Alignments Installment 28
wellymuck Installment 28
Series title: Alignments
Series summary: Friends come together and pull apart under the pressures of the first war with Voldemort.
Series rating: PG-13
Author: magnetic_pole
Word Count: 2700
Installment 28: Freedom/Exile, April 1981
Summary: Remus begins a new life in Muggle London.
Warnings: An odd mixture of description, vignettes, and memories.
At twenty-two Remus finally did what he had been planning since he was a student at Hogwarts: he became a Muggle. Well, not a Muggle, not exactly, because he would never really get used to electronics or the Tube or the overwhelming commotion of Muggle London or the sheer physical labor required by daily life without magic. But for the first time in his life, partly of necessity and partly out of curiosity, Remus put his wand away and made every effort to forget about magic and wizards and the world he had grown up in.
Living as a Muggle was easy enough logistically. Edie, true to her word, had a second cousin who lived in south London, Patrice, a gentle, graying, slow-moving man, who was happy to lease Remus a bedsit on the top story of his terraced house. Patrice, in turn, referred him to another cousin who needed help at a nearby co-op. Less than forty eight hours after Edie had squeezed his hand and kissed him goodbye, he was on his way home from his first day of work, a bag of groceries in one hand and Edie’s instructions on the bus system in the other.
Getting used to his new-found freedom proved harder. He was overwhelmed, at first, by how liberating it was to wake up in Muggle London, without the Prophet reporting on the latest round of attacks, without McGonagall appearing in the Floo with instructions for Sirius, without Order meetings or the duties assigned by Dumbledore or his tense, clandestine visits to the Hog’s Head. He hadn’t realized just how bad the situation in the wizarding world had gotten over the past few years, how much he had begun to worry about his safety and the safety of his friends, how he almost always held his wand ready in public places these days. And until recently, at least, he had been in no more danger than anyone else in the Order; apart from his weekly meetings with the fellow werewolf in the Hog’s Head, he had no real reason to suspect that the Death Eaters knew or cared much about him. But as soon as he went into hiding, as soon as the threat of violence was lifted, he felt a sense of relief that bordered on vertigo.
The first day he left his wand in his room to go to work he felt vulnerable and defenseless, and his heart pounded when another employee upset a shelf and sent a hundred tins rolling across the shop floor. He laughed weakly when he realized what had happened, and the other employees teased him gently for being so skittish. Several days later, while riding home on the bus, it suddenly occurred to him that he no longer needed his wand to defend himself. He was safe; there were no Death Eaters in this part of south London, just rude teenaged boys and horrendous traffic in the evenings. There were no Ministry officials who wanted to register him or track his movements, no Order members who might learn about the wolf or the visits to the Hog’s Head and doubt his loyalty.
It was a strange sensation, being safe, being anonymous, and being free to do what he wanted. He wished he liked it more.
*
Remus fell into a routine quickly, rising early to go to the co-op, where he had been placed in charge of the stockroom, and working through until the mid afternoon. Late afternoons and early evenings were his to run errands or explore the city. Now that the days were getting longer, he had several hours to himself before he needed to return to his room--home, he reminded himself firmly--and fix a meal in Patrice’s kitchen.
Some afternoons he went into central London because the city’s bustling cosmopolitanism and strangeness fascinated him. Never, in all of their trips to Diagon Alley when he was growing up, had he and his parents explored the shops and restaurants in the city surrounding it. Even when he lived with Sirius in Notting Hill they had rarely ventured out of their neighborhood. He was delighted to find restaurants serving food from all over the world, and he spent countless hours walking along the Tottenham Court Road, looking at the various electronic devices in the shop windows, amazed that Muggles had come up with so many ingenious ways to compensate for their lack of magic. One day, on an impulse, his first weekly paycheck in hand, he bought something called a Polaroid camera, which spat out small, square pictures, already developed. The images didn’t move, like ordinary pictures did, but the instantaneity pleased him. He shot an entire package of film of people and shop fronts and traffic while walking along nearby Oxford Street, and when he got home he tucked the pictures away to show Sirius and the others one day. He didn't think about if or when that day would come.
Other days he stayed close to home and browsed in the tiny, second-hand bookshop next door to the co-op. Like the co-op, this seemed to be run by another one of Edie’s numerous politically engaged cousins, an intense, intellectual woman who always eyed him suspiciously over the rims of her glasses. The shop had the best collection of political books Remus had ever seen, and there was a Marxist reading group that met here twice a week in the evenings. He joined, partly because it reminded him of Sirius, and partly because he discovered it was easy to talk politics with strangers and the meetings filled his quiet evenings.
He was lonely, achingly, intensely lonely, but this was to be expected at first, he told himself. He tried not to think about Sirius too often; perhaps he would join him soon, perhaps he wouldn’t. There was nothing Remus could do to change things. He tried not to think about Lily or Alice or James and Peter, either, or the tables at the Three Broomsticks or the Witch's Wart where they sometimes gathered, or the flat in Notting Hill, or the park round the corner where sometimes he and Sirius met up with Edie and Angelina. Events were out of his hands, and Remus was good at resigning himself to situations he couldn’t change. Besides, he’d been thinking about living as a Muggle for years, far away from the Werewolf Registry and a society that didn’t seem to want him, anyway. He was determined not to waste this chance.
His first attempts at Muggle life, that first year out of Hogwarts, had been half-hearted, but now Remus made a determined effort to take his new life seriously. He showed up to work early, he got a proper haircut for the first time in years, and he sent away for university materials for the autumn. He told himself sternly that there was no point in thinking about the wizarding world, and when odd thoughts of Sirius or their flat or Hogwarts or the Three Broomsticks crept into his mind, he simply concentrated harder on whatever he was doing.
*
Patrice, who recognized another expatriate when he saw one, would often join him over dinner, talking to him in his deep and gentle voice about Kingston and St. Ann and his childhood in Jamaica. Patrice had emigrated as a young adult in order to help out with a family business in London, but the city was too fast-paced for him. He hated the traffic and the crowds and the fact that nearly all of his extended family was now in London, so that St. Ann did not feel like home, even when he went back to visit.
“What was it like, the village where you grew up?” Patrice would ask. Remus told him about the small town where he had grown up with his parents, and, improvising somewhat, about the friends he had made at school and his job at the supermarket. “Why did you leave?” was a harder question, and Remus answered it awkwardly, with excuses about small-town life and jobs in the city and plans to attend university. “Do you miss it sometimes?” Patrice wanted to know. Yes, Remus had to admit, he did, despite the fact--and here he was improvising wildly--that due to the circumstances of his birth he had never been fully accepted at home, and despite the fact that he had always longed to get away.
Patrice did not press him. “You never really leave the village,” he said, nodding enigmatically. Somehow the truth of this statement struck Remus, even though he realized they were talking at cross purposes.
*
It was odd, the way being in Muggle London made him feel more like a wizard. For his entire life, he had been concerned about not being enough of a wizard, about failing to fit in, about somehow doing the wrong thing and exposing parts of himself he did not want to expose. He wasn’t resentful by nature, but Remus was a realist, and he had few illusions about the tightly-knit nature of wizarding society and the peripheral position he occupied in it.
Before going into hiding, he hadn’t though much about what tied him to wizarding society. There was only one time he could remember discussing it with anyone, even indirectly. It was a Sunday afternoon he had spent with Lily, just a few months after leaving Hogwarts, about four years ago now. They were sitting together, side by side, on the grass in a park on a warm, lazy September afternoon. Lily had just entered Auror training, and Moody was making her life difficult, whether because she was new or because she was the only woman in the class or because he simply didn’t like her, she couldn’t tell. She couldn’t find a flat; landlords kept turning her down. And she was having difficulty with James’ parents, who had been polite but distant for reasons she couldn’t explain.
She turned to Remus, her expression suddenly serious and a little out-of-place in the sunlit afternoon. “You can tell I’m Muggle-born, can’t you?” she asked. “James says you can’t, but I think he just doesn’t want to see it.”
Remus thought about this for a moment. “You can, I think,” he said, nodding slowly. Both of his own parents were wizarding, but he had a grandmother who was a Muggle, and he knew enough about the problems his mother’s family had faced to recognize them affecting Lily’s life.
“It’s not as obvious as it was when we first entered Hogwarts and all the Muggle-borns had odd hair and odd clothes and knew nothing about magic,” he said. “Now it’s more subtle. It’s the way you use magic, more cautiously and more carefully than other people, less often. And you’re more...” he paused here, looking for the right word. “More forward and outspoken than a lot of wizards or witches. This is a conservative society, and you clearly didn’t grow up in it.”
“I can see that,” Lily said thoughtfully. “You watch Alice or Sirius or other purebloods, and you can see that magic is completely different for them. They have a sense of entitlement, an expectation that they can bend things their way, and the spells follow.” She smiled wryly. “I’m still busy trying to remember wand movements and incantations.”
Remus nodded. “It wasn’t always such a terrible thing, to be Muggle-born, though,” he said. “Not when I was younger. Or before that, from what I can tell from my parents. It’s the political climate lately, Voldemort, the fear of becoming an outsider as things change. It may not be like this always.”
“I hope not," Lily said. "Has it always been such a terrible thing to be a werewolf?” she asked, glancing at him shyly; they did not talk about this often.
“Hmmm,” Remus said absently. “I suppose so.”
Lily pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
“Can you tell I’m a werewolf?” Remus asked, suddenly curious. “Just by looking at me or the way I act?”
Lily titled her head and eyed him carefully. “If I paid attention I could. We learned about this in Auror training, signs to recognize the untransformed werewolf: a change of coloring around the full moon, the way your eyes dilate and get lighter. As you get older you won’t change back so completely, your eyes will stay that color, and your canines won’t recede. There were a few more things, but I don’t remember what they were.”
Remus unconsciously ran the tip of his tongue along the edge of his teeth. He suddenly remembered a Muggle book his grandmother had read to him once as a child, and leaned towards Lily, teeth bared.
“All the better to eat you with, my dear,” he said and then growled. Lily looked startled and frightened for a moment and then laughed so hard she fell over on the grass, clutching at her side.
Remus lay down next to her, and they lay silent for a moment, looking up at the blue sky and the leaves on the tree above them.
“I don’t care,” Lily said, suddenly decisive. “Things will change. I like the wizarding world anyway.”
Remus smiled. “You do?”
“I do,” Lily said. “Watch this.” She pulled her wand out of her pocket, and, after a quick glance to make certain no one was watching, she pulled her wand in a long, slow arc, and the leaves above them turned orange and yellow and deep crimson and started to fall from the tree.
“Lily!” Remus said, smiling, looking around himself. The park wasn’t crowded, and, indeed, no one had seemed to notice. He pulled out his own wand and aimed it upwards with a flourish.
“What are you doing?” Lily asked, puzzled. “I don’t recognize that.”
“Making the sky a little bluer,” Remus said.
“Really?” Lily asked eagerly, but then she must have seen something odd in Remus’ expression, because she started to laugh.
“You fooled me,” she said.
Remus smiled. “I did.”
They sat in a quiet, easy silence for a few minutes.
“You wouldn’t ever want to be a Muggle again?” Remus asked.
“No,” Lily said. “Would you? I mean, if you had a choice?”
Remus did not know what to say at the time, but more and more lately he was beginning to suspect the answer was no.
*
When being in Muggle London was too exhausting Remus sometimes read the Prophet and thought about home.
There was a cafe around the corner from his bedsit that both Edie and Patrice had told him about, a cafe with excellent Indian food and friendly owners who let him stay as long as he wanted and sometimes came by to sit with him and chat. For Remus it was a window into the wizarding world he had left, because this was where he could find copies of the Prophet.
“Look at the back of the cafe,” Edie had told him. “Next to the bins, there’s a pile of Muggle papers, the Daily Mail, I think. Concentrate on them, and you’ll see they’re actually Prophets with a weak spell disguising them. I’m not sure where they come from, but I read them sometimes when I’m here.” Remus felt awkward rummaging about behind the café, but he did it anyway, and Edie was right, there were inevitably a few recent Prophets there. He would pull them out from behind the bins, dust them off gingerly, and bring them inside the cafe to read.
Whenever he brought a stack of papers in, one of the owners, Mrs. Patil, would bring over a plate of curry or a cup of tea.
“Such a conscientious boy,” Mrs. Patil said approvingly to him one day. “Always reading the news. None of my nephews read the news. The only things they read are those football magazines.”
Remus smiled and thanked her for the tea.
“You don’t strike me as a Daily Mail reader, though,” she said.
“No?” Remus said, flipping past the Quidditch scores, looking for signs that his exile would end soon.
“No,” she said. “I think we still have yesterday’s Guardian. You should try that instead.”
“This will do, thanks,” Remus said, looking up, gesturing to the seat across from him. “But perhaps you want to join me?”
“I think I will,” Mrs. Patil said. “It’s too quiet this afternoon. I’ll get the Guardian first.” She fetched her paper and a cup of tea for herself, and they sat there together, reading, whiling away the afternoon hours, waiting for something to happen.
Next chapter: Dear Sirius
Series title: Alignments
Series summary: Friends come together and pull apart under the pressures of the first war with Voldemort.
Series rating: PG-13
Author: magnetic_pole
Word Count: 2700
Installment 28: Freedom/Exile, April 1981
Summary: Remus begins a new life in Muggle London.
Warnings: An odd mixture of description, vignettes, and memories.
At twenty-two Remus finally did what he had been planning since he was a student at Hogwarts: he became a Muggle. Well, not a Muggle, not exactly, because he would never really get used to electronics or the Tube or the overwhelming commotion of Muggle London or the sheer physical labor required by daily life without magic. But for the first time in his life, partly of necessity and partly out of curiosity, Remus put his wand away and made every effort to forget about magic and wizards and the world he had grown up in.
Living as a Muggle was easy enough logistically. Edie, true to her word, had a second cousin who lived in south London, Patrice, a gentle, graying, slow-moving man, who was happy to lease Remus a bedsit on the top story of his terraced house. Patrice, in turn, referred him to another cousin who needed help at a nearby co-op. Less than forty eight hours after Edie had squeezed his hand and kissed him goodbye, he was on his way home from his first day of work, a bag of groceries in one hand and Edie’s instructions on the bus system in the other.
Getting used to his new-found freedom proved harder. He was overwhelmed, at first, by how liberating it was to wake up in Muggle London, without the Prophet reporting on the latest round of attacks, without McGonagall appearing in the Floo with instructions for Sirius, without Order meetings or the duties assigned by Dumbledore or his tense, clandestine visits to the Hog’s Head. He hadn’t realized just how bad the situation in the wizarding world had gotten over the past few years, how much he had begun to worry about his safety and the safety of his friends, how he almost always held his wand ready in public places these days. And until recently, at least, he had been in no more danger than anyone else in the Order; apart from his weekly meetings with the fellow werewolf in the Hog’s Head, he had no real reason to suspect that the Death Eaters knew or cared much about him. But as soon as he went into hiding, as soon as the threat of violence was lifted, he felt a sense of relief that bordered on vertigo.
The first day he left his wand in his room to go to work he felt vulnerable and defenseless, and his heart pounded when another employee upset a shelf and sent a hundred tins rolling across the shop floor. He laughed weakly when he realized what had happened, and the other employees teased him gently for being so skittish. Several days later, while riding home on the bus, it suddenly occurred to him that he no longer needed his wand to defend himself. He was safe; there were no Death Eaters in this part of south London, just rude teenaged boys and horrendous traffic in the evenings. There were no Ministry officials who wanted to register him or track his movements, no Order members who might learn about the wolf or the visits to the Hog’s Head and doubt his loyalty.
It was a strange sensation, being safe, being anonymous, and being free to do what he wanted. He wished he liked it more.
*
Remus fell into a routine quickly, rising early to go to the co-op, where he had been placed in charge of the stockroom, and working through until the mid afternoon. Late afternoons and early evenings were his to run errands or explore the city. Now that the days were getting longer, he had several hours to himself before he needed to return to his room--home, he reminded himself firmly--and fix a meal in Patrice’s kitchen.
Some afternoons he went into central London because the city’s bustling cosmopolitanism and strangeness fascinated him. Never, in all of their trips to Diagon Alley when he was growing up, had he and his parents explored the shops and restaurants in the city surrounding it. Even when he lived with Sirius in Notting Hill they had rarely ventured out of their neighborhood. He was delighted to find restaurants serving food from all over the world, and he spent countless hours walking along the Tottenham Court Road, looking at the various electronic devices in the shop windows, amazed that Muggles had come up with so many ingenious ways to compensate for their lack of magic. One day, on an impulse, his first weekly paycheck in hand, he bought something called a Polaroid camera, which spat out small, square pictures, already developed. The images didn’t move, like ordinary pictures did, but the instantaneity pleased him. He shot an entire package of film of people and shop fronts and traffic while walking along nearby Oxford Street, and when he got home he tucked the pictures away to show Sirius and the others one day. He didn't think about if or when that day would come.
Other days he stayed close to home and browsed in the tiny, second-hand bookshop next door to the co-op. Like the co-op, this seemed to be run by another one of Edie’s numerous politically engaged cousins, an intense, intellectual woman who always eyed him suspiciously over the rims of her glasses. The shop had the best collection of political books Remus had ever seen, and there was a Marxist reading group that met here twice a week in the evenings. He joined, partly because it reminded him of Sirius, and partly because he discovered it was easy to talk politics with strangers and the meetings filled his quiet evenings.
He was lonely, achingly, intensely lonely, but this was to be expected at first, he told himself. He tried not to think about Sirius too often; perhaps he would join him soon, perhaps he wouldn’t. There was nothing Remus could do to change things. He tried not to think about Lily or Alice or James and Peter, either, or the tables at the Three Broomsticks or the Witch's Wart where they sometimes gathered, or the flat in Notting Hill, or the park round the corner where sometimes he and Sirius met up with Edie and Angelina. Events were out of his hands, and Remus was good at resigning himself to situations he couldn’t change. Besides, he’d been thinking about living as a Muggle for years, far away from the Werewolf Registry and a society that didn’t seem to want him, anyway. He was determined not to waste this chance.
His first attempts at Muggle life, that first year out of Hogwarts, had been half-hearted, but now Remus made a determined effort to take his new life seriously. He showed up to work early, he got a proper haircut for the first time in years, and he sent away for university materials for the autumn. He told himself sternly that there was no point in thinking about the wizarding world, and when odd thoughts of Sirius or their flat or Hogwarts or the Three Broomsticks crept into his mind, he simply concentrated harder on whatever he was doing.
*
Patrice, who recognized another expatriate when he saw one, would often join him over dinner, talking to him in his deep and gentle voice about Kingston and St. Ann and his childhood in Jamaica. Patrice had emigrated as a young adult in order to help out with a family business in London, but the city was too fast-paced for him. He hated the traffic and the crowds and the fact that nearly all of his extended family was now in London, so that St. Ann did not feel like home, even when he went back to visit.
“What was it like, the village where you grew up?” Patrice would ask. Remus told him about the small town where he had grown up with his parents, and, improvising somewhat, about the friends he had made at school and his job at the supermarket. “Why did you leave?” was a harder question, and Remus answered it awkwardly, with excuses about small-town life and jobs in the city and plans to attend university. “Do you miss it sometimes?” Patrice wanted to know. Yes, Remus had to admit, he did, despite the fact--and here he was improvising wildly--that due to the circumstances of his birth he had never been fully accepted at home, and despite the fact that he had always longed to get away.
Patrice did not press him. “You never really leave the village,” he said, nodding enigmatically. Somehow the truth of this statement struck Remus, even though he realized they were talking at cross purposes.
*
It was odd, the way being in Muggle London made him feel more like a wizard. For his entire life, he had been concerned about not being enough of a wizard, about failing to fit in, about somehow doing the wrong thing and exposing parts of himself he did not want to expose. He wasn’t resentful by nature, but Remus was a realist, and he had few illusions about the tightly-knit nature of wizarding society and the peripheral position he occupied in it.
Before going into hiding, he hadn’t though much about what tied him to wizarding society. There was only one time he could remember discussing it with anyone, even indirectly. It was a Sunday afternoon he had spent with Lily, just a few months after leaving Hogwarts, about four years ago now. They were sitting together, side by side, on the grass in a park on a warm, lazy September afternoon. Lily had just entered Auror training, and Moody was making her life difficult, whether because she was new or because she was the only woman in the class or because he simply didn’t like her, she couldn’t tell. She couldn’t find a flat; landlords kept turning her down. And she was having difficulty with James’ parents, who had been polite but distant for reasons she couldn’t explain.
She turned to Remus, her expression suddenly serious and a little out-of-place in the sunlit afternoon. “You can tell I’m Muggle-born, can’t you?” she asked. “James says you can’t, but I think he just doesn’t want to see it.”
Remus thought about this for a moment. “You can, I think,” he said, nodding slowly. Both of his own parents were wizarding, but he had a grandmother who was a Muggle, and he knew enough about the problems his mother’s family had faced to recognize them affecting Lily’s life.
“It’s not as obvious as it was when we first entered Hogwarts and all the Muggle-borns had odd hair and odd clothes and knew nothing about magic,” he said. “Now it’s more subtle. It’s the way you use magic, more cautiously and more carefully than other people, less often. And you’re more...” he paused here, looking for the right word. “More forward and outspoken than a lot of wizards or witches. This is a conservative society, and you clearly didn’t grow up in it.”
“I can see that,” Lily said thoughtfully. “You watch Alice or Sirius or other purebloods, and you can see that magic is completely different for them. They have a sense of entitlement, an expectation that they can bend things their way, and the spells follow.” She smiled wryly. “I’m still busy trying to remember wand movements and incantations.”
Remus nodded. “It wasn’t always such a terrible thing, to be Muggle-born, though,” he said. “Not when I was younger. Or before that, from what I can tell from my parents. It’s the political climate lately, Voldemort, the fear of becoming an outsider as things change. It may not be like this always.”
“I hope not," Lily said. "Has it always been such a terrible thing to be a werewolf?” she asked, glancing at him shyly; they did not talk about this often.
“Hmmm,” Remus said absently. “I suppose so.”
Lily pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
“Can you tell I’m a werewolf?” Remus asked, suddenly curious. “Just by looking at me or the way I act?”
Lily titled her head and eyed him carefully. “If I paid attention I could. We learned about this in Auror training, signs to recognize the untransformed werewolf: a change of coloring around the full moon, the way your eyes dilate and get lighter. As you get older you won’t change back so completely, your eyes will stay that color, and your canines won’t recede. There were a few more things, but I don’t remember what they were.”
Remus unconsciously ran the tip of his tongue along the edge of his teeth. He suddenly remembered a Muggle book his grandmother had read to him once as a child, and leaned towards Lily, teeth bared.
“All the better to eat you with, my dear,” he said and then growled. Lily looked startled and frightened for a moment and then laughed so hard she fell over on the grass, clutching at her side.
Remus lay down next to her, and they lay silent for a moment, looking up at the blue sky and the leaves on the tree above them.
“I don’t care,” Lily said, suddenly decisive. “Things will change. I like the wizarding world anyway.”
Remus smiled. “You do?”
“I do,” Lily said. “Watch this.” She pulled her wand out of her pocket, and, after a quick glance to make certain no one was watching, she pulled her wand in a long, slow arc, and the leaves above them turned orange and yellow and deep crimson and started to fall from the tree.
“Lily!” Remus said, smiling, looking around himself. The park wasn’t crowded, and, indeed, no one had seemed to notice. He pulled out his own wand and aimed it upwards with a flourish.
“What are you doing?” Lily asked, puzzled. “I don’t recognize that.”
“Making the sky a little bluer,” Remus said.
“Really?” Lily asked eagerly, but then she must have seen something odd in Remus’ expression, because she started to laugh.
“You fooled me,” she said.
Remus smiled. “I did.”
They sat in a quiet, easy silence for a few minutes.
“You wouldn’t ever want to be a Muggle again?” Remus asked.
“No,” Lily said. “Would you? I mean, if you had a choice?”
Remus did not know what to say at the time, but more and more lately he was beginning to suspect the answer was no.
*
When being in Muggle London was too exhausting Remus sometimes read the Prophet and thought about home.
There was a cafe around the corner from his bedsit that both Edie and Patrice had told him about, a cafe with excellent Indian food and friendly owners who let him stay as long as he wanted and sometimes came by to sit with him and chat. For Remus it was a window into the wizarding world he had left, because this was where he could find copies of the Prophet.
“Look at the back of the cafe,” Edie had told him. “Next to the bins, there’s a pile of Muggle papers, the Daily Mail, I think. Concentrate on them, and you’ll see they’re actually Prophets with a weak spell disguising them. I’m not sure where they come from, but I read them sometimes when I’m here.” Remus felt awkward rummaging about behind the café, but he did it anyway, and Edie was right, there were inevitably a few recent Prophets there. He would pull them out from behind the bins, dust them off gingerly, and bring them inside the cafe to read.
Whenever he brought a stack of papers in, one of the owners, Mrs. Patil, would bring over a plate of curry or a cup of tea.
“Such a conscientious boy,” Mrs. Patil said approvingly to him one day. “Always reading the news. None of my nephews read the news. The only things they read are those football magazines.”
Remus smiled and thanked her for the tea.
“You don’t strike me as a Daily Mail reader, though,” she said.
“No?” Remus said, flipping past the Quidditch scores, looking for signs that his exile would end soon.
“No,” she said. “I think we still have yesterday’s Guardian. You should try that instead.”
“This will do, thanks,” Remus said, looking up, gesturing to the seat across from him. “But perhaps you want to join me?”
“I think I will,” Mrs. Patil said. “It’s too quiet this afternoon. I’ll get the Guardian first.” She fetched her paper and a cup of tea for herself, and they sat there together, reading, whiling away the afternoon hours, waiting for something to happen.
Next chapter: Dear Sirius