The Girl in the Robe Shop

Madam Malkin was a short, comfortable witch done up in purple from head to foot.

“Hogwarts, dear?” she said, before Harry had got his mouth open. “Just a minute. There’s a young lady being tended to. I’ll be right with you.”

At the back a girl was standing on a footstool while a second witch knelt at her feet, pinning up the hem of a long black robe. Harry stood among the cloaks and waited. When Madam Malkin came back for him, she stood him on the next footstool along, dropped a robe over his head, and set to work with her mouth full of pins.

Harry looked sideways.

She was about his own age and exactly his height, with a pale, pointed face and hair so fair it was nearly white, held back off her forehead with a band of dark velvet. There were tiny diamond studs in her ears. Her eyes were grey, and so light that Harry, who drew eyes, couldn’t think what he would have drawn them with. She held herself straight. She looked like the girl on the lid of the tin of shortbread that Aunt Petunia kept for visitors, which Harry had never been allowed to open.

She had looked him over as he came in, and Harry was suddenly, horribly aware of what she must have seen: his glasses, mended across the nose with a thick wad of tape, and the collar of Dudley’s enormous shirt poking up over the neck of the robe. Her eyes stayed longest on his hair. Aunt Petunia had tried to give him a bowl cut, and all of it had stood up again except the front, which Hagrid had flattened and which now hung nearly to his glasses.

“Hello,” she said to his reflection in the long mirror, without turning round. “Hogwarts as well?”

“Yes,” said Harry.

“Charmed,” she said coldly, and then the rest came out in a rush. “Are you alone? Father’s buying my books next door, and Mother has gone ahead to the wand shop.” Her voice was clear and cool and carried across the shop, and she said everything as if she were reading out a list. “I’ve told them I want a new broom before we go home. I had one for my birthday, but there has been a better one out since, so that one is no use. First-years aren’t allowed them, but I simply must have one. I’ll find a way to bring it in. How about you? Have you got a broom yet?” she asked him.

And that was that. It was Dudley. It was Dudley on the morning of his birthday, counting up his presents in front of his parents and finding them one short. Harry stopped looking at her and started listening, which was worse.

“No.”

“Do you play Quidditch?”

“No,” said Harry, who had no idea what it was.

“I do.” She lifted her chin. “I’m a Seeker, really, though I can play Chaser if I must. I can very nearly do a Wronski Feint. They will have to put me in my House team.” She raised an eyebrow at him in the mirror. “Do you know which House you’ll be in?”

“No,” said Harry, who had lost track of all of it some while ago. He was beginning to feel that he only owned the one word.

“Nobody can be sure before the Sorting, of course. But I’ll be in Slytherin. My entire family is Slytherin. Imagine being put in Hufflepuff.” She made a face. “I’d rather go to Durmstrang.”

“Mm,” said Harry. He’d started a list in his head of things to ask Hagrid, and it was growing by the minute.

“Good gracious,” she said, without lowering her voice. “Look at that man.”

Harry looked. Hagrid was outside, filling most of the window and beaming, with an enormous ice-cream held up in each hand. He couldn’t come in with those.

“That’s Hagrid,” said Harry, glad to know something at last, and pleased about the ice-cream. “He works at Hogwarts.”

“Oh, him. He’s a servant, isn’t he?”

“He’s the gamekeeper.”

“Yes, same thing,” she scoffed. “They say he’s practically wild. He lives in a hut in the grounds, and drinks, and every so often he tries to do magic and sets his own bed afire.”

“I think he’s brilliant,” said Harry quietly.

She turned her head and looked at him properly for the first time. Harry got the feeling that people didn’t often tell her what they thought.

“Do you?” she said. “Why is he with you? Where are your mother and father?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh, sorry.” She stepped over it the way you’d step over a puddle. “They were our sort, though? Weren’t they?”

“They were a witch and a wizard. If that’s what you mean.”

“Good,” she said, nodding. “There are far too many of the other kind now. One can always tell. They hold a wand like a spoon. Half of them didn’t know there was such a place as Hogwarts until an owl turned up.”

Harry, who hadn’t known there was any such place himself until last night, kept his eyes on the wall and said nothing.

“It ought to be for families who have always gone.” She held out her arms for the witch to check the sleeves, without looking down at her. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“That’s you done, my dear,” said the second witch, and luckily for Harry it was the girl she meant.

The girl stepped down off her footstool. Harry had never been so glad to get to the end of a conversation.

“I expect I shall see you at school,” she said. It didn’t seem to bother her that he hadn’t answered, and she looked pleased with herself.

At the door she looked back and gave him a brief smile. The bell jangled behind her, and she swept past the giant at the window without a glance, and off up the street towards the wand shop.