Potions

It was a hot, cloudy afternoon in Spinner's end, and the streets were stewing in the unseasonable warmth. Severus and his mother were sitting in the back garden – a thin strip of yellowing grass between two red-brick walls, with a splintered wooden fence leading onto an alleyway at the back.

There was a washing-line suspended between the two brick-walls, and Eileen Snape was pegging sheets, shirts and socks over it. She had draped a shawl across her bony shoulders, but it was trailing loose at one end. It always did. She didn’t notice the world outside her head very much anymore.

Her forehead was furrowed with resentment, and she was gnawing on her lips. It was the expression she always wore when she was dredging up all her most painful memories – and sometimes, she found it difficult to see her son through the resulting mud.

The past would never stay buried, not with Eileen Snape. It got up out of its grave and lurched around her, groaning and stinking, and clamoring for her attention. Sometimes, Severus thought she couldn’t even see him. She looked right through him, as though he was the memory.  

Severus was sitting on the upturned laundry basket, relishing the quiet. He liked watching the neighbours walk past in the alleyway outside. His mother had told him there were wizards everywhere in the muggle world - walking around in disguise, hiding their talents, talking in code, identifying one another with secret handshakes - and Severus was playing a game where he guessed which of the many passers-by might have a connection to the magical world. Not that group of guffawing boys wheeling their bicycles beside them, that was for sure - though they might have some troll ancestry some way back.   

They watched a young woman walking past the fence. She had a round, pretty face, and was wearing a short, brown dress under her coat. Every time Severus remembered Spinner’s end, it was in these muted tones of brown, or beige, or orange. The carpet in the living room was patterned with beige-and-cream swirls, like chestnut puree stirred into ice-cream. The exposed filaments in the electric fire glowed a demonic orange, and started humming at random intervals, as though it needed to fill up the silence that frequently descended in the living room, when there was no shouting.

And there were those three brown ducks on the yellow wallpaper, always mocking Severus with their suspended animation, their perpetually postponed escape.

One of the first times he’d ever performed magic, he had animated those ducks and made them zoom, head-long, out the living-room window. They’d been trying for so long; it was only fair that they should get their freedom in the end.

He still didn’t know where they’d ended up. He’d briefly indulged in fantasies about using them as his own private, winged army – pecking out the eyes of those dim-witted muggle children in the playground, and flying off with their sweets.

Still smoothing down the linen on the washing line, Eileen watched the round-faced girl walk past with her eyebrows raised.

“That’s Mrs. Johnson’s daughter, from number Six,” she muttered. “According to Mrs. Reynolds, she’s no better than she should be.”  

Severus thought about this. “How good should she be?” he asked.

“It’s an expression, Severus.”

“A muggle expression or a wizard expression?” he persisted, wondering whether he should make a mental note to use it or avoid it.

“Keep your voice down.”

Severus thought this reply was pretty spurious. He knew for a fact that his voice was down. He never said anything louder than it needed to be, simply because he had such a deep-seated dread of drawing attention to himself. What his mother really meant when she said ‘keep your voice down’ was ‘be quiet’. Still, she hadn’t said ‘be quiet’, which, in Severus’ mind, meant he still technically had permission to ask questions.

Even as a six year-old, he was good at finding the loop-holes in other people’s arguments.

“Tell me some wizard proverbs,” he said, as softly as he could.

Eileen Snape gave him an exasperated half-smile, glanced over her shoulder, back towards the house, and then walked over and picked him up. Balancing the skinny boy on her hip, she raised his ear to the level of her mouth, so that she could speak in whispers. She walked up and down the garden with him like this, and Severus had a vague notion that she used to do this when he was very small. Talk of the wizard world was always guaranteed to calm him down or make him behave.

“There’s ‘Don’t count your dragons before they’re hatched’,” she murmured, as though she was reciting a secret incantation. “And ‘No use crying over Spilt Potion’.”

Severus, who had heard the muggle equivalents of these proverbs before, giggled delightedly.

He listened to his mother talk, torn between happiness and dread. The look in her eyes was sharpened somehow – not misted over with resentment anymore, but glistening with pain instead. He knew it made her unhappy to talk about the wizarding world, because she missed it so much, but the times when she was talking about it were the only moments when she ever looked at him.

But there was something else, too. If dad came out and heard them talking like this, there would be ‘trouble’. Severus knew a million definitions of the word ‘trouble’, but they all hurt. Sometimes, the pain would be sharp and immediate, like the kind you’d get from a slap, and sometimes it would be subtle and gnawing, like the kind you get from watching your mother cry.

Trouble never, ever meant a trip to the sweet shop or a nice drive through the countryside. Unless it was a drive through the countryside to the hospital.  

“And there are rhymes about what your wand prefigures for your future,” she went on, in that same happy but oddly strangled voice. “You see, witches and wizards have wands made out of different types of wood, and there are folk beliefs about what each one says about the wizard who holds it.” And she recited, in a dreamy voice:

“Wand of willow, tears on the pillow;
Wand of oak, he’ll frighten folk;
Wand of larch, or wand of rowan,
Quidditch players aren’t uncommon,
But if he has a wand of pine,
He’ll be remembered for all time.”

“What’s your wand made out of?” Severus asked instantly.

Eileen hesitated. “That’s not important.”

“It’s willow, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be clever, darling.”

Severus stopped to consider this advice. “I thought it was a good thing to be clever.”

“It is, as long as you don’t let anyone know that you are.”

“What’s the point of being clever if no-one’s allowed to know about it?” he asked peevishly – but he stopped, because his mother’s eyes were starting to mist over again. He recognized that withdrawn look – it meant she was leaving him – so he pulled himself back from that line of questioning. He put the cleverness to one side, vowing to pick it up again later, and tried to think of something innocent to ask.

“When do I get a wand?”

“Not ‘till you’re eleven.”

“But I’m definitely getting one, right?”

Eileen Snape gave him a rare smile. “The way you made my good china fly out of the living room window yesterday, I’d say you’re definitely getting one, yes.”

Snape smiled. He liked making things fly. He did it almost absent-mindedly, whenever he was staring out of the window at the rain-lashed suburban streets. It was therapeutic, and not just because it frequently led to things getting smashed.        

There was an empty whisky-bottle half-buried in the grass at the end of the garden, and the sight of it wiped the smile off his face instantly. It would have been nice to think that it had been thrown over the fence by some passer-by, but Severus knew better. His father even kept bottles wedged in between the books on the book-shelf, as though he was trying to neutralize the threat of ‘Advanced Potion-Making’ or ‘The Tales of Beedle the Bard’, by placing grim reminders of the muggle world right next to them.  

As if Severus needed any reminders.

Snape had taken the bottle out when he was five, and tasted some of the foul, searing-hot, liquorice-flavoured liquid inside. He’d dropped the bottle, coughing and spluttering with shock, and it had spilled all over the carpet, and all over his grey T-Shirt and tattered jeans. When his dad had come home, he’d been more angry than Severus had ever seen him before. He’d cradled the empty bottle in his arms as though it were a lost child.

Eileen Snape had immediately run him a bath, and scrubbed him till his skin was raw, trying to get the stink of the alcohol off him. It was nearly Christmas, so her longing for the wizard world was at its most intense, and her depression at its lowest ebb. She talked bitterly about her husband “and his muggle poison.” Severus was in a cold dread all evening that his father would creep up the stairs and overhear her. But he never crept anywhere. That was the only good thing about him: you always knew when he was coming.

They had stayed in the bathroom until Snape’s skin was crinkled. His mother had taken an unnaturally long time drying and dressing him, as though she was polishing the best silver-ware. They both knew that, as soon as they strayed out of the bathroom, there was going to be ‘trouble’ – Severus had a feeling that all the definitions of ‘trouble’ he’d ever learned would hardly cover it. The bathroom was their sanctuary, like the safe place in a game of tag, but they couldn’t stay there forever.

“Mum,” Severus had whispered, as she was buttoning up his pyjama-shirt. “Let’s run away! You could magic him to sleep, I know where your wand is.”

“He’d just be angrier when he woke up,” she muttered.

“But we wouldn’t be there!” Severus insisted. “We could escape!”

“Where to?”

“To the wizards,” he replied impatiently, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world.  

“You don’t understand,” Eileen moaned, running a distracted hand through her hair. “They don’t want me back! They won’t want you, either, after what I did.” She stopped to steady her voice and smooth down his wet hair. “You’ll have to make them want you,” she added, in the same hushed, reverent tones she always used when talking about the wizard world, “by working hard, and being clever, and making friends with the right people.”

Severus was silent for a moment, staring at his bare feet against the cracked tiles on the bathroom floor. “Alright,” he said at last. “I will. And, when I’ve made them want me, they’ll want you too, right?"

Eileen turned her face away, but Severus kept on talking stubbornly.

"And then we can escape. And forget any of this ever happened.”

“Just be quiet now,” his mother said, in a flat, defeated voice. “It will be alright.”

Severus longed to question the logic of this statement, but he stopped himself. Sometimes, being clever really didn’t do any good.       

Eileen had clearly hoped to avoid an argument by putting him straight to bed, even though it was five in the afternoon. Severus hadn’t protested. He always did everything in his power to avoid an argument. But he knew he was under suspended sentence. He lay under the covers, watching the daylight filtering through a chink in the curtains, and waited for his father’s anger to catch up to him. He could hear the shouts and laughter of other children playing in the street outside, and, all at once, from nowhere, without passing through annoyance or dislike on the way, he hated them. He hated everything about them. It was a rush of feeling that almost made him throw up. He didn’t understand why they got to be outside playing, while he was lying in bed, waiting for what his father eloquently described as ‘a good thrashing’. What had they done that he hadn’t? He’d seen them in the school play-ground. They pushed each other off steps for fun; they stuck chalk up their noses; they ate worms, for God’s sake! It wasn’t fair!

He’d been dragged out of bed just as the other children were being called in for their dinners. But he couldn’t remember anything after that.   

It was this episode that had caused Snape to be so fascinated with Potions. He wanted to understand why the liquid in his father’s bottle had meant so much to him; why he loved it more than his wife and son.

This was the first idea – that potions could command love, and loyalty, and respect – that they were powerful. And, as with all powerful things, you had to get on the right side of them.

The second idea was that he'd made a promise to his mother to be a great wizard. He could pull her out of this muggle slum, and out of the clutches of the gin-soaked gorilla she'd married, if he worked hard.

Eileen Snape didn’t keep many potion ingredients in the house, but Severus had her books (whisky-stained now, and later to be covered with spidery-writing, as he developed his own spells and theories, and sank deeper into dark magic and despair). He spent afternoons out by the canal, looking for wolf-spiders, aconite, or dead bees.

The dead bees were never a problem. Most things died by the canal-side, as though it was a place of pilgrimage for sick animals. He'd seen dead foxes, dead cats, dead hedgehogs (their quills weren't as good for Potions as Knarl quills, but they were often used as a cheap substitute). Snape was at ease with death. A lot of harm came from the living, but the dead tended to mind their own business, and Severus liked creatures that minded their own business.  

He wondered whether potion-brewing could be traced. His mother had said that the Ministry of Magic put a Trace on under-age wizards, so that they always knew when they were performing magic out of school, but potion-making was just putting things into a cauldron. Surely even a muggle could do it?

That was the third thing that attracted Severus Snape to Potions. It didn’t sort the wizards from the muggles; it sorted the clever people from the idiots. And this was a far more exclusive club to belong to. Magic was everywhere, but common-sense was rare as diamonds.    

Still, he’d brewed the potions in his bedroom, just the same – that way the Ministry of Magic would assume it was Eileen Snape who was performing the magic.

It was probably the only magic they’d ever monitored in her house since she’d married.

He liked being busy. It provided a focus for his anger. And he could escape into the Potion books - where everything was logical - where power was just a matter of paying attention and following guidelines, and had nothing to do with people.

And, as he worked, he learned that it was magic, in a far more subtle way than he’d realized. There was no wand-waving or dragon-taming, no loud bangs or disappearances (well, there were disappearances, of course, but the sinister kind – the kind you get from turning a human body into a puddle of liquid on the floor).  

The potion reacted to his moods and his intentions. It took the impression of his thoughts. He was infusing these ingredients with magic as he brewed them. A muggle couldn’t have made these potions, after all. He could have measured out the ingredients, thrown them into a cauldron, and stirred counter-clockwise until he was blue in the face, but they wouldn’t have become poisons, or truth-serums, or love-potions. It took magic – and thoughtful, logical magic at that – to transfigure these ingredients into a working potion – into a liquid draught of intentions.

For the first time in his life, Severus Snape felt in control of something. Watching the shimmering fumes evaporating from the small cauldron he’d set up on his bedroom floor, he felt calm and confident.     

Potions were not unreasonable or erratic like humans. You could predict the way they’d behave. Simply learn their properties, and their combinations, and you had a formula for predictable chaos. It was complicated, but not conscious.  

As a teenager, when he wanted to impress girls or beat Potter, he would go back to hexes and charms and transfiguration – and they were all fine, but they rewarded confidence, and strength of feeling, not intelligence and subtlety. Severus had strength of feeling, but he didn’t like putting it on display. It made him vulnerable. Showing people you cared about something was like handing them a manual on how to hurt you, with the important passages underlined in bright red ink. But Potions couldn’t betray your feelings – only your thoughts. And he was seldom ashamed of his thoughts.