Chapter 2: Twenty-Two Attempts
Private Room Six. Patient: D. L. Malfoy. Week one under H. J. Granger. Reflection: absent. Shadow: absent as of Tuesday. Peripheral temperature: hands cold to the touch, wrists cool. Anchoring attempts: twenty-two. Held: 0. Patient's comment, when shown this note: "You could at least round it up."
The trouble, it turned out, was that everything I knew about Draco Malfoy was wrong.
Not wrong as in untrue. I had a great deal of very precise information. I knew he pushed his hair back with his left hand when he was nervous and his right hand when he was showing off. I knew he had a small white scar under his chin from a Hippogriff and would tell anyone who asked that it was from a duel. I knew he hated pumpkin juice and drank it anyway because his father had, that he pronounced "Muggle" as though it had a silent extra syllable, that he could not, under any circumstances, resist the last word.
I sat by his bed on the Monday of my first week and said all of it, out loud, slowly, holding the counter-charm Smethwyck had pieced together from Paracelsus open on my knee. I said it the way you would say a spell, with my wand in my lap and my whole attention on him.
Nothing held. Not a flicker in the mirror. Not a grey edge of shadow on the sheet.
"Well," said Malfoy, when I'd finished. He was looking at the ceiling. "That was the most humiliating forty minutes of my adult life. And I've been on trial."
"It should have worked."
"It's the Hippogriff scar, isn't it. You can't stand that I lie about it."
"It's not the scar." I shut the book. My hands were cold and I didn't know why. "It's that you don't push your hair back with either hand anymore. I've watched you all morning. You just leave it. And you've drunk water every time they've brought you pumpkin juice. And you just let me have the last word four times."
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me.
"Everything I know about you," I said slowly, "is about a boy I hated a long time ago. I don't know anything about you. Not really. Not now." I felt it settle on me like a weight. "Smethwyck was right. I know facts about you. They're just older facts."
There was a long silence. In the corridor, a trolley rattled past and somebody laughed.
"Then you'll have to find out some new ones," said Malfoy. "Won't you, Healer Granger."
So I did.
It became a routine, the way things do in hospitals, where time stops behaving properly and every day is the same corridor. My shift ended at six. At ten past I would knock on the door of Room Six with two cups of tea from the visitors' tearoom on the Fifth Floor, and he would say, "You're late," and I would say, "I'm early," and then I would sit down in the chair by the bed and ask him questions until a mediwitch came to throw me out.
I found out that he had spent three years on the Ministry's reparations programme, returning objects from the Malfoy vaults to the families they'd been taken from, and that he had done more of them than anyone else on the scheme. Four hundred and six objects. He knew every one.
"There was a teapot," he said one evening, staring at the window. "Blue and white. Taken from a family called Wainwright in 1978, Muggle-borns, in Leeds. My grandfather took it. I don't know why. It wasn't valuable. I think he just liked the idea of having something of theirs." He turned his cup round in his cold hands. "I took it back myself. Mrs Wainwright was eighty-one. She made me sit down and she made tea in it, in front of me, and she said, 'There. Now it's been used properly.' I sat in her kitchen for three hours. I couldn't leave."
That one held. Just for a second. I saw it out of the corner of my eye: in the mirror over the washbasin, for the space of a heartbeat, the faintest outline of a man sitting up in an empty bed, holding a cup.
Then it was gone. He hadn't seen it. I didn't tell him.
I found out that he played the piano, badly, and was very sensitive about it. That he read Muggle detective novels under the covers at night, as though somebody might still confiscate them, and that he could always guess the murderer and was furious when he was right, because he liked to be surprised. That he had never in his life been able to cast a Patronus, and had stopped trying around the time of his trial, because he'd been afraid of what shape it would take. That he did not sleep well. That he had a cat at the Manor called Bartholomew, who was enormous and spiteful and had bitten Lucius on the ankle in 1999 and never been forgiven, and that the cat was the thing he missed most, and that he'd rather die properly than tell his mother that.
I found out that he was funny. That had always been true, I think. I had simply never been on the right end of it before.
And somewhere in the middle of all that I found out other things too, things I did not write in the chart, because they were not about him. I found out that I looked forward to ten past six all day. That I had started bringing the good biscuits from the shop on Charing Cross Road because the visitors' tearoom ones were stale, and he had noticed on the first day and said nothing, and the next evening there'd been a note on the bedside table in that small precise hand that just said Thank you for the biscuits. Ginger, next time? That I'd kept the note. That I was keeping all of them.
By the end of the second week, his reflection came back for nearly a minute every evening. A pale shape in the glass, like breath on a window. By the end of the third, his shadow had a hand again. Just one, his left, the long fingers spread across the sheet.
"Look," I said, the night it happened, and he looked down and saw it and went very still.
"That's mine," he said.
"That's yours."
He moved his fingers. The shadow-fingers moved too, grey on white.
"What did you say?" He was still staring at it. "Just then. Before it came back."
I had to think. "I said you'd lied to me. On Tuesday. About the piano. You said you'd stopped playing years ago, but you've got calluses on your left hand. You play every week, don't you. You just don't want anyone to hear."
He didn't answer for a moment.
"I play on Thursdays," he said. "In the music room, when my mother's out. It's the only time the Manor feels like a house." He looked up at me, and his face was doing something complicated. "Nobody knows that. How do you know that?"
"I pay attention," I said. "It's unbearable. You said so yourself."
"Granger."
"What?"
"Say my name," he said. He said it quietly, without any drawl at all. "Not 'Malfoy.' Not 'the patient.' Just my name. Will you?"
My heart did something extremely unprofessional. I put my tea down on the bedside table.
"Draco," I said.
In the mirror over the washbasin, for one long breathtaking moment, a whole man sat up in the bed. White-blond hair and sharp face and lime-green hospital pyjamas, which he had complained about on my first day for twenty minutes. He was looking at me. And his reflection, unlike him, had not quite managed to hide its expression in time.
Then a mediwitch knocked and said visiting hours were over, and it faded, and neither of us said a word about it, and I went home and lay awake until three.
His mother came on the fourth Sunday.
I wasn't supposed to be working. I had come in anyway, because I had read a footnote in a translation of Paracelsus the night before that I wanted to ask Smethwyck about, and because it was Sunday, and on Sundays there was no ten past six. I was coming down the corridor with two cups of tea and ginger biscuits when I saw her standing outside Room Six.
Narcissa Malfoy was exactly as I remembered her, tall and pale and very composed, in robes the colour of a pearl, with an armful of hothouse lilies. She was looking at the door. There was ink on the back of her left hand. Room Six, it said, in her own handwriting, and underneath, D.
I watched her look at her hand, and then at the door. I watched her face.
She turned and saw me in my lime-green robes, and her expression changed into something polite and slightly lost, the expression of a woman in a hospital who has forgotten which floor she wanted.
"I'm so sorry," said Narcissa Malfoy. "I think I've written something down wrong. Could you tell me, Healer… whose room is this?"
Behind the half-open door, in the bed in Room Six, I heard a cup set down very carefully on a bedside table. Then nothing at all.