The Hook (15 page)

The telephone rang. It was Mick.

‘It's time we had some fun together, sweetheart. I'm going to take you to London, would you like to go on Wednesday?'

Swivelling her chair, Christy leaned over the desk, twisting her hair round her fingers, smiling at his
nerve, his belief that she would jump when he said jump. And of course she did.

‘I'd love that. We could stay with Aunt Vaughan. I'd like you to meet her.'

Mick was hardly listening.

‘I can't see you till then, sweetheart. I'll be doing some business with Lennie and all that. You arrange things and make a list of what you want to buy. I want to give you a present for my birthday.'

‘But it's not for ages.' Christy was surprised he mentioned it, even though she had been planning his present for a couple of weeks already.

His birthday was nearly a month away. She had written it in her diary in pink felt-tip the day he told her, embellishing the dot over the ‘i' with a flower trailing hearts. She had quite wanted to un-write it when she was angry with him, especially as her diary was the one on the desk in the office and anyone could see it, but the pink pen was luminous and no amount of scribbling could hide her doting artwork.

‘I know, but I think we could celebrate a bit in London. Who knows where we'll all be in a month's time. I'll be seeing you on Thursday then.' Mick was gone.

Christy knew she was never going to ask him if it had been him at the race meeting; she wasn't even going to ask him about being massaged by Linda. There was no need: he wanted to be with her, he was taking her to London.

She rang Aunt Vaughan and went to find Frank. He had stormed out in a fury earlier when Maisie
telephoned to announce her plan to marry Ben in the spring. Christy was sceptical, Frank was not.

‘She'll do it just to annoy me,' he complained, heading off to the smoke house with his sledge hammer.

Clad in an old boiler suit and his yellow building-site helmet, Frank looked like a coal miner when Christy found him in a crack between the smoke house and the garage it abutted. He was wedging bricks using mechanical sideways movements because there was no space for him to bend forwards. He was also wedged and Christy laughed so much she could hardly hear him.

‘Thank God you've come, Chris. I got the sledge hammer stuck in here and when I climbed in to get it I found that I couldn't get out again.'

‘Why are you building yourself in then?'

Frank was separated from Christy by a knee-high wall. She had a sudden picture of him trapped in the tiny space, bricks up to his chin and then above his head, closed into a cell of his own making.

‘I thought the smoke house might work better if there wasn't this gap behind it, so while I was stuck I thought I'd get on with it. Here, give me a hand.' He climbed out, leaning heavily on Christy to keep his balance.

The gap was narrow, and in half an hour they had built their wall high and haphazard.

Frank took off his helmet and wiped his sweating forehead.

‘That should do for now. We'll see if it makes a difference.'

Christy was certain it wouldn't but knew better than to say so. All around the farm there were collapsing examples of Frank's handiwork. He lined ditches with old fertiliser sacks, he mended fences with coat hangers and string and the washing machine with Superglue. None of it worked for long, but Frank was on to the next project before the binder twine unravelled on the last, and met accusations of slovenly work with bluster.

‘It's broken? Nonsense, I mended it, there's nothing wrong there now.'

It was left to Christy to follow his path of construction around the lakes with pliers, hammers and proper materials, making good his chaos.

Back in the office Frank made tea and unhelpful suggestions about Christy's price list. She often worried about what would have happened to Frank if she hadn't been there. Maybe he would have married again. She worried that her presence might be preventing this but she could not imagine him running the trout farm without her. They had learnt together and were a team now, more than Frank and Jessica had been because they shared the responsibility of the family livelihood. Christy shied from the notion that she had replaced her mother; it was a burden she knew she should not have to bear. Anyway, it was not so, for although Jessica had never known this new world, it belonged to her, built by Frank out of grief and loss and as much a monument to her as her grave.

For supper they tested the latest batch of smoked salmon, Christy hiding her reluctance by pushing
pink shreds beneath her bread, and she told her father she was going to London for a few days.

‘I might come too,' he joked. ‘There's a match at Highbury I'd like to see.'

‘We're going to stay with Aunt Vaughan.' Christy carefully sliced another slither of marble pink from the fish for Frank, her knife so sharp that the flesh came away like skin.

He passed his plate over.

‘Mick won't have much fun with her,' he said. ‘She gave me a real grilling when I first met her and she's only got worse with age.'

Aunt Vaughan didn't much like men or children, or for that matter most women, but she had adored Jessica, and in the absence of Jessica she had taken to adoring Christy. She sent her silk scarves and small bottles of scent with notes scrawled in purple ink encouraging Christy to come and stay with her and be frivolous. Aunt Vaughan lived alone in a small flat where every surface was green, even the sheets. Christy always felt a little unwell staying there, but put it down to the fact that her reflection was tinted by the walls around her when she looked in the bathroom mirror.

Frank gave Christy fifty pounds as she was leaving for London with Mick. She hugged him tearfully even though she would be back on Sunday evening, and rolled the fifty-pound note up like a cigarette.

‘I seem to be seeing a lot of these at the moment.'
She waved the tiny baton in front of Mick's face as they drove off, and he laughed.

‘You could get used to them, couldn't you, sweetheart. Mind you, don't get too expensive for me now, will you.'

Hotspur was draped like a moth-eaten rug across the back seat of the car. Christy noticed him when she turned to put her bag down and scowled.

‘I didn't know you were bringing the dog. I don't think Aunt Vaughan will let him into the flat.'

‘He can sleep in the car. I had to bring him because Lennie's gone back now and I haven't a soul to leave him with.'

Christy was about to ask what the point of Lennie was when she was diverted, hypnotised as she always was driving past the cemetery in Lynton. She craned her head back to try and glimpse Jessica's grave in the split-second it took to pass the gate. Mick's car radio was only just on, the windows were all closed against the spitting drizzle of late afternoon, and the upholstery wafted a mild scent of dog and aftershave. Christy was suddenly cocooned in childhood again, driving somewhere with her parents in a state of near trance, with no anxieties or responsibilities to keep her from mindlessly counting the jumping dots on the car ceiling. Jessica wore a scarf over her hair in the car and held her handbag beneath folded hands on her knee. She and Frank talked in tones the children couldn't quite hear, and although Jessica was the passenger, she stared straight ahead and never looked at Frank or into the back at the children.

Mick accelerated as they reached the motorway and Christy's reverie broke into a sweat of fear. She was remembering a winter road, darkness, a sudden blaze of headlights flooding the windscreen, Frank's voice splintering into rending tyres, the car slewing on its side in an explosion of metal and pulverised glass.

She searched wildly for something to distract Mick, hoping he would slow down if they talked.

‘I'm really worried about Danny. He might have got mixed up with some unpleasant people, I think.'

The speedometer needle edged up and up; Mick glanced across at her.

‘Oh yeah, why are you thinking that, sweetheart?'

The car was weaving too fast for sense between slower vehicles; it reminded Christy of the careering motion of the printer on her computer when she set it to disgorge the mailing list.

‘He was showing off the other night about those bikers you took him to meet. Saying they were really marvellous, and then I found some money in his room. A fifty-pound note.'

‘What did you do with it, sweetheart?'

His voice was soft beneath the roar of the engine and she could hardly hear him. She was glad because it meant she could whisper back.

‘Nothing, but I was worried he might have got mixed up in drugs or something.'

Mick laughed out loud.

‘Sweetheart, I don't think Danny is involved in anything. Those bikers aren't drug dealers, their
lives are all about throttles and engine capacities and all that sort of thing. You wouldn't be interested and Danny was never in a moment's danger, I promise you that now, Christy.' He put his hand on her thigh. ‘I gave him that money, if it's the same note, which I'm supposing it is, because he wouldn't be having more than one. It was a private joke between us which we got right into when we were working together. Don't worry about Danny, he'll soon tell you if he's hanging out with the wrong sort of people.' He seemed to consider the subject closed and returned to a low mumble of compliments for the car.

Mick had christened this new car Baby and when he drove with Danny in the front and Christy in the back she fumed with irritation as they discussed Baby and her peccadilloes. He usually restrained himself on his own with Christy, but now on the motorway he began a monologue.

‘Oh Baby, you're enjoying this run. You need to let your hair down, don't you, and it's such pretty shiny hair you have, Baby, isn't it?'

‘Shut up, Mick, I can't stand it. If you're going to carry on driving like this and talking to your stupid car then please let me out and I'll hitch home.' Christy was almost sobbing with terror, her feet braced against the floor, her arms nerveless rods holding her up as the car swooped in and out, on and on.

‘Sweetheart, you're not jealous of Baby, are you?' Mick lounged in the driver's seat, one hand and forearm curved over the steering wheel, the other hand
lolling on the gear stick, as relaxed as if he were at home watching television.

Christy bit her lip, preparing a wasp-sting retort which was eclipsed by the whine of a police siren. Behind them blue lights slewed beams into the dusk and traffic crept apologetically into the slow lane to allow the police car through.

‘Jesus, man, I don't need this.' Mick braked hard and pulled over on to the hard shoulder. ‘Just go along with what I say, Chris,' he whispered, and wound down his window as two policemen approached the car. ‘Good afternoon there, officers,' he said. ‘I'm afraid I was spending too much time looking at my beautiful girlfriend and not enough at the road.' He got out of the car.

Blushing, trembling with embarrassment, Christy stared at her feet, trying to ignore Mick and the policeman as they walked round the car. The other officer had gone back to the patrol car and was speaking on a radio, checking the car licence plates. Mick moved away towards the patrol car, and Hotspur, who had been watching, whined and started pushing his head and shoulders out of the window Mick had wound down. Christy grabbed his collar; to have the dog run over or cause an accident would be the last straw. Through the rear-view mirror she could see Mick talking while the policeman wrote notes, slanting his notebook to illuminate the page by the headlights. Mick's arms were folded, his feet planted far apart, and his hair fell across the scar on his forehead in strands. Even though he was in the wrong, his stance was confident
and his presence more assured than that of the uniformed man next to him who shuffled from foot to foot and bobbed his head about in eager response to Mick's words. In the car Christy fidgeted, biting her nails and making faces at herself in the mirror. Hotspur caught her mood and whined, staring out of the back window, his head cocked to one side waiting for Mick.

The motorway was pitch dark now in the brief pauses between ribbons of white lights changing to red as cars whipped past. Christy fell into a trance of boredom and didn't know how long she had been sitting there when Mick reappeared, making her jump. He slammed the door and for once put his seat belt on then sat back and sighed.

‘We got through that all right. Now let's be hitting London, sweetheart.'

I saw so many witnesses stand in the wooden box and take their oath on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. At first it was odd to hear those words spoken by someone real: you associate them with films, not with life. Walking down the street in Lynton on my way to the car from court I looked at the office workers and businessmen, the builders and shoppers, the mothers on the way home with a car full of children, the students with stringy hair. I wondered how many of these ordinary people living steady lives had gone into a witness box and sworn an oath of integrity. I especially wondered about the mothers.

There was a day in court when I hated Mick. There had been days when I wished I had never met him, days when I looked across the courtroom with pity I hoped he couldn't see, and days of raw anger. But I thought I couldn't hate him, it was too late for that, and I had to help him now. I had a lot of time after his arrest to decide whether I would see him through this trial, and I vowed I would because whatever his crimes, the one thing I knew was that nobody had been hurt. Everything was confusing, and I held on to that knowledge like a shield.

I was late for the afternoon session that day; at lunchtime I had delivered three trays of trout to a new restaurant and they couldn't fit them in their fridge. In the end we put them all in the bath upstairs where the proprietor lived, banked on ice, their freckles glistening through frost chips. The witness had already been sworn in when I took my seat in the courtroom. She had neat dark hair and the side of her face I could see when she turned towards Tobin was smooth and pretty. From her skin and her voice I guessed she was about thirty-five.