Never Felt This Way
August 1971
A father sits at the head of an empty dining table. There is a single envelope resting on the surface in front of him. He tries very hard to conceal his disappointment but his daughter sees right though him. His daughter, a little girl of almost eleven and a half called Mary Macdonald, standing behind his chair, looking over his shoulder, looking intently at the mysterious envelope. Well, not really mysterious because she knows the gist of the content. She keeps her questions in check because she fears upsetting her papa. He finally takes in a sharp breath after torturous seconds of silence. He turns to face Mary, looking as if he is holding back tears, and asks, “Do you want to go?”
Mary opens her mouth and closes it again. She knows the answer. She wants to go. She really really wants to go. But she wants her father’s happiness too. He is the only person of importance in her life really. But that is the problem. She wants to go and meet people and experience something else because she is just so so bored with her life, but she also wants to always be near to make her papa smile. He’s only got her after all.
Seeing her hesitation, her papa says, “Don’t think about me child. It’s alright to want for yourself.” He smiles sadly and repeats, “Do you want to go?”
“Yes.” The word is whispered yet certain.
“Well then,” he slaps his knee and gets up and sort of airs away the seriousness with his hand, painting his face with a familiar toothy grin, “we’ll have to start shopping early on. Open up that letter and you’ll find a list of all sorts of things.”
Mary eagerly snatches the envelope and rips it open.
❀❀❀
“’Students may also bring, if they desire, an owl or a cat or a toad.’”
Mary looks up at her papa after she finishes reading the sentence. He always laughs at the perturbed expression that crosses her face when she reads that line.
“Well it’s not mandatory so I’m obviously not going to get any of tho-ose.” She emphasises the last vowel with a wave of her fingers. “I mean owls are creepy, cats shed too much and-“
“-and toads are yuck.” Her papa finishes for her with a fond tussle of Mary’s hair.
“And when they say broomsticks they really mean the ones to fly on? Not to sweep but to fly?!”
“Pretty sure, yeah.” He grins.
And so they walk on, and enter shops, and ask for items of peculiar names, and walk out with heavier hands. Right now, Mary’s clutching a dark brown stick of wood with three simple rings carved into it where it begins to taper off right above where her hands were told to be placed by the nice man in the store. There’s also designs of tiny leafy vines wrapping around between the rings. (“’Ten inches and moulded out of rose-thorns and core of unicorn tail hair’ he had said. Like oh my god unicorns are actually real?!”) Mary was in love with this new pretty thing that is apparently her wand. The first one she waved around almost lit her on fire but the second let out light pink sparks at the tip and she felt a smooth sense of right fall upon her. It was apparently the perfect match.
Her excitement quiets down as she takes in the thoughtful look her papa is giving her. He’s not really looking at her. Mary’s all too familiar with this particular expression of her father’s.
“You know your mum was like you too when she was a child. Her parents had told me. Wasn’t hard to imagine her your age at all, she was also so vibrant and smiling.”
Now the thing is, Mary didn’t have any mum. She’s never said it to her papa because she won’t dare to break his heart like such but it’s true. Mary doesn’t know about the woman he constantly speaks about and praises and compares Mary too. All she’s had is her father, her lovely lovely father. And sometimes, well actually almost all the times, whenever her papa starts about her mother, Mary doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like this woman who has left her papa so so sad and tired and wrinkled. Of course her father does realize it makes Mary uncomfortable. How can she hide it? After a few revering sentences he comes back to the present and gazes at his little girl’s face and changes topics smoothly. But there’s an air of disappointment in these moments that Mary doesn’t dare to make worse by admitting that she sort of loathes the woman who birthed her and left them all alone.
September 1971
“And when you get there, first chance you get you’ll write me a letter telling me you’ve reached safe okay, you hear me?”
“Yes papa! Hundredth time you’ve said that I reckon.” Mary mutters impatiently as she looks out the car window, pressing up her face to the glass as all the vehicles on the road whoosh by.
A few more minutes pass by, Mary’s excitement only growing further, as her papa finally parks the car outside the station. He looks out at the crowd moving to and fro near the entrance impassively.
Mary knows better than to rush her father but she’s visibly shaking with anticipation in her seat and finally her papa turns away from the window and wipes his palms on his grey trousers. He sighs and opens the door and Mary barely contains her squeal.
They head through the station looking for platform nine and three-quarters, with all of Mary’s luggage arranged neatly in a cart. Mary sticks close to her father, while he pushes her cart, so as to not get lost in the crowd. Above her, her father’s forehead wrinkles in confusion. The sign says platform nine but the next one just says ten. Mary looks around in bewilderment, wondering if she’s going to wake up any moment, and then she sees it. It being what looks to be an older teen and two parents run straight into a wall one by one only to disappear. Mary blinks, and then taps at her father’s forearm urgently, pointing at the spectacle when he notices her. His eyes widen just as the presumed father runs through and disappears. She sees that he realizes then, what they are supposed to do. He looks down at Mary who, in her excitement, has already started running towards the wall. He barely grazes her arm, trying to pull her back, and Mary can picture his dismayed face as she disappears through the wall. Disappears through the wall!!
Mary looks down at herself, finally fully realizing that this is real. She’s felt she’s been in a half-asleep state, the wait for her to wake up in the back of her mind. She looks out at the buzzing families all around her, some kids dressed in long dark robes. She looks at some kids hugging their parents and boarding the train with teary goodbyes. The train in question is massive and coloured dark red. She can see through the windows plush seats slowly being filled with more and more kids excitedly chattering. Mary feels so so alive.
And then she feels a hand on her shoulder and jumps.
She looks back and sees her father with her cart looking down with an unimpressed eyebrow raise and a thin press of his lips. Mary gives a sheepish smile but she truly isn’t sorry for anything. This is the start of something so terrifyingly new, Mary feels on top of the world, nothing can dampen her spirits right now.