What was worse was that her less-than-subtle entrance had somewhat startled the scrawny-looking cockerel which, after a deafening shriek, was now lying on the floor with its legs in the air. And it had woken Snape.
Bollocks, thought Snape savagely as he jabbed his wand at where the cockerel had been standing previously. The spell hit the wardrobe, tried to find something to castrate, failed, found it had no purpose in life and had a minor nervous breakdown.
Lily looked desperately for somewhere to hide as the castrating spell began to wail loudly, but it was no use “ Snape’s black eyes were narrowed and firmly fixed on the triple-breasted redhead in the corner, and he looked…well really rather menacing, actually.
“Who,” said Snape in what he hoped were threatening tones, “are you?”
Lily’s brain was going into overdrive. Somehow she had to accomplish the impossible, i.e. decode Dumbledore’s cryptic nonsense, find out how to get Snape to hear whatever it was Trelawney had said and how to get out of here alive, all at once. In short, she was a woman on the edge.
“Don’t you remember?” she purred. “Sexy,” she added, just for good measure.
Apparently, he did not. He proceeded to perform the fourth Unforgivable Curse, the Toe-Stubber, (which is so heinous it has now been classified as one of the “Dear Lord, No!” Curses along with the Papercutius Curse and other such atrocities) and threw her bodily out of the window.
Lily was not amused. She had landed in a dingy street which had all the charm and odour of a spider’s backside “ something a local Muggle prankster had obviously noted, for the sign reading “Spinner’s Bend” had had the letter “B” blotted out with white gloss paint. She had sustained a second blow to the head and attendant bump, and her toes were in excruciating pain and were throbbing and swollen, so she found she had to hobble and limp her way down the street. In short, she was a triple-breasted, hornèd, swollen-footed, crippled, freakish mess as she muttered and cursed her way to the end of the road, finally Apparating into the air.
Severus Snape, meanwhile, was somewhat perplexed. He had awoken (mercifully on time) to find his cockerel had died of shock and that a vaguely familiar-looking woman who appeared to have three breasts and some kind of growth on her head was lying on his floor and calling him sexy, of all things.
Well, he thought reasonably, she does have a point.
A wicked idea formulated in his brain. Should he? Oh, why not…just this once. After all, he was in the mood, rather.
Shimmying over to his drawer, he flexed his fingers delicately and extracted from amidst the hotchpotch of greying underpants a lacy black thong “ the only souvenir he possessed of his pre-Death Eater days when he had been a manufacturer of saucy lingerie - and slipped it on.
Oh, the memories!
Blissful days of designing, of creating, of attempting to bribe the local spider population into working as machinists, of inventing antidotes to the venom from the resultant spider bites.
”Saucy Snape “ make ‘em gape!” he proclaimed nostalgically to the room at large. The castrating spell in the wardrobe began to howl with renewed vigour.
Pulling on the set of robes that was furthest away from the spell (in case it got any ideas), Snape braced himself for the day ahead. Performing the daily ritual of finger-combing his hair and oiling the door hinge in one fluid movement, Snape began to slink out of the room, then, as he had not had to endure the sensation of a permanent wedgie for many-a year, reverted to a somewhat twitchier gait.
Lily was in the bar of the Hog’s Head Inn, feeling utterly wretched. Not only was she looking remarkably freakish, being crippled, horned and triple-breasted as she was, but she was also “ to put it bluntly “ drunk.
“Shame ‘gain,” she slurred, holding up her glass to be refilled. The 80s being what they were, inflation was so drastic that though she was only a few months ahead, she could now afford drinks without the feeling the pinch. The mysterious barman was ever-obliging.
“Oh-arrrrr, all roight Miss,” he said in his unconvincing West Country accent.
“Mrs,” corrected Lily with a hiccup. “I’m married to a complete tosher, you shee, and a brat, but he’sh my shon, not my husband.”
“Curses,” muttered Aberforth. “Just when I found a woman who looked like a goat. Lovely…”
The reader is now spared any further insight into the twisted mind of Aberforth Dumbledore by the dramatic entrance of one Severus Snape. Lily is far too inebriated to notice this, but is forced to acknowledge his presence when he comes to sit next to her at the bar. Snape himself has had rather a good day in comparison to the kind of day he would have had if he had not been inadvertently motivated by a strange redhead to ditch the Y-fronts for a day and go with the little black number. He is therefore in rather a good mood and is willing to make amends.
“Hi sexy,” said Snape, bending right over so as to give himself a VPL. “Mind if I join you?”
Lily grunted in approval without really registering that it was this man who had caused her such a great deal of pain that morning.
“I apologise for the Toe-Stubber,” he leered, “but I wasn’t prepared for the arrival of such a “ well, I was going to say Sexy Beast, but I think Beast will do for now.”
He indicated her additional lumps and bumps with an eloquent wave.
Lily muttered inaudibly, her eyes swimming in and out of focus as she reeled precariously on the teetering bar stool.
“Mgnbesick,” she said in a rush, now sporting a greenish tinge which, Snape couldn’t help noticing, complimented her eyes rather fetchingly, not to mention the striking contrast it made with her red hair.
His appreciation was short-lived, however.
With a great walloping lurch, Lily Potter vomited spectacularly over the hapless Death Eater, regurgitating the entire contents of her stomach (which unfortunately for Snape included a partially digested portion of James’s notorious “Flobberworm Surprise”).
With a strange, elongated cry which oscillated considerably in its accurate summing-up of his distress, Snape shook out his vomit-coated limbs frantically, erratically. The result was something which so resembled the Agadoo song that soon half the pub was joining in, singing and dancing rowdily. Snape was not amused.
“If you’d told me you were going to spew “ ” he began angrily. (Miles away, the infant Hermione was heard to say indignantly, “It’s S.P.E.W.” to the eternal puzzlement of her parents.) But he may as well have been talking to a glob of Flobberworm mucus, for Lily was now lolling, semi-conscious, over the bar, and now that the pub had moved onto the Macarena in a fit of high spirits, there was very little he could do to make himself heard.
“Gah!” he spat in his monosyllabic rage, and stormed up the rickety stairs in the direction of the toilets.
Several minutes later, Severus Snape emerged from the communal cesspit of dubious hygiene known as the men’s toilet of the Hog’s Head Inn. Vomit-free and glowering, he made a mental note to give the drunken loon below a wide berth, and was just about to descend the stairs when a voice from a nearby room caught his attention.
It was, of course, emanating from the room in which Albus Dumbledore had been smiling politely at the clearly deluded Sibyl Trelawney. Smiling, that is, until the old bat had begun to speak in harsh, low, rasping tones, which had caused Dumbledore to think she had choked on the cockroach clusters Aberforth had left for his enjoyment in the middle of the table. However, mid-way through the Heimlich Manoeuvre, Dumbledore had realised that this was probably a prophecy of some kind, and had dropped the crazed clairvoyant unceremoniously back onto her chair to listen more intently.
Snape, too, was listening eagerly. Ear pressed against the door, to the extent that he fully expected to be pulling splinters out of his earlobe the following morning, he absorbed the words of the prophecy. Until, that is, his free earlobe was gripped between the cloven fingernails of Aberforth Dumbledore, who had taken advantage of the noise below to slip off and check on “the kids”, as he called them.
“Well, well, well,” he breathed into Snape’s maimed ear.
The plot of Harry Potter, it seemed, was back on track.
But what of Lily stranded in the past?
Will she ever get home?
Will she ever get over the inevitable hangover she will have the following morning?
Where is the plot of this story going???
Find out in the next scintillating instalment of what is already a tale of alarmingly farcical proportions! Adieu!