The Harry Potter's saga seen by disenchanted eyes
By: Michele M. C. Mataloni
Tags: Marginalized People, Harry Potter, Fiction, Homeless, Literature

A castle in ruins

Should they ever get to Hogwarts, and it is hard to imagine why they would push themselves to such a remote, inhospitable and unattractive spot, people would not find but ruins and a danger alert sign. That is what they would find, as that is what there is.

Ruins, yes: probably of some long-abandoned industrial site. Who knows what it used to be… So deeply eroded by time and wind it has been its, now, skeletal shape, that it could be the vestige of really anything. In the pale light of dawn or the soft one of twilight, the silhouette recalls a fortress’ impregnability as well as an abbey’s austerity. In daylight, anyway, those crumbling towers reveal themselves as what they are: half-collapsed, reddish-brown brick chimneys dating of the Second Industrial Revolution. Similarly, what dusk shapes into a massive stronghold, an imposing apse and a sturdy peripheral walls, lacks in the daylight of such dreamt medieval charm: spray paint graffiti superpose in several layers on any surface, empty bottles and crushed cans lay everywhere, while spring-spitting mattresses and broken chairs peep among the scattered, wilted bushes.

Dressed in rags, a handful of homeless people dwell there. They live isolated, with no contact with the nearby settlements but in the occasion of rare trips they make to beg for pennies and buy junk food, cheap spirits and tarry cigarettes; or to dig into the dumpsters for precious tattered clothes or half-eaten sandwiches. Their gibberish muttering interrupted by sudden rumbling exclamations and spasmodic gestures, they may seem stunned by alcohol or drugs; indeed, they take the lump of a merciless life.

Someone regularly visits them, in addition to the many phantoms of their troubled past and the rare stray dogs sweeping the surroundings. It is the marginalized young people of the suburbs: teenagers playing hooky, drug addicts needing a safe spot to trip, some dealer-wannabe and runaway kids. These visitors share food and drinks with the old dwellers while listening to their tales or learning how to pick a lock and trick a cop, stupefied with amazement and booze.

Time and weathering bewitched the ruins and, as the decay of a building usually starts from the roofs, nothing but the sky now vaults over those magic people. The stars’ light melts and stretches in their watery eyes to resemble myriads of candles swaying in mid-air. Memories of past banquets mix with the distant hope of future feasts: if only good beverage and food magically appeared there and now! If only music and chants echoed in the air, instead of the endless howling of wind! However, every time they reopen the eyes, banquets have disappeared, together with the illusion of a comfortable life. People arrange bivouacs at the ruins, all and everything most of them can call home: makeshift shelters of cardboard and cellophane foil or old half-broken tents; yet, in the cold and below the rain, as luxurious as four-posters.

More on magic people

The aged homeless have allowed the kids to the ruins. The kids have learnt to look beyond their hosts’ rubbished appearances to discover wisdom in their rambling speeches. From them, the kids also learn how to prepare those “potions”, so that they can travel to fantastic places, transform themselves into other creatures and even fly… or fight. Quarrels are frequent, as altered minds quickly lose control, and seldom end in beating or even stabbing. Switchblades are not for everyone, but others can count on a club, a crowbar or a wrench; one or two have guns: all such objects are their magic wands. “Magic wand”, though, is also the providential syringe to start a trip out of space and time.

The ruins’ community has its hierarchy in place, which grants the highest rank to those regularly dwelling there; then to the children, in order of arrival, as well as in terms of aggressiveness and strength. A hierarchy that the possession of a wand can occasionally subvert, of course. Homicide is rare and a taboo, especially for the intrusion of police that it brings. It happened, of course: by accident mostly, during some fight or playing, high, with a gun. Other practices are also considered unforgivable, like physical aggression and torture, frequent to abuse or steal someone; and psychologically manipulating people who happen to be drunk, high or suffering from withdrawal syndrome.

Like an atavistic instinct, fatalism seems to possess the ruins’ dwellers to the point of preventing them from any action capable of changing their lives. In the same way, one would say, as magical thinking had prevented society’s progress until its unmasking operated by the Enlightenment. One of the rare exceptions is a bald former member of the community, now living with his own family in a countryside’s crack house. He comes back from time to time to greet his past acquaintances, unsuccessfully trying to convince them of the admirable advantages of the outside world. Not even driving in on a car one day (quite a piece of smoky scrap, actually) could temper the snotty contempt of the clan’s dominant members.

Trains, buses and other means of transportation

A freight yard is active on the lakeshore opposite the ruins, an integral part of the new industrial site that started developing between the two world wars when the original one was gradually abandoned. A freight train, not a regular one but still reasonably frequent along the year, connects to the South, eventually getting to London. The end-to-end travel takes ages, but it comes for free to those passengers who are ready to accept some discomfort. The eldest dwellers of the ruins cannot face a long trip as a stowaway any more — or any travel at all; but the kids sometimes go to the Capital and back, for the fly markets and a taste of underground life.

Leaving to London is an easy task, as the train remains relatively unguarded for hours after loadout, while the locomotor arrives from the main railway station depot. On the contrary, jumping on the train that comes back requires innate skills and proper training. First, one has to get to either St. Pancras or King’s Cross; as the two places share the same Underground station, that would be easy, if it weren’t for the sniffer dogs. It results that those animals do not like people to carry “potions” at all and get crazy like werewolves. Consequently, cops become even angrier than their hounds, gather in platoons, circle the couriers, bring them to some obscure place and start dementing them with endless questioning. Then, they put them in jail for years. No one wants that, especially not the ruins kids, who heard tales on such obscure places; those of them who have not already been there themselves. Therefore, dribbling and mingling are a must even before passing the barriers (with no ticket), mug the curious looks of remarkably cleaner, better-dressed and somehow combed passengers, and move then, unnoticed, towards the end of the platform. Then, there is the risky walk along the rails, till the nearby concrete plant’s freight line. The “Express” does not stop there, but it proceeds slowly enough among switch points to allow jumping on without too much of a run.

When your feet are swelling, and your head is bumping; when you feel lost among streets all equally shining for the rain; when your mind is even more lost, half a way back from a trip or just still stunned by too much alcohol: what is more desirable than a bus to take you where you are supposed to get to? The artificial light of the street lamps reacts with the Pantone of the bus, fatigue and intoxication distort any shape on your retina and there you are, jumping on a purple bus as tall as a building. There you are, shaken and continuously waken from your dozing off, to witness your nightmares mixing with the vertigo of the fast drive. Onboard, most of the few passengers are sleeping, horrendously slouched in their seats when not even rolling on the floor since that sporty curve. Vice-Admiral Nelson would horrify discovering what mutineers sail every night from the square named after his last victory!

Only those who have lost everything can genuinely understand the interest that the People of the Ruins show towards the most common — and worn-out — objects. They crave for things like an empty can or a single boot. Once they reach and touch them, they seem ravished, like transported elsewhere… Who knows what sort of memories or dreams such objects awake in them! Nearly the same happens with some of those powders they sometimes use.

Dubious places downtown

They have their secret places in London. Places where to find anything they need, from the ingredients for the potions to any kind of wand, passing through second-hand clothes, used books and furnishings of unknown origin. Such flea markets, obviously escaping any officialdom, spontaneously settle in piss-smelling alleys that divide irregular rows of buildings, often hosting shops of no less disturbing appearance than that of the markets themselves. Stolen bicycles and smuggled tobacco are regular trade, often accompanied by illegally captured exotic and wild animals. Changers and moneylenders, nervously standing at the corners, handle all currencies, including, it goes without saying, flesh and blood.

There is also a place in London where the people of the ruins and their homologues from other corners of the country can seek for shelter and care when their bodies cannot stand potions and hardship any longer. Of course, not a hospital that for many among them could turn into the anti-chamber of jail. Instead, a rehabilitation home run by volunteers in an exceptionally shabby building and standing on donations. It will save their lives and try to put them back on a more straight line. Police stay away, in a sort of agreement with volunteers and funders; not the same can be said, anyway, for hallucinations and withdrawal-induced symptoms in general. People arrive, and people go; many will come back repeatedly, transparent by now to passers-by.

It is not easy at all to find accommodation in London. Especially for our magic people, at least, always cash-strapped and lacking a good network among residents. So, sleeping on the stairs descending to some basement or curling-up in a doorway is their rule. Some more comfortable squats exist, anyhow, for those left with enough orientation capability to find them. Half-hidden among less squalid dwellings, the original entrances often walled to (ineffectually) prevent squatting, here and there they stand: decrepit places that any untrained look refuses to see, authentic museums of broken furniture, whose permanent shades are overpopulated by rats and roaches if not even, one may think, by ghosts and skeletons.

Very few inns would have compunction about immediately calling the police, should magic people cross their doors. Fashioned in rags, differently clean and wrapped in clouds of sweat-secreted cologne, they are often high or drunk, promise to more likely possess a knife than any money and tend to scare customers away. Nevertheless, some cafeterias and pubs around the flea markets have progressively tuned on their boroughs’ multiform population’s requests. Thus, they let them in for a drink or allow them to exit from the back door when they look in need. The wanderers shall not expect to see any clear sign out of such establishments, nor would they feel any appeal to enter. How many premises have we, Muggles, stopped noticing in our daily wondering? There they are, nevertheless; their new functions unfathomable to us.

Oblivion

A tiny girl, the wind in her bushy hair and her look towards the horizon stands by the ruins. Her expression is grave and solemn for her young age. By now, she thinks, the merciless Alzheimer syndrome must have wiped out any lasting memory of her from her parents’ minds. Anyway, even if it had not, she knows they long ago deleted her from their own days, when she had gradually become a regular of weird places and weirder companies… Disinherited for bringing shame to the family by living such a low life, she is not scared of being on her own so young. Instead, she feels somehow relieved thinking that her parents are now free of that burden of taking care of her, and nobody will look for them to pay the consequences of her actions.