The Cupboard under the Stairs
Nostalgia is a disease, historically. No really, check the mortality bills from times of war; cause of death: nostalgia. Killed by a sickness that softens the mind and rots the soul. Nostalgia is the longing for a home you cannot return to, or perhaps one you’ve never known. Nostalgia is the ache for a time that you cannot reach because it no longer exists- in fact, it never existed at all. Only ever existed in your warped, pinked memories.
Nostalgia is poking a festering bruise to see how many pretty colours it can turn. Nostalgia forgets the details and forgives everything.
Harry feels it rock through him now, the ache, as he stands in the hallway of 4 Privet Drive. As he stares at his cupboard, the one under the stairs. As he fights the urge to try and climb inside it.
It had taken Harry two months after the battle to owl Dudley.
Things are safer here. Going back to school but have some stuff to sort. Let me know when.
Give Alf a treat or he’ll bite.
They’re in Guernsey Aug. 25-31. Come then. I won’t be here. Your owl did bite me. It’s worse than the other one. Don’t send it again or they might see.
That’s how Harry found himself here, on a sickly hot day at the end of an even hotter summer, hands twitching by his sides, longing to reach out.
He’d already done the room upstairs. Empty, newly painted a fresh white. As though something had tainted its walls just by sleeping inside it. Harry had never even touched it, barely breathed in there, honestly. But they had to repaint it just to be sure nothing of him clung to the space, that traces of him could never be found anywhere here. Harry was like a very bad dream you try to scrub out of your hair the next day. He'd waited idly at the threshold of the room for the tell-tale pop of house-elf apparition, as though pretending not to care might make it come. The hinges groaned, after, as he shut the door on the resounding silence.
Now he faced the cupboard.
Open it. Get in. Shut the door behind you. What if it’s different too? Don’t open it. Don’t find out. Have to know, have to know, have to-
A hoover. A tub of white emulsion - for the room upstairs, he supposed. Shelves laden with cleaning products and random containers and a whole lot of rubbish. Nothing important at all.
He tried his best not to be offended.
Well, he thought, desperate, if I just move some stuff out of the way there will still be room for me.
Harry started with the shelves. All purpose cleaner, bathroom cleaner, glass cleaner- he wondered, who did the cleaning now?
Then the boxes. Boxes of nothing, of rubbish. Screws, random electrical wires, replacement light bulbs. Spares. Stuff you didn’t know what to do with so you just shoved it in the cupboard under the stairs so no one had to see it.
Piles and piles of shit and shit, a cupboard full of nothing meaningful at all. But it mattered to Harry, it mattered, it had to.
‘Fucking hell, stop, stop stop stop,’ he did, when he realised he’d just been launching things into the corridor, and now the useless shit was all over the carpet.
‘Fucking shit.’ Harry didn’t want to get in the cupboard anymore, he wanted to get out of this fucking place. Away from the ugly furniture and the ugly carpet and the fucking rubbish that didn’t mean anything to anyone. But he needed something from in there, something that, despite appearances, wasn’t rubbish at all.
Breaths coming short and putting as little of his body in the space as possible, he reached deep into the cupboard, down the side where it slanted to meet the floor, and felt for the join in the skirting board. Just behind it, where he’d left it, a folded up sheet of paper, so worn it barely held together as he pulled it from behind the wood.
They hadn’t found it, didn’t know it existed here in the cupboard, the only proof that he ever had. It was the only thing he had at all, really, of his own. This was Harry's, and he wouldn’t let them have it.
Before he left he set the things back on the shelf. He wondered if the magic of the floating charm would linger. He didn’t think he wanted it to, if he wanted anything of his left here. He shut the door on the cupboard of useless, meaningless shit, and was surprised to find himself, after all of that, on the outside, and not in there along with it. He locked it for good measure and regarded it one last time. It’s very small, he thought suddenly, horrifically, and made himself leave it behind.
In a bizarre attempt at defiance, Harry smashed one of Aunt Petunia's decorative china plates, watched the shards skid across the kitchen linoleum. Felt truly underwhelmed, if slightly tetchy at the sight of the mess on the pristine floor. Reparoed it, put it back, and apparated.
Grimmauld Place greeted him the way he assumed an aloof, disinterested relative might. Offering an old, cold hand for you to shake, but never hold. He supposed he had Walburga Black to thank for that, her cloying presence seeming to be the very glue fastening the wallpaper to the walls.
The difference between the two houses jarred him so severely he almost ended up on the floor in the entryway. Instead he leaned, back pressed against the stupidly sentient wallpaper and tried to remember how to feel his fingers. He stared up at the ceiling that seemed to go up for miles and miles and felt truly and utterly unmoored.
He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, didn’t put them back on. He left a trail of clothes in his wake on the way up to the bedroom, creating as much mess as he dared. It didn’t matter anyway, it was always gone when he woke up. As if by magic. By the time he got to bed all that remained were his boxers and the sheet of paper held tightly in his fist. He shoved it blindly into his bedside table, out of sight but not forgotten, and crawled between the sheets of the bed that belonged to his dead godfather. It was early afternoon but no sun made it past the curtains, and in the dark and without his glasses Harry could pretend that the walls weren’t so far away. He dare not make a sound, not for fear of discovery, but fear of the noise trailing out into the cavernous room. Skittering off the sides and coming back to haunt him.
He lay awake, breathing softly despite the weight of his heart, and considered if the definition of a cupboard depended on its size or what, exactly, you were trying to conceal inside it.
