The Hook (2 page)

Her revenge was futile but she exacted it anyway. A week after Jessica's funeral she picked up a boy in a local pub. She chose the one her parents would most disapprove of if they'd seen him and she thought as she flashed her eyes at him and smiled: This is what I will do to make my dead mother wish she was alive. This is what I wouldn't do if she hadn't left me. Gary's jeans were grey with grease, his face smeared black with engine oil, and beneath the grime he leered.

When he had drunk a stack of pints with his friends, marking time with bum-and-tit jokes, Christy allowed him to drive her home. He stopped the car on an empty road and leaned towards her. She smelt alcohol and indigestion on his breath and turned away

‘Come on, Christine, don't get stuck up on me.'

He couldn't even get her name right. Christy stared out of the window; black hedge loomed back at her. She was shocked by how stupid she had been. The sky pressed low; beyond the road on either side fields backed fields to nowhere. Far ahead an orange smear hung above Lynton and home. Gary's headlights arched a tunnel through the night, his hand slipped on to her thigh, rubbing a snail trail through her thin skirt.

‘I'm sorry, I think I've made a mistake.' She tried to keep fear out of her voice, soothing him as she would a strange dog, avoiding fast movements or sharpness in her tone.

Gary took his hand away leaving her leg damp where he had touched it.

‘You were leading me on in the pub, you wanted me then. You've got me now, haven't you? Just relax, girl.' The hand clamped back on her thigh, the other one rested on her shoulder and his wet mouth sucked at her neck, opening and closing like a dying fish.

Christy flinched, pushing him, pressing away towards the window.

‘You frigid bitch,' he hissed.

Spittle scattered across the dashboard, tears dripped down Christy's nose and into her mouth. Gary tried to turn her face towards his; she shuddered, her lungs filling up with fear. She yanked at the door and forced her way out of the car. He didn't follow her. Breathing sobs, she ran along the path of light from the car. She didn't dare look back, she wanted to go the other way, not to be within Gary's sight, but home was in front. Two miles in front. She threw herself beyond the reach of the headlights and doubled up beneath the hedge. Brambles scratched at her thighs and her hair caught on a twig but she didn't move while the car was still there, throbbing behind her on the road. Blood tickled on her legs and her breath came more slowly as she crouched in the wet dark, praying for Gary to go. Finally she heard the engine race and the car whined as he turned it round and drove off, careering fast away.

Frank was still up when she came in, sitting with slippers on by a dying fire. His expression when he
saw her remained in her head long after she had forgotten Gary's face.

Maisie wanted to meet Mick. Frank had given an account of gilded perfection and she was incredulous.

‘Christy? With someone like that? Come on, Dad, you're joking, aren't you?' Maisie shook back her hair and it settled like the curve of a fur collar, heavy and red on her shoulders.

Christy went to stay for the weekend in her flat in Lynton. Maisie had already moved out when Jessica died, and she didn't come back although Frank wanted her to.

‘I'll have to be mother if I come home,' she said. ‘And I don't want that role.'

Maisie's flat was on the third floor of a building near the hospital. It had four big rooms with rotting cornices and ceilings mapped by cobwebs. The back windows looked out through dust to the cathedral spire and laundered grass folding down to the river. Maisie was engaged. Ben worked on the oil rigs so he was never there, but his motor bike was. From the kitchen Christy could see it in the middle of the sitting room, a pink T-shirt dangling from its throttle-lever like a lonely signal on a desert island. More clothes spilled across the floorboards towards it, twisted straps and sleeves flung out, bits of Maisie around Ben's bike.

They built the motor bike from scratch in Maisie's flat. It took two years, and when they carried the new
tyres up all the flights of stairs and fitted them Ben brushed tears from his eyes and asked Maisie to marry him. They couldn't get the bike out now. Ben wrote every week and in each letter, after a few lines of Maisie-worship, he raved through page after flimsy page suggesting and vetoing ways of extracting the bike from the flat. His favourite was to ride it down the narrow stairs on their wedding day, with Maisie on the back in a white leather dress. Maisie thought not. She wasn't planning on white leather and anyway she liked the bike in the sitting room.

‘It keeps me company,' she insisted.

Christy thought Maisie really liked it because it made her famous in Lynton. Everyone knew and admired her for doing something they would never contemplate themselves. Maisie needed admiration. Her hair was a beacon lit for attention, it fired her; restless and vital, she made Christy feel like a ghost, a version of Maisie lacking light, tired and slow in her flitting shadow.

Perched on the edge of the sink, her feet tapping, her fingers sliding through her hot hair, she pelted Christy with questions.

‘How old is he? What does he do? Has he kissed you? How did he know your name in that club?'

Christy shook her head, ashamed of how little she knew, how little she had tried to know.

‘You can ask him yourself. I'll phone him and ask him over if you like.'

Mick brought his camera. Maisie opened the door to him and the flash exploded in her face. Danny
came up the stairs behind him and Mick spun round and caught him too. He put his hands up to guard himself, flinching, instinctively afraid of a looming stranger firing light at him. Mick laughed, Danny looked bewildered and edged past him into the room.

‘Who's that crazy guy?' he whispered, hanging back with Christy as Maisie led Mick through to the sitting room, preening and pirouetting so he could see her profile.

‘That's Mick, my boyfriend,' Christy hissed, irritated because Danny had thought Mick was to do with Maisie, not her.

Maisie brought beer from the fridge and they drank it out of cans. Mick drank Coke lounging on the sofa behind the motor bike and Christy could hardly see him. Next to him Danny rolled a cigarette thin and tight and cupped his hand to smoke it; his hair flopped across his forehead. Beside Mick he was fidgeting and fragile. Maisie paced around the motor bike, stretching her fingers to touch the leather seat, melting in reflection on the chrome petrol tank and exhaust. Apart from the sofa and the bike there was nothing in the room, no chairs, no carpet, nowhere to sit. Christy folded her arms and leaned in the door frame wondering if Mick would take her with him when he left.

‘I can't believe you lot.' He was flirting with Maisie now as she draped herself low on the bike and played with the wing mirrors. ‘You're all so beautiful.' He winked at Danny. ‘You're all so different. Where did your parents have to go looking to get kids like you all?'

Danny grinned, liking him already. ‘Lay it on with a trowel, it'll spread thicker that way.'

Mick laughed.

‘What the hell, it's not often you get to pay a compliment to a worthy cause, is it now?'

Christy cringed at his corny smile, but Maisie played up. Mick took another picture and she posed, eyes wide in a face hard as porcelain, cheeks so hollow her beauty almost collapsed. Christy felt as if she had been tilted until all the tears inside her were poised to pour out and she backed away to the kitchen. How could she be loved when Maisie was there to be loved? Mick couldn't want her. The sink was full. Automatically she began to wash up, soothed by routine.

‘You lucky thing. He's gorgeous. I wouldn't trust him an inch but I think he's dead sexy.' Maisie came in and opened the fridge for more beer.

Christy pretended to sneeze, lowering her head to peer into a greying saucepan, recoiling at the stench but not turning round. Looking into Maisie's washing up she began to shake with anger.

‘God, you're a slag, Maisie. Sort your kitchen out before you start on other people's boyfriends.'

Maisie didn't listen.

‘He's crazy about you. He's been banging on about you. I wish I'd seen him first.' She sighed, enjoying the thought.

Christy scrubbed her saucepan, teeth clenched, hating Maisie who she could hear laughing back in the sitting room.

Mick appeared in the doorway.

‘Christy, are you ready? We need to get going.' He saw her smarting eyes and put his arm round her. He lifted her hair and whispered, ‘I was scared of meeting your family. That's what I brought the camera for. It's my protection, you know.'

Frank was a contract manager in the frozen-food factory on the edge of Lynton when Jessica died. He had worked there for fifteen years and the ritual of his obligations shielded him from Jessica's ebbing life. He didn't believe his boss when he was called in a month after his wife had died.

‘You can't make me redundant, I'm important here.' He heard himself from a long way off, the way Jessica told him she heard her thoughts when he sat with her in the evenings holding her leaf-light hands.

His boss's stomach dimpled behind a thin shirt.

‘I'm sorry, Frank, I wish it was within my powers to prevent this.' The boss stood up, the stomach took a moment to go with him then sprang up his torso and wedged like set jelly above his belt. ‘You will be missed, Frank, you will be missed.'

Frank started playing poker with a farmer outside Lynton. He didn't lose very much money, and anyway he had plenty now. The redundancy cheque was
morphine to his grief and his wounded pride. He came back one night quite early. Christy was in her room sticking photographs of Jessica into an album she'd not had time to use. Frank walked in. His tie was slack, his wavy hair a blur about his head, and his eyes shone.

‘I've won a field,' he said. ‘Come and see.'

They drove in the dark to a waterlogged meadow and squelched across to look at the stream which ran like a vein down the side. Frank talked all the time, striding ahead through long grass. Christy floundered, her feet caught deep in the swamp. Her boot half came off and she toppled for a second before her toes found the warm tunnel of rubber again. Frank was shouting something up ahead and Christy pushed her fingers into her ears and stood still, feeling her life disappearing into a mire deeper than this field. After a moment she ran to catch up, desperate to stop Frank saying too much. She felt that every word he uttered as he paced over the meadow rooted his mad plan more firmly. He wanted to build a lake and a house and live in this field as a fish farmer. That was what Turndell his poker partner had intended, and the planning permission was already granted.

‘It's a gift from God, Christy.'

‘Dad, please stop it, you don't know anything about fish. I hate trout anyway, it always tastes of mud.' Christy grabbed his arm as he plunged into a ditch.

He was shouting now.

‘Nonsense, we'd be mad to ignore this. It's a new start in nine acres of prime gravel. I'm going to
negotiate with Turndell to buy another ten acres across there.' He gestured wildly into gloom.

Christy steered him back to the car and home. She couldn't make sense of his whirling ideas, but the mud-dank smell of the river lingered in her room as she fell asleep, pulling her down into dreams where she tangled with weeds and chains. The next morning Frank told Maisie and Danny and he put their neat little house on the market.

Time spiralled like the wind then. They lived out of suitcases. Frank flourished, his energy recharged by every meeting where a builder scratched his head and said ‘It'll be difficult to get that done' or ‘There's no way round it'. Christy became a ghost, her voice sank to a whisper, the glow left her skin, now paper white with fine veins tracing lines across her brow and down her neck. Her hair lost its sheen and became a blob of yellowing cotton wool immobilised in a high ponytail on top of her head. She cried herself to sleep each night and woke with eyes puffed pink and glassy as the fish she loathed.

She wept all week, day as well as night, when they moved out of the patchwork suburb where she had lived all her life. Danny and Maisie stayed away as much as they could, hissing like affronted cats when they were forced to come and help, crackling the sad air of the little house. All its character was packed away in boxes leaving dusty rooms stripped of their dignity and forlorn, with smudges on the walls by light switches and worn paths across the carpets. In the end Christy did it all herself. She wrapped the
pictures her mother had hung and the vases she had filled with flowers from her garden. She dug up Jessica's favourite roses and planted them in the mud-tracked field Frank called the new garden. There they sprawled, battered by wilder weather conditions than they had known in Lynton. She covered her childhood in layers of newspaper and packed it into cases. It would never come out again. Nothing was the same, not even the memory of her mother now the world she had built for her family was stacked in storage on the Lynton industrial estate.

They moved to a rented bungalow until the new house was built and the funnel-shaped field became a crater as the diggers excavated. The hole in the ground at the top of the field would be the main lake and out of it lorry-loads of gravel were pumped as fast as the newly exposed springs pulsed in. The gravel funded the lakes; mining it reminded Christy of the gold rush. Men everywhere, digging, rinsing tools, heaping yellow mounds of stone worth enough money to pay for the lake to be filled and even stocked a little. The money from their semi-detached house in Lynton was enough to start straight away on plans and materials for the new house on the lake. Everything was changing, there was no old life to hold on to now and Frank was so happy Christy couldn't look at him.

By autumn the first lake glimmered across the thin high end of Frank's field, a spine of turf separating it from the river. Lake Two was eating into feathered
grass at the other end and next to it bricks heaped up into a house. Christy made Danny and Frank's breakfast in the bungalow a mile away each morning and sent them off to school and the fish farm with Tupperware boxes of sandwiches. She was meant to be starting at the sixth-form college in Lynton, but she was terrified. She knew she should go; Danny was managing his school, in fact he said he was glad to get away from the bungalow and the gathering threat of the fish farm.