Author: Kate Atkinson
Category: Literature
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He had an afternoon shift at Transylvania World, or “the World,” as it was known to its underpaid employees—basically Harry and his friends. ARE YOU PREPARED TO BE SCARED? it said on a poster outside. It was one of the attractions on the pier, although “attractive” was not a word anyone would have used to describe it. Harry had worked there for the last couple of summers, taking the money, issuing the tickets. It was hardly challenging and, due to the lack of customers, he spent most of the time reading. He was starting his A levels in September and had a long reading list that he was currently trawling his way through. He went to a posh school—that was how his father referred to it. “Is that posh school teaching you anything?” or “I’m paying that posh school to teach you ethics, for fuck’s sake? I can teach you ethics: Don’t kick a man when he’s down. Don’t let your right hand know what your left hand’s doing. Women and children first.” As moral codes went it was a mixed bag and Harry wasn’t sure that Socrates would have entirely concurred with it, or even that his father adhered to it.
Despite it being a “posh school,” nearly everyone Harry knew worked during the summer holidays. There were so many seasonal jobs going it seemed criminal not to have one. The cool kids—or rather the kids who considered themselves to be cool—all spent their time bodyboarding or trying to qualify as lifeguards, while the nerdy ones, like Harry and his friends, manned ticket booths, scooped ice cream, troweled chips, and waited tables.
The World was owned by Carmody’s, the amusement people, and was the lowest of the low where attractions were concerned—a few moth-eaten figures acquired from an old waxworks and a couple of badly modeled tableaux. It advertised “with live actors” but there was only one, not an actor but a fellow nerd called Archie who was in Harry’s History class and was paid peanuts to lurk around and jump out at the (few and far between) paying customers in a rubber Dracula mask. True Blood it wasn’t.
The town was known for vampires, it was where the original Count had landed—in fiction, at any rate, although the way people went on you would think it had been an actual historical event. The souvenir shops were full of skulls and crosses and coffins and rubber bats. Several times a year the town was flooded with Goths in thrall to the living dead, and now there was Steampunk Week and a Pirate Week so that the whole town seemed like the venue for a fancy-dress party. The “pirates” all wore shabby greatcoats and big hats with feathers stuck in them and carried cutlasses and revolvers. Harry wondered if the cutlasses were sharp. In reality, Harry’s friend Emily said sarcastically, “they’re men called Kevin who work in the data mines all week. Living out their fantasies for the weekend.”
Harry supposed there was nothing wrong with that, although why anyone would want to be a pirate or the bride of Dracula he couldn’t imagine. (“Well, lots of women are married to vampires,” Crystal said.) But steampunk was something Harry had yet to come to terms with. Only last weekend a man had bumped into Harry. He was wearing a full-face metal mask with hoses and tubes coming out of it. “Ee, sorry, lad,” he said cheerfully. “I can’t see a thing in this.” Harry didn’t want to be someone else, he just wanted to be himself. That was hard enough.
Harry still had some time before he had to get going. He could have a swim in the pool, he supposed, or sit in the garden and read—but it was a lovely day and he didn’t feel much like sticking his head in a book. That was how Crystal referred to it—“Got your head stuck in a book again, Harry?” It would be funny if his head did actually get stuck in a book.
Between the theater and the World he had a series of laborious journeys most days. High Haven was stranded high on the cliffs in a no-man’s-land between Scarborough and Whitby, and Harry had spent most of the summer shuttling between the two. If he had lots of time he sometimes cycled on the old railway cinder track, but usually he caught the bus. He couldn’t wait for the day he passed his driving test and was allowed a car. His dad had started to teach him on back roads, letting him drive his S-Class. (“What’s the worst you can do? Crash it?”) Tommy was surprisingly (astonishingly) patient and it turned out to be an arena in which they got on like, well, like father and son. (“You’re not as crap at this as I thought you would be,” Tommy said. High praise indeed.) It felt nice to have discovered an activity in which they were not a disappointment to each other.
This summer Crystal had driven him in to work a few times, “because I’m going in anyway, Harry,” or sometimes she “just felt like a drive.” Crystal said she would list driving as one of her hobbies if she ever had to fill in a form for “a job application or something.” Was she thinking of getting a job? Harry wondered what she was qualified for. She enjoyed driving and Harry enjoyed being driven by her. He usually sat in the back of the Evoque with Candace and all three of them sang “Let It Go” at the top of their voices. Harry had a nice, modest voice—he was in the school choir—but Crystal was tone-deaf and Candace was a screecher. Nonetheless it felt bonding. Like being a family. He caught sight of the clock and realized he had spent so much time dawdling that he was about to miss the bus.
There had been hardly any visitors to Transylvania World all afternoon. It was dead, Harry thought. Ha, ha. Plus it was sunny and no one, apart from the occasional pervy type, wanted to be inside when the weather was good. Rain was best for business, people came in to find shelter and it was only a two-pound entry fee, although even that often proved too much once they had sampled the meager amount of horror on offer. The exit was on a different street so Harry didn’t usually have to deal with the disappointed customers. By the time they’d worked out where they were and how to get back to the beginning they’d lost the will to live and two pounds didn’t seem worth arguing about.
Archie, the so-called live actor, hadn’t turned up. When this happened—which was unsurprisingly often—Harry would guide people toward the entrance (“It’s quite dark in there.” It was!) and then he would race along a back corridor to a concealed door, grab the Dracula mask, and jump out just as they rounded the corner, making gargling noises in his throat (Yaargh!) like a vampire trying to cough up phlegm. People were never impressed and rarely frightened. Fear was not a bad thing, his father said. “Keeps you on your toes.”
Harry’s mother—Lesley—died six years ago when Harry was ten, and his dad had gotten married again, to Crystal, and a year later they had Candace. She was three years old now and got called Candy by everyone except Harry, who thought it was a bit of a sexist sort of name. He thought girls should have straightforward names like Emily and Olivia and Amy, which were the names of the girls at his school who were his friends. “Hermiones,” Miss Dangerfield called them, rather dismissively, especially considering they were in her “fan club,” as she called it. “A wee bit Jean Brodie for my liking,” she said. (Was Miss Dangerfield in her prime yet? Harry wondered. He hadn’t asked.)
Miss Dangerfield was their Drama and English Lit teacher at school. “Call me Bella,” she said to Harry when she gave him a lift home from rehearsals. (“I live in the same direction.”) At the end of the summer term they had put on a production of Death of a Salesman. Harry had a small part—Stanley, the waiter in the chop house—although he had auditioned (poorly) for both Biff and Happy. He wasn’t very good at acting. (“Don’t worry, Harry,” Crystal said, “you’ll learn as you get older.”)
They ran Death of a Salesman for three nights. Harry’s dad couldn’t make it, but Crystal came for the first night. (“Depressing play, isn’t it? But you were very good, Harry,” she added. He knew he wasn’t, but it was nice of her to say so.)
“How did Hamlet start his soliloquy about cheese?” he asked Miss Dangerfield as she gave him a lift home on the last night. “To Brie or not to Brie.” She had laughed and then when she parked her car outside his house she put her hand on his knee and said, “You have no idea what a special boy you are, Harry. Remember—your whole future’s ahead of you, don’t waste it,” and then she had leaned over and kissed him on the mouth and he had felt her tongu
e, probing his, like a sweet, mint-flavored slug.
“Was that your precious Miss Dangerfield?” Crystal frowned when he came in the house, still reeling from the kiss. “I can see you on the security cameras.” Harry blushed. Crystal gave him a sympathetic pat on his shoulder. “You know she’s transferring to another school next year, don’t you?” Harry didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved at the news.
Girls with names like Bunny and Bella could be confusing. And a name like Candy might lead to all kinds of unfortunate things. (Being eaten, basically.) Of course, you might grow up to be a drag queen. Bunny Hopps, who had a drag act at the Palace, knew someone called Candy Floss, although Harry presumed that wasn’t his (or her) real name.
Everything in Candace’s bedroom (in her life, in fact) was pink and themed on fairies and princesses. She slept in an elaborate bed that was meant to be Cinderella’s carriage and had an entire rack of Disney fancy-dress outfits that she liked to wear in rotation—Belle and Elsa, Ariel, Snow White, Tinker Bell, Moana, Cinderella—an endless, virtually interchangeable inventory of sequins and artificial satin. They had been to Disneyland Paris last year and pretty much cleared the rack in the shop.
“Better than looking like JonBenét, I suppose,” Bunny said. If anyone knew about fancy dress it was Bunny, of course. He—she—Harry had to watch his pronouns around Bunny—was Harry’s confidant. It was weird but he was the one Harry had started going to for advice, for confession. It was almost like having a mother again. One who wore a wig and size-twelve heels and “tucked his undercarriage away” (something that required a masculine pronoun, even in Bunny’s lexicon).
Harry often read Candace her bedtime story and he had retrieved his own books from one of the old outbuildings where his childhood had been boxed up (rather badly) and left to molder. His father had converted two of the outbuildings into garages and he was trying to get permission to convert a third, but was prevented from doing so because there were bats roosting in there (or “the fucking bats,” as they were always referred to) and the bats were protected. (“Why? Why would you protect a fucking bat, for fuck’s sake?”) Harry liked to watch them flitting around the barn in the summer evenings, catching insects. They were tiny and seemed vulnerable and Harry worried that his father intended them clandestine harm.
Harry had found a very nice illustrated edition of the Grimm Brothers (inscribed From Mummy with Love) in one of the boxes in the Batcave and he was employing it to introduce Candace to the more evil side of fairies—tales where people were cursed or abandoned or had their toes chopped off and their eyes pecked out. Ones where there was a noticeable absence of sugar and spice. Not because he wanted to scare Candace—and to her credit she didn’t scare easily—but because he felt that someone ought to counter the fluffy pink marshmallow world she was being swallowed up by, and in the absence of anyone else he supposed it would have to be him. Plus, they had been his own introduction to literature and he thought it would be nice if she turned out to be a reader too.
He had had a conversation with the dangerous Miss Dangerfield about fairy stories and she said they were “primers” for girls so that they would know how to survive in a world of “male predators.” (“Or wolves, as we might call them.”) A handbook of what to do, she said, when a girl found herself alone in the dark wood. Harry supposed the dark wood was a metaphor. Not many dark woods around these days, but nonetheless he liked to think that Candace might grow up knowing how to avoid the wolves.
No matter how hard he tried to conjure her up, his own mother was no longer much more than a smudge of memory and it was becoming more and more difficult to re-create her. Occasionally something would break through this miasma, a sudden sharp fragment—a recollection of sitting beside her in a car or being handed an ice cream—although the “context,” as Miss Dangerfield would have called it, was entirely missing. His mother had never lived at High Haven, so he had no sense of her here either. She had been a smoker, he remembered that. He remembered, too, a hoarse laugh, dark hair. And her dancing around the kitchen once, not like waltzing, more like poor cursed Karen in “The Red Shoes.” (Too horrible a tale for telling to Candace, Harry had judged.)
Emily seemed to have more of a connection to his mother than Harry did and she was always saying things like, “Remember that fire-engine cake that your mother made for your birthday?” or “That was good when your mother took us on the Christmas steam train, wasn’t it?” and so on. Was it? He didn’t know, it was as if most of his memories had been erased along with his mother. Like a book that no longer possessed a narrative, just a few words scattered here and there throughout its pages. “Sometimes it’s best to forget, Harry,” Crystal said.
Harry sometimes wondered if she would have died of cancer eventually, given the smoking, instead of falling off a cliff, which was what actually happened to her.
No one had seen her fall, she had been out walking the dog. Tipsy—a sweet little Yorkshire terrier that Harry could recall more clearly than he could his mother. A prescient name given what happened to the dog. (“Prescient” was another of Miss Dangerfield’s words.) Tipsy was found on a ledge below the cliff and it was presumed that the dog had gone over and his mother had tried to get her back and had slipped and fallen.
Tipsy was found alive, but his mother’s body had to be rescued from the sea by the inshore lifeboat. Harry had recently come across his mother’s death certificate when he had been looking for his own birth certificate—to prove his age for his under-eighteen bus pass—and it said her cause of death was “drowning.” Which was a surprise as he had always imagined that the tide had been out and she had dashed her head on the rocks, which would have been awful but better somehow because it would surely have been quicker. Sometimes he wondered if Tipsy had seen her when she plummeted past, if they had exchanged a look of surprise.
His dad gotten rid of the dog, gave it to one of his drivers. “Can’t look at it, Harry, without thinking about Les.” Two years later and he was married to Crystal. Harry wished he hadn’t given Tipsy away.
His mother had been replaced, but not the dog. There was just a Rottweiler now called Brutus that his dad had bought to be a guard dog for the Holroyd yard, and at first they weren’t allowed near him. It was Candy his father was concerned about, he seemed less bothered about Crystal or Harry being mauled to death by the dog. Actually Brutus turned out to be not quite the savage that his dad had hoped he would be, he was a big softie and seemed especially fond of Harry, although Crystal remained suspicious of him. She had never had a pet when she was growing up, she said. “Not even a hamster?” Harry asked, feeling sorry for her. “Not even a hamster,” she confirmed. “Lot of rats around, though.”
Crystal wasn’t a wicked stepmother. She didn’t nag (“Live and let live”) and she took a benign interest in his life (“How’s it going, Harry? All right?”). She didn’t walk around the house in her underwear or anything, God forbid. Nor did she make jokes about the absence of stubble or the presence of spots on his face. In fact, she had discreetly left an expensive antibacterial face wash in his en suite. He did his own laundry these days, though, it would have been embarrassing if Crystal had washed his underpants and socks. “Don’t mind, Harry,” she said. “I’ve handled a lot worse.”
She didn’t treat him as a child, more as an adult who happened to share the house with her. There were times when Harry would really have liked to be treated as a child, but he didn’t say so. (He was “young for his age,” according to his father.) They were “pals,” Crystal said, and it did feel companionable when they flopped on the sofa together after Candace was in bed and watched their favorite programs—America’s Next Top Model, Countryfile, SAS: Who Dares Wins. They had eclectic taste, Harry said to her. (“Electric?” Crystal puzzled. “Kind of,” he said.)
They hardly ever watched the news. (“Turn it off, Harry, it’s all bad.”) They watched nature programs, though, oohing and aahing at anything cute and furry, changing channe
ls the minute it looked as though something sad or gory was about to happen. It went without saying that Harry’s father wasn’t on the sofa with them. (“What’s this shit you’re watching?”) He was working a lot of the time, and if not he was in his “den” with his eighty-inch TV and Sky Sports. He lifted weights in there too, grunting and sweating as he heaved barbells above his head or jabbed at the big Everlast punching bag that hung from the ceiling. Sometimes it felt as though Harry and Crystal were conspirators, although Harry never felt sure what it was they were in league against. His father, he supposed. His dad liked to think he was “the masterful type,” Crystal said.
“Like Mr. Rochester,” Harry said, and Crystal said, “I don’t think I know him. Is he a teacher at your school?”
Crystal worked overtime on Candace and Harry sometimes wondered what her own childhood had been like. There was no evidence of it—no photos, no relatives, no grandparents for Candace—it was as if Crystal had come into the world fully formed, like Botticelli’s Venus. That was an unfortunate thought—Harry went to great lengths not to think about Crystal naked. Or any other female, for that matter. He had a huge coffee-table art book he’d asked for last Christmas. The nudes in it were the nearest he got to porn. Looking at nude women embarrassed him even when he was on his own. (“The boy’s not normal,” he heard his father say to Crystal. Perhaps he wasn’t. “Show me normal,” Crystal said.) He’d asked Crystal about her childhood and she’d laughed and said something about fairgrounds and ice cream, but she didn’t make them sound attractive.