The Three Wishes

Harry Potter spent his last night of being ten on the floor of a shack on a rock in the middle of the sea, and as far as Uncle Vernon was concerned, it was all Harry’s fault. It was Tuesday. Tomorrow would be Wednesday, and Wednesday was Harry’s eleventh birthday, though he didn’t suppose anybody else in the shack had remembered.

It had all started with a letter. Nobody had ever written to Harry before, and this one came in a fat envelope the colour of an old playing card, addressed in green ink to Mr H. Potter, The Cupboard under the Stairs. That was where he slept. Uncle Vernon took it off him at breakfast, read one line, and went the colour of a week-old dishcloth. That same night Harry was moved upstairs into Dudley’s second bedroom, to sleep among all the things Dudley had broken, and the next morning’s letter was addressed to The Smallest Bedroom.

After that, Uncle Vernon went to war. He nailed up the letter box, so the letters slid in under the door. He boarded up the doors, so they came in through the lavatory window instead. On Saturday the milkman handed two dozen eggs in through the living-room window, with a letter rolled up inside every one. On Sunday, when there wasn’t even any post, forty of them came shooting down the kitchen chimney at once. Harry wasn’t allowed to open any of them. Uncle Vernon locked him in the car while the others packed, and then drove all day, and in the morning the owner of a gloomy hotel came over to their table with something like a hundred letters in his arms, all addressed to Room 17.

They didn’t try another hotel. They spent the night in the car, in a lay-by, and in the morning Uncle Vernon drove into the middle of a wood and straight out again, then into a ploughed field, then halfway across a bridge, looking for somewhere. By Tuesday afternoon Dudley had missed nine of his television programmes and complained he had never gone so long without a proper meal. Then Uncle Vernon found the rock. Nobody could deliver a letter there, and he was so pleased with himself that he bought everybody a tin of sardines. An old man with terrible breath had rowed them across in the rain. The shack had two rooms and stank of seaweed, and the wind came straight in through the walls. Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon took the bed, Dudley took the sofa, and Harry got the floor and the thinnest blanket.

All Harry had brought with him was what was in his pockets: a pack of cards gone soft at the corners, a coin, and James and the Giant Peach, which old Mrs Figg from two streets away had given him, and which he’d found under the front seat of the car, where it had lain since the day of the zoo. Everything else was back at Privet Drive: a rubber ball with a piece out of it, a notebook full of eyes drawn in pencil, three library books about the Hardy Boys (long overdue), and, under the mattress where nobody would think to look, three books from a book drive at school and four foam rabbits from a magic set that Dudley had broken. Aunt Petunia couldn’t bear magic. She’d told him so often enough, always in a hiss, and Harry, who had taught himself to bring the nine of hearts to the top of a pack and walk a coin across the backs of his fingers, had always supposed that she meant the tricks.

The storm got worse as the night went on. Harry could not sleep. He lay shivering on his stomach and watched the lighted dial of Dudley’s watch, which was hanging off the edge of the sofa on Dudley’s fat wrist. He walked the coin back and forth on his knuckles. Ten minutes to midnight. Five.

Four minutes. Dudley got a wish every year. You shut your eyes over the candles and you didn’t tell anyone, and then you got a racing bike, which Uncle Vernon had bought the week before, so perhaps it didn’t count. No candles here. No cake. Did it work without a cake? Probably not. Probably it didn’t work with one. Still. Nobody could stop him. And nobody had ever actually said you were only allowed one wish; in stories it was three. Three, then. He resolved not to waste them on the obvious things, like a blanket or the rain to stop. Not on Dudley rolling off the sofa in his sleep, either — tempting, but no. Three proper ones.

He shut his eyes.

I wish I knew what was in that letter.

That one was easy. He had been wishing it all week. Somebody had wanted him to read it badly enough to put it inside an egg.

Two left.

And that was the thing, really, when you thought about it. Somebody had written his name in green ink a hundred times over. They had known about the cupboard, and the smallest bedroom, and a hotel in a town that Uncle Vernon had picked at random, and they had not once given up. Hardly anyone in his life had ever given him the time of day. Dudley and his gang didn’t count; all they ever wanted was to beat him up.

I wish I had friends. He thought it very fast and went straight on, before he could feel stupid about it. One would do. He sent the coin back the other way.

One left. Two minutes. Make it good — not the blanket. He was so cold he could not feel his feet. A minute. He could hear something outside that was not the wind. Thirty seconds. What did he want? He wanted to be anywhere else. He wanted to go straight up through the hole in the roof and out over the sea, where none of them could ever catch him. He had dreamed it once, a long time ago, and it was his favourite daydream. Ten seconds. Hurry up —

I wish I could fly out of h —

BOOM.

The whole shack shivered. Harry scrambled on to his side, staring at the door, and the coin rolled off into the dark. Somebody was outside, knocking — politely? — to come in.