Bones

The top deck of the Little Whinging multi-storey closed at seven, which meant nothing, because the man in the booth went home at seven and the barrier had been broken since Easter.

Harry could hear them before he saw them. Wheels on concrete made a sound like a long breath, and with three boards going at once it filled the whole stairwell. He took the last flight two steps at a time, shouldered open the fire door, and the evening hit him: warm, orange, smelling of hot tarmac and the bins behind the bakery.

"Oi, Scotland's back," Dez called from the far ramp. He was nineteen and worked at Halfords, and he'd been calling Harry Scotland since September before last, when Harry had disappeared for ten months and come back with a story about a boarding school up north.

"Scotland's been back three weeks," said Kel. She was sitting on the curb by the pay machine, retaping the nose of her deck. "Scotland's been avoiding us."

"Scotland's been doing chores."

Kel looked up. She was seventeen and the best skater in Surrey, by her own estimate, and Harry had never found a reason to argue. She had a way of looking at him that went straight past whatever he said and landed on whatever he hadn't.

"Chores," she said.

"It's a deal with my uncle. It's fine."

"Didn't say it wasn't."

She went back to her tape. Harry dropped his board.

It was a terrible board. He'd found it in a skip behind the leisure centre three summers ago with a split tail and one truck held on by a bolt from Uncle Vernon's toolbox, and it had been rebuilt so many times since that hardly anything of the original was left. The deck was Spud's old one. The wheels were Dez's. The grip tape had come off a roll Kel had nicked from somewhere she wouldn't say, and the bearings had been a Christmas present from all three of them, wrapped in a page of Thrasher and handed over in this car park in the sleet. It was the first present anybody had ever given him. He hadn't told them that.

He pushed off.

The first lap was always the best one. The concrete up here was smooth from years of tyres, and the board rolled out flat and grey towards the edge, where a waist-high wall was all that stood between you and the drop. Below it, the whole of Little Whinging was laid out like a model railway: the same roofs, the same gardens, Number Four somewhere in the middle of it pretending he didn't exist.

It wasn't flying. But the feeling lived in the same part of his chest.

"Right," said Spud, who was sixteen and never skated if he could film instead. He had the camcorder up on his shoulder, the one his dad had bought for his sister's wedding and never asked for back. "Kickflip. The four-stair. You said you'd have it by summer."

"I said I'd try it by summer."

"It's summer."

The four-stair was in the corner, where the ramp down to level three met the pedestrian exit. Four concrete steps and a handrail nobody was brave enough to touch. Harry had been looking at it since he was eleven.

"Commit or don't," said Kel, without looking up. "The half-commit's how you break your wrist."

He rolled back to the far wall, turned, and pushed. Once, twice, three times. The stairs came up fast. He popped the tail and dragged his front foot off the edge, and the board flipped under him —

And at the last second, the very last one, some small cowardly part of him leaned back.

His back foot caught the board. His front foot didn't. He came down on the bottom step with all his weight on his left side and put his hand out to stop himself, which was the one thing everybody told you never to do, and he heard it before he felt it. A small, wet crack, like stepping on a twig in the rain.

Then he felt it.

"Don't look at it," Kel said.

He looked at it. Two of the knuckles on the back of his left hand weren't where knuckles were supposed to be. The whole hand was already swelling, fat and shiny, and the edges of the world had gone grey and fizzy.

"*Ooh*," said Dez, with feeling.

"Did you get that?" said Harry, from very far away.

"Yeah," said Spud. He'd lowered the camcorder. He looked a bit green. "Sorry."

"Don't delete it."

Kel was kneeling next to him on the concrete. She didn't help him up. She never had, not once in three years. She'd told him on the very first day, when he was ten and limping and too proud to say why: You fell, you get up. If you can't get up, then I'll help.

"Can you get up?" she said.

He got up. His left leg wobbled under him, the old weak one, and for a second the limp was there, the one he'd spent two years at Hogwarts hiding so well that nobody had ever noticed. He shifted his weight before anybody could see.

Kel saw.

"Right," she said, in a voice he hadn't heard from her before. "Spud, give me your car keys."

"I haven't got a car."

"Your mum's car."

The waiting room at St Luke's A&E smelled of floor polish and vending-machine soup, and the clock above the desk was four minutes fast. Harry knew it was four minutes fast because he'd been watching it for two hours and fifty-one minutes.

His hand had stopped hurting about an hour ago. That was worse. Now it was just a hot, swollen thing in his lap, resting on Kel's hoodie, and every time he looked at it his stomach turned over.

"Half-commit," Kel said, next to him. She'd said it once already, in the car park.

"I know."

"I told you."

"I know."

She bumped his shoulder with hers, very gently, and went back to her magazine.

It was a stupid way to break something. He'd been hit by a Bludger. He'd fallen fifty feet off a broom. He'd been bitten by a basilisk under a school and carried a girl he couldn't stand out of a dead man's chamber, and none of that had ended with him sitting in a plastic chair under a poster about cholesterol. At Hogwarts, Madam Pomfrey would have mended this in a minute and sent him off with a sweet. Here, it was going to take six weeks.

Hogwarts was in seven. If he could get through seven weeks, Pomfrey could fix whatever was left. And he couldn't even try to fix it himself, not without the Ministry snapping his wand.

"Potter?" said a nurse with a clipboard. "Harry Potter?"

The doctor was a tired-looking woman with grey in her hair and a Scottish accent, which made Harry like her straight away for reasons he didn't want to look at too closely. She put his X-ray up on the light box and tapped it with her pen.

"Fourth and fifth metacarpals," she said. "Both clean. You'll need a cast, four to six weeks, and no skateboarding. And I mean no skateboarding, not no skateboarding unless your friends are watching."

Kel made a sound in the corner that might have been a laugh.

"Fine," said Harry.

"Good." The doctor didn't take the X-ray down. "Hop down off the bed a second for me. Walk to the door and back."

"Why?"

"Humour me."

He walked to the door and back. He'd done it a thousand times: on the stairs at Privet Drive, through the Great Hall with three hundred people watching, past Madam Pomfrey every time he'd ended up in the hospital wing. Weight even. Stride even. The trick was to think about something else, so your body didn't go looking for the weak spot.

But it was nearly eleven at night and his hand was broken and he'd landed on that leg as well. Halfway back, his knee buckled very slightly. He caught it. It was a tiny thing, a hitch in his stride, barely anything.

The doctor watched it the way you'd watch a card trick you'd already seen.

"How long have you been walking on that?" she said.

"On what?"

"Harry." She sat down on the wheeled stool so her face was level with his. "You walked into this department perfectly normally. I watched you. And then you got tired, and you stopped walking normally. That's not a sprain. That's somebody who's had a lot of practice."

The room went very quiet. Harry didn't look at Kel. He could feel her not looking at him, very hard.

"I'd like to X-ray your leg," the doctor said. "It won't hurt. Is that all right?"

He could have said no. He thought about it. Then he thought about how saying no would look, here, in this room, to this woman, and he said, "Fine."

It took forty minutes. When she came back she put a new film up on the light box, and there was his shin, a long pale shape on the black. About two-thirds of the way down there was a lump in the bone, thick and knotted, like a branch that had snapped and grown back together slightly wrong.

"That's an old break," she said. "Two or three years. It was never set. It healed on its own, and not quite straight. Nobody brought you in for it?"

He'd been ten. Off school after Dudley's lot pushed him off the climbing frame. Uncle Vernon had said hospitals asked questions and freaks healed on their own anyway, and he hadn't been completely wrong, because it had. And the day after that, Harry had been lying in the cupboard with his leg throbbing when the front door opened and a woman who wasn't his aunt came laughing into the hall.

"I don't remember," he said.

He said it well. Calm, a bit embarrassed, a kid who'd fallen out of a tree once and didn't think it mattered. He'd lied to Snape's face with less practice.

The doctor looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, slowly, and wrote something on her clipboard. He couldn't read it upside down. He'd never wanted to read anything more in his life.

"We'll get that cast on," she said. "And then we'll need to call your guardian."

It was Aunt Petunia who came.

Uncle Vernon was at a trade fair in Birmingham until Sunday, and Dudley was Dudley. So at a quarter to one in the morning, with a fresh white cast up to his elbow, Harry watched his aunt walk into St Luke's A&E in her good coat and her church shoes, holding her handbag in both hands in front of her like a shield.

She saw him. Then she saw Kel, and her mouth went thin. Then the doctor came out from behind the desk and said, "Mrs Dursley? Could I have a quick word?" and Aunt Petunia's face went a colour Harry had never seen on it before.

They went into a side room. The door closed.

Kel let out a long breath.

"So," she said. "Your leg."

"Kel —"

"I'm not asking." She was picking at the tape on the knee of her jeans. "Three years. Three years I've known you. I thought you just had a funny walk, some days."

"I do just have a funny walk."

"Yeah," said Kel. She didn't look up. "I should've asked."

Harry didn't know what to do with that. Nobody had ever said they should've about him before. He sat with the cast heavy in his lap and the clock four minutes fast above the desk, and he couldn't think of a single thing to say.

The door opened after eleven minutes. The doctor came out first and went straight back behind the desk without looking at him. Aunt Petunia came out second, holding a leaflet. It was pale blue, and Harry could read the top of it from across the room.

Surrey County Council — Children's Services.

"Get your things," Aunt Petunia said. Her voice was perfectly steady. "We're going."

At the doors, Harry looked back. Kel was standing in the middle of the waiting room with her hands in her pockets.

"Station Road," she said. "Above the launderette. Number twelve. Sofa's lumpy."

"I know where you live."

"Yeah. I'm just saying it out loud." She looked at Aunt Petunia, then back at him. "Don't care what time."

The car smelled of air freshener and Dudley's crisps. Aunt Petunia drove the way she did everything, precisely and in silence, both hands on the wheel. She didn't put the radio on. She didn't look at him.

They were turning into Privet Drive under the orange streetlights before she spoke.

"Someone will be coming to the house," she said. "To talk to us."

"Right."

"To talk to you."

"Right."

She pulled up outside Number Four and didn't turn off the engine. In the light from the dashboard her face was all sharp lines, and for a moment it didn't look angry. It looked frightened.

"What did you tell them?"

Harry looked down at the cast. Kel had already signed it in the waiting room in black biro: a little skull with its tongue out.

He thought about the deal. Leave me alone. Feed me. Lawn, bins, bathroom, back by nine. He thought about how carefully he'd built it, and how small, because he hadn't known you were allowed to ask for more.

He thought about the pale blue leaflet in his aunt's handbag.

"Nothing," he said. "Yet."

Aunt Petunia's hands tightened on the wheel. Then she turned the key, and the engine died, and they sat in the dark together for a long time without either of them reaching for the door.

Uncle Vernon came home from Birmingham on Sunday evening.

Harry heard the car in the drive. He heard the front door, the thump of the suitcase, Vernon's voice booming in the hall about the M6 and some man from Grunnings who didn't know a hammer drill from his own backside. Then Aunt Petunia said something, very low. Then nothing at all for so long that Harry got up and went to sit at the top of the stairs.

When Vernon finally spoke, it wasn't a shout. It was barely more than a whisper.

"*Social services?*"

Harry went back to his room and shut the door. He sat on his bed with the cast in his lap and waited.

Nobody came up the stairs.

At dinner, Uncle Vernon cut his food into very small, very precise pieces and didn't eat any of it. Dudley ate three helpings of lasagne and kept looking between his parents and Harry like a dog that knew a storm was coming and couldn't work out where to hide.

Vernon waited until Dudley had gone through to the television. Then he put his knife and fork down side by side and said, "What do you want?"

Harry looked up.

"That's what this is, isn't it?" Vernon's voice was low and flat. "Another one of your little deals. So go on. Name it. What's it going to cost me, you keeping your mouth shut?"

Harry opened his mouth and closed it again, because the honest answer was that he didn't know.

He'd thought about it all weekend, lying awake with his hand throbbing. He'd thought about telling. The leg, the cupboard, the bars on the window last summer. And then he'd thought about what came after. A foster home. Strangers. Strangers who'd want to know where he went every September, and why there was an owl, and why he had a stick he wouldn't let anybody touch. Dumbledore had sent him to this house for a reason. Dumbledore had never said what the reason was, and Harry had a bad feeling that a council social worker was exactly the sort of thing that would make him find out.

And there was the other thing, the one he didn't like looking at straight. If he told, he'd be spending all of it in one go. Every card he had. And then he'd have nothing.

"I don't know yet," he said.

Vernon went dark red. "Don't you play games with me, boy —"

"*Vernon*."

Aunt Petunia hadn't raised her voice. Vernon stopped mid-sentence like somebody had pulled a plug.

She was looking at Harry. She'd been looking at him on and off all weekend: at the sink, on the stairs, in the garden while he watered her roses one-handed. She looked at him like she was trying to read a word in a language she'd half forgotten.

"He doesn't know," she said. "Leave it."

The phone rang in the hall.

All three of them jumped. Vernon got up to answer it. Harry heard him say, "Dursley," in his phone voice, and then, in a completely different one, "*Marge!*"

Aunt Marge arrived on Tuesday with two suitcases, a bulldog called Ripper and a box of dog biscuits she put in the fridge next to the butter.

"Still here, then," she said, when she saw Harry in the hall. She said it the way you'd say it about damp. Then she saw the cast. "Ha! What've you done?"

"Fell over."

"Fell over," Marge repeated, delighted. She turned to Vernon. "I keep telling you. You can't build anything on bad stock. They're weak in the bone, that sort." She leaned down to Ripper. "Aren't they, my darling?"

Ripper made a lunge at Harry's ankle. Marge let the lead go just slack enough for the dog to reach his trainer, and just tight enough for her to be able to say she hadn't meant it.

Uncle Vernon, behind her with the suitcases, didn't say anything at all.

Harry watched his face, and understood. Vernon couldn't tell his sister about the deal, because then he'd have to tell her why. And he couldn't tell her about the hospital, or the leaflet, or the woman from the council who was coming on Thursday. He couldn't tell her any of it. For a week, Marge was going to walk straight across the middle of everything, and Vernon was going to have to stand there and let her.

So was Harry.

She talked. That was the thing about Aunt Marge. She didn't need to hit anybody, and she didn't need to starve anybody. She just talked, like a tap nobody could turn off.

"It's all in the breeding. You can't get a decent dog out of a bad bitch. Never mind what you feed it."

She said it to Aunt Petunia, over the cottage pie on Tuesday. She said it looking at Harry.

He ate his cottage pie one-handed and looked at his plate. He thought about the four-stair. That last second, when some small part of him had leaned back.

He got through Tuesday. He got through Wednesday, just. Marge found out he'd been allowed out all summer and decided it was disgraceful. "Running wild, Vernon, at his age. And look what happened. Keep him where you can see him." Vernon, who was sweating, said nothing, and so for the first time in a year Harry spent the whole day inside Number Four. He listened to Marge tell Dudley about a Labrador she'd had to have put down because it had turned.

On Wednesday night, Aunt Petunia painted the cupboard under the stairs.

It had been full of Dudley's old toys and a broken exercise bike since Harry moved upstairs. She took everything out of it and painted the inside white. Marge thought it was spring cleaning. She told Petunia she'd missed a bit.

Harry passed the open door on his way to bed. He looked at the clean white walls and the bare floor. And he thought: She's getting rid of it. She's getting rid of the evidence.

It wasn't that he'd forgotten the cupboard. He'd just never thought of it as evidence before. It had only ever been his room.

Ms Okafor came on Thursday at eleven.

She was younger than Harry had expected, with braids pulled back under a scarf and a leather folder and a calm voice. Aunt Petunia let her in. Aunt Marge, who had been told that "a lady from the council" was coming about "the boy's arm, some nonsense, forms," sat in the armchair by the window with Ripper on her lap and her eyes like gimlets.

Ms Okafor accepted a cup of tea and a custard cream. She looked at the flowers on the table and the freshly hoovered stairs and the smell of new paint, and she didn't comment on any of it. Harry, watching her, thought she'd probably seen a lot of hoovered stairs.

She talked to Vernon and Petunia for twenty minutes. Marge interrupted twice. Then Ms Okafor asked if she could talk to Harry on his own, and they went out to the bench by the rockery in the back garden, in the sun.

"Nice cast," she said. "Who did the skull?"

"My friend Kel."

"The one who brought you in?"

"Yeah."

She opened her folder on her knee but didn't write anything. "Harry, I'm going to ask you some questions. You don't have to answer any of them. And whatever you do say, I'm not going to go running back in there and repeat it. All right?"

"All right."

"The doctor thinks your leg was broken when you were about ten, and nobody took you to hospital. Is that right?"

He looked at the rockery. He'd weeded it on Saturday, one-handed.

"I fell off a climbing frame," he said. "I was being stupid. I didn't tell anyone it was that bad because I didn't want to get told off."

It was a good lie, because most of it was true. He'd fallen. He'd been pushed, but he'd fallen.

Ms Okafor nodded. She didn't write that down either.

"Does anyone in that house hurt you, Harry?"

Nobody had ever asked him that before. He'd been asked whether he'd done his chores, and whether he'd done something unnatural, and whether he was the Heir of Slytherin. But nobody in thirteen years had just asked.

"No," he said.

It came out easy and clear and completely believable. He'd had a lot of practice. He kept his eyes on hers, not too long, not too short, and his hands loose on his knees, and his voice a little bored, the way a boy's would be if a stranger asked him something stupid.

Ms Okafor looked at him for a long time.

"Okay," she said at last. She closed the folder. "I'm going to give you a card with my number on it. If anything changes, or you just want to talk, you ring it. Any time. I mean that." She handed it to him. "And I'm going to come back, once, in a few weeks."

"I'm away at school from September."

"Then I'll come before September." She stood. "Where's school?"

He thought of Marge in the armchair by the window, who believed he went to St Brutus's Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys. He thought of the Dursleys, who had told the neighbours the same thing. He thought of the doctor, and Kel, and the crew, who all thought he went to a boarding school in Scotland on a scholarship.

He'd never once mixed them up. He wasn't going to start now.

"Scotland," he said. "It's a scholarship."

"That's a long way."

"Yeah," said Harry. "That's the good bit."

When they came back in, Aunt Marge was watching from the window. She'd seen the whole thing through the glass: the folder, the card, the boy on the bench with his arm in a cast and his face perfectly calm.

She waited until the front door had shut behind Ms Okafor. Then she said, "Well."

Everybody looked at her.

"Well," she said again. She was looking at Harry, and there was something in her face he'd never seen there before. It took him a second to work out what it was, because it was so odd on her.

It was approval.

"Kept his mouth shut, did he," she said. "Bit of loyalty. Didn't think he had it in him." She scratched Ripper behind the ears. "You can't teach that, Vernon. Either a dog knows whose house it lives in or it doesn't."

Vernon made a noise that might have been agreement.

And for two whole days after that, Aunt Marge backed off. Not much. She still talked, and she still let Ripper go for his ankles. But at dinner on Thursday she passed him the potatoes without being asked. On Friday she told Vernon to let the boy out of the house, for heaven's sake, he was moping like a sick hound. That afternoon Harry went up to the top deck of the car park, with his cast and without his board, and sat on the wall watching Dez fall off things for three hours. It was the best afternoon he'd had all summer.

He was nearly stupid enough to think it might last.

The owl came at ten past three in the morning on his birthday.

He'd been awake anyway. Hedwig had already been and gone, with a long letter from Hermione full of exclamation marks and very careful not to mention Ron, and a parcel from Hagrid that had tried to eat the bedspread. So when the second owl landed on the sill, Harry was sitting up in bed in the dark with the Monster Book shut under a belt, and he saw it straight away.

It didn't fly in. It waited on the windowsill, filling the whole frame. It was an eagle owl, huge and tawny, with orange eyes like coins and feathers groomed until they shone. There was a silver ring on its leg.

It held out the other leg with the bored patience of something that had done this for a lot of people far more important than Harry.

There were two things tied to it. One was a letter: thick cream paper, his name on the front in green ink in handwriting like engraving, and a wax seal on the back he'd seen once before on a trunk at King's Cross. A serpent, coiled around a letter M.

The other was a small leather pouch, black and plain and about the size of his palm. It weighed almost nothing.

He opened the letter first.

Mr Potter,

On the twenty-ninth of May, you rendered my daughter a service. House Malfoy does not forget such things.

Please accept the enclosed as a token of my family's regard. Should you ever find yourself in need of further assistance, you have only to write.

L. A. Malfoy

That was all. Four lines.

Harry read it twice. Then he picked up the pouch and opened the drawstring and looked inside, and the inside went down a lot further than the outside did. It went down into the dark like a well. And at the bottom of it, catching the grey light from the window, was gold. A lot of gold.

There was a slip of Gringotts parchment tucked into the neck. Ten thousand Galleons. Deposited to the bearer.

He sat very still.

Ten thousand Galleons. He did the sum the way he always did, because he always did: about five pounds to a Galleon, last time he'd checked at Gringotts. Fifty thousand pounds. More money than Uncle Vernon made in two years. More than the house he was sitting in was worth, probably, or near enough.

He waited to feel something. Rich, or grateful, or bought.

What he actually felt was cold, and very awake. And the longer he looked at the letter, the more he saw what it didn't say.

It didn't say thank you. It didn't say debt, or payment, or settled. It said token, and regard, and further assistance. Words chosen so carefully that you'd only notice them if you'd spent a year watching Vernon Dursley choose his.

Ten thousand Galleons was nothing to Lucius Malfoy. Harry knew that. It was the price of a few good brooms and a nice evening out. The money wasn't payment. Lucius wasn't paying anything. It was a show, the sort of thing he could mention, lightly, at dinner with the Minister. Oh, the Potter boy? We saw to him. Very generous. So that nobody could ever say House Malfoy hadn't been seen to do the right thing.

And the real thing, the actual debt, was sitting in the last line. Should you ever find yourself in need of further assistance, you have only to write.

That was the hook. Ask for one thing, and it would be a favour. Lucius Malfoy would have done something for him, and then they'd be even, or Harry would owe him back. And then he'd want to know what else Harry might need. You only had to ask.

So Harry wouldn't ask.

He'd take the gold, because sending it back would be a statement and he wasn't ready to make one. And because, if he was honest, he wasn't stupid. He'd keep it because to a man like Lucius it meant nothing. He'd put the letter in his trunk. And he'd sit on the rest of it, the part that actually mattered, for as long as he liked.

He wrote back three words on a page torn from his Charms notes.

Thank you. — H. Potter

The eagle owl looked at the note, then at him, with what in a person might have been mild disappointment. Then it took the note and was gone over the roofs of Privet Drive.

Harry put the pouch under his pillow, lay back down, and stared at the ceiling until it got light.

Happy birthday, he thought.

Nobody at Number Four mentioned his birthday. That was normal.

What wasn't normal was the way Aunt Marge looked at him at breakfast. She was quieter than usual, and redder in the face, and when Harry came in she watched him cross the kitchen all the way from the door to the sink without saying anything at all.

"Vernon tells me," she said eventually, "that the boy was out last night."

"I wasn't," said Harry.

"There was a bird at his window. Vernon heard it. Great flapping thing. Woke Ripper." She drank her tea. "Odd sort of boy that has birds at his window at three in the morning."

Vernon was looking at his newspaper very hard. Petunia was scrubbing a pan that was already clean.

Harry understood then. The two good days were over. Whatever Marge had seen in him on Thursday, whatever she'd liked, she'd been chewing it over since, the way Ripper chewed his bones. And she'd found the bit that tasted wrong.

It came out at dinner on Saturday, the last night.

Harry would remember it later in pieces, like a film someone had cut up with scissors. The brandy, the third glass, then the fourth. Marge's face, red and shining. Uncle Vernon at the head of the table with both hands flat on the cloth, sweating, saying Marge in a low voice, then Marge again, then nothing at all.

"Don't Marge me, Vernon, I'm only saying what everybody thinks." She pointed her glass at Harry. "Thursday, I thought, well, there's a boy who knows which side his bread's buttered. Not so much bad stock as I'd thought. And then birds. Birds at the window at three in the morning, and coming home with his arm broken, and a woman from the council in your front room. You mark my words. He's like his father."

Harry put his fork down.

"Unemployed, wasn't he? The father?" Marge took another long drink. "A layabout. No wonder the boy's —"

"He wasn't unemployed," Harry said.

The table went silent.

"*What* did you say?"

"You don't know anything about my dad." His voice came out very even. That surprised him. "You don't know anything about either of them."

"I know they got themselves killed in a car crash, drunk as lords, and left their mess on my brother's doorstep." Marge's eyes were very small and very bright. "That's all I need to know. You can tell a lot from a bitch. If there's something wrong with the bitch, there's something wrong with the —"

There was a moment when Harry could feel it. The air in the dining room went thick and buzzing, like the sky before a storm, the way it had at the zoo right before the glass vanished. It went up the back of his neck and down into his good hand, and he knew, very clearly, that if he let it go now it would go straight through her.

He didn't let it go.

He stood up. He pushed his chair in. He did it very neatly, the way Aunt Petunia liked, because his hands needed something to do.

"Sit down," said Vernon.

"No," said Harry.

He walked out of the dining room. He walked up the stairs, not running. In his room he took the black pouch from under his pillow. He took his wand out from between the mattress and the slats and put it into the pouch. Then the photo album Hagrid gave him. Then the tapes from the shoebox under the bed, all of them, every one Spud had ever made him. Then Hermione's letter. The pouch swallowed all of it without changing shape.

He opened Hedwig's cage and the window.

"Find me," he told her. "Kel's place. You know it. Not tonight. Tomorrow."

She nipped his finger and went.

His board was by the back door. He couldn't skate with the cast, and he picked it up anyway and put it under his good arm, because he wasn't leaving it here.

Uncle Vernon was in the hall.

They looked at each other.

Vernon had his car keys in his hand, Harry noticed. Maybe he'd been about to drive somewhere. Maybe he'd been about to stop him. Behind him, through the dining-room door, Harry could hear Marge still going, shouting now, Petunia's voice low and fast underneath.

"If you walk out of that door," Vernon said, "don't think you're coming back."

"I'll be back next summer," said Harry. "It's in the deal."

Vernon opened his mouth. Shut it.

Harry walked past him and out of the front door, and he didn't slam it. Somehow that felt more final.

It was nearly eleven when he got to Station Road. The launderette was dark. The window above it was lit.

He stood on the pavement with his board under his arm and everything he owned in a pouch in his pocket, and he looked up at the light, and his heart was going like he'd run the whole way. He hadn't. He'd walked. He'd walked very carefully, because his leg was hurting again and he wasn't going to let it show, not even with nobody watching.

Sofa's lumpy. Don't care what time.

He went up the side stairs and knocked.

For a long moment there was nothing. Then footsteps, and the door opened on a chain, and Kel looked out at him through the gap. She was in a huge old T-shirt and pyjama bottoms with her hair sticking up on one side.

She looked at his face. Then at the board. Then down at the way he was standing, all his weight on his right leg.

She shut the door, took the chain off, and opened it again.

"In," she said.

The flat was one room and a kitchen and a bathroom the size of a wardrobe. There was a mattress on the floor in one corner and the famous lumpy sofa in the other, and a little telly, and a poster of some band he didn't know, and skate decks stacked against every wall. It smelled of toast and fabric softener from downstairs. It was the best room Harry had ever been in.

She didn't ask. She put the kettle on and made him tea with too much sugar in it, and he sat on the sofa and drank it and his hands shook so badly he had to hold the mug with both of them, cast and all.

"Your aunt," Kel said eventually. "The other one."

"Yeah."

"Bad?"

He thought about it. About the air in that room, thick and buzzing. About how close it had been.

"I didn't do anything," he said. "I wanted to. I really wanted to. And I didn't. I just left."

Kel nodded slowly, as if that was the answer to a question she'd been wondering about for three years.

"Good," she said. "That's harder."

She went and got the duvet off her mattress and dragged it over to the sofa. She sat down next to him and threw it over both of them, the way you'd throw a blanket over a little brother at a sleepover, and shoved him over with her shoulder until there was room.

"Shove up. I'm not sleeping on the floor in my own flat."

He shoved up. The sofa really was lumpy. There was a spring under his left hip that was going to leave a mark.

Kel turned off the lamp. In the dark the telly was still on with the sound down, some old black-and-white film flickering blue across the ceiling.

After a while, Harry's head ended up on her shoulder. He didn't decide to put it there. He was just very tired, all at once, more tired than he'd been in years. She didn't move it. She put her arm round him like it was nothing, like this was a normal Saturday, and went on watching the film.

"Happy birthday, Scotland," she said quietly.

He hadn't told her it was his birthday. He'd told Spud, once, months ago. End of the month. Spud must have told her, and she'd remembered.

He meant to say thank you. He fell asleep before he got there.