Hallows Game || HP X Squid Game (Draco Malfoy)

33 - The Girl With The Red Hair

A famous writer once said 'when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life'.

This was certainly the case for Jasper Smith, a sixty-eight year old man whose home for the best part of the last decade had been curled up in various shop doorways and bus stops, coughing up his guts.

Smokers cough, his late wife, Franny, always said with a frown. A frown which quickly smoothed over the second Jasper pulled her into his arms for a kiss. Then she would laugh and complain that his beard tickled her face and that if he wasn't careful she would shave it off in his sleep.

But she had loved his beard really. Jasper knew this, for whenever he had considered a new clean cut look as he inspected himself in the mirror, Franny's arms would circle around his generous middle as she nuzzled her face lovingly into the crook of his neck. "Then you wouldn't be my big hairy bear anymore."

The pain Jasper felt from losing his wife was still of the same abundance as it had been on that morning, ten years previously, when he awoke to discover her lying dead beside him in their marital bed. A heart attack, they said.

It had been three days before their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Jasper had never got to tell his wife about the surprise around-the-world cruise he had booked for them.

Having had no children to keep him check, Jasper had spiralled out of control, turning to alcohol to numb the agony of loneliness.

Needless to say, he soon lost his job, his house, his sanity.

And now this was life. A London hobo. Franny used to always throw a coin into the homeless man's cap whenever they used to stroll through the city, much to Jasper's chagrin. "You never know, dear," she would say in response to his grumblings, "one day it could happen to someone you know, and you'd wished you'd done more to help."

His dear, sweet, Franny.

******

London was a wonderful place to be during the Christmas period: the general excitement in the air as shops adorned their windows with festive lights and buskers switched soulful ballads for joyful jingles.

However, below all this cheer, in certain parts of the underground, was a place where the festivities didn't quite reach. A place where the rats ran wild and the homeless took shelter from the cold, icy elements.

One could be forgiven for thinking they had accidentally wandered onto the set of a Charles Dickens adaptation if one ever found themselves down there - but the absence of cameras and crew would tell them the squalor was very much real.

It was darkness and depression. Hopelessness and loneliness. Lost happiness, abandoned dreams. A place where vermin crawled to die.

And then, one day, an angel wandered amongst them. A beautiful angel with bright red hair who brought light and colour wherever she walked.

On her arm she carried a basket of seemingly never ending consumable goods: hot, nutritious meals in small cardboard packages, freshly baked pastries, and paper bags of apples, bananas and pears which she would present with a flourish, gifting to the needy.

At first she began to visit weekly, and then, when the weather turned colder, she was there daily, retrieving from her magic basket an array of thick blankets, hot water bottles and pillows, and other paraphernalia that one might need to survive minus temperatures.

Jasper, who had since been forced down into the sewers by a heavy blizzard, at first eyed this lady with skepticism. No one in this day and age gave for nothing. Not since his Franny.