Chapter 6: In which a start is made

Disclaimer: Do we see Dumbledore use mind control and conjured gin - which he implicitly compels her to drink - to procure a muggle's compliance, leaving her drunk in charge of a childcare facility when he dismisses her? If so, I don't own Harry Potter.

Announcement: I'm working on Chapter 13 at the time this is posted. Since I keep having ideas while I'm writing - doing this for fun, after all, and am not restrained by editor nor publisher - the tale is growing considerably in the telling.

CHAPTER 6

"...Harry and I will be out most of the day shopping. Clothes and school things, mostly, and some books so I can get him started reading before school starts. And remedial work for Dudley, I won't be accepting a school report like the last one. It might have done for Vernon, but I hew to higher standards than that."

"You're spending our money?" There's a sharp note to Petunia's voice over that.

"Come Monday, I'll be going out to earn it, too. And I rather suspect I'm better at finances than Vernon; with his salary and this mortgage, you shouldn't be even mildly struggling. As for spending it, the childrens' needs come first, including making up for the neglect you visited on Harry. Which neglect, Petunia, is why you aren't permitted to complain about me fixing the problem. You know I could make this so much worse for you."

-oOo-

Getting ready for the day drives home to me that, at this level, obesity really is a disability. Obesity coupled with a level of fitness that isn't even up to a second round of golf in a day makes even getting socks on a challenge. Used as I am to being at least within hailing distance of reasonable shape, Vernon's body feels like it's about to die. In Vernon's body, I can't imagine I'm getting much change out of 20 stone and he thinks he's five foot ten. My mental arithmetic isn't up to BMIs, whatever they're worth, but whatever a healthy weight is for this body, this is not it.

The fitness level underneath the obesity is shocking, too: he's thirty one years of age, and I was in better shape at fifty. That's the real problem, of course. It's quite possible to be fit and healthy with a lot of body fat. There are whole categories of athletes that are just like that - strongmen, wrestlers of all kinds, and weightlifters - and they have to eat a lot to keep it up. Point is, they exercise, and Vernon doesn't, and hasn't in ten years, the arse.

As a result, getting ready for the day, which I'm used to doing in under ten minutes - shower and shave included - takes nearly half an hour. By which time Dudley is already on the naughty step.

"It's worse than I thought," I say to Petunia as I step carefully around him. Carefully because if I fall in this body I'd crush the boy to death, more than likely.

"He ate his breakfast and wants cake for afters," she tells me. "And he's upset that the - that Harry is allowed to watch television. I told him that you've said he's to lose weight and that Harry is to be part of the family now, and he threw a tantrum."

"I see." I compose Vernon's face into the best 'Daddy is very cross with you' I can manage with the material to hand. He's no looker and scowls a lot and - to his credit - has a very good moustache for bristling. I turn around to look straight at Dudley, who is banging his head against the newel post and making a sort of gulping, whooping attempt at fake tears. "Dudley. Eustace. Dursley."

Yeah, I'd've insisted on Big D, too.

The shock - he's probably never had the all-three-names thing before, and I don't think Vernon has Dad Voice at all - actually shuts him up. "You will stay on the naughty step until you start being a good boy."

"But-"

"NO! It is time to start learning how to be a young gentleman." I go on in that vein for the rest of his five minutes, and a bit beyond. I'm very much winging it with the poor kid: since for all her faults my ex-wife was also pretty good with kids (we both were, just dreadful with each other) we never had more than the occasional blow-up out of our three before they turned into stroppy teenagers. A kid who'd flat-out been taught to misbehave to the point of being rewarded for it? I foresee some trial and error ahead for Petunia and me. I didn't look too hard at her childhood, but she and Lily seem to have started out fairly well-adjusted: Vernon's the problem here. He was raised by remarkably tight-arsed authoritarians, and I'm kind of sad for him that the day he was packed off to Smeltings was one of the happier ones of his childhood. He went on to do all the wrong things to get over that, what with being, frankly, a bit dim.

As it is, the end of the lecture sees Dudley silent, sitting meekly with a trembling lower lip. I offer him a hand to get up. "That's better," I say, "Now you and I are both going to be having no second helpings and no sweets or cakes until we're properly healthy. No use crying or screaming or trying to fight. I'm going to take Harry out now to go shopping for clothes and you can watch telly while we're out. Mummy won't give you any snacks or sweets, and you're going to try and not be angry, Dudley. Do you understand?"

A meek nod.

"Now go hug your mummy and tell her you're sorry," I tell him, and to my surprise he actually does it, and goes off to join Harry in front of Saturday Superstore.

Petunia is quite wide-eyed. I crook an eyebrow at her.

"That…" she sort of gestures vaguely.

I'd shrug, but I'm not sure it'd be visible under the lard. "He'll have forgotten in an hour or so and you're going to have to do it again. Tiresome, but you're an adult and have patience, so use it. Eventually we'll basically train good behaviour into him and he'll be less work. Oh, and just so's we're clear, Dudley needs a healthy diet and good exercise habits, not to lose weight as such. I know you've got a thing about fat, but that's not Dudley's real problem. Keep the sugar and junk food out of him and he'll be fine, so long as we can get him up and moving."

She nods. I reckon I'll probably have to have more words with her about this, but one step at a time. "When you got him to calm down like that, that wasn't, you know…? " she waves her hands with waggling fingers in lieu of saying the dreaded m-word.

I can't help it: I snort with laughter. "Just years of practise. When I died, my youngest had just had her 21st birthday. We never let any of them get as bad as Dudley there, so I'm busking a bit, but a firm tone and an air of authority gets you a long way with kids. Springing it on him like this probably added some shock value."

She sighs in relief. "I was worried you'd - do, do that thing you're doing to Vernon."

"That wouldn't be right. Look, without help, Vernon's not going to see his fiftieth birthday, and he's going to make you, Dudley and probably a whole lot of other people miserable until then. Harry's my main charge in all this - I'm not allowed to tell you what's really going on," Mostly because I've only the vaguest fucking notion myself, "but Vernon's going to be spending at least a few months dreaming while I run things for him because fixing Vernon is my best route to getting things right for Harry."

"I suppose - I suppose it's for the best, then."

"I sincerely hope so. I'm not all-knowing and all-seeing, though, so be warned I may well make mistakes here and there. But my aim in all this is to fix this home and family for Harry's sake. And so's we're clear: you need to get over yourself on the subject of magic and wizards. Harry doesn't need to be told anything until he either works it out for himself or starts with accidental magic, but it is going to be a factor in all this. I appreciate you felt dreadful that Hogwarts wouldn't take you, but that's buying into their bullshit about how they're superior because they've got magic. Be better than that, Petunia, and I'll say no more about it."

She nods in acknowledgment, but I've seen too much of her mind to think she's ready to agree quite yet.

"If it helps, I really do have ethical limits in all this, and magically rewriting Dudley's personality is well beyond them. Besides, you need to practise decent parenting skills and you won't learn those if I just put the hoodoo on the boy, now, will you?" I give her a grin and, after a detour to secure wallet, keys, chequebook and what-have-you, go get Harry.

Saturday Superstore is just coming out of the cartoon segment, the animated version of Happy Days, and Harry is enraptured. They go into a bit where a bloke plays the trumpet underwater because children's television was completely insane in the 1980s and I have to stop and watch that. Turns out it's Roy Castle, who hasn't died of cancer yet but does have the power to get the Record Breakers theme song stuck in my head if I don't look sharp about it.

"C'mon, Harry," I say, "time to go get you some clothes and stuff. Bit of an adventure for you, a look at the big wide world."

Harry looks torn for a moment. He clearly wants to watch all the television, but I'm offering an adventure out in the big wide world. He jumps up. He takes my hand when I offer it, but gingerly. He knows its me but he's still scared of Vernon. We'll get there eventually, I suppose.

"Dudley, if mummy tells me you've been good while I'm out, I might bring back a treat. So be good!"

Dudley looks up and nods. He'll probably have forgotten in about ten minutes, I'm pretty sure any intelligence he develops is going to have to come from the nurture side of the equation, but it's worth a try.

Out in the car, I discover that Vernon seems to have thought booster seats were some kind of socialist plot, so the first stop is going to have to be the Halfords on the way in to Twickenham. Beyond that I'm drawing a bit of a blank for shopping in the area - I've only ever been to Twickenham for the rugby, and while I do know the shopping in Guildford having lived there for a year, I know it as it was in the early 90s. For all I know the retail park I'm thinking of hasn't been built yet. Vernon hasn't got clue one about clothes shopping, apparently Petunia handled all that via catalogues with the occasional day out on the train. The days of needing the car for a big weekly shop haven't arrived in the Dursley household yet so he doesn't even have more than a faint notion where the groceries come from.

Harry doesn't care: he's never been allowed in the car and this is a massive adventure: if he was a puppy his tail would be a blur. While we're driving I decide we can add trains and the tube to the day's Exciting New Stuff For Harry: park at Richmond tube and travel that way to Brent Cross. I know that's in business because I went there in '81 or '82. One of the first of the modern style of shopping centres, we should be able to get everything there. I've decided Harry's getting a bag full of sports-casual to be going on with. He'll be wearing his school uniform more than half the time and will probably have grown out of everything in six months, so no sense blowing huge amounts on kitting him out. If I'm wrong about the impending growth spurt - it's been years since I had care of a boy this age, and memory is a fallible thing - then we can get another batch in the January sales.

After a stop to get a couple of booster seats - completely rubbish ones compared to what will be available in ten years' time, apparently the world didn't give a shit about children's automotive safety until the 90s - we cross the river to Richmond and park up to continue the process of blowing little Harry's mind with a ride on the tube. The traffic's less awful than I was expecting, but then my experience of London driving is nearly two decades in the future and a lot nearer the centre than this.

Most of the journey is taken up with explaining everything because apparently Harry's urge to ask questions has built up a gigantic head of pressure. It seems it takes more than isolation broken only by 'shut up freak' to do that much damage to a kid with a good brain and a vivid imagination within hearing distance of a telly, or at least not in the time the Dursleys have had available.

Since I'm having to answer all these questions through a real throat now, I have to detour while changing trains to get drinks. And no, they don't sell bottled water at tube station news kiosks yet, cans of diet coke are the only option without a shitload of sugar in. Memo: find a sports shop and invest in a water bottle. I get Harry a bottle of chocolate milk, and show him how to drink it with two holes in the foil cap so he doesn't spill it on the train. Harry is mightily impressed that there is some actual science behind this technique.

The Northern Line doesn't look any less urban-decay than it did in the late 90s when it was my regular commute. Since the questions have dried up a bit by the time we get seats - we get lucky, especially for a change at Embankment on a Saturday in peak tourist season - I decide to get started on a quite important part of Harry's education.

"Harry," I say, "You've reached an age where, as a young gentleman, you should be learning an important part of your culture, and it's time we started. I was about your age when I learned this"

Big wide eyes, lots of nodding. Harry is not going to miss anything.

"Right then, I give you: the Ying Tong Song." Vernon has a fairly usable baritone voice, and Harry goes through the usual stages of learning the Ying Tong Song: disbelief, giggling, helpless laughter, and joining in. We get four or five other passengers coming in on the choruses and one glorious bastard who can actually do the raspberry verse, which I could never quite manage and Vernon hasn't a hope with. The tourists range from baffled through vaguely afraid to mightily amused.

Which makes it twice I've managed to get a Goon Show singalong going on London Transport, albeit the first one was over ten years from now on a section of the system that hasn't been built yet (I don't think.)

Harry had found the car and train rides mind-expanding. A couple of acres of shopping centre is nearly a bit much for the poor lad, but a sit down in the food court with a tray of junk food and a milkshake steadies him considerably. Forcibly reminding myself that it's actually the eighties steadies me down from amused mockery of the godawful eighties fashion parading about.

("No, Harry, all I need is a cup of tea, you enjoy your nuggets and chips. You see, I'm carrying all the nourishment I need in my big belly, like a camel in his hump. What's a camel? Why, it's a rare beast that eats mud, poos bricks, and has a triangular bumhole. Which is how Egypt got all them pyramids. Oh, you want the sensible answer? How do you know that wasn't the sensible answer I just gave you? Oh, well spotted, you're going to make a great card player when you grow up.")

Harry gets a couple of bags of clothes - sports kit mostly, because little boys can and will wreck anything less durable - and is chuffed to little mint balls to be allowed to wear one of his new outfits out of the shop. Replica Arsenal shirt - his second choice, he'd wanted Man United but fuck Man United - a pair of baggy shorts with miles of growing room, they're nearly longs on him, and velcro trainers because everyone wanted velcro trainers in the 80s. I know I did, and got some shitty off-brand ones that I was mortified to be seen in. It's a shame the shop didn't have Stoke City shirts, I could've got him a full set of kit for the team nicknamed "the Potters" and had him be too adorable for words. As it is he attracts much praise from passing little old ladies who tell him he's a brave little soldier to be marching about all walking wounded like that. And a couple of cheery old geezers who tell him "Up the Gunners!" which I have to explain to him.

There's a bookshop of a chain I straight up don't remember at all, probably because Borders and Barnes & Noble wiped out all the small chains, nearly did for Waterstones and Blackwells, and made all but the most specialist independents a thing of distant memory. I make sure we get a couple of Dr. Seuss omnibus editions, some basic ABC books and the complete Ladybird Peter and Jane series, which I'm surprised to learn are still a thing. I learned to read out of these, so Harry and Dudley should manage all right.

Harry wants to know if I've read all of these books ("Nobody can read them all, Harry. But that's no reason not to try"). I tell him he can pick one for being a good boy, and it's the nearest he comes to a meltdown all day because he doesn't know how to choose. We do some narrowing down - he likes animals, big scary ones, and wants a book he might be able to read quite soon rather than one that might take a while - and go through the available stock on dinosaurs to pick out one with simple text about the usual suspects. There's a rack of Ordnance Survey maps by the counter and I grab the Explorer sheets for Surrey. I may be in the disagreeably-flat south but there should be some good hiking somewhere. God knows Vernon needs it.

Memo: get Harry to an optician pronto. Kids' glasses are still free on the NHS, there's no excuse for waiting until the school sends a note home, and he's going to have a devil of a time learning to read without. He's not blind without glasses, but definitely has trouble with small fiddly details.

We finish the day with a wander through Toys R Us, I think the only one in Britain this early. Harry picks a stuffed brontosaur (I think we're still in the years of the apatosaurus mistake, so I keep quiet about that) and I confess myself completely stuck for Dudley's treat - I'm pretty sure he hasn't behaved while we've been out, but seeing the treat he could have if he behaves tomorrow might give him something to focus on. Trouble is, he's had piles and piles of wildly inappropriate shit bought for him, most of which he's ignored or broken, and I doubt he'll care for educational stuff until we've seriously reshaped his attitude.

Harry gets it when I tell him that he should stick with his stuffed Brontosaur because Dudley won't want it like he will the far shinier Optimus Prime that I pick in the end, and Dudley isn't going to be given it if he's been naughty while we're out. Also, Optimus Prime is on the telly and a definite hero, so maybe he'll follow the heroic example? I can but hope.

It's only sheerest will that keeps Vernon's body on its feet on the way home. The man's fitness level would shame a ten-year coma patient.

-oOo-

Back in Little Whinging, Petunia is slumped at the kitchen table with a G&T and a slightly frazzled air. Dudley has, apparently, spent about half the day on the naughty step and only realised Mummy was serious when she threatened him with no lunch and no telly to go with the no snacks or sweets. Optimus Prime is staying in the boot of Vernon's car for the time being.

Dudley has spent the afternoon on the sofa feeling sorry for himself and watching Empire Strikes Back over and over on the Betamax Vernon was so proud of picking over the clearly-inferior VHS last year. Little Whinging's video library - is Blockbuster a thing yet? - has a poor selection in Betamax and Vernon has been blaming them for not being as smart as him. I foresee Vernon's golf-club fund taking another hit in the near future to get the home entertainment options sorted out. Dudley's Smeltings fund won't be touched - it's in a school-fees endowment policy, so it pretty much can't be - but Vernon's game won't be improved by anything other than practise and losing the belly, so six grand's worth of space-age alloy clubs are a pure waste of money better spent elsewhere

Petunia has done cold collations for dinner because she didn't know when we'd be home. Vernon's portion is bigger than I need to shut up his grossly-overindulged need for blood sugar, so Harry gets a second helping and Dudley sulks when I tell him the only thing he is allowed second helpings of is salad and vegetables. Long as it's not a tantrum, let him sulk. I notice Petunia's got a whole stack of diet books out - one of them is the F-Plan, called it - and we idly chat over the possibility of Vernon using one of them. Which is to say Petunia raises the possibility and I take the opportunity to explain - while acknowledging there are some good recipes in F-Plan - the basics of healthy eating and the importance of exercise to her again, this time pitching the explanation at a level the boys can understand.

Hopefully they'll get the subtext: eat your greens and exercise if you want to grow up big and strong. Dudley thinks he's hearing it from his daddy and Harry knows he's hearing it from his own personal friendly magic ghost, hence the hope.

I also take the opportunity to point out that Vernon's opposition to anything that might count as 'foreign muck' (he regards onions as a borderline-exotic ingredient, for fuck's sake) is now a thing of the past. It has long been past time for England's eating habits to recover from the shipping restrictions of two world wars and while the rest of the country will take another couple of decades this household is going to enjoy its meals. In suitable moderation, naturally.

Since they're in separate bedrooms Harry and Dudley get storytime on the sofa: Vernon's bulk is quite enough to keep Dudley from trying anything with Harry, and Scrambled Eggs Super - a personal favourite, and one I've nearly learned by heart, along with The Lorax - has both boys giggling in all the right places. Petunia puts Dudley to bed - she caves and reads him another story, which I don't say anything about because that's the kind of spoiling she should be doing - and I end up having to carry Harry up to tuck him in.

-oOo-

Vernon needs a bath - really must look into getting a shower installed - so it's nearly nine by the time I join Petunia in the living room after getting myself a cup of tea. (Even if Vernon's health could stand nightcaps of the size he was accustomed to, his taste in mass-market blended whisky is execrable.)

"You're good with the boys," she remarks, pausing in her appreciation of Riders.

"Well, back when I was alive, I was a better father than I ever was a husband. Had a rough go of it myself as a kid, and rather wanted to do better." Not that there weren't a few false starts, like, but I got the hang of it quite well though I do say so myself.

"I didn't get to the spare room today." There's a note of challenge there: I think she's expecting me to react like Vernon might.

I shrug. "I said that more in hope than expectation. I've been watching long enough to know Dudley's a handful, and I'm pleasantly surprised you've made as much progress with him as you have."

Petunia snorts derisively. "Vernon was most of the problem, I'm sorry to say. He liked to indulge his little man, and wouldn't hear of him being disciplined. Thought he was too young."

"I've some sympathy with Vernon on that, actually. I can see his childhood memories in here, and while his parents didn't mistreat either of their children, they were a right pair of humourless tartars who'd skin a louse for a ha'porth o' hide, There's a reason he was barely on more than christmas-card terms with them for the last years of their lives, even leaving aside the way they favoured Marge in the will. Vernon knew he didn't want that for his own child, nor Marge for her nephew, they just didn't know any better way to go about it. Fortunately I do, and Vernon's still in here with no choice but to learn as we go."

"It sounds like you're saying Vernon is stupid." There's the hint of a building temper eruption in Petunia's voice. In their own fucked-up unhealthy way, the Dursleys do actually care for each other.

"I'm saying he was never taught, and was taught to distrust nearly everything and everyone that might have helped him learn. A sort of mental trap, if you will. It doesn't excuse the way he treated his family and himself, not hardly at all, but it does help to understand it." I mean, Vernon Dursley is quite a stupid man - his ability to function in business tells me that Smeltings' fees are actually worth every penny, they put quite a high gloss on this particular turd - but it's clearly nothing I want to say aloud where Petunia can hear.

A long silence follows. Because Petunia is the smart one in this family, and can follow the chain of reasoning, her own mind will make her face up to the fact that she doesn't have Vernon's excuses. She was never taught that everything not generations-deep Home Counties English With The Right School Tie was inherently wrong, corrupt and immoral: she's a working class Staffordshire girl - Harold Evans was the senior Shop Steward for the mill he worked at from demobilisation to the day he died, and a die-hard of a Labour party that hadn't yet lost its way. He and Iris raised their girls by the motto of 'treat folk decent and you'll not go far wrong'.

If only Petunia hadn't lost that along with her accent.

I watch her face. She bloody well knows it. I can only hope she doesn't have a breakdown of some sort.

"If it helps," I say after a while, "think of my arrival as giving you a chance for a fresh start. Live the way your mum would have wanted. I mean, if you want to keep getting your money's worth out of the elocution lessons, go ahead, but you really don't have to row in with the nosy old biddies at your Neighbourhood Watch meetings. Lot of miserable old trouts you're better off without. What the neighbours will say does not matter."

She starts crying and laughing and hiccuping all at once. "It's easier said than done, you know. I don't know about you, but Vernon likes everything respectable, and I was raised the same. Oh, we didn't have the fancy house and the good schools and all that, but we were clean and respectable. Best foot forward, mum used to say."

Until the car crash and you had to bury them with Lily away at Hogwarts and no way to get in touch, I think to myself, and you got a student grant to secretarial college and met Vernon and he gave you a whole different idea of what 'respectable' meant and you bought in to it because he had money to flash and a nice company car, you daft girl.

I've been nodding along as she pours her heart out. "Look, I understand that. My father was a builder," let's let her assume mud and wellies and not senior construction engineer, "and I worked my way up from that background to end up at a City of London law firm. I was head of the legal department at a fairly large corporation," again, let her assume big company rather than municipal authority, "by the time I retired. I know all about people who want to live the not-a-blade-of-grass-out-of-place life. The thing is, you don't have to live it in your own home. You don't even have to live it outdoors if you don't want to: the days when the villagers could ruin your life with gossip are long gone. Even the echo of it that still exists will be gone soon. Remember, I've been outside time, I know what the future holds for society and what you've been trying to live is not it."

Petunia looks like she could start crying all over again with relief at that. All of that curtain-twitching keep-up-with-the-Joneses bollocks, well, I never indulged but I imagine it's fucking exhausting to try and maintain day after day. I'm lying about it vanishing, of course, it just changes shape and adapts because deep down there's an irreducible minority of utter bastards who are tireless in dragging the rest of us down. It's possible to tell them to go fuck their hats, though, and once you've done that you discover that they're as powerless as they are petty.

After a long session of reassurance - I get a quite girlish giggle out of her by describing the neighbourhood game of one-upmanship as 'willy-waving' so I know I'm making progress - I remember to tell her to get both boys in for opticians appointments. I've seen through Harry's eyes in his dreams, and Dudley's having trouble reading so he might well need some help too. Petunia has reading glasses and I suspect Vernon should have had his eyes checked but for reluctance to be a 'four-eyed ponce'. Where was this vanity when he was going up a trouser size and a half every year?

I tell her I'll be putting Vernon to sleep and going out 'to make my rounds in the spirit world' and to see if I can find the spells Dumbledore put on the house.

"Are they safe?" she asks. Dumbledore vaguely mentioned 'protection' in his letter, but all the blather about secrecy and hiding led the Dursleys to assume that he meant security through obscurity.

"More than likely, although I have to say I haven't been able to detect them yet. I only know about them because I looked into the future and saw times when he mentions them, along with claiming they built on whatever your sister did to keep Harry alive. He's a notorious bullshitter, though, so there's every possibility it's a massive bluff on his part. If they do exist I may end up having to do some discreet magic of my own to detect and measure them. The wizard I ate last night had some skills in that area, so I should be able to manage."

Petunia gives me a hard stare over the top of her reading glasses, reminding me why I want Vernon in to the opticians as soon as I can. Staring over the top of a pair of spectacles is one of the most effective weapons in the arsenal of authority. "This magic you're going to do had better be discreet. I can only take not caring what the neighbours think so far, you know."

Was that a joke, Petunia Dursley? We make progress, yes we do. "It will be. Wizards have been hiding away for centuries, they've got quite good at making magic pass beneath notice. I'm not about to start parading about in a robe and wizard hat."

"See that you don't."

"I'll say again what I said this morning, though. You need to relax about magic: it's real and it's going to have an impact on your life whether you like it or not. Tearing yourself up about it is just going to add misery to the equation. Besides, that set of green fingers you've got? Probably how your family's magic comes out in you even though you could never use a wand." This is almost certainly bullshit - pretty sure it's something I saw in a fanfic once - but if it boosts Petunia's self-esteem then I've no scruples about using it.

"You think so?"

I shrug. "It's certainly plausible, although I've no idea how we'd prove it one way or another. It certainly seems unlikely that your parents could have both a witch and an entirely unmagical child, for all that the genetics of magic haven't been studied as far as I can tell."

Petunia looks pleased with that. So, mischief managed I suppose.

-oOo-

Putting Vernon to sleep is easy enough. He's not entirely convinced he's awake to start with, and his body is running on fumes. I lay Vernon down and get up, to a slight shriek from Petunia.

"You can see me?" I'm a bit surprised by this, I've got used to invisibility. Hopefully my form is indistinct as to details, because my clothes are in an evidence bag more than three decades into the future.

She nods. Clearly she can also hear me.

"Proves you've got at least some magic, too. The likes of me are invisible to people without magic. Have a think about whether you want to look into that." A thought occurs to me, and I expend a little mental effort on occluding my mind. I've got Tom's memories of learning the formal discipline to go with his natural talent, and I've been flexing the skill in odd moments all day. "Still see me?"

"You vanished."

"Good, so long as I know that that's working properly, see you in the morning!" I pop in to check on Harry - out cold, as well he should be after a day like that - and then Dudley. (Mostly out of a sense of duty. He has a long way to go before he's a likeable child.) From there, out to the boundaries of the property, as far as I can discern them: fences and, at the front, knee-high box hedges. They're not necessarily on the actual surveyed property lines - hedges grow as they will and the guys who put fences up for a living aren't generally that fussy - but on a property this new they'll be within an inch or two.

I'm looking here for the spells on the time-honoured principle of the bleedin' obvious. Protection, like armour, goes between you and the threat. After a bit of nosing about I come to the conclusion that sensing magic must be a skill you have to work on, like perfect pitch if you're not one of the lucky few.

A dig in Tom's memories confirms that: it's apparently a standard part of cursebreaker training, and it helps with a few other jobs. The problem is that it starts with being alive to bodily sensations as you react to magic, and only the very fortunate or dedicated manage to get good enough that they can actually see magic with their eyes. Tom never managed it, but did develop the ability to taste magic in the air, which he found gratifyingly snakelike, the creepy bugger.

Must you add insult to injury? Name-calling? Bad enough you carried me around among swarms of dirty muggles, but now I have to listen to your foul mouth denigrating the -

If the next words out of you are "Great Lord Voldemort" I will devour the memory of every - have to think about it a moment - every moment of triumph you ever enjoyed. You don't get to complain, failure. I won, you lost, that's an end of it. And what's so great about completely ignoring literal millennia of lore on the subject of Oracles and going off half-cocked like you did? You're lucky you didn't end up fucking your own mother.

What? My mother -

You never read any of the greek myths, then? None of the stories about what comes of messing with oracles and prophecies and similar?

MUGGLE myths.

Seriously, Oedipus doesn't ring a bell with you?

Should it?

Bloody hell. What kind of school did you go to that missed the likes of that? I'm being unduly harsh on Tom, I know. While the more expensive schools insisted on a good grounding in Classics back then, I'm pretty sure that whatever institution taught the wards of Wool's Orphanage wouldn't have done. The three Rs, and they should count themselves lucky to get even that much: they'd only just stopped calling them Poor Law Schools when Tom went.

Curious - and thinking it might be helpful to look at how Tom was doing magic before he got a wand, I eat his childhood.

It takes a while for the disorientation of absorbing the memories to dissipate, but when it does -

Holy shit, Tom.

What now?

Your time at Wool's Orphanage. Most of it is the strange and distorted stuff that childhood memories are made of - whatever magic makes memories the pin-sharp things you see in the Pensieve and in Tom's adult memories hasn't kicked in yet. But the widespread assumption that Tom had a rough time growing up takes a hearty kick in the sacks once I see it from his perspective.

Precious few luxuries, a staff doing the best they could with the budget from the Board of Guardians - or was it the Borough Council by then? I can't remember the date of the change and Tom never knew - but the kids were kept clean, clothed, warm and fed and sent to the local school. Some of them even kept pets, if they could get odd jobs for pocket money. There was abuse, all right, but it was Tom doing the abusing. Where the other kids indulged in the usual friction and picked on each other where matron and the house-mothers couldn't see, Tom wanted to hurt people.

If Hogwarts hadn't taken him away, something like the James Bulger or Edlington cases would have been the result, if I'm any judge. There's usually something that shoves a child criminal over the edge, generally not whatever the media get in a moral panic over, but something. Tom, however, was a wrong 'un from the get-go. Thus far the little bit of criminology that I learned takes me, and no further.

Wool's orphanage?

Where you grew up.

I don't remember it. I'm pretty sure it was some muggle shithole, but I've not thought about it in years.

Of course you don't remember it, I just ate your memories.

No loss. I had to endure the muggles for a time before I began my rise. There is no value in remembering it.

I suppress the unquiet shade - with a hope that he'll get quieter as I pull him more to pieces, for all that he's probably nothing more than my own mind reacting to the big chunk of foreign memory in it. The useful thing about Tom's childhood is that he actually remembers all the occasions when he did magic. He didn't know it was magic, but it marked him as special and the pleasure he took from that marks every episode.

A pleasure that, incidentally, he'd lost later in life as the toll of all the things he did - dark magic and just straight-up criminality - mounted up. Ordinary psychological case-hardening would do it, psychopaths start small and seek bigger and bigger thrills for approximately this reason. Then again, it might be the cumulative effect of horcrux-making, but something about those things makes me nervous of examining the memories. When a virtually magicless spirit like I was until last night can sense the malignancy of a thing, you'd have to be an idiot not to take warning. If I absolutely have to examine those things, it's going to have to wait until I'm a lot more confident about remaining who I am despite the incorporation of a whopping great load of Tom-stuff. I'm certainly minded to be careful of the later memories, since there's a clear pattern of degradation in just the period where he was learning stuff.

As it is, I've now absorbed the techniques Tom used to move things - his control was good enough to tie knots strong enough to hang a rabbit from the rafters - and cast nonspecific curses of general misfortune, pain and injury on people. The moving things I've already got, of course, and Tom's early powers of mind control were much superseded by his later learning of legilimency and possession.

An hour or so of experimentation reveals that using Tom's tricks I can make my poltergeisting a lot more impressive. I try a few tests with things lying around the neighbourhood - if anyone sees, well, there's a breeze up. At a rough estimate, if I could have done it with just one hand at the end of a fully-extended arm, I can do it with telekinesis.

It's actually a transfiguration.

Being actually helpful, Tom?

I'm bored. I can't have my magic back, so I want to enjoy it vicariously.

Well go on, then..

Transfiguration is the most primal of the higher magics. There is nothing between you and the world but your will, and your will brings the world in line with desire. By magic you permanently or temporarily change an object in its relationship with the platonic ideal of its current form, or attach it to other ideals and change its relation to the new ideal.

Platonic formalism was shot down in Aristotle's time, but go on…

As a branch of philosophy. As a magical theory it still has merit for teaching beginners. Like the progression from Galileo to Newton to Einstein. This is straight from Dumbledore's first day teaching my NEWT class, by the way.

Several of the subjects I was taught at school were arranged that way. I've heard it called the 'lies-to-children' method of teaching.

Not Dumbledore's most reprehensible lies, but the phrase is apt. To continue: an object's location in Cartesian space is a property of that object that can be transfigured, considering the location of the platonic ideal at an arbitrary null point outside the cartesian space in which a wizard finds himself, located in the state of non-being omnia et nihil...

Tom goes on in this vein for a good fifteen minutes before calling for questions.

So what you're saying is that telekinesis such as I've been doing and you did as a kid is transfiguration of an object into the same object slightly offset in space? And that because this doesn't change an object against its inherent nature it's as permanent as anything is in this imperfect world?

Yes. You understood?

Lose the sceptical tone. Stripped of the sesquipedalianism you just gave a beginning A-level lecture to a chap with four postgraduate degrees and a full professional certification. It's been years since I even have to think about it to cut through pretentious academic obfuscatory twaddle.

Until you stole my magic you were a muggle, how - ?

By the standards of the rest of Britain, wizards are barely half-educated. If you want to make anything of yourself in the non-magical world you need at least three more years of education past the equivalent of NEWTs and you're expected to have studied a thing or two outside your intended career field. Shows breadth of character, very important to prospective employers. From what little I know of wizarding Britain, you assume being a wizard or witch is enough to qualify you to do anything, which is self-evident claptrap demonstrated frequently by the incompetence of the various ministries of magic around the world.

It shouldn't be possible for Tom-in-my-head to splutter incoherently, but he manages it. Sure, I've answered his specious claim of wizarding superiority with an equally specious claim of muggle superiority, but I'm not bandying nuance with a mere epiphenomenon. Besides, that which is asserted by way of complete bollocks ought to be dismissed by way of complete bollocks. Brings balance to the cosmos, and similar.

Tell me, purely as a teacher how did you rate Dumbledore? Leaving aside the mutual hatred thing?

Though it pains me to admit it, he was one of the best we had at Hogwarts when I was there.

And that pompous over-elaboration was normal for him, was it?

For the theory parts, yes. It's the expected style, certainly for NEWTS.

I have to figure out a way of getting myself a body of my own to get into Hogwarts. If you can score high marks through sheer force of bullshit, my legal training will let me absolutely wreck all previous records.

That aside, I spend the rest of the night practising my poltergeisting, and now I understand that it is in fact magic I'm doing, and what kind, paying attention to anything I sense from it. And by concentrating on my 'hearing' I notice that I hear a 'note' every time I do something. Since outside of an actual body I'm not hearing with ears, this must be impinging directly on my magic. If I had a face right now, I'd be grinning.

I stop and listen: nothing. No protective spells, then. Or, rather, that's one conclusion. What else can we eliminate? Can't eliminate me not having sensitive enough hearing (yet). Location might matter, if the spells can only be heard from certain vantages. Easy test for that, of course, and I float across the property line disembodied for the first time since eating Tom and his magic last night.

Well, there we have it. There are spells on Number Four Privet Drive, Little Whinging. They 'radiate' outward from the property boundaries - fits with the protective function - and extend upward at least to the cloud cover and down as far into the earth as I dare go. (Which is not very. There are shedloads of legends about devouring horrors in the deep earth and I know for a fact that spiritual entities can be eaten.)

I say 'spells' because there are two definite sounds. A deep, ponderous, flowing sort of thing and a high, chiming, arrhythmic one that sounds like what you'd get if you got a load of wind-up music boxes with different tunes and played them all together slightly out of time with each other. Two magics doesn't imply two magicians, but it does permit it. This bears investigating, and I will be mining Tom's memories for any and all appropriate techniques.

AUTHOR NOTES:

The bit with the underwater trumpeting is actually up on Youtube. I found it while refreshing my memory of the time, and I couldn't not throw it in.

The Goon Show, from which the Ying Tong Song comes, is one great foundational pillars of British comedy, the others being Round the Horne and ITMA. The actual jokes have passed into the annals of Dad Jokedom, but the style runs through the nation's sense of humour like the veins in blue cheese.

Vernon's attitude to onions: That's based on someone I actually knew back in the mid 90s. I don't know if it's at all possible to die of eating boring food, but he was giving it a damn' good try.

Shop Stewards, for those not familiar with the more old-fashioned terminology of British Trade Unions, are the Union's representatives in individual workplaces.

Orphanages - and the accommodation for children whose parents were in the workhouse or prison, they were often the same institution - in the inter-war years are not as bad as they're often painted. They were spartan, certainly, but abuses were the exception, and investigated and punished when discovered. It was still a hard life in which the kids wanted for much, but it was frequently better than what actual parents could offer their children at the time.

The bit in the disclaimer - yes, he totally does that, and shows Harry the memory without any hint of remorse for his actions. Harry was really drinking the Dumbledore kool-aid to not object to that bit of shenanigans. Earlier in the same book he's depicted muggle-baiting the Dursleys. Sure, they're arseholes who didn't get a tithe of the comeuppance they deserved in the books, but: only intervening after nearly all the damage was done, no effort to help them improve, no acknowledgement of Dumbledore's own role in events even if only by omission. Just intimidation and mild physical bullying of people much, much weaker than him. One can't blame Harry for taking a perverse delight in it, but still. Dumbledore may be a great wizard, but he's a piss-poor role model.

So, to respond to reviews and PMs asking about whether this is a Dumbledore-bashing story: no more than canon was. Dumbledore gets away with some shocking behaviour in the books - he's cleaned up a bit for the movies, as I recall - but I (and therefore Mal) hew to a higher standard of moral judgement than book-Harry or, apparently, JKR.

Finally: of course Tom Riddle never bothered to study classical mythology. How else could he not know that Cerberus was soothed to sleep by Orpheus's lyre?

Fic recommendation: the complete works of Northumbrian, who posts on FFN and AO3 alike. Search for 'Strangers at Drakeshaugh' to be sure of finding his stuff. All of the stories are from the same post-Hogwarts canon-compliant (up until Cursed Child came out) narrative, and for all I have some Issues with matters pertaining to the Epilogue he makes it work.