"And there's me mum, sneering away!" Dudley flipped another page of the scrapbook, urgent to pass his mother's beaked face.
"Hmm." Colette murmured from the armrest beside him. She uttered nothing more as she examined the fringe on the window curtain.
"Ah, Piers. Before we all found out he was fruitier than a bowl of punch." Dudley indicated the photo of his Best Man.
"Hah! I knew it the second I set eyes on him! Honestly Dudley, you've got no awareness of these kinds of things."
"Yeah, well . . ." Dudley knew only how true that was. While attending Smeltings, he never suspected Piers' regular visits to Bowagard Goodwin's dormitory.
Dudley turned another page hastily, getting off the subject of others' personal lives.
The first dance photo was stuck to the next page. Only, there was something in the background he had not noticed before. Black hair, inexpertly combed to the side, poked out from behind the forms of Dudley and Colette, lumbering their way across the floor.
"Isn't that the man who sends those interesting cards at Christmas?"
"Me cousin, yeah."
"He seemed such a lovely man. I wonder why we hardly hear from him. Weren't you raised together like brothers?" Colette fell silent as he thought; a task that can prove arduous for Dudley at times.
"We were raised together, yeah. Not like brothers, though."
Colette nodded knowledgably.
"Did you not get along?"
Dudley remembered well how he bullied Harry, nearly to the point where he broke him. Harry did not fight back; he held no hope of ever winning. His only chance was to run, or to remain silent and take his blows. Dudley was unaware at the time of how Harry could vanish mysteriously, or why his parents punished him so for it. But it was his family's way to hate Harry for no particular reason, other than that he was an intrusive outsider from unworthy stock. The Dursleys spouted this as fact, and never allowed either of the boys to forget it.
"My parents did whatever I asked. Whatever ruddy thing--I could have. The only thing they didn't do for me was toss out Harry. I made him pay for it every day until he was eleven."
Colette gasped. Dudley's guilt squirmed inside of him with his half-digested sausage. He felt uglier than ever beside her as she looked at him with a new, dubious gaze.
"Why did you hate him so much?"
"Don't much know. I only knew that my parents did. They thought he was trash, you see. My mother hated her sister; sounded more jealous of her, if you ask me. Treated me like a God next to him, so I started thinking of meself as one."
Colette's nose flared in disgust. Her fingers twitched as if activated to strangle the next neck within their reach.
"I always knew there was something wrong with your parents. To think your father tried to pay me to skip town before our wedding! 'This is what your sort's after, isn't it? Take the money and leave the boy be.' I will never forget it. But to think they would abuse children so . . .to pit cousin against cousin!"
In the kitchen, a pair of water glasses rolled off of the table and shattered into jagged crystals on the tile below them. Dudley, sensitive to loud sounds, dropped the album to the floor.
"What in the blazes!"
Colette, poised and collected, was on her feet in a moment, her protruding belly only slightly detracted from her balance.
"Dana! Are you causing mayhem again?" She called up the stairs.
"I'm here, Mummy!" The four-year-old blonde girl was at their side, having just entered from the hall. "I did'n do that. I was play'n with Eliza." She held up the lame turtle in her pink little hands. Eliza looked disinterestedly at the alarmed party.
"What could have done . . . they just fell on their own somehow." Colette moved to the kitchen, assessing the damage. "You don't expect a pregnant woman to clean this up, do you?" She snapped at Dudley, who stood disturbingly still in the entryway.
"Oh, dear." Dudley ran a hand over his backside, hardly knowing what to do next.