3
3
The park looks different in different glasses. It looks darker, its shadowed outlines enhanced. They sit on the man’s nose and ears, noticeably foreign. He dusts the scraps of orange leaves off the bench and sets his bag next to him, the strap still coiling over his shoulder. He frowns, looking upwards so his hair, blown in frays by the early autumn wind, doesn't itch his eyes.
An insect lands gently off a branch and on his arm, it sits curiously on the folds of his sweater, then another breeze brushes it off. A movement catches his eyes, he looks up again and sees someone in front of him.
He knows him, he thinks. His eyelids tremble, like the marigold flakes of leaves before they fall off.
He opens his mouth and closes it again, he moistens his lips with his tongue, and deepens his breath. Holding it, and exhaling until his chest caves. The figure waits patiently, and he swallows a tuft of air, and he says the person’s name like an imitation of a snake’s hiss, tongue rolling behind closed teeth.
Sirius.
He, Sirius, wears a turtleneck, black that covers every inch of his torso and limbs, cuffing his neck. His trousers an ash grey, his hands in the ash grey pockets, his scarf is ash grey and it makes his skin look ash grey. The man thinks, not for the first time, of their school, that without the glory of the warm, fiery light of Hogwarts, he looks much more like a moon left without the sun.
Sirius looks at him strangely, then he points to the ground next to his feet, at the silver object half hidden in the weeds.
‘You dropped your lighter.’
The man wears a brown sweater, patterned with diamond shapes and jagged lines of green and grey. His tweed pants are brown, his bag is made of brown linen, and his beanie is knitted from a light shade of blue wool, the solitary sharp colour on an otherwise monochrome figure. On his nose sits a very heavy pair of thick-lensed, silver-rimmed spectacles, his face is long and round, with a stubble over his chin, like the smooth curves and roughness of certain pebbles in water.
He is 39, and his eyes are aged with intelligence, but the constant unfocused look and magnified size of them makes it hard to believe. His shoulders are drawn out, unpurposefully broad, that makes him seem larger. His fingers sometimes quiver uncontrollably, and he has a habit of fixating himself on the small movements.
‘Light mine too?’ Sirius asks him, between his lips is a cigarette the man has handed him. He has one between his own lips, too. He flicks the lighter and hears it click like a bell of fire, and lights his cigarette. He holds it under Sirius’s too.
What are you doing here? He asks him, looking up to meet his face. Sirius is watching the trees, a light smile or grimace between his lips, his sunken eye-bags sombre. He looks thin, his sharp jawline wrapping the bone, the skin stretching as if he only had enough to cover his body. Above all, his face is pristine, unwrinkled by age. He looks twenty-two.
‘I think I might’ve been there, you know. Just that once. He thinks I was the traitor, you know. He thought it is me.’ Sirius pauses, his gaze flicks to him, brows draw together in a frown. ‘Is, think, was, thought. How does a man, labelled ‘insane’, prove himself innocent? He can’t. What happened is just what everyone thinks.’
He stays silent, looks away.
Have you eaten?
‘Nah. Can’t. I– Okay, It’s stupid, but I’m waiting for him, you know.’ Sirius’ cheeks return a flicker of colour, dusty pink. ‘Like, he can’t be that long away, get it?’
‘It was…It was supposed to be better without Dumbledore. Yeah, he’s a genius, and he would've won— if we… if everyone— the Order, the muggles, the Death Eaters, Voldemort— were clay models. Chess pieces. He’s one half of a god.’
In history, we learn wars. They speak of them individually, a unit of triumph. We fought a war for the colour of victory. For righteousness. For justice. So you can imagine our surprise when we saw that paintings were made with brushstrokes.
He takes off his glasses and stops seeing. The park becoming a temple of fiery red, if he imagine, he can believe the rustling of trees are flickers of fires. Before he could speak again, Sirius stubs out the blunt of his cigarettes, digs it into the cobble. The ash smears between the cracks, grey on grey.
~
Late October two years previously, the man had been invited to work as a substitute for his old school. The lack of teachers was one of the main reasons, and a Professor Paigne, the third werewolf professor in history, second in Hogwarts’s, was off for the full-moon period. One of the students had a smoking habit. Two were in an open relationship.
On his third day, he was no longer certain returning to his school was a great idea. When he stood in front of his desk, and a minute or so passed without him saying a word, the students started shifting in their seats, glancing at each other. A girl in the front, black-rimmed glasses and a poker-faced look asked him if he was fine. The class was mostly whisper-filled, itching his head. They were staring at their new substitute, curious, unbothered, friendly. His mouth opened, wordlessly.
Do your thing; keep quiet. He scribbled on the blackboard like practice, listening on the smooth friction of the white chalk. The class’s whispers increased into voices. He finished his sentence with a full-stop, the words’s pronunciation on chalk reduced itself to a rigid break. He returned it into the teacher’s box of chalk, the white noise of students talking washing out the purpose of his task at hand.
He jumped, violently, when a paper plane flew from the back of the class and erupted into a firework, flakes of smoke spewing in a small spectacle. He was certain the face of the violator looked familiar, but he was too agitated to place it. Everyone! Stay calm! Press to the walls! He ordered, immediately, over the left over sizzling sounds. He stood up, searching frantically. People were no longer reacting wildly, only staring at him. The quick dispersion of the smoke proved its harmlessness, but still that did not settle his heart. He could feel the magic. He could feel it burst into the room, a shimmer of air onto his skin, his bones, he could feel magic like a silver bullet, he could feel it deadly and straight.
If I see anything similar again, I’ll have a talk with your head. That was stupid and unnecessary. What if someone took that as a warning? You’d be wasting their time and resources to “save you”. Never do that again, you hear me?
It was only afterwards, in his temporary dorm, after the initial shock of the incident, did the familiarity of the face reveal itself. He thought it was strange, and his lungs hurt terribly when he recognised it was Sirius who had flown the paper plane. He shot up from his bed. Sirius’s black mane, Sirius’s delicate cheek, his mischief,
Sirius is here, Sirius is here, Sirius is here, Sirius is–
The ground opened up again, the dorm deathly dark. Four walls stood around him, unmoving. The sky had never been so far away.
Every school is the same, every year, every place. History is an endless cassette on a spiral, we travel through time in a circular rotation, a pendulum repetition. Images appear with new shadows, again and again and again. Ten years ago there had been a Sirius, a Remus, a James, a Peter. Ten years later there would be again, and again. He had been there, he was there, he was the student with the paper plane, he is all the students.
It was only at midnight when he realised the dorm was darker with lights on than off, the room a whitewashed veil of dark brown. Under the black shadows, it might have even been grey if he were careless.
~
As a child, he loved Christmas. There was no real logic to this, he only took a liking to it because his friend had one day told him he loved Christmas, in his backyard out of the blue. He might’ve been five.
‘Have you been to the spikey thing?’ The boy in front of him was holding a red racecar with blue wings, a sharp, brilliant fire sticker over the sides. The wings were extendable, and the boy had waited all day to come over to show it to him. A girl was laying on the grass, her golden hair sprawled on the floor like a cobweb in sunlight, a handful of colourful hair-clips scattered on her head. She seemed concentrated on figuratively outlining the fig tree from below it, waving her extended hand around carefully.
No. But I went to, uh, the cars…building. It’s so big! My mum said angels fell from it.
‘My mum doesn’t think angels are real.’
Maybe she’s never seen one?
The other boy shrugged, rolling the racecar on his arm for a smooth “road”. Then, he must’ve gotten annoyed at the short length his “road” was, because he sat up straight, suddenly, eyes the same vibrance as the colours of his toy-car.
‘Can we go inside? The road here is bad. I like your room– it’s better than mine.’
‘Yeah, your room is like, sooooo big. I wanna use your crayons.’ The girl piped up, suddenly eager. “Please.” She added hastily, Her task abandoned, looking at him with wide eyes.
I like my room too. My dad made my bed, before. With his hands. It’s really cool.
They were getting up, moving from the grass, sunny green filled with lavish sunlight. He squinted under the garish, blue sky to look at his friend, when the boy suddenly blurted out,
‘My favourite day is Christmas. You get presents.’
It’s mine too. He nodded, solemnly, then a grin overtook his face. Okay. Race you to my room!
Then the children were sprinting across the backyard, stumbling and shoving to win. His father had called them to the kitchen for his mother’s biscuits that she made when they were outside. His father ruffled their hairs as their little bodies tried to dodge. His mother took off her oven gloves and told him of the section of the tray where his favourite blue cookies were; and then she plucked a fallen leaf from her hair and quickly brushed over it, fixing her hair-clips; and then she asked about the boy’s toy-car, smiling as he prattled on in circles, coming back to its colours over and over again.
He watched his mother talk to his friend, and he thought he had the perfect picture of “always”— gentle yellow for his mother, blue sky for his father, green, green grass for the boy who was his friend, and apple red for the girl.
~
The first time this picture was proven wrong, the man was eleven.
He was in the common room, decorated with the gothic interior of red and gold, the figure of a lion’s head above him, Sirius was next to him on the couch, laying down with his feet over his lap.
‘You know what my brother did, once?’ Sirius was laughing, ‘He thought “choler”, you know, the feeling, and “collar” meant the same thing, for some reason,’ he tugged at his own collar. ‘And he wrote, “He was less collared at her dressing,”’ Remus was the first to laugh, a sharp, giddy snicker blurting from his spot in the armchair.
Sirius grinned, continuing, ‘Something, something about feeling hot and happiness, or something, and my mum was like “what?”’ He widened his eyes so he looked stupid and bewildered, which was somewhat similar to that of a pigeon’s eyes. He and Peter laughed, the air knocking from his chest.
“And he looked so confused, when my mum was confronting him about it, like he wasn’t saying anything, but by his looks, you could hear the ‘huh?’ from way across the room. Listen, I tried to teach him, you know? But for some reason, the idiot forgot to show me.’
Remus was curled up, his textbook fallen on the floor, quivering in laughter. He himself was pinching his face together to let out his sniggering, which doubled as he bent forward to suppress it, meeting Sirius’ foot with his nose.
Ew! Get off me! Your feet smell like ass! He shoved Sirius’s legs off roughly.
Sirius was laughing too, now, tumbling onto the carpeted floor. He stuck up one of his leg in front of him. ‘Screw you, you wish your ass smelled like these.’
His chest was laughing in spasms, joyfully light, like bubbles to escape the ground. The four boys were all in crumbled shapes, curled up in collapsing humour.
The calm before the storm feels so obviously bright, like a flashing sign of warning. It felt easy to have these, now that he looks back. Something had to give, something always had to give. Free of charge bore the price of unwritten change, everything had to give.
He remembers someone speaking to him, in the dark room under the floors of Hogwarts. The both of them, running like children in a sinner’s tunnel. Hate the sin, love the sinner, right?
Do you think God exists?
“Christianity?”
No, well, like in general. Something larger than us, larger than the universe, I guess. Something of saviour.
“My mum thinks it’s bullshit.”
I think religion is an individual thing.
The boy in front of him laughed, a small sound from his throat.
“Well, I think I do think there’s a god- I just don’t think he’s here to save me.”