Chapter Four
Charing Cross, Revisited
Something bothered him about the cat. In retrospect, he supposed there were several things that should have bothered him about the cat - the fact that the girl had continued babbling on about it chief amongst them - but she had read his silence incorrectly as disinterest. He was not disinterested (as, to be honest, he usually was with people's pets), but, rather, confused.
Mostly because he was absolutely certain that Crookshanks ought to have been male.
He'd meant to ask, before they'd been interrupted. But still, while the girl had her delusions (he kept telling himself, when he was trying not to listen to the rumblings in his own mind), she was not stupid, and she would have known full well the sex of her own pet. It was ridiculous for him to feel so strongly about the matter, as well—why did he care?
Because it's not the right cat, he thought to himself, at least three times, before dismissing the thought as absurd.
There was a drawing of it, on the inside of her diary—that's all he'd had time to see, as well as her full name in pen beneath the pencil (Hermione Granger) before the Tube became too crowded to read and he had to stuff it into the inner pocket of his coat. He spent the remainder of the journey back to Charing Cross pressed up against a tourist wearing a massive rucksack, leaving barely any room for breathing, never mind flipping through the book she'd given him, studying the handwriting, looking for clues.
He found himself back at the pub, wishing she'd appear, knowing she wouldn't. It was busier, with plates of beige food leaving in a constant train from the kitchen double doors. He ordered a sparkling water from the grumpy woman at the bar and found a seat by the toilets.
He pushed his drink across the table, wary of spilling on the pages, undid the knot he'd tied too tight on the train (he barely had the nails for it), and spread the diary open in front of him. The spine didn't crack at all; the edges of the pages were worn. It was a diary for the calendar year, generic with cheap paper, the 1 January crossed out in pen on the first page.
Her handwriting was tiny and neat; she'd even titled it: Magic or Madness?, as if it were a dissertation, and not something she'd hidden in her bedroom, away from the eyes of her worried parents. The only amateurish features were the drawings: the cat on the inside cover, done in smudged pencil with an overlarge body and an even flatter face than in reality; and a few more creatures part of the way in: a unicorn, or a griffin, half-way between paragraphs, as though she had to stop and think, or sketch in order to accurately convey what was in her mind.
It was otherwise so tidy that he wondered if she had source material: notes scribbled down to provide an outline, to organise her ideas.
"D'you mind if I take this chair?" someone asked him and he jumped. He glanced up, flicking the diary closed; his look must have been dangerous, because the man paled before disappearing back to the other side of the room, cheekily with Snape's other chair in hand.
Snape flipped back to the first page and finally began to read.
I strongly believe that it is illogical, when one is experiencing an odd turn of mind, not to keep a record of events. And I am most definitely experiencing an odd turn of mind.
Symptoms are primarily loss of concentration, insomnia, fitful sleep, and loss of appetite. Mum and Dad attribute it to A-Level stress, as does my form tutor. Which I think is odd, considering I've never thought so little of exams in my life.
Are dreams symptomatic of something? Are nightmares? What about nightmares where one wakes up feeling cold, and empty, as though the happiness has been sucked out of them, leaving them with screams in their heads? I suspect something may be wrong. I don't want to worry my parents. I will wait a week, and if there is no change, contact the doctor's surgery for an appointment. I suspect, and fear, it may be depression. Brilliant timing.
The next entry was dated a fortnight later.
Mum and Dad are worrying about me. I think my tutors might be becoming angry with me, as well…Dr Albert has accused me of ignoring my studies during leave, and of wasting his time with e-mails asking questions not relevant to my maths exam. I don't even remember sending half of them. Mum is taking me to visit a psychologist on Wednesday, which I am looking forward to with the appropriate amount of enthusiasm.
A few lines below, she'd scribbled in, more hastily:
Psychologist is a quack. Was wearing a paper bead necklace and drinking herbal tea and asked me if I've ever heard of Ian Stevenson, who is, according to the few sources I can find, a psychiatrist studying past lives in children. I told Mum. We won't be going back.
Someone came in from the toilets, the door swinging open on groaning hinges, and a chill draught cut through, tugging at the cuffs of Snape's trousers and sneaking through the holes in his knit socks. He glanced at the signs on the wall, arrows pointing the way to the toilets and the courtyard, as if pleading with people to take their smoking outside on a freezing night like this.
It was almost like the letters in Courtyard glowed.
His chair scooted back, catching on a hole in the ill-advised carpet. He nearly ran into someone coming out of the ladies', and took a wrong turning and ended up almost walking into the back of the bar. He turned back, thinking he should know better than this but not knowing why, and took a left at the end of the corridor.
One more door and there it was, just like he'd known it would be. A little stone courtyard with bins and a patio table stripped of its umbrella, folding chairs leaning against its rim.
He stood there, his hands in his pockets, and stared at the facing wall.
This is stupid.
What was he expecting to happen? That the bricks would rearrange themselves and take him to someplace new? He was a man of science. Sort of. And his thoughts, as always, were taking him to a frame of mind he did not want to inhabit. To be here was a weakness; to be entertaining these thoughts was just going to take him further down the rabbit hole of self-pity and land him in the chair at a psychiatrist's office, or worse, in hospital with her.
It made him feel better to take one of the chairs out from the table and unfold it against the wall. An empirical test, he told himself. It was flimsy but he was lighter than most men—it groaned and swayed beneath him but did not give way. The wall still ended a few inches above his head; he had to hook an elbow on the lip of the wall and pull himself up with his arms, his heart racing and his mouth dry before his eyes, at last, reached the top, and the air wooshed out of him, his lungs collapsing in his chest.
It was nothing.
Nothing but an alleyway, like any alleyway, the backs of shops with loading docks for chain stores, dark now that they'd shut for the night. Snape felt as though he'd gained five stone in those few seconds as he dropped himself back to the chair, landed wrong and tilted sideways into the bins—he leapt off, misjudged and stumbled into the table, while the bins and the chairs clattered to the ground all around him.
Bollocks.
At least no one came for him as he limped back inside. He didn't even walk into the bar on the way back, and his table was still free. Furious, he flung the diary back open (carelessly—he heard a tear of pages from the spine), and flipped open to the next page, looking for something to prove wrong.
Only to find that she'd taken charcoal to it, smeared lines down the page, a black, hanging blob that blocked out the lines beneath.
He snapped the cover shut, suddenly cold. Exhaled, wondering why he couldn't see his breath. His fury had instantly leached away—suddenly all he could feel was the pain in his thigh, the ache in his bones, and a high note in his ears, like the highest pitch of a scream cranked up two octaves, and drawn out to a thin, single note.
He limped to the bar to order a hot chocolate, then sunk back into his chair and shivered, as though he'd never be warm again.
A few minutes later the chocolate arrived with sprinkles and whipped cream. He spooned it off on a plate and gulped down the first burning, chalky swallows as if it were medicinal. He felt instantly better. Buoyed, he opened the diary once more, carefully draping his gloves across the offending page, and took a deep, shaking breath, wondering where his resolve had gone.
The next entry was only a list of words, written in joined up script quite unlike that on the previous pages:
Fluxweed
Knotgrass
Lacewing Flies
Leeches
Horn of Bicorn
Skin of Boomslang
A hair
What does this mean?
The people around him erupted into cheers. He hadn't even noticed that someone had put a football game on the television. A middle-aged woman lurched toward him, drunk off her tits already with a cigarette dangling from one hand, and slurred, "You all right, sweetheart? Somethin' botherin' you?"
"No," Snape said, hurriedly tucking the diary away, but not before the woman said, "Writin' a book?"
"No," Snape said again. He shoved the half-empty chocolate mug across the table, as if it would ward her off. It didn't—she reached for the chair that had once been on the opposite side of the table from him, and then realizing it wasn't there, stumbled toward him, grabbed onto the table, and lowered herself into his lap.
"You look sad," she said.
Snape didn't move, afraid what his body would do if he did.
"I assure you I'm fine," he said.
Her thumb found his chin. "Such a long face."
"I'm afraid I was born that way."
She laughed. Her teeth were surprisingly white. She brought her cigarette to her lips and pulled.
"You seem lonely," she said, white, sulfurous smoke leaking from her mouth, dragon-like.
"I get by."
"What a pity," she said.
Without warning, she took a hold of his hand and brought it into her lap, palm-up. He tried to tug it away, tried to get up, but she was heavier than him, and she didn't seem to notice his struggle.
She traced the creases of his palm with her fingers.
"Would you like your fortune told?" she asked.
"No," Snape said, yanking back and finally managing to loosen her grip, but she still had a hold on his sleeve cuff, his button caught between her short fingers.
"Why?" she asked. Her eyes were black-rimmed and liquid. "Don't you believe in magic?"
A second later and she was on the ground, shouting, "Oi!" and a few men were on their feet by the bar, fury on their faces.
Snape walked out without a word, praying they wouldn't come after him.
Fool, he told himself. Idiot.
This wasn't helping. He didn't know why he thought it would, coming to London. What was he expecting? For years of unease and sorrow and feeling as though something was missing to just slide away, for the plain ordinariness of life to be pulled aside, like a curtain, to reveal there was something underneath that he'd never thought to think of, a mirror that would reflect his true self, what he really was, beneath the plain clothes, the frustration, the sour face and powerlessness?
Don't you believe in magic?
"Can I borrow a fag?" a tramp asked from the entry of the underground station.
"Absolutely not," Snape muttered to himself as Charing Cross Road disappeared behind him.
She was mad. The girl was mad. She'd said it herself. She could be a stalker, tried to deflect the accusation by proposing it herself. She could be following him, goading him, setting him off. Someone could have set it up, trying to rattle him.
She knows, his brain told him.
"She's delusional."
A woman standing next to him shoved to the other side of the carriage.
The signs for King's Cross/St Pancras appeared a heartbeat later. He didn't even remember changing lines.
Why are you scared? Frightened of learning the truth? Afraid that there's something in the world that you don't understand? Something you've forgotten?
"It's not real."
His ticket home was in hand, creases forming between his fingers. The train was on time, already there, nothing stopping him from getting on now, disappearing up north, never coming back. Settling down to a normal life, ignoring the odd intricacies of his brain, pretending she didn't even exist.
He was nearly run over by a trolley, a mother with her children, and another strange sensation slid into place, a tingling crawling across his scalp.
He looked up.
She was there.
Hermione Granger was there, bag in hand, standing between platforms nine and ten, and she was smiling.
