Chapter 10: is seldom wasted

DISCLAIMER: Is the Wizarding world a jarring collage of delightful whimsy and sickening dystopia with absolutely no rhyme nor reason as to which crops up where? If so, I don't own Harry Potter.

CHAPTER 10

She nods. "One last thing: the PTA are organising a Santa Claus visit for the school's carol concert this year, and they're looking for a new Father Christmas as the old one has moved away. Can I put your name forward?"

"Oooh, that's stereotyping, that is," I say, slapping Vernon's belly and smiling. I never had the right build to do the santa thing in my previous life, and it always looked like a lot of fun. "Of course I'll do it. Send a note home with Harry of the date and times you want me, and whether they've got a costume or if I should sort that out myself. I'll practise my Ho Ho Ho in the meantime."

-oOo-

"You've agreed to do what?" Petunia looks like she can't tell whether to sniff in disapproval or burst out laughing.

"Santa Claus. And since I've got a load of Riddle's cash, I reckon I can do a proper job of it. Goodie-bag for every kid, sort of thing." Hopefully I can have a photographer on hand to capture the look on Tom's face when he finds out where his money went.

"What possessed you - no, bad choice of words. Why did you - I mean, that's a lot of work, presents for what, two hundred and something children?"

"Not that much work, the trick is delegating most of it. I'm sure you can find a couple of teenagers who need a bit of pocket money for filling goodie bags? Getting things to put in them is an afternoon with the Yellow Pages. Sweeties, a novelty of some sort. Might be worth seeing if I can get a bulk deal on small lego sets." The days when it was an hour or two with the internet are a ways off yet, more's the pity. "If you can do a bit of needlework to get a costume run up, doesn't have to be fancy, I'll find a beard and a great big sack. Fancy being an Elf for the day?"

That's the point where she decides on laughing. "Oh, no, you volunteered to make a spectacle of yourself, don't drag me into it. Besides, you've already got me recruiting your present-wrappers, I'll tell them it comes with elf-duty into the bargain. How does Vernon feel about you making a show of him?"

"Vernon's actually pretty happy with it." I've been keeping up Vernon's talk sessions, and while I'm no expert he's actually making some good progress figuring out who he really wants to be and how to get there from what he was made to be by his upbringing. I do wonder whether he's going to book some time with an actually qualified therapist when I'm done with him. "He's going to get a reputation as a good sport and generous with it, for the low, low price of an afternoon having fun playing dress-up. I imagine if you start early enough you could get a few people together to share the cost of doing it next year. Vernon'll probably want to do some kind of Santa's grotto thing rather than addressing the whole school hall the way I mean to. It's the kind of good reputation and respectability that you really want. Generosity and warm-heartedness and willingness to muck in, people like that sort of thing."

It all goes as I hoped it would, and it turns out you can use the whole aura thing that goes with legilimency to project the idea of really believing in Father Christmas. Petunia found a couple of St. Gregory's alumnas who were willing to take the afternoon off from Stonewall to pass out sweeties and presents - small lego sets, I got a good deal off a toy wholesaler in Burnley - while I had enormous fun going full Pantomime at the front of the hall. I'm not sure whose reaction I enjoyed more, the infant classes down at the front or the adults cracking up at the back. Even Harry and Dudley, who are technically in on the gag, look like they feel as though they're in the presence of Saint Nick himself.

Then it's the turn of the top infants class to do the nativity play, all in best tea-towel-on-head style, and every class gets a turn at singing a couple of carols on stage. With my own kids all grown up, I'd not realised how much I missed this sort of thing. With the boys in top infants next year, they'll quite likely have a nativity play of their own. Memo: look into where camcorders have got up to by autumn of '86. Showing the girlfriends of 20-odd-year olds video of their boyfriend's first appearance on stage is one of the great overlooked pleasures of parenthood.

-oOo-

It's the night after the PTA shindig that I get started on the spell survey. It's the winter solstice, inauspicious for a great many magics and the strongest day of the year for a number of particularly nasty ones, but it has in common with the summer solstice that the calculations - and oh, boy, does Arithmancy make me wish I'd taken Statistics instead of Pure Mathematics at A-Level, thank goodness for the existence of revision guides, the first and only resort of the desperate crammer - get a great deal easier, much as measuring water levels at the top and bottom of the tides is easier.

I'd used up two of Vernon's days off instead of just the one I'd needed to perform at St. Gregorys, to give me time to get everything set up right in advance. Vernon had had a backlog of holiday time because he didn't dare be away from supervising the expenses scam he was running. Since I've dismantled the whole thing and concealed it all as best as my rudimentary forensic accounting skills will allow, I've a lot more leeway.

I spent a thoroughly miserable eight hours - it may be the warmest December for ten years or so, but it's rainy even by my standards, and I'm from fucking Lancashire - measuring and sighting to get survey pins and stakes in their proper places and the little mirrors and lenses on the top of them aligned just so. At some point I am going to seriously look into using lasers for this kind of deal, but they're not cracker-novelty cheap yet, nor even in the price range of the home gamer. The apparatus I've built includes several slit lanterns and lamps with lens arrangements to produce beams of light, and I suspect there's room for cheap-laser improvement there, too. Fortunately, Vernon and Petunia are early adopters of the tacky outdoor christmas lighting fashion, so the additions to the grounds of Number 4 are thereby camouflaged amid fairy lights and animated illuminated reindeer.

I get to spend the day of the solstice itself in the warm and dry assembling the operator end of the whole thing. The recording instruments are all set up on the dining table, on which I've laid an eight-by-four sheet of inch-thick marine-grade plywood so I can screw things in place. Painting the runes gives me a crash course in Old Norse, a brutal refresher in Old English, and a brush-up on the technical drawing they made me learn at secondary school, and then it's string-and-pin geometry and carefully drilled pilot holes to get everything in the right relation to everything else. Fortunately Petunia hadn't inflicted her horrible taste in wallpaper on the dining room, so there's a clean painted wall to use as a projection screen.

Despite herself, Petunia is curious, and brings cocoa to me while I'm working on the final setup. The boys are asleep, having been told I'm busy all day with 'boring grown-up stuff, let's go to the zoo tomorrow'. Chessington Zoo has a christmas event on, so they're excited about two Santa visits in one Christmas.

"It looks more Mad Scientist than Wizard," she observes.

She's not wrong: there's a lot of brass and wire and bits of blown glass and prisms and lenses on the table, not least because the influx of cash from Tom let me spring for the deluxe models of most of it. "It does have a Hammer House of Horror vibe to it, yes," I agree, "but it's all magical in one way or another."

"That's the red writing, yes?"

"Yep. Most of it's in runes, which is the alphabet we used in this country before the church made us all switch over to the Roman alphabet in the tenth century. Basically any writing can work magic, the Egyptians were buggers for it with their hieroglyphs, if you've got enough meaning all together in one place for it to count. Which is why the proprietor of the magical bookshop has a hard time finding where he's shelved the books about invisibility, for example, and the leading textbook on magical monsters tends to bite. This is where runes and hieroglyphs and writing systems where the characters themselves have their own meaning come in. You can pack a lot more meaning into a single word than you can if you just spell it in roman script. On top of that, you can use synonyms and poetical figures and so forth to get the meaning you want where you want it. Even concrete poetry for some effects, much though I loathe it as an art-form. A runic inscription packs a lot of meaning into a small space, so it's easy to make it magical."

"Why doesn't that happen with, you know, normal books?"

That actually amuses me; I've noticed the same assumption coming from wizards, that magic stops at the borders of the wizarding world. "What makes you think it doesn't? Never felt transported away by a good story? Felt the reality of the triumphs and tragedies of the characters? That is magic. Small magic, everyday magic that you don't notice because it's so pervasive. It's also no coincidence that roman and greek script, with letters that only meant sounds, got to be popular. It's a lot harder to make a strongly magical text by accident with those, and standardised spelling and a rejection of fanciful language for factual writing also damps the effect. The wizards and witches are a bit snobby about what actually counts as magic, but coming at it without their cultural blinders on? Magic is everywhere and everyone is at least a little bit magical. Vernon more than, well, a common house-brick. Dudley, if I'm any judge, not much more than Vernon. You more than Dudley, Harry more than any of you. It's not three sets of wizards, squibs and muggles, it's a continuum, a spectrum if you will."

I finish up the last of the settings as I say this and open the shutter on the big lantern that shines into the main prism. Which projects, yes, a spectrum on the dining room wall. I take my cocoa from Petunia - still no rat poison, Petunia is a lot more comfortable with my presence now even as she looks forward to the day she gets unaugmented Vernon back - and say, "and now, we wait. It takes time for the apparatus to capture everything." It'd be quicker if I trusted my wand-work, of course, but you can't have everything.

"What happens now?"

"That spectrum will start to show absorption lines and various shapes and figures, it's very much like scientific spectroscopy in that regard. Between the lines and figures and measurements of their spacing - I've got a magical camera to get a record as well - I should be able to find our what all those spells do."

"There's more than one?"

"I've reason to believe so, yes. At least two, I personally pick this sort of thing up as musical sounds, and there's a bass and a treble clef to it and they don't sound related at all. At a guess, something Lily did and something Dumbledore did after. Do you recall her visiting here at all?"

"Just the once. The christmas while we were both pregnant, just before then. She came by to drop off a christmas present for Vernon and me."

I raise an eyebrow. I remember reading in the books about Petunia sending a christmas present to Lily - a vase that Harry broke with his toy broom - but nothing about what Lily had sent in return. Vernon has no memory of this at all.

"The print of Monarch of the Glen in the hall. She always knew I liked that picture. I never told Vernon it was from Lily and her husband, he was still angry because he thought James had been sending him up the first time they met."

I don't say anything. I like to think I've been setting a good enough example that Petunia can figure out her behaviour over that was atrocious. Her expression suggests she's at least some of the way to that conclusion, at any rate. I also resolve to take a closer look at that picture, which I must have walked past a thousand times since I first arrived. If there's magic on it, it's subtle enough that I've not noticed it. It's far more likely that it's exactly what it seems to be, but not checking would be overlooking the obvious.

The spectrum on the wall is starting to look, well, dirty for want of a better word. There are marks starting to appear, and lots of them. This looks promising. "Is that all you have to remember Lily by?" I ask, to break the awkward silence.

"Just that, and the baby blanket that Harry was wrapped in when we got him. I've got it in a box with some mothballs at the back of the wardrobe. It's got some of that magic writing embroidered on it, I think."

Definitely want a look at that, I think. Aloud, I say, "Something for Harry to have when he's a little older, that, I should say. You'd think that when Dumbledore brought the little fella here he might've fetched a few of his toys and so forth. They can't all have been magical."

Petunia sniffs in best annoyed-housewife mode. "I'm glad you've no high opinion of that lot either. It's like the magic rots their brains. I thought Lily had gone doolally with it, until I met some of the others. Touched in the head, all of them."

I shrug. "When you live a different way, it's easy to think a different way. I don't imagine it's impossible to keep some common sense about you with a wand in your hand, but having seen them in their natural habitat, as it were, I rather think most of them don't see the need. They're insulated from the consequences of their own absurdity, for the most part."

"What makes them so foolish in the first place?"

"Not a clue, I'm sorry to say. You'd expect some cultural divergence, they cut themselves off from the rest of us at the end of the seventeenth century and in some ways they've sort of stalled there. That I'd expect. They're long-lived, so cultural conservatism seems quite natural. It's all the absurdity that they just accept as normal I don't get. Having a bit of whimsy in their purely magical spaces I could get, embracing the absurd to maintain a clear distinction between magical and mundane life, that's entirely understandable. It's submerging themselves in the ridiculous and never coming up for air that I don't understand. It's like refusing to leave the nursery when you're all grown up."

"You think that might be it? They've made themselves a never-never land and refuse to grow up? Like Peter Pan?"

"It's a plausible hypothesis, I'll give you that. I'd need a team of top-flight sociologists and cultural anthropologists and the funding for a decade-long study to know what's really going on, of course. And I don't even know if this is magicals the world over or just here in Britain."

As I watch the image on the wall develop, I'm starting to think that I've managed, quite against expectation, to get all of the surveying instruments correctly set up first time. I mean, I did draw up checklists and crib sheets and went around everything re-measuring and ticking it all off on a clipboard before I lit the lanterns, so it's not impossible. I turn the room light off and start working the wizarding camera to get shots of the spectrum as it develops. I've got blu-tack and a box of tailors' measuring tapes with which to start the process of recording everything. For thirty long, silent minutes, though, Petunia and I just watch the image on the wall come into sharper and sharper focus.

The image seems to have stabilised; I time another five minutes and watch closely for changes. There aren't any. This is the information we're getting tonight, with this equipment in this configuration.

There's one thing obvious right from the start. "Definitely two sets of spells," I say. "This group of lines here and this group here. The lengths and angles denote function, although I've some work ahead of me to figure out what each set does. Might just be two really complicated spells, but apparently almost nobody does that, it's like trying to play the whole orchestra by yourself; even if it was physically possible you'd just make a mess. You have to get a whole lot of wizards together, and it's the sort of thing you can't really hide in a place like Little Whinging."

I turn my attention to the big set of curves that denote magic-over-time, looking for the peaks - the illustration in the book showed them looking like EEG heartbeat traces - that denote spellcasting activity. Some work with tape measure, magnifying-glass and calculator puts the most recent big peak right around the end of October or beginning of November 1981. "When Harry arrived," Petunia observes, "so Dumbledore did do something." I notice she's not pretending not to know who he is or how to say his name any more. She's as intrigued as I am: her troubles all started when she wasn't allowed to go to magic school and here she is working with magic in her own home.

"It's about the right time, certainly. Until I've figured it out precisely - there are astronomical effects that show up in this image that'll let me pin it down to within a day or two - we can't be sure that it wasn't something that occurred at the same time Lily died. That's a thing you can do, apparently: have magic begin or end at the moment of your death. And some spells just do that of their own accord." I'm thinking of the goldfish desk ornament Lily made for Slughorn: the spell ended at the moment of her death. There's nothing in the magical theory I've learned to say that a spell can't be made ready to start when the caster dies, either.

"Oh, now this is interesting," I say, pointing to another peak I've found. "Pass me another measuring tape."

"What's interesting about it? This line is time, right, so there's another spell before That Night?"

"That's exactly what it is," I say, blu-tacking the tape in place to get the length of line measured off right. "And it's at least a year and a half before that night, possibly as much as two years. Do you want to bet that we get a date for this one right around the time Lily visited?"

"It does seem likely, doesn't it? December of 1979."

I get the measurement - I'm pretty sure this is something Lily did when she came to drop off the Landseer print - and grab a magnifying glass to look closer at the spell-trace. It's visibly different to the one we're tentatively calling Dumbledore's work, in as much as it doesn't look like a fully-formed spell. I trace the ripples in the spectrum that tie the casting trace to the spell-trace itself and observe that there's a whole fan of ripples from that back to the time curves. "Well, bugger," I observe.

"Language," Petunia says, absently. I'd left the relevant page of Magic of Measurement open and she's actually doing the time-trace calculation herself. It's not difficult, just laborious, and well within her O-Level maths.

"This other spell, the one we think Lily did, it has multiple casting dates," I tell her as I walk my fingers across the projection to follow the new traces. "Some of which are very, very old. Like Lily's spell woke something up that was already here. Do we know what was on this site before the houses went up?"

"Fields, as far as I know," Petunia says. "And the date matches up with Lily's visit. Mid December 1979." Of course, this is the British Isles, which have been quite densely inhabited since the last ice age. 'Fields' can cover a surprising amount of archaeology that goes unnoticed for centuries.

"Then we have an authentic mystery," I tell her. "And at least something to confirm that Dumbledore was at least mistaken when he said the protection on this house was powered by Lily's self-sacrifice. Whatever it is, she switched it on before she died."

"What does it do?"

"That'll take a lot of work - some of this is like interpreting the I Ching - but I'm going to guess that Dumbledore wasn't completely bullshitting when he said it was a protective enchantment. He could probably have picked up that much just from his own personal expertise without all the gizmos we're using here, but it looks like he's missed the connection to much older magic."

"How much older?"

"It's all the way over here. And that table of conversion factors in the book, there, it looks decidedly logarithmic to me. Or logarithmic-ish, anyway, I'm remembering stuff from an A-Level I got a C in over thirty years ago. Non-linear at any rate. This is almost certainly centuries, could even be millennia." Hopefully Petunia doesn't notice that I just straight-up gave away the time-travel thing there. Unless A-levels have been going for more than thirty years at this point, in which case we're shiny.

"Well? Get the measurement," Petunia tells me, handing me blu-tack and measuring tape. She's actually working up an enthusiasm. "I'll go and make tea while you do the hard sums, you're the one with the A-levels, after all."

I get the result and do the calculations. There's actually a whole range of dates, and rather than try and pick out all of the peaks - which are weird and smeary and nothing like the diagrams in the book, indicating that this is not a kind of magic that the author of that section had ever encountered - I take a best guess at the start and end. Which gives me a start date in the ninth century and an end date in the early seventeenth. From Alfred the Great to James I, roughly speaking: I could be out by as much as a century either way at the start and by anything up to fifty years at the end, taking as pessimistic a view as I can of possible measurement errors.

Which is problematic, as those are two periods when this country changed a lot. James I's accession expanded the nation to include Scotland - it's when you get the first references to the United Kingdom - and fifty years later his son has been executed and the country is a parliamentary democracy, or at least the larval form of one. The differences a century either side of Alfred the Great are even bigger. Before Alfred: the seven kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons, more or less at peace after the viking raids subsided. After Alfred: England, united to drive out the Danish invasion. I can't recall exactly when the Danelaw was fully reconquered - but I'm pretty sure it was done and dusted less than a hundred years after the midpoint of the date range I've got in front of me.

I'm sitting glaring at the calculations on the page when Petunia comes back in with tea. "What did you get?" she asks.

I hmm a bit while I sip my tea, trying to will the calculations to make some actual fucking sense. "Well, whatever Lily did, and I honestly can't think of anyone else who might've been casting spells here on that date, it called on some really old magic. Ninth century, possibly as early as the late eighth, with a slight option on early tenth century. For some reason I've got Alfred the Great in my head, which would be late Ninth Century, he died in 899. No idea why I'm thinking that, but he was a big man for the scholarship, which would've included magic back then. It could just be that he's the only big figure from back then that I can readily call to mind."

"Well, everyone remembers Alfred the Great and how he burnt the cakes."

"Quite, and there's a lot more to his story than one bakery accident, chap was impressive, but what we've got here is some sort of magic starting in his time that apparently Lily was still able to call on over a thousand years later. Along with all this other stuff that feeds in to it, which seems to have stopped in Stuart times, or thereabouts. Possibly as late as the Civil War. Which again, has to be something fairly impressive to still be working three or four centuries later."

"And no idea what it does?"

"We should be able to get a general sense right away, I'm pretty sure we've got diagrams showing some of the figures those lines form, which will give us the executive summary. Details will take longer, so I'm going to stay up late photographing everything." I pick up the relevant book and start flipping through the appendix full of diagrams.

The big, old spell that Lily had a hand in has two strong figures in it: protective magic, and blood magic. Which explains why it was that Dumbledore got it in his head that the magic he found already on Number Four had something to do with Lily's sacrifice: he'd probably already analysed the magic on Harry himself and assumed a connection. In all fairness, I'd made the same assumption: where Dumbledore and I differ is that I went and bought a load of kit and measured it properly. And ended up with more questions than I had when I started, because the rest of that magic is straight-up baffling. Whatever it is, it was forgotten by the time of Magic of Measurement.

Memo: when Harry's a bit older and more settled, I'm going to get him to sit still for a session with all of these gizmos and we can find out what the crack is with his protection. It's obviously a known magic: even if there isn't anything about it in any of Tom's memories that I've eaten so far, he did claim to recognise it. Directly to me, and to Harry in the graveyard scene that, touch wood, we're going to be able to prevent. If the magic on Harry generates the same screwy result, we might conclude that there's something about what Lily did that generates funny results when measured like this.

Of more immediate interest, and rather harder to interpret, is the set of spells - and it's definitely more than one piece of magic cast on the same day - that we're labelling 'Dumbledore's Work'. Whatever he did, it involved dozens of spells across a whole range of magical categories: several protections, some that deal with information of some sort (anti-scrying protections?) And four, quite concerning, that appear to be some sort of mind-altering spells. They could be designed to confound enemies, make them think this isn't the right place and forget they were ever here. Spells like that would make sense. They could also be means to link these magics to Dumbledore's own mind, so he knows if there's an attack: the category is broad enough to include that. I want to be sure about this, because one of the other possibilities is that it's meant to subtly influence anyone residing here. Which is all kinds of concerning if you've read the kind of fanfics where Dumbledore magically influenced the Dursleys to be extra cruel to Harry.

I get as much information as I can out of all of the magics - detailed measurements, photographs of the lines and figures, and close-up photographs of the lines and figures with measuring-tape blu-tacked in place. It's one in the morning before I can put out the lantern and put Vernon to bed, having used up nearly a dozen rolls of film and filled a ring-binder with notes I'm going to have to transcribe neat over the next few weeks. The job ahead of me would be so much simpler if laptops had been invented yet. Right now, the definition of 'portable computing' is 'doesn't quite require two blokes to lift it.' I'm fairly sure that the first spreadsheet programs are available for microcomputers, but I'm willing to bet that to someone used to Excel or LibreOffice they're painfully primitive.

-oOo-

The next day Chessington Zoo - done up for Christmas, with a Santa's grotto and everything - is a hit with the boys. They're both too young to remember Johnny Morris, but they're entirely on board for me supplying the animals' dialogue in various accents. Harry is careful to note that the camels do not, in fact, have triangular bumholes. In response I challenge him to explain the pyramids, then, and he gets this just-you-wait expression on his face that tells me he's going to be hitting the books over that one.

It's very different to the version I took my own kids to in the early 2000s. For one thing, while they've got a few fairground rides and a light railway with a little steam engine and some obviously under-construction areas with info boards up about their plans, it's not a theme park yet, it's still a traditional zoo. And I mean really traditional, they're not nearly as focussed on conservation efforts as zoos got to be by the time I died. Here in the mid 80s, they're mid changeover from 'attractions and exhibits' to 'conservation collection' so the whole experience is a bit disjointed to my 21st-century mind. It's still fun, though, because I get to recycle half-remembered jokes from Animal Magic.

The reptile house is kind of the reason we're here, though, and after spending much of the morning exploring the world of animal voice-over comedy, we go in to look at matters herpetological. I have Petunia - who I dragged along for precisely this reason - take Dudley on his own tour while Harry and I discover three important things. First, that I speak snake. I kind of expected it, but wanted to confirm the matter before trying to use it under field conditions. The second is that so does Harry. Either the thing in his scar wasn't providing the ability - he could have inherited it naturally from either side, after all, it's not like it's the kind of thing you'd brag about with Voldemort on the loose being all snakey at everyone - or having it dissolve inside his mind let him pick up some bits of Tom's abilities even while I was devouring the bugger. (I'm carefully not calling the Scar a Horcrux: while I haven't absorbed all of Tom's knowledge on the subject, whatever was in that scar wasn't done by anything even derived from Herpo's method. I don't know enough to say whether it could have worked for Tom in the tying-him-to-this-plane sense, but it wasn't a Horcrux.)

I'm quite pleased that Harry has that: it means that he and I have our own private language, which is one of those things that you don't really need until you do, and then you really need it. Where I'd go for information on what magics Parseltongue helps with or makes possible I have no idea, but I sort of remember that Paracelsus had it in this universe and he was a prolific writer, so he's sure to have recorded at least something. It remains to be seen whether my near-fluency in modern German is up to reading sixteenth century alchemists' German. The possibility that english translations of his works on magic will be honest ones if they're on sale in magical Britain is somewhat low, I suspect.

The third thing we learn is that Parseltongue is definitely a magical language: we don't seem to be hindered at all by the toughened glass between us and the snakes we're chatting with, so the communication isn't happening via sound-waves. Which snakes can't hear anyway. The serpents themselves are mostly calm, peaceful creatures who're just waiting for the next meal to happen by, as most snakes are wont to do. They really won't bother you unless you tread on them.

Except, that is, for the King Cobra, who is a cantankerous, foul-mouthed beast who would dearly like to bite everyone and everything and we can all fuck off as far as he's concerned. He's clearly a handful in the estimation of the zookeepers as well, as the placard next to his vivarium informs us they've named him Bronson. Presumably after the tough-guy actor: I don't think the armed robber of the same name is famous yet. I have to tell Harry that if he ever talks to anyone like that, I will be very cross with him. Good manners are important. Bronson tells me to fucking stick my fucking good fucking manners up my fucking vent, which sends Harry to the floor laughing. Nearly does for me, too, if I'm honest.

Harry is quite pleased to have been able to talk to the snakes, and because I've been Johnny Morrising my way around the zoo all day, Dudley doesn't bat an eyelid over Harry's account of the conversations. I discreetly check with Petunia while the boys are having a chippy lunch: she never saw, nor heard about, Lily talking to snakes. Unfortunately, we can't do anything to eliminate the possibility that Harry was a parselmouth before he got a bit of Tom stuck in his head. Britain's native snakes are thin on the ground and extremely shy of human contact, so it'd be quite possible that there are a lot more parselmouths than anyone suspects, because they've never actually met a snake to discover a talent that they'd probably keep schtum about anyway.

-oOo-

Christmas comes and with it the chance to have some fun cooking. Petunia gets slightly befuddled over the whole 'take christmas morning off' thing while I sort out a roast turkey with all the trimmings: Petunia tends to be a bit jealous of the kitchen as her domain so I've kind of been missing it. Not that she's a bad cook or anything, but I've got twenty years more experience than she has, none of it cooking for a palate as unadventurous as Vernon's.

I also have precedent on my side: social inversion is a yuletide tradition going back to at least early medieval times, after all. The boys get to help - once their attention span for the piles of presents has expired - mixing and stuffing and watching timers and so on. Christmas is, of course, a cheat day for everyone so I overload the dining table and let Vernon make a perfect beast of himself. As far as I can tell he's coming around to the idea of eating smaller amounts of more enjoyable food, but a table properly laden with decent scran is still a small foretaste of heaven for him.

We finish in time for the Queen's speech - bloody hell she looks young! - and we're left with a couple of hours of daylight in which to start the boys off with learning to ride their new bicycles - stabilisers properly fitted, of course - and they're soon organising races with the neighbour kids. I'm a little weirded out by the lack of helmets in evidence - they're not a thing you can actually even buy at this point, the only ones I could find were adult models.

It's Boxing Day when the real challenge comes: Marge. I've tried, in telephone conversations, to get her alongside the idea that Harry is accepted now, and we're not holding his parents against him. Marge, alas, hasn't the depth and warmth to be called a cunt. So, I've planned how I'm going to deal with her when she turns up and tries her usual bullying horseshit. The essence of it is that she is going to be told, beyond any possibility of doubt, that there is now a line in the sand. (The plans for if she crosses the line may or may not involve a sock with a half-brick in it.)

She arrives and makes a huge fuss of Dudley, who squirms away as soon as he decently can. Meanwhile, Ripper - who isn't the overbred monstrosity I'd been expecting, just an obnoxious animal woefully mistrained - goes looking for trouble.

And finds me. Thing is, I like dogs. Which is why it pains me to see an animal so mishandled. He's not overbred, but the breeding-for-conformation has still produced an animal with mild breathing difficulties that absolutely should not still have his testicles. Add to that an owner that thinks an aggressive dog is funny and we were always going to have a problem.

Ripper is, for all it's not his fault, not a particularly Good Boy.

He's acquired a target lock on Harry, who's not been allowed out of his cupboard during any of Ripper's previous visits, and decided that the runty kid needs showing his place. I could probably do this with just Dad Voice - it works on dogs, too - but there's a safety concern so I lace a bit of magic into it. "RIPPER! SIT!"

Ripper's arse is on the deck before he quite knows what's happening.

"Ripper! Lay down!" He looks like he's going to make an issue of it, so I add a bit of 'I am Big And Scary' when I repeat 'Lay Down!'

"Here now, why are you speaking that way to poor Ripper?" Marge's wattles are vibrating with the first gusts of a temper-tantrum. She's eating her emotions just like Vernon was, and her poison of choice is sweet sherry which makes the whole thing worse: if it wasn't for having to walk a kennel of dogs every day, she'd be in even worse shape than Vernon was when I found him.

"Making sure the dog knows his place, Marge. We've children in the house, he can't be getting ideas."

"I'll have you know - "

I cut her off with a gesture, which works more via surprise than anything. I'm going to keep my tone reasonable: if Marge flounces (which I kind of want, she's a bad influence on Vernon and not suitable to be around children absent getting her life in order in a major way) I want it quite clear to any onlookers that it's her own fault. "I'll not have it, Margie. If he's allowed to show aggression, it's only a matter of time before he bites and I'd stand for nothing short of him being put down if that happens. I don't mind - RIPPER! DOWN!" Like a lot of young dogs, Ripper takes the view that commands are to be obeyed only while the humans are watching. He subsides with a small whine when he realises I'm not messing about. I return my attention to Marge. "As I say, I don't mind making the effort to keep him under control, but I expect you to pull your weight too. Indulge him all you want at home, but under my roof he'll behave himself. Understand?"

I've deliberately borrowed the phrasing and diction of Vernon and Marge's father, who was a gouty old bully of a tyrant in his own home. It's enough to give Marge pause.

Not much of a pause, alas. I can smell the sherry, and I have a sinking feeling that she's been over the drink-drive limit all the way from West Wittering. "Now look here Vernon -"

"Oh, put a sock in it, Marge. This is my home and my family built with my hard work. I didn't complain when you got the lion's share of the inheritance and the family home. You know why? I agree with father that you weren't able to make your own way in the world. It's why he never made you move out. If you weren't living off the dividends on top of the pittance your dog-breeding brings in, you'd be on the dole. I don't begrudge you it, but try and remember that you're in my house. Behave accordingly." Vernon, in his dreaming inarticulacy, is rather cheerful about this. His big sister has had a long run of mildly bullying her little brother, and Vernon had dreamed of taking her to task about it for years. He just didn't quite have the chat for it. And, you know, didn't have the ability to put magic into his voice to give extra weight to his words. It's totally cheating, and I totally don't care.

Marge's eyes narrow. She's one of those idiots who thinks of things in terms of dominance and submission - it's part of why all her dogs are so badly trained. She's trying to come up with a suitable comeback: when she and Vernon were both children she'd've just thumped him, of course. For me, it's child's play to slip in through her eyes and make her mind replay a few personal embarrassments. Things that come back to her in the armpit of bad nights when she's not had quite enough to drink to keep the dreams at bay. She sags a little where she stands. "Perhaps Ripper can have the run of the back garden? He's a little boisterous for smaller children, so perhaps you have a point."

Just to drive the point home, a little of one of Tom's first tricks - animal control - has Ripper come to heel without any hesitating or looking to his mistress for confirmation. She needs to understand that I won't stand for any of her malarkey, and that she should harbour no illusions of being in charge here. Mostly, it has to be said, so I'm not tempted to lamp her one if she has a go at Harry. Ripper is quite happy to go out and have a sniff around the back garden away from the scary man who makes him do as he's told. I don't doubt that there'll be a few burdensome turds by the time we're done eating dinner, and I'll probably have to apologise to Petunia for that and the damage if, as seems likely, Ripper is also a Digger.

Over dinner - Marge follows the boys' example and behaves herself, to my considerable relief, albeit that it doesn't give me any chance to have at her how I've planned. She grumbles a bit about the food actually having flavour - not her words, obviously, but it's what she means - and tries to have a go at Petunia over it. I shut her down hard by making it quite clear that it's what I wanted.

She's also gets a little grumpy about me cutting her off after her second glass of wine - it's the eighties and takes effort to get decent wine in England at this point in history, it's actually annoying me watching her try to swill it. She doesn't have an argument to offer against my pointing out that driving over the limit is a crime and she wasn't raised as part of the criminal classes. Drunken joyriding is for hooligans Margie, and there are boys needing an example set. Petunia spots what I'm doing and starts giving me a bit of a gimlet-eyed stare. She doesn't care for Marge, never has, and frankly I doubt Vernon would if it weren't for the whole 'family matters' nonsense that everyone has spouted at him his entire life. Nevertheless, she doesn't approve of me baiting her the way I'm doing.

"Well, we know what irresponsible driving can do," Marge says at length. There's a sly tone of voice and a very speaking side-eye at Harry.

Gotcha. Just the opening I need.

"Harry, Dudley?" Both boys give me their attention, they'd been talking quietly about Transformers. "If you're finished with your main course, go watch telly for a bit. Your Aunt Marge and I need to have a grown-up discussion. We'll call you back in for pudding."

I've no idea if it's the magic or what, but the room's decidedly chilly all of a sudden, and Harry and Dudley scamper tout' suite. I've been baiting the woman for a response I can use since she got here, but even with all my hints she's gone for the 'have a go at the orphan kid's dead parents' angle. She's given me just about the perfect target.

"Marjorie Eileen Dursley. There are limits. Limits which exist for very good -"

"Vernon! How can you -"

"ENOUGH." I don't shout, but I put some body into it. And punctuate it with a slap to the table that jingles the cutlery. "Bad enough to speak ill of the dead, but to do it in the presence of their orphaned child? Have you no shame?"

She's gone all wide-eyed. She's used to Vernon deflecting and changing the subject and resorting to sycophantic agreement to avoid the possibility of conflict with his big sister, who lorded her status as favourite child over him whenever he ever tried to stand up to her. I hope she's just realised that she no longer has that support to rely on. She gapes, all fish-mouthed, stuck for something to say in response.

"I won't have my son set such a bad example, Marjorie. Especially not under my own roof. You've driven here under the influence, brought an ill-trained potentially dangerous dog with you, tried to object to me remedying your lack of control over the animal, tried to render yourself unfit to drive in abuse of my hospitality and now this? Again, have you no shame?"

For best effect she has to be rendered speechless by this, and since I don't have to take chances I get into her mind and tongue-tie her while the moment builds properly. I know why she was trying to get herself unfit to drive: it's so she doesn't have to drive back at night because Vernon always caves and lets her stay. Me cutting her off before she can get in that state is a new development, because usually Vernon is getting sloshed along with her.

Once I've judged that she's stewed long enough - Petunia's giving me worried glances, because she's used to anger coming out as ranting and shouting, not the quiet, measured verbal assassination I indulge in when my fuse burns down, not that she's seen me get really nasty - I go on. "I have two little boys in this house whose future depends on the example they are set. And your behaviour, Marjorie Eileen Dursley, will not do. I don't mind you picking a favourite. I don't mind you being, frankly, an irresponsible dog-owner so long as you keep it under control here. I can even cope, somewhat, with you drinking to excess in front of the children, I can always use you as a bad example. What I will not have is outright criminality - drunk drivers kill people. And where you crossed the line that separates civilisation from barbarism is when you sought to hurt an orphaned child by speaking ill of his parents. If that's how you mean to behave, I can't have you influencing Dudley."

She pales. I can see beads of sweat on her upper lip. For all her many and horrible faults, she does actually care about Dudley. Well on the way to being a forty-year-old spinster, spoiling her little Duddykins is as near to motherhood as she'll ever get. Ought ever to get, come right to it. If Vernon disowns her, she's facing a lifetime of outright solitude. I can see it in the thoughts that churn through her mind as I make the threat. Colonel (retd.) Fubster tolerates her because he likes dogs, judging from the memories that flash by. She knows she's never going to get anywhere with him, and I reckon on some level she knows he's as gay as a hat full of glitter. It's certainly obvious enough to me, at any rate.

She croaks something that might be the start of a response, which I ignore.

"For your general fund of information," I go on, "and I probably shouldn't be telling you this, the car-crash is a cover story. We're not allowed to know the details, but Petunia's sister and her husband died in their nation's service. We're all that Harry has left, and his safety and therefore Dudley's safety depend on everyone thinking his parents were simply unlucky on the roads. Not, as I'm given to understand, heroes who simply can't be publicly recognised. Remember that: it's a cover story, not a stick for you to use to beat a child. Which, since I for one want to be a better man than our father, won't stand for either."

"I- I understand. I think I should go, now."

She suits action to words, and I heave a sigh of relief as she and Ripper pull out of the drive. I suppose I ought to have made her stay and at least get some more food down her to mitigate the alcohol - she'd have been about on the legal limit - but I'd given her a fairly serious verbal beating already: making her sit still for an awkward pudding course would probably have made her less safe on the road, not more.

"So, pudding?" Petunia asks, with forced brightness.

"Yes, of course. I can only hope that she goes home to seriously rethink her life. Most of the same problems as Vernon, of course."

"I wouldn't say it to Vernon, but I never cared for her. I just wish you could have done that away from the dinner table."

I shrug. "I did try and warn her over the 'phone that there were some changes around here. I'm afraid she's rather too used to getting her own way, though. I suspect nothing short of catching her in the act and rubbing her nose in it was going to work. It could have been a lot worse, she's certainly capable of it."

That metaphor amuses Petunia. Ripper isn't the only dog Marge has brought to Privet Drive. Her previous favourite, Hussar, had a habit of disgracing himself on the hall carpet. Although, fair play to the late Hussar, I'm of the view that the hall carpet is ugly enough to deserve it. "Do you think she'll improve?"

"We can hope. I suspect she'll need slapping down a time or two more, though. I can only hope Vernon's up to it by the time I start letting him fly solo. Or at least develops the backbone to disown her entirely. She's a bad influence on him."

The first week of the new year I get a call from Marge. Apparently there were other things going on in her life, and my harsh words - she calls it 'straight talking' - made her decide on a New Year's Resolution to quit drinking. She has attended her first AA meeting. I wish her good luck, and mean it.

-oOo-

AUTHOR NOTES:

Primary school nativity plays are the most adorable things ever. I've no idea whether this is a thing anywhere outside the UK, but five-to-seven year old kids doing the Story Of Baby Jesus is just beyond brilliant. Between my own kids and the nieces and nephews I have a massive store of Future Embarrassment Photos.

Pantomime, for the benefit of you Johnny Foreigner types, is a christmas tradition that involves putting on double-entendre-laden plays full of audience participation, cross-dressing and sly digs at political and public figures and taking the kids along to see them. It's better than I've made it sound, honest. (All of my British readers are now yelling "OH NO IT ISN'T!" to which I say: OH YES IT IS!)

A-Levels had been going for more than thirty years as at 1985, so Mal is worrying over nothing on this point.

The whole magical survey thing is borrowed more from the movie continuity, where the set dressing often includes old-timey scientific instruments. (Only Dumbledore's office is so adorned in the books.) I reckon there are at least some wizards with the kind of inquiring minds that would invent instruments and methods for measuring magic because they're so obviously useful.

Johnny Morris: his show Animal Magic was one of my favourites as a little boy and it was off the air by 1983 when he retired. He more or less invented animal voice-over comedy as a genre as well as educating entire generations about natural history and conservation. We shall not look upon his like again, alas.

Finally, Hussar was named for Colonel (actually Major when he retired one step ahead of being cashiered, it's not uncommon for retired officers to big themselves up a bit) Fubster's old regiment. He was, in fact, a Gay Hussar. Sorry not sorry.

Fanfic recommendation: A World Out of Balance by Gehayi, available only on AO3 as far as I can tell, along with the rest of the works in that series. It's a reaction to JKR's cultural tone-deafness in her writing around magical America. I won't go so far as to say I'm adopting Gehayi's ideas wholesale, but there's definitely something there. (And it's not like JKR wasn't tone-deaf about her own culture, when all's said and done.)