having their heads lopped off – Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette.
‘Don’t forget Lady Jane Grey,’ Harry said. ‘The Nine Days Queen, they called her.’ They’d done the Tudors at school, he added apologetically. He tried not to show off his general knowledge around her general ignorance. She didn’t mind, she’d learned a lot from Harry. His mother, Lesley, had ‘lost her head’ too, according to Tommy. ‘After the baby.’ There’d been a stillbirth, a sister for Harry. Harry didn’t remember. Tommy loved Candace – his ‘princess’. Her birth had secured Crystal’s position as Queen of High Haven, Harry said. ‘Like a character in Game of Thrones,’ he added. It wasn’t one of the TV programmes that they watched together. It was too much like real life for Crystal.
Before she could decipher anything else, the BMW took a sudden left turn and was lost to her.
Not Tommy, she decided. Hiring a private detective wasn’t his style. He’d confront her head on. (What the fuck, Crystal?) Something more menacing than a suspicious Tommy? Someone more menacing than Tommy? There were plenty of those, but they were all in the past. Weren’t they? She braked suddenly to avoid a cat that had pranced nonchalantly into the road. Candy gave a little squeal, halfway between delight and fear. She pulled off her headphones and Crystal could hear the music continuing tinnily within them. ‘Mummy?’ she said, a worried look on her little face.
‘Sorry,’ Crystal said, her heart racing. ‘Sorry, sweetheart.’
When they got home Crystal fed Candy lunch – wholemeal toast with almond butter and a banana – and then put her down for a nap.
She knocked on Harry’s bedroom door to see if he wanted anything. He always had his head in a book or was drawing little cartoons. ‘He’s artistic,’ she said to Tommy, and he said, ‘They’re still calling it that, are they?’ You didn’t get to choose your children, you took what you were given, she said. Tommy didn’t have a sense of humour, but Harry did, always coming out with silly jokes. (‘Why didn’t the cheese want to get sliced?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Crystal said obligingly, ‘why didn’t the cheese want to get sliced?’ ‘Because it had grater plans!’) Nearly all his jokes were about cheese, for some reason.
There was no answer when she knocked on his door. He must be out. Harry was always busy – if he wasn’t reading or drawing he was working at the vampire place. And at the theatre, too, this year. Tommy didn’t give him much pocket money because he thought he should ‘learn to stand on his own two feet’, but Crystal slipped him the odd twenty. Why not? He was a good kid and the poor lad had lost his mum, you couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
‘I lost my mum too,’ she told Harry, but didn’t add that for all she knew her mother was still alive. She imagined her not as a person but as a heap of gin-soaked, urine-stained rags in a forgotten corner somewhere. And as for her father, well, not a good idea to go there either. There wasn’t even a path.
‘Did you get on with your mum?’ Harry had asked her the other day. He was always asking questions. She was always having to make up answers. ‘Course I did,’ she said. ‘Who doesn’t?’
She didn’t like the idea that Harry was working for that old goat Barclay Jack at the Palace Theatre, but she could hardly explain her objections to Harry without revealing things that were best left to rot in the dark of the past. Barclay was a dirty old bugger, but at least he wasn’t into boys. She wouldn’t have let Harry near him if he had been. Still, he shouldn’t really be allowed to carry on walking the earth. Crystal had met Barclay a couple of times – been ‘introduced’ to him. Nothing had happened, he hadn’t been interested because she was ‘too old’ for him, apparently. She must have been all of fourteen by then. She shuddered at the memory. Bridlington, of course. It didn’t matter how far you travelled, the road always led back to Bridlington.
Once Candy was asleep Crystal made herself a cup of mint tea and reviewed her bake-sale trawl. After much deliberation she freed the Victoria sponge from its suffocating cling film and placed it on the breakfast bar. Then she stared at it for a long time, tapping her false nails on the polished granite