and let live’) and she took a benign interest in his life (‘How’s it going, Harry? All right?’). She didn’t walk around the house in her underwear or anything, God forbid. Nor did she make jokes about the absence of stubble or the presence of spots on his face. In fact, she had discreetly left an expensive antibacterial facewash in his en suite. He did his own laundry these days though, it would have been embarrassing if Crystal had washed his underpants and socks. ‘Don’t mind, Harry,’ she said. ‘I’ve handled a lot worse.’
She didn’t treat him as a child, more as an adult who happened to share the house with her. There were times when Harry would really have liked to be treated as a child, but he didn’t say so. (He was ‘young for his age’, according to his father.) They were ‘pals’, Crystal said, and it did feel companionable when they flopped on the sofa together after Candace was in bed and watched their favourite programmes – America’s Next Top Model, Countryfile, SAS: Who Dares Wins. They had eclectic taste, Harry said to her. (‘Electric?’ Crystal puzzled. ‘Kind of,’ he said.)
They hardly ever watched the news. (‘Turn it off, Harry, it’s all bad.’) They watched nature programmes though, oohing and aahing at anything cute and furry, changing channel the minute it looked as though something sad or gory was about to happen. It went without saying that Harry’s father wasn’t on the sofa with them. (‘What’s this shit you’re watching?’) He was working a lot of the time, and if not he was in his ‘den’ with his eighty-inch TV and Sky Sports. He lifted weights in there too, grunting and sweating as he heaved barbells above his head or jabbed at the big Everlast punch-bag that hung from the ceiling. Sometimes it felt as though Harry and Crystal were conspirators, although Harry never felt sure what it was they were in league against. His father, he supposed. His dad liked to think he was ‘the masterful type’, Crystal said.
‘Like Mr Rochester,’ Harry said, and Crystal said, ‘I don’t think I know him. Is he a teacher at your school?’
Crystal worked overtime on Candace and Harry sometimes wondered what her own childhood had been like. There was no evidence of it – no photos, no relatives, no grandparents for Candace – it was as if Crystal had come into the world fully formed, like Botticelli’s Venus. That was an unfortunate thought – Harry went to great lengths not to think about Crystal naked. Or any other female, for that matter. He had a huge coffee-table art book he’d asked for last Christmas. The nudes in it were the nearest he got to porn. Looking at nude women embarrassed him even when he was on his own. (‘The boy’s not normal,’ he heard his father say to Crystal. Perhaps he wasn’t. ‘Show me normal,’ Crystal said.) He’d asked Crystal about her childhood and she’d laughed and said something about fairgrounds and ice-cream, but she didn’t make them sound attractive.
Crystal cooked the kind of food his father liked – the ‘full English’ which she made every morning, the Sunday roast (‘and all the trimmings’), and in between steaks and burgers, although his father spent a lot of time at work or ‘out and about’ when he picked up takeaways. Or he came in late and took a pizza or a ready-meal from the freezer (a Meneghini, the price of which would have bought Harry his first car when the time came).
Crystal and Candace didn’t eat any of ‘that muck’, as Crystal called it. The arrival of Candace had made her a ‘convert’ to healthy eating. ‘Clean eating,’ she said. ‘I like those words.’ She was on the internet all the time, blogs and vlogs and recipes. Salads and fruit and veg. Cashew milk, tofu. Quinoa, chia, goji berries – food that sounded as if it should be eaten by tribesmen in the Amazon, not a sixteen-year-old boy in Yorkshire. Last week Crystal had made a ‘chocolate’ cake from black beans and avocados and yesterday she had offered Harry a ‘meringue’, saying, ‘I bet you can’t tell what that’s made from.’ No, he couldn’t. Something that had died at the bottom of a well a hundred years ago, perhaps. ‘The water from a tin of chickpeas!’ Crystal said triumphantly. ‘It’s called aquafaba,’ which sounded to Harry’s ears like something the Romans might have built.
Harry was generally free, however, to choose