tales from the garden

It was a warm summer night, so I went to WH Smiths at midnight. I'd never done it before, but I figured I'd do it this time because it was the last book and it felt like a special occasion. I was also on a special mission to snag a copy for my then-boyfriend's mother*, who was in her seventies and as feverishly invested in the series as anyone.

There were little kids dressed as wizards running all up and down the high street, mums calling them to heel in the long queue that snaked almost down to the bank. It was a carnival atmosphere come early, fancy dress and sugar highs, up past their bedtimes. Some of the children were so little they might have been new to the concept of midnight itself, all of their other midnights spent in colic or teething pain they were too tiny to articulate yet.

And there were adults, adults like me, over thirty. I clocked one of them walking down towards the end of the queue and stopped her. It was one of my best friends from primary school. There had been four of us in those days, before we all got split up to go to four different middle schools, she to the convent school and me to some soulless fucking dump that functioned as a sort of reeducation camp for future advertising executives. She'd struggled even at primary school because of severe undiagnosed dyslexia, whereas I was the teachers' darling. Despite our mirror opposite treatment we'd always gravitated towards each other, probably because we were both imaginative and mischievous kids. The only difference was that she lacked the same facility with reading and writing as I did, but she was - and still is - one of the brightest and most intellectually curious people I've ever known.

So I surreptitiously scooched her into the queue beside me, and we chatted about this and that. She was seeing someone new. She was thinking about learning Mandarin. Did I remember how we used to hang out inside the built in wardrobe in her bedroom with our ears pressed against the walls, trying to hear evidence of Narnia? Did I remember - deep inside that wardrobe - the remnants of the old teddybear patterned wallpaper where we drew speech bubbles with rude words coming out of the teddy bears' mouths?

"We tore out that wardrobe and rebuilt it," she said. "And the graffiti was still there. I knew it was you, because all of the swear words were spelled correctly."

"Oh my God," I said. "We were such horrible little girls."

She didn't laugh with me. "No, we weren't," she said. "We were normal."

It caught me off guard, the way she said it. It was an abrupt shutdown, and it had the tone of something that had come from a therapist.

And it was also very true.

We'd always been the naughty ones, you see. When I said there were four of us there were, but we were the two who stuck like glue. We were always talking about poo, plotting escapes, speculating about the sex lives of our Barbie dolls. We made potions in the basement, and rode the spinning seesaw contraption in her back garden until we were literally sick. (To this day she remains the reason I cannot touch cottage cheese.) When we went to the beach we would pelt piles of horseshit with sand until we could stand to touch it, then over it we'd built a sandcastle so complicated and beautiful that the boy who was kicking over everyone's sandcastles wouldn't be able to resist it.

We were so normal, and both of us, in our own ways, had been told we were not. She was 'stupid and lazy'. I was oversensitive and precocious, and we'd both been picked on and picked out by adults who should have known better.

So it made sense, didn't it, that we'd be here? At a book launch for a book about a child. Like me, Harry Potter had borne the weight of too much expectation. Like her he'd been bullied and brutalised by teachers. "You know me," she said. "I hate reading. Takes me ages, but I read Harry Potter. Then I read the next one. And the next. And now I'm going to finish the series."

In front of us in the queue was a family, a mother with a snoozing toddler in a pushchair, a little girl of about eight, and a boy of maybe fourteen or so. He was talking to his younger sister. "I was about your age when I read the first one, so maybe you can start there. Think this one might be a bit scary for you, but when you're my age..."

Handing it down. Healing. Doing a favour for someone we loved. That was us, at the midnight book launch.

I think about that night sometimes, when I think about who Joanne could have been. And who she chose to become.