Crystal could feel her brain curdling at the memory. They had been children. Little girls, not so very much older than Candy. No one had come looking for them. Not Giddy, not Davy. Not the police or social workers. They were scrap, not worth bothering about.
She remembered Fee was always telling her that they were lucky because Mick and Tony took care of them, but there was that word ‘care’ again. Care shouldn’t mean a grotty caravan and sweets and fags for doing ‘favours’ to old men. They’d seemed old, anyway. Looking back, they probably weren’t that old at all. Not then, at least. The judge had once said to her that he knew he was getting old when bishops started looking young to him. Bishops, knights, pawns. They were all pieces on the universe’s big chess board, weren’t they?
She’d been taught to play by one of the judge’s friends. Sir Something, a double-barrelled name. Cough-Plunkett. Something like that, anyway. A ‘knight of the realm’, Tony Bassani said. He was proud of his connections. Cough-Plunkett, or whatever, had brought a chess set with him to the caravan. He said she was ‘a clever girl’. He was the first person who’d ever said that to her. It was an odd thing to want to do, when she thought about it now, but then the men had many worse kinks than wanting to play chess. Of course, in the end he’d wanted more than just chess. It was a long time since she’d made herself think about the judge and his friends. The magic circle.
That was what they called themselves. The magic circle. ‘Up to tricks,’ one of them laughed.
This morning, in the welcome absence of patrons in Transylvania World, Harry was sticking his head in Cranford. He liked Cranford, it was a safe place where small events were accorded great dramatic significance. Harry thought that this was better than big things being treated as if they weren’t important.
A better attraction than the World, in Harry’s opinion, would be Cranford World. A place where for the price of the entrance fee you could call on Miss Matty and drink tea, or have an evening of cards, or sing around the piano with your neighbours. (‘A place of safety,’ Miss Dangerfield had called Cranford.) He would enjoy listening to the Captain reading aloud from The Pickwick Papers. He could—
‘Harry?’
‘Crystal?’ He dropped abruptly out of his Cranford reverie. ‘What are you doing here?’ She was carrying Candace in her arms and dropped her on to the ticket counter with a sigh of relief.
Harry frowned. ‘You’re not wanting to take Candace in there, are you?’ he puzzled, indicating the dark mouth of the tunnel that led to Transylvania.
‘Fudging carrot, no.’
Crystal made this big effort not to swear. It was such an effort that Harry thought she must have sworn a lot before she married his dad. It was funny really, because sometimes she made all the silly innocuous words she’d chosen as proxies sound just as bad.
‘I need you to look after her for a bit, Harry.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes, here.’
‘I’ve got to leave for a matinée soon.’
‘I won’t be long.’
‘What the fuck is that?’ Barclay Jack asked when he encountered Harry backstage, lugging a bedraggled Snow White in his arms.
‘She’s my sister,’ Harry said. ‘Not a that.’
‘Sister?’ Barclay Jack frowned as though having a relative was an outlandish idea. Perhaps Barclay didn’t have any. Harry had never heard him mention a wife or a child and it was almost impossible to imagine him as a father, he barely qualified as a human being.
Despite her promise, Crystal had failed to return when it was time for Harry to hand over his shift to Amy, and Amy, almost as blunt as Emily, refused point-blank to babysit, and so Harry had had to bring Candace all the way on the bus, a switchback ride over the moors. She had never been on a bus before and the novelty of it kept her quiet for quite some time, as did Harry’s packet of Monster Munch – strictly forbidden by Crystal, obviously, but she needn’t have worried if she’d known because Candace threw it all back up again minutes later and then promptly fell asleep on Harry’s knee. He did his best to clean up the orange-coloured mess but it was difficult without the bottomless bag of accessories with which Crystal normally travelled – an entourage of wet wipes, sippy cups, changes of clothes, drinks, snacks, face cloths. At the very