According to Benoit, lip gloss is the single greatest invention of the twentieth century.
Don't just think of it as that goopy shit staining up your best shirt, he says. Placed in its proper context, it's a device. An ultra-effective tool in the sub-conscious strive for biological self-mimicry.
I mean, really, Benoit says, the tip of his churchill a tiny, orange sun flaring in the shadows, you can hardly ask for a more blatant signal than a pair of sweet-slick lips parted and practically dripping in your direction.
The guys at his table all grunt in a knowing way, the sound of bandits planning their next plunder, while at our table Ron spews his stout, spotting up the front of his robes. He splutters and gasps. He takes a big, croaky breath and asks, "Are you hearing this?" Like I might have suddenly gone deaf. Like every man within earshot isn't locked in on Benoit's voice, memorizing every word he says.
Benoit points to the bar: The girl on the stool at the edge there, that thing she's doing with her shoe, flexing her toes, her foot thrusting in then slipping back out. Think, boys. Remind you of anything?
Benoit nods toward the billiards table: The woman fiddling with the pendant on her necklace, sliding it along the chain so her fingernails graze the soft, white skin of her chest. That's called 'self-touch', and she's sending a message. She's saying 'This feels good. Maybe you can make me feel good, later.' It's a text-book example of the physical manifestation of sub-conscious desires.
Ron says, "Are you listening, Harry? Because this …this is good stuff," He leans back to get closer, his chair creaking as the weight shifts from four legs to two.
I say, "Oh,yeah," and trace my middle finger over the big 'O' of the Ogden's logo on my beermat. I say, "He's brilliant, Benoit," then, just to see if I even register, "Even Hermione thought so when he was trying to chat her up earlier."
And… nothing. Benoit is going on about red lipstick and primate courtship displays, and Ron is sunk in wonder, eyes round and wide, mouth just this side of gaping, chair groaning as he tilts further and further back.
I say, "Yup. She was really impressed."
I say, "And he was quite taken with her."
I say, "You know, I think she might have this mad idea that you're about to chuck her."
Still nothing, so I say, "She practically told me as much, though I didn't get it at the time."
Ron is gawking over his shoulder, a new and avid disciple. I lean my head against the brick behind me and stare across the table.
I say, "Are you listening, Ron? Because this…this is good stuff."
***
My chair is squeaking.
No. Screeching is the better word. It's screeching-- eye squinching, tooth shattering shrill- every time I move to the right. I don't remember this being a problem yesterday, or the day before. I'm fairly sure my arse was only greeted with one quick croak before being served in silence. But now, today of all days, there it is. Obviously, I've never heard the Mandrake's cry, but I imagine this is how it kills. This same sort of sound ripping through the brain, severing all crucial connections until all those automatic functions of the body- breathing and blinking and blood pumping- simply stop.
I stand and grab the chair. I flip it upside down and wrestle it, shrieking, onto my desk. The file I was supposed to be studying scatters, and the cold dregs of an afternoon coffee dash across the photos as my mug spins across the wood then smashes on the floor. The corners of today's Prophet catch the stirring air and lift, fanning upward, the paper sliding slowly from the edge of the desk and down, the pages falling away from each other with a quiet flutter of slipping sounds.
Once up-ended and off the ground, my chair is an alien artefact, an unfamiliar form of wood, metal, and pocked rubber wheels. I'm no tinkerer, but, today, I need to take apart this chair. I need to find out exactly where the weak spot is. I must see the broken pieces with my own eyes and fix them with my own hands. And so, minutes later, my desk is strewn with rusted screws and bits of steel, soggy paperwork and flecks of sawdust. I'm so engrossed, I don't even hear her walk up. I don't see her in front of me until her hand sets the re-assembled mug on my desk, and then she is kneeling, collecting the pages of the Prophet, shuffling them back into order.
"It doesn't have to be perfect, Hermione," I say to the thick, ropy bun bobbing against her neck. "It's going in the bin, anyway."
She stands and lays the re-folded newspaper on my desk. She pushes her fingers into it, pressing it flat, as if something alive and dangerous might snake its way from between the pages. I don't look up, but work on. She is still, watching.
"Looks like you might be a while," she says. "Mind if I join you? They've begun a maintenance project on the fourth floor." She lifts her hand from the Prophet and flicks one of the wheels branching up from the base in front of her. It whirls upon its caster with a tiny clatter. "Lots of dust and noise."
"Yeah," I say, "sit." She does, and I listen as she rummages, pulling her things from her satchel. There is the hollow scrape of unfurling parchment, then the fluid roll of her quill gliding over its surface. She exhales, settles in.
Dust and noise.
Sitting in a room Hermione has Silenced is the auditory equivalent of floating in deep space. She can repel dirt from every surface within a twenty metre radius.
Dust and noise, indeed. We both know why she's really here.
Even so, we work without speaking. Ignoring the Prophet, ignoring Hermione, ignoring the awful urge to slop the whole, shameful mess into her waiting ears, I fix my eyes on the clutter in front of me. I tell myself there's no rush. We'll get to the picture in the middle of page five soon enough. But the silence spins out forever, and my nerves are drum-head tight, and a single tone is humming in my head, and suddenly I'm halfway through blurting out the question before I even know what I want to ask.
"So, the hair. Is that something new, or…" I keep my eyes down, punching at the chair column with the ball of my hand, knocking it loose from the base.
Hermione's quill scratches on. "I suppose so. I hadn't seen it until today," she says, unbothered. "Really brings out the Charlie-ness of her face, I think."
At this, I look up. "What?"
"That sort of pixie cut, it makes her look like Charlie."
"Does not," I say, but she is already picking up the Prophet and shaking it open. She spreads the page in front of me.
"Harry, really…." she says. And, damn it, but she's right. Now, all I see is Charlie. Charlie's cranky brow. Charlie's jaw-- clean shaven and buffed smooth, but still Charlie's jaw-- above the peep of forged cleavage peeking from a tight, black dress. One strange, hybrid hand clasps a muffin- shaped bag , the other grasps the arm of someone the caption calls 'Marco Giordano, Italy's finest Seeker'. Even the set of her shoulders-- she's her brother all over. A mad little laugh gurgles from my throat, and I look up at Hermione, feeling every bit the nutter I've been accused of being.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I shouldn't have…this isn't why…." She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth, drops her eyes, and folds the paper back onto itself.
"No. It's fine. I mean, everyone's seen it, and they're all pretending they didn't, and that's worse than just…."
"Rubbing it in your face?"
"Right. It's time you rubbed it in my face. It's done. It's over. And it's well past the point where I need to be tip-toed around and coddled. "
She sags back into her seat and crosses her ankles. She scrapes the corner of her parchment with her thumb. "I just…. I didn't know if you had reason to still hope…"
I go back to my chair, tapping the screws that hold the column base to the seat with my wand, watching as each wiggles free and then nests in its hole. "No," I say. "No hope."
"I'm sorry to hear it," she says. She's watching me again, patient. And then she takes a deep breath. "Harry…."
"Let's just drop it, okay, Hermione?" I don't even look at her. Instead, I fiddle about, dividing similar parts into piles, until she finally gives up, turns away, and goes back to her parchment.
I should be glad. These days, it only takes a few words to shut Hermione out.
I should be glad, but I'm not.
Instead, for the thousandth time, I wish it had ended for any other reason than it did. I would rather explain anything- jealous rages, cheating, a substance problem-anything other than what really happened. Anything other than the truth.
Because there's what's true, and then there's what's honest. What's true is that I can't sleep for dreaming. What's honest is far more complex and involves a list of particulars I'd rather never speak of again: My clinically termed "sleep disturbances", the services of one Dr. Joan Scarlett, and, worst of all, that stupid black notebook where it's all written down.
The truth is "seeking treatment" was Ginny's idea.
And, honestly, I can't blame her.
In fact, I'm surprised she limped along with me as far as she did. It wouldn't take long for anyone to get sick of living around what I'd become. A zombie narcoleptic. A stumbling, grunting cat-napper of a man. "You have to do something about this," she hissed one Sunday morning, slapping me awake after I dozed off- bang in the middle of sex. I think when she made the appointment with the Healer she was convinced the right potion, the easy cure, was just round the corner. It was for Ginny that I went and I sat, half asleep and half naked, on the examining table. The Healer traced the veins of my arms with his wand. He pulled my lower eyelids down and pressed hard against my cheekbones. He pushed his thumbs into the hollows beneath my jaws and tilted my head to the left, and then to the right. He scowled, the corners of his mouth sinking deep into the folds of his jowls, and then he picked up a pad of paper and a short, raven quill. He leaned in close and spoke quietly. "There's nothing wrong with you, Mr. Potter, the talking cure won't fix." He scribbled on the pad, pulled the top page away and passed it to me. "I want you see this lady. Muggle, but her husband was killed in our first war, so she knows all about our, er, recent history. However, I believe her to be ambivalent to your particular status and I know her to be very discreet, and I don't think I'm wrong in supposing that discretion, Mr. Potter, is certainly preferable in this matter."
So I met the discreet Joan Scarlett, and she sat with her pad on her knee, holding her ready pen in a spear grip beside her face. She smiled her satin rose smile and said, "All right, Harry, why don't you tell me a bit about yourself."
But I had nothing to tell. By then I was nothing but the reason I came, so I said, "I have trouble sleeping."
She nodded once, slowly, and said, "Okay, then. Let's talk about what keeps you awake at night?"
There is what's true, and there is what's honest, and truthfully, I wasn't exactly honest with Dr. Joan Scarlett. Maybe because she's the same age my mum would have been had she lived, but I found myself playing it close. I evaded. I diffused. And I thought I was so clever until the end of the hour when she reached over to her desk and picked up a black leather book. She walked me to the office door and then slapped the book into my chest. She told me to fill it up, to write down everything I dreamt, to specially detail the moments that led up to waking. The worst of the worst, so to speak. "And, Harry," she peered over her tortoise rimmed readers, "omit nothing. We have work to do. No editing."
It's harder than one would think, writing it all out in any way that makes sense, but I try. In my black book, I write about blood and sand and the tiny heart that heaves in my hands. I write about glass spiked air, breathing it down, the prickle in my throat, coughing up black. I write about Teddy, his loose limbs cartwheeling through layers of sky and fog, falling to a place that I can't see. I scrawl letters into words into phrases. Grey lips, loose jaws, the silver flick of a short blade, powdered milk eyes sunk in char, my feet unmoveable, dark liquid ribbons lifting, spreading from bodies mired beneath the water.
In my black book, I drop a robin's egg on Ginny's red tongue then sew her lips shut with coarse, blue thread. I force my fingers into Ron's mouth and pluck out his teeth, one, then another, then another.
I run with Hermione. Through caverns, and narrow, shadowed passages, and hallways, and up and down staircase after staircase, and through close grown thickets, and across wide fields, night after night, we run. I can never see her face, but I know it is Hermione. I recognize the sound of air rushing in and out of her lungs. I know too well the feel of her feet pounding the earth beside me.
And, per doctor's orders, I omit nothing. All the ugly things I do to ugly people, all the words so terrible I cringe to see them strung together in my handwriting: It's all there. I take to using my own shorthand-- Dlhv, Grybck, B. Lstrng-because I can't stand pairing the names with the verbs-- crvd, smshd, slcd, fckd. These things I do with no wand or magic words. No distance from the dark. Just my hands and my body. The feeling of skin tearing at skin.
Honestly, what happened next, I'm still not sure. For weeks I had been beyond careful. Perhaps I was just too out of it after not sleeping the night before to remember to hide the thing away. Perhaps I left it laying in the open that morning accidentally-on-purpose. But, that evening, when I stood in the hallway, staring into our bedroom where Ginny sat, the closed book in her shaking hands, there was a brief flash of something like release. For one moment, I knew she knew everything, and yet, still, there she was. But then she raised her head and, far too fast, her mirror bright eyes raked me over. "This," she said, her voice crumbling, "This is what's inside you."
And because she wasn't as much asking as telling me it was so, I said, "Yeah, I guess it is."
The truth is heroes will inevitably fail. Golden souls tarnish.
This is what's inside you.
The chair is dismantled, every part whole and lying in plain sight. All that bad noise, unfixable.
I toss my wand onto the desk and run a hand through my hair. Hermione stops writing. Somewhere, miles off in the cubicle maze, a clock is ticking. Hermione shifts in her seat. Her breath catches as she inhales.
"Harry, I…I need to ask…." She begins, but is cut off as the office door bangs open and a surge of male prattle floods around us. Even when their briefings aren't so gruesome, the night shift are a loud lot. Tonight, though, they're absolutely buzzing- high tension wires live with an overload of auxiliary power. Above it all, a distinct Louisiana drawl barrels between the walls.
"… don't care how long the old hack's been around." The voice stops on the other side of my cubicle and drops to an undertone. "One word of this gets printed, Blevins, and he'll kill the girl and run. You make sure her editor-no-you make sure the publisher understands that." There's the sound of a hand slapping a shoulder, one set of footsteps strides away, and then Nathan Benoit steps across my threshold. "Potter," he says, "you're still here?" I watch him glance at Hermione. He catches her eye, grins. "I see you've, uh, been brushing up on our case, there." He nods at my desk.
The pictures, the reports. Everything damp and brown and crumpled. The pinnacle of professionalism, I am. Luckily, he's past caring. The female in the room proves too distracting, and I can see I'll never be rid of him until introductions are made.
"Hermione, this is Nathan Benoit, South-eastern Bureau Chief of the U.S.A.A.. Benoit, this is Hermione Granger. She works in the BBS division. You may have seen each other around."
Hermione grasps her things, stands, turns, and then extends her free hand. She fumbles her quill and the parchment she holds coils up on itself, shooting forward. She lunges in reflex, but in one swift movement Benoit is already across the cubicle, the parchment in his fingers, his body square with hers, his lips almost brushing the tip of her nose.
"I don't believe I've had the pleasure," he says, smouldering all over her, before he finally steps back and takes her hand.
Slick git.
If I were Ron, I'd hex his bollocks into a permanent twist. Or, rather, if I were Ron, I'd try. Not to be rude, but men like Benoit use men like Ron to pick the grist of still other, better men from their sparkling, white, alligator teeth.
Already, the two of them are chatting about house-elves. This is how fast Benoit works. How efficient. This is why he's been here three weeks and already he's the Swordsman of the Secretarial Pool-a.k.a. the Right Man for the Job, the Bloke with Three Legs, the Louisiana Plough Horse. Benoit had never seen a house elf until he came here. He's curious about their behaviour, curious about the magic that binds them to a family. He's heard she's an expert, maybe she could explain. Benoit holds her parchment between them. His robes slip over his bare forearms, thick cables of long muscle under oak-coloured skin.
By now, under Benoit's stare, any other female in the Ministry would be a slick, warm puddle of quivering goo. Hermione, though, is as polite and indifferent as if he were any crusty, old dodger off the street. She gives him the name of a book, its author, and the shelf where it can be found in the Ministry's library. She peers down between them and plucks the parchment from his hand.
"Thank you ever so much," she says. She turns to me and pushes a strand of loose hair from her face. She looks at her watch. "I suppose I'll leave you to discuss your case, then."
"Actually, I was just about to clean up," I say, quickly grabbing up my wand and siphoning the coffee from the photos before circling it over the shrapnel on my desk. "Refecio."
Everything I pulled apart, it all comes back together. Metal and wood, every part in its place, as perfect a chair as it can possibly be. I haul it down from my desktop and turn it right side up. Gently. So I don't have to hear whether I've failed or not.
Benoit takes the hint. He points his finger at me and then jerks it back, the imaginary recoil of an imaginary gun. He makes a clicking sound with his tongue and teeth, then says, "Tomorrow, Potter," all the time ogling Hermione as she sits packing away her things. He moves a couple of steps back, then bends at the waist until his face is level with hers. When she lifts her eyes, he smiles. "It was very nice to meet you, Miss Granger," he says, then backs himself out of my cubicle and disappears down the hall.
I cram the case file back into its folder. She stands and grasps the handle of her satchel, her body tilting with the weight. "Are you coming, Harry?" she says.
"Yeah. Just a second." I toss the Prophet in the bin, then grab my cloak off the filing cabinet. I trail along behind her through the hallway and out the office door. The smell of fall, of green apples and black tea and ink, swishes from the folds of her robes.
Waiting for the lift, I nudge her with my elbow. "You joining us tonight? Ron didn't say."
Hermione turns. Her brows drift together. "What?"
"Ron and I at The Leaky-- are you coming along?"
"Ron?" She says.
"Yeah. You know Ron. Ginger hair, hogs all the biscuits."
"You're meeting Ron at the pub? Here? In London? Tonight?"
The tremble of her voice. With every syllable, my stomach twists a little tighter. "Yeah. He…he didn't mention it?"
She looks away from me. "He's been at the shop in Hogsmeade since Sunday."
Today is Thursday. I try to think of one good reason why he hasn't spoken to her in four days.
"Well, Halloween is next week…" I say, and as soon as the words are cast out, I wish I could reel them back in. Instead, they are immediately lapped over and sunk, submerged inside her to bloat and rot away.
The door in front of us opens and she automatically steps forward. I follow her inside and watch as she presses her thumb into the button labelled with the capital 'A'. She leans against the wall. She grips the handrail and the door slides shut.
"Ron's a good friend," she says.
"Yeah. The best." Best friend. Crap fiancée.
"He worries. He likes to lure you away from your 'sad little teacup', as he calls it."
"It's not so bad, my place," I say.
"No," she says, so soft I barely hear. "It's not so bad."
She reaches forward and brushes her fingertips down the row of numbered buttons. "What's the hardest part, Harry? At night, when you go home to that empty flat, what's the worst part of living alone?"
I laugh, a strange, bitter bark that bounces off the walls. "Speaking of rubbing it in…" I say. But then I look back at her face, at the way it's all pinched around her thoughts. She bothers to ask. Why is it so hard to just answer her bleeding questions?
"I guess…I guess when I wake up in the night… and the bed is freezing all around. The fact of there being only one warm spot. I'm still not quite used to that, yet. "
The lift shudders to a stop. The ding of the bell tells us we've reached our destination.
"Sounds stupid, doesn't it?"
"No," she says. "Not at all."
The door opens onto the Atrium. I wait for her to move, but she stays still, her satchel hanging by two fingers at her side.
"After you," I say. She glances at me and rouses herself forward. Instead of the lifts out to the street, she moves toward the row of fireplaces and I follow, thinking that if I can just persuade her to come with me, if I can just get the two of them together, everything will be all right.
"Hermione…" I begin.
"Have a lovely evening, Harry," she says over her shoulder. "Tell Ron not to get too pissed, will you? If he gets himself splinched, there's no one waiting in Hogsmeade to help fix him up." And then the flames flow around her, and she is gone.
****
When I fling it, the wringing beermat is just heavy enough to maintain a decent momentum. It thwacks him in the ear, and Ron startles and goes down, chair clunking back hard, legs sweeping inelegantly through the air. A few quick titters drift from the shadows. The bar-maid dropping drinks a few tables down rushes over to help peel him from the floor.
"What'd you do that for?" Ron says, rubbing his new-raised welt and righting his chair. "I know you've had a crap day, but bloody…"
"What do you care what he's on about?" I jerk my head at Benoit. "It's not as if you're on the pull."
His face goes flat. He takes a big gulp from his tankard and says, "Yeah. Well. You never know."
And there it is again. That twist in my gut.
Benoit, in his apparent quest to destroy the magic and beauty of all good things, says, really, breasts are nothing more than modified sweat glands.
And, honestly, I think I'm beginning to hate Benoit.