Mr and Mrs Wilkins
Monday, May 5, 1997, Sydney, Australia, 5:00pm
Mr Wendell Wilkins stepped off the bus and made his way through the park, following the familiar route home. As he reached the end of the park, he stopped and turned back. He watched as mothers stood chatting to each other, pushing their children on the swings, the early evening light casting long shadows across the grass.
Wendell allowed himself to dream, just for a moment, of having a child. He knew that many people of his age without children dreamed of having children, but this was different. As he watched the swings move up and down, he pictured a little girl with bushy brown hair, laughing as she swang higher and higher, to the point where it seemed impossible that a person with as little weight as she had could have reached such a height. This girl felt like his own child. He didn't know why. Maybe he was going crazy, but he felt like this little girl was his child, like he'd lost her and she'd come running back, any minute now.
He shook his head to drive away the image of the girl, whose face he just couldn't put his finger on. The girl had kept popping into his mind ever since Friday. He would see her whenever he saw one of those owls or people in cloaks, and every time he heard of another person from Europe, especially Britain, returning home, going back to where they came from, where he came from, the other side of the world.
Wendell walked into his house and joined his wife, Monica who was sitting on the porch watching the Sun set with a far off look in her eyes. "You right, Monica?" he asked her. "Yeah" she responded, pulling herself out of her trance. "You know, I was just thinking, about these things going on… the owls and people in funny clothes and fireworks in May… and all these people moving back…" "Yeah" "Well, it all seems oddly familiar, somehow related, like something I've heard of before." Wendell watched as the final rays of sunlight disappeared over the horizon. "You know what? I was thinking the same thing."
Monday, May 5, 1997, Ottery St Catchpole, England, 8:00am
Hermione lay in bed, running through her mind thoughts of Friday that she desperately wanted to forget. She rolled over and looked out of the window, past Ginny's Harpies posters and into the garden of the Burrow. Her eyes adjusted to the different lighting and she watched the garden gnomes filing back into the garden after the de-gnoming they had done the day before.
Sighing, she rolled over lay on her back, looking up at the roof. Something had been nagging at the back of her mind since the war had ended, a thought that she knew was vitally important but that in all the grief and chaos of the last few days she just hadn't had time to think about. Her parents. Her mum and dad, all the way across the world in Australia.
"Hermione! Breakfasts ready!" Before she got up, Hermione decided that she would spend the day packing, and that the next day she would go to Australia, the other side of the world, to find her parents. "Coming!" she called, running downstairs for breakfast, wondering how long it would take to find her parents and exactly what she would need to pack.
