the cadence of part time poets

Chapter 93: Stayin' Alive... Stayin' Alive...

Everyday, it's a-gettin' closer,
Goin' faster than a roller coaster;
Love like yours will surely come my way,
A-hey, a-hey, hey;
Love like yours will surely come my way...

- "Everyday" Buddy Holly, 1957

Remus had forgotten what it was like to have a mother. He'd witnessed bits of it, through Effie and Mrs. Pettigrew—even a few of the more overbearing ladies in the estate's kitchens—but Sheila was something else entirely. It wasn't as though she was suddenly bursting into his room every Sunday morning, screeching for the laundry or pestering him about how a cup of coffee did not qualify as a meal in itself (really, he had James for that); rather, she told him things. Gave him her opinion, offered advice, shared memories from when she was a girl. Memories of himself, and his family. Before it had irked him, knowing that a stranger might remember more of his own past than he did, but Sheila wasn't a stranger.

She was something else.

He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to forgive her for walking away during the penultimate years of his life, but maybe he didn't have to. Maybe it was enough just to let her in at all.

"I think you should be glad to be named Remus," she'd told him once. "You were almost Rodney."

"And then on your first Halloween, Hope dressed you up like a little dalmatian," came another; "A bit on the nose, maybe, but the photos she sent of you with the dogs were so cute." 

"The first time you met your grandmother you spit up right in her face. Hope and I laughed for hours. She really was a nasty woman, that Alys Howell. You're lucky, Hope was nothing like her."

Every memory, Remus drank in desperately. It was as though he'd lived his entire life on a desert island, and was only now just getting his first taste of water.

"Do you remember the first song you ever heard, Remus?" Sheila asked.

He shook his head.

"I do. I was there actually. But of course you wouldn't remember... it was the first time you and I had ever met, after all. Hope had just brought you home from the hospital. Such a tiny thing—Lyall barely had you through the doors by the time I came whipping up the road. But I was so excited. I'd made your mother promise that I could play you your first ever song."

"You?" Remus echoed. "You played me my first song?"

"Not myself," she laughed; "Doubt I could've gotten through a single verse on my own, no matter the instrument. I'd already mucked up the whole thing, you see. When I arrived at the house, I'd meant to play you a Bobby Darin record, only I was so nervous that I'd grabbed Bobby Day instead. Not that it mattered much, you loved it. I can remember the way your pudgy little face just lit up! I swore up and down that you'd be a music lover, and you proved me right straight away. Playing that record was the only thing that could get you to sleep. I'm almost sure that Lyall and Hope were cursing me to my back—they must've had 'Rockin' Robin' stuck in their heads for months."

It was amazing. Like a golden ticket—the perfect flick of ash off the end of a cigarette. As long as she had it in her to keep going, Remus would listen.

"Hope and I would sing to you for hours, you know," Sheila said proudly that same evening, after he'd finished the day's lessons and snuck away to her office for the fourth time that week. It wasn't a secret where it was going, but Sirius and James knew better than to try and tag along. Remus needed this, even if hearing some of her stories made the knots in the pit of his stomach twist uncomfortably; he wanted to know.

"Your mother had decent enough taste when it came to music," Sheila went on; "Though, it was all thanks to me, of course."

"Yeah?"