Part 1 – the Orphanage Ghoul
"I am selfish. All artists are selfish and self-centered,"
- Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
London, England
1947- present
"Here you are, dearest." Mrs. Weasley smiles as she tucks two shillings into Hermione's small hand. "Put that in your pocket and make sure no one sees it. I don't want any of those crooks getting your pay. You've worked hard for it."
"Thank you, Mrs. Weasley. I won't let anyone near it." Hermione puts the shillings deep inside her satchel and waves goodbye to the Weasley family. All six of them are bundled in their homey flat two sizes too small just inside the threshold she now stands on. Five red-headed children shout out their returning goodbyes. Mr. Weasley, who is off in the factory where he works until the wee hours of morning and builds parts for ships, has already said his parting an hour past. Sweet Mrs. Weasley, rosy-cheeked and stern as a Mary Poppins, is hustling Hermione off firmly, warning her to get going before dark.
The door to the Weasley's flat snaps shut behind Hermione. Mrs. Weasley's delicious meal fills Hermione's stomach pleasantly and she sighs, turning on her heel and starting down the narrow, steep stairs to the first floor. She shouldn't say it but Mrs. Weasley is a far better cook than Mrs. Granger, Hermione's mother. Sometimes, she wishes that she was one of the Weasley children. They were always so cheery, as if they didn't have a care in the world... even as the world threatened to rip itself apart around them. The Weasleys always found a way to laugh at their sorrows. They were not concerned for the landowner threatening to throw them on the streets if they paid rent late once more. It was as if the Great Depression that had swept over all of England overnight, or the bombs and dead husbands and brothers and sons marching to Germany, hadn't touched them.
Hermione's family does not find it so easy to laugh in hard times.
Still, things are getting better, she reminds herself. I'm making money. I can take care of us. At this thought, an enormous sense of pride fills the small space in her body unoccupied by Mrs. Weasley's hearty supper, and she lifts her chin a little higher as she marches down the rainy street. Yes, she is the supporter now. It is her who keeps her family running, who prevents the Grangers from slinking down into a slump impossible to dig out of, or worse, the London slums. It hadn't always been this way. Only last year, Hermione was a student at an all-girls charter school. She still had her uniform, which she kept tidily hung in a closet for when she could finally return to school after the war. She was the best in her class until her parents were forced to pull her out for work.
Destitution. Hermione learned the meaning of that word when Mum and Papa lost the family dentistry. Hermione had asked why the good people of London didn't want dentists anymore. Mum told her that people didn't have enough money to buy bread these days, much less enough to go to an expensive dentist to check on a crooked tooth. Papa said people didn't worry about cavities anymore; they worried about terrorists and Jews and Hitler.
When Mum and Papa couldn't find any new jobs, they enrolled for unemployment. The first check from the government, or the dole as Papa calls it, came days before the rent was due. It was enough to get by if they skipped a meal and no more. Mum cried that night. Papa cried too, outside their one-bedroom flat long after midnight when he thought they'd all gone to bed. But Hermione heard him sobbing through the thin wall of her bedroom.
Papa comes home late most of the time now. What exactly he does out and about in London, Hermione doesn't know. Mum would ask before, but Papa gets angry and yells at her when she does. Before the war, Hermione had never heard her Papa – her sweet, tactile Papa – raise his voice at anyone. Especially her mother.
"Mum, I'm back," she shouts, stepping into their flat. She dumps her satchel on the floor. Her skin is sticky with sweat and drizzle from the long walk over. She retrieves the two shillings and fists them, hiding both hands behind her back and creeping forward.
"Muuuummm." She listens for a response, but doesn't get any. "Mum! Where are you?"
"In here, baby" comes the tired reply. Mum's voice travels out of the bedroom they all share and Hermione moves toward it, past the four-foot wide kitchen, tiny bath, and the radio and armchair serving as their living room. Her incredible hair cast a wobbly shadow.
"Mum, look what I've got," Hermione says excitedly, unraveling her hands into the open. But her mother does not turn from where she half-bends out the window, smoking a cigarette. The woman's gaunt body, which has shrunk two sizes in the past year, looks skeletal from this angle.
"I made two shillings," she continues, not one to be discouraged easily. "I found a penny on the way here and bought us half a loaf of rye. It's in my satchel now-"
"Baby." Mum is crying. "Baby, baby."
Hermione stops babbling and frowns at the back of her mother's head, swathed in a cloud of toxic smoke and failed dreams. "Yeah?" she asks.
"Oh baby," her mother continues to murmur, sounding dizzy. She moans softly. "Baby, baby…"
Hermione chews her thumbnail, a bad habit no one has yet to reprimand her for, and eyes her mother. "Mum?"
At the familiar call, the gaunt woman finally turns around, tossing the finished cigarette out of the half-open window behind her and tugging down the Venetian blind. It only comes down partway and hangs at a crooked angle. Grey evening light slashes into the bedroom in strips. The other half of the room, the side her mother stands on, is plunged into murky darkness.
Something shiny glints in Mum's hand.
"Baby, please don't give me that look," she says, tightening her grip on the pliers and blinking back tears. "I don't want to do this – you know that – but we need the money."
Hermione stares at her.
"Come here, baby." She waves her over with hands once soft and ripe with flesh, that once tucked back frizzy wisps behind Hermione's ears and caught the chocolate ice cream dribbling down her chin when she ate too fast. They look like spiders with bones for legs now.
"Baby." Mum's brow furrows with confusion. Hermione always listens to her. She's a good daughter. Never disobedient. "Come on now."
"Where's Papa?" Hermione whispers.
Mum's expression closes. It shuts down, a shoe shop gone out of business; it darkens, a storm building up thunder; it shivers, just as glass does seconds before it shatters into a thousand itty bitty pieces. "Papa left," she says flatly.
"Left? For how long-?"
"I don't know." Her mother is agitated and tears at her hair with one hand, dangerously whipping around the pliers with the other. "Forever, I suppose. We haven't seen him in days, so he could be at the bottom of the Seine for all I know, couldn't he?"
Hermione begins to cry.
At the sight, Mum's face softens like warm bread dough. "Oh baby, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…" She sighs. "There's just not enough money. Not for everything we need. But if I could just-" She stops, then starts again. "Look, I'll make it quick. They're baby teeth, so they'll grow back. All I need is two molars. One is worth four pounds, you know. That could get us food for a few weeks, and then the other could pay for Mummy's special sugar. You know how much I love my special sugar, baby…"
Hermione's stiff with fear and her tears stop running now. She stands frozen while the shell of her mother croons and tries to calm her, her bony spider hands shaking from withdrawal and brown eyes eerily vacant. Hermione knows what she has to do then.
Mum knows too, a mere second before she does it.
"Don't you run, Hermione Jean Granger," she warns, lifting the pliers and coming forward slowly. Hermione tenses. "Don't you dare-"
"Hermione!"
The scream chases her out the flat, overwhelming the sound of the two shillings Hermione left on the bedroom floor, of the pliers sticking headfirst into the plaster wall exactly where her head was a second ago, of her footsteps rushing and tripping and fumbling down the stairs, of her falling down the last flight and ripping open a gash on her palm when it caught on a loose nail.
It chases her all the way to the inner city, where she finally stops running and catches her breath on the edge of an alley, gasping. She looks up at the sky through a messy explosion of matted brown hair.
It's jet-black.
London is a dangerous place at night, Hermione knows, and it doesn't help any that she's bleeding. She'll be helpless if one of those disturbed gents she's heard about tries to snatch her, and it gets real cold after eight o' clock in the fall. She needs somewhere to go. She needs help. She needs-
She needs Mum.
And she's crying again, in the way that only a child can cry. She cries with wild abandon and no care for anyone or anything else, with absolute misery, with gasps for air and hiccups when she eats up her tears and a huge wail just when she almost stops, burying her face in her sleeves and snotting all over them.
Just then, from a nearby café emerges a retired policeman by the name of Moody. His beer belly is warm with drink, his mind sharp and vigilant as ever. The sound of crying startles him and he looks around, his eyes – or should we say, one good eye – landing on a little girl with terrible hair crouched in an alleyway. He scowls and marches over.
"What are you doing out here alone, eh?" a gruff voice demands, startling Hermione out of the depths of self-pity and enticing her to look up. Her eyes goes wide.
The man before her is large and portly, with a jagged scar webbing across his cheek, scruffy blondish hair, a bowler hat, and a most intriguing glass eye. He wears a black trench coat as well and, rather interestingly, the jacket would have looked extremely suspicious on any other person, but it only made this particular man seem imposing and curiously mysterious.
"Well?" the man barks. "What are you doing out here? It's past curfew for you, innit?"
"I…I'm alone," she finally says. "I haven't got anywhere to go."
"No? Well, what about your parents?" the man says shrewdly.
"Haven't got any." Hermione doesn't usually lie, but she knows that if she tells the man about her mother he'll take her back no matter how hard she pleads otherwise, and she can't go back home. She remembers the pliers with a shudder.
"Well damn." The man sets his hands on his hips and growls in thought, looking around and scowling some more. "Well then, maybe you can go to…nah, can't do that…what about…? No, no, he moved out to Tyneside…and then there's…meh, perhaps not…maybe…maybe…Nah…never, not in a million years…well, there is that one…meh… Blast." He smacks his meaty hands together, matter-of-factly. "Yep, that oughta do it."
"What oughta do what?" Hermione inquires. Curiosity invested in the man's strange way of talking makes her forget her earlier troubles.
"Mrs. Cole oughta take you in, little missy, that's what oughta what," the man says sharply. "Now stand up, we've got places to go – well, one place anyway – and that woman owes me a favor. Yep, she'll take you in. Sure. No problem. That oughta do it." He starts to stride off, limping slightly due to what Hermione now notices is a right wooden leg. She hurries after him.
"Who is 'Mrs. Cole'?" she says, after they even their pace and cross the busy street. The man growls in annoyance.
"Mrs. Cole," he grumbles. "She is going to be your matron. She runs one of the orphanages here. It's a fine place, and you'll be lucky should she take you in."
Hermione nods, although she is taken off guard by this new bit of information. Orphanage? she thinks and hesitates in the middle of the crossing, without the man in the bowler hat noticing at all. She stares after his flapping black trench coat, ignoring the honks of cabs and their angry drivers screeching at her. She wonders if she should run now, back to her mother. Before it's too late.
It's been too late for months now, the voice of reason reminds her. Papa isn't ever coming back and Mum's been gone for a long, long time. Where else can you go?
The man in the bowler hat, who has seemed to finally realize she isn't following, turns back. "Hey! You coming or not, eh?"
"Coming." The answer is immediate, said in a whisper too quiet to hear in the city. Louder, she says, "Coming!" And then she sprints to catch up.
AN: Hello! You're probably confused as to why there are two versions of BHoC now. This is the ORIGINAL BHoC before any of the edits or changes. I decided to put up the original because so many of you requested it and I just happened to find it after all this time. (Also I have no idea when I will be able to finish the newest version.) I will post a chapter every day or two as quickly as possible. Thank you to everyone who has put up with me all these years and stuck by BHoC.
~ImmortalObsession