Cold Feet

Ginny and Hermione decided to have coffee at Hermione’s flat. They settled Francis to snooze in the living room and retired to the kitchen so that Ginny’s shrieking laughter wouldn’t wake her son as they got down to some serious character assassination. Ginny had some great gossip about a girl they knew from Hogwarts who claimed to have increased her breasts by four cup sizes by doing nothing other than rubbing pureed newt eggs into them every night before she went to sleep. Hermione laughed until she could barely breathe.



They both turned a little guiltily at the sound of Harry Apparating into the apartment.



“I could hear you two cackling all the way down the street,” he claimed as he walked into the kitchen.



“We don’t cackle,” Ginny sniffed.



“Yes, you do. Like a pair of… well, witches. Got some good gossip?”



“Swapping knitting patterns. Hello, Harry.”



“Ginny.” Harry blew her a kiss hello.



“Phew!” Ginny pretended to reel from the alcohol fumes. “Been out on the town again?”



“Been downstairs with Mrs. Smith.”



“Your other woman,” Ginny laughed. “You should keep an eye on him, Hermione.”



“Oh, I do,” she played along with the joke.



Mrs. Smith was eighty-two years old and lived in the downstairs apartment. On a Thursday night, Harry played cards with their elderly neighbour. He was always around there, opening jars, taking out the rubbish on a Tuesday night and making sure the front steps were clear of ice and well-gritted in the event of a freeze.



“Where’s my little man?” Harry asked now. Ginny had appointed Harry her son’s godfather, without the ceremony – unless you counted the bottle of vintage champagne they had toasted away on Francis’ behalf. Molly Weasley was still furious that her daughter had refused a nice, big family party to celebrate Francis’ birth. Secretly, Hermione thought Ginny might have indulged her parents a little more.



“Francis is asleep in the living room,” she told Harry.



At least, he *had* been asleep. Ginny suddenly frowned. Her ears were attuned like those of a mother bat’s to the small squeaks and rumblings that came from her son’s tiny body. She reacted to Francis’ tiny cry before Hermione even really heard it. Possibly even before Francis himself knew what was going on. “Harry, will you do me a huge favour and bring Francis into the kitchen for me while I warm up some milk?” she asked.



Hermione had expected Harry to appear at the kitchen door with the pushchair, which was how she would have done it, but instead, he appeared cradling Francis in his arms, tucking his little finger into Francis’ mouth to keep him occupied and cooing a song. Hermione was stunned. As he stood in the doorway, Harry looked like something out of that poster from the early nineties, that one with the bare-chested man tenderly holding a tiny baby. Only, not quite as shirtless. And with spectacles.



“Wow,” Ginny said, impressed. “You actually picked him up.”



She was clearly as surprised as Hermione was. Even Francis seemed to be blinking in surprise.



“Of course I picked him up,” Harry said defensively. “What else was I going to do? Am I doing it right?” he added.



Ginny nodded. “If he isn’t screaming, then you’re doing it right. You do look very comfortable like that, you know.”



Harry smiled straight at Hermione. She gave him the thumbs up. “Looking good, Mr. Potter,” she agreed.



“Ouch!” That was when Harry discovered Francis’ first tooth.



“Oh, yeah,” Ginny smiled contritely. “I meant to tell you, I’ve stopped putting my body parts anywhere near his mouth.”



She handed Harry a clean dummy and, with a whispered spell, warmed up a bottle of milk with her wand. After a moment, she tested the temperature on the back of her hand.



“Is it cool enough?” Harry asked, concerned.



“Well, I haven’t got a blister.”



“Ginny!” Harry exclaimed.



“Of course it’s cool enough.” She passed the bottle to Harry. “Here. You’re doing so well at holding him, perhaps you want to try giving him his bottle, too?”



“Okay,” Jack said easily. “I think I should be able to do this.”



“It’s so easy, even you can do it.” Ginny winked at Hermione.



Still cradling the baby in his arms, Harry lowered himself very slowly onto one of the kitchen chairs and tried to find a comfortable position. He shifted so that Francis was almost completely prone across his knees. Sensing that all wasn’t quite as usual, Francis swivelled his head and looked to his mother in alarm.



“You’ll need to lift him up a little more than that. He still can’t sit up too well, but he likes to try and hold the bottle himself.”



Harry moved accordingly but Hermione could see he was finding it hard to manoeuvre.



“Give me that for a second.” Hermione took the bottle back off him.



Harry finally got Francis into the right position, resting in the crook of his arm against his soft green sweater.



“This okay with you?” he asked the baby.



Francis made serious eye contact and attempted a half-smile, as if to say it would do for now. Harry held the teat of the bottle to Francis’ lips, but Francis turned his head as though the bottle was filled with poison.



“He doesn’t want it,” Harry said, dismayed.



“He does. He always moves his head away like that. He gets so excited, he forgets what he was crying about. You’ve kind of got to shove the teat in his mouth,” Ginny instructed.



“Shove it in?”



“Yeah. Don’t be so delicate. Press it against his lips again.”



Harry did as he was told. “Here you go, little man.” He put a little more pressure behind the bottle and it worked. This time, Francis sucked the teat greedily, grabbing at the bottle with both hands. But he took just one big gulp before he squawked and spat what little milk he had taken over the kitchen table. The speed with which Harry handed him back to his mother was almost comical. He offloaded Francis almost as quickly as Hermione’s own record time.



“Forgot to lock the door behind me,” Harry muttered as he headed out of the kitchen again, apparently forgetting he had Apparated into the apartment.



“At least he wanted to try,” Ginny whispered when Harry had gone. “I know plenty of guys who’ve never even really looked at a baby until they get their own, let alone tried to feed one. He’ll make a good father, I think, our Harry.”



“Hmm…” Hermione agreed.



“You’ve got to have a girl first so she and Francis can get married and make you, me, Ron and Harry all in-laws,” she continued. “Make our friendship more official.”



“But will any girl your son falls in love with ever be good enough?” Hermione asked. “I don’t want to fall out with you because my daughter doesn’t do her share of the housework.”



“Then you’ll have to teach her by example and stop making Harry do it.” Ginny ran a finger along Hermione’s kitchen table and tutted. “I can’t wait until you have a baby and I have someone decent to talk to about the whole thing. The girls from my antenatal class have turned into a bunch of zombies. No sense of humour about it at all.”



Ginny talked on for a while about the few girls from her antenatal class who were still doing their best to keep a support network going now all their babies were born. Ginny particularly hated one called Janine Whittiker, a witch who was actually on her third baby and had made a point of telling all the ‘beginners’, as she called the rest of them, how it should be done: natural birth, breastfeeding, recyclable nappies. Doing it like the twentieth century had never happened. Hermione had met Janine once, while she and Ginny were walking Francis through the park. Janine had her youngest in a big, old-fashioned pram – a genuine, reconditioned antique. Her middle child ate dirt in the sandpit while the eldest hit smaller children who tried to climb up the slide he had commandeered.



“STILL BREASTFEEDING?!” Janine had yelled to Ginny from the other side of the playground.



At the sound of the word “breast”, a dozen fathers’ heads swivelled towards them like dogs hearing, “Walkies!”



Hermione groaned on Ginny’s behalf.



“YES, THANKS!” Ginny yelled back, somehow managing to keep a straight face. “AND HOW ARE YOUR STITCHES?!”



“ABSOLUTE AGONY! TELL ME, DID YOU GET ANY PILES?!”



Hermione was very relieved when, after quite a standoff, during which they competitively yelled out their birth-related ailments across twenty yards of tarmac, Ginny deigned to push Francis’ pram over to Janine the Alpha Mother.



“Johnnie’s still running cocoa butter into my perineum every night,” Janine confided in a whisper. Thank God.



Hermione crossed her legs and looked anywhere but at the new mothers while Janine rambled on. Cocoa butter in the perineum? It didn’t sound much like foreplay to her.



“And don’t even get me started on my cracked nipples,” Janine continued.



'I won’t,' Hermione promised inwardly. 'I won’t!'



“Oops,” Janine giggled. “I’m leaking again.” She looked down at the front of her shirt, where a wet patch bloomed in the blue cotton like a dandelion, and promptly started to unbutton it. “Must be lunchtime.” She flopped her left breast out of an enormous flesh-coloured bra. “Are your nipples looking like this?” she asked Ginny, pointing one in her direction.



“Oh, yes,” Ginny nodded solemnly.



Janine insisted that they stay and talk while she fed baby Sean and the dozen fathers nearby tried very hard not to look on.



Nipples. Perineum.



Cracks. Stretch marks. Stitches.



'Your body becomes public property. Derelict public property at that,' was the minus-point of motherhood Hermione added to her increasingly long list that night.



Ginny had, in fact, given up breastfeeding long before that hideous afternoon in the park. Francis was just too big and she couldn’t produce enough breast milk to stop him from going hungry. After the first bottle of formula, the guilt was gone and the relief of being able to leave her son with his grandparents or one of his six doting uncles for a few hours every so often took its place.



That night, Francis sucked hungrily on his bottle and it was empty within a couple of minutes.



“Well, I don’t have to worry about him not feeding.” She tipped Francis forward to burp him. An enormous belch wracked his small body before he pulled another familiar face – eyebrow-knitting effort, and then eyes-wide-open relief.



“Oh, no,” Ginny groaned as Francis filled his nappy. “Not already. Talk about in one end and out the other. I don’t know how he’s managing to get so big when he spends so much time expelling everything I put into him straight back out again. We go through so many nappies! It’s a good thing I can simply Vanish them away, or else he’d be responsible for the contents of an entire landfill site of his own.”



“Drink?” Hermione offered, eager to make sure her hands were busy before Ginny found her something altogether messier to do with them.



*



“I did pretty well with Francis tonight, didn’t I?” Harry grinned when he climbed into bed beside her that night.



“You held him for a whole five minutes,” she agreed.



“You know, I think I’m getting pretty good with kids,” he said thoughtfully. “Alan from the office brought in his son last week and the boy followed me around for almost twenty minutes. He loved me!”



“He probably only loved you because your face is on one of his Chocolate Frog cards,” Hermione retorted, a little cruelly.



Harry carried on as though he hadn't heard her. “We’re going to have a boy first, you know.” He wrapped his arms around her and kissed the back of her neck. “Within a year of our wedding. Mrs. Smith says so.”



Mrs. Smith had a tendency to think she was a powerful seer and oracle after several sherries, but Hermione preferred it when she used her special powers to pronounce on the marital prospects of celebrities.



“And we’re going to call him Johnny, after the greatest man who ever lived,” Harry continued.



“Who?” Hermione played dumb.



“Johnny Baxter, you idiot!”



Johnny Baxter was the Captain and Seeker of the England Quidditch team, and Harry’s personal hero. “We’re not going to call him Johnny,” Hermione replied. The name ‘Johnny’ would now, to her, always mean cocoa butter on the perineum. But at least the England Quidditch team’s 2004 World Cup victory meant that Johnny Baxter had replaced the late, great Dumbledore as Harry’s hero of the moment, even if only for briefly. Much as she had respected and been in awe of the great Wizard that had died at the end of their sixth year at Hogwarts, ‘Albus Granger-Potter’ definitely wasn’t a name Hermione wanted to inflict on her future son. And neither was ‘Alberta’ for a girl.



“Johnny Albus Granger-Potter,” Harry murmured into the back of her neck. Future England Quidditch captain. Minister of Magic for Great Britain. Formula One racing driver—”



“Sounds great,” she interrupted, moving Harry’s hand to her breast. “Let's put this baby-making lark into practise, then.”



*



Hermione was still awake long after Harry had fallen asleep. She was extremely tired, and she must have changed position a dozen times, turning her pillow over and over to let her cheek rest against the cool side. She stuck one leg out from underneath the sheets. She counted sheep. She tried to remember what sheep really looked like. She considered getting up and taking some Sleeping Draught, then remembered Harry had used the last of it last week, when he was having one of his recurring nightmares. Then, she cursed the fact that Harry liked to wake up to sun filtering through cream-coloured drapes while she really needed black-out blinds (they had compromised on dark blue).



In the end, she gave up, went to the fridge and poured herself a big glass of milk. She drank the milk sitting at the kitchen table, thinking back to earlier that evening, when Ginny had been sitting in the chair opposite with Francis on her knee, pulling his best infant Buddha face while she told a story about a comically bad blow-job that had Hermione laughing until her nose ran.



“For God’s sake,” she had said. “Not in front of your son.”



“He won’t remember this. But when he’s all grown-up and famous, I can see his biography. He’ll describe evenings when, dressed as if for a ball, I came into his room to wish him goodnight, my exotic perfume still hanging in the air like a fragrant cloud as I drifted through the door in my rustling silk robes…” She waved her arm dramatically. “That’s how I’d have liked to remember my mother. But mine always smelled of cleaning products or frying food, and her robes were always horribly unfashionable, even for someone as poor as us. She still wears those horrible robes, even now.”



Hermione sighed. “Mine always smelled of their dentist surgery. Antiseptic and rubber gloves.”



Ginny chuckled.



Sat in the kitchen now, by herself, Hermione let her mind wander. Many people claimed to remember their earliest memories. But she had read somewhere that those people who thought they could remember lying in a cot, wearing a baby-gro, were probably just remembering their parents’ memories of them. When you thought back to what you believed to be your very early memories, it was just as likely you were remembering a photograph someone once showed you. Or perhaps your mother told the story of the time she lost control of your pushchair on the steep hill that led towards the busy road so often that you thought you could remember it, too. You couldn’t. You slept all the way through it. It was true.



One of Hermione’s earliest true memories was of her mother’s back.



She must have been four-years-old. She'd had a doll called Katie. She was an ugly-looking thing with a squashed head, which Hermione had graffitied on, but she had loved her with a passion, almost more than the puppy who decided the doll would be fun to play tug-of-war with. As Hermione wrestled her doll free from the puppy’s jaws, one of its legs came away in the fight. She picked up the loose limb, dented with sharp puppy teeth-marks, and went running through the house, yelling for her mother to mend the doll and make her happy again. Her mother could always make her happy.



But this particular day, Karen Granger didn’t answer her daughter’s call. By the time Hermione found her, she was in a total panic and thought someone had kidnapped her. She’d been watching too many movies, been listening to too many Grimm fairytales. Her mother hadn’t been kidnapped, of course. She was just sitting on the back doorstep of their house, slightly hunched over something Hermione couldn’t yet see. It was cold outside, but she wasn’t wearing a sweater over her thin shirt. When Hermione put her hand on her shoulder, the woman flinched and turned to look at her with a face the young Hermione didn’t recognise. She was lighting up a cigarette.



“Hermione, don’t creep up on me like that.”



“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Hermione told her accusingly. “Benny broke my doll.”



Benny the puppy stood beside Hermione, still wagging his tail. He was waiting for her to take her eye off the doll for just one second so he could run down the garden and bury her next to his bones. Hermione was convinced of it.



“Mummy.” She held the sorry-looking doll and its broken leg towards her mother again, but she didn’t take it from her and immediately work her Mummy's-magic.



“Show it to Daddy,” she said instead.



“Is that a cigarette?”



Karen Granger looked at the glowing tip as though surprised to find it in her hand. “Yes, I think it is.” Then, she took a long drag. She exhaled luxuriously, and while Hermione was sure she didn’t mean for it to happen, some of the smoke got into the little girl’s eyes. She screwed them up tightly against the pain but didn’t complain. She already knew complaining wouldn’t be appreciated that morning.



She waited for her eyes to stop stinging, and when she opened them, she found her mother had got up and was slowly walking straight past, without looking at her, to the end of the garden. She stayed there and watched the laundry blowing on the clothesline until she had finished her cigarette.



Her mother certainly didn’t smoke anymore, which made Hermione wonder if she ever really did see that woman on the doorstep. Perhaps all these years, she’d really been remembering a photograph of someone else or a scene from a movie. Not a Hollywood blockbuster, but one of those films about urban isolation made by some gritty director from the north of England who grew up without shoes. It didn’t seem possibly that the bright, intelligent, professional woman who greeted her with a hug at the door of her parents’ house these days ever walked straight past her so coldly when she wanted her to console her about a broken doll.



But sometimes, when she thought back over her early childhood, it did seem unusually quiet. Hermione remembered going to friends’ houses, playing music loud and jumping on the beds, screaming around the garden, hollering through the halls, but those memories never took place in the house where she grew up. She played quiet games at her house – a lot of quiet games of imagination, or more often than not, reading a book. That was really the whole reason she *had* been such a bookworm as a child, and even now. That was merely the way in which she had grown up. And she'd never had her school friends around.



Hermione stood at the kitchen sink and cast a “Scourgify!” on her milk glass, shivering as she had done on that distant morning. She had been thinking about her mother and the strange cigarette moment quite often lately. Her face would pop into her mind at the oddest times – when she was watching the news on television, feeling sympathetic towards people starving in countries she hadn’t even heard of, or while she was in a café, watching a father trying to entertain an unhappy preteen, or while she was waiting for Harry to hold open a shop door for some overburdened woman struggling alone with a pushchair and a toddler. She saw that odd, expressionless mask her mother had on that day twenty-three years ago, so different from the smiling, open face in the framed family photograph taken around the same time that now sat on the bookshelf in her living room. Which was the real one?



“Hey, what are you doing, out here in the cold?” Harry appeared in the kitchen doorway.



“Just thirsty,” she told him. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”



“You didn’t. My bladder did. Knew I shouldn’t have taken that last sherry Mrs. Smith gave me. Do you want me to get your robe for you?”



“No. I’m coming back to bed now.”



“Good. I can’t sleep without you beside me.”



Harry kissed her on the top of her head. She smiled and reached up for his hand.



“Only because it’s too cold otherwise,” he added.