a lot of work to stay in this holding pattern. She was a construction, made from artificial materials – the acrylic nails, the silicone breasts, the polymer eyelashes. A continually renewed fake tan and a hairpiece fixed into her bleached-blonde hair completed the synthetic that was Crystal. A hairpiece was less trouble than extensions and it wasn’t as if Tommy was bothered either way. The hair was real, Crystal had no idea who it had once belonged to. She’d worried it might have come from a corpse but her hairdresser said, ‘Nah, from a temple in India. The women shave their heads for some kind of religious thing and then the monks sell it.’ Crystal wondered if the hair got blessed before it was packed up and sent on its way. Holy hair. She liked the idea. It would be nice if a bit of holiness were to rub off on her.
Crystal was never sure where the ‘glamour model’ thing had come from, she must have mentioned something in the throes of courtship. ‘Topless only,’ Tommy said if he told people – he liked to tell people, she wished he wouldn’t. It was true she had done some photographic stuff, some films as well, early on, but there’d been precious little that was glamorous about it, quite the opposite. And it wasn’t just her top that had been off.
‘The bimbo,’ she’d heard someone say at their wedding. It didn’t worry Crystal, it was the way Tommy liked her and she’d been called far worse names in her time. And, let’s face it, ‘bimbo’ was a step up from most things that had gone before. Nonetheless you had to wonder when the cracks would start to show.
On the plus side, Tommy loved Candy and, as an extra bonus, he had a cheerful nature, not to mention being easy on the eye. Women found him attractive, although Crystal was pretty numb to the charms of men on account of her personal history, but she was adept at faking so it hardly mattered. And they lived in a fantastic house – High Haven. Tommy bought it after their wedding and renovated it, top-to-toe, all his workmen off the books, the interior décor left to Crystal so that it was like playing with the doll’s house she’d never had as a child. It had a huge kitchen, an indoor swimming pool, all the bedrooms en suite. The swimming pool was just for her and the kids as Tommy didn’t swim, although even Crystal thought it was a bit too bling as it had a kind of Roman theme with a gold mosaic of a dolphin in the middle the pool and a couple of fake classical statues that Tommy had picked up in the local garden centre.
Crystal loved swimming, loved the way that when she moved through the water it felt as if she was washing everything away. She’d been baptized once – full immersion – at the insistence of this Baptist minister that she’d known. ‘Wash away your sins,’ he said and she thought, What about yours then? No! She didn’t need to revisit that memory, thank you very much.
The pool had been built into the basement of the house, so all the light was artificial, but in the rest of High Haven there were big windows everywhere and everything was painted white and it was like living inside a big box of light. Clean and white. Crystal believed in cleanliness – that was her religion, not some mumbo-jumbo God stuff. And, thank you, but she didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell her that with every drop of Domestos and every wipe of Dettol-soaked J-cloth she was disinfecting the past.
The house was at the end of a long drive and perched high on a cliff, hence its name. It got battered by the weather in winter, but it had a great view of the sea. You wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize living in a house like this.
She had side-stepped the après playgroup in Costa this morning. Sometimes it was too much like hard work. She knew that the playgroup mothers regarded her as a curiosity (trophy wife, glamour model, et cetera), like a flamingo amongst a flock of chickens. They were all on Mumsnet. Enough said. She only suffered playgroup for Candy’s sake, not to mention Baby Ballet and Gymini and Turtle Tots and Jo Jingles – it was a full timetable that left her hardly any time for her own martial arts