Just a perfect day
Problems all left alone
Weekenders, on our own;
It’s such fun.
Just a perfect day
You made me forget myself
I thought I was someone else
Someone good.
Wednesday 11th August 1976
St. Edmund’s was less bearable than usual that summer. Remus was angry almost all of the time. It was too hot and he missed Hogwarts and he missed his friends and most of all he missed Sirius, but he also hated him. It was a huge mess. He missed Grant too; Grant, who might have made it all a bit more manageable, or at least offered some escapism.
But, as an unsatisfying conversation with another St Eddy’s boy called Mike had told him, Grant had left St Edmund’s shortly after Christmas. He was living in a flat in Mile End, apparently, though Remus didn’t have much more information than that. ...and he had said Remus could come any time.
At least I’m not knocking over off licences or getting pissed on the common this time, he thought, as he planned his escape. As summer rebellions went, this one was perhaps the most healthy.
He waited until the second full moon of the summer had passed – on the tenth of August. On the eleventh, he waited for Madam Pomfrey to come and give him the all clear, and then he just left. He was sore, and extremely tired, but at the time he didn’t feel he had any other option. He packed a small bag, without taking books or homework or his wand or anything at all that reminded him of Hogwarts. He would be a muggle for a few days; why not.
All Remus had to do was walk out into the garden and crawl through the fence at the back, just as he had been doing for years to get into town. From there, he simply walked to the nearest tube.
Theydon Bois underground station was about five miles away, but he did it easily in under two hours, even with a gammy hip. He couldn’t afford a ticket, but it wasn’t difficult to push through the barriers behind a group of suited business men on their way to work.
He got a seat on the train, and pretended to be asleep so that the ticket inspector wouldn’t bother him, listening to the rattling rumbling roar of the train as the carriage whooshed along the tracks, like a great earthworm ploughing its way into central London.
Excitement pulsed in Remus’s chest as he reached Mile End, where he hurried out of the carriage into the dimly lit green and white tiled station.
Mile End had been hit by a German bomb during the war and still hadn’t recovered from the shock of it. It was a dirty, sprawling mess of a high street, littered with rubble and newspapers, children playing in the road, noise everywhere. The grim anonymity suited Remus. Who would come looking for him here? Who would find him?
He wandered for a bit, unsure what to do next. The information he’d been given was just a building name, no street address. But after asking in a newsagent, and quite literally following his nose, he found it.
It turned out that Grant didn’t actually have a flat – not in the sense that he owned it, or was even renting it. As far as Remus could tell, it was a squat, shared with several other young men and women. He hadn’t actually been expecting Remus, either.
“Bloody hell!” He exclaimed, when one of the girls finally brought him to the door, “What are you doin’ ‘ere?!”
Remus felt very foolish. He wasn’t sure what sort of welcome he would have liked, but it wasn’t that.
