Author: Kate Atkinson
Category: Literature
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There was no shame in marrying for money—money meant security. Women had been doing it since time began. You saw it on all the nature programs on TV—build me the best nest, do the most impressive dance for me, bring me shells and shiny things. And Tommy was more than happy with the arrangement—she cooked for him, she had sex with him, she kept house for him. And in return she woke up every morning and felt one step further away from her old self. History, in Crystal’s opinion, was something that was best left behind where it belonged.
And she had lots of shells and shiny things in the form of a huge wardrobe of clothes, a diamond bracelet and matching pendant, a gold Cartier watch (given to her by Tommy on their first anniversary, inscribed From Tommy with love), a high-spec white Range Rover Evoque, a black American Express card, a child, Candace—Candy—whom she adored. This was not the order that Crystal ranked her assets in. The child came first. Always and forever. She was ready to kill anyone who touched a hair on Candy’s head.
She had met Tommy when he came into the salon one wild and wet afternoon, looking attractively disheveled on account of the force-eight gale outside, and said, “Can you give me a quick manicure, love?” He was on his way to a meeting, he said, but couldn’t turn up with his hands “covered in oil and muck.” He’d had to change “a bugger of a tire” in a lay-by, apparently, on his way back from Castleford.
Tommy was surprisingly chatty and so was Crystal, if only professionally (“So are you going on holiday this summer?”), and one thing led to another. As it does. And now here she was mashing a telltale stub of a cigarette into a Swiss cheese plant—an ugly thing that refused to stop growing—and wondering if the washing machine with his shirts inside had finished its spin cycle.
Tommy’s first wife—Lesley—had been a smoker and he said that the smell of cigarettes reminded him of her. He didn’t say whether this was a bad thing or a good thing, but either way it was probably best not to summon up the ghost of the first Mrs. Tommy Holroyd in his presence with a packet of Marlboro Lights. “She was a bit unstable, Les was,” Tommy said, which, considering what happened to her, could have been funny if it wasn’t so horrible. It was an accident (Crystal hoped), but you never knew in this life when you might slip and lose your footing and find yourself going over the edge. Crystal trod a very careful path these days.
Crystal was hovering around thirty-nine years old and it took 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-blond 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 of the pool and a couple of fake classical statues that Tommy had picked up in the local garden center.
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 sidestepped 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 among 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 classes. The only reason she’d chosen Wing Chun a couple of years ago was because it was at the local leisure center and they had a daycare. It sounded like something you would order in a Chinese restaurant. It wasn’t. It was all about balance and strength and finding your power, both inner and outer. Crystal liked that idea. She was surprisingly good at finding her power.
It was important to Crystal that Candy had friends and fitted in and didn’t grow up to be an odd one out. The flamingo among chickens. She was trying to give her daughter the childhood that she herself had been robbed of. A few weeks ago Harry had asked her what it had been like for her when she was young and she had said, “Oh, you know, Harry, fairground rides and ice creams all the way.” Which was not in itself a lie, of course. Harry was sixteen, Tommy’s son from the ill-fated first marriage. He was a funny boy, young for his age but also old for his age. He was a bit of an odd-bod, but Crystal was fond of him. He was nothing like his father, which was probably a good thing.
Instead of Costa, they had gone to the swings. Candy could sit on a swing for hours. Crystal understood, she felt the same about swimming laps in their pool. Up and down, up and down, nothing but the movement. It was soothing. And driving. She would drive all day if she could, she didn’t even mind traffic jams and roadworks. Tommy—surprisingly patient—had taught her before they got married. She’d taken to it like a duck to water. What would it be like, she wondered, to live somewhere like Texas or Arizona where all you had ahead of you was the empty horizon, mile after mindless mile beneath your wheels, slowly erasing everything behind you?
When they got back in the car she said to Candy, “Don’t go to sleep back there, sweetheart, you’ll spoil your nap,” although stopping a small child from nodding off in a warm car was pretty nigh impossible.
She reached back and handed Candy her little pink portable DVD player and matching headphones and her Frozen DVD. She was, appropriately, dressed as Elsa today. In the wing mirror Crystal could see there was a car behind them. A silver BMW 3 series. Crystal knew her cars.
She was pretty sure it was the same car she had noticed yesterday when she had given Harry a lift to Transylvania World. And then prowling after her as she came out of the car park in Sainsbury’s. And then again later in the afternoon when she’d popped out to pick up the dry cleaning. Too many times to be a coincidence, surely? Was someone following her? Watching her? Or was she being paranoid? Maybe she was going mad. Her mother had drunk herself into madness, leaving Crystal to the clutches of a so-called care home. After that happened to you at the age of ten, nothing could surprise you.
In the back of the Evoque, Candy was in a world of her own, headbanging along to her DVD and yelling tunelessly to what might have been “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” but without being able to hear the music it was pretty much impossible for Crystal to tell.
Crystal tried to read the number plate of the BMW in the rear-view mirror, squinting because she couldn’t locate her sunglasses in the glove compartment. They were Chanel, fitted with prescription lenses. She had terrible eyesight although she hardly ever wore her regular specs, it was a bad look on her (librarian slut) and her optician said she couldn’t have contacts because she had “dry eyes.” Must be all that crying she’d done as a child. Emptied the well.
She could make out a T and an X and a 6, it was like taking an eye test at the optician’s, except backward and on the move. The car had blacked-out windows and gave off a sinister air. Was it stalking her? Why? Had Tommy hired someone to follow her? A private detective? But why would he do that? She hadn’t given Tommy any cause for suspicion, never would. He never asked her where she’d been or what she’d been doing, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to know, she supposed. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sprang into her mind. The only bits of history Crystal knew seemed to involve women 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 programs 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 humor, 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 theater, 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 traveled, 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 as if she were waiting impatiently for the cake to do something. Her heart began to hammer in her chest and her ribs felt like a corset that was being tightened by the second. It was as if she were about to perpetrate a murder. The cake was unresponsive and after some more silent debate with herself, Crystal cut herself a modest slice. She ate it standing up to lessen her commitment to it. It was disgusting. She put it back in the cupboard.
“You’re beefing up there, love, aren’t you?” Tommy had laughed the other night. She had been brushing her teeth in the en suite when he had put his arms around her from behind and grabbed a handful of her midriff beneath her lovely La Perla nightgown. As a kid she’d never had nightclothes, she’d had to sleep in her vest and knickers in her little bunk in the trailer.
Beefing up? What the duck? (A few pounds, maybe, but it was muscle, from the Wing Chun.) Cheeky bugger. Badger. Cheeky badger, she corrected herself. (That sounded worse, somehow.) “I don’t mind,” Tommy said, moving his hands down to her hips. “I like a bit of flesh on a woman. Gives you something to grab on to so you don’t fall off. They don’t call them love handles for nothing.”
Crystal retrieved the cake from the cupboard and placed it on the breakfast bar. She unwrapped it again, cut another modest slice. She sat down to eat it this time. Cut another slice, less modest. Ate it. And then another and another, stuffing them in her mouth. It was surprising how quickly you could eat an entire cake if you put your mind to it.
When the cake was finished Crystal stared at the empty plate for a while and then went to the downstairs cloakroom and threw it all back up again. She had to flush the toilet twice to sluice it away. She scrubbed the toilet bowl with bleach. You could have eaten out of her toilet, it was so clean. She refolded the towels and smoothed them down on the rail, realigned the spare toilet rolls in the cupboard beneath the sink, and sprayed J’Adore around the small roo
m. She felt lighter, cleansed. She returned to the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. Then she went back to the conservatory and lit up another cigarette. Up to some of your old tricks again, Christina, she thought. What brought that on? she wondered.
Saving Lives at Sea
Collier’s unit base was a couple of streets away. They’d commandeered half a municipal car park—at great cost, Jackson imagined. They were filming here all week—Julia’s “arc” involved being kidnapped by a raging psychopath who had escaped from prison and was on the run. Jackson couldn’t remember why the raging psychopath had chosen to bring her to the seaside, he had stopped paying attention to the arc after a while.
It was five o’clock and Julia had said she thought she would be finishing about then. She had a day off tomorrow and Nathan was going to stay with her tonight in the Crown Spa. Jackson was looking forward to an evening of peace—living with Nathan was like living inside an argument. Jackson hadn’t realized until recently how much he relished solitude nowadays. (“Some might call it reclusivity,” Julia said. “Big word,” Jackson said.) And there were still several weeks of the school holidays to go. His son missed his friends, he was bored. He was dying of boredom, in fact, he said. No autopsy had ever resulted in “boredom” being put on a death certificate, Jackson told him.
“Have you seen an autopsy?” Nathan asked, perking up at the idea.
“Plenty,” Jackson said.
How many dead bodies had he seen? “Like in the whole of your life?”