The Hook (19 page)

‘I'm sorry, Danny, I'm really sorry. I just had the most ridiculous thoughts in there. I think the strain of all this is getting to me now.'

Maisie appeared from the main stairs. She had lost interest in the case, having yawned her way through three days in court, and only came now to check when it was going to end.

She marched up to us glaring.

‘Has Dad finished yet? They must have got enough by now.'

The date of her wedding loomed two weeks away and she was afraid the case might still be going on.
Dad still hoped she might change her mind and pretended it wasn't happening.

‘Have you sent Mick an invitation?' Danny couldn't help teasing her, and she swallowed any bait he cast.

‘Of course I bloody haven't. He's in prison.'

‘He might be out by then. He might be found innocent.'

‘He's guilty as hell. He'll get twenty years.' Her mouth stretched back in a snarl.

I pushed her.

‘Shut up, Maisie, everyone can hear you.'

The guards outside the courtroom were motionless with their guns, but I knew they were listening. Maisie dragged me away to the top of the stairs.

‘Look, you've got to find out how much longer this is all going to take. I need to know.'

‘You're not the only one, Maisie.' Her selfishness was reassuring, a thread of consistency running through bolts of woven confusion.

‘Look, Christy, I know this is difficult for you, but a joke is a joke. You can't stand by him. He's dangerous and he
has
lied to you. Even if he does get off, how can you trust him? He might be checking Dad's house out to raid.'

Her mouth gaped and closed, gaped and closed as she harangued me. I was half listening, but my concentration on her words dwindled to nothing. She was being Mum, I realised. Talking sense or talking self. Whichever it was, she was saying what my mother would have said. I wished I could tell her that I knew she was right.

A door beside us opened and Mick's barrister emerged. I smiled and he moved nearer to me.

‘Could I have a word with you, Christy?'

Maisie snorted and swung away muttering, ‘This whole thing is like a bad television programme and bloody Christy thinks she's the star.'

Mr Sindall's eyebrows curled in astonishment but otherwise he pretended not to hear.

‘Your father was very good. A solid character witness speaks volumes to a jury.'

I twisted one leg round the other and nodded. Whenever Sindall spoke to me I felt as though I was in the headmistress's office at school. His lips were red and curved around square yellow teeth, and out of the courtroom in his gown with the greasy periwig perched on top of greying hair, he was difficult to take seriously. In court he was fine. I loved watching him pull the veins of Tobin's arguments until they snapped and clotted to dry uselessness in the minds of the jurors. He never needed to blink and his still approach was very different from Tobin's bluster. He was sinister where Tobin was bullying, he was a shark where Tobin was a bullfrog.

‘We're nearly there now, Christy. Mick is not giving evidence, as you know, and tomorrow Mr Tobin and I will present our speeches, the Judge will sum up on Wednesday and by the end of the week we should have a verdict.'

‘Oh good,' I said, and wondered if it was.

The surface of the feeding pen boiled, hungry mouths gaping, sinking, tails spilling circles in pursuit of a pellet of food beneath cross-hatched netting. The jetty planks trembled under Christy's feet, reverberations setting the next pen swarming. She moved on, buckets thumping her calves, bruising through her trousers on to a patch of skin always tender when she was on a week of feeding duty. The third pen was still. Christy flung a handful of feed in and waited. No fish rose to snap the surface tension; the water gleamed black, frilled white with the reflection of passing cloud. At one corner of the pen something bobbed beneath the waterline then another form and another. She peered across, leaning to see into the corner, trying to make sense of the clogged shapes emerging, her heart drumming apprehension. The fish were dead. She knew this before she saw maimed carcasses drift to the netting at the edge, broken as if vast hands had picked them up and torn through scales and skin, flesh and gossamer bone.

Christy had reared these fish from tiny fry, watched them grow with as much affection as anyone could have for creatures never seen but for the churn of mouths and tails until they were hooked on a fisherman's line. Now they were dead, floating in blood-boultered water. She paced along the jetty, fists clenched, searching for explanations in the fenced square of lake. Then she saw the heron. Dead too. Caught in the netting of the pen, mud-coated where its wings had tried to beat freedom. On its beak just beneath the water, skewered and shivering spectral
energy, hung a once perfect rainbow trout. Christy leaned over the edge of the jetty, stretching out her arms, but was too far away to reach the bird. Pulling herself back she caught sight of a second heron enmeshed beneath her. This one was alive, blue-silver feathers floating like little tug boats around its bulk, torn out in the struggle to escape the netting web. Beneath a curve brow its eye was a disc of watchful unblinking yellow awaiting death or deliverance.

Christy ran back to the house shouting for Frank. Maisie met her in the hall. It was her day off and she had come early to talk to Frank about dates next year for her wedding. As Christy had feared, Anna's nuptials had affected her. Worn down by her bullying letters, Ben had finally agreed that spring would be appropriate, particularly apple-blossom time which Maisie felt suited her well.

Frank was out. Maisie lurched on high snakeskin heels across to the lake with Christy. Armed with nets and sticks, Christy ran ahead, her unfastened waders quacking and flapping around her legs.

‘Oh God, how disgusting.' Maisie covered her face with her hands, shuddering as Christy took off her coat and opened the nets over the surface of the pen to lower herself into the water.

The waders were not a good idea. Bubbles oozed around her and water spilled over in a trickle then a torrent.

‘It's much deeper than I thought.' Christy heaved herself out again leaving the boots crumpling beneath
the weight of water and took off her jeans. ‘Here, you get those boots out and I'll get the heron.'

She slid down, suppressing panic as her feet sank deep into cold velvet mud. Backed against netting at eye-level, the heron was nearer and bigger than Christy anticipated. Its beak was an arrow pointing at her face; she could see in her mind the dead bird at the other side of the pen and its impaled prey; she imagined her eyeball pierced, or her arm as she reached to free the bird.

‘Catch it in this.' Maisie crouched on the jetty waving Christy's coat. ‘Otherwise it'll stab you.'

Christy caught the coat, the heron opened its beak in a silent snarl, two compass points pivoting inches away, between them a tongue curled in disdain. She lurched forwards trailing the coat into the water and threw it over the heron; heavy fabric bore the hidden head of the bird down, wet staining the coat creeping black across sandy oilskin. The heron struggled and its beak began to protrude; the coat was slipping off as the bird fought its way free. There was no time to be afraid; Christy stepped closer and grasped its beak. It felt at once fragile and dangerous, as if she had put her hand around a folded cut-throat razor. With her free hand she tore at the netting, urgency overriding any possibility of untangling the bird with gentleness. The head had emerged from beneath the coat and the lidless eye reflected her flailing movements with no shadow of fear clouding its glass yellow. Suddenly the netting sagged; the heron was free. Christy heaved it towards herself, straining beneath the weight and the
awkward mass of sharp bones, and staggered back into open water.

‘Here, Maisie, take it,' she panted, finding a last burst of strength to pass the struggling creature up to her sister.

Cream silk smeared grey and tore as Maisie gathered the heron in her arms, its reed legs flailing pond weed across her skirt. In Maisie's no longer immaculate embrace the bird looked damaged and dangerous, stretched as tall as Maisie when it raised its beak, pulling her clamped hand up and around, stronger than she was although its neck was more slender than her arm.

‘Quick, help me, I don't think I can hold on much longer.'

Christy scrambled out of the lake and they carried it together up to the house, Maisie supporting the neck and head, Christy bent over the body. They set it down in the wood-shed and waited by the door, watching in silence. Fluffing its feathers until they puffed like dough, the heron shook itself and began preening, the beak folding deep into down as it worked.

‘I think it's all right,' Christy whispered to Maisie. ‘Let's leave it in here for a while to make sure and go and get clean.'

In the house Frank had made a pot of tea, his morning ritual of the newspaper and ten o'clock toast and marmalade spread over the kitchen table.

Christy opened the door.

‘Dad, something horrible has happened. The herons have slaughtered half the fish.'

Frank's tea slopped across the gingham tablecloth; he slammed out of the room and went out to survey the damage in the pen. Maisie and Christy had changed by the time he returned, and they led him out to the wood-shed to show him the surviving heron.

‘They've done a hell of a lot of damage. We've lost quite a bit of money this morning.' Frank walked between his daughters, scarcely taller than Maisie who was dressed in too short trousers and a pink jersey that had belonged to Jessica.

The dispersal of Jessica's possessions was haphazard, and Frank was glad to see Maisie in her mother's sweater. She would keep it, wear it, wash it, until the scent of Jessica lingering in the wool distilled into the scent of Maisie. He had done no formal distribution of his wife's clothes and jewels; it was too final and painful to make a decision to be rid of the outer layers that made her real now that she wasn't. Easier and more appropriate to have them borrowed or asked for and to know that they would be used instead of remaining for ever in mothballs.

He and Christy had unpacked Jessica's belongings when they moved to the farm, folding the clothes into her chest of drawers, the jewellery placed in her dressing table, her favourite chair and her mirror all grouped in the spare bedroom which he had painted pale blue like her bedroom in Lynton. He was aware that he was making a shrine of sorts but none of the children objected; Christy had even washed and ironed the lace curtains Jessica had loved and hung
them at the window, tied back with yellow ribbons as they had always been. His own room was bare, under-furnished because there was nothing to put in it; all the bedroom furniture had been so feminine, so much Jessica's that he had hardly belonged in their room in Lynton. Christy made him some tartan curtains, Maisie gave him a bedspread for Christmas the first year they were at the farm, and Danny supplied his old lamp decorated with a trio of footballers in the Arsenal strip. The room was colourful and it held no poignant memories. It was fine.

He could see the tartan curtains dancing through the open window as he and the girls walked around the house to the wood-shed. They opened the door and stood a moment, their eyes adjusting to brown shadows within.

Christy saw the bird first.

‘Oh no.' Her voice sharp, shocked.

In front of timber stacked neat to the roof, lay the heron, beak open, limbs still, yellow eyes closed.

Maisie put her arm around Christy.

‘Never mind, at least it's not in pain. It would have been terrible to have released it and for it to starve to death.'

‘But if we had left it alone it might have been all right.' Two tears rolled down Christy's face, then two more. She was surprised by how much she minded.

Frank carried the bird out and laid it in the yard.

‘Probably shock,' he said. ‘I can't say I'm not glad, even though you did a great job getting it out of the lake. If it had lived it would have done the same again
some time. Now we've got no herons living here, or not until the word spreads and some more come to prey on the fish.' He took Christy's hand. ‘It's best this way. I would have had to shoot it if it was damaged, you know. And even though they're a menace, I love them.'

She forced herself to smile.

‘I know, I know, and it killed my fish, so I shouldn't feel sorry for it, but I do.'

Maisie had wandered off and returned with two spades.

‘Come on, let's bury it. I want to get on with my wedding plans.'

Frank's face froze in horror, and Christy laughed.

‘You two can dig the grave then. I'm going to clear the pen.'

October sun, late to rise and slow to penetrate the earth after the bone-cold night, had dispersed the early mist from over the lake and shone a spill of copper across the unbroken surface. On the bank ducks and moorhens dozed, neat as curling stones on ice with their heads lost among their feathers. Christy fancied she could taste the smell of wet grass warming and yellowed leaves sinking closer to the earth as they rotted. She sat down on the jetty raising her face to the sun, putting off for as long as possible the moment when she had to collect the dead. Above her leaves whispered a roof of sound beyond which there was nothing. Her world ended with the lake now; Mick had ceased to be in her every thought when he dropped her off from London a week ago with a smile
that flickered no further than his jaw. She hadn't seen him or spoken to him since. Nothing was resolved, but the balance had shifted and she had lost her faith in him. Maisie and Ben were getting married. Mick and Christy were splitting up. She could leave him now. She was independent and powerful. The fountain pen, tucked away in her underwear drawer, had a new significance. It could be her parting gift.