English Girls, Approximately.

This is my first fanfiction, though I've done previous writing. One of my favorite aspects of "Harry Potter" is the richness of each of the characters created, and I love elaborating on the lives of secondary characters--especially the characters so secondary, they almost never get any lines. Thus, my fanatical love for Terry Boot has grown book by book. I have theories that it's Mister Boot who saves us every volume, but that's a long story for another time.

As a disclaimer, I don't own Harry Potter; I don't own Ginny, Terry, or even the word Muggle. All of these wonderful pieces are a part of a brilliant piece of work by J.K. Rowling, who deserves all the credit and money that she gets. Cheers to you, JKR.

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"English girls are pretty when they play guitar
Crazy like a day just a-breaking I ain't sure what for."


Ginny had chosen London for its predictable dreariness: the gray, long empty streets that led away into darkness, twisting and turning alleyways stretching into thin spaces between houses crammed and huddled together, birds roosting for warmth. Later on she would say to herself that she missed the green of the English countryside; she yearned for the green rolling lawns and the merry twinges of distant laughter from the town schoolyard, but at the time of choosing living quarters, Ginny had been firm that she would be far from greenery.

Crumbling, cracking, old London. Comfortable like an old pair of tatty slippers, worn straight to the heel.

A piece of pavement crumbled away from beneath her own rather shabby shoes, and Ginny caught her balance with a sharp intake of breath as her toes went straight for a puddle in the gutter. It had been raining rather badly as of late, though of course it never seemed to do anything these days but rain.

She moved through the crowds, unseen, wraithlike, stumbling on the protruding cobblestones with half-hearted curses. It didn’t really seem necessary. Her feet were already soaked through from the water; she was damp from the mists of rain that drifted through the streets, ghosts on the wind. If not for her sense of purpose, she would meander around a bit, running her fingers over the cracked walls, mended with seams of concrete, feeling the age of London, falling apart in front of her very eyes. The whole city was like an overripe fruit, falling into decay and rot from the inside out.

Her flat, a small, leaky building at the top of a ramshackle building, loomed in front of her, stark against the gray clouds that hang low on London’s skyline. Back when her eyes had been starry with promise, Ginny had loved the way it looked—romantic, dingy, fraying at the stitching as only hardy old buildings can. She had defended its virtues to anyone who would listen, but she remembered particularly vividly her talk of its squalor with Ron.

“It’s dirty,” he had proclaimed, setting down her heaviest case and frowning at the windowpanes.

“I can clean it,” Ginny had replied impatiently. “It won’t take much.”

Ron had frowned. “Will you? It’s going to be dirty ten years from now, still.”
Ginny had laughed at him and teased that he was too motherly, or something; she felt guilty that she couldn’t remember her exact words. Did she forget so easily? It had not been that long ago that Ron had helped her to carry her things up the wending stairs to her tiny little room—Ron; he had always been a loyal brother, though stiffly pigheaded at times.

She snorted as she twisted her key in the lock and jiggled the door handle, causing the chipped door to creak open on its dry hinges. Funny, how time changes impressions, she thought to herself with a wry little smile. If you would have asked her the day that Ron had told her that her little nest was dirty, Ginny would have spoken any number of insults against her elder brother. Now to hear her…!

But Ron had proved, inconceivably, correct; her rather clumsy brother, who was never right about anything—he had been right that her apartment was dirty. And it was still dirty. Ginny had never quite gotten around to cleaning it. And she would rather not remember that time—the way Ron had grinned at her, how she had teased him and made him frown. Easier, she told herself, to forget—though she could almost remember without repercussion by now, and not be reminded of the way things had come to be.

The stairwell, narrow and painted a fading apple-green, smelled musty in the rainy evening. Ginny scuffed up the stairs, each step creaking beneath her shoes; she unlatched the worn lock on her door and let herself in.

Her apartment: tatty, small, and ratted at the edges, it smelled like a mix of coal from the stove and the sour scent of the city air. No matter what Ginny did, the smells permeated every aspect of her life: coal and grime, grime and coal, it all added up to filth.

Ginny tossed her keys down onto the table, letting herself sink down at the table across from them, head in her hands. She has purposely arranged herself in the center of London, far from family and friends that she had known previously, and memory: Hogwarts, Ottery St. Catchpole, the Burrow, mum and dad, the twins, Bill, Charlie, Ron; and Harry. There was always Harry, trailing along. Even that was getting easier to forget, though it festered at her and dogged her thoughts.

Some days it all seemed so distant: another world away, or at least another life. But Ginny hardly every thought in such grand terms; Ron had always been the one for melodrama. And things were getting easer; every day was a little more bearable. Every day was a little easier to forget, or at least swallow it all down.

Ginny was thin, grimy in a way that comes from living in the city—but beautiful beneath it all. There was still something of her former vibrancy in her, but it was muted: by the coal streak that smudged across her ivoried brow, by the wear and tear to her robes, by the very frayed edges of herself that made her appear so worn and shabby. She carried herself like a girl too quickly grown up, patching her robes in the neat stitches that her mother had taught her and remembering every time that she pricked her fingers, the lessons in front of the fire.




Sex had been surprisingly simple.

Ginny hated her skin. There was far too much of it, draped over gangly bony limbs as pale as parchment, except when the wind blew against her cheeks too hard—they turned a bright shiny pink. In the summertime, despite all her best efforts, she only managed to crisp and burn, like a marshmallow left too long over the fire logs. Her arms seemed always gooey with sticky white lotion, her knobby knees always tucked under a blanket to hide them from the sun. And still, freckles popped out like the plague, sunlight reddened her back, sunburn peeled her shoulder blades to flakes, crumbling like ash on the wind.

Ginny hated her skin, and she hated the seashore, but when you’re caught up in the bedroom, it’s hard to be self-conscious about things like that anyway. Or really, it’s quite easy, but you seem to forget. There are other more important things to worry about, like trying to remember where he’s throwing your camisole so that you can find it in the morning.

They made love when it was snowing, when there were great white flakes tumbling past the darkened panes of the window. His first-floor flat was positively huge, all drafts and rickety corridors, but Ginny loved it. She loved the feeling of the stone floor in the kitchen, padding beneath her bare feet; she loved his chipped blue coffee mugs, wrapping her fingers around the handle and feeling the warmth tingling along the heels of her hands; she loved standing in the back garden, leaning against the brick wall baked rusty-red by the sunlight with the faint sounds of Muggle London drifting over like distant fuzz on the radio.

His bed was huge, a massive four-post monstrosity that loomed against one of the walls, casting everything in its shadow. Ginny had needed a leg up just to get into the thing, with its mattresses stacked sky-high to the ceiling.

“Like the Princess and the Pea,” Harry had told her, fussing at the mirror with his hair.

“Like the what?” She was thumbing through Muggle magazines, turning the glossy pages on still photographs that seemed stale and bare, the white sheets clutched up around her armpits to keep her warm.

“The Princess and the Pea.” He flattened a hand against his forehead, frowning as his hair sprang right back up again. “They put her on a stack of mattresses high in the sky, to see if she could feel a pea all the way down at the bottom.”

“And why would they do that?” Ginny turned the magazine up-side-down, shaking out all the perfume ads stapled to the center pages. For a minute, she was awash in flowers and clean sheet smells; then it smelled like Harry’s flat again: coffee and dirt, and slightly damp wood.

“To see if she was worthy to marry the prince. If she was princess enough for him.” He frowned at his reflection a second time, turning to the side and giving himself an appraising glare, surveying wares in a piece of polished glass. “Or something, I can’t rightly recall.”

“Harry, I think you’re absolutely barmy,” Ginny told him matter-of-factly, dropping the magazine and crawling down to the end of the bed. A draft of cold air reminded her that she was naked, that there was nothing separating her bare freckled arse from the cold air; but Harry had turned to look at her with a shy sort of smile stamped across his face, letting his hair spring up over his forehead in a tousled way that she absolutely loved.

“It’s true,” he replied, “it’s an actual Muggle story,” but he was staring at her with that mad grin still, his hair gone all funny and his cheeks touched with the beginnings of a blush.

Ginny had let the sheets fall away from her breasts, and sat up to hold her arms out to him. “Whoops, Sir Prince,” she said, cocking her head to one side and grinning back, “I think I actually felt a pea under all of your mattresses. Am I princess enough for you?”

He had fallen into her arms, tumbling against her pale skin, his dark hair fanning out over her collar bone; he murmured into her neck, “Of course you are, Gin; of course you are,” and that was that, covering her skin with kisses and dancing his fingertips across her hip bones with feather touches.

Ginny never felt quite as beautiful as she did when she was with him.