I knew when I was very young that my mother considered me ugly. I was seven, and being dressed for a birthday party, and nothing was right, and there wasn’t anything I could do to fix it. The fabric pulled wrong over my rounded, little girl stomach, and my wrists weren’t dainty at all and neither were my ankles. They were hard and strong and already formed by years of grasping, reaching. Those swollen joints were older than their years, and I hadn’t realised until I was too much of a person to know it was bad, but I was still too little of a person to change anything about myself.
The dress robes I refused to wear, in the end, and mother didn’t push very hard to get me into them, and then I knew for sure that I was not what she wanted, that the two of us - Phineas and myself - were such bitter disappointments.
I was a good daughter, I had to be. Perhaps the pressure of that crystallised me into a bad person.
Daphne was always so light I used to lie awake at night wondering how she did it. I hated her - we were best friends - she understood the way I hated and she hated too, so in the end it made sense that we did everything together. Sometimes her sister would come along and we would be united then, turned against the interloper who was less interesting than us, less clever than us, less than us. We always were better as a three.
I was better when there were more of us. I was better than everyone, and it enraged me when people didn’t know. I despised all the people that could exist outside of my topiared edges and be so blind as to not see how they were wrong. That they could be loved and love who they were despite their shortcomings. Was no one pointing them out? I took it upon myself to be that person, a noble undertaking. Nobility ran in my blood, as well as other poisoned things that you couldn’t buy even if you wanted to, secrets and histories and smoke, really, it was all smoke, potion fumes that became dense and solidified when they hit glass.
All my edges were glass. Brittle and angry and ready to break, let the poison smoke seep out, a pollutant bomb. Or perhaps that was just how I wanted to be. I wanted them all to suffer as I did because I did it so beautifully, but perhaps the reality was that I never had been truly dangerous and the bomb would only have blown me apart.
London after the war was already blown apart, and the sharp edges of the city hurt in all the wrong ways. My father and brother were dead and that was a relief, and so it was only mother and I that had to navigate things, learn to breathe again, to dress, to think, to speak, to say, to laugh, to scheme. We had to learn it all from scratch but this time the rules were different and they were being made by the worst people I knew. I remember thinking, how on earth is the new world being made by these creatures? Everything they touch turns tufted and worn, warm. Nothing gleamed. Nothing worked.
I did, though. I had to get a job, both Daphne and I did, and we moved in together into a pointy little flat with edges that felt like home and walls that we left bare for months until we finally found something to put on them.
I had always felt rather formless, it was easier to empty myself than to think of reasons to resist, after all, and so I found myself filled up with other people’s opinions. It made sense that we worked in a newsroom. Daphne knew someone in the magazine department and sometimes, when we were drunk and softened and scared we would say things like “one day I’ll edit interiors and you’ll do the fashion pages and everyone will look up to us to tell them how to be.”
That kind of dreaming made my head swoop and ache, a little like the drinking, and I said “yes, Daphne. I want that too.”
When I used to go for lunch with mother - salads, picked over like we were two little birds though I always felt more like a vulture those days - I would come back and think I wonder if Daphne would let me switch. My ankles and wrists hadn’t improved, and I had taken to wearing thick bracelets to cover them up, which probably only made them look worse.
“You always accessorise so well,” Daphne told me when we dressed to go out.
We did a lot of that, dressing together and going places together. I didn’t know where any of our other friends were those first few months. It was only once we got some portraits on the wall that they started to return.
Theo was first, which was a bore, because he was always the least fun. He brought us a bottle of champagne which we drank even though it tasted off, and we smoked french cigarettes off our tiny terrace, and said wouldn’t it all be better if we were in Paris. I had no idea why he wasn’t, why he was lingering about in our festering corner of the world. His father had also died in the war, another relief, and there was no one else. Poor, orphan Theo. He carried it very well, you would never have known he had no family left and not many friends either. He had the look about him which made you think his solitary-ness was a choice - no one that beautiful could have been so lonely, after all.
After that came Blaise, they always followed one another. Theo would do things first, but Blaise would do them so decisively you would forget that Theo had even been there at all. Blaise bought us champagne too, several bottles that tasted nicer, and flowers. He entertained us with stories of him venturing out into the muggle world. Blaise was an enormous snob, but he never let that stop him from being the centre of attention, and never let something like blood get in the way of the things that really mattered to him, which were shopping, and sex. The three of us ended that night sticky and entangled, and we woke the next morning and pretended that nothing had happened at all.
Draco took a year to come around, but we excused him because of prison. I had written once, mainly out of duty than of anything to say. I think I told him that Daphne and I had jobs, because I thought it would make him laugh. I made all of it seem jolly, a word that I hated and never used. All our sharp angles and quiet lunches and long days at the office where people hated us were smoothed over in a sort of cosy gloss. He never wrote back - perhaps it was too much for him, to think we were all having such a lovely time. I should have been honest, but I never had been.
When he was out it became clear that we had all been waiting, or at least that’s how I felt. As though I had been waiting to be summoned, to be relevant again. I cried myself to sleep afterwards though it was more for me than for him, that realisation that none of it mattered any more. I tried not to stare at the ink on his neck but wasn’t good at looking away. Blaise was always better at that - he knew what to say to make it seem daring and funny. He suggested more tattoos, make him look dangerous, he talked about sex appeal. I drank up Draco’s thin smiles like gruel, and then the conversation moved on, but my eyes remained stuck.
Draco spent a lot of time in our flat in those early days. Sometimes we would get visits from Narcissa also, but he always refused to speak to her. I felt sorry for the woman, the warmest I had ever felt for her, but she could sense my pity and stayed away from me. She would stand outside and wait for her hair to reflect off the cracked mirror we had over the mantlepiece, it was broken when we got it, a beacon for her only son to follow. He never did, but he never spoke about why. Or maybe we never asked - I can’t quite remember.
Daphne started to skip work. At first I was delighted. I blamed my problems on her - she was so beautiful and light and easy that people actually spoke to her, whereas I hovered like a guard dog, and didn’t laugh easily. I knew my work was better, I always had been better at things you could improve upon. One night Daphne had tried to tell me that you could improve on things like small talk, too, but I didn't believe her. The only way I had of speaking was cruel, and then she poured me another drink and I softened for her, like I always did.
I thought if she wasn’t there then maybe they would realise I was good. Maybe they’d look past my ankles and my wrists and see the work underneath it all, a thought that both thrilled and terrified me. I felt sure thinking such things meant I was on the cusp of some sort of break through, but it never really materialised.
People didn’t soften towards me but I was happy anyway. I liked coming home to her, peppering her with news about the day and making her soup. She couldn’t keep much down, and I sat on her bed, feeding her and making her laugh. It was the warmest I had felt in years. I found new pictures for the walls. Draco started to talk about moving somewhere. We turned a corner into Christmas, and I felt sure that this year I would want a tree. I pictured myself cleaning up all the pine needles underneath it - it would be a little routine. Daphne could sit on the sofa and laugh at me as I tried to learn household charms, and then we would tuck into to roast dinners, fat white sandwiches stuffed with leftovers, dripping puddings. I would wake up with dainty bones.
Daphne returned back to work in early December. She glowed with health - people made jokes all the time about her sickness being a holiday. We shared secret smiles, and I knew she was thanking me for taking good care of her.
“It’s almost as if you didn’t need me at all,” she breezed, and I didn’t know what to say because I had always resented her and wouldn’t know what to do if she wasn’t there.
I was pulled in for a meeting with one of the Interior Magazine people in Daphne’s first week back. They wanted to give me a job. I couldn’t believe it, and spent most of the time staring at the desk rather than making eye contact with the man. I hadn’t seen him before, but Daphne and I were usually tucked out of sight by the news desks, ready to run around at any point to deliver letters, follow up leads, and generally do all the work none of the real journalists wanted. There had been a minor scandal when we were hired - we had been told about it one lunch by a younger journalist, a man, looking to hurt. Apparently people ‘like us’ hadn’t been desirable employees. I had spent so long convincing myself that people wanted to be like us, that I hadn’t understood at the time what he’d even meant.
Daphne always wore heels then, and she was terribly slow when sauntering around. Perhaps that was why the Interior and not the Fashion magazine picked me - they must have thought my calfskin loafers were sensible.
Helmut told me that the job paid horribly and I’d be expected to work all hours. There was a paltry sum on offer for expenses, which I would only be able to access once I had proven myself. I wasn’t given a strict timetable within which to achieve this, but it didn’t matter because I was used to being in a state of proving, rising and falling in a fragile and uneven fashion. The desk he sat behind was yew, unfashionable at the time but certainly not ugly. I thought of our shabbily decorated apartment and the fantasy Christmas tree I had conjured and said yes. That lunch time I went out and bought fabric for four striped cushions to put on the sofa. I spent a fortune getting them made - all my wages that month. I ate more lunches with mother to save money.
I couldn’t work out if it would be better to say I just didn’t think when I accepted the job, but that wasn’t true. I thought of Daphne immediately, and I said yes anyway. I wasn’t sure why she had always wanted to work in Interiors when she wore such impractical shoes, and I didn’t let my ignorance stop me.
I told her that evening. I’d made us a trifle, a boozy one. I have no idea why. I hated jelly, and cream. She just stared at it, and refused to eat any of it, and then she had cried. That was the worst bit. I couldn’t abide crying, engaged in it myself only very secretly, and only on special occasions. The fact that she did it in front of me seemed appalling. I walked round the terraced houses for hours, seeing the shapes of our neighbourhood shift in the lamplight, wishing to get mugged. When I came back the trifle was smashed in the sink, and I ate bits of it like that, half hoping for a shard of glass.
Draco hadn’t been home for a week, and Daphne started wearing flats to work. It was ten days until Christmas. I’d spent all my money on those cushions and didn't know what to buy people, but that didn’t matter as I wasn’t speaking to anyone. I was given my first work assignment, which meant I would have to travel to Yorkshire just days before the holiday. I couldn’t say no, and I didn’t tell Daphne where I was going. I expected her to change the locks while I was out.
Yorkshire was bleak and comforting. A wrinkled old pea of a wizard wanting to show me his garden shed. In it was the largest collection of gnomes I had ever seen, but they were all frozen, taxidermied in some way. It wasn’t until later that he told me they were plaster casts, and I had spent the day walking alongside a murderer and thought nothing of it. We ate cake his wife had baked, filled with currents and soaked in rum, and drank tea that filled me up, big robust cups that almost made me want to laugh. I took photos as best I could - I wasn’t allowed a photographer yet - and made sketches in the margins of my notes. The pea wizard even admired them, and I ripped one out of my notes to give to him. The generosity impressed all three of us, and they assured me they would hang it up on the door. My loafers didn’t seem out of place there, and neither did my ankles and big appetite, in fact, I came away feeling full.
The flat was dark when I returned and the locks hadn’t been changed. I stood in the hall in my knickers, hovering my way to the bathroom as silently as I could. Daphne and I hated each other, after all. I couldn’t work out why this argument felt different to all the rest.
She had threatened to go home for Christmas, but in the end it was just her and me, sitting in opposite armchairs. I was glad the sofa cushions hadn’t arrived. I tried to make tea the same way but it didn’t work, and the brew tasted limp in our mouths. Daphne didn’t want to drink, didn’t want to eat. She was starting to look puffy, despite her lack of appetite. I suggested we go to the hospital, and she told me she knew what was wrong with her.
I didn’t know how I hadn’t realised it before. I was so stupid. Six months - a testament to how slim she had been if it took me that long to notice, if it took her that long to stop fitting into her clothes. The morning sickness had come on late, but she told me that was normal for her family, her cursed family with blood more polluted than mine. We never spoke about the father. I thought about Draco robotically thrusting into me the first night he had come back, I thought about her and Blaise and me, and then wondered if the sex had continued, without me. I shouldn’t have been angry, I didn’t have any right to be, but the imagined possibility made me furious. Theo I wrote off, though perhaps I shouldn’t have. They were the only men we knew, the only men she would have kissed.
I thought about us, and our life. I wondered what the baby would look like, whether it would be well. Daphne told me it was a secret, and I stupidly said that it wouldn’t be a secret for much longer. She refused to talk to me until the New Year.
My article was published, gnome drawings and all. Helmut said I had a good eye and a good angle. It was the first time that anyone had ever told me anything kind, and I stared at him. That night I dreamed of the baby, of soft squishy limbs and downy skulls and tight grasping fists and I woke up with empty arms. I told Daphne I wanted to help her, and she laughed at me and was cruel.
“What do you know about looking after a baby, Pans.”
She was right, I didn’t know anything.
My ignorance didn’t put it off - she arrived early, a small thing that looked just like her mother. I couldn’t believe it, as though she had removed all trace of her father in the womb. Maybe that was why she was in such a rush to get out, to escape the essence of him that still swum in Daphne.
It was the two of us in the delivery room. She had asked me last minute to come, and I held her hand as tight as she wanted to, and I wiped the sweat off her brow, and I even told her that she was strong, not something I had not ever considered a complement before but in the face of bringing a person into the world became something I realised was a good thing. Daphne said I was a bitch.
I had read about post birth hormones but I wasn’t aware they were contagious. I swam in that fearsome new love with Daphne as she fed her child, and Daphne and the baby cried. The next weeks and months were blurred with fatigue and fights. I had to go back to work of course, the baby wasn’t mine, though every time I held her I thought she might be. She had perfect blonde hair and a tiny turned up nose and I felt so relieved she was pretty it cut me off at the knees.
The boys hadn’t been round for months, perhaps Daphne had told them to stay away. Draco ignored her, emerging and looking better even while we had worn grey faces with dark cushioned eyes. The baby had been sick all over my sofa cushions, several times over. I thought Daphne might have been burping her over them out of spite, but I found the stains mattered less to me than her alive little limbs.
Draco took one look at her and laughed out loud. I took him carefully off my fatherhood list. He had come to invite us to dinner - with Hermione Granger of all people, an insufferable, unconscionable know-it-all. Daphne didn’t know why, but I could sense this one. I knew Draco more than he wanted me to, and his eyes gleamed when he talked about her, and I hardened my heart against it. The baby had softened me, and we both refused to leave the house.
Draco misinterpreted us - either deliberately or masculinely - and turned up with food and Hermione. She was too soft among the sharp edges, the baby loved her. I could tell Daphne was jealous, and that made me feel better about being jealous, too. That evening we cuddled together, the three of us, and said horrid things about her - how ugly she was, how boring she was, how tasteless she was. You wouldn’t have known it if you spoke to Draco, he was half in love with her already. I wondered how she had saved him, whether she had even wanted to. Perhaps it was accidental, perhaps she was another one of those people who good things just happened to.
The baby grew up quickly and slowly all at once. Every day seemed to have an impossible number of hours to fill, and yet months passed quicker than minutes. When Daphne came to the end of her maternity leave I tried to be as tactful as possible. She was only too happy to stay at home and continue to take care of the child. We told my mother, who was horrified and cut me off, like she had always longed for. I felt an immense amount of peace, finally being able to please her.
I got fat, Daphne did too. Not on purpose, but accidentally, and we both wore it badly. Sometimes I’d stroke her stomach and tell her it looked beautiful on her, and she would tell me I was cruel. I never meant it cruelly, but perhaps I had spent so long being myself it all came out that way. I was aware then of the baby listening. She had such big demanding eyes that I was sure she was cataloguing. I did not want her to grow up scared of her wrists like I was, but I also desperately did not know what to do if she was ugly.
We didn’t have to worry about that. The baby was beautiful, perfect. Her blood tests came back negative, a miracle, a true honest miracle, that neither of us even knew we were expecting. Suddenly I started to understand things that had seemed so mystifying to me. When I couldn’t sleep, I worried the baby was too fragile to help me grow up as well, and the weight of me would break her. My work was sleep deprived, I found myself telling people I was a new parent. Who is the father, they would ask, and I would laugh and say I was.
She called Daphne mama first, a blessed relief, and then said the same thing to me. I couldn’t not cry in front of them both when it happened, and I stayed at work late the next day to try to avoid it. They were waiting for me, my child and my Daphne, and then when Blaise turned up out of the blue we sat, all three of us pressed against each other on the sofa while he poured us champagne from the side. We covered her limbs in sticky sweet kisses, and Daphne cried again.
Blaise left when the baby went to bed. Beside her, the two of us climbed in together. I had been sleeping in Daphne’s room more often - before, whatever touching that would take place would be hurried and embarrassed, and we would never linger. After the baby was born it made sense that I would also be in there, to help with the night time feeds. The only time I slept beside her before was when Blaise had been there, and his reappearance seemed to make everything feel sweeter. I realised that I didn’t hate her at all, and we slept side by side, her hand in mine and her head on my shoulder, her blonde hair spilling across my breasts. The baby slept in the exact same position, thumb halfway to her mouth like her mother, and I wanted to wake them up with the thing inside me I wasn’t sure how to voice.
I got another promotion somehow, no idea how, not sure what changed. It was as though the baby slotted everything into place, that the only way I could exist peacefully was when all of my hurt was dulled through sleep deprivation. We took her to nursery but Daphne couldn’t bear to leave her. A stern older woman told her she didn’t want to raise a child who was too dependant on its mother, and both of us blanched. We had been fearsome independent things and we hoped the baby would need us forever. We never spoke about the future, until Daphne mentioned that the flat was getting cramped.
I had been fully moved into Daphne’s room for months, my bedroom a spare closet and study. I had presumed that it would be the baby’s room eventually, but Daphne had other ideas. We didn’t have any money, not really, but that didn’t seem to matter to her. She found a tiny home in the countryside, which I hated. It was the worst fight we’d had since I’d taken the job, and it wasn’t until I was pacing the moonlit streets again that I realised we both had assumed we’d be together.
Daphne must have had the same realisation, because when I returned to the house she was tender and grateful and I wished I was a man, purely so we could have made another child that night.
Helmut, perhaps the closest person I ever had to a real friend by that point, found us somewhere in the end. It was totally falling apart, surrounded by muggles. But there were big windows, and three bedrooms. I wondered how Daphne had conjured her pregnancy because I wished for more. I had grown up so quiet and sad, and now I could see onto the street below. This house didn’t have edges, or the ones that did exist were covered in ancient crown mouldings and gilded picture rails that we used to hang our motley collection of portraits, that looked more than ever like we’d picked them up off the side of the road.
Theo came by and he was different, and it wasn’t until later that I realised he wasn’t lonely any more. I wondered if that was how I looked, these days. Soft around the edges, soft inside. Papery skin sliding somewhat downwards, unbrushed hair. Glowing, gleaming. I laughed when the baby laughed, which was often. Daphne joked that we might get married, and I laughed then too.
We were peaceful until Astoria found us again. She was different, too, though this time she was more brittle, more perfect. Next to her I felt, for the first time, shabby. I was still wearing that same pair of shoes and the baby wasn’t even a baby anymore. I never asked Daphne why she had kept her family away, but as I saw Astoria take in her loose limbs and strawberry-stained shirt I understood.
You could tell she hated the baby. I suppose she thought she had been replaced. I didn’t have the energy to tell her that I never resented the baby like I did her, because it seemed unnecessary. Instead I took her to the park, and we giggled on the swings.
When we returned the house was dark, but Daphne was still there. We didn’t talk about it, and Daphne ordered a takeaway. This was a new invention - we had a phone put in because Draco insisted, and then we learnt about dialling places for food. He would call, sometimes, and we would talk like it was a normal thing for us to do. I put a chair next to where it was on the wall, and wouldn’t tell anyone that I thought it was better than crouching on the floor and speaking through the floo. Sometimes Draco and I chatted for hours. I never remembered what we spoke about but it clearly sunk in because things would come back to me at strange times, things like oh Draco loves that restaurant, or oh, that’s Draco’s favourite song at the moment.
I think it was jealousy that made her try to become friends with Hermione. By that point Daphne had returned to her silver-edged self. Something in her sister’s visit had revitalised her, and even though she still floated I now saw the effort it took. We dusted her shoes off and they still fit. When Draco and I used to speak she would sometimes shout something to Hermione as she bounced the no-longer-a-baby on her hip, heavy enough to bruise. I would roll my eyes, and we would continue with our nothing-ness. Then the fire would go, and Hermione would come through, arms open for cuddles.
I don’t think Hermione minded Daphne’s hard-heartedness because she was so elegant with it. Sometimes I could tell she had brushed her hair before she came over, and sometimes I was jealous enough that I pointed it out. She never liked me much, and I never minded, because I did like her. Draco could tell, and he knew to keep my secret.
For Daphne’s 25th birthday I commissioned a portrait of the three of us, our not-baby sitting on her lap and laughing as we stared, only occasionally blinking, outwards. Sometimes my pinky finger would skate the edge of her dress, and sometimes her head would twitch, as though she wanted to turn to brush me off. For the most part we were peaceful in it, and the baby loved to watch herself.
She never thanked me, but she slipped out one evening and came back, hand on her stomach. The baby reached for me, wrapped her podgy little fist around my wrist as I pressed my face into the sweet smelling skin of her mother’s belly and we sat like that, all three of us joined together. I was happier than I even knew how to hold within me so it overflowed in other, urgent ways. None of it seemed real, and I didn't want to say it all out loud.
“I hate you,” I told her, instead.
“I hate you, too.”