Revelation.
13th September 1985
Little Whinging, Surrey.
Harry was having an awful month, he was used to being punished for things he didn’t quite understand. How can any five year old make sense of the world without an adult to guide them? When the only adults he knew in life were actively trying to hinder him, what hope did he have of making sense of the world around him?
Initially he hadn't known what he was doing occasionally was odd, every five year old and even some adults believe their experience is the standard, the average, the norm, lived experience they call it, it was moral philosophy he wasn’t ready for. A five year old who couldn’t remember the last time he experienced empathy and whose relatives would never embrace human diversity didn’t have the tools to realise people could be different quite yet.
Eighteen days before the start of Primary School he’d been told to take the bin bags out of the kitchen to the big blue black bin that was kept outside the garage because his aunt, Petunia didn’t want it cluttering up the kitchen. This was a normal occurrence, Petunia a thin horsey looking woman would have called herself ‘houseproud’, others would have called the house sterile and devoid of personality. Petunia would have called herself attentive, others would have said she was nosy. Petunia would have classified herself as cultured, others would have told her she was keeping up appearances; one of the neighbours even called her Hyacinth Bucket behind her back and came up with an entire BAFTA winning TV Show about it half a decade later.
When she’d asked him to put the bin bags out it was pouring with rain and Harry had asked if he could wait until it stopped. His uncle Vernon, a stout man with a beefy neck and bushy moustache, had worried the boy might get used to standing up for himself if he didn’t stamp this out immediately. ‘Good British weather’ he’d said to him just as it turned into solid balls of hail and he pushed him out the door. Stood in the porch Harry really didn’t feel like getting wet or pelted but he closed his eyes and braced himself opening them only to find the bin right beside himself. Elated, he put the bag in the bin and turned round only to find Uncle Vernon standing in the doorway, a shade of purple not common in nature and radiating anger, a scowl on his face, eyes following him as if he was dangerous. Vernon stuck his head into the street and looked to the sides to see if the neighbours were watching. Satisfying himself they weren’t he lifted Harry off his feet grabbing him by the scruff of his neck, bellowing, tossing him into the cupboard under the stairs as he walked down the hall before sliding the deadbolt across, locking him in.
Harry hated his cupboard, it made him feel trapped, it made him feel lonely. It was often dark because Uncle Vernon would sometimes take the light bulb for punishment and it was dusty. The only thing that enjoyed living there were the spiders. It made him long for a sense of freedom.
At the same time Harry Loved his cupboard, it was safe, nobody ever attacked him in the cupboard, if he was in the cupboard he wasn’t doing chores. Sometimes he could read books about being anywhere else but the Dursleys. Occasionally, when the living room door was left open he could watch TV through the vent, he always tried to leave the door open. Sometimes he was sure the living room door would move if he wanted it too so he could see, this summer Star Wars had been on one afternoon and his Cousin Dudley thought he’d broken it and that it was stuck because he couldn’t move it.
Worried with the start of school approaching, the Dursleys had made Harry stay in the cupboard until the start of term in an attempt to squash his ‘Freakishness’ as they called it. It had been his longest punishment yet, there’d be worse in the years to come. It was the first punishment we’re he'd been purposefully starved, something that became more common, eventually he learned to hide food and ration for these occasions.
Before starting Petunia had been worried people would notice the boy's condition and it would show her in a bad light. The worst thing imaginable was a blow to her reputation so she set off for a meeting with the staff to spin a tale to prevent that happening. A tale of a troubled child born to two unemployed alcoholics who crashed a car killing themselves and four members of an upstanding family with them. She told them how the boy was angry, lazy and violent, how he lied so often he could never be trusted.
This view became cemented in the teachers minds the first time his name was called on the roll, Harry hadn’t known his name, he thought he was called ‘boy’ so when it came up he waited in silence for someone else to call ‘here’. The teacher only looked up and stared at him and kept waiting in a standoff that earned him a wrap on the knuckles from a ruler before being shouted at and made to stand outside the classroom door. Teachers being teachers she gossiped in the break room at lunch about the boy and the opinion spread.
During the fist lunch Harry had got picked before Dudley for football in the playground, the other kids had thought he was too overweight to be good at it, an unbiased observer would have told them they were right. Harry was ecstatic, he loved football, Match of the Day was his favourite program through the slit every saturday night. Dudley had quickly set about making sure this never happened again threatening the other children and Harry. By wednesday Harry had given up spending time outside with the other kids and had taken to hiding in the library away from Dudley and his new gang of friends.
The Librarian was the only person who liked Harry, he didn’t know it but it was because she was the only person who worked at the school who ate all her lunches outside the staff room so she’d judged him based on her interactions with the boy without any preconceptions or bias unlike all the teachers that followed.
After spending seven school days there consecutively and burning his way through the entire catalogue of Dr Suess she got worried for the boy. So, thinking he was just bookish but not wanting him to become a recluse cut off from his peers she kicked him out of the library for the day thinking it was to his benefit and that she was helping him form lifelong interpersonal skills.
While trying to sneak across the playground without being seen Harry heard a voice he didn’t recognise shout his name from a few metres away and turned in the direction it came from.
Harry found himself standing in a corner of the playground out of sight from the teachers obscured by a brick wall surrounded by Dudley and his gang of three bullies trying their best to look intimidating.
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Two weeks ago an owl had felt a small push of Harry's accidental magic along her tug coming from outside the blood wards for the first time in four years.
She’d travelled towards where she thought her objective was trying to narrow her search when it suddenly cut out again. After failing to find her purpose last time she was agitated, thinking she’d missed her chance. Fortunately this cycle continued for the next fortnight, the tug reduced her search area repeatedly but with no more pulses of accidental magic to guide her in like a missile guided by radar. Sat in a tree overlooking a herd of children she could feel her goal was in her eyeline and was just waiting to feel the final ping of accidental magic to pinpoint her target when she felt it. The boy in front of her with the messy black hair and green eyes, afraid, had touched on his magic to make himself look slightly bigger, like a startled cat caught by a dog in a blocked alleyway raising its hackles. She took off, flying fast and low, swooping just over the other children before landing on his head as a feeling of euphoria overtake her before being rejected, failing just before it fully took it’s embrace.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Dudley had spent lunchtime roughing up a few of the primary one students, hoping to find the few that still had some change left for the school tuck shop. The operation was very lucrative, with his own money on top of the other students this was fuelling a massive supply of sweets, a new time of plenty and he had plans to make it continue for years to come.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw his cousin walking across the playground and decided it made for a more enjoyable target, it’d been a few days since he’d beat him up and that was far too long. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to catch up to Harry if he didn’t want to be caught he told one of his new friends Piers to run after him and hold him up.
After shouting at him he’d seen Harry stop walking and was rushing to close the distance, to spring the trap. As he made it to within two strides of his cousin a big white owl flew just over him and landed on Harry, turning its head so it’s body faced away while its head faced Dudley.
Dudley knew odd things sometimes happened around Harry, he remembered the time his mum tried to feed him a bar of soap as punishment and it went on fire in her hand or when his dad had shouted at him before boiling water in the kettle only for vinegar to come out. Despite all that even he thought having an owl land on you then glowing a faint copper colour was odd.
Anything that was strange, that wasn’t ordinary he felt an irrational hatred for and often that was because he was afraid of it. Everything he’d just seen made his fight or flight response kick in and for Dudley when that happened the fight always won. He balled up his fist putting as much power as he could behind it and throwing a punch. He saw Harry tense and a slight silver tinge to his skin, not enough time to stop the connection with his jaw.
His hand shattered, the sound of pops and snaps ringing out and a feeling of intense pain radiating from it. It was worse than the time he hadn’t been allowed to take his friend's older brother's NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) home after visiting and he’d punched the wall in anger.
Seconds later the first teacher showed up and Dudley saw the look of victory in Harry's eyes turn to defeat as his gang lied telling them how the entire thing was his fault and he realised how much trouble he was in.
After the fight on the playground his aunt and uncle had been apoplectic with rage when they had arrived at the hospital. They’d hid it well while talking to the teacher who’d accompanied Dudley and dragged Harry with her was present, but the moment they were away from scrutiny life hadn’t been pleasant. When Dudley had mentioned an owl had been involved in the entire affair a knowing look passed between the two elder Dusleys who held a hushed conversation before rounding on the boy and screaming accusations at Harry. Reaching the car to find the owl perched on the roof of the car waiting for them had only made the berating worse and turn physical for the first time before he was bundled into the car and drove off.
When the owl had the audacity to follow them home, sitting in the tree in the middle of the Dursleys garden Vernon had decided it was mocking him, vowing to take action and that no ‘freakish owl!’ would be living near his family. Initially he’d tried shoo’ing it out of the tree with little success, gradually moving onto throwing a sheds worth of items into the tree then in a peak of rage removing his shoes and tossing them too the last missing the owl by at least a foot knocking Dudleys old Hula Hoop back out of the tree. Muttering to himself he’d shuffled in his socks down the hall towards the telephone while flicking his way through the yellow pages, slamming it on a small table pointing his finger at one of the advertisements and crowing with glee.
The tree surgeon arrived the following Saturday, the name seemed quite misleading because it was clear that the goals of this operation in no way envisioned the tree coming out of this in a healthy state. In fact it was clear by the time the second chainsaw came out of the lorry that tree surgeon was just a fancy way of saying lumberjack. Within minutes the owl's home for the last week had been destroyed, Vernon couldn’t help having a small grin of satisfaction as he watched what was left of the tree be swallowed into the woodchipper spraying out like confetti at a party of his making.
Unfortunately for the Dursleys this had the opposite of the desired effect: the owl watching the tree be felled from a spot on the roof, simply deciding to move into the next best location in the neighbours garden which only brought extra attention when it was spotted. The street now almost permanently sported an encampment of bird watchers after the word of an endangered owl rarely seen in the UK and even then only seen in the Highlands of Scotland spread. Vernon hated the twitchers, ‘oddball perverts’ he called them, hiding in their camouflage tents with long lens cameras taking photos. ‘Probably taking photos through the windows while they were in the nip’ he’d made a production of shouting while gesturing his hands. Petunia had her head turned slightly towards him, occasionally nodding at his rant while surveying the street through a small gap in the blinds.
28th November 1985
Little Whinging, Surrey.
The doorbell rang as Vernon was walking down the stairs and he resigned himself to answering it, a short man with long but thinning hair turning his neck so he faces the door as it opens “Hello can I use your loo?”. He was torn between wanting to chew the man out and knowing if he refused the man would only go to neighbours perhaps mentioning how impolite he’d been. The one thing Vernon Dursley couldn’t abide was feeling as though others didn’t respect him, he couldn’t be seen to lose face with the neighbours and being rude was a quick path to animosity so he let him in. Petunia craned her neck around the living room door watching the man as he scaled the stairs tutting loudly as she saw what was left of the man's hair drawn into a ponytail. They both blamed the boy and Vernon vowed to put an end to it, hustling himself out the door only to return from the shops three hours later with a new air rifle.
Harry had been let outside of the house while not at school for the first time since the incident, Uncle Vernon claiming the grass in the front garden needed to be cut while secretly wanting to make sure the boy watched the bird die.
They’d been standing in the garden for forty five minutes, dozens of empty boxes of ammo pellets littering the ground around his uncle. Every shot, even when lined up perfectly deflected away from the bird at the last second only serving to further enrage him, Harry thought he heard him mutter ‘bloody magic’ under his breath like a mantra thinking he couldn’t hear.
Just as he had started shearing the hedge a van skidded to a stop at the end of the path with RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) emblazoned across the side. Harry was pretty sure the car was still moving when a tall man with a pointed nose so beak-like in later years it’d be the thing he laughed about most when retelling the story got out and made his way to Vernon bellowing. “What on earth do you think you're bloody doing!. Blood Snowy Owl in England! It’s almost unheard of! Vulnerable endangered bird! You're bloody shooting at it!”
Vernon had the good sense to drop the air rifle when he heard a car enter the cul-de-sac and try to kick it behind the hedge nearer to Harry but he’d been caught in the act and couldn’t palm it off. As the argument between the two men continued he’d told Harry to wait inside before coming back in when it had started to get dark out and locking him back in the cupboard without speaking a word.
A letter with a court summons came three days later, Vernon would complain, waxing lyrical about the fine and ‘bloody owls!’ for years, his rage was only compounded by stolen glances of the owl interacting with the boy every time he was outside.
22nd July 1989
Little Whinging, Surrey.
Harry had been hiding in the garden, sitting cross legged reading Redwall in his nook between the shed and the hedge, a spot he’d found out after some testing you couldn’t see from the house unless you were looking out Dudley's second bedroom window. His owl was perched in his messy black hair sleeping, his constant companion for the last four years, he could always sense where the owl was when it was nearby. Even during punishments secluded in the cupboard he could feel through the comfort of the connection even though it often felt fuzzy that he had at least one friend.
He’d named the owl Robert or Bob for short because he bobbed his head about when he walked, he’d been five when he did it, how was he supposed to sex an owl? He still thought it was a boy, the librarian had been unable to help when he finally managed to convince the owl she was safe to approach. The little owl gave a bark of indignation every time she was called the name but Harry just didn’t understand and thought she was answering him back.
The owl suddenly startled peering into the hearing the rustling of the hedge as a grass snake poked its head out to bask in the summer sun only a few metres away. The sudden movement had drawn Harry's attention away from the book and he jumped up in fright, limbs scrambling, shouting,“ Bloody hell! Scared the life out of me!.”
The little snake was now just as shocked only hearing rumours hissed from mother to egg of two legs who spoke the tongue, “Speaker?” Only for the two legs to begin spinning around, giving a couple of hops trying to find where the noise was coming from obviously confused so the snake repeated itself “Speaker?”
Harry had checked for the noise, unable to see who was speaking he jumped up disturbing the owl who hadn’t been expecting it to see if it was the neighbour from over the hedge. After a second hop where he saw nobody nearby he decided it was the wind playing with his imagination, running wild after spending the day reading about talking animals in his book when he heard it again… ” Are you saying that? ” The boy inquired tentatively looking down towards the snake, voice low at the ridiculousness of the question.
Unknown to both, Petunia, ever inquisitive, had rushed to the window as soon as she heard the beginnings of strange noises emanating from the garden, dropping Vernons ironed work shirts she’d been putting into the wardrobe in the rush. Intuitively feeling a strangeness that she disagreed with to her very core. Seeing the boy and a snake apparently in conversation had terrified her, a new level of depravity in the boy's freakishness that she knew needed immediately quashed before the neighbours saw. She began to move, as quickly as she could towards the garden collecting a brush that permanently sat outside the back door as she burst into the garden.
Harry heard her before he saw her and turned his head away from the snake just to see her round the corner at speed, screeching “What are you doing!” She swung the brush at the snake like she was playing a round of golf. It would have struck the creature if Harry hadn’t reflexively kicked out at the brush, clipping it enough to deflect it as it swung, missing only by a few centimetres.
She rounded on Harry “What are you doing!”
“I was just trying to stop you hurting it.”
Petunia swung the brush at Harry repeatedly “Freak, what were you doing? What if the neighbours saw you doing those strange things!?”.
After being clipped in the crossfire the owl was livid and gave a loud bark drawing Petunia's attention. Petunia, knowing that the owl represented everything she despised and worked up into a fit of anger after the snake's escape, launched the brush with the skill of an olympic javelin thrower at the creature but it never made contact.
Harry after receiving a few scrapes and welts from the brush had been worked into a rage, a rage at the violence directed at animals he felt he had to protect, a rage at the violence directed at him, a rage at the unfairness of life. He couldn’t contain it any more and when Petunia threw the javelin he was terrified at how injured his best friend would get and closed his eyes.
“STOP DOING IT!”
Harry opened his eyes again only to be confronted with the brush floating in mid air ten centimetres in front of its target. Harry looked at it for three seconds then it fell vertically like a brick, a dull thud as it hit the grass.
Petunia grabbed him by the arm pulling him, dragging him back towards the house while glaring at the owl. She thought about how she and her husband had tried their best for most of the last decade and been unable to stomp it out. No matter the punishment no matter how severe they’d been unable to make it stop. In many ways each incident just got stronger and stranger than the last.
It was in that moment dragging him between the house and the patio doors she came to the realisation that she had to get rid of him at the first opportunity, that he wasn’t safe, he could talk to snakes, she’d seen what he was doing, it was unnatural, freakish.
She couldn’t help thinking maybe it would be best to let them get at him, they took her sister, stole her from her family for nine months a year and then they lost her to another world she just didn’t understand. Maybe they could take her son, it’s not like she wanted him, the reminder of the scale of her loss. If she let them they’d be free of him most of the year and then be done with him, safer, happier.
Finally having made it through the kitchen boy behind her being dragged at such a pace he’s struggling to keep his footing the pair made it to the living room. She pushed the boy down on the settee gritting herself to a conversation she’d previously promised she would never allow. Harry knew it was serious, he was usually only allowed on the living room furniture if a guest was over to keep up appearances usually being made to leave the room or if he was lucky watch TV sitting on the floor. Standing in front of the boy Petunia stared down her nose at him for what felt like a lifetime debating if she should follow through on her decision before letting out a raggedy breath and beginning to speak “Harry, your mother, she didn’t die in a car crash…”