The Hook (6 page)

Mick finished cleaning his teeth and left the table to light the fire. He crouched on the hearth breaking kindling, light as a cat on his feet even though he was filling the whole fireplace with his body. Christy tiptoed past Mick's turned back and tucked herself into the chair by the fire.

‘What do you think of this place, sweetheart? Do you like it out here in the sticks?' His voice was smooth as glass to steady her now they had moved from the table.

In the half light he loomed and Christy receded sinking back in monochrome shadows, her pink dress the only colour in the room. She didn't answer.

Mick laughed.

‘Are you still here, Christy? I can't see you now, and I can't hear you. You're scared as all hell, aren't you?'

‘I'm not scared, I'm nervous.'

‘Same thing,' said Mick and he stretched out on the sofa, leaning back to look at her bolt upright on her chair near the fireplace.

She wished he would turn the lights on. The heap of him merged with the heap of sofa, spreading across the whole room. Neither of them spoke. And then Mick was holding her hands and his hands were so warm she realised hers were frozen. And he was putting his arms around her, unbending her clamped elbows and wrapping her arms around him. And he was kissing her, making her feel so wanted that she did not notice that she wasn't nervous any more.

Christy woke up stretching in warm morning light. She was in Mick's bedroom and the telephone was ringing downstairs. She heard him answer it, his voice clear at first then rumbling indistinct but constant like a train passing. She couldn't help smiling, thinking that even at seven-thirty he couldn't stop talking.

He appeared in the bedroom, dressed and wide awake.

‘You get up early.' Christy pulled the sheets up to her face, self-conscious at being naked in daylight when Mick had clothes on. He smelt of coffee when he kissed her. ‘I thought you'd be asleep. I have to
collect something now, so I'll be seeing you later, sweetheart.' He stroked her hair and was gone.

Christy rolled over and closed her eyes, listening to the car roar away until the sound was so distant it mingled with the moving trees.

From the beginning of the trial everyone knew I was Mick's girlfriend. The policemen with macho guns who guarded every entrance, the court clerks, even the traffic warden, who had stopped giving me tickets when a constable told him who I was. They smiled at me with sad sympathy in their eyes and whispered ‘Poor love' when I passed.

Mick was delighted.

‘It'll really help the atmosphere with the jury and their mood and all that if everyone feels sorry for you, sweetheart,' he told me during one of our visits.

‘But I don't know if they're sorry for me because of what might happen to you or because I'm involved with you.'

Mick stretched his fingers under the glass screen and touched my hand.

‘It doesn't matter what they're thinking. Just look tragic and wronged as often as you can and be drop-dead sexy the rest of the time. They'll love you, Christy, they'll love you.'

He pressed his palm flat against the glass and I did the same, my hand fitting into his so it looked as though I'd drawn round it. This was how we held hands now.

Mick liked being in court. Right from the first day he had power even though he was handcuffed. The security around his case was crazy. Even the barristers were searched with metal detectors, once at the front door and once outside the courtroom.

Mick applied to the Judge to have the handcuffs removed a week after the case was opened. His arm was sore from the days spent tethered to a shifting rota of police officers.

‘It's not as though I'm going to do anything, Your Honour,' he said to the Judge with a grin. I thought he shouldn't be smiling, he should be pleading, but Mick wasn't like that and anyway the Judge almost smiled back. ‘I'd have to be crazy, wouldn't I, to think about escaping with two dozen men with guns crawling around this building?' He lifted his right arm, dragging the policeman beside him to reluctant attention. ‘I'll be ending up deformed, Your Honour. I'm already blistered and bruised enough – you can see the bandage right here.' He pointed with his unyoked hand at the greying fabric on his captive wrist.

The Judge considered him, head on one side, wig awry, heaped up like suet.

‘No, I don't think we'll uncuff you, Mr Fleet.'

Mick scratched his scalp and ran his fingers through his hair slowly; the policeman's hand hovered useless above his own.

‘I suppose it might be prejudicial to the prosecution,' said Mick. ‘For sure it's prejudicial to the defence that I am handcuffed.'

The Judge straightened up in his chair shaking his head and shuffled small hands among his papers.

‘No, Mr Fleet. I cannot allow that. You cannot talk like that in the courtroom.'

I didn't see why it mattered. The jury were always sent out when the Judge and Mick, interrupting his barrister, had this sort of conversation, and they had it often. Mick couldn't help treating the Judge like someone he knew. He was always demanding reasons and explanations for the way things worked. The Judge allowed far more than I expected. He seemed to like Mick, even though Mick was fired up and emotional sometimes.

‘This is the rest of my life being debated, Your Honour. I need to know what you all think you're doing with it in here.'

The Judge was like a slap of water in his responses.

‘Yes, yes, but you cannot go against the legal structure,' he explained time after time.

Mick had a talent for making other people feel important. He gave me a role when all I really needed was to be there. But maybe he was right to. He sucked me into his trial so deep that I could not have got out if I had wanted to. I didn't want to. I was his route to the outside world, and I was vital. Mr Sindall, Mick's barrister, had a team of solicitors who darted around me nipping information from me before returning to their notes and files. Members of the public who came to watch the trial smiled at me; one or two spoke, just making conversation: ‘It's a lovely day,' ‘Traffic's bad on the ring road, I hear,' ‘Do you know when the
canteen opens?' I knew what they were doing. Each sentence came with a searching gaze, their ears flared when I responded and they tucked my words into their gloating minds and hoarded them to tell their friends later. ‘I spoke to his girlfriend. She was friendly, not like you'd expect one of them to be.' I could hear them marvelling as if I was with them, back in their safe worlds where court was a source of excitement and glamour. I was a part of that glamour and it would have been a lie to say I didn't love it.

Maisie kept Tuesday evenings free for experimenting on Christy. It was a ritual that had evolved long before Maisie decided that hairdressing was her vocation and before Christy was old enough to understand the repercussions of acquiescence.

Christy was three when Maisie first realised she was better than a doll.

‘Christy, of course, can walk and talk and wee very nicely. The only thing she can't do is grow her hair fast,' Maisie explained to their mother in a moment of pride.

Christy basked in a sense of unity with her sister but was anxious. Her hair must grow faster. She tugged at it, she wove nests of wool in its split-ends and filled them with pebbles and buttons as ballast, and she screamed herself breathless blue if Jessica tried to trim it. The hair was a perfect tool for Maisie, a rope to knot, a sheet to drape, a mop to curl. Christy never minded how much Maisie pulled or pinched at her
scalp; the habit of pleasing her was unassailable. By the time Christy was seventeen, the habit of pleasing Maisie had lost most of its charm, but she still found herself melting before her sister's jaw-tight determination. She managed to strike a deal for Tuesday nights only and on the whole they had stuck to it.

This Tuesday Maisie was doing hair extensions. Christy found the bottle of wine she had bought rolling like a nine-pin in the back of the fish van and rang Maisie's door bell. Squinting up for the key, Christy stepped back to the edge of the pavement. Her reflection warped in the plate glass of the magic shop on the ground floor of Maisie's building, and again in the distorting mirrors at the back of the shop. Christy bloated, Christy wide-hipped and fish-tailed, Christy long and narrow as a snake, stared back at Christy hot on the pavement.

Danny appeared behind her, his shirt flapping open in the breathless still of the evening. He was back from college for the summer, quiet and etiolated from the months spent bending over his computer. Christy had tried to make him join a circus school she had seen a poster for, but Danny was only interested in computers and making money.

Maisie's key landed in the gutter behind them extravagantly wrapped in a knot of silver satin. She was in a good mood. When she was angry the key hurtled from her third-floor window bound to a lump of coal. She didn't care if she hit anyone, didn't care if she hurt anyone; when Maisie was angry everyone had to know and preferably suffer as well. Much thought
accompanied her key in its arc to the pavement; on days of depression there was a damp sponge, on sad days just the key, naked and alone, and on tempestuous days the contents of her handbag showered down, papers and receipts twirling like woodshavings and landing out of reach on the ledge above the magic shop.

‘Why does Maisie have to be so affected? I wish she'd lay off.'

Danny tried to throw the slither of ribbon into a dustbin but Christy took it from him.

‘She's just like this. You know there's no point in arguing. Anyway, at least she's in a good mood this evening.'

Maisie had laid the kitchen table for supper and pulled the coloured blinds so the room flickered pink and orange like the inside of a Chinese lantern. Her collection of car accessories and bumper stickers crowded the shelves by the cooker and stirring a pan she paused to run a wooden spoon across a row of plastic dogs, setting them nodding manically in time to the tune on the radio.

Christy dropped her scarf on the back of a chair and opened the wine.

‘This is really nice, Maisie, what a treat, I didn't expect supper.'

Maisie giggled.

‘Look again at the table, Chris.' Her eyes danced and she winked at Danny.

Christy lit the candles and looked. Salad, bread, pots of mustard and relish dotted the table and the plates were prettily decorated with sauces.

‘I don't understand.' Christy squinted nearer and squealed. The salad wasn't lettuce, it was green hair, the very hair that Christy was supposed to be wearing later, viscous and apparently doused in dressing. The bread was a hairbrush wrapped in a napkin and the sauces were shampoos and conditioners drifting a sweet synthetic smell across the room. Christy suddenly felt very hungry.

‘God, this must have taken you ages.' Walking around the table eyeing the feast, she was annoyed that she could ever have mistaken it for food. Maisie's joke was revolting; Christy couldn't laugh as Maisie and Danny were.

Maisie was almost hysterical, clutching her stomach, knees together, back hunched, so she was a string of knots and curved corners enjoying her own joke with childlike abandon. She hadn't meant it to be creepy. That was the trouble with Maisie: she was always upsetting people without meaning to, especially people close to her. Ben was lucky to live in the middle of the North Sea; on days when Maisie really lost control Christy liked to imagine her sailing off to join him, never coming back, but wreaking red-hot havoc on the oil rigs.

Maisie didn't give Christy hair extensions in the end.

‘Your hair is long enough and anyway, I don't think green would really suit you.'

She did it to Danny instead and Christy was her assistant. He looked like a fairground troll when his sisters had finished soldering seaweed strands on to
his dark hair. He posed on the motor bike while Maisie darted round with her comb, flicking wisps of hair into ever more absurd peaks. Christy ached with laughter, wandering through the flat looking for the camera. She was halfway through Maisie's wardrobe, throwing clothes out in a jigsaw swirl of colours, when the door bell rang.

Maisie leaned out of the window dangling the key from a lock of green hair.

‘It's Mick.'

‘What's he doing here? I didn't even say what I was doing this evening.'

Christy crawled out from the scented folds of Maisie's clothes and ran to look out of the window. The pavement was empty. Mick was already in the building.

Danny scuttled in from the living room, his neck pushed down into his shoulders, trying to hide his head like a tortoise.

‘Get this crap off me. I'm not your doll, you know.' Grabbing Maisie's scissors he slammed himself inside the bathroom.

Christy stared in astonishment at both the doors, the front one through which Mick was about to appear and the bathroom one echoing with Danny's anger.

‘I don't think he wants cool Mick to see him dressed up as My Little Troll,' whispered Maisie.

Mick was breathless and had running clothes on when he opened the door. Sweat glistened on his forehead and his eyes gazed blank and tired. Christy was disappointed: Mick should be equal to anything.
And he shouldn't wear tracksuits. No one should wear tracksuits.

She stepped back from him.

‘How did you know I was here?'

Mick ignored her and tried to open the bathroom door.

‘Danny's in there, you'll have to wait.'

Christy followed him into the kitchen and gave him a tea towel to wipe his face on. His skin was pasty white and looked as if it would crumble like cheese if he rubbed it. She averted her eyes. He drank a pint glass of water in one slide and revived, wetting his hair under the kitchen tap so he looked like a boxer with the tea towel slung around his neck. It was better than looking like a jogger.

‘Your dad told me you were coming round here. I thought I'd drop by and make sure your sister wasn't pulling out your teeth.'