The Hook (4 page)

Christy stepped away talking fast.

‘You can fish any time. There's no season for rainbow trout, only brown, and it started in April. I'll give you a card like all the members here have.' She picked up the filleting knife, her thumb juddering along the ice-thin blade.

Mick clasped her hands in his.

‘Don't do that. You'll be cutting yourself and I'm liable to pass out if I see blood.' He was smiling now right back to his eyes, and Christy laughed over-long in relief. ‘Will you come and fish with me at the weekend? Show me where the big ones hang around so I can be in one of those record-breaking photographs.' He gestured to a row of snapshots, each one featuring
a fish like a massive eye held aloft by jubilant fishermen.

‘I can't, I'll be working with Dad on Saturday.' She licked her thumb tasting salt and blood where the knife had nicked her. ‘He can't manage on his own and on Sunday we usually go to Mum's grave.'

Mick whistled mock awe.

‘You're a good girl, Christy. I can't lead you astray, can I?'

‘This is my job, and Dad doesn't have anyone else now.' Christy heard the note of apology in her voice and stopped. Looking round for something to do, she opened the door of the freezer and began to count trout, her fingers sticking to ice-powdered skin as she stacked them.

She had told Mick about Jessica in a tight voice that hurtled out of her one night before he took her home. The moon warped green through the windscreen and she gazed ahead, keeping her profile to Mick. She could feel his eyes on her as she talked; he didn't touch her, he didn't move, he didn't speak until she had finished and was waiting small and worn-out in her seat.

‘You can trust me,' was all he said.

Christy didn't know how long she spent leaning into the freezer rearranging fish barrelled like lead balloons. The rattle of the motor filled her head. In the bone-white gloom she reached deep into frost flakes for submerged fish, her arms chilling, each movement awkward. Finally she pushed herself back out into daylight and shut the door, skin flaring tight
like blown glass in the warmth of the shop, ears humming as they thawed.

Mick hugged her, laughing.

‘I've been trying to keep some kind of conversation going with your back while you were in there, and I thought it was getting somewhere, but you couldn't hear me, could you? I was asking if I could come to your mother's grave with you.'

She knocked over a pyramid of fishing stools by the door, confused and slowed with cold. There was too much of Mick in this cluttered shop, leaning over her, taking a step further into her life.

‘Yes, if you like, you can come this Sunday. We always go late in the morning.'

A voice within her which she could not allow herself to recognise said: Thank God she's dead. She would like him, all right, but not for me, she couldn't bear me to have someone like him.

When she was a child Frank gave Christy things and Jessica took them away. Not always the same things, although there had been a rabbit, briefly. Frank brought it back from an auction as a present for the children. Christy knew it would be hers really because Danny was too small to look after it and Maisie didn't like animals, she liked Barbie and Ken. The rabbit only stayed a day, long enough for Christy to name it Felt and tell her friends at school.

When she came home, dropped off by a neighbour because it was Thursday and Jessica didn't do the school run, Felt had gone. Christy didn't like Thursday anyway. Jessica called it her day off. Usually she wasn't there when they came home and Mrs Edge the cleaning lady made them tea. Jessica would arrive while they were sitting at the kitchen table and she always went up to her bedroom and changed before saying hello to the children. This Thursday she was at home to meet them and Christy ran to hug her first
before Maisie and Danny could reach her. But when Christy skipped into the garden to look at her rabbit, the hutch door was open and every sign of Felt had vanished. The hutch gaped dark and clean; Christy looked under it, shouting as she squatted.

‘Mummy, quick. Where's Felt? The dogs will get him.' She careered across the small lawn, stopping and turning, desperate to find him.

Jessica came out and knelt in front of her, holding her arms still for a moment.

‘He's gone, darling. He had to go. We can't have a rabbit here. I've got enough to do.'

Christy stared at her mother in disbelief then pulled herself away. She ran to the hutch and bent over it sobbing. Danny pottered across to her and patted her with his small warm hands. Jessica tried to hug Christy and was met with brittle outrage.

‘You can't possibly mind. You haven't had time to get fond of the rabbit. That's why I did it quickly. We couldn't keep it, not with the dogs and everything I have to do already. It would have been me who looked after it. It always is.'

Frank came home with a Peter Rabbit bowl to feed Felt from. He called Christy to take it out to her pet and when she told him the rabbit had gone he pinched the bridge of his nose hard and rubbed his eyes. Jessica sailed on through her day, bathing her children, cooking Frank's supper, pretending not to hear Christy crying in Frank's arms in the sitting room.

When Frank tried to talk to her she spun round taut and stinging as a whip.

‘I'm not going to discuss the matter any further. The rabbit has gone. You should never have bought it without consulting me first and the sooner everyone stops thinking about it the better.' She sighed, smoothing her hands down the front of her dress, rubbing out the creases. ‘There is no point in making this fuss.'

Christy could not bear to see her father plead with her mother and her mother ignore him. Frank marched back and forth in the hall, his face turning pink then purple with rage. From a safe position behind the coat stand Christy watched him step purposefully into the kitchen and she hid her face for an explosion. None came.

Peering out again she could see Jessica over Frank's shoulder turn her wavering smile on him and reach out her hand to his cheek.

‘Frank, please don't go on. You know I have enough to deal with without looking after a rabbit.'

Frank's arms stretched forward to her and Jessica walked into his embrace; Christy saw Jessica's fingers twining in her husband's hair and she knew Felt would not be back.

Mick and Christy visited the cemetery that Sunday and Christy was more nervous than she had been when Mick met her father. Jessica's anger at her illness caught Christy as if her mother was beside her talking in the rasping whisper she died with. She shivered. Jessica was in her head, hissing and venomous: ‘You
needn't think you can parade your handsome boyfriend here. This is my place, take him away.' Christy clutched Mick's hand, but she couldn't turn back, she had her flowers and the grave needed tending.

The cemetery lay between Lynton Hospital and the shoe factory, hemmed in and shaded so the grass was glass green all year. Railings twisted and bowed around the perimeter, unravelling between brick pillars and tangling with nettles and brambles in forgotten corners. Jessica's grave was near the hospital, too near when the sun shone and the tall shadow of the chimney swung across it like a pendulum. The chimney spewed smoke and Christy imagined hospital porters stoking an evil-smelling fire with spare limbs and organs.

Jessica was halfway down a row in a plot used so long ago that it was deemed empty again. On both sides headstones were spaced like neat teeth and for the first six months Jessica's grave was a gap in the perfect jaw, a hump of soil banked beneath turf squares until the ground settled and her milk-marble slab could be set. Christy wondered who the previous tenant had been, if Jessica would have liked them enough to spend eternity mingling with their remains. It had to be a woman: Jessica could not be buried with a man she didn't know, however much time separated them. Somewhere someone probably knew who had lain in this spot until they rotted to nothing more than the air tunnels of worms and the sandy soil around them, but Christy did not want to find out.

Today Jessica's spirit was malevolent, and Christy wouldn't have cared if there had been a murderer in the grave. Even as she had the thought, she could imagine her mother's mocking face, brows curving up at the ends in surprise: ‘But you must know, love, they don't put murderers in Christian graveyards, do they?'

Mick waited at a distance from Jessica's plot, ignorant of Christy's internal battle, her desperate yearning for a sign from the grave, a sign that Jessica accepted her boyfriend, was happy for her. She stooped to lay her flowers on the ground; it was better to leave them strewn than to put them in a vase which the wind could empty in her absence.

Arranging them, crumbling last week's rose petals around them, she ran her hands across the turf and knocked her fingers on a stone. Pulling it up, she stared, astonished. A whole walnut lay on her palm, wrinkled and darker than the ones in supermarkets.

‘Mick, look what I've found.'

He bent over her, his hand on her shoulder.

‘Well now, you can take that as a sign from God, or if you are not so inclined, as a message from a devoted squirrel.'

She rose, laughing, and put the walnut in her pocket. The voice of Jessica's illness vanished leaving a blessing. She had never laughed by her mother's grave before.

Christy had vowed at Jessica's funeral that she would visit the cemetery every Sunday. For three years,
unless she was away, she had done so, spurred by nagging fear that if she didn't go once she might never go again. She began to recognise other grave tenders, who like her brought their floral offerings at the same time every week. A pair of twins trailing plaits like thin tails down acid-bright backs made a noon pilgrimage to a plot three down from Jessica. In patent shoes their little feet pattered a rhythm along the paths and they looped arms near the grave, their coats a billow of neon yellow. The plaits were streaked grey, rouge smeared circles on four identical cheeks and Christy guessed the twins were fifty at least. The object of their fluorescent mourning lay beneath a black headstone engraved with ferns. ‘Basil Shelton, R.I.P. February 14 1989.' He could have been their father; there was no clue beyond the ferns to his age or status. Perhaps he was brother or lover or husband. Ferns did not suggest romance; father was most likely; identical twins didn't share husbands, and these two looked like spinsters. Christy imagined them living together, brushing one another's hair a hundred times each morning and evening until it crackled and flew with static before binding it into tight pigtails.

Beyond them an old man crept towards his wife's grave, his skin bone tight, refined through the folds of old age into sheer antiquity. Each week he brought a posy from his garden and it took him longer than Christy was ever there for to bend down and place the flowers on the grave. She always smiled at him, even though his soft irises were blank, and her tears welled because his loneliness and dignity were so
much more substantial than he was. He wanted to be dead like his wife.

The sun appeared for a moment from behind a cloud and rushed across the grass. Christy clasped her hands at the back of her neck, pulling her hair into a hood over her ears as the breeze snapped her dress against her legs and filled Mick's coat so it bulged across his back. They turned to walk out of the cemetery together; Christy in her shimmering dress with her hair flying leaned towards Mick. His coat embraced her, it covered her like a net catching a leaping fish.

Mick didn't take Christy to his house until their sixth date. She got drunk on their fifth date and cried at him the way hysterical women in films cry, all bosoms, teeth and sobs.

‘You know me, you know about me, and I don't know you. You've met my family and seen my mother's grave and I've only met your dog.'

They were at a table outside a pub on the river and they had been there too long. Behind them the river lazed black and a pair of ducks snapped blunt beaks through a crisp packet. Mick was tense and unshaven, tapping his keys on the table, glancing at his watch, scratching in a manner Christy was convinced he had perfected to annoy her. He didn't answer or try to soothe her; she glared at him and her eyes smarted again. She marched off to the lavatory to wash her
face and compose herself. All evening Mick had been buying her drinks, sighing because she asked for another straight away, and with every drink Christy slumped further from being able to talk to him.

When she returned a group of girls had settled on the edge of a nearby bench, their backs to the men on the other side of the table. The girls were passing photographs of a recent holiday between them, drumming their heels into the grass, shrieking like peacocks when an incriminating picture reached the top of the pile. Presently they rose and left, brushing out their skirts as they walked away, their summer prints a drift of coral and sea green above long brown legs. Mick watched them go, frowning, his fist a claw around his keys. Christy slewed her chin down on both hands, soft and uncoordinated, her eyes blurring into her hair which she kept rearranging further into chaos. She felt pink and fluffy and useless; she giggled, imagining herself as a giant Barbie doll, speechless and concupiscent, sitting there with Mick.

The ducks had gone and the river was slack and tired, its treacle surface broken by an occasional ripple. Mick hunched over the table, twisting his face away, his spine like a knife beneath his shirt. The silence between them stretched. She lit another cigarette, the last one in the packet.

Mick reached across and pulled it out of her mouth.

‘You smoke too much, girl.' He crumpled the cigarette in his fist and scattered it, stinking and smouldering, on to the grass at their feet.

Christy's mouth gaped as the wires suspending her hysteria snapped.

‘You're crazy. Didn't that hurt?'

Mick wouldn't look at her. His scar stood out across a fat vein and she stared at him, hairs creeping on her bare arms, willing him to look up and smile or take her hand. He didn't. He rose, stiff and taller than she thought he could be, and picked up the car keys.