Evenings like this one had always been what their marriage had been about. Millie would profess eagerly to even a stranger that her and her husband’s best work was done in bed. Whilst that may had been not far wrong, it also wasn’t the whole truth, either. They were at their best when they had two bottles of beer, food, the cat and each other. That was when they were at their equilibrium. It had started in his rooms. She’d moved in slowly and then all of a sudden until one day she wasn’t entirely sure whose black socks were whose. They’d brought out in each other the goodness, the youth and the playfulness that time and hardship had tried to erode away. They had set each other to rights again and when they were apart, things began to truly spin off axis and they were lost. It was easy to forget that relationships needed work. It wasn’t all cream cakes, iced buns and rainbows. No, it needed work. They needed work. And evenings like this? Those sealed every crack in the masonry.
Millie laughed and scooted forward on her bum to the table. After one last mouthful of pasta for the moment she set the bowl down beside her money and picked out the hat. She did rather like being the hat. Nevertheless, the banter would start up now and she was half expecting it to either end in tears or her sitting on her husband until he let her win. He wouldn’t give up without a fight but she’d never actually see him enact his more Slytherin side and use underhand tactics. She knew she would be easy to distract if he put his mind to it but he was easier still and, of the two of them, she was the one wearing the trousers and certainly had no qualms about cheating until her heart was blackened if it meant that she could win the game.
Smirking, Millie picked up the dice and rolled it out over the board. She rolled her eyes immediately and pushed her hat along a few spaces before picking up her bowl again. However, she did so after quipping in return to her husband, sending him a quizzical look as she considered his words before confiding:
“Only a few times?” Millie exclaimed admonishingly. She smirked and clucked her tongue against her front teeth before rolling her eyes about the room, feigning deep and meaningful thought. “No… no, wait… oh no... wait! Oh, no. Nope. Definitely not. You mustn’t have made it very clear. You need to be thorough. I did think you were a better educator than that.” Millie licked her lips, her smirk overriding her face now as her shoulders began to shake with poorly concealed humour. “Professor, you’ll just have to lecture me about this, I think. You’ll do a special class just for me, won’t you? I can come after hours if not. In fact, I can stay all night long if you like… just so you can make sure you can ram home the point properly… so I don’t forget next time. And I trust… I’ll have some sort of test to pass after. I’d prefer it to be a practical over theory … just so you know.”
Millie was an expert wind-up merchant. She was still a Finnigan, after all. However, returning the bowl to her lap, Millie resumed eating. Her smirk wasn’t so easily gotten rid of, however, and she poured over the pasta regardless. Then it occurred to her that, thanks to her midwife, she didn’t have to sit around and drink water during the evenings. Millie jumped up, setting down her pasta, albeit bear in mind this was more of a roll and rise scenario than any actual jumping. But whatever. She hopped (actual hopping) over to the drinks cabinet and from it produced a bottle of Shloer. She grinned and picked up her favourite wine glass before hopping back over to the table. She plopped herself back down on the pillows and broke the seal before pouring herself a hearty amount into the glass. She then set the bottle down before pausing to watch the bubbles.
“The midwife sussed me out immediately. She was a new one this one and was talking to me about clubbing because…y’know, I really look like someone who is going to go clubbing – but whatever. No, we then started to talk about booze and I was whining about how I can’t have beer or wine or well… air, even. But she recommended this because it’s like … sparkling grape juice or whatever and it makes me feel refined.” Millie laughed before picking up her glass and taking a sip. She offered it to Keiran with a smile. “It’s not bad, really, is it?”
Millie set the glass down after and looked at her husband with a curious smile on her face. She dropped one arm onto the coffee table and propped her head up in her palm before casting an eye over him, wondering what it was that he was getting at.
“I know I said I was bored but I’m not suddenly going to become Nigella. I just don’t have the hips.” She grinned a little before nodding thoughtfully. “No, I know what you mean. Eli’s Elves do make a cracking tiramisu though. He’s the best at making a fry up after a hangover. That’s his only forte and unless you’ve got a house full of Werewolves and Vampires like yours truly then I am sure you don’t see a lot of Krum breakfasts.” Millie smirked. “My dad used to cook in ours. All the time. Lavender could burn boiling water if she put her mind to it. He used to make this brilliant thing. Oh, god. It was pasta, ever a staple, but corned beef and tomato sauce and so much pepper you can’t feel your head anymore. Just… great comfort food. Then his puddings. They were fantastic.”
Millie’s smile grew wistful as she looked down at her wine glass. She could see him in her mind’s eye. He was immortal to her, ever young like he had been when she was little. With his glasses perched on his nose and his Quidditch jersey on, specked with paint of course because it was an old one and he hadn’t been to a match since well before they’d been born. He would always smile. Always, always. He’d always have a pint of Guinness at his elbow, too. Later it would be whisky but regardless it had always been something. Guinness at one elbow, Marlboros at the other. She understood she had a ridiculously romanticised view of her father now. The horrific circumstances in which he’d died and in the way they’d found him was etched permanently on the backs of her eyelids and in her trials to get rid of that memory she’d tried to remember the best of him. It had all been dredged up, though, when Aiden had died. That night appeared in tandem with the one before, though. Now, she wasn’t sure whose screams married up to the person. Perhaps they’d all just blurred together.
“There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t miss my dad, Keiran.” She murmured, lifting her watery gaze to look at him. “You’re so lucky, you know that? Like… I know, oh God I sound ridiculous but I… I’m sorry.” She exhaled, rubbing her index finger around the rim of the glass as she thought. “In your parents’ house there’s still love. People come and go and laugh and cry and they love each other so fiercely in that house. All of that was snuffed out and snatched away from underneath us when my dad died. Everything was gone. They chucked us out of the house in our pyjamas. God. What even were pyjamas back then? I think Ell had nought but a pair of trousers and socks on and there was me stood there in the then on-again-off-again boyfriend’s shirt and a pair of knickers. The coppers bundled us up in blankets and the medics took us off to the clinic and we sat there for hours, it felt like. I remember this one nurse… she said that she couldn’t believe that any parent would let their children get like us. I was livid. Who was she, you know? Who was she to make that judgement when she didn’t even know us? We were fine with him, dad, I mean. With him we weren’t broken and we were alright and I thought everything would be fine as long as we were with him but then he wasn’t there anymore and by the time the expelled us from the clinic everything was gone. She’d already done it. The house had been put on the market and there was nothing left. The furniture, our clothes, our things, my books, my paintings… even the sodding dust bunnies were gone and the whole place stank of bleach. Everything she ever touched turned to ash like the anti-Midas she was. She didn’t even come and pick us up it was Trent’s gran. Des wouldn’t let us go home without getting us fed and clothed and I don’t think Elliot spoke a whit through it all. I didn’t hear him speak for a week until he finally snapped at Lavender. I didn’t see him for a month after that. Comes back more or less the same way he was when you first met him. First met me, too. Buzzed, I guess. Cigarette fingers. Unkempt. God knows where he’d been. But I remember, even before that she’d started with her poison – or what I thought was – and before the grass could even grow over his plot she’d already sold the house. The buyers… this young couple having a baby. Lav and the missus took the helm, going round the house meanwhile I shagged the hubby upstairs whilst they were in the garden. Trent and I were off, by this point, so it was perfectly legitimate having sex with a married man in a house you were trying to flog to him, am I right?” Millie laughed humourlessly and shook her head. “Fat beached whale, his wife, too.”
This time she did laugh, though she muffled it a little with a mouthful of her drink.
“I always thought we were going to be alright as long as we were with him. Once he was gone we were on our own. We used to wallow in that house. It was a wonder we didn’t all die in there, the way we festered. It stank of fags and booze and pizza grease and we were all dying slowly but God we were happy. Happy as you can be watching the world around you fall down about your ears. I think we’d all come to accept that it was going to be this way. The four of us. Me, Ells, Trent and my dad… it was fine. Then one night Trent went out. Went to a party with…” Millie smudged her lips together, wondering how candid she was going to be. However, admitting to having sex with a married man while his wife was downstairs trying to buy the house your father had died in… that was perverse enough and she shouldn’t have really censored herself over the forthcoming confidence. “Our … friend who also sold Spice and … a number of other hallucinogenics and had done since we were around… fourteen, I think. Um. So he was out. It’d been a great day. We’d sobered up as best we could. Gone to the football, come back, eaten fish’n’chips and made dinner and then we started and it was fine. It was normal. We watched films and fixed the world in an evening. We had one last bottle of Firewhisky and over that we worked out how Arsenal would win the league. Ells went to bed first with the girl he’d brought home. They went to bed and then it was me and dad finishing off the whisky… we did as best we could but he sent me off… I was falling asleep where I stood and he just laughed and kissed me and said ‘g’night Mell-Belle’ and that was it. I trudged off to bed and he stayed back to lock up. Trent came to bed at some point, I remember he flopped in and muttered something about … oh God, I don’t even know anymore but it was something like five… maybe. We found my dad at eight. Then… then everything changed.”
Millie sighed and lifted a hand to rub it across her face. She shook herself, unsure now what she sought to gain by telling Keiran this. In many ways, he had a right to know. She had no idea where her spiel had come from though. The last time she’d confided in him about something like that she’d let it all out in one large clump, too. She didn’t regret it but at the same time she felt ashamed. She still felt like a failure, asymmetrical to him in more ways than not.
“I guess I’m just…I don’t want it to happen to our children. You’re not a chain smoking alcoholic with Lavender Brown for a wife, of course, but I just don’t want for them to not have somewhere to go. We couldn’t go anywhere. I ended up in sodding Jamaica for God’s sake and the first time I’d seen Elliot since that time was when we got married. I’d written to him but I hadn’t seen him and he’d not spoken a word about anything and it was like everything was fine. I want them to have a house, no, a home… that is theirs and that is always going to be theirs but I just… I don’t want my life to be theirs. Do you know what I mean? Like… I’m a walking disaster that got lucky because the Ministry thought it would be funny to put someone as maddeningly successful as you with someone who… well, someone like me. So I… I don’t know where any of that came from but I think what I’m saying is that … I don’t want us to be my parents and I don’t want our children to be like me and Elliot. I’d rather two carbon copies of you, if you please, Professor.” She smiled and reached up to wipe her eyes, finding them damp but not too bad at all. “Sorry. That was the worst way to try and get out of losing to you at monopoly ever, I think.”