To the Ordinary World (Look at Our Life Now, Tattered and Torn)

Chapter One found here.

Stories play out many ways. There are a great number of terribly clever people that argue history is narrative. Unfortunately they suck at writing, so their point is dense, confused and uses way too many references to French philosophy. Thus, it’s ultimately unclear if they accept the idea that physical events really are story-like or are merely satisfied with claiming that what is recognised as history is crafted: a literary exercise.

To be fair, that is a pretty big deal. Still, there’s an argument that nothing they say actually matters at all. It’s all very… cool story, bro; needs more dragons. But, superficially anyway, it’s a direct challenge to the entire practice of historians and the very notion of History itself. The idea that the course of history is affected by individuals trying to live stories? Now that’s infinitely more fascinating.

It’s not difficult to imagine the two stories running through Potter’s mind. One’s got a happy ending. The other… well, in the other he drowns and Ginny lives. Potter doesn’t think he’s getting out of Azkaban. And it’s really easy to understand why.

Potter knows he doesn’t live in an actual story. Even after ten years in Azkaban. Even after 15 odd years of living among magic. Life is not fixed and controlled by some inscrutable and disinterested narrator. If he falls, he won’t get really big booboos. He doesn’t need to know if his life is comedy or tragedy. He’s got a life sentence to the most miserable and inescapable prison on Earth. And he’s the only person alive who knows how to escape it. Hell, he knows two ways to escape. Swimming through a salty pool of water in his cell, isn’t one of them.

Of course, it’d be very useful for Potter to be living in a story. It’s a bold author that puts a main character in a cell they’re going to die in. An even bolder author that leaves them in solitary for all time. Those sorts of stories are all about introspection, morality, philosophy and politics. Their subjects are usually guilty. Ooh, what bravery to condemn the innocent to years of torture in Azkaban without any escape. And who’s really got the guts to do that? So if Potter was living in a story, he’d almost certainly survive this. Or, at least, he’d wash up on shore, his drowned corpse seemingly reaching out a hand for Ginny… their heads turned, with sightless eyes finally seeing what’d become of them.

Which, for Potter, would be a happy ending. For the hypothetical author, it’d be some kind of metaphor: the final piece of symbolic imagery that would complete the moral argument of the text. Which, on balance, would probably be seen as a happy ending too, even if in universe it’s sad.

Beauty is greater than truth, in fiction.

Of course, Potter and C are very far from beautiful. They’re thin. Okay, fine, it’s the noughties. Thin is good. Hell, skeletally thin is the desired look for women. Somehow. But people aren’t meant to look… blue-ish, with purple undertones and red and white highlights. And that’s without thinking about their hair.

People have hang ups about hair. That’s the truth. Hairless is good. Except on the head. There hair is good, but control is what’s most important. Actually, that’s the same with body hair too. Hairy is natural… primitive… unrefined… uncontrolled. Uneven, jagged cuts can work… as long as everyone knows it’s obviously intentional. Potter and C are escaped convicts. Well, would be. They’re escaping convicts. Intent is not part of the picture. And Potter and C are probably both a little on the hairy side to start with. Nothing some clothes wouldn’t… obscure, of course.

C hasn’t really got clothes. Sure, she wears her blankets like some sort of toga, but to swim who knows how far in a toga? Yeah, no. Potter does have clothes. Mostly. The shirt’s too tight and the trousers almost snug. The classic Bowler Hat Guy look, really. Just without the cool cape and hat. Snape stole the cape and Fudge the hat. But, on reflection, tight clothes are still clothes. Of course, they were designed to be loose and formless, so the Ministry inspectors wouldn’t have to notice how emaciated the prisoners were. From that angle, Potter doesn’t have a uniform, either. And naturally it was the Ministry inspectors who note when prisoners need new uniforms: when they find themselves noticing the prisoner’s condition. There is nothing in Azkaban with a humanitarian design. That’s what makes it Azkaban.

But Azkaban isn’t just a cruel place of amoral guards and immoral governance. No. It’s a magic prison. That grows and changes to fit the arbitrary tastes of wizarding government. But old features can become new bugs. And all magical deals have flaws.

Wizards aren’t just capricious because they’re raised that way.

He stands on the edge of a precipice. Figuratively. In practice he’s in a prison cell he’s never seen properly and never will. Before him stretches the arc of history. That mystical and misty landscape, so obscured and so obviously stolen from Friedrich’s painting it’s sure to appear in an exam, just a few short years hence. Possibility is before him, waiting to collapse into actuality. All he‘s gotta to do is… jump.

You think it’s that easy?

It is.

This is Azkaban. Whatever’s down there is better. By definition. Ginny wants this.

There’s no way for them to know, but they hit the water at the same time. C did it better. She’s better at swimming. She helped teach Potter to swim. In another life. But mostly it was Ron. He’d always loved to swim. In the water, everyone’s a pauper.

It’s quite impossible to describe that first rush. It can kill. Water is dangerous. Cold water is more dangerous. And these are not healthy swimmers. These are not practiced swimmers. These are prisoners on the brink of death, basically… prisoners trying to swim in pitch black, salty water with no sense of geography or destination. They should be doomed.

They swim left. Potter’s cell was to C’s left. And all they can do is keep swimming left.

She’s faster. She’s sure he’s there now. She wants to tell him. Let him know. But she can’t. She either keeps this breath or she dies. It’s just that simple.

He’s slower. He’s sure she’s there, just behind, no, next to him. He wants to tell her. But he can’t. Just like he couldn’t scream. The water stings his wounds. And he’s got too many. He keeps this breath. She asked him to. It’s just that simple.

It’s easier than she remembers swimming in the pond at home. No, not home. At the Burrow. And much easier than the Black Lake. It’s like the water’s willing her on. Some kind of current, even. Perhaps, on occasion, it bursts up through the rocks to the surface… drenching wherever it sprays. And it’s fast. But that strength… it’s squeezing her chest.

Whoomp!

Azkaban was an island before it was a prison. Not a nice island, sure, but an island. It had geology. Plants. Dementors. Rabbits. It’s still got those things. Rabbits are tough to get rid of: Dementors can’t build fences. But there was one place where it was just geology. Huge, jagged rocks. Massive boulders, pummelled into gravel by the terrible currents of Azkaban’s sea. A squarish kind of platform where a wizard might survey the misery that awaits above. Or where the might of the ocean might dump a prisoner. Prisoners.

Potter feels it first, the wind. C feels more. She moves, her sharp bones digging into the rock below her and the body above. Her right shoulder’s exposed. She feels the wind. They were outside!

“Ginny?”

“Harry?”

They still can’t see. It’s night. There’s no light… it’s Azkaban. It’s night. Breakfast appeared to have been dinner. But, then, it was Azkaban. They should have expected that. And it’s winter. Too many clouds for stars. Or the moon. If they were to be hunted, they’d need skilled hunters. Those that sought challenges.

“Where are your clothes?”

C shakes her head and pulls herself from under Harry. She’s looking at him, still feeling the scratch of his beard, of his clothes, as her naked form squeezed out from between the rock and his body. There was a time she’d had dreams like that. Sort of. She’d been small, not young. They’d featured moments like this. Her… naked, exposed. Him… there, able, wanting to look. “They fell apart.”

“Here, take my shirt.” Potter can barely see a shape in front of him. There’d been no-where safe to put his glasses in the cell. He’d tried to leave them next to the slab, on the floor. It’d worked for a long time. But it takes just one day. One time to accidentally brush them, instead of grabbing them. He’d had that one day. But it’s dark. In the dark, it’s not his eyes that are the problem. It’s the dark. He’s always liked that. Appreciated it. And Ginny was still close enough to reach.

“Thanks.” C didn’t feel self-conscious, given the gloom. But when she rolled the saturated fabric to its fullest extent and felt it reach the top of her thighs, she suddenly felt short. It’s quite a thing to spend ten years without reference to scale only to find another thing Azkaban might have stolen. And for whatever reason, the lonely slab in Azkaban’s most dangerous rock formations was helping C think. Really think. “We’ve got to reach shore. I think the current will take us there.”

Potter paused… his sense of time was, back? Like there was previously only now but here, once more, there was then and next. But that wasn’t it.

Potter shook his head, the damp hair slamming into his face reminding him that he didn’t know himself, not any more. Not after the dark of Azkaban. He had to resemble Sirius. Oh! Sirius! “I never asked, but… I think that must’ve been how Sirius swam to shore.”

It was funny. C spent years in the coldest hole of a prison whose jailers’ hearts were ice and there’d never been a chill like this in her blood. Never. “It’s… true? You knew Sirius Black?”

Oh, God! Potter felt his heart beat faster, his breathing shorten and shallow. Ginny didn’t know. He hadn’t told her? How hadn’t he told her? “He was innocent, Ginny. It was Pettigrew. That night Ron hurt his leg, we had Pettigrew, but Snape let him escape.”

She must’ve forgotten what emotions were like: C was sure horror never gave way to relief so quickly… before. It was a decent theory.

All they had to do was jump.

It was that easy.

There are stories about British beaches. Photos of little red haired girls in the sixties, dressed up in bobble hats and way too many layers of what’s presumably wool (it’s the sixties). That’s not what a holiday at the beach should be like, right? But if it was just an ordinary day, it’s certainly not what you’d imagine taking a photo of in the sixties. People weren’t frivolous when it was film.

Oh, sure, there are plenty of desolate beaches in allegedly “sunny” and “warm” places. Don’t go to a West Coast beach on a cold day. Especially if it’s got black sand. But it’s not the same. You can’t imagine that kind of photo… nothing but beach for miles around and absolutely nothing about it suggesting “this is a beach holiday”. You can always imagine those West Coast waves with surfers. Or the sun in the sky and sand so hot it burns the skin. And anyone who could go to the beach would just wait for another, better, day. The country is, after all, mostly coast. And a lot of drownings.

With British beaches you think hordes of people who don’t know any better. And even then that’s just Blackpool. Which is mostly promenade, anyway.

With British beaches you think “holiday in Spain, instead”. And if that’s unfair you don’t feel guilty. Why? Because you’re thinking about British beaches and even the Brits would rather go to Spain.

This is a British beach.

And those aren’t drowned bodies.

Oh, sure, they’re definitely bodies. They’re just alive. Barely. Flotsam on the tide of fate, ignorant of the law… outlaws loose and running. That sort of thing. Er, person.

Well, not just people. They do have clothes now. Mostly. Potter’s shirtless: the washed out light of dawn just bright enough to catch the odd prematurely grey hair among the many plastered to his chest by sea water. C’s bottomless, but between Potter’s extra year, the overlarge design, her stunted growth and a pureblood’s insistence that prisoner’s were unworthy of robes, not immodest. Certainly not appropriately dressed for… anywhere really, but enough to stagger up the dunes and then along the road to any sign of habitation.

It’s not as arduous as it sounds. She can lean on Potter. And he on her. Literally, for a change.

There are genres of fiction, and certain documentarians, that like to focus on the depiction of human misery and exhaustion. Sometimes the point is cathartic but usually it’s about drama. Not every moment needs to be seen. Not every moment should be seen. The human mind is powerful and capable of envisioning quite a lot. It does not need to sustain itself on little match girls dying in the street. It certainly can but as a matter of morality, of dignity and decency, it does not need to. Yet, what world would result? Surely, a distinction must be drawn between fact and fiction. But, then, wouldn’t imagining the horrors and miseries of existence be worse. Or, rather, false. What one imagines a life of dignity and purpose, others see as pathetic and wretched. They cannot, for all the vaunted power of human reason, conceive otherwise. To not document the contrary experiences would be to leave the imagination to run wild, invent its false ideas and hail them not only as truth, but the only possible, the objective, truth.

The difference, it seems, is that there is nothing gained from showing the athlete in the misery of defeat. Nothing except the exploitation of despair. But to not photograph little girls stalked by vultures or drowning in mud would be to perpetuate something wrong. And by that virtue, one of difference, what is to be found in the slow progress of Potter and C from their beachhead? An example to bring to bear in some moral discourse? How?

This seems nothing but a momentary episode of struggle, an experience of effort and desperation… no different to watching slaves being torn apart by lions. An offering of a private, human truth, robbed of its dignity and packaged simply for the consumption of some faceless audience, baying for metaphorical blood; its appetite, regardless of any pretensions, still nothing more than ‘I want pain, suffering and wasted effort’.

Or, rather, it would be, were anyone present on the isolated stretch of coast to bear witness and record. There wasn’t. How could there be? It was just them, abandoned and broken… whatever they were or could have been, now merely the drive to continue their escape.

It was Potter who woke first.

In that desperate climb above the tide line, his effort and strength nearly gone from the temperature and mental cost of trying to keep with the current, Potter managed only a single four legged step clear. C pushed herself harder.

She was smaller: each metre gained took that much more. It was natural that she’d rise later. And Potter waited. Not just because he was tired still. Not just because he knew he’d need help to walk any meaningful distance. Not even because without glasses, every footfall hid who knew what in the blur of colours and vague shapes. No, Potter waited because not even Azkaban can take everything from a person.

Somewhere C remembered the feeling. That sensation of the light beyond the darkness slowly becoming too much, far too much to ignore and thus the wakeful state’s triumph over the natural inclination to rest, to sleep. Ten years! Ten long years C went without it. Ten long years C woke in darkness, without a sense of reality. And now! Now, C found herself in the latter hours of dawn, seagulls busy and wind rushing overhead… waves breaking and crashing to shore and the breath of her one companion those ten years, audible. No. Visible! C watched the faint steam of Harry’s breath for just a moment as her brain acclimated to a world of sensations beyond ‘cold’.

It took just a few moments.

Perhaps magic’s tendency to rob its wielders of all sense of perspective came from its physical effects on the body? Ten years without light and yet C rose, albeit groggily, into the light of day as anyone would. She may as well have bounced from wall to garden gate. And what better place than this to observe the welts, cuts, bruises and scars that littered both C and Potter’s bodies? The reality that C, too, knew wizards and witches are hard wearing?

It’s all just dwelling on misery, at the end of the day. Shameless attempts to glory in the hardships those ten dark years inflicted. A rotten and corrupt endeavour that would cause the hypothetical observer to miss the raw dignity of that leaning, crooked, arms linked around shoulders walk along the wet sand. To miss the true humanity of the moments in favour of the superficial, the faux-authenticity of pain.

Which is not to say that the first house they saw brought rescue. It is not even to say that when they’d finally stumbled through the low gate and down the cobbled path of the second, to (somehow and beyond all expectation) politely knock on a peeling, red painted door that they received an answer. It is to say that when the little car with its fluorescent green and deep blue livery and flashing lights found them, much further down the beach than any believed plausible, that they were met with a quiet presence and a reserved understanding, so unique to the community constable, not burdened with a charge to protect and serve but merely a mission to assist.

To fixate on the misery would be to remember that the little car was dispatched. That there were those that saw and did nothing. It is to judge, rather than record. To find a story that not everyone is interested in telling, or would think to tell.

For ten years there had been nothing and no-one. Now there was something and someone. Why would Potter and C care why? Even if Harry and Ginny had? The symbolic resonance of their pain?

It seems unlikely.

Fiction cares more about beauty, than truth.

Hospitals suck. Basically everyone agrees. You can tell by all the variations on the joke that hospitals kill people. Think stuff like ‘Gran was alive when she went in, but dead when she came out’.

This is a hospital. Therefore, it sucks.

On the other hand, if there was somewhere Potter really needed to be when they brought him in, it was a hospital.

That’s the problem with stories and jokes. In real life, hospitals are awesome. It’s just in fiction, it’s necessary to give them a point. And unless the main character is a doctor, it’s hard to make a hospital anything other than speed bump in the plot. Patients come in and either die or get better. This is not a dynamic conducive to advancing the grand story between star crossed lovers, solving the murder or exposing the politician.

Making the hospital awesome is quite a perspective switch. Especially since even doctors give themselves to the hospitals suck narrative. Imagine a daily grind where one of the major outputs of your effort is dead people. Can’t be good for the soul.

Still, it’s the noughties. Hospitals are a jewel in society’s self-congratulatory crown. A key piece of why people aren’t afraid of cities. Why there’s a new public health, one that doesn’t care so much about contagious disease, but life-styles. Imagine a society so successful its biggest problem is itself. Doesn’t that sound better than the alternative? Now ain’t that just the truth.

Yeah. Hospitals are awesome.

Doesn’t mean they’re not boring.

Doctors aren’t too difficult to find in hospitals. This is logical. Hospitals employ doctors. A hospital without doctors is… like imagining a homeopathic A&E.

Alice is a doctor.

There are all sorts of doctors out there, but that’s not really important. It’d be like fixating on the enormous pimple Alice had on her forehead that first day she treated C. The point of Alice is that she fixes people. Well, that’s crude and reductionist. Alice has a very nice home-life. She wins prizes for her goldfish. She got the idea out of a book. She wants to get married, but is waiting for a law change. But mainly Alice is a doctor, since this particular hospital demands long hours and up to date medical knowledge.

Terrence is also a doctor.

Much like Alice, it’s not really important to think about Terrence all that much. The main thing is that he tries to save people. He doesn’t go by Terrence. He’s vegetarian, but feels guilty for not being vegan. He likes to go rock climbing and is worried about going bald prematurely. His girlfriend’s always telling him to consider a shaved head look. But that’s neither here nor there. What matters about Terrence is that he treated Potter.

Sometimes doctors talk to each other in the hospital. There are lots of places in a hospital where they can do so. But sometimes doctors find themselves carpooling since they live either side of the same town park. It’s Terrence’s turn to drive, but his girlfriend’s brother and his kids were round for Christmas so he’s driving her work van. It’s white. It’s a van.

“Do you get much out of her?” He asked with his heavy Welsh accent.

Alice’s jaw tightened, it was a quirk: some found it endearing. “No. Definitely not.”

“Is it true that she seems completely confused by basically everything?”

“Yes.” Alice paused, “what about yours?”

“No… he seems no more confused than any other patient. Even apologised for being unable to remember his NHS number.”

“He gave a name?”

“Er… Vernon Dudley. I think it’s fake.”

“Mine refuses to be called anything but C.”

It was a few weeks before their shifts lined up again. Alice drove. She refrained from commenting on Terrence’s new… well, he called it a haircut.

“How’s yours?”

“Mr Dudley’s making a very promising recovery.” Terrence clicked his tongue and looked at the ceiling of Alice’s comfortable blue estate car, “I… I think the absence of continued police contact helped.”

“Still on the fake name theory? Really”

“He gives a name, she’s not talking. Their injuries don’t just happen, Alice!”

“So he locked himself in a cellar with her for years? Why?”

“Some weird sex thing, I’m sure.”

Alice was lucky she was a jaw tightener. Raising both hands to the sky and baring her teeth to God, as some were wont to do, was not safe driving. “I’m pretty sure they’re both virgins.”

“An extra weird sex thing.”

“And what about you? You’re still treating him even though you think he’s some kind of monster.”

“He’s a patient. Refusing to treat him would mean a lot of other people wouldn’t get treated and I’d be unemployed.”

“That’s what I think happened. Someone was holding them for someone else. That other person gets bored or forgets about them, the money runs out and the jailer scarpers.”

“That’s absurd.”

“I listened to a 24 year old woman tell me that she’d forgotten what menstruating felt like, today. That she could remember her reaction, but not the feeling. What’s absurd is obsessing about why they’re here now.”

Terrence tensed his arms and curled them in towards his face before relaxing. He stared out the window until they were almost at his house, his girlfriend’s van visible from the corner against the narrow street. “I guess it won’t be long to discharge; what’s going to happen then I wonder?”

“Maybe another week.” Alice sighed, “I don’t care why they’re here or what happened to them or where they go next. What matters is that we’re helping them, now. That’s the job.”

He turned as he got out of the car, “What is the point of helping people if we’re just putting them back into the world that hurt them, Alice?”

And as Alice drove away, she found herself muttering under her breath, “That we helped, even if just for a little while.”

Potter allowed himself a moment to enjoy the sun and the breeze. Just a moment, of course, because things were very much up in the air. It’s not difficult to understand why.

The hero of a fictional or mythological tale is frequently confronted with a symbolic choice. Sometimes this choice comes in the form of two contrasting mentors or, even, co-protagonists. Does the hero struggle with their own nature? Well, the wily author reckons, how about offering two siblings to tempt the hero? Who does the hero choose, the reader wonders? The sister and her humanity or the brother, the animal? It’s a cunning scheme. Character development and mystery all in the one option! Of course, this option probably requires most of the narrative to play out. Simpler, by far, to offer the hero a literal choice of path: the crossroads of destiny.

Now, what would an author be saying if their hero was stuck on a plaza, apparently able to pursue any direction imaginable?

There is another school of thought that argues cigars are only ever cigars. Symbolism is ridiculous and absurd, they say. There is plot. There is character. But mostly there’s plot. And whether a real person would actually do something.

In real life, a stranger in a strange town is confused by a plaza because they are a stranger in a strange town. Unless they’re literally comparing their circumstances to stories they remember, it seems quite impossible to imagine any real person marvelling at the symbolic potential of a plaza. But, to take it as literally impossible would be foolish. Who knows? Maybe the stranger has spent weeks in the company of a man who needs to structure life into patterns of cause and effect, with nothing better to do than entertain those notions? Maybe the stranger is wondering what a hidden observer would make of the choice of that direction over another? Maybe the stranger is wondering what possibilities close with that choice over this one?

Sometimes a stranger in a strange town needs to remain a stranger, but not in a strange town. Such a person would have a great deal of interest in cause and effect… in the outcome of the path not taken.

C crossed the plaza with purpose. She looked a lot better than when she’d gone into the hospital. So did Potter, of course, but Alice had proved a better judge of C’s size than Potter’s. Where her second hand muggle t-shirt and jeans fit C well, the suit Alice found for Potter was made for a larger man who’d followed 90s fashions closely. It wasn’t the 1990s. Worse still, the salmon colour scheme did not suit the auburn beard Potter opted to keep, despite the barber’s advice. He did agree to have it tidied up, though. Fitting in was important.

“That style suits you, Ginny.”

She couldn’t help but smile at the comment, C reflected. Not just that Harry still called her Ginny, but that he liked what the hairdresser termed a long pixie cut. “Thanks.” There seemed like there was another part to this exchange. It felt familiar. From before. “I…”

“It’s the suit, isn’t it? Ten years in prison and I still have to wear Dudley’s second hand clothes. You’d think there’d have to be some upside to being wrongly imprisoned, but it seems not.”

“Dudley liked salmon?”

“Along with tuna, trout, bass and, of course, cod. Honestly, Dudley liked anything you put on his plate, provided there was lots of it.”

C laughed. It reminded her of Ron. The laughter died in her throat. “Do you think whoever it was got them, too? The Dursleys, I mean.”

Potter frowned briefly. “No. They’d have mentioned it at the trial, I think.”

“Maybe it happened later. McGonagall didn’t attack Snape for turning you into a Death Eater until after it came up in the trial.”

“Hmm…” Potter realised he was scratching the back of his neck. The doctor, Terrence, was very clear that scratching was a bad idea. He stopped. “I can’t remember them being mentioned at all. Actually, that’s… who was mentioned?”

“Well, they charged us with McGonagall’s death after she and Snape killed each other…”

“That was the day after Snape was accused of training me to become the next Voldemort, right?”

“Yeah.” C nodded, but clearly concentrating on her fingers, “Dumbledore had that heart attack, Fred and George hanged themselves because of their gambling debts to us, Sirius Black was killed after murdering Stan Shunpike because he knew one your aliases… and…”

“I think that’s it, Ginny.”

“It’s a completely absurd list, Harry. We did none of those things and I don’t believe for a second Dumbledore couldn’t save himself from a heart attack.” C stamped her feet and flexed her hands. Then she froze and turned her once warm brown eyes to meet Harry’s similarly dead green eyes, “There was one more person. You were conspiring to fix the Triwizard Tournament with Ludo Bagman, who conveniently vanished.”

Potter stepped towards C and wrapped his arms around her, “We’ll find him. All we need is wands. But where would we find any? It’s not like we can go to Ollivanders…”

C took Potter’s body in her arms and returned the embrace, “I forgot. Magical Britain’s pretty much still a foreign country to you isn’t it?”

There was a slight pause before Potter broke the hug, stepping back once more to look on C’s face, “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s simple really: your grandparents’ wands are probably still in the completely abandoned house at Godric’s Hollow.” Cs heart quickened at the desperate, almost hungry look in Harry’s eyes: he was still alive! not merely living. “And if they’re not… I’m sure one of the other houses in the area has a few ancestral wands.”

“We’ll have to go in disguise. I’m already surprised no-one’s come after us. Remember what it was like when Sirius escaped? Maybe the Dementors think we’re dead? It’s not like we were ever inspected and how would the Dementors tell anyone anyway?”

“You need a hat. And the hairdresser mentioned that muggles can change hair colours? Would we have enough money to get to Godric’s Hollow?”

“We can hitch hike.”

Author’s Note

Ugh, dialogue. I just can’t make it work. It was… kind of okay, before, since I could pretend it was just about the darkness of the cells but now it’s outside and I did that perspective switch to try and get out of the hospital/recovery period.

I think I’ve kept the tone/narrator fairly consistent and hopefully the tense switch worked. I wasn’t joking before. I never used to struggle with tense control but I just can’t do it now.

The stuff about British beaches is based on an old family photograph. The stuff about West Coast beaches is based on personal experience. The stuff about Blackpool is based on Wikipedia, but it really did use to be the Big Beach Destination in the UK.

The History stuff is all true. There are people (the disciples of Hayden White, if you will) who produce very, very dense post-structuralist takes on History. Elements of what they say are true, of course. For example… as an exercise, consider treating Australian history from the North. The traditional narrative of Australia is as an isolated island continent lost and separated from everywhere else. And from the West, East and South, it’s true… there’s nothing but sea. But from the North… well, Australia is just one very big island at the end of a very long island chain. If your entire perception of Australia/Global history doesn’t change from this simple change in perspective, I have absolutely no qualms in saying you’re doing history wrong.

Hospitals… well, it’s a little nod to Coronavirus in part (the whole new public health stuff) and the anti-hospital joke stuff is something I seem to come across a lot. I guess I should have addressed babies, but… yeah. Maybe I can deal with that later…

Hopefully what I’m trying to do with the “is the Ministry chasing us?” question is emerging. Likewise, I hope it’s clearer why Mr and Mrs Weasley abandoned Ginny. I decided at some point that it was sort of… would Ron’s horrific death be enough to make them react like that? The twins also had to go… I decided that whatever happened (Dumbledore alive or no), Umbridge would be the High Inquisitor and therefore the twins would be counted as more enemies.

I feel like I might be going back to get rid of that line about Umbridge. It’s starting to feel like the story would work better if why they’re in prison is a mystery to the audience as well. I’m already going back to edit in a solve for a “but wouldn’t that give the game away?” so…

I now expect, unfortunately for the hopes of this ever being finished as a story, that it’s a four chapter thing. Prison. Escape. Chase. Justice. And probably an epilogue…

Oh! Chapter Title is a (very slightly corrupted) lyric from Hold Me Now.