As Long As You Want

Harry saw a ceiling with a crack in it shaped like a river, and then he saw Mrs Weasley's face, upside down, looking at him.

He was lying on a sofa. Somebody had put a cushion under his head and a crocheted blanket over him, and the room smelled of woodsmoke and toast and something frying. Ron was hovering behind his mother with his hands jammed in his pockets and a look on his face that Harry had last seen when the white queen's arm came down.

'There you are,' said Mrs Weasley softly. 'Are you all right, dear? Don't sit up. Just tell me.'

Harry nodded. Then he remembered the yard, and the hens, and what he'd been in the middle of saying when the ground came up, and it all came out of him in a rush.

'I'm sorry. Mrs Weasley, I'm really sorry. It's my fault, all of it. Ron only came because of me. Please don't be angry with him, it was me, I'd have done anything to get out, I...' He swallowed. 'I'll understand. If you don't want me here. I'll understand, honestly.'

'Hush,' said Mrs Weasley. 'Hush, now.'

She put a hand on his forehead, the way you'd check for a fever, and left it there a moment, and Harry, who'd never had anybody do that, didn't know what to do.

'I'm not best pleased with Ron,' she said. 'Or with Fred, or with George, and the three of them know it. But I'm not angry with you, Harry. Not in the least. Do you hear me?'

'I had to get him out, Mum,' said Ron, before Harry could answer. He'd come round the end of the sofa. 'You should've seen him. You should've seen the room. They'd put bars on his window. Actual bars, Mum, bolted on. And a lock on the door like a prison, and a cat-flap at the bottom to push food through, and there wasn't any food, there was an empty soup bowl and that was it. They were starving him. It's not right. It's not right.'

'Ronald.'

Mrs Weasley didn't raise her voice. She didn't need to.

'I am going to handle this. Go and set the table for breakfast. We've a guest.'

Ron opened his mouth, shut it, and went. At the door he looked back at Harry, and it was the look he'd given him from the window of the car, the one that said I've got you, and then he was gone, and Harry heard cutlery start to rattle in the next room.

Mrs Weasley pulled a chair up to the sofa and sat down on it.

'Now,' she said. 'Is that true? What Ron's just told me?'

Harry's first thought was to lie.

It came as easily as breathing. It was what he'd always done. Say it was fine. Say he'd fallen over. Say it was nothing. Because he knew exactly how this went: she'd go to Privet Drive, and Aunt Petunia would open the door in her good apron, and Uncle Vernon would stand behind her in his tie and say very disturbed, I'm afraid, tells stories, we do our best, and by the time Mrs Weasley came back she'd be looking at Harry the way all the others had. The teachers. The dinner lady. The lady from the council who'd come once and had a cup of tea and gone away. Every one of them had believed the Dursleys, in the end, because the Dursleys had a nice house and a clean car and Harry was a scrawny boy with broken glasses who said things that couldn't be true.

He looked up at Mrs Weasley to say it was fine.

And she was looking at him with such plain, ordinary kindness, with no suspicion in it at all, that the lie wouldn't come. He tried. He opened his mouth for it, and what came out instead was the truth.

'They locked me in,' he said. 'In my room. They wouldn't let me out. It was because of that house-elf, he came to the house and dropped a pudding on the kitchen floor in front of the people Uncle Vernon was trying to sell drills to, and then the Ministry sent an owl saying I'd done magic, and I hadn't, I never touched anything, it was him, that stupid, snivelling little...'

He'd sat up. His hands had closed into fists on the blanket.

'All right,' said Mrs Weasley gently. 'All right, love. Never mind the elf for now.'

She waited until his hands had opened again. Then she looked him over, slowly, from the top of his head to the blanket, the way she'd have looked over a chicken she was thinking of buying, and Harry saw her mouth go tight.

'You're all skin and bone,' she said. 'Were they feeding you properly, Harry? Before the lock, I mean. Were they feeding you at all?'

'They gave me bread and stuff,' said Harry, as he'd said to Ron. 'Don't worry about me. I'm all right.'

'Bread isn't a meal.' She said it quite quietly. 'And I saw you in that yard before you went down, so don't tell me you're all right. You were white as that wall.'

Harry noticed her hands. They were folded in her lap, and they'd gone very still, and her knuckles had come up pale under the skin. Her eyes had changed, too. They were still kind. They'd just got sharper, somehow, like a knife that's been on the steel. He didn't know what to make of it. He had no way of knowing that what he was looking at was a woman getting angrier, by the sentence, than she'd been in her life, and keeping every ounce of it off her face for his sake.

'Harry,' she said, and it was the sweetest, gentlest voice he'd ever heard a grown-up use. 'Did they ever hit you? The Dursleys?'

He didn't know that Mrs Weasley had already seen the ankle. Uncle Vernon's fingers had left a ring of bruises round it like a cuff. She'd seen them when she took his trainers off and said nothing.

'No,' said Harry.

It came out wrong. It came out small, and it didn't finish properly, and they both heard it.

'I mean... it's not like... I get hurt at Quidditch all the time, you know, that's nothing, Fred and George hit Bludgers at me every practice. And Quirrell, I fought Quirrell, he had his hands round my neck and I didn't let go of him, I beat him, so I'm not... I can take it. I'm good at ducking now. That's the Bludgers. I got really quick, Oliver says I've got the best reflexes on the team, and that's why I could finally dodge Aunt Petunia's frying pan, I never used to be able to and now I...'

He stopped.

He hadn't meant to say that. It had got out while he was looking the other way.

And once it was out, the rest came up behind it, whether he wanted it or not. The frying pan. The rolling pin. The flat of Uncle Vernon's hand across the back of his head for burning the bacon. Dudley's gang in the playground, and the school roof, and the cupboard, with the spiders, and the bolt going across on the outside. Ten years of it, every blow he could remember and a good many he'd thought he'd forgotten, all stacked up and waiting, and the wall that had held them back for ten years went, all at once, like a dam going.

Harry cried.

He didn't cry the way he'd cried in the car. He cried the way he hadn't cried since he was very small, with his whole body, bent over on the sofa with his face in his hands, great ugly sobs that hurt his chest, and he couldn't have stopped it if Voldemort had walked into the room.

'It never used to bother me,' he got out, between them. 'It didn't. I didn't know any different, I thought that was just, that was just what it was like, for everyone, and then Hagrid came and he was kind to me, he was just kind, he gave me a cake, and then I met Ron on the train and he...'

He had to stop and breathe.

'Ron's the best person I know. He's the bravest. He's the kindest. He sat down in my compartment and he didn't even know me and he shared his sandwiches, well, I shared mine, but he would have, and he stood up for me to Malfoy, and he came to get me, he flew a car to get me, Mrs Weasley, nobody's ever... I'm so lucky. I'm so lucky to have him as my mate and I don't know why he bothers.'

'Harry...'

'And your jumper.' It came out in a sob, and he didn't care. 'And the fudge. At Christmas. I'd never had a present before. Not a proper one. And it was the best thing I'd ever been given, and Ron was moaning about his being maroon, and I was so angry with him, I wanted to hit him, because he gets that every year, he gets it all the time and he doesn't even know, and I've never told him that and I'm ashamed of it, I still think about it, because he's such a good son and you should be proud of him. You should. He came and got me. You shouldn't be angry with him, you should be proud.'

And then he couldn't say any more, because Mrs Weasley had got off the chair and on to the sofa and put both her arms round him and pulled him in against her apron, and she was rubbing his back in slow circles the way you'd rub a baby's, and saying, over and over, 'It's all right. It's all right, now. It's going to be all right. I'm going to make it better, Harry. I promise you. I'm going to make it all better.'

Harry held on to her.

He'd never been held like this. He'd been grabbed, and dragged, and shoved into a cupboard, and once, when he was six and had the flu, Aunt Petunia had put a cold flannel on his head and told him not to be sick on the sheets, and that had been the most anyone had done. He pressed his face into Mrs Weasley's shoulder and wondered, with his eyes shut, whether this was what it felt like. Having a mum. Whether this was what Ron had every day of his life and didn't know he had.

She isn't yours, said the voice. She isn't your mum. Your mum's dead. And when this one goes round to the Dursleys, and she will, she'll find out what you are, and she'll come back and look at you the way they all look at you.

Harry was so far inside his own head that he didn't see the look on Molly Weasley's face over the top of his, which was turned towards the window, and the south, and Surrey, and would have frightened Uncle Vernon very badly indeed.

'Mum,' said Ron, from the doorway. 'Table's done.'

He stopped. He took in his mother and Harry and the state of them both, and had the sense to say nothing whatever.

Mrs Weasley let Harry go, slowly, and wiped her own eyes with the back of her wrist, and stood up and smoothed her apron.

'Right,' she said. 'I'll get on with breakfast.' She put a hand on Harry's head. 'You're to stay here, Harry. For as long as you want. Do you understand me? As long as you want.'

She said the last part as though she'd like it written down somewhere.

Then she took him gently by the shoulder and steered him through to the kitchen.

It was small, and rather cramped, with a scrubbed wooden table and chairs in the middle, and Harry sat down on the very edge of his and looked round. He'd never been inside a wizard's house before.

The clock on the wall opposite had one hand and no numbers at all. Round the edge, where the numbers should have been, it said things like Time to make tea and Time to feed the chickens and You're late. Books stood three deep along the mantelpiece, with titles like Charm Your Own Cheese and Enchantment in Baking and One Minute Feasts: It's Magic! And unless Harry's ears were playing tricks on him, the old wireless by the sink had just announced that coming up next was Witching Hour, with the popular singing sorceress, Celestina Warbeck.

It was so cosy it made his throat ache. Every inch of the place had been lived in and loved, and mended, and lived in again, until it had a character of its own, like a house in a storybook. So this was how a real family lived, he thought. In the wizarding world, anyway.

Mrs Weasley was clattering about at the stove, cooking a little haphazardly and shooting black looks at her sons as she flung sausages into the pan. Every so often she muttered something like 'don't know what you were thinking of' and 'never would have believed it'.

'I don't blame you, dear,' she assured Harry, looking him over once more as she tipped eight or nine sausages on to his plate, and he saw her mouth go tight again at what she saw. 'Arthur and I have been worried about you too. Only last night we were saying we'd go and fetch you ourselves if you hadn't written back to Ron by Friday. But really,' and three fried eggs went on top of the sausages, 'flying an illegal car halfway across the country, anyone could have seen you...'

She flicked her wand at the sink, and the washing-up began to do itself with a gentle clinking.

'It was cloudy, Mum!' said Fred.

'You keep your mouth closed while you're eating!' snapped Mrs Weasley.

'They were starving him, Mum!' said George.

'I know. I'm going to deal with that dreadful lot,' Mrs Weasley said, with a grimness that Harry would think about later, as she took the bread out of the bin.

'And you!' she said, rounding on George, but her face had softened a good deal by the time she'd turned back to Harry and started cutting and buttering bread for him as though he were five years old. He let her. He found he didn't mind in the least.

There was a diversion then, in the shape of a small, red-headed figure in a long nightdress, who came into the kitchen, saw Harry, gave a squeak like a trodden mouse, and ran straight out again.

'Ginny,' Ron muttered to Harry. 'My sister. She's been talking about you all summer.'

'Yeah, she'll be wanting your autograph, Harry,' grinned Fred, and then he caught his mother's eye and bent over his plate without another word.

Nothing more was said until all four plates were clean, which took a remarkably short time. Harry ate everything. He ate the sausages and the eggs and the bread and butter, and the second round of bread and butter that appeared without his asking, and a tomato, and when he'd finished he sat back and found that the kitchen had stopped swaying.

'Blimey, I'm tired,' Fred yawned, putting his knife and fork down. 'I think I'll go up to bed and-'

'You will not,' snapped Mrs Weasley. 'It's your own fault you've been up all night. You're going to de-gnome the garden for me. They're getting completely out of hand again.'

'Oh, Mum...'

'And you two,' she said, glaring at Ron and George. 'You can go up to bed, dear,' she added, to Harry. 'You didn't ask them to fly that wretched car.'

But Harry, who felt wide awake now, and who wanted very badly to be useful, so that Mrs Weasley wouldn't have any reason to wonder why she'd kept him, said quickly, 'I'll help Ron. I've never seen a de-gnoming...'

'That's very sweet of you, dear, but it's dull work,' said Mrs Weasley. 'Now. Let's see what Lockhart's got to say on the subject.'

She pulled a heavy book from the stack on the mantelpiece. George groaned.

'Mum, we know how to de-gnome a garden.'

Harry looked at the cover. In swirling gold letters it said Gilderoy Lockhart's Guide to Household Pests, and under the title was a large photograph of a very good-looking wizard with wavy blond hair and bright blue eyes, who, this being a wizarding photograph, kept winking up at them all in a way Harry found hard to warm to.

Mrs Weasley beamed down at him.

'Oh, he is marvellous,' she said. 'So dishy, and he knows his household pests, all right, it's a wonderful book...'

'Mum fancies him,' said Fred, in a whisper that could have been heard in the yard.

'Don't be so ridiculous, Fred,' said Mrs Weasley, and her cheeks had gone rather pink. 'All right. If you think you know better than Lockhart, you can go and get on with it, and woe betide you if there's a single gnome in that garden when I come out to inspect it.'

Yawning and grumbling, the Weasleys trooped outside, and Harry went with them.

The garden was big, and in Harry's opinion it was everything a garden ought to be. The Dursleys would have hated it. There were weeds in every bed, and the lawn wanted cutting, and nothing had been clipped to any particular height. But gnarled old trees leaned in over the walls all the way round, and plants Harry didn't know the names of spilled out of every border, and down at the bottom there was a big green pond, loud with frogs.

'Muggles have garden gnomes too, you know,' Harry told Ron cheekily, as they crossed the lawn, with a half-formed idea of setting Ron up for something. But Ron was nobody's fool.

'Yeah, nice try, you smart arse. I've seen those things they think are gnomes,' said Ron, from inside a peony bush. 'Like fat little Father Christmases with fishing rods. They don't even walk around.'

There was a violent scuffling, the peony shook from top to bottom, and Ron came up out of it holding something at arm's length.

'This is a gnome, annoying little bugger,' he said grimly.

'Gerroff me! Gerroff me!' the gnome squealed.

It was nothing like Father Christmas. It was small and brown and leathery, with a bald, knobbly head exactly like a potato, and it kicked at Ron with hard little horny feet as he got it by the ankles and turned it upside down.

'This is what you do,' he said. He lifted it over his head ('Gerroff me!') and began to swing it round in big circles, like a lasso. He saw Harry's face. 'It doesn't hurt them. You've just got to get them really dizzy so they can't find their way back to the gnome-holes.'

He let go. The gnome went twenty feet up, sailed over the hedge, and came down in the field beyond with a thud.

'Pitiful,' said Fred. 'Bet I can get mine past that stump.'

Harry learned very quickly not to feel sorry for the gnomes. He'd meant to drop his first one over the hedge, gently, out of consideration, and the gnome, sensing a soft touch, sank a row of teeth like needles into his finger. Harry swore, loudly and with feeling, and flung the wretched thing away from him with all the strength in his arm.

'Wow, Harry. That must've been fifty feet...'

The air was soon full of gnomes.

'See, they're not too bright,' said George, with five or six of them in his fists at once. 'The minute they know there's a de-gnoming on, they all come storming up to have a look. You'd think they'd have learned by now to stay put.'

Before long a crowd of gnomes was trudging off across the field in a straggling line, with their little shoulders hunched.

'They'll be back,' said Ron, as they watched the last of them vanish into the far hedge. 'They love it here. Dad's too bloomin' soft with them, he thinks they're funny...'

Just then the front door slammed.

'Speak of the Jabberwocky, he's back!' said George. 'Dad's home!'

They hurried back through the garden and into the house.

Mr Weasley was slumped in a kitchen chair with his glasses off and his eyes shut. He was a thin man, going bald, but what hair he had left was as red as any of his children's, and he was wearing long green robes that were dusty and creased from a night's work.

'What a night,' he mumbled, groping for the teapot as they all sat down round him. 'Nine raids. Nine! And old Mundungus Fletcher tried to put a hex on me when I had my back turned. I suppose they can't help themselves. Those lot with the caravans. Bloody Pikey Ba-'

He opened one eye, saw that the kitchen was full of children, took a long gulp of tea, and sighed instead.

'Find anything, Dad?' said Fred eagerly.

'A few shrinking door-keys and a biting kettle,' yawned Mr Weasley. 'There was some pretty nasty stuff that wasn't my department, mind. Mortlake was taken in for questioning about some extremely odd ferrets, but that's the Committee on Experimental Charms, thank goodness...'

'Why would anyone bother making door-keys shrink?' said George.

'Muggle-baiting,' sighed Mr Weasley. 'Sell a Muggle a key that keeps shrinking down to nothing, so he can never find it when he wants it... Of course, it's very hard to get a conviction, because no Muggle will admit his key keeps shrinking. He'll swear blind he just keeps losing it. Bless them, they'll go to any lengths to ignore magic, even with it staring them in the face... but the things our lot have taken to enchanting, you wouldn't believe...'

'LIKE CARS, FOR INSTANCE?'

Mrs Weasley had appeared in the doorway with a long poker in her hand, held like a sword.

Mr Weasley's eyes jerked open. He looked at his wife with the guilt of a man who has been caught halfway through a biscuit.

'C-cars, Molly, dear?'

'Yes, Arthur, cars,' said Mrs Weasley, and her eyes flashed. 'Imagine a wizard buying a rusty old car and telling his wife all he wanted was to take it to bits to see how it worked, when all along he was enchanting it to fly.'

Mr Weasley blinked.

'Well, dear, I think you'll find that he'd be quite within the law to do that. Even if, er, he might have done better to, um, tell his wife the truth... There's a loophole in the law, you see... as long as he never intended to fly the car, the fact that the car could fly wouldn't...'

'Arthur Weasley, you made sure there was a loophole when you wrote that law!' shouted Mrs Weasley. 'Just so you could carry on tinkering with all that Muggle rubbish in your shed! And for your information, Harry arrived this morning in the car you weren't intending to fly!'

'Harry?' said Mr Weasley blankly. 'Harry who?'

He looked round, saw Harry, and jumped.

'Good Lord, is it Harry Potter? Very pleased to meet you, Ron's told us so much about-'

'Your sons flew that car to Harry's house and back last night!' shouted Mrs Weasley. 'What have you got to say about that, eh?'

'Did you really?' said Mr Weasley, and his whole face lit up. 'Did it go all right? I-I mean,' he faltered, as the sparks flew out of Mrs Weasley's eyes, 'uh, that... that was bang out of order, boys...'

'Let's leave them to it,' Ron muttered to Harry, with a hand on his shoulder, as Mrs Weasley swelled up like a bullfrog. 'Come on. I'll show you my bedroom.'

Harry had been wanting to see it since the train.

They slipped out of the kitchen and down a narrow passage to a staircase that zigzagged up through the house with no two steps the same height. On the third landing a door stood ajar, and Harry caught a glimpse of a pair of bright brown eyes looking out at him before it shut with a snap.

'Ginny,' said Ron. 'You don't know how weird it is for her to be this shy. She never shuts up, normally. She's um... well, you'll see.'

Two more flights, and they came to a door with the paint peeling off it and a small plaque that said Ronald's Room.

Harry stepped inside, with his head nearly brushing the sloping ceiling, and blinked. It was like walking into a furnace. Nearly everything in the room was a violent orange: the bedspread, the walls, the ceiling. Then he saw that Ron had covered almost every inch of the shabby wallpaper with posters of the same seven witches and wizards, all in bright orange robes, all holding broomsticks, all waving at him like mad.

'Your Quidditch team?' said Harry.

'The Chudley Cannons,' said Ron, and pointed at the bedspread, which had two enormous black Cs on it and a speeding cannonball. 'Ninth in the league, but look at them. They'd batter those ball blokes Dean goes on about,' Ron said proudly. 'Also, all the Chudleys are from England. What are those Muggles playing at, letting blokes from bloody Timbuktu play for English teams?'

'Dunno. Never understood it myself, Ron.'

'Muggles are mental,' Ron said, shaking his head, and after the summer Harry had just had, he found he couldn't argue.

Ron's schoolbooks were heaped in a corner next to a pile of comics, all of which seemed to be about The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle. His wand lay on top of a fish tank full of frogspawn on the windowsill, beside Scabbers, who was asleep in a patch of sun and looked, if anything, fatter than he had in June.

Harry stepped over a pack of Self-Shuffling playing cards on the floor and looked out of the little window. Far below, in the field, a straggle of gnomes was creeping back through the hedge one by one. He turned round, and found Ron watching him, almost nervously, as though he were waiting to hear a verdict.

'It's a bit small,' said Ron quickly. 'Not like that room you had with the Muggles. And I'm right under the ghoul in the attic, he's always banging on the pipes and groaning...'

But Harry was grinning so widely that his face hurt.

'This is the best house I've ever been in,' he said.

Ron's ears went pink.