A Very Dursley Lockdown

Chapter 3: About That Cupboard

23 June 2020. 7:34 a.m.

His daughter blinked her huge, brown puppy eyes at him. "But Daddy!" she wailed. "You're supposed to be in bed! We were going to bring you breakfast!"

"You could pretend this table is a bed," Dudley said. He put his head down on the table and let out a snore.

She and her brother both laughed, then wailed, "Noooo! Go back to bed! It's meant to be a surprise!"

Dudley flopped heavier on the table, letting his arm drop to his side. His children started pounding him. He pretended to awaken with a jerk of surprise. "Wot is this? When did my bed get so hard?"

"Get in BED, Dad, it's not FUNNY!"

Dudley staggered around the house imitating a cartoon version of a sleepwalker until his children managed to herd him into his bed.

_______________

August 1997.

"It was cozy," Petunia was saying, with that little sniff she let out when upset. "He loved it. Always kept crawling into it and giggling to hide. And he hadn't slept there for years, anyway."

"Quite right," Vernon nodded, vigorously. His fingers were twitching, which Dudley knew from playing poker with Dad and Aunt Marge was one of Dad's many tells.

"The boy loved that cupboard," he went on. "Practically begged to sleep in it." His fingers twitched some more.

Dudley always had a harder time reading Mum. She had only been willing to play poker once every few years or so, because she hated all the peanut shells and dust that spilled on the table, and the way Aunt Marge let her chips get a bit slipshod, and of course, Ripper's drool. But when she played, Mum tended to win, raking in chips that she quickly stacked into neatly arranged piles.

Perhaps, thought Dudley, that's the real reason Mum didn't play – maybe Aunt Marge and Dad didn't like being shown up.

Aunt Marge always let on that she thought Mum a bit weak and silly for her brother.

Mum would flinch when Ripper barked, and her voice got squeaky rather a lot.

But you never really knew with Mum.

There was a lot she'd managed to keep to herself over the years.

Whether she was holding a full house or high ace, or whether Harry had really slept in the cupboard because he just adored the way the light filtered through the slats – you could never quite tell with Mum.

Dad, on the other hand...

He was definitely lying.

Dudley tuned out the conversation between Hestia and his parents. It was about Harry's early childhood, which Dudley only vaguely remembered.

Dudley tried to remember his life in the early 80's, before things had got weird.

His memory filled with pictures of toys, his first Atari, the fun way his scissors gouged up his desk in school, that odd gummy feeling of paste between his fingers. The paste was interesting, because if you tried to get it off while it was wet, it made a huge mess, but if he let it dry, he could roll it off in little bits and scuff it into the carpet. What color was that carpet, anyway? Blue?

He wondered if after all this was done, if he should go back to the school and see if the same carpet was still there. Cheap bastards probably hadn't changed a thing.