The Best of Both Worlds

Back in Spinner’s end, Snape was desolate. Lily wanted to spend time with her family and, in any case, he didn’t want to seem too keen to see her, so he kept his distance from her house for the first few days of the holidays, spending as much time as he could out of the house or submerged in his books, visualizing the magic he wasn’t allowed to perform, practising incantations and seething with resentment about Potter.  

Spinner’s end was not a place of action; it was a place to stew in resentment or longing. It was a kind of limbo world, where nothing ever happened, but nothing was ever forgotten.

His parents had asked him a few questions about his term, and then resumed their constant arguing with increased vigour, as though they needed to catch up. His mother looked withered and malnourished whenever she wasn’t shouting. Performing magic and taunting Tobias Snape were the only things that made her look alive.    

Eileen Snape’s dark hair was fly-away and crackly; on the rare occasions that she performed magic, strands of it would stand out from her head in a kind of static halo. This spectacle was one of Snape’s earliest memories of magic: he always remembered how happy she looked, in the grip of that static exhilaration. This was also one of the reasons he didn’t wash his hair - because the same static effect occurred whenever he performed magic, unless his hair was particularly greasy.  

Eileen’s face was long, and taut with a general expectation of attack. She had long, sinuous limbs, but always walked around with her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed. This defensive posture, and her desire to be inconspicuous, Snape had inherited from her.

She was brilliantly sensitive, which made her suffering all the more acute. He saw the way she flinched when his father spat or cursed, and the way she shuddered when he raised his voice. The years could not desensitize her to him.   

She hated him. She felt that he had made her betray her proud heritage, bring disgrace on her family. He had dragged her down into this hateful muggle slum, and then withdrawn into clouds of cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, leaving her alone. But hating him took up all her energy; she had very little to spare for Severus. She would sometimes snap out of her miserable trance for long enough to tell him that he needed new clothes - that his ancestors had set trends and created fashions in the Ministry of Magic, and that it was deplorable that one of their descendants should be reduced to this. These sporadic but tender outbursts would generally trail off into dark hints about his father’s ineptitude. “If your father could hold down a proper job, it wouldn‘t be like this. But he doesn’t understand what we are. He doesn’t understand what’s due to us.”

Severus found this kind of talk pretty cryptic, because he didn’t understand what was due to them, either. He would have settled for a lack of shouting.

Eileen Prince was a prisoner, but a complicit one. The door of her cell was wide open, but she had lost all knowledge of the outside world, and any desire to see the sky. All she cared about was revenging herself on her captors. So she stayed in her cell and waited for an opportunity.     

Snape had seen that hatred could bind people indissolubly - his mother and father were soldered together, and painfully, clumsily, like some lame, limping animal, they had to make their way through the world hand in hand.
   
As a child, whenever it was possible, he would slip out of the house, and skulk around the streets, with their endless lines of red-brick houses, or watch the oozing flow of the nearby canal. His parents had never seemed to notice that he was gone, and he had relished the quietness, far away from their constant fights and the malicious rumble of the school playground.

They had no money, and all of Eileen’s friends in the magical world had disowned her, so they’d sent Snape to the local primary school, confusing him with contradictory messages about how he was better than all the other children but he’d do best not to provoke them and to keep out of their way.  

Don’t draw attention to yourself, that was the only thing they agreed on. You’re superior but you have to hide. No-one must know that you’re different.

Well, what was the point in being superior if nobody was allowed to know it?

Snape developed a sneering resentment for the other school children - they made him jealous and disdainful at the same time. He didn’t want to be like them - it was clear that they were stupid, loud, hostile, little animals. They teased him about his name and his mismatched, oversized clothes. But he hated them all the more because he wanted to belong to them, to anybody. Much as he wanted to be separate, distinctive, special, he also wanted to be like somebody. Because it was lonely, sneering at people all the time.   


This school was also the first place he had ever seen Lily. To begin with, he knew her vaguely as a pretty girl who didn’t tease him. And no matter how superior boys are taught to feel, they’re always going to notice pretty girls who don’t tease them.

Then, he saw her perform magic. She was in front of Snape in the dinner queue, chatting to her sister - a bony-faced blonde girl with a shrill voice who was whispering loudly about how the school bully’s parents didn’t live together.

“Layla says they’re not even married. She says her mum told her that Dean Vernon’s dad was in prison. Bet you that’s where Dean’ll end up.”

Lily made a non-committal noise. She was staring out of the window at the horse-chestnut tree in the sunlit playground. Snape would grow to recognise these abstracted moods of hers, where she noticed beautiful things and suddenly forgot where she was.

No doubt her sister was used to them too, because she gave Lily a bony elbow to the ribs, making her start, and repeated: “His dad was in prison, Lily!”

Unfortunately, she had underestimated the force of her whisper. Dean Vernon was standing some way off, but he had heard his name, and the words ‘married’ and ‘prison’ and, dim as he was, Snape thought, he could conjecture the rest.  

He pushed his way through the queue towards them - there were a few muted ’Ow’s and ’Get off’s, but never any loud enough for Dean to hear, because everybody knew that his dad had been in prison, and that he had taught Dean how to kill someone with a single punch.  

“Whatchoo sayin’ about me?” he rumbled. He could speak perfect English really; this accent was affected to make him seem tougher - a move that was patently unnecessary when you saw his bulging muscles and lack of neck.

Petunia gave a kind of whimpering gasp and said: “Nothing.”

“Yeah, you was,” Dean said, pushing her shoulder with such force that she almost spun completely around. “You was sayin’ something about my dad.”    

“Get lost, Dean,” Lily said, her hands on her hips (this posture was to become familiar to Snape too). “No-one cares about your stupid dad.”

There was a silence. The hall held its collective breath. Lily Evans had called Dean Vernon’s dad ‘stupid’.   

And then two things happened in quick succession. Dean raised his fists at Lily, and then suddenly Dean wasn’t there.

From the startled grunts and swear-words that were suddenly issuing from the other end of the hall, they spotted him again, dangling from the basketball hoop, his stumpy legs flailing off the floor.   

It was at this moment - as she looked up at Dean Vernon dangling from the basketball hoop, with an expression somewhere between surprise, exhilaration and satisfaction -  that Snape first noticed her eyes. They were a startling, electric green, and they gave him goose-bumps.


On the third day of the holidays, Lily came to call for him, politely ignoring the way Eileen Snape’s lip curled with contempt at the sight of her, and the way Tobias Snape leered at her hungrily. She had got used to these things - you had to put up with if you wanted to be friends with Severus.

It worried her sometimes. She wondered where it would end, what her feelings for him would make her do but, for the moment, she could bear his cruel, bigoted parents, if it meant she got to see him.

Snape, on the whole, was so happy to see her that he didn’t notice his parents’ reactions to her presence. He grabbed his keys, and the handful of muggle coins that he had managed to scrape together from around the house, and, doing his best to look casual, walked up the street with her without a backward glance at his front door.

It was late afternoon. The sunlight had become horizontal, and was shining on the red-brick houses, turning the windows on one side of the street into blazing sheets of light. Every house looked as though it were on fire. Severus didn’t know why, but he found the sight soothing.

The shadows were lengthening, and the first chill of evening was infusing into the air. The terrace of houses stretched, like an unbroken chain, as far as the eye could see. Spinner’s End seemed to have no end, which was just typical of the place.

The river still oozed languidly, its current slowed by crisp packets, bottles, cans and the semi-submerged bones of shopping trolleys, but somehow the air had never been clearer. Snape felt as though he was back in the Hogwarts grounds, breathing that icy mountain air, the kind so cold that you could feel it dispersing through your veins long after you’d breathed it in.

They went down to the canal-side and sat on the foot-bridge over the river, dangling their legs over the side - Lily’s were not long enough to reach the surface of the water, but she was doing her best to get the toes of her shoes wet, stretching her legs out until she was teetering precariously on the side of the bridge.  

They had been talking about the Dean Vernon incident, and Lily was trying to protest her innocence.

“I’m telling you, all I thought was: I want him to go away. That’s it.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t end up in Siberia,” said Snape.

“But I didn’t want him to get hurt,” she protested.

“Oh, come on,” Snape murmured in her ear, “not even a little bit?”

Lily smiled grudgingly. “Maybe I wanted him to look stupid,” she admitted.

“You didn’t need magic for that.”   

“I mean, he did push my sister.”

“Of course. He had it coming. When people get on the wrong side of you, they’d better watch out.”

“I didn’t say that,” Lily interrupted coolly.  

Snape smiled contentedly. He was always teasing her like this. She was so nice, that it was fun to make her out to be a shameless, mean-spirited bully. There wasn’t a suspicion in his mind that it might get to her; he didn’t understand that she didn’t see herself as he did.      

“Was that the first time you used magic?” he asked.

Lily shrugged. “For all I know.”

She was stretching her legs towards the water. Snape was silent for a while, watching her dark red hair spill over her shoulders as she leaned forwards. It was jewel-bright in the sunshine, as red as the terraced houses in Spinner’s End. Severus suddenly felt a kind of excited warmth spreading through his body. It was half greed and half tenderness; it made him resent and revere her.

“Do you think there’s fish in there?” she asked, peering into the foamy river.    

“Not living ones,” Snape replied.

“I sort of always remember magic,” Lily said musingly. “I never knew what it was, but I always had this feeling that, if I tried hard enough, I could make things happen. Like the world was just waiting for me to say the word.”

Snape smiled his fond, exasperated smile again, but said nothing.   

“When was the first time you ever used magic?” she asked

A shadow stole over his face. “Oh,” he said, frowning. “It was when dad was hitting her - you know, my mum.”

Lily turned her wide, green eyes on him, but he avoided her gaze, looking down at his shoes as they dragged in the murky water.   

“I cast this charm,” he went on, “I still don’t even know what it was. It held him up in mid-air by his throat and sort of choked him. Nearly killed him. He hated magic even more after that.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said gently, after a small silence. “You were just a kid.”

Snape shrugged. “I knew what I was doing. I wanted to kill him.”

“And quite right too!” she replied. “But you didn’t; that’s the important thing.” She was silent for a moment, staring at her own shoes as they dangled above the water. “Why doesn’t she leave him?”

“She can’t. She hates him too much. If she left, there’s the chance that he might find some peace. If she stays, she can torment him every minute until he dies. She doesn’t know anything outside that. It’s the only thing that makes her happy.”

“I don’t blame her,” Lily said grimly.

“No, but then, you don’t blame anyone, do you?”

She looked up at him. “Do you blame her?”  

Severus considered. “No,” he said eventually, “but she shouldn’t have had me. If you’re going to start a war, you should try not to drag civilians into it.”

Lily sighed. “I know it’s hard escaping,” she said. “You feel like a traitor for getting out, because you think you should help her.”

“There’s no helping her,” Snape said. “She’s going to fight it out to the bitter end.”

“Then you’ve got to get out,” Lily told him frankly. Her eyes were so alive with sympathy that Snape suddenly wanted to make his troubles seem less acute, so that she wouldn’t have to feel them so much. He was reminded of his mother’s intense sensitivity, but somehow turned outwards. A little smile creased his face.

“I will,” he said. “We both will. We don’t belong in this place. We’ll do something better.”

Lily shrugged, and watched a dragonfly that had settled on a drooping leaf beside her; it was shimmering electric blue in the heat haze, and looked as though it had flown straight out of another world - a world of tropical ferns and mists and dinosaurs.

Snape knew Lily was easily distracted like this - beautiful things made her forget herself - but he suspected that her silence was due to something else.

“You do want to get out of here, don’t you?” he prompted.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I just don’t want to forget. It’s hard to explain. I feel like you do; I don’t belong here but I don’t want to leave my family behind. I don’t want to live without them.”

“They’ll never understand you!” he said impatiently.

“Maybe not,” she said, with a mischievous smile, “but I won’t compromise. I won’t choose one world or the other. I want the best of both.”

Snape sighed with exasperation, and gestured around at the uniform houses and the rubbish-filled river. “How could you miss any of this when you’re at Hogwarts?”

“It’s part of me.” She leaned back on the palms of her hands and tilted her head to the sky, warming her face in the sun, closing her eyes in the brightness. “Anyway, this is good, isn’t it? Right now? Our friendship? That’s part of the muggle world. In the magical world, you don’t want to know me.”

Snape spluttered and turned red, but he could see that she was smiling playfully.

“That’s not fair,” he mumbled.

“It is kind of fair. You don’t like Mary Macdonald, and she’s muggle-born.”

“That’s because she’s incredibly irritating,” Snape said, half-smiling himself now. “She never stops giggling - and if I sounded like a banshee with the hiccoughs every time I laughed, I’d try to be serious as much as possible.”

Lily managed to turn her smile into a disapproving frown. He decided, pretty as she looked when she was angry, not to press the subject.

“My point is,” he said, “that I find plenty of pure-bloods irritating too.”

“But how many muggle-borns do you find completely non-irritating?”

“Just you. Except when you make up words like ‘non-irritating’.”

Lily nudged him peevishly. “Are you saying that I don’t annoy you?”

“Yeah.”

“What, never?”

Snape shook his head.

“There’s nothing I do that irritates you?”

“Well, this conversation’s quite annoying,” said Snape.

Lily laughed beautifully. “I knew it,” she said.