Chapter 2: Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area
Lesson one was money, and it went badly for everyone.
"Why," said Draco Malfoy, holding a twenty-pound note up to the window of the café on Parkway, "is there a small lady in the corner of this one, and a different, larger lady on the other side?"
"It's the same lady."
"It isn't. This one's younger."
"It's a hologram."
He looked at her. She looked at her tea. She had made a lesson plan, colour-coded, with a column for Objectives and a column for Assessment, and he had read it over breakfast with the face of someone being handed a ransom note. Week One: Currency, Transport, Food Acquisition. Week Two: Appliances, Laundry, Telephone, Post.
They had agreed on payment, eventually, after he had offered her an amount in Galleons that would have bought the flat outright and she had said that if he tried to pay her she would charm his shoelaces together every morning until the assessment. He had pointed out that she would be reported. She had pointed out that she wasn't the one on probation. In the end he was doing the washing up for a fortnight, which she suspected he thought was a punishment and which was, for her, the best thing that had happened since the war.
He counted out the coins for the teas without help. He did it slowly, examining each one, and when the girl at the till said "Cheers" he said "Thank you very much," with a little bow of the head, and the girl went pink to the hairline.
"You don't have to bow," Hermione said on the pavement.
"I didn't bow."
"You bowed. Slightly. Like a duke."
"My grandfather would have bowed. That was a nod." He turned up the collar of his coat. It was a beautiful coat, charcoal wool, entirely wrong for Camden, and people kept looking at him as if he might be someone famous they couldn't place. "Where next?"
"The Tube."
He stopped walking. "The underground train."
"Yes."
"Under the ground."
"That's generally where the underground goes, yes."
He did not like the Tube.
He held the yellow pole between Camden Town and Euston with both hands, the way she had once seen him grip a broomstick in a high wind, and watched the black walls rush past the windows as if they were personally threatening him. When the voice said Mind the gap, he muttered, "Mind it how?" and a man in a suit across the carriage snorted into his newspaper.
"You've Apparated," she said. "You've used a Portkey. This is far less unpleasant than a Portkey."
"A Portkey is honest about wanting to kill you."
At Euston she taught him the barriers. He went through the first time, the second time, and on the third time the gates snapped shut on his coat and he had to stand there, trapped and very still, while a station worker came and released him with the bored kindness of a man who had seen everything. Hermione laughed so hard she had to lean on a vending machine.
"Glad I'm entertaining," he said.
"You really are."
He gave her a long look. Then he went back through the barrier on his own, cleanly, the card held out in front of him like a wand, and did not look back to see if she'd noticed.
She had.
Sainsbury's on Camden Road was where he finally met his match.
"Unexpected item in the bagging area," said the machine.
"There is nothing unexpected," Malfoy told it. "I have put a single tin of tomatoes in the bag. I scanned the tin. You saw me scan it. We were both there."
"Unexpected item in the bagging area."
"Granger."
"You have to wait for it to register the weight."
"It has registered the weight. It has been registering the weight for some time. It simply objects to the weight." He bent toward the screen. "Is it the tin? Would you prefer a different tin?"
A small queue had formed. An elderly man with a basket of custard creams was watching with open delight. A lad in a tracksuit behind him had his phone out. Hermione stepped in and pressed the button for assistance and said, quietly, at Malfoy's shoulder, "If you hex it, it'll show up in your report."
"I wasn't going to hex it."
"Your hand is in your pocket."
His hand came out of his pocket. The assistant came over, swiped a card and fixed it with one tap. Malfoy paid, bagged, and walked out with the tomatoes held against his chest like something he had rescued from a fire.
On the walk home he was silent for a full street. Then: "I could have done that with a spell in half a second."
"I know."
"I could have done all of it. The toaster. The Tube. I could have taken us to Euston without moving."
"I know you could."
"Then why does it feel," he said, frowning at the tin, "as though I've done something?"
She didn't have an answer for him. She thought about it the rest of the way home, and when they got there she wrote under the house rules, in black biro: 6. Malfoy is permitted to be pleased with himself about the tomatoes. When she came back from the shower, there was green ink under it. Malfoy is always pleased with himself. This is merely documentation.
The launderette downstairs was run by Mrs. Okafor, who was the landlady's sister and who had, within a day of their moving in, appointed herself the building's moral authority.
"The tall one," she said to Hermione on Thursday, nodding at Malfoy, who was across the room reading the dial on a dryer with the expression he'd turned on the toaster. "He carried my shopping up from the bus. Four bags. He said, 'Allow me, madam.' Madam! Nobody under sixty says madam."
"He's very polite," Hermione said, "when he's not being horrible."
Mrs. Okafor peered at her over her reading glasses. "And you're very thin, when you're not being clever. Do you eat?"
"Sometimes."
"Sometimes," said Mrs. Okafor, with enormous disgust, and went back behind her till.
Hermione was folding her jumpers on the counter. It was warm in there, the machines rumbling, the air sweet with fabric softener, and she had pushed her sleeves up past her elbows without thinking. She didn't notice until she reached for the last jumper and felt the room go quiet next to her.
He was looking at her arm.
She knew what he saw, because she saw it every morning in the bathroom mirror: the thin, silvery letters across the inside of her left forearm, eight of them, raised and pale and permanent. Some curses healed. That one hadn't.
Hermione pulled her sleeve down. It took her a moment to manage it. "Don't," she said.
He didn't say anything. He put down the shirt he'd been holding, very carefully, folded in a neat square, and walked out of the launderette. The bell over the door rang behind him.
Mrs. Okafor looked up from her magazine and said nothing at all, which from Mrs. Okafor was a speech.
He wasn't in the flat when she got upstairs. He came back after ten, his hair wet from the drizzle, and stood in the kitchen doorway while she ate cereal at the table because she couldn't be bothered with anything else.
"Rule four," she said, before he could speak.
"I know." He came in and sat down across from her. He put both hands flat on the table. He looked, for a moment, very like the Malfoy she'd known, and then not at all, because that Malfoy had never once in seven years sat still and waited for her to look at him.
She looked at him.
"I'm not going to talk about the war," he said. "You made a rule, and it's a good rule. I'm only going to say one thing, and then I'll go back to being unbearable."
She put her spoon down.
"I stood there," Draco said. "In the drawing room. I want you to know that I remember I stood there."
The fridge hummed. Upstairs, the trombone was silent for once, as if it were listening.
"I know you do," Hermione said.
He nodded once. Then he got up, rinsed her bowl when she was done with it, dried it, put it away in the wrong cupboard, and went to bed. She moved the bowl to the right cupboard in the morning, and he moved it back, and by Sunday she had stopped minding where the bowls went.
The second week was easier, and stranger.
He learned the hob, with a great deal of swearing and a box of Swan Vestas, and on Tuesday she came home from the Ministry soaked to the knees to find a pan of pasta on the table and a jar of sauce, heated through, and two plates. He had got a library card from the Camden library and was halfway through a beginner's encyclopaedia of electricity, because, he said, it was the only book that explained it without assuming he knew what a volt was. He read her facts across the table, unprompted. She learned more about the National Grid than she had ever wanted to know.
He said "Granger" like a name. She noticed every time.
On Wednesday night she fell asleep on the sofa with a stack of house-elf employment complaints on her chest, and woke at two with a blanket over her and the complaints squared in a neat pile on the floor, sorted by date. She lay there in the dark for a long time, looking at his closed door.
The owl came on Thursday morning, while he was in the shower and his allotted twenty minutes were becoming twenty-five. It was a Ministry owl, but not a probation owl. It came to her.
Dear Miss Granger, the Housing Restoration Office is pleased to inform you that, owing to a surrender elsewhere on the list, a one-bedroom flat has become available at Diagon Alley, above Flourish and Blotts. It is yours from Friday, should you wish to accept. Please reply by owl no later than Friday noon, after which the allocation will pass to the next applicant.
A flat of her own. Above a bookshop. Ten minutes' walk from the Ministry, and a fireplace, a proper one, on the Floo.
The shower turned off. She heard him humming, badly, through the wall.
Hermione folded the letter in four and put it in the pocket of her cardigan, and when he came out in a cloud of steam and said, "Granger, the boiler made a noise," she said, "What sort of noise?" in a perfectly normal voice, and didn't tell him.
His assessment was on Friday at ten.