Song rec: "Parasol" by Tori Amos
August, 1994
Flora became a woman in a tarn of chaos in the middle of an August night. She screamed louder than murder, vomited, passed out, woke up, and screamed again. Hestia, on the other hand, started her period the following week with neither calamity nor fanfare. Hestia asked Alecto how to brew herself potions so she wouldn't have to have the damn thing every month. Only once Hestia perfected the formula did she share with Flora.
Flora stopped sleeping, and sleeping in the same room as an insomniac wasn't always easy. Hestia found that her Bifröst journey to puberty led her to sleep more, and that when she didn't sleep, she became extremely grouchy. Sometimes she was also grouchy with plenty of sleep. It was fortunate that the Knockturn trade mostly occurred at night, when Aurors were too busy still searching for Sirius Black to bother with peddlers.
Hestia and Flora made a lot of money that ultimately got swept out of their hands. Alecto and Amycus used it to buy more things they didn't need. Clothes seemed to be their favourite thing, which was ridiculous considering that they rarely went anywhere. Hestia, who had outgrown playing dress-up around seven or eight, rolled her eyes at Alecto's new embroidered handbag. Their next favourite thing to buy was absinthe and absinthiana, though Hestia almost never saw them drunk, unlike the way Rhiannon described her parents. Finally, they threw a lot of the house's budget towards purchasing out-of-print and banned books, which Alecto would read aloud to Amycus in the parlour until he fell asleep.
Hestia would secretly join the audience on occasion, silent on the stair. Her money had helped pay for those books, and since everything she bought could be subject to scrutiny, this was the easiest way to be transported to worlds outside the walls of this house. It was too bad all the stories were narrated in her aunt's wheezy voice. She'd have liked to have heard them told in a Cockney accent.
"What do you think Rhiannon does in the summer?" Hestia mused one day, watching the sea from her window. She lowered her voice and added, "In Muggle London?"
"Maybe she plugs in televisions," Flora guessed.
"Well, whatever she does, it's not this."
"No, it's not this," Flora agreed as she counterfeited another grimoire.
On a slow, humid night, when all their customers were running up their tabs at the pubs, Hestia turned to her elderly-looking sister.
"Flora?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you fancy anybody?"
"No."
"Oh."
"Do you?"
"No," Hestia lied. "I was just thinking what it'd be like to maybe fancy somebody."
"I don't think it's something you can control."
Flora spoke as though affection were a N.E.W.T.-level Alchemy project she didn't want to start. She charmed her basket in front of her so she wouldn't have to hold it. They'd have to make rounds all over if they wanted to make any money tonight. Hestia had worn the wrong shoes for that sort of thing. She should have known.
"Some of the Weird Sisters are pretty cute," Flora remarked, though it was more about getting Hestia to talk.
"Yeah, I guess."
"Which one do you think is the cutest?"
"Which one? Aren't there like seventeen of them?"
Flora chuckled, "C'mon, tell me."
Hestia pulled a name out of thin air, since he had been mentioned in her guitar book, "Donaghan Tremlett." Flora was thrilled to tease her about it. Hestia figured it'd be best if she kept her enduring mix of feelings about Rhiannon Clarke quiet.
"We're supposed to take more classes next year," she said to change the subject.
"I know for certain that I need Arithmancy," said Flora.
"That's a hard class," Hestia warned. "Older kids complain about it on the daily."
"I want to be successful so I don't have to do this for the rest of my life."
"Fair."
"Amycus and Alecto said we can use our money for Hogsmeade trips," Flora added as they climbed the hill to try to snatch Diagon night-owls.
"Really?"
"Yeah. They said not to let anybody figure out we were poor."
"Ah."
Hestia got more blisters on her feet than customers. It was getting hard to be thirteen, knowing that at seventeen they would be considered adults. All at once, it hit Hestia in the face that her childhood had been terrible and that she was already on her way to making a shoddy version of a grown-up.
A light rain lulled her to sleep that night after she was finally able to get off of her sore feet. When the light rain became a violent storm hours later, Hestia awoke. The glass of her windows was splattered, and the lightning struck beyond her curtains, illuminating the room like a spell. She rolled to her other side so the flashes of light wouldn't pester her eyelids. She heard something, maybe the house creaking in the wind.
This side wasn't very comfortable to sleep on, so she lay on her back. More wind gusts brought more rain to her glass. When the lightning struck again, bubbly-looking shadows from the raindrops briefly dressed her blanket. She could hear how angry the ocean was from here. It was hitting the sea wall. But she'd slept through worse.
She rolled over again. There was just something about having one's house creak that kept one awake. There was no intruder; this place was kept under more wards than the Ministry itself. Hestia closed her eyes.
Hestia blinked again, sleepless. Flora was awake, her eyes all in the lightning. Her fist was balled tight round the blanket over her neck. Hestia sat all the way up. She smoothed her blankets and fluffed both her pillows. She lay down with her back to the window, but she couldn't shut her eyes. It's the wind. It's the wind.
"It's them," Flora mouthed with horror carved into her face.
"Wha?"
Hestia lifted her head from the pillow.
A horrible noise, worse than a dropped cauldron, thudded against the stair rail and crashed into the floor downstairs. A second noise came a moment later, this one without the extra thud, swishing the air and crunching with unbearable volume on the solid wood. It was the sound of two bodies jumping four storeys in 1968. It was just as Flora had said: they'd been jumping ever since.
The next morning, Hestia awoke to the sound of Flora getting dressed. Maybe Flora had never slept.
"Where ya goin'?" Hestia mumbled, kicking her tangled blankets off.
"Out."
"Out where?"
"Get fresh air."
Hestia groaned and sat up.
"With Dad?"
"No."
Flora combed and twisted her hair into a tight bun and opened the door.
"Flora, wait, where are you going?"
"Away."
"Alone? Can't you wait for me?"
Flora sat back down on her bed, which she hadn't made. Hestia grabbed a bundle of mismatched clothes and stepped to the bathroom. Her reflection greeted her. She felt so unattractive without makeup, but Flora wasn't wearing any today, either.
Skirt, shirt, shawl. Hestia didn't need a bra yet. She likely wouldn't need a bra for a long time. She glared at her bee-sting breasts. It wasn't fair that she had to be so hormonal and still look like a kid. Rhiannon would probably never look at her the way she looked at Rhiannon.
"Ready," Hestia said, and Flora led the way.
Hestia looked all over the staircase on her way down. She didn't know what she expected. There was nothing there. The handrail wasn't even dented. The banister at the very top was fine. There were no dents or blood on the floor. All these things had been repaired twenty-six years ago. Flora didn't even take a second glance at the spot. She put on her sandals, swung open the door, and breathed in heavy, fishy petrichor.
The house sealed itself off from the world once they exited. Now they would walk among Muggles. Flora stormed along the footpath, out of the trees, and down the zig-zag steps along the trail. The coastline was a mess. Debris from the storm littered the sand in long, dark stripes. As they descended to the beach, Hestia saw that several beach huts were broken. The sand was wet and compacted. The ocean was grey. Flora went straight for it, stepping beyond the littered drift. Hestia splashed footprints right behind her as they walked on the high tide line. The cool water got between her toes.
They stepped over the groynes across the sand and reached the gravelly part of the beach, gradually making their way to the pier. Flora had splattered sand all the way up her ankles. Hestia was surprised they were walking in the water as opposed to the promenade, since Flora usually disliked walking in the sand. They came upon sticks broken off from trees in the storm. Hestia picked one up and wrote her name in the sand, watching it wash away. She drew a flower. She tried to draw a sun, but the waves came too quickly. Flora picked up a longer stick and dragged it along at her side, writing no message but rather a single, flat line.
Hestia would have liked to bring Rhiannon to Cromer. To the house, like a normal girl. To the beach on a sunnier day, even just as friends. To some place where they could forget how Rhiannon almost lost her life.
That was all out of the question. Besides, there were too many negative memories attached to this location. Maybe it was better if Rhiannon would never see Hestia's hometown. Hestia already knew Rhiannon wouldn't bring Hestia to her house, even if by some miracle Rhiannon wanted to.
The pier, which looked so tiny from their house, now loomed over them with its criss-crossed legs and long body. In the rubbish washed up alongside the last wooden groyne, Flora found a beached, dead fish. Hestia laughed, expecting Flora to run away, grossed-out. Instead, Flora poked its carcass with the stick, even lifting its fin from the side of its body to see the light come through it, translucent. Hestia stood back a bit as Flora rolled the dead fish over, studying it in silence.
Flora left the fish and rummaged about the foreshore, picking up shells and peering sharply into them. If the shells still had an organism tucked inside, she threw them back into the water. But she tested her strength against the empty ones. Which ones could she break with her bare hands? Which ones were too sturdy? Hestia tried to pick up the cooler-looking shells before Flora would find them and snap them in her fists.
The next time Hestia looked up, Flora had started wading into the water.
"Flora."
The waves salted her knees.
"Hey, Flora, you'll ruin your clothes."
Flora's skirt billowed around her at the next crash of waves, then plastered to her legs. Hestia huffed.
"You know — hey! — you know we can't use magic to clean you up, or we'll be expelled. You'll get in trouble if you're all a mess when we go back!"
Flora paid no mind to Hestia's warning. Later, she stepped back out of the water with soiled clothes and retrieved her stick. With it, Flora excavated the grimy Muggle litter, looking at the bright labels on the plastic bottles. She found a small shoe and lifted its laces as she had done with the dead fish's fin. They were still tied in a double-knot.
A large, beat-up tennis ball bounced against the wood groyne, and soon a large dog came running after it. The dog was too late; the ball had bounced right into the water. Hestia moved to go get it, but Flora trotted over and grabbed the slimy ball first. She held it up for the dog, who was very friendly, and tossed it. Hestia grinned as she watched the dog run after it, joyfully kicking up clods of wet sand. To her surprise, the dog brought the ball back to Flora. Flora held out her hand so he could sniff her, then lightly scratched his ear.
"Sorry!"
A Muggle man was running to catch up with his dog.
"So sorry — threw it too far!"
"That's okay," said Flora. "He's very happy about it."
Hestia raised her eyebrows. This was the first time Flora had ever spoken to a Muggle. When they walked around the beach, any necessary interactions or small "hellos" went through Hestia or Dad.
"All right, c'mon, boy!" said the Muggle, clipping the dog's leash to his collar. "Cheers!"
"Cheers," said Flora.
"See, that wasn't so bad," Hestia said teasingly once the Muggle left.
Flora took out one of Hestia's bouncy balls from her wet pocket. She threw it against the wood wall of the groyne and caught it back in her hand. They made a game of it, alternating who would catch it after it rebounded from the wall. Flora failed to catch it more times than Hestia, but they weren't keeping score. For someone playing a game, Flora was flinty.
"That's the first time I heard it," Hestia spoke up, and Flora missed the ball.
"Hm?"
"You know. Our grandparents," Hestia said.
Flora missed the ball again. It went right into the debris.
"They earned every inch they fell," she said, digging it out.
Hestia started throwing the ball gentler so Flora could keep up. After their game, they hoisted themselves on the wet wood of the groyne, sullying their clothes, knees, and palms. They weren't supposed to sit there, but nobody looked ready to stop them. From their post, they watched the beach come awake. The post-storm mess kept the tourists away, but locals and joggers didn't mind. The turbid ocean whispered rhymes, breathing after its exercise.
That was the morning Hestia finally heard the submerged bells. They came over the water, barely audible. But that was them all right. The bells of Cromer's church, which weren't tolling at all, were loud and musical. Shipden's ghost bells, though, were muffled and metallic. Hestia sat perfectly still and listened carefully, but she couldn't determine the exact nature of the haunted ringing.
Hour strikes? Sunday service? Wedding?
Funeral?