Post by BECCA on Jan 27, 2014 12:49:03 GMT -5
[presto]
twenty one
male
barman
BLOOD STATUS
heterosexual
harry lloyd
jacob nathaniel gullane
 So yeah, this is me. Jake Gullane, school drop-out, teen father, thief, liar, cheat, con-artist, ex-convict... Well, I could carry on, but that's not a pretty list. Say what you want about me though - I can guarantee it's nothing that hasn't been said before. I'm getting my shit sorted now though - I am. I know I've been saying that for a while now, but look at it this way: I’ve been out of prison for over a year, I’ve got a job and a little girl who’s the greatest kid in the world, and who thinks I’m the greatest guy in the world, so I must be doing something right. I'm kind of starting at the wrong end though, aren't I? Sorry, writing things down's never been my strongest point. It's all there in my head, but I'd rather say it than write it. But here goes: I'll start at the beginning and try and stay on track. I was born on a shitty little housing estate in a shitty little town nobody's ever heard of, but it's north of Manchester if that helps. My dad was a security guard in a factory, and my mum was a cleaner at a Primary School. Neither of them got paid much. I'm the youngest - I've got an older sister called Amber, who's a nurse, and an older brother called Dan, who's an attendant at Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station. Obviously, I'm the only one who's a wizard. Mum and Dad split up when I was three, and we kids lived with Mum, though we still saw Dad some weekends. I never registered any of the weird things I could do when I was a kid. Neither did anyone else. I mean, there was this one time when this older boy had been twisting my arm, and then later he fell out of a tree and sprained his ankle, but nobody ever thought that had anything to do with me. And then there was the time when a kid down the street from me got a new bike I really wanted, and it ended up in my dad's shed, but they all just thought I'd nicked it. I did that, you see – nicked stuff. Everyone knew it, and it wasn’t like it was just me who did it. Most of my crowd back then would have if we got the chance - though it was mostly just sweets from the shop, slipped into our pockets. We didn't see any harm in it - it wasn't as if they didn't have enough. I was better at it than most, but we all just thought I was quick fingered. Looking back, it might have been accidental magic that stopped me ever getting caught. I wanted things, see. We didn't have a lot, and I didn't like it - I wanted what I saw other, richer, kids getting. So if I saw a chance, I took it. It was fair, in my head. I took things from people who had more than me - those people who owned the supermarkets, they had loads of money. The time I took the purse out of the open car window... well, that was a big expensive car, and if you're careless enough to leave money on a car seat with the window down, you've obviously got more of it than you need. I tried not to take things from people who had less than me - I wouldn't ever admit it, because I had a tough-guy image to keep up, but upsetting someone who didn't have much themselves made me feel horrible. I remember there was this old lady who lived on our street - she was a bit mad, eccentric I suppose, so we laughed at her behind her back because we were little shits. She had this big toy dog she kept in her window the whole time, looking out like it was a real dog. It was the ugliest thing you've ever seen, but she talked about it like it was real. And I suppose she was probably going a bit senile, because sometimes she used to go to the shops and leave her door open a bit, and one time my friend dared me to go inside and steal the toy dog, so I did. Seemed like a laugh at the time, and we were all pissing ourselves, but then later on I saw her standing on the path in her slippers - it was getting dark and she was just standing there, like she didn't know what to do, and there were tears streaming down her face. I took her dog back to her and said I'd found it in the park, and she wouldn't stop thanking me and hugging me, and I've never felt so guilty. I was known as a trouble maker though. I was little Jake Gullane with the light fingers, who lied as easily as he breathed. I was cheeky and lazy - about my school work at least - but I was bright enough to get by anyway, which annoyed some of my teachers no end. I don't know what it was, but I took things in quickly and remembered them well, and I noticed pretty much everything that went on round me. I was adaptable too, and thought well on my feet, which is what made me such a good liar and thief. If I was interested in something, I'd throw myself into it and work as hard as I could, but generally the only things I was interested in were the ones where I could see some benefit for myself, and that mostly wasn't school work. I don't think most people disliked me though, even my teachers. They probably wanted to kill me sometimes, but I always got the impression most of them though I was okay at heart. Which I was, really. I was cheeky, but not rude - and I always did it with a smile. I was good at making people laugh. I broke rules right, left and centre, and I was in fights pretty often, but I never crossed the line into hurting other people on purpose (unless they hurt me first). And if I was caught breaking rules - which I often was - it never bothered me too much. I'd always admit what I'd done, because I'm pretty honest for a liar, and just take whatever punishment came my way. Arguments and fights were over as soon as they were over with me - I never held onto bad feelings. Then, when I was eleven, everything changed. For people like me, from places like where I grew up, there aren't that many choices. You don't have any money, so you want to make some as soon as possible. That's more of a priority than school, and it's the way things are - it's the way of thinking you grow up with, so it's just part of you. School's just something to get through, and you leave at sixteen, because staying on isn't for people like you. If you're ambitious, or you can't find work, you might go to college and do something practical, or do a course to get your basic skills up. My sister went and did nursing after some foundation thing at college, and that was more academic than most of us went in for. You definitely don't go away to Boarding School - that's for the posh kids, and nobody wants to be like them. And as for magic... well, you learn pretty fast that there's no such thing. So when the weird guy in the crazy clothes turned up on our doorstep and tried to tell my mum I was a wizard, she shut the door in his face. He kept coming back though, and eventually she let him in and listened to him. By the end, she was white and shaking, and had to sit down with a cup of tea. For me, the worst part was that I had to go away to school. I didn't want to go, and first of all I just refused point blank. Then they told me a bit about it, and well... when you're eleven, learning magic seems kind of exciting. So I agreed, even though I knew my friends would rip the piss out of me, which they did. They never really got it - we spread it round that I'd got some sort of scholarship to a school in Scotland, but nobody really understood how I'd managed that, and I think a lot of people thought it was some kind of juvey or something. My mum couldn't afford to pay any fees, of course, but there was a fund available for kids like me, where they paid the fees for us, and even gave us something towards the uniform and books, because those were expensive too. Hogwarts was like a different world, literally. I suppose kids get used to anything though, because I settled in pretty quickly. I was sorted into Ravenclaw - I wasn't surprised because I didn't know anything about the Hogwarts Houses. I think if I'd known Ravenclaw's reputation, I'd have been shocked, because a bookworm was about the last thing I was, and if they were expecting me to be a good student because of the house I was sorted into, they could think again. But if I've learnt anything over the years, it's that stereotypes don't work. There are all kinds of people in each of the houses, so there's no point judging anyone on it. I was a Ravenclaw because when it came to knowledge I was interested in, I absorbed it like a sponge, and remembered it. I was always looking for new things and new information that could be useful. I had friends in various different houses though - it never mattered to me. I wasn't really that interested in all the competition between the houses - I did play Quidditch (I was the Ravenclaw Seeker for four years) because it was fun, and a bit like riding a bike, and of course I wanted to win at it, but other than that, I didn't give a shit about house rivalry. It was as if I had two different lives - Hogwarts and home. I got used to that, but it wasn't completely easy. The people I was friends with at Hogwarts were mostly so different from the ones at home, and they didn't get what it was like to grow up like I did, with no money and no expectations. And yet in some ways they were no different at all. I never let the two worlds mix though. My Muggle friends never knew I was a wizard, and I didn't really talk about my Muggle life with my Hogwarts friends. They never met each other, and that was the way I liked it. I could talk some shit about how it shows I like to compartmentalise my life or something, or that I was secretly ashamed of being Muggleborn or poor (which would be bullshit, because I'm not), but the truth is that the idea of them meeting each other worried me purely because I’d have hated it if they’d met and didn’t like each other. I got on okay at Hogwarts. I made good friends, and life was pretty good. The food was great, some of the lessons were interesting (I liked Charms and Transfiguration best, because the things they taught you were actually useful in day-to-day life). I never grew out of breaking rules - and laws. And with magic, there were so many more possibilities, and I wanted to try them all. I had loads of plans for making money - some were legal, some... not so much, but most of them worked, more or less. School was just never my thing though. I'd always planned to leave at sixteen, and even when I got some pretty good results (if I do say so myself) in my OWLs, I wasn't going to change my mind. I wanted to be out there, working, making money, having fun. So when I went home for the summer after my Fifth Year, I knew I wouldn't be going back, so I knew that life was going to change again. I wasn't expecting it to change quite in the way it did though. I'd been seeing a girl from back at home, called Emma. I'd known her a while, she was sweet and fun, but it wasn't anything serious - we both knew that. I didn't really do 'serious' - I liked light hearted things where you could both mess around and have fun, and not be left with any hard feelings at the end. I hadn't really been in many exclusive relationships - and this one wasn't exactly entirely exclusive either. I was still shagging Rosa Rodriguez at Hogwarts, even though I was seeing Emma at home, but that was okay, because she didn't mind. Like I say, nothing serious. At least, nothing serious until she told me that summer that she was pregnant. You don't really know what to do when you're sixteen and someone hits you with that kind of news. It seems like the end of the world at first, and then you realise it's not, and that's even more scary. Because you've got to decide what to do and face up to it, and make decisions that are hard enough to make as an adult, let alone as two sixteen-year-old kids. Emma wanted to keep it though, and when it came down to it, so did I, even if I was fucking terrified. She was training to be a hairdresser, and had dreams of her own salon. I'd found a job at Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour, which wasn't exactly the best paid job, but it paid my way while I worked on my sidelines. We had enough to get by on - just. Of course, we had a lot of long, deep chats, and what came out of it in the end was that we both knew we didn't want to be together for the rest of our lives, which meant that for the sake of the kid and not screwing up its head later on, we should probably stop being anything except friends right now. We're still just about as close to each other as two people can be without being a couple though - I would say she's like my sister, only that would be a bit sick considering we have a child together. I worked as hard as I could during the months before the baby was born - both at my legal job, and at less legal things. I was good at that shit - I did a lot of selling stolen or illegally imported goods, but the thing that really got the money coming in was my magical forgery business. People pay a lot for fake papers, whether it's faked IDs, faked trading licenses, faked import licenses... I did them all. And I made money. By the time the baby came along, I was more than able to support her and Emma. Yeah, it was a girl - my daughter, Skye. The one I mentioned before. I was only seventeen when she was born, but I loved her from the start. The only problem was that I hadn't told any of my friends from Hogwarts about her. I don't really know why I didn't. But I'd always kept the two worlds separate, and at first I was too freaked out by it all to tell them - I was scared, I was embarrassed, I was ashamed (because fucking hell, how stupid do you have to be to forget the fucking condom?), so I just... didn't tell them. And once I hadn't told them, it got harder and harder. How do you drop that into a conversation? And when? 'Hey guys, I know I haven't told you, but there's this girl out there who's six months pregnant with my baby.' 'Hey, I know you're worrying about NEWTs and all, but would now be a good time to invite you to a christening?' 'Hey guys, it's kind of weird that I haven't told you yet seeing as we hang out all the time, but this is my daughter, she just turned three.' Yeah, it's not really so easy. I went for the last one in the end. Probably not the best choice, but there we go. There were other things that got in the way a bit though. Azkaban, for example. I should have known. I suppose I kind of did know really. You play that kind of game, you're going to get caught sooner or later. I got cocky, and I got caught. One year in Azkaban, for theft and forgery. Worst year of my life - hopefully the worst year I'll ever have. I was eighteen, and whatever they say, prison fucking blows. I'm not going to talk about it - I haven't really talked about it to anyone. I acted like I didn't care when I came out - just shrugged it off with a grin, same as I did detention at school. I joked about it - I still do - and I never told anyone how much I'd hated it. Plus, there was the fact that I had a baby, and Emma was a Muggle so she couldn't even bring her to visit. That killed me. Emma wrote letters and sent photos (she knew about the magical world - I'd broken the Statute by telling her, but hey, it wasn't like it was the only law I'd ever broken), but I knew Skye was growing up without me. There's a whole year of her life that I missed, and won't ever get back, and I don't think that'll ever stop hurting a bit, even though I see her most weeks now. Babies change so fast at that age - I missed so many firsts. And when I came out, she didn't know me. I was a stranger. It took six weeks of seeing her almost every day before she called me Daddy off her own bat, and that's one of the best memories I have. I pretty much lived in the Muggle world for a while after I came out. I had a baby to build a relationship with, and I suppose I was worried about what my Hogwarts friends would think of me. That they might not even want to know me anymore. It was stupid, but that's the kind of thought that goes through your head at times like that. I suppose I was pretty down, but Emma and Skye helped, and my parents stuck by me, and eventually I started getting back in touch with people. Turned out they'd missed me or some shit, and I fitted right back in. I didn't have a job any more, and it took a while of being unemployed, camping out at my Mum's or at Emma's or at my friends', before I found one in the Three Broomsticks. You don't know how good it feels to have a job until you've been unemployed and dirt poor for a while. Eventually, I came clean to my friends and introduced them to Skye - that was kind of nerve-racking, and they were pretty shocked, but I got through it. They all know now, which is good, because Skye's four, and a few months ago she started making her toys levitate. Emma... well, I think in some ways, she was hoping Skye wasn't a witch. I can understand that - it's something she can't ever be part of or share, and it means Skye's going to go off when she's eleven, to a place Emma's never been. She's kind of resigned to it though - but then, that's Emma. She's like me - we take things as they come. So now she's just wanting Skye to actually have as much contact with the magical world as she can, so she's not going into something completely unknown when she hits eleven. Sometimes it still feels like I'm two different people, even though my two worlds are kind of touching a bit more now. There's the Jake who's still only twenty one and likes having fun and drinking and hanging out with his mates and sleeping with Rosa (and let’s not get into the fact that a few months back I kissed someone I should definitely not have kissed and created a situation I don’t quite know what I’m going to do about), and then there's the Jake who's got a four-year-old kid he has to support and be a good dad to, and think of the future for. I still struggle with that sometimes. I've tried not to go back down the road of breaking the law to make money. Not saying I never do, but... well, I'm not going to say anything actually. Safer not to. As far as anyone needs to know, I'm a respectable barman at the Three Broomsticks, a responsible and law-abiding citizen, and the most shocking thing I ever do is let Rosa use handcuffs on me (but you didn't hear that either). Okay? Good. becca 25 gmt |
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