Run For Cover
Ostracised. Ignored and pitied. Abandoned. The whispered taunts fell like shells around my torn and battered mind. The five-year-old boy; round-cheeked and stuttered speech, was automatically bypassed by the other children. They formed their friendship groups, and I sat, lonely to the depths of despair, rocking back and forth in a corner.
"There's one in every class," the teachers whispered, and forsook me to the reject pile, destined to go life a loser unloved and unwanted. Raindrops battered my skull, trying to pervade the thick layers of flesh. But to no avail. Food became my friend; it leered terrifyingly from all corners. No friends, no friends, the sticky buns and sugary cakes called to my bleeding ears. Sweets like grenades exploded inside my body, and I swelled with fat and despair. Food was my worst enemy, and yet it was the only comfort I could get my hands on. Insecurities flew like dark-winged bats constantly around my psyche, and tiny creatures padded the endless walks of my mind. My gran scolded me; said I was getting like my parents. I would run to my bed and sob, hiding under the covers. The metallic smell of urine smacked at my nose. I wet the bed every night. There was no way… no way. I couldn't be going mad. But the red-eyed ghouls smiled from every corner, and I knew that it was all true. I was losing my mind at the age of seven.
The other children at my school would taunt me and laugh at me. The barely disguised loud whispers always floated across the classroom. "Fat… smelly… stupid."
I would wet myself at school as well. The teacher would shake her head as the terrible telltale stream of dark wetness streaked my trousers once more.
"Come on, Neville," she would say, and take me by the arm. "Let's get you some fresh underwear… Come on, Neville. Don't be such a baby. For heaven's sake, stop grizzling!"
And then she would smack me. That was when teachers were allowed to smack pupils. She smacked almost as hard as my gran. But not quite as hard.
I would always find something in the bathroom. The mysterious razor in the washbag, that gran refused to explain. I didn't care anyway. It relieved the inner pain by letting in stream out of my arm, in the terrible and fascinating gush of red. Nobody knew… or cared.
I turned eight, still fat and ugly. My gran would tell me what a disappointment I was, every single day. I barely seemed to stop crying. The bigger boys would laugh and the girls cackle. Sad, fat Neville. The others played football every lunchtime, and I would watch from the shade of the oak tree in the playground, sucking on boiled sweets, and doodling with a stick in the earth. Nobody dared approach me, for if they did, Dan's gang would come and beat them up. They simply adored picking on me. In year six, all aged eleven, their prey were all younger and smaller. I was the favourite.
In one year, the teasing progressed from the other children putting worms in the hood of my raincoat, to kicking me around the tarmac. I was left, torn and bleeding on the ground every day at three thirty. Almost biblically, people would skirt around me, walking home. I had no Good Samaritan.
If school was life on earth, then home was fiery, adulterated hell. My homework lay in my bag day after day, undone. I fell to my bed and sobbed, and my gran would come and scream at me. Then she would yank me up by my wrist, and throw me into the battered old Volkswagen Beetle. She would drive in silence, the wind and rain beating at the glass windows, the storms of my mind howling and battering. I knew what was to come.
The hospital was huge; whitewashed and domineering. The maze of corridors were lit with stark white bulbs, casting a penetrating glare, like Gestapo lamps. They gazed into the faces of the innocent.
"This will knock some sense into you," she would always say. "Some people have a reason to cry, Neville. Look how privileged you are. You have everything, and all you do is moan, you ungrateful boy.
We would draw closer and closer to that door: number seven-three-nine. Then gran would open the door, and push me through. The heavy oak door would slam after me. Gran never came in with me. I never asked why.
My mother and father sat stiffly on a large white bed, not looking at me, nor each other. The curtains in the small, white room were always drawn. In the semi-darkness, I always noted the bags under my mother's eyes, and the way her gaze would flick over me, as though I wasn't there at all. My father simply sat there, occasionally twitching, a small bead of drool glistening on his trembling lower lip. They were shells of the people I used to know.
Even now, I cling to the vague and hazy memories I can hold on to. They are filed at the back of my mind, where no one can take them away. Filed under a heart-shaped lock. My mother, young and pretty, with curly golden hair and blazing copper eyes and my father, tall and strong, swinging my around in his arms. I was only a toddler, and I gurgled with happiness. They were always away for long stretches of time, and I always stayed with my gran. Then, one day, they didn't come back.
Crucio, crucio. What must it have been like for them? Such unimaginable pain, for such a long time…
Thoughts of childhood angels and fluffy heavenly clouds left my mind as I reached eleven. I resented the very forces that had created me. Why couldn't they just leave well alone? I would have been happy as a patch of space, cells simply to be aborted into nothingness. Fragments of hate embedded my heart like a glass cage, impenetrable…
And then, one day, I got the letter.
*
"I know you and I haven't always seen eye to eye, Neville," my Gran had said on September the first, the watery end-of-summer sunshine lighting up her thin grey hair. "But… I've got you a going away present. Good luck at Hogwarts. Make the most of it."
She pressed a small green toad into my shaking hands. I watched her from the back of the taxi as we sped down the London roads towards Kings Cross. The toad ribbeted in my clammy grasp. I named it Trevor. After my father. He nestled comfortably in my grasp, gazing up with calm, friendly black eyes. I ran a finger along his pocked back, and sighed with happiness. The station had been bustling with many children and parents. I got on the train, and sat in a warm, comfortable seat, nestled at the end of one of the carriages. It felt safe and enclosed, and I watched as the other children ran up and down the aisle.
Presently, a girl sat down in the seat opposite me. I studied her bowed face. She had a defiant look, but I could tell she was trying to quash terrible nervousness, just as I was. I didn't dare speak to her. I might embarrass her by being to associated to such a nobody.
For an hour, we sat there in silence. I was content to stare out of the window, and watch the green fields with sheep and cows stream past in the golden sunlight. I ran my hand over Trevor. Just then, the carriage door burst open with a loud bang. Trevor gave a strangled ribbet, and jumped from my hand. He disappeared under the seats. I looked up into a sneering, pale face.
The boy turned to the thickset thugs on either side of him, and they all sniggered cruelly. "Look Crabbe, Goyle," he said in a sneering voice. "It's a little fat slug." He turned to me, and leaned forward so that his face was just inches from mine. I felt my heart leap desperately. "Do you know what I like to do to little slugs, fat boy? I like to squash them." And he snatched up Trevor from under the seat, and raised his foot to stamp on him.
"No!" I cried, before I had time to think. The girl who had been sitting next to me suddenly stood up.
"Leave him alone," she muttered, her eyes burning with rage. "He's done nothing to you."
The blonde boy's face glittered with derision and contempt. "What's it to you?" he spat. "Get out of my face, you little buck-toothed bitch." He looked down, ready to tread on Trevor, and let out a cry. I looked down too. Trevor had gone.
Crabbe and Goyle, the thickset cronies, growled menacingly, and Malfoy looked me straight in the eye. "Just you wait, pig," he said. "I'll be back."
They stomped out of the carriage. I looked apprehensively at the girl. "Thank you," I whispered.
"What for?" she said rather abruptly. "They're idiot bullies. I can't stand bullies. It's nothing. I'm Hermione Granger, by the way."
"Neville Longbottom," I said in a slightly shaky voice. I wiped my sweating hands on my jeans. "Can you see my toad anywhere?" I asked desperately. "I think it hopped away."
"Come on," she said, pulling me up by my arm. "Let's go and look for it. It can't have gone far."
I tingled at the human touch. The only person, I realised then, who had ever really touched me, had been my gran. The children at my primary school had all considered me an 'untouchable'. They had gone out of their way to avoid ever touching my skin, as though my unpopularity was an infectious disease. Sometimes children are the cruelest beasts on earth.
We walked down the carriage and into the next one, looking under all the seats. I felt an over-whelming surge of some strange emotion towards the girl, Hermione. She wasn't pretty; bushy brown hair and slightly large teeth marred her appearance. But her eyes had gold sparks of life in them, and I suddenly couldn't take my eyes off her. She was the only person in this entire cruel earth who had ever shown me a scrap of kindness.
*
Like a burst of orchestral music, the mood lifted in my heart. Slowly, slowly, I stopped cutting my arms. Sure, people didn't like me, but I couldn't expect anything more. I saw their looks when I tried to be partners with the other Gryffindor boys in lessons. I wouldn't pretend I didn't care… but, you know. I was entirely used to it. My dreams were still punctuated with thoughts of Him. Every time I looked at Harry Potter, the boy who lived, I was filled with the most troubling mix of emotions. On one side, this was the boy who defeated You-Know-Who. He practically killed him off. He got vengeance for the whole wizarding community. But then… why did he survive? Why? Could it not have been my mother, instead? How I longed to feel her arms around me again…
It was in these dark moments that I would crawl into my bed and cry, and rock myself to sleep like I was little again. It was comforting… in a masochistic way. I felt as though all the love had been stifled out of me; it had grown old and stale before its time, and floated away, useless. The rain still pounded, but it was warmer and lighter. The monsters still crept, but they growled and bared their fangs less often. There was a small golden light I could hold onto.
I scraped through lessons, simply winging life from one day to the next. And mostly, it was quite pleasant. Sometimes, in the depths of the night, when the darkness cloaked the dormitory room with velvet blackness, I looked around at the four sleeping boys in their beds, and imagined they were my brothers. And we were a normal family, like the Weasleys. I was wanted and excepted. That was all I wanted. Nothing more… but I didn't even deserve that.
The years passed, with no significant changes. We all developed; I grew a little taller and slightly slimmer. If Potions was my bete noir, then Herbology was my saving grace. There was something therapeutic about tending to the plants. No one ever knew, but I often went at the weekends and at lunchtime to help Professor Sprout with her latest additions to the greenhouses.
Trevor lived on my pillow. He was not a beautiful pet, unlike some people's sleek postal owls, or custard-coloured cats. But that was fine by me. I wasn't beautiful either. We understood each other.
Then, in the fourth year, Professor Moody came. As each of the Defenses Against the Dark Arts teachers had been before him, he was entirely unique. One day, he did a lesson of unforgivable curses.
Seeing a mere spider rock and shake in burning agony left a life-long impression on me. As I watched it convulse, I too felt a pain like a white-hot electrical wire wrapped around my brain, being ever tightened. Hermione, of course, was the only one to notice my expression.
"Stop!" she had cried shrilly to Moody. The teacher had sought me out after the lesson, when I was still half blinded with pain, both mental and physical.
"Come on laddie," he had said, leading me to his office. "I didn't mean to upset you. But things have to be said and done. You wouldn't want people to lie to you, would you now?"
He was right of course. It didn't ease the pain though. As we grew up, the teasing didn't stop; it just turned into a different kind. Malfoy and his gang of groupies would stop picking on me for my lack intelligence. Instead, they picked what they believed to be the most demeaning trait of human kind.
"Gay! Gay! Gay!" The shouts washed over me as I walked slowly down the corridor. "You disgust me, you little poufs," Malfoy was often heard to exclaim, followed by ringing, tinny laughs from all and sundry.
I knew they were wrong… because of Hermione. I wasn't gay. I didn't really understand it, like a lot of things, but I did know that it was something you didn't become out of choice. It was just the same as being born straight. But the Slytherins seemed to think that 'gay' was the worst name you could call someone; i.e. perfect for me. I was gay because I was short and fat, because I was thick, and because I couldn't play Quidditch to save my life.
I watched Hermione go out with Viktor Krum. I knew she didn't really love him. I watched her grow and change; become longer and lither, her hair becoming glossy, her face growing to fit her features. Those who had not given her a second glance before suddenly stopped for a better look, and I knew then that my plight was in vain. I could never be with Hermione, because I was nowhere near her equal. It wouldn't be fair on her. I would drag her down into my little world of darkness and fear. I wouldn't even wish that on Malfoy.
Although I knew that the other boys found me a trial and an annoyance, it didn't stop me from hanging around with them, the dog-like adoration clear as crystal. Like Peter Pettigrew had fallen into step with Sirius, Remus and James, I too padded after Harry, Ron and Hermione. It was funny; I knew more about James Potter's life than Harry did himself, because my gran had told me many things. Peter Pettigrew had loved James, as more than just a best friend would. The other three never knew this, although allegedly Remus, the most perceptive, had always had a certain suspicion. Torn up with over-powering feelings of jealousy for Lily, James's long-term girlfriend, when they all left Hogwarts at the end of the seventh year, Peter purposefully did not keep contact. He brooded over several years, and became quite insane. And then, when he was at his lowest ebb and most vulnerable, the Dark Lord approached him.
When he was asked to help You-Know-Who kill the Potters (for they were married then), Peter felt only a flicker of guilt. If he couldn't have James, then no one would. And he could finally get his revenge on Lily. People's minds work very strangely when they are possessed by the strongest feeling of all; love. And after all, if he can betray his own brother, he can easily betray his best friend.
And now, it's the summer holidays after the fourth year, and You-Know-Who has returned to power. Most of the Ministry refuse to believe anything, and are burying their necks in the sand. The fools. I don't pretend to be anything special, but at least I'm not a coward. Not like Peter Pettigrew. Who ever said blood was thicker than water? Just because… because… of that, history will not be repeating itself. I would die to save Harry, Ron, or… Hermione. When it comes down to it, family ties mean nothing, even with a piece of dirt like him. I'm my own person. I am.