‘Hi, Percy,’ said Harry.
‘Oh, hello, Harry,’ said Percy. ‘I was wondering who was making all the noise. I’m trying to work in here, you know – I’ve got a report to finish for the office – and it’s rather difficult to concentrate when people keep thundering up and down the stairs.’
‘We’re not thundering,’ said Ron irritably. ‘We’re walking. Sorry if we’ve disturbed the top-secret workings of the Ministry of Magic.’
‘What are you working on?’ said Harry.
‘A report for the Department of International Magical Co-operation,’ said Percy smugly. ‘We’re trying to standardise cauldron thickness. Some of these foreign imports are just a shade too thin – leakages have been increasing at a rate of almost three per cent a year —’
‘That’ll change the world, that report will,’ said Ron. ‘Front page of the Daily Prophet, I expect, cauldron leaks.’
Percy went slightly pink.
‘You might sneer, Ron,’ he said heatedly, ‘but unless some sort of international law is imposed we might well find the market flooded with flimsy, shallow-bottomed products which seriously endanger —’
‘Yeah, yeah, all right,’ said Ron, and he started off upstairs again. Percy slammed his bedroom door shut. As Harry, Hermione and Ginny followed Ron up three more flights of stairs, shouts from the kitchen below echoed up to them. It sounded as though Mr Weasley had told Mrs Weasley about the toffees.
The room at the top of the house where Ron slept looked much as it had done the last time that Harry had come to stay; the same posters of Ron’s favourite Quidditch team, the Chudley Cannons, were whirling and waving on the walls and sloping ceiling, and the fishtank on the window-sill which had previously held frog-spawn now contained one extremely large frog. Ron’s old rat, Scabbers, was here no more, but instead there was the tiny grey owl that had delivered Ron’s letter to Harry in Privet Drive. It was hopping up and down in a small cage, and twittering madly.
‘Shut up, Pig,’ said Ron, edging his way between two of the four beds that had been squeezed into the room. ‘Fred and George are in here with us, because Bill and Charlie are in their room,’ he told Harry. ‘Percy gets to keep his room all to himself because he’s got to work.’
‘Er – why are you calling that owl Pig?’ Harry asked Ron.
‘Because he’s being stupid,’ said Ginny. ‘Its proper name is Pigwidgeon.’
‘Yeah, and that’s not a stupid name at all,’ said Ron sarcastically. ‘Ginny named him,’ he explained to Harry. ‘She reckons it’s sweet. And I tried to change it, but it was too late, he won’t answer to anything else. So now he’s Pig. I’ve got to keep him up here because he annoys Errol and Hermes. He annoys me, too, come to that.’
Pigwidgeon zoomed happily around his cage, hooting shrilly. Harry knew Ron too well to take him seriously. He had moaned continually about his old rat Scabbers, but had been most upset when Hermione’s cat, Crookshanks, appeared to have eaten him.
‘Where’s Crookshanks?’ Harry asked Hermione now.
‘Out in the garden, I expect,’ she said. ‘He likes chasing gnomes, he’s never seen any before.’
‘Percy’s enjoying work, then?’ said Harry, sitting down on one of the beds and watching the Chudley Cannons zooming in and out of the posters on the ceiling.
‘Enjoying it?’ said Ron darkly. ‘I don’t reckon he’d come home if Dad didn’t make him. He’s obsessed. Just don’t get him onto the subject of his boss. According to Mr Crouch … as I was saying to Mr Crouch … Mr Crouch is of the opinion … Mr Crouch was telling me … They’ll be announcing their engagement any day now.’
‘Have you had a good summer, Harry?’ said Hermione. ‘Did you get our food parcels and everything?’
‘Yeah, thanks a lot,’ said Harry. ‘They saved my life, those cakes.’
‘And have you heard from —?’ Ron began, but at a look from Hermione he fell silent. Harry knew Ron had been about to ask about Sirius. Ron and Hermione had been so deeply involved in helping Sirius escape from the Ministry of Magic that they were almost as concerned about Harry’s godfather as he was. However, discussing him in front of Ginny was a bad idea. Nobody but themselves and Professor Dumbledore knew about how Sirius had escaped, or believed in his innocence.
‘I think they’ve stopped arguing,’ said Hermione, to cover the awkward moment, because Ginny was looking curiously from Ron to Harry. ‘Shall we go down and help your mum with dinner?’
‘Yeah, all right,’ said Ron. The four of them left Ron’s room and went back downstairs, to find Mrs Weasley alone in the kitchen, looking extremely bad-tempered.
‘We’re eating out in the garden,’ she said when they came in. ‘There’s just not room for eleven people in here. Could you take the plates outside, girls? Bill and Charlie are setting up the tables. Knives and forks, please, you two,’ she said to Ron and Harry, pointing her wand a little more vigorously than she had intended at a pile of potatoes in the sink, which shot out of their skins so fast that they ricocheted off the walls and ceilings.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she snapped, now directing her wand at a dustpan, which hopped off the side and started skating across the floor, scooping up the potatoes. ‘Those two!’ she burst out savagely, now pulling pots and pans out of a cupboard, and Harry knew she meant Fred and George. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to them, I really don’t. No ambition, unless you count making as much trouble as they possibly can …’
She slammed a large copper saucepan down on the kitchen table and began to wave her wand around inside it. A creamy sauce poured from the wand tip as she stirred.
‘It’s not as though they haven’t got brains,’ she continued irritably, taking the saucepan over to the stove and lighting it with a further poke of her wand, ‘but they’re wasting them, and unless they pull themselves together soon, they’ll be in real trouble. I’ve had more owls from Hogwarts about them than the rest put together. If they carry on the way they’re going, they’ll end up in front of the Improper Use of Magic Office.’
Mrs Weasley jabbed her wand at the cutlery drawer, which shot open. Harry and Ron both jumped out of the way as several knives soared out of it, flew across the kitchen and began chopping the potatoes, which had just been tipped back into the sink by the dustpan.
‘I don’t know where we went wrong with them,’ said Mrs Weasley, putting down her wand and starting to pull out still more saucepans. ‘It’s been the same for years, one thing after another, and they won’t listen to – OH, NOT AGAIN!’
She had picked up her wand from the table, and it had emitted a loud squeak and turned into a giant rubber mouse.
‘One of their fake wands again!’ she shouted. ‘How many times have I told those two not to leave them lying around?’
She grabbed her real wand and turned around to find that the sauce on the stove was smoking.
‘C’mon,’ Ron said hurriedly to Harry, seizing a handful of cutlery from the open drawer, ‘let’s go and help Bill and Charlie.’
They left Mrs Weasley, and headed out of the back door into the yard.
They had only gone a few paces when Hermione’s bandy-legged, ginger cat Crookshanks came pelting out of the garden, bottle-brush tail held high in the air, chasing what looked like a muddy potato on legs. Harry recognised it instantly as a gnome. Barely ten inches high, its horny little feet pattered very fast as it sprinted across the yard and dived headlong into one of the wellington boots that lay scattered around the door. Harry could hear the gnome giggling madly as Crookshanks inserted a paw into the boot, trying to reach it. Meanwhile,