4. Hello, Miss Marple
The news of Harry Potter's prolonged absence from his work as Auror and
his position as Muggle Liaison Officer made for big headlines and a sudden
interest in my odd and obscure little story of the Missing Dementor. In the
absence of any real news concerning the disappearance of the Boy Who Lived,
both readers and my colleagues seized upon anything that could possibly be
said to have even the slightest connection to the Potter story. And everyone
knew of Potter's history with Dementors; his strong reactions to their power
when just a child at Hogwarts, his now famous Patronus that had graced every
front-page from here to Timbuktu, and, of course, the connection between his
infamous adversary (that my conservative editor still insists must not be
named) and the Dementors. In short, my story got interesting by association,
got a sprinkling of Boy Who Lived stardust, got pulled from a late notice to
an early full-blown article.
So now I faced another problem: creatively filling that big empty space
the layouter wanted to devote to 'Potter and Dementor related material'. I
was forced to dig up any obscure bit of Dementor lore I could possibly
locate, figure out at least ten different ways to express the same basic
fact over four allegedly different pieces ('M'dear, 's called journalism,'
my editor leered at me), wallow in conjecture, and make at least three
arbitrary mentions of Harry Potter in every article I wrote (if I didn't, my
editor cut and pasted some of my previous mentions wherever they didn't fit;
no one but I seemed to notice in any case).
Gradually, and with ample assistance from my commercialist editor, my
stories on Dementor activity morphed into wild, vaguely gothic speculations
about Dementors attacking and abducting Harry Potter; stories that had quite
a few of our readers inquiring as to why the Prophet had started publishing
fiction all of a sudden. And at the very same time, I morphed back into the
drunkard I had thought so firmly behind me. People were sniggering behind my
back. Still, I couldn't drop the story. It was my first big one and I needed
both the money and the goodwill of my, in those days, ever-present editor.
After two weeks of writing speculative horror stories, I stopped sleeping
in my search for some new angle, some real and unimagined connection to the
Potter story. As I look back on those sleepless nights, what I see is a
woman lost in a drunken dream, a nightmare of my own making, trying
desperately to regain some sort of hold on reality, trying to find something
real amongst all the rumours and borderline lies. It quite surprised me (as
much as anything could in my drunken stupor) that I found my breakthrough by
delving even deeper into the fictitious.
Having stared at an unhelpful wall for I don't know how many hours, I
picked up a crime novel (Walters, I believe) and read it in one sobering
sitting. When I resumed work on my story, it was with the clear intent of
solving the case of the missing Dementor. It had suddenly become clear to me
that the reason I had so little to write about was that the case wasn't even
acknowledged as a case by the Aurors and therefore no progress could be
made. Spurred by the fictive success of the novel's heroine, I set out to
find myself a missing Dementor.
Yes, I really felt that way. Like a struggling heroine.
I was, after all, quite drunk.