Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (71 page)

‘Maybe not,’ she said darkly, returning to her translation, ‘but at least my happiness doesn’t depend on Ron’s goalkeeping ability.’

And though Harry would rather have jumped off the Astronomy Tower than admit it to her, by the time he had watched the game the following Saturday he would have given any number of Galleons not to care about Quidditch either.

The very best thing you could say about the match was that it was short; the Gryffindor spectators had to endure only twenty-two minutes of agony. It was hard to say what the worst thing was: Harry thought it was a close-run contest between Ron’s fourteenth failed save, Sloper missing the Bludger but hitting Angelina in the mouth with his bat, and Kirke shrieking and falling backwards off his broom when Zacharias Smith zoomed at him carrying the Quaffle. The miracle was that Gryffindor only lost by ten points: Ginny managed to snatch the Snitch from right under Hufflepuff Seeker Summerby’s nose, so that the final score was two hundred and forty versus two hundred and thirty.

‘Good catch,’ Harry told Ginny back in the common room, where the atmosphere resembled that of a particularly dismal funeral.

‘I was lucky,’ she shrugged. ‘It wasn’t a very fast Snitch and Summerby’s got a cold, he sneezed and closed his eyes at exactly the wrong moment. Anyway, once you’re back on the team –’

‘Ginny, I’ve got a
lifelong
ban.’

‘You’re banned as long as Umbridge is in the school,’ Ginny corrected him. ‘There’s a difference. Anyway, once you’re back, I think I’ll try out for Chaser. Angelina and Alicia are both leaving next year and I prefer goal-scoring to Seeking anyway.’

Harry looked over at Ron, who was hunched in a corner, staring at his knees, a bottle of Butterbeer clutched in his hand.

‘Angelina still won’t let him resign,’ Ginny said, as though reading Harry’s mind. ‘She says she knows he’s got it in him.’

Harry liked Angelina for the faith she was showing in Ron, but at the same time thought it would really be kinder to let him leave the team. Ron had left the pitch to another booming chorus of ‘Weasley is our King’ sung with great gusto by the Slytherins, who were now favourites to win the Quidditch Cup.

Fred and George wandered over.

‘I haven’t even got the heart to take the mickey out of him,’ said Fred, looking over at Ron’s crumpled figure. ‘Mind you … when he missed the fourteenth –’

He made wild motions with his arms as though doing an upright doggy-paddle.

‘– well, I’ll save it for parties, eh?’

Ron dragged himself up to bed shortly after this. Out of respect for his feelings, Harry waited a while before going up to the dormitory himself, so that Ron could pretend to be asleep if he wanted to. Sure enough, when Harry finally entered the room Ron was snoring a little too loudly to be entirely plausible.

Harry got into bed, thinking about the match. It had been immensely frustrating watching from the sidelines. He was quite impressed by Ginny’s performance but he knew if he had been playing he could have caught the Snitch sooner … there had been a moment when it had been fluttering near Kirke’s ankle; if Ginny hadn’t hesitated, she might have been able to scrape a win for Gryffindor.

Umbridge had been sitting a few rows below Harry and Hermione. Once or twice she had turned squatly in her seat to look at him, her wide toad’s mouth stretched in what he thought had been a gloating smile. The memory of it made him feel hot with anger as he lay there in the dark. After a few minutes, however, he remembered that he was supposed to be emptying his mind of all emotion before he slept, as Snape kept instructing him at the end of every Occlumency lesson.

He tried for a moment or two, but the thought of Snape on top of memories of Umbridge merely increased his sense of grumbling resentment and he found himself focusing instead on how much he loathed the pair of them. Slowly, Ron’s snores died away, to be replaced by the sound of deep, slow breathing. It took Harry much longer to get to sleep; his body was tired, but it took his brain a long time to close down.

He dreamed that Neville and Professor Sprout were waltzing around the Room of Requirement while Professor McGonagall played the bagpipes. He watched them happily for a while, then decided to go and find the other members of the DA.

But when he left the room he found himself facing, not the tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, but a torch burning in its bracket on a stone wall. He turned his head slowly to the left. There, at the far end of the windowless passage, was a plain, black door.

He walked towards it with a sense of mounting excitement. He had the strangest feeling that this time he was going to get lucky at last, and find the way to open it … he was feet from it, and saw with a leap of excitement that there was a glowing strip of faint blue light down the right-hand side … the door was ajar … he stretched out his hand to push it wide and –

Ron gave a loud, rasping, genuine snore and Harry awoke abruptly with his right hand stretched in front of him in the darkness, to open a door that was hundreds of miles away. He let it fall with a feeling of mingled disappointment and guilt. He knew he should not have seen the door, but at the same time felt so consumed with curiosity about what was behind it that he could not help feeling annoyed with Ron … if only he could have saved his snore for just another minute.

*

They entered the Great Hall for breakfast at exactly the same moment as the post owls on Monday morning. Hermione was not the only person eagerly awaiting her
Daily Prophet
: nearly everyone was eager for more news about the escaped Death Eaters, who, despite many reported sightings, had still not been caught. She gave the delivery owl a Knut and unfolded the newspaper eagerly while Harry helped himself to orange juice; as he had only received one note during the entire year, he was sure, when the first owl landed with a thud in front of him, that it had made a mistake.

‘Who’re you after?’ he asked it, languidly removing his orange juice from underneath its beak and leaning forwards to see the recipient’s name and address:

Frowning, he made to take the letter from the owl, but before he could do so, three, four, five more owls had fluttered down beside it and were jockeying for position, treading in the butter and knocking over the salt as each one attempted to give him their letter first.

‘What’s going on?’ Ron asked in amazement, as the whole of Gryffindor table leaned forwards to watch and another seven owls landed amongst the first ones, screeching, hooting and flapping their wings.

‘Harry!’ said Hermione breathlessly, plunging her hands into the feathery mass and pulling out a screech owl bearing a long, cylindrical package. ‘I think I know what this means – open this one first!’

Harry ripped off the brown packaging. Out rolled a tightly furled copy of the March edition of
The Quibbler.
He unrolled it to see his own face grinning sheepishly at him from the front cover. In large red letters across this picture were the words:

HARRY POTTER SPEAKS OUT AT LAST: THE TRUTH ABOUT HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED AND THE NIGHT I SAW HIM RETURN

‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Luna, who had drifted over to the Gryffindor table and now squeezed herself on to the bench between Fred and Ron. ‘It came out yesterday, I asked Dad to send you a free copy. I expect all these,’ she waved a hand at the assembled owls still scrabbling around on the table in front of Harry, ‘are letters from readers.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Hermione eagerly. ‘Harry, d’you mind if we –?’

‘Help yourself,’ said Harry, feeling slightly bemused.

Ron and Hermione both started ripping open envelopes.

‘This one’s from a bloke who thinks you’re off your rocker,’ said Ron, glancing down his letter. ‘Ah well …’

‘This woman recommends you try a good course of Shock Spells at St Mungo’s,’ said Hermione, looking disappointed and crumpling up a second.

‘This one looks OK, though,’ said Harry slowly, scanning a long letter from a witch in Paisley. ‘Hey, she says she believes me!’

‘This one’s in two minds,’ said Fred, who had joined in the letter-opening with enthusiasm. ‘Says you don’t come across as a mad person, but he really doesn’t want to believe You-Know-Who’s back so he doesn’t know what to think now. Blimey, what a waste of parchment.’

‘Here’s another one you’ve convinced, Harry!’ said Hermione excitedly. ‘
Having read your side of the story, I am forced to the conclusion that the
Daily Prophet
has treated you very unfairly … little though I want to think that He Who Must Not Be Named has returned, I am forced to accept that you are telling the truth …
Oh, this is wonderful!’

‘Another one who thinks you’re barking,’ said Ron, throwing a crumpled letter over his shoulder ‘… but this one says you’ve got her converted and she now thinks you’re a real hero – she’s put in a photograph, too – wow!’

‘What is going on here?’ said a falsely sweet, girlish voice.

Harry looked up with his hands full of envelopes. Professor Umbridge was standing behind Fred and Luna, her bulging toad’s eyes scanning the mess of owls and letters on the table in front of Harry. Behind her he saw many of the students watching them avidly.

‘Why have you got all these letters, Mr Potter?’ she asked slowly.

‘Is that a crime now?’ said Fred loudly. ‘Getting mail?’

‘Be careful, Mr Weasley, or I shall have to put you in detention,’ said Umbridge. ‘Well, Mr Potter?’

Harry hesitated, but he did not see how he could keep what he had done quiet; it was surely only a matter of time before a copy of
The Quibbler
came to Umbridge’s attention.

‘People have written to me because I gave an interview,’ said Harry. ‘About what happened to me last June.’

For some reason he glanced up at the staff table as he said this. Harry had the strangest feeling that Dumbledore had been watching him a second before, but when he looked towards the Headmaster he seemed to be absorbed in conversation with Professor Flitwick.

‘An interview?’ repeated Umbridge, her voice thinner and higher than ever. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean a reporter asked me questions and I answered them,’ said Harry. ‘Here –’

And he threw the copy of
The Quibbler
to her. She caught it and stared down at the cover. Her pale, doughy face turned an ugly, patchy violet.

‘When did you do this?’ she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

‘Last Hogsmeade weekend,’ said Harry.

She looked up at him, incandescent with rage, the magazine shaking in her stubby fingers.

‘There will be no more Hogsmeade trips for you, Mr Potter,’ she whispered. ‘How you dare … how you could …’ She took a deep breath. ‘I have tried again and again to teach you not to tell lies. The message, apparently, has still not sunk in. Fifty points from Gryffindor and another week’s worth of detentions.’

She stalked away, clutching
The Quibbler
to her chest, the eyes of many students following her.

By mid-morning enormous signs had been put up all over the school, not just on house noticeboards, but in the corridors and classrooms too.

BY ORDER OF THE HIGH INQUISITOR OF HOGWARTS

Any student found in possession of the magazine
The Quibbler
will be expelled.

The above is in accordance with Educational Decree Number Twenty-seven.

Signed: Dolores Jane Umbridge, High Inquisitor

For some reason, every time Hermione caught sight of one of these signs she beamed with pleasure.

‘What exactly are you so happy about?’ Harry asked her.

‘Oh, Harry, don’t you see?’ Hermione breathed. ‘If she could have done one thing to make absolutely sure that every single person in this school will read your interview, it was banning it!’

And it seemed that Hermione was quite right. By the end of the day, though Harry had not seen so much as a corner of
The Quibbler
anywhere in the school, the whole place seemed to be quoting the interview to each other. Harry heard them whispering about it as they queued up outside classes, discussing it over lunch and in the back of lessons, while Hermione even reported that every occupant of the cubicles in the girls’ toilets had been talking about it when she nipped in there before Ancient Runes.

‘Then they spotted me, and obviously they know I know you, so they bombarded me with questions,’ Hermione told Harry, her eyes shining, ‘and Harry, I think they believe you, I really do, I think you’ve finally got them convinced!’

Meanwhile, Professor Umbridge was stalking the school, stopping students at random and demanding that they turn out their books and pockets: Harry knew she was looking for copies of
The Quibbler
, but the students were several steps ahead of her. The pages carrying Harry’s interview had been bewitched to resemble extracts from textbooks if anyone but themselves read it, or else wiped magically blank until they wanted to peruse it again. Soon it seemed that every single person in the school had read it.

The teachers were of course forbidden from mentioning the interview by Educational Decree Number Twenty-six, but they found ways to express their feelings about it all the same. Professor Sprout awarded Gryffindor twenty points when Harry passed her a watering can; a beaming Professor Flitwick pressed a box of squeaking sugar mice on him at the end of Charms, said, ‘Shh!’ and hurried away; and Professor Trelawney broke into hysterical sobs during Divination and announced to the startled class, and a very disapproving Umbridge, that Harry was
not
going to suffer an early death after all, but would live to a ripe old age, become Minister for Magic and have twelve children.

But what made Harry happiest was Cho catching up with him as he was hurrying along to Transfiguration the next day. Before he knew what had happened, her hand was in his and she was breathing in his ear, ‘I’m really, really sorry. That interview was so brave … it made me cry.’