The Observer Effect

      Over the next few weeks, Harry resembled a happy zombie. A zombie because he tried to spend as little time sleeping as possible. Happy because he had acquired a secret.       And it wasn’t some grubby little secret like how Mark Dennis had a wank during lessons, or how Abby Williams was in the family way by either Jim Lewis or Dick Abrams, or how Reggie Warren and Eddie MacLachlan had been smoking weed in the bushes behind the sports hall. And it certainly wasn’t some tedious, grown-up ‘secret’ like how Uncle Vernon fiddled his tax returns, or how Mr Graham, two doors down, was stealing electricity by bypassing the meter, or how the headmaster kept a half-empty bottle of gin in the bottom drawer of his desk.       No, this was a real, proper Secret, the sort a secret ought to be.       But Tom was even more than the most proper Secret in the world. He had become Harry’s Friend, and it had happened in a single night.       Looking back, Harry realised that the transition from ‘I’m not interested in the very concept of friendship’ to ‘Tom and I are best mates forever’ had been rather abrupt. But then again, if there was such a thing as love at first sight (and there was—Harry had read about it loads of times), then why couldn’t there be friendship at first, er, word? And there had been, no doubt about it; the thought of being separated from Tom now, even for one day, was about as appealing as the prospect of losing a part of his own body.       This gave rise to fears previously unknown to Harry. Before, he’d had precious little to hide—nothing in his possession that was quite so valuable and important—but now the lack of a secure hiding place tormented him hourly. There was absolutely no question of simply leaving Tom in the cupboard—anyone could pop in there at any time and do something dreadful to Harry’s things. In books, heroes usually made hiding places under the floorboards or somewhere in the walls, but in the bloody cupboard, the walls were barely an inch thick, including the plaster, and the floor was just a thin layer of lino. Door, walls, floor, ceiling—every night, Harry examined them afresh, hoping for inspiration, but it never came. Hiding the diary somewhere outside the cupboard seemed utterly impossible, unthinkable—he’d worry himself sick, wouldn’t be able to sit through even half a day at school, let alone a whole one, wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if he moved even two feet away from his treasure.       The upshot of these agonising and fruitless deliberations was that the diary now travelled everywhere with Harry. At first, he put it in his rucksack—Jane was to be granted the greatest honour of her pathetic existence, though she hardly deserved it—but then, even the rucksack ceased to seem a reliable receptacle. Gordon, Malcolm, Dennis, and the other bullies could easily turn Jane inside out just for a laugh, as they’d done before, and, during this nasty game, Tom might come to harm. Harry found the very thought of such desecration revolting. Now he carried the diary directly on his person, strapped under an elasticated bandage between his vest and his shirt. The outer layers of clothing—blazer or jumper, or both together—reliably concealed a tell-tale bulge. Only this solution, temporary and imperfect though it was, brought Harry some measure of peace.       Besides the Secret and the Friend—or rather, the Secret Friend—Harry had also acquired a mystery, otherwise known as the Mystery of Origins.       For as long as he could remember, Harry had hated his parents. To start with, they were dead—had managed to kill themselves in a car crash whilst leaving Harry with a scar as a memento, and not just anywhere, but right on his face, where it was impossible to miss. Harry harboured no particular illusions; the nickname ‘freak’ that had stuck to him thanks to his idiot cousin wasn’t connected solely to the scar. But without that dubious decoration, Harry’s life would clearly have been much easier.       And as if that weren’t enough, his parents, even whilst being dead, remained a blot on his reputation. Aunt Petunia never tired of reminding Harry that his father had been ‘worthless’ and ‘crack-brained’, whilst his mother was ‘abnormal’—a ‘weirdo’ whose true—and very low—worth only Petunia knew. That was individually; together, the Potter couple were described more frankly as ‘junkies’, ‘alcoholics’, and ‘washed-up hippies’. Little Whinging was a quiet, respectable place, but even here, one could find opportunities to observe alcoholics, junkies, and washed-up hippies if one wished. Needless to say, Harry found such parentage completely uninspiring.       And finally, their greatest sin lay in the fact that Harry’s parents hadn’t left him so much as a brass farthing. He ate, drank, and slept purely out of charity, and received Dudley’s cast-offs and various rubbish from charity shops and jumble sales, like some bloody Dickensian orphan. And like a Dickensian orphan, he had to work off his guardians’ ‘kindness’ daily, hourly—the true ‘kindness’ of the parish beadle, ‘kindness’ armed with a bowl of thin gruel and a heavy cane for beatings.       Yes, Harry hated his parents, but until now this anger had been muffled background noise, like the distant sound of rain, the ache of old dog-bite wounds, and the throb of an improperly healed wrist; it had been barely glowing coals, gently simmering stew—present, but almost never commanding his full attention.       After his conversations with Tom, it had turned to fury. It became the deafening roar of a downpour, soared to a piercing note, bubbled with bloody foam, and blazed high, like bonfires on Guy Fawkes Night.       What. The. Hell.       If the surname ‘Potter’ meant what it was supposed to mean, then his father had been a pure-blood. His mother was almost certainly Muggle-born—the horror and hatred with which Aunt Petunia reacted to any weirdness spoke for themselves.       But his father.       All pure-blood families were connected to each other through a complex web of marriage and kinship; absolutely everyone was some sort of distant cousin to everyone else, and a whole enormous crowd of people could have taken responsibility for caring for Harry after his useless parents’ deaths.       At the very least, there were his grandfather and grandmother on the Potter side, his great-grandmother on the Black side, her enormous clan in addition, and, attached to the Blacks in turn, the Crabbes, the Prewetts, and the Rosiers—and those were only the ones Tom could remember off the top of his head.       So why, one might ask, was Harry living with Muggles?       Had his parents not bothered with any sort of will whatsoever?       By this time, Harry’s vocabulary had grown exponentially. He now had the proper word for his ‘dearly beloved’ aunt and uncle, and their revolting spawn—and whilst he was at it, for that little toerag Polkiss, for Dennis and Malcolm, for show-off Brown and moron Gordon. That word was ‘Muggles’.       Simpletons. Creatures helpless before a properly trained wizard, yet practically useless as well. The previous stage of evolution, already doomed by nature to extinction, but still numerous for now. Tom didn’t even need to explain in detail—Harry had already read all this many times over in his favourite books. He understood the concept perfectly.       In the long term, Muggles weren’t a problem. As soon as he received his Hogwarts letter—and he would receive it (there was no doubt about that), and Tom had already explained roughly how it would happen (it had worked out quite well, in a sense, that they were both half-bloods; only Tom’s mother had been a pure-blood witch)—as soon as someone from the staff called round to see Harry and brought the necessary papers, Harry would be able to leave the Muggle world behind for good. One way or another, he wouldn’t be returning to Privet Drive. Among wizards, he’d find a place better than this one.       Therefore, there wasn’t even much point in trying to put the fear of God into his Muggle cousin, his Muggle mates, or his aunt and uncle. Their ‘shelf life’ was limited and consisted of a couple of weeks at most.       Given the circumstances, Harry took a philosophical approach to the continuation of his imprisonment in the cupboard. It was actually convenient. If only he didn’t have to attend that Muggle school, things would be perfect, but the holidays hadn’t arrived yet—on the contrary, all the fuss about end-of-year exams was in full swing. Until very recently, Harry would have seen them as his chance, a glimmer of hope for secondary school without Dudley and a better class than before—but now, naturally, he’d completely lost interest and was preparing half-heartedly. He had more important things to occupy himself with, and far more interesting ones at that.       He’d had to buy batteries. He was loath to spend the money he’d scraped together however he could, from walking other people’s dogs to hunting for stray coins down the back of the sofa, but the telly remote in the sitting room simply couldn’t cover his need for extra light. If the batteries in it mysteriously went flat every night, even the Muggles would become suspicious.       Harry begrudged the time spent sleeping. He begrudged the time spent on anything that wasn’t Tom.       They were friends, after all.       ‘22 July.       Dear Tom!’       This greeting had replaced ‘Dear Diary’. Tom found it infinitely irritating, but he was also (Harry could somehow sense this—that was all) grateful for the precise date, since he himself had absolutely no way of knowing it.       And that, when you thought about it, was rather ghastly and uncomfortable.       When asked how he spent his time inside the diary when he wasn’t talking to Harry, Tom had stated the following:       ‘Time feels different for me.       It’s not something you should worry about.’       Which, as Harry realised much later, had somehow transformed in his head into an assertion that things weren’t too bad—which Tom hadn’t actually said. And that in itself was very telling in a thoroughly unpleasant way, because if things really were not too bad, why not say so directly? What was the point of this carefully evasive phrasing?       Harry was gradually beginning to understand that Tom was simply a master at concealing all sorts of dreadful things behind carefully evasive phrasing.       So, providing today’s date was the least Harry could do, though it probably wasn’t nearly enough.       ‘Dear Tom,       Today I had to spend nearly the whole day at barmy old Mrs Figg’s. You probably remember her, since I’ve already told you about her—she’s the one with the broken leg. Today she was slightly less unbearable than usual…’       Harry had intended to move quickly from the comic episode with the old woman tripping over her own cat to the joyful news about finishing his school exams—but not a bit of it. Tom had suddenly become intensely interested in these very cats for some reason.       ‘Well, yes, six toes each. All of them. Ghastly business. I think it’s all the inbreeding…       Sort of mottled. No, the tail isn’t bald.       Yes. There are tufts on their ears. Looks utterly ridiculous.       Clever? I wouldn’t say so.       They don’t do anything, really, just sleep mostly.’       ‘Harry,’ Tom concluded, having extracted every possible detail about the old woman’s pets, inside and out, and though it was only one line, it looked—for want of a better word—ominous: ‘Harry, these animals aren’t cats, or are only half-cats. I’m fairly certain they’re Kneazles. Kneazles are magical creatures. I’ll tell you about them later, if you want, but right now, the important thing is this: like other magical creatures, they don’t get on with Muggles. Your neighbour, Mrs Figg, is either a witch or a Squib. And you didn’t know this, and she never told you, am I right?’       Bloody right, that’s what.       ‘Blimey!       Blimey, blimey, BLIMEY!       Tom, you’re not mistaken, are you? You can’t be mistaken?!’       ‘Language, Harry.’       Which meant: stop talking like a Muggle. That is, stop using Muggle swear words. Because if you continue doing so, pure-bloods will pretend you’re eating crap right in front of them every single time. They were supposed never to have heard anything even remotely resembling Muggle profanity, and if they did hear it, that was it—shock, horror, and heart attack. Which, as Tom explained, was ninety-nine point nine per cent bollocks, but such were the rules of the game—just like how sixth-form girls supposedly had never clapped eyes on a man’s sausage—and you simply had to stick to these rules. Develop the habit.       It also meant that Tom wouldn’t answer until Harry corrected himself.       ‘Merlin’s underpants, Tom!’       ‘Unfortunately, there can be no mistake. These are Kneazles or part-Kneazles, which means their owner is a witch or a Squib.’       Harry collapsed onto his back, rolled about on his lumpy mattress, covered his face with the diary, and let out a quiet groan. Did she know or not that he was a wizard? If she knew—why had she kept quiet? Why hadn’t she protected him somehow? They were only Muggles, after all; surely there had to be some authority over them, surely it couldn’t be that a magical child could simply be thrown to a pack of Muggles, who were allowed to treat him however they pleased… Why hadn’t she intervened? Couldn’t she see—what he was dressed in, how they treated him, didn’t she notice the bruises, didn’t she… Right, blast it, he simply didn’t have the strength to think about this right now.       ‘What’s a Squib?’       Few things in life pleased Tom as much as showing off his knowledge. And Harry was happy to give him opportunity after opportunity—it was mutually beneficial. Besides, this was what real friends did, wasn’t it? They gave each other chances to show off. Especially when there were girls around. Though it was perfectly fine without girls as well.       Tom, as usual, didn’t disappoint:       ‘Imagine a child whose parents, even before his conception, open an account at a goblin bank. Into this account they immediately deposit a tidy sum—let’s say fifty thousand Galleons.       Enough for a whole lifetime, you’d think. But then the day of birth arrives—and it transpires that over the past nine months, the key to the vault at Gringotts has been lost. Desperate searches lead nowhere, and the child, whilst owning a fortune that could provide for him completely, remains a pauper with nothing but a hole in his pocket.       Here, the gold is his magic. A Squib is one who, whilst possessing magic, cannot make use of it in the slightest.       It’s a truly pitiful existence, and the birth of Squibs is a family’s worst nightmare. In the old days, they were killed, and even now, the old pure-blood families are prepared to do almost anything to cover up their shame. Squibs are hidden away, exiled to distant estates, committed to sanatoria with trumped-up diagnoses (and there they sometimes receive fatal treatment), abandoned to Muggles, or—yes—killed.       Less conservative wizards are prepared to accept a Squib and even help them get established in life. Some are fobbed off with positions as caretakers and cleaners; others are found places in the Muggle world, especially if the family has money.       The problem is, you can’t identify a Squib whilst they’re still in nappies. Magical outbursts begin in children at different ages—there are late developers, too—and parents wait calmly until about age seven, still hope until about nine, and know almost certainly by ten. But only if the child’s name fails to appear in the Book of Hogwarts at the stroke of midnight on their twelfth birthday—only then is the sentence considered final.       Squibs can see enchanted buildings and interact with magical creatures; magical medicines work on them—and that’s all. Active spellcasting is impossible for them in any form, and no wand will respond in their hands.       If Arabella Figg is a Squib, then she has lived a long, unhappy life.’       Harry discovered that he couldn’t muster much pity for the bitter fate of Arabella Figg, a possible Squib. Instead, other thoughts swarmed in his head.       ‘And I was just… dumped like that, wasn’t I?       Just like that. With Muggles.       And kept locked up, like…’       ‘You’re not a Squib, Harry,’ Tom wrote quickly, and Harry gave a little sob; he hadn’t meant to—it just happened. ‘You’re quite the opposite.’       At that very moment, Harry desperately wished he might one day hear Tom’s voice. What sort of voice would he have, Harry wondered? Probably very warm.       Like a proper elder brother.