter without prescriptions. That'd be diagnostic: if Nazi Germany's history is the same but the meth consumption figures are lower than I remember, then wizards.
I spend a few moments thinking my way around in circles about what the hell I'm going to do - can I affect the material world? If not, can I learn how? Is there any magic that can construct me a body? Actually, there's at least one method, but I'd like to find one without any unhygienic messing about with ancestral bone, servants' flesh and enemies' blood, or drinking snake venom in any quantity. Nothing else, I want a body that still has its f.u.c.k.i.n.g nose. Voldemort might have been going for 'serpentine visage' but to me that says 'congenital syphilis' a lot more emphatically. While I'm woolgathering, the Dursleys retire to bed and put the light out.
There's enough light in here that I can see what's what, but apparently ghostly eyes have the same response to light conditions that my human ones did. With better visual acuity, unless I'm wearing ethereal spectacles. I need to start finding what my limits are, and whether I can do anything about them. A quick check in the mirror above the mantelpiece and I learn that I can't see me either, but then I knew that already. You can always see your own nose, if nothing else.
The obvious test is whether or not anyone other than Harry can hear me. That would imply a whole lot of other stuff about what I'm supposed to be doing here - goodness knows there's a lot to fix about Harry's life, but if he's the only one I can talk to it gives me a very clear focus for my efforts. Among other things, and I'm going to have to think about that. Anyway: can I be heard by anyone else? Not testing that on the Dursleys, their response to anything 'freaky' will hurt Harry. Which: not on. They're at least close to the line for criminal neglect of a child as at this time. Harry is going to survive it in reasonable if underfed health, and I don't want to be the one that tips these freaks over the edge into outright monsterdom.
Do I need to test it right now? It's not like I'm confined to the house, I've been outside once already. Can I get back in if I cross the property line? Does it work like vampires? I've collected a lot of folklore over the years, which bits of it are true in this universe? Plus there's that nebulously described protection over this house that Dumbledore enacted. The fact that I'm in here right now suggests that I can get back in if I go for a wander, unless the boundary is as meaningful magically as it is for the property registration certificate.
What decides me is that I've only spoken to Harry once, and that briefly. If I get magically locked out, it's just one half-remembered dream. Leaving things until he's started relying on me in any way would be cruel. Finding out now is better, since he'll be starting primary school in September and I'll be able to get back with him then. The Dursleys are doing the absolute legal minimum for the poor kid, so he's missing his reception year entirely by reason of his late birthday. They're going to tell him his name so he can answer to it at school, and I don't doubt that they've made sure the staff have been told he's a problem child well in advance. They've had a year of parent-teacher interaction via Dudley to get the message across. Have to figure out a plan for that when the time's nearer.
For now, I drift out through the window again. The sun is fully set, twilight is over and the streetlights are on in all their orange-tinted glory. Down to the end of the drive, and look about. Nobody's out and about, but the sound of traffic is there in the distance. This close to London there's no escaping it. The sky is busy with aircraft, low enough that their winking navigational lights are easy to spot. No way to tell whether it's traffic for Heathrow, Gatwick or both.
From the looks, Little Whinging is one of those dormitory villages for people who can afford to commute to work in Greater London, what used to be called the Stockbroker Belt.
It's an old-fashioned village with at least one reasonably well-heeled housing estate built on to it. Right on the edge of the Greater London sprawl, still palpably rural but close enough to the metropolis that you can't quite call it country. Amazing what you can deduce from just one cul-de-sac, isn't it? Familiarity with several examples from my own world helps a lot with this sort of thing.
I start moving down the pavement and discover that with a bit of effort I can get my movement up to about a fast walk. I'm not conscious of any effort, but if I lose focus I slow right down. Privet Drive gives way to Magnolia Crescent - the main drag through the estate - and, just across and a little along the way, Wisteria Walk, with a combination Spar, newsagents and post office on the corner. I spend a little time drifting about: the housing estate is nearly a hundred homes, built to a whopping six different designs, and Privet Drive seems to be all the big expensive ones. It's the usual mess of curving streets and random patches of grass and a small play-park with swings, roundabout and seesaw, all cut through with what we'd call ginnels where I'm from but the rest of the world calls alleys.
The actual historic Little Whinging is a couple of dozen much older houses either side of one of Surrey's smaller A-roads. It consists, beside the houses, of two pubs, a church that's early 19th century if I'm any judge, and a short parade of shops next to the near end of Magnolia Crescent. The most exotic of which is the Chinese takeaway, which has apparently been shut since nine. I'm going to have to wait twenty years before 24-hour shopping and food delivery become a thing again. What Little Whinging doesn't have is its own railway station, but this close to London there'll be one within reasonable bus-ride if not walking distance. The primary school looks to be down the main road a mile or two - I can just see the school crossing lights in the distance - doubtless serving Little Whinging and the next village over alike, with kids bussed in from a wider area for Stonewall High.
I check at the church that I can enter and leave holy ground and discover that while the chap walking his dog through the graveyard can't hear me declaiming 'the Bishop of Buckingham' at full volume, his dog is aware enough of me to look right at me and woof a vague d.o.g.g.y greeting. I tell him he's a Good Boy and move on. All of the cats I've encountered on the way here have given me Hard Stares, the basic impoliteness of cat-kind being much in evidence. The one thing that can see me is the graveyard's other supernatural occupant. There's a Church-Grim lounging by the lych-gate, barely visible as a shimmering dog-shaped collection of shadows. He can see me, and hauls himself to his feet.
There's no sense of urgency to it, he takes the time to stretch and pads over with a slowly-wagging tail. At least I think he's wagging his tail, the whole made-of-shadow thing being altogether visually confusing. I suspect that I'd be able to see him better if I was firmly within his jurisdiction of departed-soul-needing-company-for-final-walkies. Certainly the living only get to see him and his kind when they're about to die. He shows no sense of urgency about approaching me, just a good boy looking to make a new friend. I pass an idle few minutes inquiring who, exactly, is the Good Boy and confirming that it is, in fact, him. He's clearly doing his job of taking folk where they need to go in as much as there don't seem to be any ghosts present. Everyone buried here has been properly escorted to their ultimate destination. What a good boy!
We take a turn or two around the rest of the graveyard, chatting all the while - I'm supplying the Grim's lines, as all good d.o.g.g.y conversations should go - and I indulge in one of my favourite pastimes, that of looking for picturesque names. There's not much of a haul - even the 18th century graves have decidedly ordinary occupants, but I do learn that while the church may be relatively new, it's built on the site of a much older one. There are still-legible 17th century graves, including one from slap in the middle of the Civil War, and a couple that might well be even older but are too weathered to be sure of. I'm faintly reassured that I've got it right about where and with whom I am by the presence of the Grim. They are, after all, canon to Harry Potter and I don't have to worry about him being a death omen what with already being dead.
All of this noodling about carries me through to midnight, and I return to Privet Drive to discover that, whatever enchantments are on number 4, they don't keep me out. Which makes at least some sense, since they're based on Lily Potter's intent to protect her son, whatever Dumbledore may have done after the fact. Being a parent myself, I'm a hundred per cent on board with that, and mean to help.
Which leaves finding out to what extent I can. Sure, I can do a lot just as a voice in Harry's ear being the ultimate Helicopter Parent, but I'd look a prize berk if I stuck to just that and it turned out that with a bit of effort and experimentation I could have done more, right?
Right.
I think I need to find somewhere else, though. I'm already resolved to not provoke the Dursleys - not riling up obvious lunatics is a good general principle for life, memo: teach that one to Harry at some point - so I think I'm going to go and haunt someone a couple of streets away. Not on Wisteria Walk, Dumbledore has an agent there and while he's a good guy with faults in the books, if I'm going to be meeting the man I want to be a lot better prepared than 'hey, I died and found myself here with this kid and decided to help'. I wouldn't trust the bona fides of a wandering spirit telling that story, after all, no more than the village idiot would. So no tipping off Mrs. Figg that there's something uncanny going on. She's available if Harry needs to get a message to Dumbledore and that's where I mean to leave it for now.
Several hours of patient effort in a house picked for its occupants being away on holiday reveals that I can, with huuuuuge focus, flip a light switch, turn pages and make light fittings swing gently. I don't notice it getting any easier with repetition, but decide to keep in practise. If wandering spirits can get swole with constant exercise, I mean to do it.
I get back to Number 4 when the sky's properly light, about half past five by the clock in the Dursleys' hallway, just as the milkman is leaving Privet Drive for the next part of his round. I get a moment of nostalgia at the sight of a uniformed milkman driving an electric milk float; they'll be a dying breed in fifteen years and gone altogether in thirty. He's left three pints of milk, a pint of orange juice, a dozen eggs and a loaf of sliced bread at Number Four. Petunia rises at six thirty, brings it all in and gets the kettle on: they've clearly not got Harry started on cooking yet. She bangs on the door of Harry's cupboard, pulls back the bolt and throws it open.
"Up, Freak. Go use the loo and clean your teeth. And get back down here and back in your hole before your Uncle gets up." She hisses the words, and Harry's in there looking all vulnerable and startled awake.
"I'm still here, kid," I say. "Petunia can't hear me, but you can. Don't say anything, just get upstairs to the loo."
Petunia doesn't respond, but Harry smiles briefly and then gets his head down and scampers. In the bathroom, he closes and bolts the door. "Is that you, Mal?" he whispers
"Yep," I say. "You keep whispering, they can't hear me so I can talk normally. You need the loo, and don't worry, I'm looking away."
Poor kid gets bashful kidney anyway, but finally manages. "Oh, no." he murmurs when he's done.
I look round. Small nervous boy, toilet too tall, inevitable accident. "Don't panic," I tell him. "Get some toilet roll, yes, like that, bit more, now scrunch it up and wipe up. Down the loo with it, don't flush yet, you don't want Petunia to know you're done. Now, wash your hands. Running tap, that's right." I talk him through washing his hands properly. He might have been taught, but I doubt it. He's able to reach well enough to wash his face as well, enough to get the tear-streaks squared away.
I move on to proper brushing of the teeth and Harry hisses "I know how to brush my teeth."
"You know how Aunt Petunia has taught you. I'm teaching you to do it right, kid."
A brief widening of the eyes and he follows instructions like a good boy.
"Right, now flush and go down the stairs at a sensible pace. What usually happens next?"
"Aunt Petunia gives me breakfast and locks me in until Uncle goes to work."
"Well, let's be about it. As soon as we're in the cupboard, which is now our secret base, I'll tell you what I learned while you were sleeping."
Downstairs, Harry gets his breakfast - two slices of bread and marge and a glass of milk, neither generous nor stingy but assuredly not right for a growing boy - and he's made to eat it sitting on the kitchen floor out of what I assume is pure spite. He's eating quickly and swallowing fast with what looks like the ease of considerable practise. I try not to pay attention to this since I'm already quite angry enough, thank you very much.
Instead, I watch Petunia. She's splitting her attention between cooking breakfast, the little boy on the floor and the doorway back to the hall, an air of watchfulness about her. I'm fairly sure, watching her, that the driver for a lot of the shit that Harry's getting is actually Vernon, and she wants him out of sight before her husband is up. I'm not cutting Petunia any moral or ethical slack for this, of course: there's no call for accepting Harry's lot as any kind of way to treat a child, unwanted poor relation or no. She has options that a short green-form interview with any general practice solicitor could open her eyes to, along with a great deal of information about how very easy divorce and restraining orders are to get.
As soon as the milk glass is empty Harry gets hustled back under the stairs and she locks him in. She leaves the key in the lock, which opens up a whole world of possibilities vis a vis my poltergeisting the shit out of her security precautions.
I ghost through the door. "All OK there, kid?"
There's enough light coming through around the edges of the door - the glass front door may be tacky, but it means the hall is well lit - that I can see Harry nodding.
"Shiny -" There's a thundering as of the sky falling in, which interrupts me. "What the blazes is that?"
"Uncle and Dudley coming down for breakfast." Harry's whisper has no intonation, because this is his normal.
"What a pair of bloody elephants," I remark, for the reward of a quiet little giggle. When you're five, hearing grown-ups swear is always funny. "Right, keep quiet while I go listen in on breakfast. If I know their plans for the day we might be able to get up to some fun. Mischief, even."
Harry's grin lights up the tiny space we're in, and I wish with all my might for a face to smile back with. Nearly four years of Dursley bullshit and he can still smile. Proper little soldier you are, my lad.
A few more reassuring remarks and I'm ghosting about the kitchen while the zoo exhibits sit down to breakfast. Toast and eggs and sausages and beans and bacon and fried bread and fried mushrooms and black pudding and holy jesus Vernon Dursley, a man eats like that and he doesn't exercise, he goin' to die. I'm as in favour of the Full English Breakfast as any proud son of Albion, but he's putting away the signature breakfasts of all four home nations in one sitting. He'd probably have a crack at the rest of the Commonwealth, but he's dead against any 'queer foreign muck' unless I much misjudge my man. F.u.c.ker even eats the grilled tomatoes, the mark of a wrong 'un in my book.
One might deduce that there was something wrong with Vernon - he grew up with a sister who could casually tell an orphan he ought to have been drowned and double down with an insult to his dead mother, tell me that didn't come out of a dysfunctional family I defy you - but what he's eating isn't breakfast, it's passive suicidal ideation. It's not like nobody knows that overeating is unhealthy: I'm pretty sure the F-Plan has been out for a couple of years by now. Wouldn't surprise me if Petunia - one slice of toast, no butter, one half gr.a.p.efruit, one generalised air of misanthropy - had an autographed copy. I can't remember precisely when cholesterol got identified as one of the baddies, but I'm sure it was earlier than this.
My point, here, is that stuffing down a breakfast of that heft and variety on top of already morbid obesity is self-destructive behaviour, and you'd have to be invincibly ignorant not to know that. I'm willing to bet that he'll be snacking the rest of the day, eat a hearty lunch, come home to a dinner even bigger and then punish the whisky for a couple of hours to wind down. In the books, Vernon was still alive in 1998 and it's actually something of a surprise. Small wonder that he treats everyone around him like crap: he clearly hates himself.
Amateur psychoanalysis aside, I learn that Dudley will be at a childminder's today, Vernon at work, and Petunia at a regular coffee-and-bridge thursday. Vernon opines that the month-end meeting will see him kept late, and Dudley tries to get out of going to the minder's by throwing a nasty little tantrum that his father treats as him being an adorable scamp rather than cause for five minutes on the naughty step. I'm against corporal punishment for children - never raised a hand to my own, and proud of how they turned out - but lord, twenty minutes watching Dudley stuffing his face, whining, and kicking his parents makes me want to fetch the wee bastard a ding around the ear'ole with a sock full of shit.
I was mistreated as a child, and Harry's having an even rougher go of it than I did, but at least neither of us were never trained to be hated as a.d.u.l.ts the way the Dursleys are doing with their own crotchfruit. Vernon outright praises the little shit for trying his hardest to get his way, although I can see that Petunia wants to re-open an argument she clearly lost before the boy could talk. One can only hope that school can undo some of the damage before he reaches the age of criminal responsibility. From the look of things, the childminder also has some ideas on the subject of behaviour that Dudley doesn't care for much. I wish her, whoever she is, good luck and good hunting.
Ghostly calm or no, I have to take a moment or two to compose myself before going back in to the cupboard with Harry, who quite sensibly is getting a nap. Sleeping makes the time go faster, a lesson I remember learning around his age. I go back to surveillance on the Dursleys; Vernon heads out to work, while Petunia gets Dudley dressed and ready for the walk to whoever she's dumping him on for the day. I'm pleased to see that with Vernon not present she's actually somewhat firmer with him. On the way out, she bangs on the cupboard door. "Freak! You behave yourself in there. I'll be back at lunchtime."
Dudley gives the door a kick and yells "Freak!", which Petunia lets pass without comment.
I go back in to see that Harry has been startled awake. "I'm here, kid," I tell him. "Let's just wait until they're out of the house."
It's a tense few minutes until we hear the front door close and Petunia's heels clack off down the garden path.
"Mal, are you really a ghost?" Harry asks, once it's quiet.
"I'm really a ghost. I was alive, then I got deaded, and now I'm here. Haunting you. Wooooo!"
Harry giggles. "Why?"
"I really don't know, Harry. But I'm going to help if I can, because there's just too much stupid in this house."
"Who's Harry?"
"You are! Told you I'd find out your real name and I did. Harry James Potter. Oh, and since I didn't know the date yesterday, Happy Birthday and sorry I'm a day late." Name and birthday will do to start with; dumping everything on him at once would be unkind. It's not like we don't have time locked in this here cupboard.
A frown. "Freaks don't have birthdays."
"Harries do, though."
More giggling. "How old am I?"
"Five, Harry. And you'll be going to school quite soon. You should have been going at the same time as Dudley, but your Uncle and your Aunt are stupid." Wouldn't surprise me if they've been concealing the mere fact of Harry's existence from everyone until quite recently, because otherwise sending Harry to school with Dudley would be the more normal thing to do.
More giggling.
"Now, your Uncle and Aunt don't know that you know your name, so until they do, Harry James Potter is your secret name that you mustn't tell anyone. If they find out you know, they'll want to know how, and you can't tell them about me because they're stupid and scared of ghosts and magic."
"Magic?"
"Magic, Harry. Ghosts are part of magic. If there wasn't magic, ghosts couldn't talk like I do. Or sing like I do -" I give him a chorus of The Cat's Got No 'Air On which has him laughing until he hiccups - "or do this." I turn the key in the lock and give the door a push.
"Not 'llowed out," he whimpers, scuttling back in to the corner.. The f.u.c.kers have clearly tried to trick him like this before.
"Not allowed to get caught, Harry," I tell him, gently. Not letting any of my anger in to my voice is proving quite the challenge. "And here, let me show you that it wasn't your Uncle opening the door. It was me."
The pull switch for the light in the cupboard is quite hard to work, but it's only a couple of seconds. On, and then off.
Harry gasps. And grasps the implication immediately. From the look on his face, he's getting firmly in touch with his inner Naughty Little Boy.
"Now, with Mal the friendly ghost to help, it's time to do some scouting."
"What's scouting?" Of course, he's been raised in a f.u.c.k.i.n.g cupboard, he's got huge holes in his vocabulary.
"Looking about all sneaky like and not getting caught," I tell him. "First thing, we're going to the front door to check the car's gone."
It takes him a couple of tries to get up the nerve to leave the cupboard, but he manages like a little hero in the end. I explain to him about keeping low so's nobody looking in can see him, which windows he doesn't have to do that with because they're at the back or upstairs, and that time is important but I'll watch it for him and tell him when it's time to scamper back to his secret base.
After a tour of the house (watch whether a door is open or closed and leave it that way) I get him back to the kitchen just after ten and walk him through the basics of Stealing Food So They Don't Notice It's Gone. He ends up with a surprising amount of choice - Petunia has dozens of opened packets of fad-diet stuff, slimmers' meal bars are starvation rations for a grown woman but hearty nosh for Harry. The supply of sweeties and cakes for Dudley and Vernon is easy to raid, and Harry takes to covering up the evidence with aplomb. I reckon I've got five hundred calories down his neck in under half an hour.
We've just finished cleaning up when Harry says "Uh oh."
I recognise the expression and stance. Number two inbound, by the looks. "Need the loo?"
He nods.
"Bad?"
Another nod.
"It's getting fed properly that does it. Off you go, then."
"Aunt hasn't said I can."
"Mal says you must. Aunt Petunia is the enemy, Harry, and you only have to pretend to do as she says. Loo! Now!"
He grins as he runs for the stairs. Drifting along after him, I'm heartened that he was so ready for a minor act of rebellion, but annoyed that his first conscious revolutionary acts against the Dursley Regime include taking a shit. We've a long way to go before we work our way up to arson and riot.
"You know how to wipe your bum?" I yell through the door.
"Yes! Aunt Petunia made me learn," he yells back. There's at least some normality in this house, then.
I drift in when I hear the toilet flush, and Harry's trying to get his pyjama trousers to stay up. There's a worried look on his face. "Aunt Petunia ties them up for me." he says. And, of course, if they're not tied when she gets back she's going to know.
"Time to learn for yourself," I tell him, interrupting the panic before it can really take hold. "Get the strings in your hands and cross them over …" It takes a few minutes, but concentrating calms Harry down and I've got the patience of the literally dead. I slip in a few asides about how knots work and things you can do with them, because time spent educating a child is seldom wasted. Once we've got Harry's trousers properly secured, we go over Washing Our Hands and Cleaning Our Teeth again, and also checking the bathroom to make sure there's no obvious signs of use. Teaching Harry to be stealthy and confident in his stealth is going to pay dividends later: I didn't figure it out until I was ten or so and thereby suffered more than I might have done if I'd been smarter.
More chatting in the bathroom leads Harry to let me know that he does get a bath 'sometimes' in Dudley's used bath-water. I'm fairly sure that Dudley is the kind of difficult customer that makes enough of a fuss over bathtime that his mother keeps it to once a week. Not a problem per se, most kids are over-washed anyway and they don't start to pong until they're teenagers, but Harry, judging by the quick and eager responses to instructions on getting clean, is a naturally fastidious kid. Figuring out safe times for surreptitious bathtime is a project for later, I decide.
I stick my head through the wall to check on the Dursley's bedside alarm clock, which is actually a Goblin Teasmade. Which doesn't appear to get used. Could be because Vernon's a power-tripping gobshite who makes his wife get up to make his tea of a morning, could be because Petunia wants to get up to keep hubby from waxing wrathful over the sight of a Freak at breakfast time. "It's half past eleven, Harry," I say once I'm back in the pistachio-green hell of the Dursley bathroom, "time to go and pretend you've been in the cupboard all morning." A last check that the bathroom and kitchen are in order and the wrappers from brunch are properly buried under the rubbish from breakfast and I lock us in.
"Harry James Potter," I say once he's settled down. "That's your name. Now, I didn't find everything in just one night, but it's a start, isn't it?"
Harry nods. Big round eyes, he's drinking it all in. He's five and spends most of his time locked up in the dark, so he doesn't have any trouble accepting that he's got a ghost helping him.
"Now, your mum was Lily Potter, and your dad was James Potter. I know about them from hearing stories when I was alive, I never met them myself, but they were heroes who died in a war."
"Not in a car crash?"
"No, not in a car crash. Dying in a car crash is dead rubbish. I know, because that's how I died."
"Did it hurt?" Because of course a little kid is going to go off on every tangent imaginable and it's not like we're under pressure of time, here.
"A bit, at first, and then when I died it didn't hurt any more." It just all got really confusing for a while and took a hard swerve into the outright surreal. I'm pretty sure I'm in a fanfic at this point. "It all went strange, and then it all went black, and the next thing I knew I was in our secret base with you, a long way from home."
"Cor. Is that why you talk funny? You sound like Coronation Street."
Turns out that the dead can laugh. "Harry, I don't talk funny. I talk properly, it's you southerners that talk funny!"
"I do not!" Proper little-boy indignation. They've not broken him entirely, for all their effort, and I must be doing something right if he's comfortable enough to back-chat me this quickly.
"I know, I know, I'm just joking with you. I talk like I do because this is how everyone talks where I lived. Which is quite near Coronation Street, actually. When you grow up, you'll find everyone thinks that where they live is where people talk properly and everywhere else is where they talk funny. It's best to make jokes about things like that, or you end up stupid like your Uncle Vernon."
My attempt to introduce an important teachable moment misses the mark: five-year-old minds are an erratic and fast-moving target. "Coronation Street's real? Not just on the telly?"
Of course he's heard it. Apparently the TV comes with only two settings in this house: Loud and Too Loud. And Petunia, a stereotype down to the very bones of her, watches her soaps religiously. I decide to go with it. "Coronation Street is real, yes. I've visited there." No need to tell him it's just a TV set at Granada Studios and they do tours.
"Jack Duckworth is my favourite," he tells me solemnly. I like this kid: I used to think Jack Duckworth was brilliant too, not least because I knew about five real-life Jack Duckworths; he was a very well-observed character. Back in the day when Coronation Street wasn't complete rubbish like it… won't be for at least another ten years. "Are Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds real too?"
All hands brace for impact! Massive Nostalgia Trip Incoming! I f.u.c.k.i.n.g LOVED that show. "That one's just a bit real. There was a real man called D'Artagnan, and he was a musketeer, and there's a famous story about him called D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers. For the telly they made a children's version where they're all dogs instead of men and changed the name to Dogtanian because it was all dogs, and muskehounds instead of musketeers."
"Oh. What's a musketeer?"
"Old fashioned kind of soldiers. Named after the kind of gun they used, but they were famous for using their swords as well."
"Why did they use swords instead of guns?"
And we're off! I really can't do much for Harry except talk to him, and five minutes with any five year old will make you familiar with the phenomenon. Question after question after question until you go mad or the kid gets bored and wanders off. Of course, after the first time you're already mad and the whole process becomes rather fun, especially if you've got time to demonstrate the holy rite of Looking It Up In Books for the stuff you don't know the answer to.
Of course, the kid has to be comfortable with you and not have had the habit squashed out of him by years of psychological abuse. Seems like I got to Harry in time. What actually stops us this time is the sound of feet coming up the driveway and a key in the lock, right as Harry's in the middle of the important follow-up questions for the explanation of how special telly science can make it look like dogs can talk and fight and foil the evil schemes of the sinister Cardinal Richelieu.
Harry freezes mid-inquiry. He'd been getting quite voluble.
"Don't worry, Harry. She can't hear me and she won't have heard you. What happens now?"
"I get lunch and I'm allowed the loo and I have to do jobs until it's time to go and get Dudley from the childminder."
"Well, eat your lunch and do your jobs and we can talk more. Maybe I can tell you things about your jobs, you just have to pretend you can't hear me." I hear feet on the stairs above us, Petunia clearly needs the loo urgently judging by the pace.
"Sometimes I forget stuff and she shouts at me and I get the slipper," Harry says. The tone of his voice would make a statue weep. Sounds like something my own dear mother got up to: give incomplete instructions, or instructions no child can manage to grasp, and punish the slightest infraction. Of course Harry got right aboard the whole friendly-ghost bit, it was a distraction from what he knew was coming.
"I'll remember for you, let's avoid the slipper. The slipper is stupid, but don't say that out loud, you'll just get more slipper." I've no great hope that I can cheer him up, I have a deep-seated dread that even a.d.u.l.t memory and attention to detail won't be good enough, but maybe I can help him get his mind right to take a little less damage to his s oul from what's (probably, I could be running in fear of my own personal ghosts here) coming.
"K." The key turns in the lock and Harry's visibly retreating into himself as I watch. I wasn't being pessimistic, I wasn't being pessimistic enough.
- oOo -
It was as bad as I feared and in some ways worse: after another bread-and-marge meal on the kitchen floor, Petunia snapped orders and stood over Harry while he damp-dusted and swept and mopped and made beds and all of the other sundry and minor tasks of regular housework for two hours. He's not big enough for the vacuum cleaner or cooking yet, and either there's nothing to do in the garden or she doesn't want the neighbours to see him. She'd have to give him shoes and something to wear that isn't pyjamas, too.
The standing-over is the worst part for Harry, constantly carping about how he's not doing the job well enough or quickly enough and how he's a worthless, stupid freak. It's calculated to put him off his stroke and give her an excuse to use the slipper on him.
And she wants to. Oh, she very clearly wants to. She's put on a housework apron with a big pocket in the front, and there's a nice, big rubber-soled slipper in it.
"Just let her words go, Harry. She's a sad, angry woman who doesn't know any better. Keep your eyes on the job, nice, smooth even strokes with the cloth. Now get a bit of the cloth over your finger and get in the corners. Keep going until you've got all the dust, I know you can't see too well, but I can and I'll talk you through it. Back up a bit, you've missed a bit, bit more, got it. The important thing is that you know and I know we're doing a good job, and a good job is worth doing. Don't look around, pretend you can't hear me, she's telling you it's the dining room next, move smoothly and evenly and don't be afraid..." Just a sample of what I pour into his ear. I hope it's helping.
If I had a throat it'd be sore, but we manage a success on our first day together: Harry doesn't get the slipper. What he does get is two hours of intimidation from a woman armed with something he knows will hurt when she hits him with it. Constantly in his personal space, every utterance from her mouth an insult or a criticism couched in the vilest terms she can think of that doesn't teach him coarse language, and demanding the kind of standards they enforce on basic trainees to accustom them to military harshness. Demanding these standards from a child with defective vision who, up until now, has been unable to see what he's supposed to be wiping up.
At no point does she do anything actionable before a criminal court. While inflicting two hours of emotional and psychological torture of the nastiest kind. In a dark, sarcastic, gallows-humour sort of way I'm actually impressed. Our 'success' is measured by her being satisfied by Harry's eyes brimming with tears as she pokes and prods him to be faster drinking a glass of water, using the loo and getting back into his cage.
It takes me the best part of an hour of patient, gentle reassurance to get him back on an even keel and reassure him that this is Not Right, that it is all Vernon and Petunia's fault, that his mum and dad would be right here haunting the shit out of them if they could, and that one day all this will be past. It stops us taking advantage of Petunia heading out to collect Dudley, which takes the better part of an hour, but I can't begrudge the time. There's a lot of damage to undo.
Forget what I said about Petunia being less culpable, her only difference from Vernon is her preferred approach. Insidious, rather than brutal, but every bit as barbaric. One way or another, her and her pet manatee are going f.u.c.k.i.n.g down. Made my peace with my own lack of vengeance years ago. Taking it on someone else's behalf? I foresee catharsis.
When I figure out the how of the thing, well: Lily sends her regards, you utter, utter cunt.
AUTHOR NOTES:
The Green Form: part of the old Legal Aid. A very mild means test entitled anyone to two hours of lawyers' time paid for out of general taxation for 'general advice and assistance on any matter of law'. It got cut down to near non-existence while I was still a lawyer and I'm pretty sure it's gone altogether now.
Harry not getting his reception year at school actually complies with the law, which requires a child be in full time education from the first term after his fifth birthday. It isn't actually from canon that the Dursleys went with the bare legal minimum but is precisely the kind of petty bullshit you'd expect from the sort of arseholes who'd keep a child in a cupboard and tell the neighbours he's a habitual criminal.
The Black Dog of folklore - including Gr im, Barghest, Gurt Dog, Old Padfoot and many more in Britain alone, it's very widespread across Europe - gets a bad press that, reading between the lines, they don't deserve. Guard dogs are notoriously grumpy creatures, after all, with people who aren't supposed to be there, but you're glad of them if they're guarding you.
Other matters: Grilled Tomato on a Full English is garnish, and should not be eaten. The Teasmade is an alarm clock with a built in tea-maker: rather out of fashion now, but surprisingly they still make and sell them. I really do miss the milkmen of old, it was an enormously convenient service that got driven out of business by the big supermarkets. The best picturesque name I ever found was in the churchyard of St. Andrew's at Slaidburn, where a Mr. Tempest Strider was buried in 1788. And it's completely true about the electric goddesses, r.a.p.e-monkeys (Sodomit-Affelingen in the original german) and meth.
Fic recommendation: Messing with Time by Slythernim, on Archive of Our Own, which recently updated after a long hiatus. Harry ends up five again, with a thirty-something Auror's mind and skillset. He puts up with the Dursleys' bullshit for about fifteen minutes and then shit goes sideways in the most entertaining way.
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