The Hook (5 page)

‘I'm tired. I've got to start early tomorrow, I'll take you home now.'

Christy sat small in the car, pressed down by silence. When she tried to say something Mick turned loud music on, bouncing his palms on the steering wheel, turning his car into a cube of sound too dense for Christy to penetrate. He didn't say goodbye when they reached her house. He paused long enough for her to get out then spun away before she could close the door, jerking down the track so the door cracked shut by itself. Christy didn't cry until she got to her room.

She thought that was it. She had blown it because she had been drunk. By Friday she had taken down the photograph Mick had given her and started wearing glasses again because her eyes were too cried out for contact lenses. She felt so ugly she was relishing it; Frank was sick of asking if she was all right and had gone fishing. Christy locked the office after work, balancing two plastic trays of mutant smoked prawns as she struggled with the keys. One batch of pink
stumps slid to the ground and she stepped back on to them, grinding deformed commas into the gravel.

‘Christy, you're killing the wildlife, or was it dead already?'

Mick was behind her. Before she could turn round he was hugging her and the rest of the prawns slithered between them and hung lewd and rosy on their clothes.

‘These are for you. I've missed you, sweetheart.' He gave her a bunch of pink roses; they were a better colour than the prawns and their scent soared above the dried-out smell of bloodless fish. He had never called her sweetheart before.

She should have been cool and said she was busy, but he disarmed her, whispering, ‘You're beautiful,' which could never have been further from the truth than then.

Rushing to her bedroom to change she stood a moment in front of the mirror, her eye sockets puffed like ring doughnuts, the eyes themselves washed out and red-veined. Christy took off her glasses and threw them on to the dressing table. Her hair had separated into strings, dark at her scalp revealing grey glimpses of skin; brushing it was useless, it would lie dank and heavy down her back.

She yelled down the stairs, ‘Mick, I've got to wash my hair. Will you wait?'

She put on a pink dress, giggling to herself in her bedroom, wondering if Mick would notice she was continuing the rose and prawn theme. He was taking her to his house tonight. She knew it even though he
hadn't said so; and he was nervous. He had not told her much about where he lived and Christy preferred to guess than to ask. He drove fast, all the car windows open to dry her hair. They turned off the road and slowed to follow a tarmac track winding through pasture and woodland, neat fences dividing kempt cows from sheep and horses. It was so orderly it could have been a calendar photograph. It did not seem a likely place for Mick.

‘The landlord lives up there.' He pointed to red chimneys scarcely visible in a cloud of trees. ‘He's like something you'll find in a theme park, you know. He's got all the kit for his playground, garters or gaiters or whatever the hell you call them, and a shooting stick and a gun room. He got it all from vacuum-packed turkeys, poor sods.' Mick swung the car down a pot-holed lane through a tunnel of trees. ‘I never thought I'd be getting this cottage, my accent's not right and the manager bloke didn't like me, but when I offered six months' rent in cash he handed the lease right over. He didn't even want to see my references.'

They were in a clearing now, stopping in front of Hansel and Gretel's house. Christy had never seen a picture of it, her childhood fairy-tale book had no illustrations, but Mick's cottage was the real-life version of the image she had always carried. The lopsided porch staggered under a rose blooming yellow, its branches roaming up and scratching at diamond-paned windows; the roof zig-zagged over the two little gables and was crowned by a twisted
chimney. Christy had imagined that Mick would live somewhere macho, a tower block or an old warehouse or above a night-club. Even though he had said it was remote, even though there were no macho buildings in Lynton, she had never imagined it could be such a cliché of prettiness.

Mick sprang to open the door for her, faking courtliness with a bow as she went past him into the house.

‘Welcome to Launderer's Cottage. It used to be called Laundry Cottage but I changed the name, it seemed more my sort of scene.'

The dog Hotspur lay flat before a dead fire thumping his tail but not moving until Mick called him. Newspapers and maps fanned across the table and a collage of photographs covered one wall. Staring everywhere, absorbing Mick's world, Christy was half curious, half afraid. Her other boyfriends had always lived at home with their parents in houses like her childhood home, or in bedsits in Lynton. Frank didn't like those ones. She had never been with a man to his own house before. Mick's belongings crowded the low room, books in swerving piles, records sliding out of their corner, pictures scattered on the mantelpiece and hung high on the wall where old nails gouged the plaster. Behind the door coats filled the log basket and trailed back into the passage towards another door. A sofa drooped in front of the fire and beside it a deep armchair. There was no other furniture save the table in the window. Hotspur bounced like a Yo-Yo at Mick's side, yapping delight; Christy was hardly breathing, unable to think of anything at all to say.

‘I'd better feed this dog.' Mick went through into the kitchen.

Christy scanned the photographs, fast at first to see if there was one of her in his collection. She found herself at one end, pale and sulky in Maisie's flat; her arms were crossed and her mouth curved down at one end. She did not look glamorous or beautiful. But at least there was a picture of her. The others were landscapes, black-and-white and harsh. Christy didn't much like them, but she studied each one slowly, willing herself to be moved by the shadows cast on to lonely countryside.

Sounds of dog feeding clattered from the kitchen, Mick murmuring blandishments to Hotspur who whined a crescendo of hunger. The long evening light melted through the window, freckled where it had passed leaves silhouetted against the sun. Leaves and more leaves, nothing else for miles. Christy thought of the long track Mick had driven her down. Even the chimneys of the landlord's house were far away, back towards the road and the world. She was alone with Mick and his belongings. What was she supposed to do now?

She tried sitting down, perching on the edge of the sofa. The clatter of the dog's plate in the kitchen made her start and she jumped up again. Should she go and offer to help? No, Mick's backview filled the kitchen door. There was no room for her in there with him. She picked up a magazine and stared at the cover. She dropped it and picked up another one. Unable to keep still she walked around the room, one hand
trailing the sofa back. She needed air. Relieved by a decision, she reached to open the back door beyond a muddle of coats. It was not the back door. A mop, a broom, golf clubs and an axe fell like spillikins into the room. Panicking now, she bent to pick them up, wedging them against curtain poles and fishing rods in the corner of the cupboard. She turned to go out of the front door.

Mick called through, ‘Are you all right in there, Christy?'

And she managed to answer, ‘Yes, fine, I'm just going to look at the garden.'

Jessica Naylor's coffin was smaller than Christy expected it to be. Although Jessica was a slight woman with narrow hands and movements as fluid as a Siamese cat's, Christy could only remember her as huge. The hole her mother left gaped, and from the childhood memories soaring through the first days of loss stared a monumental Jessica. Perhaps because I was little then, Christy thought, unable yet to form another thought: Perhaps I was afraid of her. The memories were dimly lit, but in them Jessica was lambent, her children strung around her like baubles on a bracelet.

When Christy was tiny Jessica bloomed youth; she would hold her daughter by the hand and stand, poised at the front door or outside a shop or in the playground, until someone animated her with a compliment, an admiring smile.

‘How lovely to see such a beautiful mother and child,' the Vicar beamed, squeezing Christy's cheek with bone-cold fingers.

Christy hid her face in Jessica's neck, hugging her, breathing in her familiar scent of China tea and sunshine.

Jessica didn't push Christy away then. She kept the little house neat and clean. She was happy when Frank came home and the hall smelt of polish, the kitchen of dinner. If the children were in bed and asleep she shone with smooth accomplishment. Frank sat at the kitchen table with his tie undone, clean-cut in his suit among the frills of her frilly kitchen.

She chopped vegetables and told him about her day.

‘We've cleaned out the goldfish today. Christy's one had some fungus on it but the pet shop gave me blue liquid to squirt into the water. The children loved that.'

She could do it, she really could. This small life Frank had brought her to was enough. She didn't want to run back to her parents and the big house where she grew up. She didn't need to be called Miss by men on the estate now that she had local shops where she was Mrs Naylor.

‘Naylor. Such a ghastly name. What a pity.' Her mother's sole comment when Jessica told her parents she was getting married was still resonant in her mind, but she never told Frank. She loved him too much to hurt him like that.

Frank gave her everything he had promised. The house was small, but they weren't in debt, and Jessica could enjoy bringing up the children without bothering her head with bills and mortgages. She made
picnics and cleaned the house while the girls were at school, laughing at herself when she started tying her hair in a coloured scarf to keep it off her face. Every day that her house and family were in order was a mark of proof that she had made the right choice. And that her parents were wrong. She was sure Frank would become something more than a factory manager and she sat often on the window seat dreaming of their future, of trips to London to the theatre and holidays abroad. In the meantime, Frank encouraged her to go to the hairdresser once a week and to buy a new dress twice a year. She loved the sparkle in his blue eyes when he looked at her and the strength in his narrow face. They were a handsome couple at church on Sundays, the three children playing around their pew, docile and pretty, never screaming or wiping noses on the backs of their hands.

The years rolled by punctuated by the small victories and losses of childhood. For Jessica nothing changed. She cleaned and cooked and welcomed Frank home every night, sending him to work with a clean shirt every morning. He didn't always ask how her day had been, and he read the paper now instead of listening when she told him. Alone in front of her mirror, she knew why. Her silver beauty was tarnished, her hair was fading. The mother-of-pearl skin had begun to tighten around her nose and sag along her jaw, not much yet, but she saw the traced lines of what was to come and spread her fingers across her face in horror. Looking through them she could see the reflection of the backs of her hands in the mirror,
reddened knuckles and rings sliding where her plump flesh had hardened and shrunk.

Now when she looked at Christy her pride was eclipsed by jealousy. Christy's slender youth mocked her in a way that Maisie's never could. Maisie was a foil, a vital addition to enhance Jessica, a device to guarantee astonishment in those she met.

‘Surely you don't have a daughter that age? You look far too young.'

But with Christy comparisons would be made. Even Frank, looking through photographs of a recent holiday, pursed his lips and whistled.

‘Well, I don't know where the others came from, but Christy, well, this photograph could be of you in your teens, except that Acid House logo wasn't invented then.'

Christy walked around Mick's garden and the midges swooped lower than swallows in the dusk. Above her the trees creaked and expanded towards the clearing, casting a veil of deciduum through their branches. There were no trees outside the house in Lynton where she had grown up, and at the lake they were still saplings. Unused to the creaking voices of old trees, she shivered, clasping her arms close to her as she looked up to a canopy of leaves. Mick's lawn was as wild as the wood beyond and Christy wove a path back and forth to skirt the brambles leaning in from the wall. A damp scent of nettles hung across the gateway, their green a bright blur in the dying light.
Arms bare, hair a blunt gleam on her back, Christy was out of place and small in this wilderness. She was not good at being alone, her steps were hesitant, her body tensed against imagined terrors. At home if Frank was out she spent the evening on the telephone to Maisie or a friend because she didn't really believe she existed if no one was there to see her.

Her dress danced out of the evening when she turned back towards the cottage; in the kitchen steam rolled up to the ceiling from a pan on top of the chipped stove.

Mick was muttering a line of the recipe he was reading, repeating it like a mantra.

‘“Blanch and pour, blanch and pour.” Here, sweetheart, have a drink for me.' He passed Christy a cloudy glass and went on chanting, “Blanch and pour, blanch and pour.”'

The wine stung her throat and she felt it sliding down, weighty and rotund as if she were swallowing an oyster. Suffocation crept over her again and she kicked off her shoes and lay on the sofa. She knew what was really troubling her. It was Friday, she wasn't working on Saturday, although she often did, and neither was Mick. She had no way of getting home unless Mick decided to take her. She was stuck and she was going to sleep with him. That was why she was here. It wasn't that she didn't want to do it, she had come knowing this would happen. She crushed a cushion against herself and longed for it to be over, to have done it so it could never be the first time again.

Mick laid the table with candles while Christy sat like a stone, Hotspur's head resting on her lap. The scar on Mick's forehead turned red as the sun lingered on the front window. It was already dark on the other wall and the last rays waned, shrinking the room towards Mick and Christy facing one another in the glowing window. Mick ate her food as well as his own, holding his fork like a shovel as she had been taught never to do, wiping the plate clean with bread and rubbing his hands across his mouth when he had finished; she half expected him to burp and push his plate back but he leant his elbows on the table and picked his teeth instead. Christy pushed some grains of rice around her plate then smoked four cigarettes in a row. She could never eat with Mick. His vast appetite swallowed hers, and his energetic pursuit of every morsel repelled her, making food something too physical for her to bear.