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The advertisement had been running in the back pages of the Daily Prophet for eleven weeks, which told you most of what you needed to know about it.
KIT MANAGER REQUIRED Chudley Cannons Quidditch Club
Duties: laundry, boots, kit, travel arrangements, dressing rooms. Must be able to lift. Some evenings and most Saturdays. No experience necessary.
Apply in writing to D. Bagge, The Powder Yard, Chudley.
Harry read it on a Tuesday morning in June, at the kitchen table, with the paper folded to the racing. He read it twice, and then got up and went out to the shed for a bit, and came back in and read it a third time, and then wrote a letter.
The letter said that he had no experience of professional Quidditch, that he could lift, and that he was available from the first of July. He did not put his name at the top. He signed it at the bottom, the way you do.
The reply came four days later on club notepaper, which had a cannon on it and the words FOUNDED 1837 and, underneath that, in smaller letters, Let's all just keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.
Dear Mr Potter,
Thank you for your interest. Please attend the ground on Monday at eleven for an interview. Ask at the gate for Dermot.
Yours, D. Bagge (Chairman)
P.S. Bring your own sandwiches, the kitchen is not open in June.
The Powder Yard stood at the end of a lane on the edge of Chudley, between a scrapyard and a field of rape, and from the outside it looked like four stands that had been built by four different people who had never spoken to each other. Three of them were wood. One of them, the Bagge Stand, was concrete, and had been finished in 1979 and painted orange once, in 1979.
The gate was open. There was nobody on it. Harry walked in and stood in the mouth of the tunnel and looked at the pitch, which was twenty-two thousand seats round a rectangle of grass, with about four thousand of the seats still orange and the rest gone to the colour of weak tea.
It was a very quiet place on a Monday in June. A man was cutting the grass at the far end with a charm that kept slipping, so that the mower went in a long curve and then a short straight bit, over and over, like handwriting.
"You'll be Potter," said a voice.
Dermot Bagge was sixty-eight and shaped like a barrel with a good coat on it. He had been chairman of the Chudley Cannons for thirty-one years. He had a full head of white hair that he kept in order with something, and a large warm hand, and the expression of a man who has just remembered a story.
"Mr Bagge."
"Dermot. Nobody's called me Mr Bagge since my mother." He shook Harry's hand for about four seconds longer than was necessary, looking at his face the whole time, and Harry watched him decide not to say anything about it, which was the first thing Harry ever liked about him. "Come on. I'll show you the ground. Have you seen the ground?"
"I'm standing in it."
"You've not seen it," said Dermot Bagge, and took him round it for an hour and forty minutes.
He showed him the East Stand, which had been built in 1903 and had a roof supported on eleven iron pillars, each of which blocked the view of about forty seats. He showed him the Dell, which was the terrace behind the northern hoops where the singing came from, and where the concrete had a worn dip in it about four inches deep in the place where the same nine hundred people had stood for sixty years. He showed him the scoreboard, which was operated by a squib called Terence who had to be told the score. He showed him the trophy cabinet, in the corridor outside the boardroom, which held a League Cup from 1892, a fixture card from 1892, a photograph of the 1892 side, and a great deal of space.
He talked the whole time. He talked about the 1892 side, and about the Bream brothers, and about the 1974 collapse, and about a Chaser called Wilding who had played four hundred and six games for the club and never once been picked for Wales. He did not, in an hour and forty minutes, ask Harry a single question.
At the end of it he stopped outside a green door under the West Stand.
"Boot room," he said. "That's yours, if you want it."
Harry looked in.
It was a long low room with a stone floor and one high window and a smell of leather and dubbin and old sweat that was not, on the whole, unpleasant. There were racks along three walls, and about two hundred pairs of boots on the racks, and a deep sink, and a drying frame, and a table with a lamp on it, and a chair with a cushion on it that had been sat in by somebody for a very long time.
"Wattie's chair," said Bagge. "Wattie Bream had this room forty-two years. He's eighty-three now and his hands have gone, but he comes in Thursdays and you'll not stop him, so don't try."
"I won't try."
"Good lad." Bagge leaned on the doorframe. "Now. I've got to say the thing I say. We're not a rich club. It's eleven Galleons a week and your dinner on match days, and you'll work Saturdays and you'll travel with the squad, and half the away grounds have got no hot water. Ivor'll shout at you at least once a month and it won't be about you. The supporters are the best in the league and they'll tell you so themselves. And we've not won anything since 1892."
"I'd heard."
"Everybody's heard. That's the whole trouble with it." Bagge straightened up. "When can you start?"
"That's the interview?"
"What else do you want me to ask you? You can lift, you've written me a letter with no spelling in it, and you've stood in that tunnel for ten minutes without saying anything, which is more than the last three did." He put out his hand again. "First of July. Don't be late, we've a friendly on the twelfth."
Harry told Ron on the Friday, in the Leaky, on purpose, because he wanted to see it.
"You've what?"
"I've taken a job."
"You've taken a job at —" Ron put his glass down. "Say it again."
"I'm the kit manager at the Chudley Cannons."
Ron sat back. He looked at Harry for about six seconds with his mouth slightly open, and then he got up, and walked to the bar and back, and sat down again.
"Right," he said.
"Right."
"I need you to understand," said Ron, "that this is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me, and I've got two children."
"I'll pass that on."
"Do you get in free?"
"I work there, Ron."
"Do you get in free, Harry."
"I'll be inside the ground, yes."
"Can I come in the boot room?"
"No."
"Can I come in the boot room," said Ron, "just once, for about four minutes, and not touch anything, and I'll never ask again as long as I live."
"Once," said Harry. "And you'll touch something."
"I will absolutely touch something," said Ron, "and we both know it," and then he went to the bar again, and came back, and said, very seriously, "Do they know who you are?"
Harry thought about it.
"The chairman knows," he said. "He didn't say."
"He didn't say?"
"He talked about a Chaser called Wilding for eleven minutes instead."
Ron nodded slowly, in the manner of a man receiving confirmation of something he had long suspected about the world.
"That's the club," he said. "That's exactly the club. That's the most Cannons thing I've ever heard in my life." He picked his drink up. "They'll be relegated, you know. If there was relegation. There isn't, thank God, or we'd be playing the Hebridean reserves in a field."
"Would you mind? If they got good."
"If they got good?" said Ron.
"If they won something."
Ron laughed. Then he stopped laughing, and looked into his glass, and after a moment he said, "That's a funny question, that," and changed the subject to his daughter's new tooth, and Harry let him.
He filed it anyway.
The first week was laundry.
There were eleven senior players and nine on the reserve list and two goalkeeping coaches, which was one more goalkeeping coach than the club had Keepers, and every one of them generated a quantity of wet orange cloth that Harry had not been ready for. There was a charm for it. The charm had been set up by somebody in 1962 and it took forty minutes a load and shrank the collars. Harry worked out on the Wednesday that he could do it faster and better by hand with a different charm, and did, and said nothing about it, and on the Friday the captain came into the boot room holding a shirt.
"Who did this?"
"Did what?"
"It's not scratchy." Barnaby Culpepper was thirty-four, six foot four, and had been the Cannons' Keeper for twelve years. He held the shirt up to the light as though it might have something written on it. "It's been scratchy since I signed. I thought that was the shirt. I thought that was just what the shirt was."
"It's the same shirt."
"It's not scratchy, though."
"No."
Culpepper looked at him for a while.
"Right," he said, and went out with the shirt, and Harry heard him in the corridor saying it to somebody else.
That was the first one. Harry noted it, in the way he noted things, which was without writing it down.
The squad came back for pre-season on the sixth of July, and Harry stood at the end of the corridor with a basket and learned them.
Barnaby Culpepper, Keeper and captain. Twelve years, four hundred and some games, a bad shoulder, and a manner of speaking to everyone as though they had just said something ridiculous, which they usually had.
Joss Fettiplace, Chaser, thirty-one, from Kent, the only player at the club who had ever been on the fringes of an England squad and who mentioned it about twice a week.
Nadia Okonjo, Chaser, twenty-six, the best player at the club by a distance and the one every other club sent a scout to watch each February.
Little Gareth Prys, Chaser, five foot four, twenty-four, fearless in a way that made people put their hands over their eyes.
The Cobbold twins, Beaters, twenty-eight, who had played together since they were nine and who did not need to speak, which was fortunate.
And Cressida Tuke, Seeker, twenty-two, from Ammanford, in her third season.
Harry watched her for eleven days before he formed any view at all.
She was quick. She was quicker than the Seeker the Cannons had played against in the friendly on the twelfth, and quicker than two of the three Seekers he watched on the wireless that month. In training, over the pitch, with nobody watching but the coaching staff and a man repairing the guttering on the East Stand, she flew like somebody who had been born four feet off the ground.
In the friendly she caught nothing, and the Cannons lost by a hundred and ninety.
Afterwards she came into the boot room to hand in her gloves, which she did not have to do, and stood by the door with them.
"All right?" said Harry.
"Fine, yeah." She put the gloves on the table. "Sorry about the mud."
"That's the job."
"Right." She looked at the racks for a moment. "Sorry."
"You said."
"Did I?" She laughed, without much in it, and went out.
Harry cleaned the gloves.
In three seasons, according to the fixture cards in the corridor and the reports in the back of the Prophet, Cressida Tuke had caught the Snitch twice. Both times, the Cannons had been more than a hundred and fifty points behind, so both times they had lost anyway. She was twenty-two years old and she had never once won a professional match.
He cleaned the gloves, and set them on the frame, and put the light out, and went home.
Chapter Two: Thursdays
Wattie Bream came in on Thursdays at half past nine and stayed until two.
He was eighty-three and very small and wore a jacket and tie to sit in a boot room, and his hands had gone, as Bagge had said, so that he could not hold a brush for more than a minute at a time. He did not try. He sat in the chair with the cushion and drank tea and talked, and Harry worked, and the arrangement suited both of them exactly.
"You're doing the boots wrong," said Wattie, on the first Thursday.
"Go on."
"You're doing them right. That's the wrong bit." He pointed at the rack with his mug. "You're doing all twenty pairs the same. That's no good to anyone. Gareth wants his tight, he's got a narrow foot and he'll not say so. Nadia likes hers loose and she'll tell you she doesn't. Culpepper won't have dubbin on the toe, he says it makes him slide, and he's talking rubbish, but he's the captain, so."
Harry got a cloth and started again.
"Better," said Wattie.
"Anything else?"
"Everything else," said Wattie Bream. "But there's no hurry, is there."
The ledgers were in a cupboard behind the door, and there were fifty-one of them, and they went back to 1957.
They were kit ledgers. That was all they were. Every item issued to every player at the Chudley Cannons for fifty-two years, one line each, in a small square hand: date, item, player, condition, and a column at the end marked REMARKS that Wattie Bream had used for fifty-two years to say whatever he liked.
Harry read them in the evenings, in the boot room, with the lamp on, in the order they came.
14/9/62. Gloves (pr), Waterhouse. New. REMARKS: He has asked for the old ones back. Told him they are gone. They are not gone.
3/3/71. Boots (pr), Duggan. Second-hand, repaired. REMARKS: Club would not sanction new. Duggan played 39 games this season in boots a size and a half too big and nobody has asked him about it once.
21/8/74. Shirts (17), squad. New. REMARKS: These have come from the same people who do the market stall in Banbury. I have said what I think.
9/11/77. — REMARKS: The window in the home dressing room has been painted shut. I have told Mr Fitch three times. It will not be opened again in my lifetime and I am forty-eight.
It took Harry nine weeks to read them all, and by the end of it he knew more about the Chudley Cannons than any living person except the man in the chair, and a good deal that the man in the chair had forgotten he knew.
Four things in particular.
The first was the window. It was still painted shut. The home dressing room at the Powder Yard faced north and had no fire and no window that opened, and in November it was six degrees colder than the away dressing room, which faced south and had a fire, and which had been given the fire in 1934 because the chairman of the day had thought it was good manners.
The second was the boots.
1/8/81. Drying frame recharmed, Mr Ollander (not that one, the other one, of Wootton). REMARKS: Does it every August. £4 and a pint. Good man.
And then, in the ledger for 1982, in a different-coloured ink:
Mr Ollander of Wootton died in February. There is nobody else who does it. I have written to two people. No reply.
And then nothing. For twenty-seven years, nothing. The drying frame in the boot room of the Chudley Cannons had been running on a charm laid down in August 1981 by a man who had been dead since February 1982, and it had faded the way charms fade, slowly and evenly, so that nobody had ever noticed a single bad day. The boots came off the frame dry to the touch and damp in the sole. They had been doing it for twenty-seven years. Every player at the club had played his entire career in boots that weighed about four ounces more than they should.
The third was the shirts. Since 1994 the club had bought its playing shirts in one size, in bulk, from a firm in Banbury, because it was cheaper. The size was the size that fitted Barnaby Culpepper, who was six foot four. Gareth Prys was five foot four. Harry had watched him at the friendly on the twelfth of July with a yard of orange cloth cracking behind him in the wind like a flag.
And the fourth was the tunnel.
4/8/68. REMARKS: Mr Hardcastle has had the photographs hung in the tunnel. Nine of them. He says it will remind them what they are up against. I have said what I think.
Harry went and looked at them the next morning.
They were still there, nine of them, in a line along the left-hand wall of the players' tunnel, at eye height, in the order they had been hung in 1968. Every man and woman who had played for the Chudley Cannons for forty-one years had walked out onto that pitch past nine framed photographs, in this order:
The 1892 Championship Side.
The Fire, 1901.
Ragnar Cannon's Funeral, 1904.
The Collapse of the South Stand, 1931.
War Damage, 1941.
The 1955 Final: The Last Minute.
The 1968 Relegation Play-Off.
And then two that had been added later, in frames that did not match:
The 1974 Collapse.
The Nine-Hour Match, 1987 (Lost).
The 1892 photograph was first. It was the smallest, and it was hung nearest the dressing-room door, which meant that every player passed it in the first two steps of the walk and had the other eight in front of them for the remaining forty yards.
Harry stood in the tunnel for a while with his hands in his pockets.
Then he went and got a bucket, because the frames were filthy, and it was his job.
There was a fifth thing, and it was not in the ledgers, because it was not kit. It was in a drawer in the office, in a folder marked TRAVEL, in the handwriting of four successive secretaries.
The Chudley Cannons travelled to away matches by Portkey, from the car park at the Powder Yard, and had done since 1968. The Portkey was booked with the Department of Magical Transport by standing arrangement, and the standing arrangement said two hours and thirty minutes before kick-off, and it had said that for forty-one years.
Two hours and thirty minutes was the right figure in 1968, when the Portkey had put you down in the lane outside the ground and you walked in. It had not been the right figure since about 1990, when every club in the league had built a proper arrivals point inside the perimeter, which meant no walk. It meant that the Chudley Cannons now arrived at every away ground in Britain between fifty and seventy minutes before anybody else did, and sat in the visitors' dressing room, in their coats, for an hour and a quarter, with nothing to do.
Harry watched them do it at Tutshill on the fifth of September, which was his first away trip, and it was the single worst thing he saw all season.
They came off the Portkey at half past twelve and went down a concrete corridor into a room with eleven pegs and a bench, and at twenty to one they had all sat down, and at a quarter past one they were still sitting down. Joss Fettiplace read the programme twice. The Cobbold twins played a game with a bottle cap that had no rules anybody else could follow. Gareth Prys got up and walked round the room and sat down again, four times. Barnaby Culpepper went to sleep sitting upright with his arms folded, which Harry gathered he had been doing for twelve years and which two of the younger players found genuinely alarming.
Cressida Tuke sat in the corner with her boots on her knees and her hands round them and did not move for an hour.
At twenty past one somebody from Tutshill came in and said there was tea in the corridor if they wanted it, in the manner of a man surprised to find them still there, and at half past one Ivor Prosser started to talk, and by then the room had been sitting still for fifty minutes and had gone the way a room goes.
They lost by two hundred and ten.
On the Tuesday, Harry went into the office and asked the club secretary, a pleasant woman called Mrs Enderby who had been there since 1994, whether the travel arrangements came under the kit manager.
"They're on your notice," she said. "Laundry, boots, kit, travel arrangements, dressing rooms."
"Then can I move the Portkey?"
"Move it where?"
"Forward," said Harry. "An hour and ten instead of two and a half."
Mrs Enderby looked at the folder for a bit.
"It's been two and a half since before I came."
"It has."
"Why?"
"Because in 1968 you had to walk from the lane," said Harry. "There's no lane now. Kenmare built their arrivals point inside the ground in 1989 and everyone else did it by about 1993, and we've been turning up an hour before the other side ever since."
Mrs Enderby put her glasses up on her head, which Harry came to learn was what she did when she had decided something.
"Nobody's ever said that to me," she said.
"Has anybody ever looked at it?"
"I shouldn't think anybody's looked at it since Mr Hardcastle." She took the folder out of the drawer. "I'll write to Transport this afternoon. They'll want a reason on the form."
"Put the true one."
"Which is?"
"That the arrangement was made for a walk that isn't there any more," said Harry.
The new time came into effect for the trip to Ballycastle in October. The squad came off the Portkey at ten past two for a three o'clock start, and went down the corridor, and got changed, and were on the pitch forty minutes later, and nobody said one word about it to anybody, because nobody notices an hour they did not spend.
They lost at Ballycastle by thirty.
Barnaby Culpepper came into the boot room on the Monday, put a shirt on the table, and said, "We're not sitting about as long."
"No."
"Is that you?"
"It's the Portkey time."
"Who changed the Portkey time?"
"Mrs Enderby wrote to Transport," said Harry, which was true.
Culpepper looked at him for a while, in the way he had, as though Harry had just said something ridiculous.
"Right," he said, and took his shirt and went out.
"You've moved the pictures," said Ivor Prosser.
It was the third week of August. The manager of the Chudley Cannons was sixty-one, built like a wardrobe, and had been a Beater for Falmouth for eleven years before his knee went. He had managed Chudley for six seasons, which was four longer than anyone expected and about five longer than was good for him. He wore the same scarf to every match, home and away, in August and in February, and he had a habit of standing very still with his arms folded and his chin down, in one particular spot at the mouth of the tunnel, for the whole of a game.
"I cleaned them," said Harry.
"You've moved them."
"I took them down to clean them and I put them back up."
"In a different order."
"In date order," said Harry. "They were in date order before, near enough. Only 1892 was at the front and now it's at the back."
Prosser looked down the tunnel. Harry had rehung them exactly as they had been, at the same height, in the same spacing, with the same nine frames. The walk now began with The Fire, 1901 and ended, in the last two steps before the light and the noise of the pitch, with eleven young men in 1892 standing in a line with a cup.
"Hm," said Prosser.
"I can put it back."
"No." Prosser rubbed his jaw. "No, leave it. It's the same pictures."
"It's the same pictures."
"Aye." He stood there a moment longer. "Who told you to do that?"
"Nobody," said Harry, which was true. "They were dirty."
Prosser gave him a long look, and then a short nod, and went off up the tunnel, and Harry heard him stop about halfway and stand for a bit, and then go on.
He fixed the drying frame in September.
He did it on a Sunday, when the ground was empty, and it took him two hours, because the charm that had been on it was not a charm he knew and he had to take it apart to see how it went before he could lay a new one. He was a reasonable hand at that sort of thing. Six years in the Auror office will teach anybody to take a charm apart, whatever else it fails to teach them.
He said nothing about it to anyone.
On the Tuesday, Gareth Prys came into the boot room, sat down on the bench, put his boots on, stood up, and said, "These aren't my boots."
"They're your boots."
"They're not, though." He walked up and down the room. He did it twice. "Where are my boots?"
"On your feet."
"These are somebody's new boots. You've given me somebody's new boots and I'm having them."
"Gareth."
"I'm having them." He went out, and came back thirty seconds later, and said, "Did you do something to them?"
"I dried them," said Harry.
"Right," said Gareth Prys, and went and played the best training session of his life, and told four people that the kit man had given him someone else's boots, and by Thursday the whole squad had been in to ask whether there were any more of the new boots.
There were not any new boots. There were the same boots, dry.
Harry did not explain. He had worked out by then that an explanation would go to Prosser, and that Prosser would take it to Bagge as a maintenance matter, and that it would become a thing that had been fixed, which would mean it had been broken, which would mean twenty-seven years of it had been somebody's fault. There was no version of that which ended with anybody playing better.
So he let it be the boots.
"You're up to something," said Wattie Bream, on the second Thursday in September.
Harry went on with the dubbin.
"I'm doing the boots."
"You're doing the boots beautifully. That's how I know." Wattie held his mug in both hands, because that was the only way he could hold it. "Forty-two years I had this room. I know what a man looks like when he's doing the boots and thinking about something else."
"What do I look like?"
"Like my brother Donald," said Wattie, "who was a magistrate."
Harry laughed.
"Go on, then," said Wattie. "What is it?"
Harry turned the boot over in his hands.
"You wrote in 1977 that the window in the home dressing room had been painted shut," he said, "and that it wouldn't be opened again in your lifetime."
"Did I."
"You did."
"And has it?"
"No."
Wattie Bream drank his tea.
"Well," he said. "I'm eighty-three. There's time."
Chapter Three: Cannon Fodder
The season started on the fifth of September and the Cannons lost it, at Tutshill, by two hundred and ten.
They lost the second one as well, at home, to Kenmare, by ninety, in the rain, in front of three thousand eight hundred people. But it was ninety, and the Dell sang for the last twenty minutes anyway, because the Dell sang whatever happened, and afterwards Barnaby Culpepper sat on the bench in the dressing room with his boots off for a long time and said, "That was a game of Quidditch, that."
"We lost," said Joss Fettiplace.
"I know we lost. I was there. I'm saying it was a game." Culpepper looked round the room. "Kenmare are third. We had them at eighty minutes. I've played twelve years here and I've had about nine afternoons where we had somebody at eighty minutes."
"We still lost."
"Joss," said Culpepper, "I'm going to say this once, and then I'm going to have a bath. You've been at this club four years and every single thing you've said in that time has been true and no use to anybody."
Harry came round with the basket and took the shirts.
Cuthbert Pye's column ran in the Daily Prophet on Mondays, on the second page of the sport, under a small moving photograph of a cannon going off and knocking its own crew over.
It was called Cannon Fodder. It had been running for nineteen years. It was, according to a survey the Prophet had done in 2006 and had then published four times, the most-read regular item in the paper, ahead of the horoscopes and well ahead of the news.
Pye was fifty-four, thin, with a long kind face, and he came to the Powder Yard for every home game and sat in the press box with a flask and wrote eight hundred words about the Chudley Cannons that made ninety thousand people laugh over breakfast. He was very good at it. He had never once been cruel. That was the thing about him that Harry found interesting: there was no unkindness in it anywhere, and there never had been, and that was precisely why it worked.
He came down to the boot room in the last week of September, because the press box tea urn had broken and somebody had told him the kit man had a kettle.
"You're the new man," he said, in the doorway.
"I am."
"Cuthbert Pye. Prophet." He put his hand out, and then looked properly, and his eyebrows went up about a quarter of an inch and came back down, and he said, "Well. That's a story."
"It's a boot room."
"It's a story about a boot room." Pye came in and sat down on the bench uninvited, which Harry took as a professional habit rather than rudeness. "How long?"
"Since July."
"And you've told nobody."
"I told Ron Weasley."
"Ron Weasley's been in the Dell since he was nine, he'd not tell his own mother." Pye accepted a mug of tea. "Do you know what I could do with this?"
"I've an idea."
"Front of the sport. Picture of you with a brush." He drank the tea. "Would you talk to me?"
"No."
"Would you talk to me if I asked again in the spring?"
"Ask me in the spring."
Pye laughed and stretched his legs out. He looked round the boot room with real pleasure, at the racks and the frame and the ledgers in the cupboard, in the manner of a man who had found something he had been vaguely looking for.
"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said. "I'll sit on it. Not for your sake, no offence. It's that I've been writing about this club for nineteen years and the one thing I've never had to do is find an angle, and the day I write Harry Potter Cleans The Boots is the day I've got an angle, and then I've got to have another one the week after." He tapped the mug. "Do you know what the trick of that column is?"
"Go on."
"There isn't one. I just write down what happens." Pye smiled. "That's the only club in Britain where you can do that."
He was not lying, and Harry checked.
He read the back numbers in the Chudley public library on a Wednesday afternoon, nineteen years of them, on a fiche reader that a witch called Mrs Ruddle had to restart twice. The column was exactly what Pye said it was. He wrote down what happened. He wrote down that the Cannons had lost a match in 1998 because their Seeker had caught a bee. He wrote down that in 2003 the club had run a half-time competition where a supporter could win a season ticket by flying through three hoops, and the supporter had won, and it had turned out he already had a season ticket, and the club had given him a second one. He wrote down, three years running, the exact wording of Dermot Bagge's programme notes.
It was all true, and all of it was funny, and every single week for nineteen years it had said the same thing underneath, which was: aren't they lovely, and aren't we glad they never win.
Harry put the fiche back in the drawer and thanked Mrs Ruddle and walked home the long way.
The plates were advertised on the back of the programme.
CHUDLEY HERITAGE COLLECTABLES Presents THE GREAT MOMENTS COLLECTION Hand-finished. Limited issue. Number 7 in the series: "The Nine-Hour Match, 1987." 4 Galleons 10, post free.
They were fine plates. Harry had one in his hand in the club shop in October, turning it over: a decent painting of a floodlit pitch at three in the morning with eleven exhausted players on it, a gold rim, and on the back, in transfer, the date, the final score, and the words A Club Like No Other.
Number 7 in the series. Harry looked along the shelf. Number 1 was the Fire of 1901. Number 2 was Ragnar Cannon's funeral. Number 4 was the collapse of the South Stand. Number 6 was the 1974 collapse. Number 8, which was new that month and had a little card in front of it, was The 1968 Relegation Play-Off.
There was no plate of the 1892 side.
He asked the girl behind the counter about it, in an ordinary way, as a man buying a plate for his friend.
"We've not done that one," she said.
"Any reason?"
"Mr Bagge says it doesn't sell." She wrapped the 1987 one in orange paper. "We did it in 1992. For the hundred years. It's in the stockroom, there's about four hundred of them."
"Four hundred."
"He won't get rid of them," she said. "He gets them out and looks at them sometimes."
Harry gave the plate to Ron in November, in the boot room, on the four minutes Ron had been promised.
Ron used the four minutes well. He stood in the middle of the floor and turned round slowly with his mouth open. He read three pages of a ledger. He picked up one of Nadia Okonjo's gloves, and put it down, and picked it up again, and put it down again in a slightly different place, and said, "I've touched it now, so."
"You have."
"That's Okonjo's glove and I've touched it." He sat down on the bench with the plate in his lap. "Harry."
"Mm."
"Are they getting better?"
Harry went on with the boots.
"They lost by forty at Puddlemere," he said.
"I know they lost by forty at Puddlemere, I was there, I stood in the rain for two hours. Forty, Harry. At Puddlemere. We lost by three hundred and ten at Puddlemere in 2004, I remember it because my brother sent me a card." Ron turned the plate over in his hands. "Prys is playing like a different bloke. Culpepper's talking to people. Even Tuke —"
He stopped.
"Even Tuke," said Harry.
"She's flying well," said Ron. "She's flying really well. She's not catching anything." He put the plate down beside him. "That's the bit that does me. I can take losing. I've had thirty years of it, I'm brilliant at it. It's watching a kid go round and round over a pitch looking for something she doesn't believe is there."
Harry set the boot down on the rack.
"Say that again," he said.
"What?"
"The last bit."
Ron looked at him.
"She doesn't believe it's there," he said. "You can see it. She goes about looking for the Snitch like a man looking for his keys when he's already decided he's left them at work." He shrugged. "It's the club. It gets in. It got in me and I only watch."
Harry started watching Cressida Tuke properly after that, which meant watching the whole pitch and not her, because you cannot see what a person is doing by looking at them.
It took three matches.
She was quick, and she read the game, and twice a match she would go up to about sixty feet and hang there, turning slowly, with her whole attention out on the far corners of the ground, and she would see it — Harry could see her see it, the small change in the shoulders — and she would start to go.
And then, every time, in the first half-second of the dive, she would look down and to her left, at the mouth of the tunnel, where Ivor Prosser stood with his arms folded.
And Ivor Prosser, every time, in that same half-second, would turn his head away.
Harry took it to Wattie Bream, because Wattie had been at the club since 1957 and because he asked questions in a way that did not sound like questions.
"Ivor doesn't watch," he said, on the Thursday.
"Doesn't watch what?"
"The Seeker."
Wattie Bream put his mug down on the arm of the chair, which took him a while.
"No," he said. "He doesn't."
"Has he always not?"
"Since he came." Wattie folded his hands. "He was a Beater, Ivor. Eleven years at Falmouth. He got hit by a Bludger in 1979 that he didn't see coming, and he was in St Mungo's nine weeks, and he came out with a knee that's never been right and a thing about watching people fall." He looked at the window. "He'll watch anything else. He'll watch a Chaser go into a hoop. He won't watch a Seeker go down for the Snitch. Never has. He goes like this —" and Wattie turned his head, very slightly, the way a man does when he is pretending to look at something in the middle distance.
"Does anybody know that?"
"I know it," said Wattie. "I doubt anybody's asked."
"Does she know it?"
"Does who know what?"
"Does Cressida Tuke know," said Harry, "that her manager turns his head away because he can't bear to watch, and not because he thinks she'll miss?"
There was a long silence in the boot room.
"Oh," said Wattie Bream.
Chapter Four: Kit
Harry did not tell Cressida Tuke.
He thought about it for eleven days. He thought about it while he did the boots, and while he walked home in the dark, and once at two in the morning, sitting up in bed, with the whole of it laid out in front of him like a hand of cards: how easy it would be, how completely it would work, and how it would be, from the moment he said it, a thing that Harry Potter had told her.
She was twenty-two. She had a poster of Ginny Weasley on the wall of the flat she shared in Chudley; Harry had seen it once through a window, and had never mentioned it to anybody. If Harry Potter came into the dressing room and told her how to fly, she would fly the way Harry Potter had told her to fly, for the rest of her career, and it would be his.
So he did not tell her.
He told Ivor Prosser instead, in the boot room, in February, in one sentence, and then he went back to the boots.
It came about because Prosser came in to shout at him, which he had been promised would happen about once a month and which had in fact happened twice all season.
"The away shirts," said Prosser, in the doorway.
"What about them?"
"There's been a complaint."
"From who?"
"From Banbury," said Prosser. "From the firm. Mr Bagge's had a letter saying we've altered the goods and it voids something." He came in and shut the door, which was unusual. "Have you altered the goods?"
"I've taken in six shirts."
"Six."
"Prys, Okonjo, Tuke, Gareth's spare, and the two Cobbolds." Harry put the brush down. "They were all wearing a shirt cut for a man six foot four. I took them in to fit. It's the same cloth and the same badge and I've kept the seams, and if anybody wants them let out again it's twenty minutes."
Prosser stood there.
"Why?" he said.
"It was flapping," said Harry. "You could hear Gareth coming."
There was a pause of a few seconds, and then Ivor Prosser sat down on the bench in the boot room, heavily, the way a man sits down when his knee has made the decision.
"Gareth Prys has put on eleven minutes to his time round the pitch since August," he said. "Nadia's had two clubs on the phone. Culpepper's shoulder's better than it's been in four years, and he's thirty-four, so that's not right either, and the boots dry different, and somebody's moved the pictures in the tunnel, and now I've a letter from Banbury." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I've been in this game forty years, son, and I know what it is when a lot of small things go the right way at once."
Harry waited.
"It's a good month," said Prosser. "That's all it ever is. It's a good month and then it stops." He looked up. "We're ninth. Do you know when this club was ninth in February?"
"No."
"Nor do I. That's my point." He put his hands on his knees. "It'll stop. It always stops. And the lads'll take it hard because they've had a taste of it now, and that's worse than never, and in April I'll be stood in front of the Dell explaining it."
Harry picked the brush back up.
"Can I say something?" he said.
"You're going to."
"She looks at you," said Harry.
Prosser's head came up.
"When she goes for it," said Harry. "Every time. First half-second of the dive she looks down and left, at where you stand. And you turn your head away. And she's been reading that for three seasons as you not wanting to watch her miss."
The boot room was very quiet.
"I don't —" said Prosser, and stopped.
"I know," said Harry. "Wattie told me about Falmouth."
Ivor Prosser sat on the bench with his hands on his knees and looked at the stone floor of the boot room for about half a minute.
Then he said, "Twenty-nine years."
"Yes."
"I've not watched a Seeker go down in twenty-nine years. I can't do it. I've tried." He was not looking at Harry. "I never thought for one second she'd — why would she look at me?"
"Because you're the manager," said Harry, "and she's twenty-two."
Prosser stood up. He did it slowly. At the door he stopped, and put his hand on the frame, and said, without turning round, "Who else knows?"
"Wattie. And now you."
"And you'll say nothing."
"I clean boots," said Harry.
Prosser made a noise that was not quite a laugh and went out.
Harry did not see what happened next, because it happened on a Tuesday afternoon on the training pitch and he was in the laundry. But Gareth Prys came in at five and sat on the bench to take his boots off and said:
"Ivor's stood in a new place."
"Has he."
"He's stood on the other side, by the far post. He stood there the whole session and he never said why, and when Cress went for the practice Snitch he never moved." Gareth pulled a boot off. "He watched her all the way down."
"Right."
"She came out of it wrong and nearly put herself in the hoarding and he just stood there watching her and then he said 'again'." Gareth shook his head. "He's a funny bloke, Ivor."
"He is," said Harry.
Hermione came to a match in March, which she had done twice before in her life, both times under duress, and this time she came on purpose and would not say why.
She sat next to Ron in the Dell, in a coat that was wrong for it, and stood up when everybody else stood up and sat down slightly after everybody else sat down, and at half-time she came down to the boot room and stood in the doorway with two cups of tea.
"You've got mud on your face."
"It's a mud sort of job."
"Mm." She gave him one of the teas and looked round the room. "It's smaller than I thought."
"Everything is."
She sat down on the bench, which nobody who did not work at the club ever did without being told to, and Harry noticed that and liked it.
"I'm going to ask you a question," she said, "and I want you to know I've thought about whether to."
"Go on."
"Are you all right?"
Harry put the basket down.
"Yes," he said.
"You left the Aurors three years ago and you did very little for two of them and now you're washing shirts for eleven Galleons a week." She held the tea in both hands. "And I've been telling Ron for eight months that it's fine and that you're happy and that he's to stop going on about it, and this morning I woke up and thought, I've never actually asked him."
"It's a good question."
"It's a terrible question. That's why nobody asks it." She looked at him over the cup. "Well?"
Harry leaned against the rack.
"I get here at eight," he said. "There's about forty pairs of boots and twenty sets of kit and a frame and a sink, and every one of them is either right or it isn't, and I can tell which by looking. Nobody dies. Nobody's lying to me. If I do it well, a girl from Ammanford flies a bit faster on Saturday, and if I do it badly she gets a blister." He shrugged. "I did six years where I was never once sure I'd got it right. I'm sure about the boots."
Hermione was quiet for a moment.
"That's a much better answer than I was expecting," she said.
"You were expecting something sadder."
"I was expecting something brave," said Hermione. "You do a thing where you make something sound fine and I go away and worry about it for three weeks." She drank her tea. "This is just true, isn't it. You're actually enjoying yourself."
"I am."
"Good." She stood up and brushed the bench off her coat. "Then I shall tell Ron to shut up, which I've been wanting to do since August."
At the door she stopped.
"Harry."
"Mm."
"Ron says they're ninth."
"They are."
"Ron says they've never been ninth in March." Hermione looked at him with the whole of her attention, which was a thing Harry had spent a long time being on the right side of. "And he says it's because the boots are dry."
"That's part of it."
"Is it," said Hermione, and went back up to the Dell, and Harry heard her heels on the steps for a long way.
Chapter Five: The Curse
The trouble started on the wireless.
On the second Monday in March, a pundit called Ludo Hackleby said, on Quidditch Round-Up, at about twenty past seven in the evening, that the Chudley Cannons had won four of their last seven and were ninth in the table, and then he said:
"And I'll tell you what that means, Aubrey. That means the curse is off."
He said it as a joke. He said the next thing as a joke too, which was that Ragnar Cannon's widow had presumably got tired of it after a hundred and seventeen years and gone off to haunt somebody with better prospects. Then they did the racing.
By Wednesday there had been eleven letters to the Prophet about it, and a woman in Chipping Norton had written to the club offering to lift the curse for nine Galleons, and somebody had painted CURSE OFF on the wall of the scrapyard next to the ground, and somebody else had painted NOT YET underneath it.
On the Friday, Dermot Bagge came down to the boot room.
He had never been down to the boot room. Harry knew that because Wattie had told him that in forty-two years he had seen a chairman in that room four times, and three of those had been Mr Hardcastle looking for somewhere to smoke.
"Harry," said Bagge, from the doorway.
"Dermot."
"Can I sit down?"
"It's your bench."
Bagge sat down on it, and put his hands on his knees, and looked at the racks of boots for a while, and then said, "I'm going to ask you to do something that isn't in the job."
"Go on."
"You were an Auror."
"Six years."
"Right." Bagge cleared his throat. "I want you to look at the ground."
"Look at it how?"
"For a curse," said Dermot Bagge.
Harry did it properly, because there was no point doing it any other way.
It took three days. He walked the boundary of the ground at six in the morning with his wand out and his coat collar up, three times, once each way and once at random. He worked the pitch itself in a grid, twelve yards at a time, on his knees in places. He did the hoops, and the posts, and the foundations of all four stands, and the dressing rooms, and the tunnel, and the drain under the Dell, and the place behind the scoreboard where a previous chairman had buried a horseshoe in 1948 for luck, which was still there, and which was a horseshoe.
He found eleven charms on the property of the Chudley Cannons Quidditch Club.
Four were weather charms on the pitch, laid in 1991, more or less working. Two were the standard Muggle-Repelling wards on the perimeter, in good order. One was a warming charm on the away dressing room, laid in 1934 and still going, which was a better piece of work than anything else on the site. One was a locking charm on the boardroom cabinet. One was on the drying frame in the boot room and was eight months old and was Harry's. One was a small, cheerful, extremely persistent charm on a turnstile in the East Stand which had been making a noise like a duck since 1963 and which three separate clubs had offered money to have removed, and which Harry left exactly where it was.
And one was on the underside of the visitors' bench, and it was an Itching Jinx, and it had been put there in about 1996 by somebody with no particular talent, and it had not worked for a decade.
There was no curse.
There was no curse on the pitch, or the ground, or the stands, or the hoops, or the ball chest, or the shirts, or the badge, or the name, or the club, or the town. There was no curse and there had never been one. Harry went back over the whole thing a second time on the Sunday to be sure, in the rain, and there was still no curse, and at four o'clock he went into the boardroom, where Dermot Bagge was waiting with a bottle of something he had clearly decided he might need, and said so.
"Nothing."
"Nothing at all?"
"There's a jinx under the away bench that stopped working in about 1999 and a turnstile that quacks." Harry put a folded sheet of paper on the table. "That's the lot, written down. Eleven charms, what they are, when they were laid. There is nothing on this ground that has ever made anyone at this club play worse at Quidditch."
Bagge did not pick up the paper.
He sat in the chairman's chair of the Chudley Cannons Quidditch Club with his hands flat on the table on either side of a folded sheet of paper, and he looked at the wall, where there was a photograph of a cup being held up in 1892 by a man with a beard.
"Then it's us," he said.
"Sorry?"
"A hundred and seventeen years." Bagge's voice had gone somewhere else. "I've had this club thirty-one of them. And there's people in that Dell whose grandfathers stood in that Dell, and every one of us has said, all our lives — well, it's the curse, isn't it. It's not us. It's the curse." He laughed, once, with nothing in it. "And you've been round with a stick for three days and there's no curse. So it's us. It's been us the whole time. We've just been bad at it for a hundred and seventeen years."
Harry stood on the other side of the table and let that sit there, because there was nothing to say to it that would have been true.
"Do you want it in the minutes?" he said, after a while.
"God, no."
"Then it isn't."
"Don't tell anybody." Bagge looked up. "I'm not asking you to lie. I'd not ask you that. I'm asking you not to go telling people."
"I won't go telling people," said Harry, which was true, and which he had already decided about anyway, and he went back to the boot room.
Cuthbert Pye asked him in the spring, because Harry had told him to.
He came down on the last Saturday in March, after the Wigtown game, with his flask and his long kind face, and sat on the bench without being asked, and said, "It's the spring."
"It is."
"I'm asking again."
"All right," said Harry.
Pye took out a notebook and then, after a moment's thought, put it back in his pocket.
"I'll tell you what I want," he said. "I don't want Potter Cleans The Boots. I've had all winter to want it and I've gone off it. What I want is: this club is ninth in March. It has never been ninth in March in my lifetime. And everybody I ask tells me a different reason and none of them are reasons."
"What do they tell you?"
"Ivor says it's a good month. Culpepper says it's the shirts. Gareth Prys has told me twice, at length, that somebody gave him a pair of somebody else's new boots in September and he's still got them." Pye smiled. "Dermot says he knew in August. Dermot has known in August every year since 1978."
Harry went on with the dubbin.
"And Hackleby says the curse is off," said Pye.
"I heard."
"Is it?"
Harry set the boot down.
He thought about Dermot Bagge sitting in the boardroom with his hands flat on the table. He thought about a folded sheet of paper with eleven charms on it. He thought about ninety thousand people reading a column over breakfast on a Monday morning, and about what they would be reading it for.
"There isn't a curse," he said.
Pye's face did not change for about two seconds.
"What?"
"There isn't one. There's no curse on that ground. There never has been." Harry put the boot on the rack. "I walked the whole site last month and I know how to do it, and there are eleven charms on this club's property and I can tell you what all of them are. Four weather. Two Muggle-Repelling. One warming charm in the away dressing room that some chairman put in in 1934 out of good manners, which is the only decent piece of magic on the premises. One lock. One drying frame. One dead Itching Jinx under the visitors' bench. And one on the East Stand turnstile that quacks."
"The turnstile —"
"Has quacked since 1963 and I'm leaving it."
Pye sat very still.
"Ragnar Cannon's widow," he said.
"Died in 1919 in Aberystwyth. There's no record she ever said anything about the club at all. The first time anybody wrote down that there was a curse was 1926, in a match report, and the man who wrote it was making a joke." Harry shrugged. "I looked that up in the library because I wanted to know. That's all."
"You're telling me," said Pye slowly, "that the Chudley Cannons have been the worst-supported joke in British Quidditch for eighty-four years on the strength of one bloke's gag in a match report."
"I'm telling you there's no curse on the ground."
Pye got up and walked to the end of the boot room and stood looking at the drying frame with his back to Harry for quite a long time.
"That's the end of the column," he said.
"Maybe."
"No, it's — you don't understand." He turned round. "I've done nineteen years of aren't they marvellous, the poor devils. That's what it is. That's all it's ever been. It works because it's not their fault. The minute it's their fault it's not funny, it's just a badly run Quidditch club in a town with a scrapyard in it." He put his hands in his pockets. "And I like them. That's the thing you'll not believe. I've stood in that press box in the sleet for nineteen years because I like them."
"I believe you."
"Then why in God's name did you tell me?"
"You asked," said Harry.
The column ran on the Monday, and it was the longest thing Cuthbert Pye had ever written, and it was not funny at all.
It began with the eleven charms, listed. It went through the 1926 match report and the man who had written it, and the eighty-four years after, and the plates, and the fixture cards, and the nine photographs hung in the tunnel in 1968 to remind them what they were up against. It said that the Chudley Cannons had been ninth in the table since the start of February. It said that four separate people at the club had offered him four separate explanations for that and that not one of them had said because we are playing better.
And it ended:
I have made a living for nineteen years out of a club that could not win. I have been fond of it, and I have been kind about it, and I have never once written a column asking why. I did not ask because I did not want an answer, and I did not want an answer because the answer would have meant that something could be done, and if something could be done then somebody ought to have been doing it, and one of the people who ought to have been doing it was me.
They are ninth. Go and look at them.
Four thousand eight hundred people came to the next home game, which was eight hundred more than had come to any game at the Powder Yard in six years, and the Cannons beat the Falmouth Falcons by seventy, and the Dell sang for two hours.
Dermot Bagge did not speak to Harry for eleven days.
He spoke to him on the twelfth day, in the corridor outside the trophy cabinet, standing in front of a League Cup from 1892 and a great deal of space.
"You told Pye."
"He asked me."
"You told me you'd not go telling people."
"And I didn't go telling people," said Harry. "He came down to the boot room and sat on my bench and asked me a question, and I answered it, because it was true and because I'd told him in September that he could ask me in the spring." He looked at Bagge. "If you'd asked me not to answer him, I'd have told you I wasn't going to lie to a man who asked me straight. You didn't ask me that. You asked me not to go round telling people, and I haven't."
Bagge's face worked.
"That's a lawyer's answer."
"It's an accurate one."
"Aye," said Bagge. "That's what a lawyer's answer is."
They stood there.
"Do you know what he's done to me?" said Bagge. "That column? Do you know what's happened this fortnight? I've had four hundred letters. I've had a man from Gringotts on the telephone about the ground. I've had the Quidditch Board asking whether the East Stand's been surveyed since 1903, and the answer is that it has not been surveyed since 1903. I've had two of the Falmouth board offering to buy Okonjo in front of my own face, in my own boardroom, because everybody's looking now." He was going red. "For thirty-one years nobody looked at us. Do you know how restful that is?"
"I do, actually," said Harry.
Bagge stopped.
He looked at Harry for a long moment, and something went over his face, and he said, in a completely different voice, "Well. I suppose you would."
"Dermot."
"What?"
"The plates," said Harry.
"What about the plates?"
"There's four hundred of the 1892 one in the stockroom and you've never put them out."
"They don't sell."
"You've never put them out," said Harry. "The girl in the shop says you get them down and look at them."
Dermot Bagge stood in front of his empty trophy cabinet in a good coat with his hands by his sides, and for a second or two he looked exactly like a man of sixty-eight who had given thirty-one years to something.
"They're the good one," he said.
The window was opened on the ninth of April.
It happened because Wattie Bream mentioned it to Barnaby Culpepper on a Thursday, in passing, in the way of an old man remembering something; and Culpepper mentioned it to Ivor Prosser in the way of a captain who has been cold since he signed in 1997; and Prosser went and looked at it, and put his shoulder against it, and then went and got a chisel from the groundsman and took the paint off the frame himself, in his coat, on a Friday afternoon, in about forty minutes, swearing steadily.
It came open with a crack like a gunshot and thirty-two years of April came into the home dressing room at the Powder Yard.
Nobody wrote anything down about it. Harry watched from the end of the corridor with a basket of shirts on his hip, and then went back to the boot room, and took the ledger for 1977 out of the cupboard, and read the entry again, and put it back.
On the Thursday, Wattie Bream came in at half past nine and sat in the chair with the cushion on it.
"They've opened the window," he said.
"They have."
"Thirty-two years." He got his hands round the mug. "I'd have said something myself, only I did say something, three times, in 1977."
"You did."
"How'd you know that?"
"It's in the ledger," said Harry.
Wattie Bream looked at the cupboard behind the door, where fifty-one ledgers stood in a row and had stood for fifty-two years, and which nobody at the Chudley Cannons had opened in all that time except the man who wrote them and the man who cleaned the boots.
"You've read them," he said.
"All of them."
"All fifty-one."
"It took nine weeks."
Wattie sat with his tea. After a while his shoulders started to go, and Harry realised he was laughing, and waited.
"Fifty-two years," said Wattie Bream, when he could. "Fifty-two years I sat in that chair writing down what was wrong with this club in the remarks column of a kit book, because there was nowhere else to put it, and every August I'd hand it in to the office and every September they'd hand it back and I know for a fact not one of them ever opened it." He wiped his eye with the back of his wrist, which was the only way he could do it. "And you read the lot."
"They were the only thing in the room worth reading."
"Aye, well." Wattie put the mug down. "There's a blank one in there. Back of the cupboard. Never been started."
"I've seen it."
"Start it," said Wattie Bream.
Chapter Six: The Last Day
The last day of the season was the second of May, at home, against Puddlemere United, who were second in the table and who had beaten the Cannons eleven times in a row.
The Cannons were ninth. If they won, and if Wigtown lost at Kenmare, they would finish sixth, which would be the highest the Chudley Cannons had finished in any season since 1955.
Nobody at the club said this out loud in the week before the match. It got said anyway, about four hundred times, by everybody, in the way that a thing gets said when nobody is saying it.
Harry got to the ground at half past six in the morning.
He did the boots first, twenty pairs, in order, the way Wattie had shown him in July: Gareth's tight, Nadia's loose, nothing on Culpepper's toes. He did the shirts. He checked the frame. He filled the water bottles and put them where they went, and put the spare gloves where they went, and swept the floor of the home dressing room, which was not his job and which he had been doing since March because nobody else did it.
The window was open. There was a smell of cut grass coming through it.
At half past eight he went up the tunnel with a cloth and did the nine frames, as he had done before every home game since August, starting with The Fire, 1901 and finishing with eleven young men standing in a line with a cup in 1892.
At nine, Dermot Bagge came out of the club shop carrying a crate.
Harry watched him from the mouth of the tunnel. Bagge had the crate in both arms, and he was sixty-eight, and he had to put it down twice on the way across. The girl from the shop came out after him with a second one and then a third, and by half past nine there was a table in front of the turnstiles with four hundred plates on it, in four hundred boxes, under a piece of card that Dermot Bagge had written himself in marker pen.
It said:
THE 1892 SIDE Made for the centenary in 1992. Never put out. 4 Galleons 10. They are the good one.
They were gone by twenty past twelve.
Fourteen thousand two hundred people came to the Powder Yard that afternoon.
It was the biggest crowd at the ground since 1979 and it was three times what the club had been getting in September, and the stewards had not been ready for it, and neither had the turnstiles, one of which quacked six thousand times. They opened the Dell an hour early and it filled and they opened the wooden bit at the back of the Dell that had been shut since 2001 and that filled too. There were people sitting on the steps. There were people in the seats behind the eleven iron pillars in the East Stand who could see about a third of the pitch and who stayed there all afternoon.
Ron was in his place, in the four-inch dip in the concrete, where his father-in-law's brother had stood before him. Hermione was next to him in a better coat than March. Cuthbert Pye was in the press box with his flask.
At two o'clock Harry stood at the door of the home dressing room with a basket, the way he had at every home game since August, and listened to Ivor Prosser talk to his players.
It was not a good speech. Prosser had never in his life made a good speech. He said that Puddlemere were a better side than they were, which was true, and that they had beaten Puddlemere's reserves in a friendly in July, which was true and no use to anybody. He said something about the wind. He said, "Right, then," twice.
Then he stopped, and put his hands in his pockets, and said:
"I'm going to stand by the far post today. Right side, by the far post, where you can all see me, and I'll be there the whole game and I'll not move." He was looking at the floor. "That's all. Off you go."
Cressida Tuke, sitting on the bench with her boots in her hands, looked up.
They went out at ten past two, past The Fire, 1901, and Ragnar Cannon's Funeral, and The Collapse of the South Stand, and War Damage, and The 1955 Final, and The 1968 Relegation Play-Off, and The 1974 Collapse, and The Nine-Hour Match, 1987 (Lost), and then, in the last two steps, with the noise of fourteen thousand people already coming down the tunnel at them like weather, past eleven young men standing in a line with a cup.
Harry had never once seen a player look at it.
He did not think that mattered. He had worked out a long time ago that people very rarely look at the thing that is working on them.
He watched the match from the mouth of the tunnel with a cloth over his shoulder, which was where the kit man watched from, and which was the best seat in the ground.
Puddlemere scored in the fourth minute and in the ninth minute and in the fourteenth minute, and it was thirty-nil and then sixty-nil, and the Dell went quiet in the way that a crowd goes quiet when it has been here before, and Harry saw Barnaby Culpepper turn round in front of his hoops and shout something at his own defence that the whole East Stand heard.
Then Nadia Okonjo scored.
Then she scored again, four minutes later, from about thirty yards, and Gareth Prys scored from directly underneath a Puddlemere Chaser who had forgotten he was there, and it was sixty-thirty and then sixty-ninety, and the noise that came out of the Dell was not a song, it was just noise, and it went on for eleven minutes.
At half past three it was two hundred and ten to one hundred and ninety to Puddlemere.
At four o'clock it was two hundred and forty each.
Cressida Tuke had been over the pitch for the whole of it at about sixty feet, turning slowly, with her attention out on the far corners of the ground, and she had gone down twice, both times for nothing, and both times Harry had watched her come out of the dive and look across at the far post on the right-hand side, where a man in a scarf stood with his arms folded and his eyes on her.
At eight minutes past four the Puddlemere Seeker went.
He went from the north end, hard and flat, and he was a very good Seeker, and he had a start of about a length and a half.
Cressida Tuke did not look at the far post.
Harry saw that and understood what it meant about half a second before anybody else in the ground did. She had come off the turn already going, before the other Seeker had finished moving, and her head had not gone down and to her left, because she was not asking anybody anything. She had gone past the Puddlemere Seeker's inside shoulder at a height that was a mistake to try, and the two of them had come down the length of the pitch together with about four feet between them, and fourteen thousand two hundred people had stood up all at once, which made a sound like a wave hitting a wall.
At the hoops she went underneath him.
There was a piece of the crowd, low down in the Dell, that could not see it, and they said afterwards that they knew from the noise, and they were right, because the noise happened before anybody in the Dell had seen anything at all.
She came out of it at about waist height off the grass with her left hand up and her fist shut, and she was already sitting up on the broom before she had finished turning, and she went the length of the pitch again on her back with her arm straight up in the air, and she was not looking at the far post and she was not looking at the Dell.
She was laughing. Harry could see it from forty yards.
Three hundred and ninety to two hundred and forty.
Wigtown drew at Kenmare, which meant Chudley finished seventh and not sixth, and nobody found that out for about two hours, and when they did find out, nobody minded.
Harry did not go out onto the pitch.
There were fourteen thousand people on it by twenty past four and a good half of them were trying to get to Cressida Tuke, who had been put on somebody's shoulders and taken off them again and was now standing in the middle of the centre circle with her arms round Gareth Prys, both of them shouting into each other's faces.
Harry went and made a start on the boot room instead, because there were going to be twenty pairs of boots through that door in about half an hour and somebody had to have the frame on.
He had the frame on and the sink filling when Ivor Prosser came in.
Prosser stood in the doorway in his scarf. He had not been out on the pitch either. He had walked straight down the tunnel when the whistle went, past the nine photographs, and into the dressing room, and out again, and now he was standing in the door of the boot room with his hands in his pockets and his jaw working.
"Ivor."
"I watched it," said Prosser.
"I know. I saw you."
"I watched the whole thing. All the way down. Both of them, the last thirty feet, and him going over the top of her and her going under, and I watched every yard of it." He took his hands out of his pockets and put them back in. "Twenty-nine years."
"How was it?"
Ivor Prosser opened his mouth and then shut it again and stood there for a moment with his eyes very bright, and then he said, "Terrible. It was terrible. I thought I was going to be sick," and went out and up the tunnel, and Harry heard him laughing about halfway along.
Chapter Seven: Remarks
The Prophet on the Monday gave it the whole of the back page and three inside.
The back page was a photograph of Cressida Tuke coming out of the dive at waist height with her fist shut, taken from the Dell end, with about two hundred faces behind her in the crowd doing the same thing with their mouths. The headline said TUKE. That was all it said. Somebody at that paper had had a good idea and stuck to it.
Inside, there were four explanations for the Chudley Cannons' season, and Harry read all of them standing at the counter in the boot room with a cup of tea.
The first was Ludo Hackleby's, in a column headed I Said It In March, in which he explained that the curse had gone off the club and that he had been the first to say so, both of which were now true.
The second was tactical, and ran to eleven hundred words, and was written by a man who had watched three Cannons matches that season and who had identified a "high-press variation" in the Chudley midfield that Ivor Prosser had never heard of and which Prosser later cut out and pinned to the wall of his office with the word AYE written on it.
The third was in the notes column and said that the club had changed its playing kit supplier, which it had not, and that the new shirts were "noticeably better cut," which they were.
The fourth was Cuthbert Pye's.
There is no curse on the Chudley Cannons and there never was. I wrote that in March and I was pleased with myself for writing it, and I have spent six weeks finding out that I had only got half of it.
The other half is this. A club gets what it believes about itself, and for a hundred and seventeen years this one believed something that let everybody off. The supporters were let off, because you cannot ask a cursed club to be better. The board was let off. The press was let off, and I was the press. And the players were let off, which sounds like a kindness and is not one, because a young woman spent three seasons flying beautifully round a Quidditch pitch looking for something she had stopped believing was findable, and nobody ever told her otherwise, because we were all having such a lovely time.
On Saturday, with the scores level, Cressida Tuke went for a Snitch she had no business reaching against a better Seeker with a length and a half on her, and she reached it. There is no explanation for that in any of the other three pieces in this paper this morning. There is no explanation for it in mine either. I only know she did not look at the bench before she went.
This column has been called Cannon Fodder for nineteen years. From next season it will be called something else. I have not decided what.
Dermot Bagge made a speech at the end-of-season dinner, in the function room at the Bell in Chudley, to a hundred and forty people at eleven pounds a head.
It was a long speech. He thanked Ivor Prosser, and the players by name, and the groundsman, and the stewards, and the girl from the shop, and the Dell. He said that it had been the finest season of his thirty-one years and that he had known in August, which was true in the sense that he had said it in August, as he had said it in every August since 1978.
Then he stopped, and looked at his notes, and put them down.
"I want to say one more thing," he said, "and it's not on here.
"I'd a stockroom with four hundred plates in it. The 1892 side. We had them made for the centenary and I never put them out, and I've told everybody for eighteen years that they don't sell, and that's not true. I never put them out because we sold the other ones. We sold the fire, and the funeral, and the South Stand coming down, and the 1974 collapse, and we sold a lot of them, because that's what people wanted from us." He had gone rather red. "And on Saturday I put the good one out on a table at nine in the morning and they were gone by dinner time, and I've been thinking about that all week, and I'm not sure I come out of it very well."
He picked his notes back up.
"Anyway," said Dermot Bagge. "Number nine in the series will be Saturday. It'll be out in July. Four Galleons ten."
Cressida Tuke signed a new contract on the fourteenth of June and turned down Falmouth, who had offered more, and told the Prophet that she had turned them down because of Ivor Prosser, which put eleven years on Ivor Prosser's life and took about four off it at the same time.
Nadia Okonjo went to Holyhead for nine thousand Galleons, which was the largest fee the Chudley Cannons had ever received for anything, and the money went on the East Stand, which was surveyed in August for the first time since 1903 and found to be standing up out of habit.
Joss Fettiplace came into the boot room on the last day of the season, after everybody else had gone, and stood about for a while with his kit bag over his shoulder.
"All right, Joss."
"Yeah." He put the bag down and picked it up again. "I'm off, then."
"Where?"
"Appleby. Two years." He rubbed the back of his neck. "They came in Thursday. It's more money and I'll play, and I'm thirty-two, so."
"Good luck with it."
"Yeah." Fettiplace stood there. "I wanted to say a thing, and then I'm going to go and I'll probably not say it right."
Harry put the brush down.
"Go on."
"Culpepper said a thing to me in September. In the dressing room, after Kenmare. He said everything I've ever said at this club has been true and no use to anybody." Fettiplace was looking at the rack. "And I went home and I was livid about it for about three weeks, and then I thought about it properly, and he's right. That's exactly what I do. I say the true useless one. Somebody says we had them at eighty minutes and I say yeah but we lost." He shifted the bag. "I've been doing it since I was fifteen. I do it to my wife."
"Right," said Harry.
"So I've been trying to stop," said Fettiplace. "That's all. I've been trying to stop all season and nobody's noticed, and I wanted one person to know I was doing it."
Harry thought about that.
"I'd noticed," he said.
"Had you?"
"You stopped in about January."
Joss Fettiplace stood in the door of the boot room at the Powder Yard with his kit bag over his shoulder and went slightly red, and said, "Right. Good. Well," and then, "Thanks for the boots," and went, and played ninety-four games for Appleby and was capped once for England at the age of thirty-four, off the bench, for eleven minutes, which he mentioned about twice a week for the rest of his life and had every right to.
Barnaby Culpepper played one more season and then took over the reserves.
Gareth Prys never once found out about the boots.
Ron came to the boot room in June, on the last Thursday of the close season, with two bottles of beer and no permission at all.
"Four minutes," said Harry.
"I've had my four minutes."
"You've had your four minutes."
"I'm having four more," said Ron, and sat down on the bench, and opened both bottles on the edge of the sink, which Harry chose not to have an opinion about.
They sat for a bit. The window was open. Somewhere out on the pitch the groundsman's mower was going in a long curve and then a short straight bit.
"I've been thinking about what you asked me," said Ron.
"When?"
"In the Leaky. Last June." He turned the bottle round in his hands. "You asked whether I'd mind if they got good."
"You said it was a funny question."
"It was a horrible question and you knew it when you asked it." Ron drank some beer. "And the answer's yes. I did mind. Not on Saturday, obviously, on Saturday I cried in front of my wife and about nine hundred strangers. But in about February, when they beat Wigtown and we went up to eighth, I had a whole evening of being in a mood and I couldn't work out why, and Hermione asked me and I said it was work, and it wasn't work."
"What was it?"
"It was that I've been the bloke who supports the Cannons since I was six," said Ron. "That's a thing about me. It's on the list. Ron's got red hair, Ron's rubbish at Potions, Ron supports the Cannons and isn't it funny." He shrugged. "And if they're any good then I'm just a bloke who goes to the Quidditch."
Harry turned a boot over.
"That's an honest thing to say," he said.
"It's a rotten thing to say."
"It's both." He set the boot on the rack. "Half the people at this club have had a version of it this year. Dermot's had it. Pye's had it in a newspaper in front of ninety thousand people. You've had it on a Tuesday in your own kitchen and told your wife it was work, which is cheaper."
"That's not making me feel better."
"I wasn't trying to."
"No," said Ron. "You never are. It's one of your better features and I've never liked it."
"Yeah, well. I've had a bad year for it." Ron put the bottle down. "And then on Saturday she went under him at the hoops and I didn't think about any of that for about an hour, so I expect I'll live." He looked round the room. "Are you staying?"
"I'm staying."
"For how long?"
"I've no idea," said Harry.
Ron nodded, satisfied, and picked up one of Cressida Tuke's gloves off the table, and put it down in a slightly different place.
"Touched it," he said.
Wattie Bream came in on the Thursday after that, at half past nine, in a jacket and tie, and sat in the chair with the cushion on it.
He was eighty-four now. He had been at the end-of-season dinner and had been given a decanter, which he had put in a cupboard at home, because he did not drink and had told them so in 1971.
"They've had the East Stand surveyed," he said.
"They have."
"Hundred and six years." He got his hands round the mug. "I'd say something about that, only I don't want to be a man who says I told you so."
"You did tell them so. It's in the ledger for 1988."
"Is it."
"Twice."
"Well," said Wattie Bream, and drank his tea.
They sat for a while. Harry did the boots. Outside, a long way off, somebody was hitting a hammer on something in the East Stand.
"Have you started it?" said Wattie.
"Not yet."
"Why not?"
Harry put the brush down and wiped his hands on the cloth.
"I've been thinking about what goes in it," he said.
"It's a kit book," said Wattie. "Date, item, player, condition. Then there's a column at the end and you can put what you like in it, and nobody in that office will read a word of it for fifty years." He raised his eyebrows. "That's the best deal in professional Quidditch, that column. I'd not leave it lying about."
Harry started it that evening, when the ground was empty and the light in the boot room was on.
He got the blank ledger out of the back of the cupboard and set it on the table and turned to the first page, which was ruled and headed and had never had anything on it, and he took Cressida Tuke's boots down off the rack, because they were the last pair he had done that season and they were still standing there, and he wrote:
2/5/2010. Boots (pr), Tuke. Good order, cleaned.
REMARKS: She caught it.
He looked at that for a while.
Then he put the ledger back in the cupboard behind the door, where fifty-one others stood in a row, and he put the boots on the rack, and he washed the mugs, and he put the light out, and he locked the green door under the West Stand and went home.
The Chudley Cannons finished fifth the following season, and fourth the season after that, and in 2015 they lost a semi-final in Cardiff in front of forty thousand people, which Dermot Bagge described to the Prophet as the proudest day of his life and the worst afternoon he had ever spent.
There was never any question, in any of it, of the kit man having had anything to do with anything.
He cleaned the boots. Everybody said so. He was very good at the boots.
The End