I remembered the ewe's name even before I saw it hand-printed on the bands of the skeins - Mercury, scrawled in the spinner's sprawling, purple script. There'd been no call for our own, human names the morning she sold me the wool. I was a shopper amongst the stalls at Old Spitalfields. She was a scaled-up female in orange wellies. Faun-tinted freckles and a Dutch crown of strawberry blonde. Less shepherdess than Athenian Priestess, she smiled toward me as I picked up the skein from the pile in the bowl, but she spoke only when I stroked the swatch of cables.
"Beautiful, of course," Welsh vowels, like boiled sweets held at the front of her tongue. She touched her scarf, the cables branching, the fingers of fringe dripping blood colours down her chest and shoulders. "But a cable's true value is in the knitting, don't you think?"
I did not. My only jag of knitting, I'd had a mission. Speed and volume trumped craftsmanship and quality. The whole endeavour had been driven by an agenda to put objects into hands, with very little consideration for the object, and even less consideration of the hands.
"That you're snuggling is one of Mercury's second. Spun it myself. Far too lovely a lamb to trust to the mill. I've the entire fleece worths, here, if you've a larger project in mind." The spinner bent, lifted the large black tote spilling silver loops onto the table. Some things are best kept whole. I went ahead and bought the lot.
Back home, I held a skein below Ron's chin, watched each drain the other of some vital essence. And so, I thought, that is that, because who else would ever warrant the working of so much wool?
" 'S all right," he said. "I've enough of that with mum. I'd as soon skip pretending to love yet another itchy jumper, if it's all the same to you."
I stashed the black tote behind the largest door of the sideboard, left my needles speared through the odd ball of mohair at the bottom of my school trunk.
This is how the story of the blanket begins.
Or maybe it's not. Maybe the first sentence is a lie. Maybe I only want to think I remembered.
Mercury, the spinner, myself, and Ron.
Myself and Ron.
And Harry.
Maybe I've been telling myself this story all wrong from the start.
……….
From what I've seen, each Christmas Ron unwraps the same jumper as all the other men gathered round the Weasley family tree - a stockinette block of colour, an intarsia initial in the centre for contrast. Ginny's jumpers might be touched with the occasional band of Fair Isle, or Fleur's edged with a bit of lace. The baby gets bobbles and pom-pons and tiny, dot buttons, but for all the work that leaves her needles, I've never known Molly Weasley to work a cable.
I, myself, had yet to rate a jumper. A fact I might have taken to heart if Angelina and Audrey hadn't once been fellow passengers in the same, cold boat. Our gifts always matched the jumpers of our menfolk. Our ribbed scarves and fingerless mitts. Our stripey hats and floppy cowls, all coordinating to our Other's initial in some way ("In case," Angelina once muttered out of earshot, "we all forget who we're supposed to leave with tonight.") Which is to say, for all her thought and planning, Molly Weasley's really not the sort to take on cables. It is an activity that requires one be entirely present with their wool. One cannot simply spell the two sticks and the string to do the work on their own. One must see and count and anticipate. One must remember their rows and consult their charts, be aware of where the repetitions begin and where they leave off. And so, Molly Weasley would never be good with cables. She's too occupied caring for her family to ever devote the time.
I turn my needles so the right side faces, untwist the fabric pooled in my lap, begin another long row.
Seed stitch for ten. Purl one, two, three. Cable six to the back.
Purl, and purl, and purl.
My needles work without a sound. Crookshanks pretends to ignore the unwinding yarn, but his ears twitch with each wobble of the ball. Downstairs, Dandy waits, her dachshund paws tapping a slow pace against the tile. Mrs. Whigby is late returning from her weekly visit to her sister. My floo is lightless, still.
Cable two to the front.
Purl. Purl. Purl.
Each stitch is progeny and progenitor. A twist of the wrist. Three ticks of the clock.
Crookshanks turns his head, glares through heavy lids at the cracked door. At the foot of the stairs, Dandy makes what I know to be the beginning of her "emergency" sounds, a non-vocal whine, so shrill it's nearly indiscernible. "She still hasn't forgiven the exterior dog-flap for dripping rain down her nose, so, If you wouldn't mind…" Mrs. Whigby had said earlier, fastening her cloak. I work my way to a stopping place, then heap everything back into the tote beside my feet.
Dandy jump-rocks on bitty dachshund legs before realizing it's just me. She skitters backward as I descend, lifts a front foot, stares at the empty steps over my shoulder. She sniffs as I draw near, her frosted snout raised to test the air, as if it's all just a trick and I'm actually hiding Ron in my pocket.
"I know you miss him,"I say, rounding the newel post, "but he's still gone for good." The back door cracks open with the wave of my wand.
Cupboard love at first sight for those two - a couple of shared pieces of bacon when we first moved in, and then the thousand other secret morsels after. Dandy dashes down her ramp into the garden. I cast a warming charm on the foyer, then lean against the door frame, breathe in the cool night air wisping along the edges of my spell.
Dandy sniffs a low branch, "perusing the day's news" Mrs. Whigby likes to say. I fold my arms. In this garden, Dandy's is the sole byline for the morning, noon, and evening editions. She is endlessly fascinated by her own prior reportage. The neighbour's Christmas lights reflect as orange orbs off the red paint of the iron lawn chairs. I close my eyes, press my temple to the wood, waiting.
And this is Sunday night. This is the weekend winding down. Earlier today, Molly would have served roast pork with apples. She would have mashed potatoes and shelled peas, and arranged Bill's steak tartare on his plate before the rest of the family gathered around the table. She would have prepared a treacle tart for Harry, chocolate sponge and pud for everyone else. She would have poured a bit of the batter into lined tins and baked faerie cakes for Victoire and Teddy. Ron would have eaten two, unglazed, straight from the oven before lunch even began.
I wasn't there to witness, of course, but I know all this the way I know the periodic table, the English Qabalah, the mapped night sky for the month of July - unerringly, and by rote. I know it as I know the patterns must shift. The longer she stays in Italy, the more likely Ginny's favourite roast pork will give way to Percy's preferred curried lamb. My sauteed spinach will disappear off the menu, entirely. Teddy and Victoire will eventually stop playing so close to the kitchen, and little strangers I'll never know will toddle in, hands out, to take their place. If it hasn't happened already, introductions will be made. Ron's new friend will find her seat at the table. Perhaps, she's already been asked to tie Victoire's hair in one of the blue satin ribbons Fleur keeps in her pocket. Perhaps she's already wiped away a smudge of chocolate melted to Teddy's chin.
Try as I might, I can't picture Ron's face any way other than looking at her,
I roll my head, chin to chest, ear to shoulder. Neck tissue creaks and grinds. A leaf scratches across the brick path. Dandy's sniffing remains complex, arrhythmic.
This is Sunday night. What was once take-away night. Simple white plates and electric blue chopsticks. Steaming rhomboids with shining wire handles, aluminium trays, and dripping paper bags. It was Ron spearing papadums with his fork. It was Harry picking water chestnuts from the moo goo gai pan, arranging them along the edge of my plate. It was Ron's legs stretched, taking all the space beneath the table, my toes curled around the rung of my chair. It was the clink of three more bottles clutched between freezing fingers, and bits of rice on the tablecloth, and Harry's eyes ever brighter against the deepening flush of his cheeks.
I can, for better and worse, still picture Harry's face all ways.
Dandy goes quiet. I clamp my jaw and open my eyes, peer past the place she's circling to the withered clematis trailing down the bricks. Mrs. Whigby plants a proper witch's garden: Clematis vitalba, Atropa belladonna, Hyssopus officinalis.
The trick to not remembering: Remember something else, instead.
Aconitum napellus, or monk's-hood, which is aconite, which is wolf's bane.
Artemesia vulgaris, known far less lyrically as "mugwort."
Salvia sclarea, commonly called clary sage. Hyoscyamus niger is henbane, is nightshade.
I take the time to slide along the surface of each syllable. I cling tight to the typography, the crisp, black edge of each glyph in my mind, careful, so careful not to slip beneath the cortex of the literal. Because this, too, is a trap. One neural twist and these names are suddenly so much more than just their collection of sounds. Much more than the letters with which they are composed.
Antirrhinum majus and Sorbus aucuparia are soil speckles on parchment, the spiced manure odour of greenhouse two.
Passiflora incarnata is Ron's fingertip held between mine, learning the difference between to bruise and to crush.
Juniperus communis is a glimpse of Harry through dripping needles when he thinks I can't see, fists jammed in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, his face tilting into the rain, miserable, earthbound.
Harry's face. All ways.
And these are the exact sort of thoughts I didn't want to think. It's bad enough to relive it all as I sleep. There's no excuse for allowing it into my waking hours, as well.
Mrs. Whigby is very late, and I'm suddenly very tired. I can't look forward to a good night's rest, but if I make my way upstairs now, if I resist the urge to pick up my needles once again, I can get in a few fitful hours before I'll have to leave to find fire.
I say, "Come on, girl," then click my tongue twice. Dandy rockets up her ramp, trots over the threshold, crosses the foyer, then hops through her flap in Mrs. Whigby's door.
I look to Crookshanks who, I like to think, is waiting for me on the landing. He blinks toward where I stand in his lazy way, subtly shifts his old bones. I close the door, lock it tight, and trudge back up the stairs.
………
It was the school healer who suggested shaking off the nightmares by rolling from bed to plant both feet on the floor.
"It grounds you in time and space," he'd said. "It reminds you of your weight in the world. It pulls you out of your head and into your body, centres you firmly within your own, true physical presence."
And then his fingers slid forward over his knees - thick, un-marred digits. Blunt grubs the colour of raw fat. I remember feeling sick, then looking up at his face, the supercilious expression of someone who's never questioned one single decision they've ever made in their entire life. I remember thinking his dreams of being swallowed were likely quite different from mine, and then flushing hot and cold, repulsed by my own filthy mind. I remember looking away from him, and never looking back. It was past mentioning "my own true, physical presence" also posed a problem.
There were lots of things then I couldn't bring myself to say. Like, "My eyes sweep for faces I know I'm not going to find," and, "I still can't comprehend my own shadow - its shrunken distortion, its four pitiful limbs."
And, besides, it all just felt like whinging to list the symptoms aloud when I'd already diagnosed the sickness.
I never went back, but I did take that one scrap of advice and alter it to suit. Besides the feet on the floor, my method to stop dreaming the same dream for hours on end was this: Lift the body, and open the eyes. Scrunch the sheets in the fists and make the mouth form the word bed,bed,bed,bed until the desperation stops firing trembles beneath the skin. Breathe, and breathe. Remember, somewhere there is a light. There is a fire. Rise and walk to it.
And I'm finding this still works. It does. Only, building my own fire never breaks the spell, so some nights I have to walk for miles. Some nights I have to wait for the sun.
Some nights, it's a can of sterno guttering blue heat under a canopy of pitted hands. Sometimes, it's a gas log through a velvet-draped window, or a flickering bin in an alley. Sometimes, it's orange tongues lapping an unlabeled tin atop a molehill of ash. Some nights, it's a bank of shimmering red glass flanked with incense, a hundred fervent hopes melting toward Heaven.
Tonight I turn south, flip the collar of my coat up around the exposed skin of my neck. This was much easier to manage at school with the fire just down the stairs, tended all hours by small, dedicated hands. Yellow flames. An eternally eager appetite I could feed the notes into on the nights I had to write.
It's odd, really. Of all the letters I've written, the only ones I remember are the ones I never sent.
-Dear Harry,
I mended a first year's spectacles today. His frames are tortoise-shell, and his lenses aren't as round, but I still couldn't help but think of you.
-Dear Harry,
All term, someone's been leaving nosegays for Lavender in the spot where she died. I sort of assumed it must have been Parvati, but tonight on rounds I found Seamus, his forehead and palm pressed to the wall, sitting exactly in the place where her blood had puddled. And, Harry, he was singing. Something like a lullaby. And I wondered, was this just picking up where they left off? Amongst the hammocks and pillows, and all the other aching bodies in the big room, had he sung her to sleep with this same song?
-Dear Harry,
The painting of the fruit bowl is gone from outside the kitchens. Prof. McGonagall says it's been gone since last May, so how have I not noticed until February? I know it seems hardly worth telling, but I can't shake the notion it's significant, somehow. As if the replacement painting is a portent. As If, from now on, I'll be forever finding out missing things. Not as in running across things I've lost, but as in realizing I've lost something only after it's long gone.
-Dear Harry,
Ginny says you say hello. I might remind you, I have been known to read a thing or two in my time, and I've always said your atrocious handwriting is nothing to be ashamed of…
-Dear Harry,
The ground splits in my dreams. I open my mouth, scream out the air from my lungs, only there's no sound, and you and Ron move further and further away, and I'm falling back and fighting to climb, but my feet slip in the crumbling earth, and the roots I try to cling to dissolve between my fingers, and I wonder that you can't realize I'm gone, but the two of you keep walking and walking until I can't see, and then the ground heals itself over above, and there's no air and no sky and no you, and, well…it doesn't take an Oxford scholar to figure this one out, does it?
The streetlamps' light volleys off looming glass, tints the fog, coats this stretch of the A-10. My face at a glance is a monochrome in sodium orange, the hair frizzing from my bun, a familiar shade of deep ginger.
Never Dear Ron on those middle-of-the-night letters.
If I'm honest, it has rarely ever been Ron on my mind at midnight. Midnights are mostly for mulling uncertainties, the taste of blood off my gnawed lip, and Harry.
Forward and forward. Past the Christmas lights and hanging greenery of Leadenhall Market. Past Monument Station, down King William Street, past Fishmonger's Hall. The fog over the Thames is dense, bitter to breathe. The sort of fog that could hide any bad thing one person might do to another on this bridge. The sort of fog a person could fall into and never see the water they're rushing to meet. A fog that makes the south bank's skyline appear mouldy, furred. Like something rotting. Or something asleep.
I find the fire down an un-marked side lane inside a pillar of glass and pink wax set on a low, blue sill. St. Jude faces into the shop, emerald robe draped over one shoulder, his head ablaze in holy flame. I could magically snuff the wick through the window for safety's sake, but instead I ball my hands in my pockets and watch it burn. Now that I'm here, what else is there? I don't know the litany for lost causes. Even if I did, I don't believe in intercession. Even if I did, it still takes at least two to pray it.
-Dear Harry,
Since Ron left, I have learned that there are far too many cracks in the pavements of London.
I have learned that skin will callous even under the touch of soft things.
I have learned that when you pass by on Silenced footsteps, people eye you as if you are an apparition.
That darkness you've already walked through can be the force that propels you toward more waiting darkness.
That counting, steps or stitches, can effectively empty the brain, for a time, at least.
That it is possible to inject fear into an otherwise rational being with one drawn card.
That I am incapable of brand new nightmares.
That what's worse than new nightmares are these immutable extensions of all dream narrative that's come before.
That my mind won't force me to taste the dirt filling my mouth, but will provide the feel of its weight on my tongue.
That I am not as afraid of smothering in the earth packed around my face as I am of not being able to sense the tread of your feet through it.
That my favorite ink still flares a millisecond of green when licked by flame.
That the things I want to say to you remain best left as soot on chimney stones.
That indeed, indeed, I did have it all wrong from the start.
……….
The fourth floor is still mostly shadows when I step off the lift, the manufactured moonbeams through the "skylights" casting cashmere-edged pools of white upon the dark tiles. Always a full moon at the Ministry. Always a night clear enough to see thousands of stars. It is beautiful magic, the weather charms outside the "windows", the approximation of sunlight. Beautiful, but insidious. I used to class it as an earnest attempt to facilitate the employee's well-being, like providing coffee and tea, a water fountain to gossip across. Now, it's just one more false thing to face in a day. One more elaborate fabrication to make us forget we all toil in a hole underground.
I stop short at the mouth of the corridor, try to read the shape of the shadow at the foot of my office door. Not keen on surprises before sunrise, I stand for a moment, considering, then whisper "Lumos," take a step forward, and un-knot with recognition.
A box. Robin's egg blue.
It was only one shared lift ride, many of the details of which elude me. I can't remember if the American and I nodded toward each other as I boarded, or if he and his bakery box stepped back to allow more room. I don't recall if I muttered hello, or if my eyes were raw, or if my hands were in my pockets, or if the tip of my nose was still numb from walking in the cold outside.
What I can remember is wanting him to have forgotten we'd met. How he began: "I see by your pointed stare at the door this is probably an unforgivable breach of lift etiquette…" I remember leaning to look into the box, the way the scent-fog of grown man and hot sugar hung heavy on his side of the lift. I remember him saying it helped him think, this whole beignet making process. I remember his wandless magic, the scar on his palm as he plucked the linen serviette he'd Conjured out of the air where it waited, perfectly folded, robin's egg blue. I remember asking how he liked it here, and feeling compelled to label Harry's reticence as fatigue, then immediately wishing I'd just kept my mouth shut. I remember white powder on the toe of my shoe, and him recommending a cafe au lait, and me saying I preferred strong tea with a splash of milk, and him holding the door as I stepped onto the fourth floor, smiling over the box, saying that sounded "exceptionally fine, too."
I remember the careful walk to my office, how it felt to be overwhelmed by even this sudden, slight touch of kindness.
It wasn't until I was sitting at my desk, burning my fingers around my mug, that I noticed the embroidery looping along the edge of the serviette wasn't just loops, but a row of tiny, silk 'H's.
I do not remember ever saying, "Thank you."
I pad across the tiles, lift the box from the floor, and open my door. Whatever is inside is light but secure, no rattling about, and I set the box on my desk, shed my coat, re-wind the bun of my hair, then lift the shade to let the enchanted stars hang in my enchanted window. I untuck the tabs and lift the lid. Inside is a clean, linen serviette, five assorted tea bags, and, still warm to the touch, a perfect golden pillow of a pastry under a dusting of white.
The silvery script in the lower corner of the lid is only just discernible, the words "I've been thinking…," shining in the moonlight.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
So, who else is stoked Portkey is up and running again? Yay! Thank you so much for reading. Please feel free to share any thoughts.