Harry
Benoit thumbs the match head against the strike strip, the same slow sweep as collecting a tear from a cheek. He inhales the flame into his Sterling, waves it out, folds the burnt end back into the book.
"Don't order the special," he says around the fag, tucks the matches into his shirt pocket."We'll be here until midnight."
"'M not eating," I say, slide into the booth, then lean back well out of the hanging lamp's light, grateful in the moment that Benoit likes dark, Muggle pubs where he can smoke, that he's never concerned with seeing my face. "Just coffee," I say to the waiter.
Benoit sips his water, ashes his Sterling, lounges back against a strand of faerie lights in turned-up shirt sleeves and loosened tie. He could have come straight from one of the top-floor offices towering on Canary Wharf, or he might have just rolled out of a supermodel's bed. Even slightly pulled apart, he looks chic, and capable, and maybe internationally famous, and I dread the moment he opens his mouth again for reasons I can't make myself consider.
"Went to the hospital this morning," he says, flat.
"I take it's not good," I say. Benoit's eyes follow the server. He waits until my coffee is in front of me to answer.
"She's failing. They said it's like she tipped over a cliff last night, and whatever magic or…energy exchange that's been holding her together is suddenly ebbing away faster than they can attempt to replenish it. I wasn't allowed to see her. Too crowded with other personnel in there. Unspeakables, and whatnot."
"Unspeakables? Is anyone even trying to help anymore, or are they all just waiting for her to expire?"
Benoit breathes out a wisp of grey, rolls his fag between his fingers.
"You know how it is."
Yeah, I do.
Steam rises from the cup before me, triggers the same odd response it used to in that tent - a loosening at the base of the spine, then guilt for feeling anything other than rotten. Somewhere people are suffering, but right now my cup is full and I'm not dead, yet, so I may as well drink it, take the comfort before it cools into nothing.
Hermione, always setting warm things in front of me.
Never the other way round.
I lift the cup, burn my lips. I don't want to bring her here. I don't want the shape of her in my mind being this close to anyone else. Present company, especially.
The waiter is smooth, slides Benoit's plate onto the table without a sound. "Anything else for you, now?" He asks, nods at our no-thank-yous, disappears.
Benoit rolls the fag's cherry against the aluminium ashtray, snuffs its fire. "Man's a ghost. My mother would hire him in a heartbeat." He forks a paper-thin slice of browned potato from the top of the hotpot, lifts it into the light for a moment's quick study. "'Take a flirt, a mother, a maestro, and a ghost, you can run any floor in the city, baby,'" he lilts out in an accent not quite his own, feeds the potato into his mouth.
"You must miss them, your family, having been here so long." I lean back into the shadow, relax into the idea of his being far, far away, back with his own and well clear of mine. It's too easy, sometimes, to forget Benoit has relatives, a lineage, that he didn't spring fully grown onto a rocky beach out of some cold, Norse sea.
"I miss…certain inevitabilities," he says. "Like, every year, Gramps wants to stay open for the strays, so, every year, he'll say, 'Well, what about all the folks with nowhere to go? Where they gonna eat?' And then Mom will say, 'I don't know, but I work every day of my life at that place, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be forced on my feet for twelve hours on Christmas Day just to cater to whatever old so-and-so has pissed off their kin this week' Then by mid-morning they're both bored and in the kitchen, and, next I know, there's all this food that has to be driven around and handed out to beat cops and convenience store clerks and hospital receptionists." He cuts through the hotpot, absently tests the tenderness of the meat."They're a pain in the ass, and I wish I could have been there," he pierces a chunk of lamb, "but it wasn't all bad, here, in The Old Smoke." He pops the lamb chunk into his mouth, chews, smiles to himself. "Would've been a lot better if Miss Granger hadn't had to catch a flight, but..."
The words swell, thick, hot, black billows, choking out every sense.
Dumb and blind. Blink, I think. Breathe. Lift the cup. Take a sip. Set it down.
There is nothing I can say, no clarification for which I might ask.
When did you see her?
Flight to where?
Was she going alone?
When will she be back?
I can't ask. I'm her friend, and I'm supposed to already know.
Inside the black, choking billows, one un-snuffable red coal of a question.
"Why would that have been better?"
I want him to say the worst, to be cagey, and flippant, and crass. Instead, he pauses, fork hovering just over his plate, looks me square in the eyes.
"Some people…just being near them improves one's state of mind."
"State of mind…" I repeat.
State of mind, my arse.
Benoit stares as I stare back, and it isn't Legilimency, so much as a primal psychic shakedown. I've never pressed my lips to her skin, or touched her just to feel her against my fingertips. I've never had the things he wants for himself, and he sees it in my face. He knows it.
I'm a thick plank who had eleven years to figure it out, but didn't. We're not rivals. We're not even close to being equal players in the air. I'm sat, caged, in the lower stands, neck bent all the way back, watching him run the pitch, scoring goal after goal.
He's seen her. He's spoken to her. He knows where she's gone. He can imagine the shape of her there.
Bitterness at the back of my tongue. Coffee. Smoke. Bile.
Benoit's fork scrapes his plate. I blink first, look away.
Just a couple if short chapters, just wasn't a better way to do it.
