The Aurors and Unspeakables of the Ministry of Magic have a wide range of disguises – both Muggle and Magical, spells, potions, and artifacts to conceal and alter their appearances, to deceive and disorient those who see them. However, none can hold a candle to the power of a few too many drinks in altering the judgment of otherwise rational folks in appraising the attractiveness of potential partners. Presented here for your consideration is the sad tale of one Harvey Broadbent – wizard clothier and tailor extraordinaire and subject of an unintentional experiment with "Beer goggles".
Harvey sat on the barstool staring at his 3rd butterbeer and sighed. Butterbeer was just not doing the job; he needed something stronger. His day had been horrible. Normally he loved his job at Wickersham's. They were well known as the highest of the high‑end suppliers of wizard-wear. They were universally regarded as the most prestigious in all of Britain. All of their goods were of the highest quality and frequently constructed of rare and exotic materials: suits and cloaks of Acromantula silk; supple boots, loafers, belts, & dress gloves, made of specially processed dragon hide; invisibility cloaks made from demiguise pelts. For the right price clients could purchase goods made from materials of more ambiguous legality or morality: blazers woven from manticore fur, winter cloaks and overcoats made from quintaped fur, hats adorned with, hippogriff feathers, and – if rumors were true, a vest made from a nundu hide was locked away in a vault awaiting a buyer with especially deep pockets. Cuff links, stick-pins, rings and other accessories were all of the finest silver, gold, and platinum. Most days it was a delight to work with such fine materials and refined clients and he had developed enough of a reputation that many clients asked for him by name. He wished, however, that Lord Pye had never heard of him.
His Lordship was a rotund man and an arrogant arse. Harvey fitted him for a suit 3 weeks prior, choosing a silk/acromantula silk blend for its fine appearance – and more importantly, because of its tensile strength to contain the girth of His Lordship. The suit had been completed for 2 ½ weeks but Lord Pye hadn't bothered to come pick it up. Apparently he had been too busy with endless parties and social functions. Considering the 2-stone increase in his weight, they must have fed him well. Unfortunately, the added weight had rendered his suit so tight that when he put it on, buttons popped off and seat stitches burst. He came storming into the store swearing and blaming Harvey for "bloody inferior workmanship" and denigrating the fine cloth of the suit as "clearly substandard". Mr. Wikersham himself came down to the floor to attempt to mollify the irate lord and, to Harvey's horror, had publicly reprimanded him for his "failure to meet the customer's needs". When he unwisely protested that the problem was Pye's gluttony and not his tailoring, His Lordship turned a shade somewhere between purple and puce and demanded he be fired on the spot. Fortunately for Harvey, his skills were truly remarkable and Wickersham realized he did not want to lose him; nevertheless, he was still placed on a week's unpaid leave for "insolence and insubordination". Harvey wished "His Lordship 'Fatso' Pye" a lingering death rotting with gangrene in a dank pit.
As he motioned to the barman to request some whiskey, he noticed a lady waddle through the door and plunk herself down in a booth near the back. She looked vaguely familiar but he quickly forgot her when his fresh drink was placed before him. 3 drinks further in he heard sniffling coming from the back booth. The same instincts to care for his clients so assiduously now betrayed him as felt compelled to help the distraught woman who had arrived earlier. He picked up his drink and made his way to the booth.
"What ails you milady?" he asked. As she blotted her eyes and blew her nose rather indelicately, he tried to remember where he knew her from. Her wide mouth with trembling thin lips didn't do much to mitigate the affects her running mascara was having on her appearance, but he was sure he'd seen worse in the shop. Had he been sober he would have been far less sure. He slid into the seat opposite her and waited, with his best "interested and attentive" face in place.
"Oh, it's those awful Ministry cretins! They just won't listen to my ideas and just tell me to get back to work. If I were as pretty as the other interns they wouldn't dismiss me so quickly!"
"Now, now. Don't say that. I'm sure they aren't any prettier than you" he lied soothingly.
Perhaps if she had been sober herself she wouldn't have been so easily taken in by the lie, but she desperately wanted someone to be on her side for once. It seemed that most of the time she only managed to get others to take her side when she had something to blackmail them with – at least that had been her experience in school. She therefore ate up the attention like a starving cat. "Do you really think I'm pretty?" she blubbered, beginning to cry again.
"Of course!" he replied, reaching across to place his long elegant fingers over the fat, stubby ones of her hand. "Here, let me buy you a drink." "Two firewhiskeys!" he called out to the barman.
They sat talking for quite some time, drinking more and commiserating about unfair superiors and other injustices that only the inebriated can fully appreciate. Eventually they decided that each was the only person in the world who truly understood the other - and considering how slurred their speech had become, that might well have been true. Harvey threw too much money on the table to settle their accounts and they stumbled out into the night together.
Harvey awoke to a headache that felt like an imp was beating a base drum inside his skull while simultaneously trying to jack-hammer his way out. As soon as he tried to sit up, his stomach informed him that he had abused it far too much and demonstrated its displeasure by ejecting its entire contents on the floor next to the bed. This only made his head pound harder and he groaned in misery. Fortunately he had placed his wand on the table next to the bed, so he snatched it and used it to vanish the sick on the floor and scourgify the surroundings (and his legs) where it had splashed. He sat with his head in his hands trying to bring his very fuzzy thoughts into coherence. Hazy memories of the previous day and evening began to coalesce. Never again would he drink so much, he swore to himself. His muddled thoughts were interrupted by a violent snore from the bed behind him and he jerked around to see where it came from. The action caused his vision to blur and his head to nearly explode, but as things came into focus, his memory began to sharpen as well as he stared at the sprawled body of Dolores Umbridge. He remembered her now from Hogwarts. She was a nasty piece of work. What was worse – far, Far, FAR worse is that memories of what they had done last night after leaving the bar and made their way to this cheap inn flooded his mind in vivid detail. Excruciating, lurid, depraved detail…
He thought he had emptied his stomach earlier, but the memories - and especially visions offorced a fresh wave of nausea to sweep over him and he began heaving again. It seemed that his stomach was trying to turn inside out and then that it was trying to grab his intestines and throw them out as well, so violently did he retch at the memory. All through this, the snoring continued unabated. When he was finally too exhausted to continue retching, he grabbed his clothes, which even in his drunken stupor he had fastidiously folded and placed on a nearby chair, clutched his wand, and apparated home.
The memories of his drunken night tormented him endlessly until he finally realized what he MUST do. He discretely reached out to some of his clients to find the name and location of a witch who specialized in this kind of delicate work, and then went to Gringotts to withdraw a substantial amount of money. He made his way down Knockturn Alley to the building where he hoped he could get help. The room he was looking for was up a set of rickety steps, with only a single guttering oil lamp illuminating them. At the top of the steps he paused and knocked – once – twice – once – and waited. A few moments later he heard the lock on the door release and the inhabitant opened it wide.
"Well – come on in. Let's see what we can do for you" said the middle-aged witch. She motioned him to a nice over-stuffed chair and then sat down on a settee opposite him. He explained – in general terms – his predicament and what he needed. When he finished, she sat looking at him with a sober expression for several minutes. Just as he had begun to fidget, she smiled and said "Yes – I think I can help you. But are you absolutely certain you want this? Once it's done, it's done and there is no going back."
"Absolutely! I don't think can't bear another minute like this!" he replied desperately.
"Very well then. I would advise you to write out some instructions to yourself to read once we have finished the Obliviation. You may not want to remember the details about WHY you wanted this, but I believe you will need to know that you made a mistake you want to forget about and possibly some actions you wanted to take as a result." She handed him some parchment, a quill and some ink, and he commenced writing himself a letter.
Harvey felt like he had dozed off, but then he looked up and saw an unfamiliar witch sitting across from him with a mysterious smile on her face. She pointed to his hand and he looked down to find he was gripping a piece of parchment. As he glanced at it he was surprised to see it seemed to be in his own flowing handwriting – although he had no memory of ever writing it. "Go ahead. Read it." The witch urged.
Harvey,
You won't remember writing this, but you did. You have just been Obliviated at your own drank far too much after you were placed on leave and made a very, very serious error of judgment. Don't worry. You haven't committed any crimes, but the memory of what happened was so awful to you that you paid 200 Galleons to have it Obliviated from your memory. You may also want to consider requesting a transfer to Wickersham's branch in France, lest you encounter anyone who knows what transpired.
Also, in order to prevent any similar event in the future, you took an unbreakable vow to never drink alcohol again.
Harvey Broadbent
Let it be said that Harvey was wise enough to take his own advice. In all fairness, transferring to France was an excellent career move for him as it placed him closer to the fashion centers of Europe. He need not have worried about anyone else remembering that night though. The barman never paid much attention anyway and Dolores Umbridge had also sought out an Obliviator to have her "indiscretion" removed from memory. She haughtily insisted that she needed no notes to herself and would rather just forget the whole sordid mess. 9 months later that proved to have been a mistake.
A/N: This story came about as a result of another story I started writing. In that story the antagonist was Ubridge's son and I started trying to think how on earth, as unpleasant and unattractive as she was, she could have managed to hook up with someone and conceive him. I decided it could only have been the result of getting with someone when both were very drunk.