VOICES THAT LINGER IN DUSTY OLD PHOTOGRAPHS
i.
You are six. You are afraid of taking that step outside, because it's black, and memories, you think, always return then. Always always always—
He comes home right before the shadows appear in the evening, dragging himself past the kitchen and into the living room, and tossing off his muddied, too-long cloak over the already-faded chair. And in his forward stumble toward the old bookshelves lining the lounge, he remembers the newspaper smelling faintly of dirt and salt and memories, the black-and-white photo that covers half the front page, and thinks, You drown me, Sirius; drown me, and do not care.
Next he finds himself standing before the old bookshelves in search of a good book, because good books, he knows, always make the past vanish into blackness—blackening and blackening still—becoming more and more hollow; hollowed-out.
(Or, if lucky, small not-dusty hours of comfort.)
You are seven, blackness coming down—paint-like, then like a wet cloth on your skin. And you are afraid, this time too, of standing in the cold night-time fields
alone; so you scream, wide-eyed, to your dad, telling him he can't leave you there, because the memories will convert and grow until they are sulking masses looming above you (their shapes—broken—the colour of grey-black—gliding gently).
Later, in the evening, he watches the narrow, dark and rain-drenched streets through a grey-dusted glass window (thin fingers holding heavy curtains aside), and bitterly remembers that evening is a false pretender; a person who is hiding from the world in the morning and walks back to it in the evening, when villages sleep under a false sense of calm until they drowsily turn on the televisions in the morning and are shaken by the news of murders (and realise a traitor roams the nearby roads at night).
(The night, he thinks, is like Sirius.)
You are eight and you wonder, "Why, why do you return?" You stand in the darkness and wish for some sort of reply. It does not come.
He closes his eyes as if for calm, and thinks—just thinks—for he knows thinking is a corner where he can make vanish any long-ago memory; a lone corner where he can roll them up in scrolls, to gather patinas of dust, not to return. But always somehow, somewhere, they do, always return when he forgets not to look at the pictures (James and Peter and himself and Sirius, smiling), or when he hears, on his roof, the half-broken beat of rain tapping through the wind’s wretched corners.
(Tip tap, tip tap—such a rhythm from the rain’s unbroken encumber.)
You are twenty now, and the memories
of full-moons and dragging autumn nights and silver bullets, are dusty and old and weary. You are secure, anchored still, until your world one late Halloween evening is shattered by your best friend's betrayal. In the following morning you see his face in the day's newspaper ('Black in Jail' the headline blazes), and you stare wide-eyed at the picture (Sirius in the front, face mad with black hair casually falling); you are silently staring at the picture waiting for someone—anyone–to tell you this could not, and would not, be true.
You have decided complaining to The Daily Prophet is the right thing to do when Dumbledore arrives at your doorsteps and asks if you are all right. Yes is your reply (but you know it's not true, and you know he knows, too). He looks strangely at you, suggests ‘some tea, perhaps’, but you ignore him, tell him to get to his point— something is wrong, it unnerves you. Dumbledore says it then (says it, you think, quickly and gravely); and you, glassy-eyed, clench and unclench your fists because you feel dreadful and you will not admit that he did it. And you will not, either, half-ashamed, admit that ever since you read that newspaper you have been wondering, a little—just a little—if he did it; if Sirius, somehow, had betrayed.
Dumbledore turns to the crackling fire, saying, To dwell in the past never does anyone any good, Remus, and then he vanished.
They always return. He does not want them to.
ii.
In the morning, he sleeps in the chair by the wood-framed window, thoughts in the empty black or not-black space where time is not seconds or minutes or long eternities, but horror and indolence and world-weariness (time never tripping, or falling, but in a sense a half-tune—drawn out blue—perpetually breathing.)
He is dreaming of golden beaches and stretching autumn days and that alluring smell of old, well-loved books when the images abruptly convert into sudden flashes; swish, black ashen ruins, swish swish, tortured grey walls, swish swish swish, betrayal and fire and a familiar black-and-white photo–and he wakes, in the morning, gasping as if he slowly, inevitably
drowns. He begins to think, head in hands, of Sirius (young, thoughtless, foolish Sirius) and the memories return: burned ruins and thick smoke and so, so, so weary damp prison walls.
Things weren’t supposed to end this way, Sirius. You knew. I knew. And yet it did.
Our tunnel never was a tunnel too fraught with light, was it? Why?
He feels betrayed and tired and somewhat lost, and wishes—frantically—for something to read—a book or a poem or a play. Anything, he thinks, making him think until he loose all thoughts. He is about to move to the bookshelves when he (half-angrily or half-miserably) realises he doesn’t have the strength walking to the many shelves crammed with old, well-read books (Moby Dick and Midnight and David Copperfield), because four in the morning the aftermath of sleep still remains in his limbs.
(The aftermath is cold, indolent, and tired-looking, and it makes him think of Sirius until he becomes dizzy and vomits.)
He forgets himself later this morning, holding pictures (Prongs and Padfoot and Wormtail and himself) in his hands, and the memories return, claw-fingered and angry and terrifying. They flash and spin and become one hurried blur of a defeated burned ruin, and he—standing dreary-eyed in the worn out shadows of the dusty old corridor—thinks that if full moons didn't exist, this would be his boggart—thinks that this burned house, this no-longer standing ruin, is fear.
iii.
In the afternoon, he wonders if Dumbledore was right; wonders if, somehow, he had been wrong and Albus right; while 'to dwell in the past never does anyone any good, Remus' repeats itself (fragmentary) in his mind, he wonders if he does, after all, live in his past. He does not like the thought.
He is sitting in his chair by the fire, a slump figure drawing pointless, invisible words in the air (still, and dusts are visible in light, but in darkness an all-empty, an all-black); he draws them beautifully, with a spoon, and frantically tries to remember laugher and pranks and golden beaches but smoke and fire and ashes are tearing angrily the images to pieces, and in a sudden he realises, leaning forward for support, I live in my past. God, I live in it without moving on. I do not know how.
(It is the same thing with Sirius, he thinks, a little later; living within the dead-alive space the colour of grey, a stopped world, and slightly fading-away splendour—monochrome, and somewhat dusted.)
iv.
In front of him lies the yesterday's tear-stained newspaper, and when he looks at it ('Black in jail' it says in large-bolded letters above a black-and-white print of a screaming young madman), he thinks, a little bitterly, you always return. Always return and never leave. He takes it then (‘to dwell in the past never does anyone any good, Remus’ still playing in his mind), and stumbling to the fire at the far corner, he folds up the sleeves of his robes taking a last lingering look at the black-and-white photo. And he throws it into the fire, thinking good-bye,; and, somehow, after that, he finds himself spending his afternoon gathering many, many lightly dusted pictures of his past (black and white and differently coloured), watching as they melt and curl and blacken in the fire until they vanish completely.
He looks up, thinking, yes, yes, you have left, for he doesn’t feel regret, loss, or a hollowness—he feels neither of those things. The shadows cower. Once he always did, when revisited by sharp-edged fragments of his past (and always thought he would forever), but—now—knows he will not.
The world is strange, he remembers, then; strange and old and sometimes dead, but mostly, it is living.
(He once said, Ha ha, take that, Sirius; I am right, the world isn’t dead. Sometimes grey, perhaps, sometimes strange. But never dead.
He says it, and thinks it, again today. And
With the broken shadows' cumbering
wishes Sirius knew.)
Sirius-
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