The Bed Was Already Made

Sirius Black ran away from home on a Tuesday, which he would later insist was a terrible night for it, because on Tuesdays his mother had the house-elf polish the silver and the whole of Grimmauld Place smelled of tarnish and vinegar, and he had carried the smell with him all the way to the Potters' front door. It was twenty past one in the morning. It was raining in that thin, sideways way that didn't seem like much until you'd been standing in it for an hour. He had his school trunk, one strap broken, and a split lip he'd got not from his mother, who never touched anyone if she could curse them instead, but from the corner of the hall table as he'd gone past it too fast. He had seventeen Galleons, a broomstick, and no plan at all beyond this door, which he had seen before only in summer daylight with James hanging out of an upstairs window shouting at him to hurry up. He knocked. Nobody came. He knocked again, harder, and immediately wanted to take it back. What he had not considered, somewhere between the Knight Bus and the bottom of the lane, was that the Potters were old. Not ancient, not frail, but James had been born late, a surprise after years of nothing, and Fleamont and Euphemia had the gentle, slightly baffled air of people who had expected to spend their sixties gardening and had instead got a son who set fire to things. You did not hammer on the door of people like that at one in the morning. You did not turn up wet and bleeding on the doorstep of people who had already been kind to you and ask them, without asking, to be kinder. He picked up his trunk. He had actually turned around when the door opened. It was Mrs Potter. She was in a quilted dressing gown the colour of mustard, her grey hair in a long plait over one shoulder, her wand held loosely at her side in a way that suggested she had read the Daily Prophet every morning that year and was not about to be surprised on her own doorstep. She looked at him. She looked at the trunk. She looked at his lip. "Oh, love," she said. "Come in out of that." * * * He had prepared a speech on the bus. It was a good speech. It had a beginning, in which he explained very calmly that he had left home and would not be going back; a middle, in which he made it clear he wanted nothing from anyone and would find a room in Diagon Alley tomorrow; and an end, which he had not quite worked out but which involved leaving with his dignity intact. What came out of his mouth, standing dripping on the hall mat, was: "Sorry. Sorry, I know it's late." "It is late," Mrs Potter agreed. She took his wand out of his hand, which he had not noticed he was still clutching, and set it on the hall table. She dried him off with a flick of her wand, the charm as warm as a towel off the stove. "Monty!" she called up the stairs, not loudly. "Kettle, please. And wake James, or don't. He'll be furious either way." From somewhere above came a creak, a thump, and the unmistakable sound of James Potter falling out of bed. "Mrs Potter, honestly, I don't want to put anyone out. I just needed somewhere tonight, and then I'll..." "Sit," she said, and pointed at the kitchen. He sat. The Potters' kitchen was the opposite of every room in Grimmauld Place. It was low and warm and badly organised, with a dresser full of mismatched plates and a wireless on the windowsill and a row of brown glass bottles on a high shelf, each one labelled in Mr Potter's spidery hand. Sleekeazy's, Batch 40. Sleekeazy's, Batch 41 (too pink). The whole family fortune had come out of those bottles, a hair potion Fleamont had invented as a young man because he was tired of his own hair standing up. It had not worked on James. Nothing worked on James. Mr Potter came down in a dressing gown with a tartan collar and his glasses pushed up on his forehead. He put the kettle on the hob with a tap of his wand and then sat across from Sirius, folded his hands, and said nothing at all, which was worse than any question. Then James appeared in the doorway with his hair standing straight up, pyjama top on inside out, and stopped dead. "You did it," he said. "I did it." "You actually did it." James crossed the kitchen in three strides and hauled him up off the chair into a hug so fierce that Sirius's split lip hit his shoulder and he hissed. James let go immediately and looked at his face. Something went dark and dangerous behind his glasses, very briefly, an expression he usually saved for Severus Snape. "What happened?" "Hall table." "Sirius." "Genuinely the hall table. Mother just shouted. She's very good at shouting. She'd blasted my name off the tapestry before I'd got my trunk down the stairs. I heard it go. Regulus was on the landing." He stopped. He had not planned to say anything about Regulus, who had stood on the landing in his pyjamas, fourteen years old, gripping the banister, and had not said goodbye. "Anyway. I'm out." Mr Potter took his glasses off his forehead, cleaned them on his dressing gown, and put them on his nose properly, as if he wanted to see this clearly. "Well," he said. "Good." * * * Tea came. Mrs Potter put three sugars in his without asking, which was correct, and he could not remember telling her that, and then he did remember, last summer, a long afternoon in the garden when she'd made a pot and asked everyone how they took it and had apparently written it down somewhere in her head and kept it. She dabbed his lip with something from one of the brown bottles that stung and then didn't. James sat on the counter swinging his heels and making plans out loud. They could share his room. They could put the camp bed in. Or they could, no, listen, they could clear out the attic and make it a proper headquarters, and Remus and Peter could come and stay in August, and... "He doesn't need the attic," said Mrs Potter. "He has a room." James stopped swinging his heels. "Come on," she said, and took a candle off the dresser. Sirius followed her up the stairs, past James's door with its Gryffindor banner and a hand-lettered sign that said KEEP OUT THIS MEANS YOU PETER, to the end of the landing, where there was a narrow door he'd always assumed was a cupboard. She pushed it open. It was a small room under the eaves. There was a bed with a patchwork quilt in red and gold, turned down at the corner. There was a chest of drawers with a jug and basin. There was a lamp, already lit. On the windowsill someone had put a jar of sweet peas from the garden, a little wilted, as if they had been cut a few days ago and nobody had thought to change them. Hanging on the back of the door was a dressing gown, dark blue, that was much too long to be James's. He stood in the doorway and couldn't make himself go in. "Christmas before last," said Mrs Potter behind him, very matter-of-fact, "you came for three days and you flinched every time a door slammed. James thought nobody had noticed. Monty and I sat up that night and had a long talk, and I came up the next morning and made this bed. I've changed the sheets every holiday since." She paused. "I'd have said something, only I thought it might frighten you off. You're very like a cat, you know. You come to people when you've decided to and not a minute before." "You made it up," Sirius said stupidly. "A year and a half ago." "Well, I didn't know when you'd need it." There was a lump in his throat the size of a Bludger. He was sixteen. He had stood on the stairs of his parents' house an hour and a half ago while his mother screamed that he was a blood traitor and a disgrace to the House of Black and that he would come crawling back, and he had not cried, not once, not even when he heard the soft scorch of the tapestry and smelled his own name burning. He was not going to cry now, over a quilt. He cried a bit over the quilt. Mrs Potter didn't say anything. She just put the candle down on the chest of drawers, came into the room, and sat on the edge of the bed next to him, and after a while she put her hand flat on his back between his shoulder blades and kept it there. James, out on the landing, had the decency to pretend to be looking for a pair of socks. "I don't know how to pay you back," Sirius said eventually, into his sleeve. "Nobody asked you to." "I'll get a job. I'll..." "You'll finish school," said Mrs Potter, "and you'll eat what's put in front of you, and you'll stop my son blowing up the shed, which I realise is a lot to ask." She stood and straightened the corner of the quilt, though it didn't need it. "Go to sleep. It's very late, and you've had a horrible night, and in the morning there'll be eggs." * * * He did not think he'd sleep. He lay in the narrow bed under the eaves with the rain ticking on the slates and the sweet peas giving off a faint green smell in the dark, and he listened to the house: the pipes knocking, Mr Potter's low voice through the floorboards, James's bed creaking next door as he turned over and over and then, finally, a knock on the wall. Three short, one long. Their old signal from the dormitory. You all right? Sirius knocked back. Three short, one long. He slept until ten. He woke to sun across the quilt and the smell of frying bacon and, from the bottom of the stairs, Mrs Potter's voice, pitched to carry, in the tone mothers used when they had already called once. "Boys! Breakfast!" He lay very still and listened to it again in his head. Boys. Not James and his friend. Not the Black boy. Just boys, plural, as if it were obvious, as if it had always been true. He got up, put on the dark blue dressing gown, which fitted, and went down.