a nippy overtaker so it had been a challenge for Jackson to keep on her heels until she reached Whitby. She was good at parking too, magically manoeuvring the Evoque into a spot on the West Cliff that was intended for a much smaller vehicle. Jackson negotiated the less tractable Toyota into a parking bay as far away from Crystal as he dared, before setting off on foot after her. She didn’t just drive fast, she walked fast too. She’d ditched the heels and the short dress from earlier and was in trainers and jeans now, toting Snow White in her arms as she passed through the Whalebone Arch and down the stone steps to the harbour and the pier. She set a pace that Jackson found hard to keep up with, let alone Dido, although she was making a game effort.
Crystal strode along, slaloming around the holidaymakers who were jamming the pavements, moving slowly like a tide of mud. Jackson held back, mingling with the crowd, trying to disguise himself as a day-tripper in case Crystal turned around and spotted him.
Music – although it barely merited that term – blared out from an amusement arcade as he passed. Despite the good weather it was teeming with people inside. Nathan loved those places, Jackson had endured several brain-freezing hours hanging around with him while he fed coins into the bottomless maw of a coin pusher or a claw machine. Thus were addictions formed. The museum’s mummified Hand of Glory was no match for the Claw. None of the current habitués within the strident walls of the arcade looked like healthy citizens. Half of them were sloth with obesity, the other half looked like they’d recently been released from jail.
Jackson was taken by surprise when Crystal suddenly ducked into something called Transylvania World. A vampire thing, presumably – the town was awash with blood-suckers. It didn’t seem a suitable entertainment for a three-year-old – but then what did he know? (Luddite!)
Jackson loitered in the gap between a shack selling seafood and the booth of a fortune-teller, on which a sign announced, Madame Astarti, clairvoyant and spiritualist to the stars. Tarot cards, crystal ball, palm reading. Your future is in your hand. A glass-bead curtain hid Madame Astarti from the prying eyes of the world, but he could hear the low murmur of voices inside and then the voice of Madame Astarti, presumably, saying, ‘Pick a card, love, any card.’ It was the stuff of nonsense. Julia would have been in there like a shot.
Jackson tried not to inhale too deeply the scents of the pier – fried food and sugar (‘Weapons of mass destruction,’ according to Julia) – which despite their unpleasantness were making him salivate. It was lunchtime but he seemed to be running on nothing more than caffeine today. All he had on him was a bag of dog treats and he was still enough meals away from anarchy not to consider them. He gave one to doughty Dido as a reward for her stoicism.
Across the road he could see a menu board outside a pub announcing that they were serving ‘Yapas’ and it took Jackson some time to fathom that this meant Yorkshire tapas. There was a movement, he had been reading, for ‘Yexit’ – devolution for the county, in other words. Yorkshire, the argument ran, had a population almost the size of Denmark, a larger economy than eleven EU nations, and had won more gold medals at the Rio Olympics than Canada. It was funny, Jackson mused, how he had considered Brexit to be the end of civilization as he knew it, and yet Yexit played a siren tune on his heartstrings. (‘Thus are civil wars and tribal genocide fomented,’ Julia said. Julia was the only person Jackson knew who started sentences with ‘thus’ and her prediction seemed a bit of a savage outcome for something that began with a Yapas of ‘shrimp ceviche’ and ‘sweet and sour whelk meat’. Whelk meat was a (so-called) food he would only be prepared to eat if it were to save the life of one of his children. And even then …)
He was distracted by the departure of Madame Astarti’s client, a thin young woman who didn’t look at all happy with any of the tenses of her life, past, present or future.
And then, at last, Crystal was out of Transylvania World, having ditched Snow White, apparently, and before Jackson had time to catch his breath they were off again,