Obviously I'm on a Mike Leigh theme here, what with the endless dialogue and almost no action in the plot.
No, I lie, Mike Leigh kicks arse, and everyone should aim for his excellence and not that of Baby Geniuses 2. Man, did Jon Voigt have a career slump. The title, obviously, Secrets and Lies, Tonks' delightful bit of existential monologue is from Naked, and, without saying, starring a character who was played by a dude in a Mike Leigh movie.
***
I woke up in the pitch black of an unknown room, waves of a nauseous hunger crashing against the sides of my skull and a cold sweat running down my back.
How much had I drunk that afternoon?
I opened my eyes. Clearly a bad idea.
I had no idea where I was. I wasn't tired, but mentally I was exhausted. I ran my hands over my face, spiky bristle grating against fingertips which were so sensitive I thought they were burning off.
I let my hands have a bit of a wander around, trying to get my bearings.
All right. I was on a bed.
A bed with a lacy bedspread. (What the?)
A bed with somebody next to me in it. (Double what the?)
And I was naked. (Triple what the?)
I ran my head over the person's face. Please don't let it be Dung, please don't let it be Dung ...
It wasn't. It was just Tonks.
Uh oh.
"Tonks ... get up."
She didn't move, so I figured I would rouse her from my sleep with my deadliest weapon: drunk breath. I could hear her groaning, and pushed me. To her left, a lamp switched on, and she turned over to look at me.
"Tonks, we didn't do anything, did we?"
She grinned. Dear God.
I moaned, and pushed my face back into the pillow. "Please. I can't remember anything after noon. Tell me what happened, please ... "
"Well." She was sitting up by now, looking as alert as I was queasy. "Well. See, you stumbled back in on Harry's shoulder. Then you ran away from us all, crying, and fell in the pond outside. We had to strip you off and lock you in here so you wouldn't hurt anyone."
"All right. You've had a good look. Now please give me the dignity of getting me a pair of trousers at the very least."
At this, she jumped off the bed, and raced out of the room, returning with what looked like a pair of horrible yellow tracksuit pants in a shiny material.
"You're a cruel woman, Nymphadora." I pulled them on, noticing immediately that they came up to my midcalf. Fantastic. "Are they meant to be clamdiggers, Tonks?"
"Don't think so. According to Ron, they're the trendiest pants in London. Apparently, Ali G wears them."
"But isn't he being ironic?"
"He is, Ron isn't. Come on down, I'll get you something to eat."
I rolled out of bed, and regretted it immediately. I still must've had some fluid in my stomach, and it was just yearning to be free. I made a mad dash for a waste paper basket, making it in the nick of time.
"Lovely, Remus. You do realise that you're vomiting into a wicker waste bin?"
"I do. Consider it to be an installation artwork."
"Will do. Come on down, let's put something else in your stomach to throw up."
I made my way down the stairs after her, lumos lighting the pathway between the bedroom and the kitchen.
"Erm ... well, we seem to have only cheese or beetroot. It's my turn to do the shopping tomorrow. What do you prefer?"
"I don't know."
"I'll fry you some cheese."
I sank into the kitchen table, resting my head in my arms as she fiddled with the stove behind me. The clock only read 11 -- I'd been sleeping for six hours.
"You tired, Tonks?"
"Not really. I pulled an all-nighter last night, slept during the day. I got up for a bit in the afternoon, to put you to bed. Then I got bored, I guess. Went to bed."
"Uh huh. Really. You were probably trying to have your wicked way with my unconscious body."
"Oh, you were conscious when I did that. Or semi-conscious, anyway. No, I just didn't want to mess with my circadian rhythm."
"Why?"
A cup of tea had been summoned in front of me. "I'm not sure. Sleep is for night, isn't it?"
"Tonks, when you're congenitally unemployed like me, you can sleep whenever you like."
"Great! Yet another reason why I want to be just like you. You take sugar in that?"
"God yes."
In the distance, I could smell a salty, fatty, wonderful concoction, which was heating the room nicely and etching its scent into the walls. A scraping, footsteps, a chair being pulled out, and she plonked herself down, a plate of greasy yellow mess in front of me. I poked it hesitantly with a fork, and pulled some to my mouth.
Excellent.
"You know, Tonks, if you ever cure my cirrhosis, you'll probably give me heart disease."
"You know, just for a change."
I swallowed, and looked up at her. Painfully orange hair and blue eyes. It reminded me of primary school, where my art teacher would try to explain the colour wheel and complementary colours.
Somebody needed to explain that orange and blue don't complement each other.
"Why are we here, Nymphadora?"
"Well, Lupin, there was this little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded. Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday."
"No. Why are we awake at midnight eating miserable generic brand cheese from under the grill in some morose house?"
"Because you woke me up with your hobo breath."
"Fair cop."
She looked over at me, and rubbed my hand in the way that only a shoddy clairvoyant or Sybil Trelawney (and seriously, was there a difference) had done before.
"You know what you need, Remus? Apart from a rocket up your clacker, obviously?"
"I have no idea. Twenty minutes ago I couldn't even dress myself."
"You need to get help. And a woman, too. But mostly help."
"I don't need a woman, I have a perfectly serviceable inflatable girlie that Sirius bequeathed to me."
"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that, but you ARE going to get help with coming to terms with Sirius, aren't you?"
"Whatever are you talking about? Of course I've come to terms with his demise."
"That's a lie, and you know it." She stole my teacup, and took a long swill. "Pretending it never happened and imagining that this is as good as it gets isn't accepting and grieving, it's being pathetic. And so's taking out a teenage boy and getting him drunk to project your stupid repressed expression of emotion."
Tonks. Twenty-four, five seven, and her two best talents are psychoanalysis and frying cheese.
"I can't imagine what you'd mean by that, Tonks. I was looking for someone of a similar mindset to me."
"You mean a similar maturity level?"
"Bingo. That's why I brought Mundungus."
She pulled my empty plate away from me. "Go on, go up to bed."
"I'm not tired."
"Well, neither am I, and I'm not going to talk to you again until you get some sense knocked into you."
And with that, she dumped my plate in the sink, and strode into the library, the light from her wand going with her.
I got up and followed her in. By the time I made it in there, she'd curled up in a chair, reading what looked like a pig breeder's journal.
"Are you upset at all?"
She looked up at me, the magazine revealing itself to be a financial publication, as opposed to an agricultural one.
"Remus, do you know how long you locked yourself up in this study, reading stuff and not even acknowledging that he'd died?"
I shook my head.
"A month-and-a-half. Do you know how everyone else was doing during that time?"
I shook my head again.
"Well, I'll fill you in. Molly Weasley broke into tears every time something minor happened, like a book being slammed shut noisily or dropping a fork onto the ground. Ginny got creeped out by the concept of curtains, and ripped them all down. Harry's been sitting in that front room, just like you were in here, and Ron and Hermione have been tiptoeing around the house, trying to pretend they weren't there just so he wouldn't yell at them. And do you know how I was doing?"
Shake.
"I've been working nineteen-hour days, six days a week, just so I wouldn't have to return here and look at the horrible old paintings and racist memorabilia on the walls. And when I wasn't working, I was sitting outside this door, because at the end of the hallway outside this room there's a very nice window that looks out onto that cedar tree outside. And there's a little birds' nest in the tree, with four blue eggs. And one day, one of the eggs rolled out of the nest, and smashed on the ground, and the tiny little bird inside died. And you know what? Birds grieve. They fucking grieve. The parent birds didn't even have to see what their baby looked like, and they stayed on the ground with it until it got too cold and the chick died on the ground."
I sat down beside her. She was looking at me angrily, her teeth clenched against each other, gasping, her cheeks shining with tears.
"But it ... "
"But what?! It was still a life! I hate it."
I covered my mouth with my hand. "I had no idea."
"No, you clearly didn't."
I sat there, the room growing colder and quieter, the silence only breaking when I could hear a sob from her end of the chair.
"Nymphadora ... what was his service like?"
"There was no service. Nobody could bear to arrange it. We were going to leave it to you, you know, because you were his best friend and all. But you know, you were very busy and all -- what, with sitting in here and listening to depressing records and drinking."
I didn't know what to feel. Guilt. Absolute, abysmal sadness. Disgust and self-loathing.
"Do you hate me?"
"Of course I hate you. We all do."
I felt a rush of cold air onto my skin, but the windows were all shut.
"You know, we would've given you any sympathy you wanted, Remus. And we did, for a fair bit, and until you just told me you'd gotten over him, I thought you were just handling it in your depressing, emotionless British way."
I stood up, and walked out of the room, halting at the door.
She was back to reading her magazine, the tears wiped away, and she was making a very concerted attempt to not look at me.
"Thank you."
She looked up. "What for?"
"Divine realisation."