The Hook (11 page)

I wanted to have fun that night, and to be apart from anyone who knew Mick. I went to a pub in Lynton where people from the college gathered and I got drunk. When the pub closed a group of us went to someone's bedsit, I don't know whose. We made cocktails of Bacardi and milk which were disgusting. A boy with fair hair in a sweep down one side of his face came up to me. I recognised him. He was called Daley Jennings and he had been a bully in the year above me at school. He tried to kiss me without even saying hello. I ducked away from his wet mouth and his bad breath and locked myself in the bathroom. Sitting on the basin examining my hazy face, I was ashamed. If this is the best I can do on my own I can't criticise Mick. I've forgotten how to behave without him. I needed to be sick to be sober and to get home. Crouching by the lavatory I pushed my fingers too far down my throat till I retched. No one paid any attention when I left. Daley Jennings was asleep with his mouth open, folded double like a clothespeg across the bottom stair.

Christy lay in the bath. The water had cooled to match her blood so if she moved she could feel a line
of warmth around her body as if she had drawn it with a red felt pen. In her mind Mick and Ben stood side by side, arms out straight like the cut-out dolls she had loved as a child. They were dressed. Ben wore a yellow T-shirt, a little shiny and a little too tight, and some blue-and-white-striped dungarees. He often wore dungarees. She put Mick in a navy cotton shirt and the nasty tracksuit she had once seen him wear. She shut her eyes for better concentration. This was good. Mick was handicapped by the tracksuit. She could now be objective. In her mind she wanted each of them to smile, and then say hello. She wanted to compare them for dependability. The Ben doll licked his lips before he smiled, and his chin sank into his neck above the gold chain Maisie had given him. Creepy, but then maybe he's shy, Christy thought, and moved over to the Mick doll. He looked straight at her and his smile was warmer than the bath. She lay in satin water until the bathroom turned grey around her, thinking of life with Mick and his dog Hotspur.

Later Christy and Danny went into Lynton to meet Mick. Danny was supposed to go and play pool with some friends, but somehow he didn't say goodbye in the pub where they met, and bought Coca-Cola for Mick and beer for himself, occasionally remembering Christy, until closing time. Christy liked sharing Mick with Danny. She slouched on the red banquette, trickling smoke up past her narrowed eyes.

‘Come on, Christy, stir yourself, girl. Play pool with us.' Danny handed her a cue and a block of dusty
chalk. ‘Naylor versus Fleet and Naylor is a two-man team, OK?'

‘Let's have a bet,' said Mick, and he pulled a fan of money from his pocket.

Christy could see the note he laid on the edge of the pool table from the other side. It was foreign-looking, big and pink.

‘You've got to bet English money,' she protested, and Mick picked it up and brought it round the table to her.

He was too close for her to see him properly; she stood back from him, bumping into the table with him still too big in front of her. He waved the money, fanning her nose, and his eyes were slits staring out of a stranger's face.

‘It is English, sweetheart. It's a fifty.'

Christy's heart thumped.

‘Don't be silly Mick, we can't match that. Why are you doing this? And why have you got all that money?'

Mick's face in the dim pub had shadows she didn't recognise.

‘I took it out of the bank,' he said, and shutting the fan he ran his thumb across the corner. This whole stack, as thick as a pack of cards, was made up of fifty-pound notes.

‘Why did you take out so much cash?' she whispered. His nail purred across the stiff paper, he knew she was angry and he laughed.

Mick tucked the money back into his jacket and grabbed Christy, hugging her hard and whirling her
round off her feet so her shoe caught a table and another customer's calves.

‘Because I can,' he said into her hair. ‘I can take out as much as I want and there's still more when I go back.'

Danny came over.

‘Come on, let's get this game up and running.' He saw Mick's money and raised his eyebrows. ‘You're very sure of your skills,' he said. ‘Christy and I will pay in kind if we lose, OK?'

‘Not me,' said Christy, now white and hot.

‘I don't play if I can't pay.'

Mick embraced her again.

‘Come on, sweetheart, your presence is worth twice that for half an hour.'

Danny didn't seem worried about winning Mick's money. Christy sighed and picked up her pool cue again. Maybe it would all make sense later. She played the first shot. The game was over soon. Mick took too many risks, the balls spun and bumped and sometimes went in, he seemed to want to lose. Danny played slowly and set up his shots with care. Christy had hardly anything to do. When Mick handed her the fifty-pound note she couldn't look at him. Danny took it.

‘Let's get some drinks.' He moved away to the bar.

Christy in her corner seat lost sight and sound of the surrounding crowd. Mick was all she could see. Mick and his money in the smoke-deep bar.

Driving with Danny back to Mick's house late, Mick's car flickering red lights far ahead, Christy was silent. Danny was not.

‘It'll be great tomorrow. I'm going with Mick to buy a new car. That's what he had all that money for, you know. He told me not to say anything to you, but as you're so sulky I think you should know. Now will you pull yourself together?'

Christy rubbed her eyes and dug into her bag for cigarettes.

‘I wonder why I wasn't supposed to know.'

Danny swung the car down the track towards the cottage, his thin hands tight on the wheel.

‘It's obvious, Chris.' He spoke gently, as if he was the grown-up and Christy a child. ‘He wants you to trust him and he saw that you didn't. He's probably upset. You should apologise.'

Danny was so certain, so sensible. Christy closed her eyes and saw herself like rot, gnawing away at Mick until he stopped being good and strong and fell to dust at her feet.

Danny should have been a girl. That's what Jessica said until he was six when suddenly he became her favourite because he was a boy and he could never outshine her. Maisie and Christy were becoming far too pretty far too soon. When Danny was small Jessica would not accept his maleness. She sidestepped his gun toting, dogged in her belief that she could change him by spreading before him a future strewn with flower presses and magic sets. But he turned sticks into guns and cardboard boxes into tanks, he took avid pleasure in squatting by flattened frogs and hedgehogs on the road. He put them in his flower press.

Jessica had no brothers nor indeed sisters herself and had fallen in love with Frank because he was gentle, and not like the barking red-faced youths her parents had encouraged her to meet at shooting parties and on skiing trips. Her life now was as neat and feminine as the floral wallpaper she had hung in
her living room, except for the presence of Danny. By the time he was six she knew she could not steer him, and instead she changed her own course. She was fascinated by the man she could see Danny would become. His maleness ceased to be a threat and became an obsession.

She had schooled Frank and bent him to her will, their lives ran as she wished them to and he complied. Danny was different. He played with her. He flirted with her. When he wanted her to let him go to a football match with Frank he didn't argue his point. He just looked at her. She could not resist him. She always gave in with Danny. She admired him for opposing her and for his pleasure in getting away with it.

Frank remonstrated.

‘You can't have one rule for the girls and another for Danny; it isn't fair on any of them.'

Jessica tossed her head.

‘I don't. Anyway, the girls are older, they should know better by now.'

And despite her inconsistencies, Jessica's children loved her, she was sure. Jessica was thirty-five when she looked in the mirror one morning and knew she wanted more.

Mick wandered along a shingle path and stopped, facing away from Christy. He never came too close when they visited Jessica's grave, and he didn't speak until they were back in the car again driving out past
terraced houses and the liquorice lines of the railway track. It was the new car. Christy couldn't see how it was different from the old car, but Danny and Mick had both told her it was perfect. The best car around for now.

‘I'm going away tomorrow for a few days, and I asked Danny if he'd be wanting to go with me.' He stopped at traffic lights and rested his hand on Christy's knee.

She looked away, excluded, repulsed by his bitten fingernails.

‘You never take me,' she said.

‘It's not your sort of thing, Christy, and anyway, you're working. He's going to help me do some research. We're going to Reading. I've got some people to see there.'

She wanted to know who he was seeing, why he needed a new car, why he never took her with him, but she didn't ask. It was better to glide on the surface, darting between these half-submerged questions without touching them. The leaping joy of being with him, of having a boyfriend, had steadied. There were parts of him she didn't know, places where she couldn't reach him. He was attentive and thoughtful, he gave her presents and bought her dinner whenever they went out. He wanted her with him in his house and he was dependable. But Christy wanted more. She became captious and determined to see into his soul. But by now she knew if she asked too many questions he would close himself off for days, leaving her
scrambling in confusion. He loved her, he hadn't said so but he would soon, and this fuelled her crusade. In time he would be open, quite open. As she was with him.

They took Hotspur to the sea and walked along the ragged shore beneath the stony bulge of the sea defences. Above them cliffs crumbled soft sugar brown and Hotspur dashed up, pausing then hurling himself back down to the sea. Pebbles round and tight like roe shored up in hills and valleys along the wide beach and in the distance their smoky purple met the sea beneath a ribbon of foam. September sun crept in and out of fleeting cloud casting bruises on to the sea. Mick flicked stones into the water sending Hotspur into a spin of hysterical pleasure. His face was sleek and wet like an otter and he panted at Mick's side, barking and leaping to and fro but determined not to set foot in the sea. Christy sat behind them on banked stones, her arms clasped around her knees and her face turned up to the sun.

Mick threw a last flint for the dog and knelt down beside her.

‘A seashore for your thoughts,' he said smiling, balancing two round pebbles on her knees.

‘I was thinking about you, wondering about your family.' If she didn't ask a direct question she might catch him out.

Mick lay flat beside her and closed his eyes, his scar a fine colourless ridge like a hook caught beneath his skin.

‘We never had anything like you've got, Christy. My dad worked in a brewery and Ma was a nurse in an old people's home. They've retired now, and there's no money. They were never there when we came back from school, and it didn't take us long to realise that they would never know if we didn't go to school at all. None of my mates went anyway. There wasn't much to do during the day there, so we used to nick cars and bikes, anything to get you out of that place, even for half an hour.'

They lay side by side, feet towards the sea, listening to waves crashing on stones. Christy shaded her eyes and looked up at no-colour sky. Autumn sharpened the air and stretched shadows down over the sea scent of salt and wet sand. Danny was going back to college next week. Maisie was already in the latest look for the new season, her tan scrubbed off, her hair pinned high and tight like a Victorian governess. Christy twisted to look at Mick. He had placed two pebbles in the sockets of his eyes and straightened himself as if he had been marked and discarded by the sea.

‘Don't. You look dead, Mick.'

She took the stones off his face and pulled him up. She couldn't bear to think of him filling his childhood with petty crimes and danger; she wanted to make it all right, she wanted it not to have happened like that.

‘Is your sister still living there?'

‘Yeah, she works in a day-care centre, and at night she goes home to Ma and Da and cooks for them.
She's older than me, five years older. I don't think she'll get out now.'

Hotspur bounced towards them from the sea, his mouth full, the hairs on his chin dripping in a goatee beard. He came closer and Christy saw that the beard had claws, wildly twitching then falling still for a moment.

‘He's got a crab. God, he's disgusting.' She got up and called the dog.

He came to her, eyes bright with pride, tail spinning. The crab waved at her, Hotspur dropped it and barked a challenge, stretching down on his front legs, enjoying the game. On the ground the crab pulled itself together like a puppet ready for action. Christy suddenly couldn't pick it up. The grey-blue shell gleamed and the claws snapped. She pushed it with her toe and the sea caught it, whirling it to and fro until it vanished beneath a slapping wave.