The wizards represent all that the true “muggle” most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so. Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!
J. K. Rowling to Margaret Weir: “Of magic and single motherhood,” Salon, 1999.
CHAPTER TWO
Revulsion
by Trevor Middleton
If I’m honest, I knew about it after only six months. I married Carol in the summer, and by winter it was obvious. I didn’t face up to it back then; it didn’t seem important. Due to faulty wiring in our street, we had several evenings of black-outs, and by the third power cut, Carol and I were too busy groaning about the incompetent council to look at what was sitting in front of us.
What was sitting in front of us was Carol’s daughter Lisa. “I don’t like the dark,” she complained. “Turn on the light, Mum!”
“Love, there inn’t any light,” Carol tried to explain. “We don’t ’ave electricity.”
There was a thud and a scrape as Lisa dragged a chair across the kitchen towards the light switch. She padded up on top of it, and “ SNAP!
There was light.
The light was dazzling, at least two hundred watts. We blinked and batted, and Lisa remarked, “Too much!” Before our eyes, the light slowly turned down to a comfortable brightness.
It was just luck that the power returned at the moment Lisa flicked the switch. But for the rest of the winter, we couldn’t convince her that the electric company sometimes cut the power. She firmly believed that light was caused by light-switches, and no amount of scientific talk about electric currents would convince her otherwise. Whenever she’d had enough of the dark, she would go and play with a light-switch. She persevered for such long periods that in the end, she was always rewarded by the return of the power.
I should have known back then.
We’re not very good at explaining science anyway. We’re plain people: we left school after our C.S.E.s. I trained as a carpet-layer, selling folks the durable and laying it down firm so they’ll walk on safe, smooth floors in their homes and offices. Later I branched out to hanging curtains and blinds, solid ones that keep out the noise and the light. I’m good at what I do and I don’t cheat my customers; but trying to explain invisible stuff is all too fancy for me.
“Lisa’s only four years old,” Carol reminded me. “There’s no point in trying to teach ’er difficult stuff like electricity.”
I never knew what to say to kids. I didn’t know any four-year-olds before I met Lisa, who had been part of the package when I married Carol. Lisa had wide, blue eyes in a long, pale face and she seemed like no trouble at all. Back then, I had no idea how one kid might be different from another. I agreed with Carol that Lisa was bound to learn how the world works sooner or later because everyone does.
That’s what I told myself at the time.
We Middletons have lived in Yorkshire for centuries, and all of us are plain. We say what we think with no beating around the bush. We don’t believe in God. We don’t believe in any superstitions at all. We’re practical sorts: those who left farming have taken on skilled trades, plumbers and carpenters and the like. When I married Carol Southwick, we settled in a plain two-up-two-down terrace in Clifton, York. Tim was born a year later, and Jason two years after Tim. Carol worked a couple of shifts a week at Rowntree’s, manufacturing the famous fruit pastilles, but mostly she was busy with the kids.
Jason collected matchbox cars. He saved his pocket money to pick them up at charity shops, and cars were all he ever wanted for Christmas. He said he was going to be a racing driver when he grew up, but more likely, he’d be an auto mechanic.
Tim was good at drawing. He drew plain things, dogs and cats, ships and trains, telephones and electric drills. His teacher gave him a gold star for his picture of a crane trolley, but then she asked him why he didn’t draw anything creative, such as a dwarf or a dragon.
“Dragons don’t exist,” said Tim. “I don’t draw stuff that inn’t real.”
Lisa is still known as Lisa Turpin. We could have easily pretended to the neighbours that Phil Turpin never existed because he never sent money and he never tried to see Lisa. But we didn’t: we told the plain truth to anyone who asked. Carol used to be married to someone else; she walked out on him because his drinking made him violent; she got a quick divorce two years before she met me. There was no point in hiding those facts. One day Lisa might need to know about Phil for legal or medical reasons.
Carol and I treated all the children alike. There wasn’t a lot of extra cash, but we forked out for school excursions and birthday parties, and I took them to football matches weekends. Lisa didn’t always want to come, but that’s a female thing: I always offered to take her, no matter how tight the money was. We organised fair turns on who chose the video and we served out fair shares of the sweets. I didn’t thump any of the kids without a good reason, not more than three or four times each in their whole childhoods. We did make Lisa do more chores than the boys, washing up and hanging laundry and so on; but she was older; and she didn’t complain about it any more than another kid. I did right by Lisa Turpin.
It was Lisa who never caught on to how to act normal. No matter how plain we set the example, she had to do things a different way. One time I caught her spilling a tube of silver glitter. It swirled all around her, not just a few specks, but a huge cloud of dust, running dizzily round and round her, growing larger all the time.
“Stop that!” I barked, and all the glitter instantly vanished. It didn’t drop to the lino for Lisa to sweep up; it just disappeared into thin air.
She had this thing about air. She never blew up a balloon in her mouth; she’d just wave it around, and it would catch a blast of air in one sweep, swelling up big and round. Once she even did it when Tim was in tears over a punctured football. Lisa picked up the ball and sort of pressed, and before you could say “soccer,” the football hissed up tight and full.
I’m strictly the TV type myself, but Carol and Lisa both liked a good read. That’s what made our boys so well-rounded: they grew up with the example of both sport and study, and they enjoyed both. Lisa, who took good care of her little brothers, would borrow pictures books from the local library and spend hours reading to them. Tim liked a story about zoo animals. He sat spellbound when Lisa read:
The tiger jumped out of ’is cage! Grrr!
The giraffe raced out of ’is cage! Maaaa!
The zebra sprinted out of ’is cage! Yap-yap!
The elephant marched out of ’is cage! Ta-ra-ra-raaa!”
I entered the room just as the animals were running across the open book. A lion, a tiger, a giraffe, a zebra and an elephant leapt off the page and ran across the paper and even onto the arm of the settee before vanishing! It must have been some kind of pop-up effect, but it was so realistic that it was repellent.
Later on, I looked through the book and saw that it had no three-dimensional pop-ups at all, only ordinary, two-dimensional drawings. So perhaps Lisa had found some coloured paper and cut out the little pop-ups herself.
I cringed to think on such deceit. I couldn’t quite take to Lisa as a daughter, and the reason was her sneaky habits. She wouldn’t do things the natural way; things around her were never quite normal.
That’s what I told myself at the time.
A couple of years later, when Jason was finally out of nappies, we took a camping holiday to Whitby. Carol wanted to stop off at Helmsley Castle, although it was only a heap of crumbling stone.
“It’s ’istory,” said Carol. “We can see ’ow people used to live.”
“Yes, but they don’t live there now, do they?” said Tim.
“We can imagine it,” said Lisa, stopping on the drawbridge to leaf through the tourists’ brochure. “It says that Walter t’ Woodpecker built the first castle out of wood, but Sir Robert de Roos built the stone one that’s there now.”
Someone did race over the drawbridge at that moment, someone dressed up in a nose-guard helmet and chain-mail. Following him, a horseman cantered into the guard-house waving a sword. Tim and Jason suddenly became interested.
“They ’ave live actors,” I said. “Let’s go and look for ’em.”
“... and the next baron married a Scottish princess,” Lisa continued. By a strange coincidence, the next actor to trip into the gatehouse was a woman, a redhead with long, trailing sleeves and a coronet on her head. We followed her, with Lisa still reading the brochure out loud.
“In the sixteenth cent’ry, Sir Edward Manners modernised the chamber block...”
As if on cue, a man with a ruff and slashed doublet appeared out of the shadows.
“Excuse me,” I said to him. He ignored me, so I spoke up. “Excuse me, we want to see the show. Where is it?”
The man gave an elaborate bow while his pointed beard nearly touched his knees, and then faded back into the shadows while he had gone. The only actor left in the gatehouse was wearing a periwig and holding an architect’s plan.
“‘... ’oo, early in the eighteenth cent’ry, built a stately ’ome in the park, but left the ruins of the castle standing,’” Lisa finished.
Most horrifying of all, Tim shouted, “Do it again, Lisa! Make those pictures walk out of the page again!”
Lisa turned back to the first page and recited: “The first ’Elmsley Castle was built of wood by Walter t’ Woodpecker.” As soon as the words left her mouth, the first actor, the one in the nose-guard helmet, marched back into the gatehouse.
“That’s enough!” I said sharply, snatching the guide off Lisa. It was a children’s glossy, full of cartoon pictures of the historical persons. Walter the Woodpecker, Sir Robert de Roos, Princess Isobel and the poncy Sir Edward Manners were caricatured there, all dressed exactly like the live actors, just as if they really had escaped from the page and come to life.
It was freaky.
“Dad, they’re not alive!” Lisa pleaded. “They’re just moving pictures, like in a video. They won’t talk to yer!”
“Stop calling me Dad!” I barked at her. Then I shook myself. Of course the castle-people had dressed their actors the same way they had drawn their cartoons. They were putting on a show; they wanted us to pay attention. “All right, let’s look for that show.”
Although we wandered around Helmsley Castle for the next two hours, admiring the kitchen, ramparts and grounds, we didn’t find out where the show was and we didn’t see any more dressed-up actors. A guide in normal clothes even tried to tell us that they never had actors, but it was a great idea, and they’d consider doing it if funds ever permitted. Lisa was subdued and did not try to read the brochure again.
We arrived in Whitby, pegged up the tent, bought fish and chips and strolled along the beach. By the time we put the children into their sleeping bags, Jason was already asleep, and Tim was excited; but Lisa was almost tearful.
“Stay wi’ me, Mum. I don’t like the dark!”
“Don’t be silly, love. Settle down and go to sleep.”
“But I’m afraid of the dark!”
Lisa clutched at her mother, but Carol, after telling her she was a big girl now, disengaged herself and came out to boil a kettle on the camping stove. Before the water was hot, something behind us lit up, as if a neighbour was shining a powerful torch. The light grew brighter, and Jason started to wail. I looked up and saw that the light was coming from inside our own tent. Did the kids have a torch?
I dashed inside, almost dazzled by the strong light, and grabbed for Jason, who was now screaming in pain.
“Turn off that bloody torch!” I snapped.
“It inn’t a torch, Dad!” said Tim. “Lisa’s making the light!”
The light, now at its maximum brightness, did seem to be surrounding Lisa, who was happily sitting up in her sleeping-bag.
“Yer’ve woken Jason,” I said. “’E were asleep while yer started fooling around.” Feeling sick, I lunged at Lisa’s sleeping bag, unzipped it and threw back the corner to reveal “ Lisa’s blue pyjamas.
There was nothing that looked like a torch. There was nothing else at all.
Carol came in and started to soothe Jason back to sleep. I forced down my nausea, lowered my voice and shook Lisa sternly.
“Where is the torch?”
Lisa started to cry, and the light faded away as she sobbed. “I ’aven’t got a torch, Dad. I din’t do it on purpose!”
“Tim,” I persisted, “what did Lisa do?”
“I din’t see, Dad. It was dark! The light came on, but I don’t know ’ow. Look, it’s going out now.”
I left Carol to settle them and went to investigate behind the tent, just in case the light had been caused by a camper with a lamp. We decided in the end that must have been it, as we never did find anything like a torch in our kids’ possessions. But the weird light had been uncannily centred on Lisa.
A week of camping in cramped quarters pushed me far too close to Lisa far too often. She was moody; it seemed she couldn’t behave naturally unless she was miserable. Why couldn’t she dump her weirdness in the dustbin and play happily like everyone else’s daughter?
After that holiday in Whitby, I stopped pretending that Lisa was normal. I didn’t say anything to anyone, but I knew in my own mind that there was something weird about Lisa.
Light was worse than air. It was no good telling Lisa to replace a broken light bulb; she’d only touch the broken one, and it would start shining again, so suddenly that she’d burn her fingers. She hadn’t even got the sense to check that the switch was off before she started!
A year or so after Whitby, Lisa brought some glass prisms home from school. They were her science project, but she didn’t do much writing because Tim and Jason were completely fascinated by the diffraction effect. (“Diffraction” was Lisa’s new word for the day. We all learned it.)
“I want a great, big rainbow, all over the room!” said Jason.
Lisa tilted the prism, trying to maximise the image on the whitewash, and suddenly the rainbow seemed to jump right off the prism! That trick of the light was beyond tricky: there was a huge whoosh of colour, and it didn’t land on the wall at all; a great band of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, as large as a playground slide, was straddling the middle of our living room!
The live rainbow seemed to suck the stability out of my guts and leech the colour out of every object in the room. All the children ran into the middle of it, Lisa dropping the prism on the way, and suddenly they were wide bands of red, green, indigo all over the kids, because the live rainbow was the only visible colour in the room.
My head was spinning painfully but I managed to order, “Stop that!”
“But it’s just light, Dad,” said Lisa. “It inn’t ’urting owt!”
“It’s unnatural,” I said, staring pointedly at the glass triangle on the now-colourless carpet.
Lisa stole a glance at my furious face, and the rainbow abruptly vanished.
“I want another one!” said Jason.
Lisa picked up the prism, still not scientific enough to acknowledge that there shouldn’t have been any diffraction without any light-source, and positioned it between the window and the wall in ordinary scientific fashion.
I stopped thinking about it. I knew that unnatural, sickening things happened around Lisa; but I reckoned that if we never talked about them, they might go away.
I was out at work when Lisa’s letter arrived. I arrived home to find the whole family excited over a sheet of yellow parchment. Old-fashioned, lime-green writing announced that Lisa was a witch who had been invited to study at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
“Very funny,” I sneered. “Throw it out. Those jokes are sick.”
Lisa snatched at her letter and raced upstairs. Tim, still bursting with agitation, persisted: “But, Dad, an owl brought it! It flew right into ar garden and stopped over Lisa and ’eld out its claw. It wun’t go away while she’d taken the letter. It was a magic owl!”
“Well-trained, more like. ’Aven’t yer ever ’eard of pigeon post? Carol, love, what’s for dinner?”
A few days later, we were forced to think about it again. A posh lady rang our doorbell, saying she was a professor and she’d come to talk about Miss Turpin’s letter.
“You must have been surprised,” she said, “but I assure you, Miss Turpin is a genuine witch.”
Before we had a chance to say we didn’t believe in all that stuff, and the so-called professor would have to play her tricks on someone else, Lisa clattered down the stairs, calling a cheery, “Come in! I’m Lisa “ are yer the person ’oo sent me that letter?”
Carol didn’t do a thing to stop the intruder, who swept through into our living room and declared that Hogwarts was a real school that really had invited Lisa to be a student. The professor made a display of conjuring tricks that would have fixed her a permanent job in York’s Theatre Royal, or maybe even in New York. She made our china ornaments tap-dance and she changed the colours of all the cushions. She made a kitchen jug fly through the air and she made a bowl of oranges squeeze themselves out into the jug (no knife to cut them open; the juice simply squeezed through the peel) to make orangeade. I was too queasy to tell her to stop. She spoke to the carpet, and a cloud of dust rose up and flew out of the window, leaving the carpet perfectly clean and my head dizzy with suffocation.
But it wasn’t conjuring. If you saw it on telly, you’d say it could only be done by trick photography. Seeing it live was like seeing the end of the natural universe; it was so disgustingly unnatural.
Swallowing my bile, I asked, “So do yer know ’ow to cure it?”
“Cure what? Magic?”
“It’s against nature. It’s wrong. Do yer know a way to set it right?”
“Magic doesn’t go away,” she said. “It isn’t an illness. Miss Turpin needs to learn to channel her powers, and we can teach her that.”
“Yer mean she’s allus going to be sick-minded? Is ar Lisa allus going to do unnatural stuff “ forever?”
“Miss Turpin is always going to be a witch.”
“Lisa can get the pictures out of books!” Jason told her.
“I expect you mean something like this,” said the professor. She spoke weird words, and photographs suddenly hopped up out of the newspaper, dancing across the room and almost talking to one another, but vanishing when they reached the opposite wall.
I stared in horror. The boys looked as if they were playing a game. Carol looked as if she wanted to pay cash for a few easy-housework spells. Lisa looked as if she had the keys to Fairyland. We would never get this unnatural stuff out of Lisa, but we might be able to get it out of my house.
“Enough fooling,” I said. “Lisa ’as to go that school.”
“Dad!” She threw herself into my arms happily. “Ta so much! I “ ”
Shuddering at her touch, I pushed her away. I’m not her Dad. Thank goodness. “Yer a freak,” I told her. “Yer belong with the other freaks, out of ar sight. Yer need to go that school and keep yer dirty business away from the rest of us.”
She stopped short as if I’d slapped her face. Then she burst into tears and buried her head in the professor’s shoulder. She didn’t do the natural thing and go to her mother; she immediately turned to the unnatural stranger.
After we’d pushed the unnatural stranger out of my house, Carol and I gave out to each other furiously.
“How could yer say that to Lisa?” she demanded. “She can’t ’elp what she is! Yer din’t ’ave to make it sound as if being a witch stops ’er being a family member!”
“Yer’ve been keeping secrets,” I accused Carol. “Are you a witch? Is anyone else in yer family?”
“No! Nobody! The professor-person said it dun’t allus run in families. Lisa’ll remember for the rest of ’er life that ’er Dad called ’er a freak because of summat she cun’t ’elp!”
“I’m not ’er father! Nowt so disgusting ever ’appened to a Middleton! This unnatural stuff din’t spring up out of nowhere, so if it din’t come from the Southwicks, then it came from Lisa’s father!”
I grabbed the telephone directory and thumbed through the Ts. “Where are the Turpins, then?”
As it happened, Phil’s parents were still living at their old address. I made Carol ring them and ask where he was. Given she had spent the last ten years avoiding him, I was slightly surprised at how naïvely they told her his new address in Hull, but it was only ten minutes later that I was in the car with Phil Turpin’s address in my pocket. I couldn’t be there in less than an hour and a half, but there was no chance of cooling off on the journey. I wanted some answers and I was fuming even more furiously when I finally landed on his doorstep.
Phil Turpin was large-framed, ruddy-faced and shocking-blond; he reminded me of someone, yet it wasn’t Lisa. He looked annoyed when he realised who I was, but he thought on his manners and invited me in.
“I’ve come about Lisa,” I said. “There’s been some trouble.”
“So yer after money, is that right?”
“No!” I exclaimed, then cursed myself for not saying yes after all. “Not money. We need to know about ’er family. It dun’t seem to be ’er mother, so I need to ask about the Turpins.”
“Oh? Family illnesses, yer mean? Is Lisa sick?”
Lisa was sick-minded, all right! But if I said so to her father, he wouldn’t admit to a family connection. “Yer could say so. ’As anyone in the Turpins ever done odd... wrong... be’aviour?”
Turpin frowned. “Was that a dig at me, Middleton? I know I din’t always do right by Carol, but I’m off the drink now and I’ve never been in trouble since. I’ve ’eld a job in the oil refinery eight year; married again, two sons. Is Lisa turning out bad?”
“Not that way. No trouble at school. But she’s... well... Did a Turpin ever act a bit... er... off-normal?”
“I certainly ’aven’t!” he retorted. “But if yer mean mental troubles... ’Ad an aunt once ’oo was proper miserable for no reason. They shut ’er up in a loony ’ospital, but she offed ’erself anyway. Wait, though, she was only related by marriage. She passed nowt down to Lisa.”
“That’s more the sort of thing,” I said. “But Lisa inn’t loony. They’ve accused ’er of... doing magic. A witch.”
“What?” Turpin burst out laughing. “Do yer believe in witches? Go on, pull the other one. My daughter inn’t a witch because witches don’t exist.”
“Was anyone in yer family “ ’appen an ancestor “ ever accused of witchcraft?” I pressed.
He switched off the laugh and stood up, obviously meaning to show me to the door. “’Appen yer the one wi’ mental troubles, Middleton. The Turpins ’ave been farming in Yorkshire since the Dark Ages. We’re plain folk ’oo say what we think wi’ no beating around the bush and we don’t ’ave superstitions. Yer can check the old records if yer’ve time to waste; look all yer like for TURPIN, sometimes written THORFINN. But yer’ll see that no Turpin was ever accused of superstitious stuff, not even in the day when folk believed in witches. We’re too plain; folks allus knew it cun’t be the Turpins.”
As I was leaving the house, his second wife appeared on the stairs. She gave me a shock. Although she was a brunette, her face looked startlingly like Carol’s. But it was only as I drove away from the Turpins’ that I realised where I had seen Phil Turpin’s face before.
Apart from the colouring, it was nearly identical to the face I saw every day in my shaving mirror.
For the next five weeks, Lisa crept around the house quietly, giving me reproachful glances and not daring to speak a word. Carol kept close to Lisa, and I kept the boys away from both of them. I wondered how I could ever have tried to be a father to someone like Lisa. Anyone who wanted to be a witch didn’t belong in our family.
Lisa went to the freaks’ boarding school. I told the neighbours that she’d gone to live with her Dad. The family learned not to talk about Lisa in front of me but they never really accepted that she had gone, for I often heard them mention her when they thought I couldn’t hear. Sometimes the natural postman brought Carol letters in Lisa’s handwriting; and sometimes the letters were delivered by those unnatural trained owls. If the letter came by owl, I wouldn’t let Carol read it to the boys.
It wasn’t too bad as long as Lisa was out of sight, but she came home every summer.
“I’m not allowed to do magic out of school,” she assured us.
But Lisa didn’t need to perform actual magic. Even the sight of her face reminded me that she was one of those people, someone who could do magic, and I would break out into a cold sweat.
I suggested that we might send her to stay with the Turpins, but they didn’t want her; I must have let on too much that she wasn’t normal. So we sent her to Carol’s family for the summer, or I made excuses to be out of town myself. That helped, but the problem didn’t go away. However much I stepped around Lisa Turpin, she was my wife’s daughter, and sooner or later, I always had to meet her face to face.
“We might not understand magic very well,” said Carol, “but Lisa’s still me daughter.”
“And she’s ar sister!” chimed in Tim.
“But she inn’t normal,” I argued.
“She can’t ’elp that.”
“And I can’t ’elp ’ow I feel about abnormality!”
It was no good. Carol wouldn’t see reason; she had far too much sympathy, and the boys were learning her softness. Quarrels broke out, even without anyone mentioning Lisa’s name. Home became a mine-pit where one false word led to a pitched battle. I went to work for a rest and I began to work longer and longer hours. My workmates were all normal, and the new receptionist was gorgeous. She was childless, too.
Long story short, Carol threw me out. She screamed it was because of the receptionist, but it was probably because of Lisa. The divorce courts, with their usual injustice, gave Carol half the savings, all the furniture and all the kids. You’d think she’d be glad to keep Lisa and give me the boys, but the only question before the court psychologist was whether I’d even be allowed access rights. I’ve never been violent, so I did win that much. But access visits are still quite strained, and I don’t know how much longer we’ll be keeping them up. Tim and Jason still think of Carol’s house as their real home and Lisa as a real sister.
Nevertheless, there’s no returning. I’ve started again with my new woman. I want a normal family now.