A Quiet Life
Mary Macdonald’s life was blissfully ordinary. She wasn’t quite sure precisely why or how, but the mundane was something that she’d always secretly longed for, somewhere in the back of her mind. On the outskirts of the New Forest, Mary lived in an ordinary house with a wonderful husband and three children who had never known anything but peace.
There was a quiet feeling inside of Mary that she had spent her youth at war, with what or who she wasn’t quite sure, but sometimes she felt as though there was a ghost sitting on her shoulder - a past just out of reach. Her memories of anything before 1982 were strangely hazy, she remembered little of her eldest son’s early childhood, but enough to know that his dad was an ex of hers who had never cared enough to be involved in Dean’s life in any way. That didn’t matter for long though, when Matt, Mary’s now-husband, had come into their lives 10 years ago, he had accepted Dean as though he were one of his own and always loved him just the same as his younger half-siblings.
It was another ordinary day, the sky was a dull British grey, and the branches of the tree by the front door were swaying slightly in the gentle wind.
“A letter came from Dean’s school by the way,” Matt called across the room to Mary from where he was making coffee in their little green kitchen, “His parents’ evening’s coming up in a couple of weeks.” Mary hummed in acknowledgement as she gathered up her marking and books to take to work. Dean was in his third year at a boarding school called Hogwarts. It had been rather a shock on his eleventh birthday to find that he had been invited to attend a school for wizards, but it had always made a strange sort of sense to Mary. For the last couple of years Matt had attended Dean’s parents’ evenings alone. As it meant a mid-week trek up to Scotland, one of them had to stay at home with their two younger children while the other booked two consecutive days off work in order to make the long journey there and back.
Upon a read-through of the letter, which was for some odd reason written in swirling emerald ink on a piece of heavy yellowed parchment, Mary discovered that the date of parents’ evening this year fell during half-term for the school where she taught, giving her the opportunity to attend for the first time.
“I’ll go this year love,” Mary told her husband, the thought of going to Hogwarts settling inside her like a punch to the stomach, “I’ll write to Dean and let him know.”
~
A few weeks later, on an ordinary sunny afternoon, Mary disembarked from the scarlet steam train she had ridden up to Scotland in at Hogsmeade station. She had been chatting to a few other parents on the train, they were all perfectly lovely but she had noticed an older lady sat off to the side who kept throwing her strange looks from beneath her eagle-topped hat, as though she had known her a long time ago. Mary was sure she’d never seen the woman before in her life.
The parents collectively made their way towards a waiting group of carriages, pulling them were huge, winged horse-like creatures with hollow eyes and leathery skin pulled taught across sharp bones. Their presence made Mary slightly uneasy, there was something ominous about their presence, the warm curls of breath that puffed from their sharp nostrils, the muffled pawing of their hooves on the leaf-strewn ground.
“What’s pulling the carriages?” a lady asked from farther back in the group, Mary supposed she had never seen the creatures either, “Surely they can’t be pulling themselves?” Mary’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion at that. Of course the carriages weren’t pulling themselves, they had these strange horses at their helms, they were hardly easy to miss.
As they began to board the clearly-not-self-pulling-carriages, Mary noticed the woman from the train in a carriage up ahead. She was murmuring quietly to a short plump woman with greying ginger hair, who was currently giving Mary a sympathetic look, eyes full of sorrow. Why was everyone here so strange?
While the carriages trundled their way up through the woods, Mary continued to talk to Aoife Finnigan, mother of Dean’s best friend, Seamus. Aoife and Mary had met on many previous occasions when the boys had met up during school holidays, and Mary felt very relieved to have a friendly face by her side as they approached the ever-looming castle. In the days leading up to her Hogwarts trip, Mary had felt a growing sense of apprehension, there was a part of her that wanted to stay away from the school so badly that she had broken down crying last night as she took off her make-up over the bathroom sink. She had tried her best to shake off these thoughts, why wouldn’t she want to visit her son’s school? But as the castle got closer and closer, Mary’s instinct was to jump from the carriage and run as far as possible into the rolling hills.
Battling with the urge to run as it strengthened by the second, Mary looked up at the looming castle as it became visible through the trees. Aoife’s melodic Irish lilt faded into the background as the sight of the castle overwhelmed Mary’s every sense, she had no idea why she had wanted to run, just a glimpse of Hogwarts and Mary felt as though she had just arrived home at the end of a very long day.