Exile in Mugglesville

Chapter One: Help Me Mary

The half-empty bottle of rum tipped over, landing parallel to the wooden tabletop, spilling its contents onto the rotten floorboards. Draco lunged at the bottle, like a lion catching its prey, hoping to salvage its contents. He caught the neck deftly between his fingers and stood it upright. He knelt in front of the table and tried to peer through the black glass.

“Fuck,” he growled as he leveled his index finger with the liquid inside, just an inch above the bottom.

He leaned back and lay down on the floor taking the bottle with him, holding it against his stomach. His legs were stretched out underneath the table and he could feel the back of his shirt absorbing the little amount of rum that wasn’t dried up yet.

He spread his arms out on his sides in Christ-like fashion and basked in the young moonlight obscured by the window. “Father, father you bastard!” He yelled with all his strength but his voice came out feebly.

He drank a swig of rum and several drops dripped down his cheek, some getting into his ear. He was in hell. Why couldn’t they have killed him or thrown him in Azkaban like all the other Death Eaters? Instead they had put him in this world he had loathed all his life. The world without magic; where he had neither wand nor galleons and everything had to be done the hard way. The muggle world.

“Bastards,” he mouthed as he took another swig.

He heard a loud rap, like someone drumming a broomstick against his door.

“Martin! Martin!” He heard the female voice holler from the other side. He instantly recognized it as Mrs. Fleet, his landlady. She had a distinct voice, every time she spoke it sounded as though a frog croaked along with her (in perfect beat too.)

“Just a minute,” Draco slurred.

He stood up, balancing himself first on one knee before finally getting up on both feet. The world swayed around him, like the feeling you get after spinning round and round like a top, and he was tempted to fall back on the rutty sofa, springs and cotton bursting from ripped seams, as he passed it. He reached the door knob covered in moist dust, without tripping once and opened it to Mrs. Fleet’s unwelcoming face.

“Pleasure to see you,” Draco said, bowing to her and doing an intricate twirl of sorts with the hand not holding the rum.

“Your three days are up,” she said without cracking a smile. Her face was like the moon, glowing amidst its potholes.

“I was robbed,” he explained to her. He swung his hand up to express the gravity of the situation, and almost hit her face with the bottle of rum. “This is all those bloody robbers left me!” He gestured towards the clothes he was wearing.

Mrs. Fleet looked him up and down. “A pirate costume?”

“Pirate costume?” Draco looked at her incredulously. “How dare you?! This is no pirate costume! This is the Malfoy family’s trademark formal and even carries the Malfoy family crest! It’s a tradition passed down from generation to generation. Something a peasant like you would never understand.”

“Well tell the Malfoy family that their trademark formal looks like a pirate costume,” she said. He wondered if her face was incapable of registering any human emotion. “Your three days are up.”

“I was here earlier when you said that.”

“So you know that I’m here to kick your arse out into the street.”

“No, please, just a bit more time.”

“One hour.”

“One hour? I can’t even get my hair fixed in one hour!”

“You haven’t paid me for three months now Mr. Martin, you should be glad I haven’t called the police. One hour.”

Draco hung his head, staring down the floor, shuffling his feet, as if trying to shake off the dust from his shoes. He was hoping to look pitiful and helpless.

“Nice try. One hour.” Mrs. Fleet turned her back to him and walked away.

“Nice fucking try Malfoy,” he said under his breath. He shut the door and walked back to his earlier spot on the floor, legs drawn-out underneath the table.

He pondered for a moment if he had made a mistake in quitting his job at McDonald’s. Maybe he would still have somewhere to live. But he couldn’t stand the heat; it wasn’t like summer heat, breathing and free. It was contained heat, like being stuck in a steel cubicle with three hundred people breathing hot air all over you. Nor could he stand the stench of greasy food. It was much too proletarian for his taste. He would rather live in the streets than spend one more minute in the perky, commercial hellhole.

He raised the rum to his mouth to take another drink. Two pathetic beads glided down his tongue. He sat up, his forehead a finger away from the tabletop. “I’m homeless and there is no more rum.” He hurled the bottle against the wall to his right. It met the thin wooden walls with a clang and the black glass clattered onto the floor in a thousand tiny pieces.

Draco got up and out the flat. There was nothing for him here. As he went down the old stone steps of the building he looked back and barked, “I don’t need your one hour you old hag!”

~~~~~oOo~~~~~

He’d been walking the wet and dark streets of London for approximately one hour. The lamp posts flickered idly, even they were ready to sleep. He was tired and cold and not having more rum to cure headache rum caused was very painful, as painful as being thumped several times with a mallet. He turned a corner.

It was definitely a change of scenery. He could see the billboard sign bathed in neon lights standing on the rooftop of the building. Lights forming a definite cylinder flashed onto a throng of people lining up towards the door of the establishment. It was one of those cheeky clubs where all the women’s bums hung out of their skirts and all the men were bisexual. It was another place in the muggle world that Draco couldn’t stand.

He passed through the crowd, all dressed in shiny glittery outfits. He was pretty certain he’d be glowing himself once he got out. He shook his arm out of a blond girl’s reach; she was begging him to walk in with her. He was about to pull away when a nasal voice in an Irish accent from above the crowd yelled, “Hey you, in the pirate costume! Come here!”

Draco wheeled around to see a man wearing matching red jogging pants and a sweatshirt looking as if he’d go straight to the gym to teach Aerobics 101 after his bouncing stint here, beckoning him to come over. Draco looked over his shoulder to make sure there was no one else in a pirate costume.

“Yes, you,” the man mouthed to him.

Draco walked up to the makeshift rostrum the man was standing on. He could feel jealous stares boring a hole down his back, and he was pretty sure the blond girl from earlier was mentally clawing her nails on his face.

“Wicked get-up!” the man told him.

“This isn’t a pirate costume,” Draco explained.

The man ignored him. Instead he shoved several stubs of shimmering purple cardboard onto Draco’s hands.

“What’re these for?” Draco asked, looking peculiarly at the paper.

The man looked at him as if Draco was asking “What is a loo?”

“Free drinks.”

“Like rum?”

“Yes, rum, beer, whatever you want. Just go through that door there and walk to the bar. What a queer boy you are, good thing you’re pretty.”

Draco nodded and walked in the door. “Free rum,” he thought, “Well fancy that, I now like one thing in the muggle world.”

Inside was not as well-lit as it was outside. The black vinyl floor was interrupted by several square silver metals every foot or so. The white lights peeked from behind dense red glass. He could only see his way through the glistening sweat of the crowd. The sounds were so loud that he could barely hear the music, just a series of drumbeats that pounded near his heart.

He searched around for where the bar was. He should’ve known it was where the crowd was too. He fought his way past a group of giggling girls shaking their behinds to the music. He was about to reach for an empty chair when a hand grabbed his wrist. The hand wheeled him around; it belonged to a redhead girl with a glittering star sticker on her upper left cheek. She was about his height, maybe even taller and wearing an orange leather dress.

“Dance with me!” she yelled over the music.

Draco didn’t hear what she said exactly but he figured it had something to do with taking him away from the rum. “I’m here for the rum!”

“What?”

“I’m here for the rum!”

“You want to buy me rum?”

“No! I want rum for myself! Not you!”

“You can get that later! Dance with me first!”

Draco waved his hands frantically across his chest. “No thanks! I can’t dance!”

But the girl was persistent. Pulling him farther from the bar, she wrapped her arms around his neck and began to grind her hips downwards. It wasn’t that he didn’t like women throwing themselves at him. It validated his claim that he was beautiful and irresistible. It was just the actual throwing that he didn’t like.

He yanked his neck away from her grasp, wrestling her Koala-like hug from himself first. The girl looked as if he had just insulted her.

Draco sighed. “I’m sorry.” She took it the wrong way and was about to throw her arms around him again. “No!” Draco ejaculated, “Stay!”

He walked backwards, away from her as she just stood there dumbfounded. He thought he was home free when his back bumped into something. Or someone. He turned around to see two men who seemed to have come straight out off a “Mister Universe” pageant, their biceps bulging menacingly at him.

Draco was quick to apologize but the two had other thoughts in mind.

“You don’t like that girl?” asked the shorter one on the right wearing a black muscle shirt. Whoever invented muscle shirts was seriously mental.

“Who?”

“That girl, in the orange dress, you don’t like her?” asked his companion.

“Oh no! No! She’s all yours, if you want her,” Draco offered.

The shorter one grunted, “That girl’s our sister.”

Draco gulped, he could feel the rum rising from his stomach. “Well, rest assured, I wish nothing to do with your sister.”

“Why? She’s not good enough for you?”

Draco let out a high note from his nose. “Of course not! She’s a fine young lady.”

“You think our sister’s not good enough. You think she’s a tramp. I’ll show you little punk!” With that the shorter of the muscle twins punched his stomach. Yes, the rum was definitely coming up now.

The taller one struck one down the back of his neck. Draco fell face-forward. He had to squeeze his eyes. His mouth smacked the floor as blood came spurting out of his lips and down his throat. He could hear the red head girl shrieking in the background. “Derek! Stop it! Hansel! Put him down!”

It was only then that he realized that he was approximately six feet from the ground. “Let’s take the trash outside!” he could hear his carrier say.

They whirled around and he was led towards the door. Not the one he came through; a smaller one just behind the bar, made of grimy metal.

He was thrown down several garbage bags. He coughed at the reek that met his nose. A mix of rotten fish, used socks and his own smell some seven days of not bathing. He felt like a rundown potato sack. He pleaded for them to just leave him alone, not minding that they took his stubs of free rum. He squinted to see either Derek or Hansel, he couldn’t really tell, preparing to land another jab at his face.

He didn’t have the strength to meet the punch or close his eyes. He just waited for it to land. Then with the suddenness of a comet crashing into the earth’s atmosphere, a blue light struck one of the muscle twins. Another blue light followed, hitting the other man. The two landed in a heap, as though they were a pair of copulating wrestlers, about five yards away from him.

Draco searched for the source of the light. It was from a hooded figure in scarlet robes “Quidditch robes,” he thought. The shadow still had his bare hand stretched out in front of him. He could not be mistaken, for he knew that hand as if it were his own. For years he had watched it, admired it, loathed it, and fought against it.

“Potter!”