to be himself. That was hard enough.
Harry still had some time before he had to get going. He could have a swim in the pool, he supposed, or sit in the garden and read – but it was a lovely day and he didn’t feel much like sticking his head in a book. That was how Crystal referred to it – ‘Got your head stuck in a book again, Harry?’ It would be funny if his head did actually get stuck in a book.
Between the theatre and the World he had a series of laborious journeys most days. High Haven was stranded high on the cliffs in a no-man’s-land between Scarborough and Whitby, and Harry had spent most of the summer shuttling between the two. If he had lots of time he sometimes cycled on the old railway cinder track, but usually he caught the bus. He couldn’t wait for the day he passed his driving test and was allowed a car. His dad had started to teach him on back roads, letting him drive his S-Class. (‘What’s the worst you can do? Crash it?’) Tommy was surprisingly (astonishingly) patient and it turned out to be an arena in which they got on like, well, like father and son. (‘You’re not as crap at this as I thought you would be,’ Tommy said. High praise indeed.) It felt nice to have discovered an activity in which they were not a disappointment to each other.
This summer Crystal had driven him in to work a few times, ‘Because I’m going in anyway, Harry,’ or sometimes she ‘just felt like a drive’. Crystal said she would list driving as one of her hobbies if she ever had to fill in a form for ‘a job application or something’. Was she thinking of getting a job? Harry wondered what she was qualified for. She enjoyed driving and Harry enjoyed being driven by her. He usually sat in the back of the Evoque with Candace and all three of them sang ‘Let It Go’ at the top of their voices. Harry had a nice, modest voice – he was in the school choir – but Crystal was tone deaf and Candace was a screecher. Nonetheless it felt bonding. Like being a family. He caught sight of the clock and realized he had spent so much time dawdling that he was about to miss the bus.
There had been hardly any visitors to Transylvania World all afternoon. It was dead, Harry thought. Ha, ha. Plus it was sunny and no one, apart from the occasional pervy type, wanted to be inside when the weather was good. Rain was best for business, people came in to find shelter and it was only a two-pound entry fee, although even that often proved too much once they had sampled the meagre amount of horror on offer. The exit was on a different street so Harry didn’t usually have to deal with the disappointed customers. By the time they’d worked out where they were and how to get back to the beginning they’d lost the will to live and two pounds didn’t seem worth arguing about.
Archie, the so-called ‘live actor’, hadn’t turned up. When this happened – which was unsurprisingly often – Harry would guide people towards the entrance (‘It’s quite dark in there.’ It was!) and then he would race along a back corridor to a concealed door, grab the Dracula mask and jump out just as they rounded the corner, making gargling noises in his throat (Yaargh!) like a vampire trying to cough up phlegm. People were never impressed and rarely frightened. Fear was not a bad thing, his father said. ‘Keeps you on your toes.’
Harry’s mother – Lesley – died six years ago when Harry was ten, and his dad had got married again, to Crystal, and a year later they had Candace. She was three years old now and got called Candy by everyone except Harry, who thought it was a bit of a sexist sort of name. He thought girls should have straightforward names like Emily and Olivia and Amy, which were the names of the girls at his school who were his friends. ‘Hermiones,’ Miss Dangerfield called them, rather dismissively, especially considering they were in her ‘fan club’ as she called it. ‘A wee bit Jean Brodie for my liking,’ she said. (Was Miss Dangerfield in her prime yet? Harry wondered. He hadn’t asked.)
Miss Dangerfield was their Drama and English Lit teacher at school. ‘Call