The Hook (3 page)

On the first day of term she caught the little train into Lynton with him, oddly comforted by the journey through pale-gold fields of stubble littered with great cotton-reel bales. A distant village, its church towering grey above a frill of trees, caught her eye and she began to believe she might like living out in the country. The station they paused at had a platform stippled like shortbread and baskets of orange marigolds hanging from the pillars; low white fences bordered the car-park behind where a tangle of bicycles was hitched to a rack.

‘This will be our station when we move,' she told Danny.

He grunted without raising his eyes from his homework.

They walked together up the swaying streets of Lynton Old Town past buildings with fronts overlapping, leaning down the hill drawing pedestrians with them. People always walked up the hill very slowly, not because it was steep but because they were moving against the flow of the streets, obstructing the
downward trickle like a post caught upright in a stream. Danny said goodbye and went in the great arched gateway that led down towards the river and the cathedral and his school.

Christy continued alone through the shopping precinct and along the Market Square, a car-park until Thursday when the market was held. The college was beyond New Town and past the ugly plate glass and corroded steel buildings put up in the sixties to form the shopping heart of Lynton. New Town was a neat tartan of squares and roads lined with large trees which guarded prosperous Georgian and Victorian town houses. There had always been money to help Lynton grow, from the days of the wool trade, through light industry and now tourism; and every age was visible in the architecture propelling Lynton further along the river. The river Lyn was a black eel thrown on to streets which spread from the bridge in Old Town to the factories and housing estates beyond New Town. Christy had lived on the edge of this fantail all her life in an area where band-box thirties houses flicked in tiny streets to farmland beyond. Now she entered from the other end of town and walked through all the layers of prosperity. Lynton was small. She reached the college in a few minutes, her heart sinking as she pushed open the main door. It gaped black and wide in the flat concrete façade. She had enrolled the week before; now with slow steps she headed for her first art lesson.

All that week she attended every class on her timetable and cried for half of each session. The other
students gave her rallying smiles but kept their distance; she was tainted by her grief, damaged and dangerous. They could not help her, it was best not to try. Christy continued to turn up for her classes, but every day when she entered the building she felt she had been swallowed and had become invisible. Only her art teacher noticed her and spoke to her by name. She liked him, his brow shone a path back across his scalp, hedged on either side by wisps of silver hair; his beard was pointed like a satyr's and when he was thinking he sucked the black leg of his spectacles as if it were a pipe. His name was Jack Hall.

After three weeks she had still produced no work and he asked her to come and have lunch with him. They arranged to meet at a table in the canteen. Christy was relieved she didn't have to queue up with him maintaining lively conversation while they ordered their liver and chips, fumbling cutlery on to the dirty trays. She arrived before him and sat down at the appointed table arranging her sandwich and glass of Coke in front of her. Her fingers twitched for a cigarette; she lit one, inhaling quick anxious puffs, and watched the door. He waved when he saw her and joined her presently with a cup of coffee. Jack Hall's smooth gestures and erect posture marked him out above the tables of swaybacked students shovelling food into their mouths or sticking great feet out from under the tables. His faded blue eyes were kind and Christy relaxed under his scrutiny. The confusion and sorrow she wore unconsciously behind every fleeting expression disturbed him here in the canteen
among her carefree peers, and he looked down at his coffee cup so she shouldn't see his pity.

He offered her a cigarette and smiled.

‘I'm worried about you, Christy.'

Tears perched sharp beneath her eyelids; she breathed deeply, determined they shouldn't spill over.

‘You have taken on a lot at a difficult time. I wonder if you feel you are doing the right thing?'

She shook her head, unable to speak, the possibility of freedom rising in her, pulling her up from her slumped position in her chair.

‘Do you want to be here, Christy?'

She shook her head; her hair flayed a bright hole in the ill-lit room.

‘You've got a lot to deal with at the moment. Perhaps you should consider delaying your A levels until you feel more settled.'

Christy nodded, still mute, hoping no more was expected of her, thankfulness wrapping her like sleep, until every muscle slackened.

‘I've spoken to your other tutors and they agree that you have great ability. We would like you back when you are ready.' Jack Hall sipped his coffee. ‘I will write the necessary letters for you and when you feel you can come back, come and see me and I will arrange for you to take your place up again.'

‘Thank you.' Christy flushed and smiled.

He changed the subject and began to talk about an exhibition he had seen at the Castle. Christy, dazed with relief, recovered herself and made him laugh with a description of her own visit to the show with
Maisie who became paralysed in any museum or gallery after five minutes and had begged Christy to push her round in a wheelchair next time.

That evening she told Frank she was leaving college and he sank back in his chair, head in hands tight with remorse.

‘I should have noticed, I should have made you leave, I should never have made you go, poor Chris. Why didn't you tell me? Your mother would have noticed, of course.'

‘It's OK, Dad, I didn't know myself what the answer was until Mr Hall put it to me. I feel fine now, and I need a job.'

So Christy went to the fish farm with Frank every day and her plans for college sank under the churning disorder that was their future. The house was built but not finished. The rooms were all there, but like a cartoon waiting for animation, they needed colouring in before they lived or could be lived in. Frank designed everything himself, right down to where the bath would go.

Long and low and built of flint and reclaimed brick so it looked as though it belonged to the landscape, the house had three main rooms downstairs. The kitchen faced east towards Lake One and beyond it the road, invisible except in midwinter when the poplar trees along Frank's boundary wept their amber leaves and sent shivering branches high into the sky. Next to the kitchen the small study was Frank's
favourite room, and he installed a fireplace across one wall and filled it with a wood-burning stove. With its doors closed, the stove squatted like a malevolent robot in the white room, but Frank was unperturbed. He planned to have his desk and chair right in front of the stove and thus to save a fortune on heating costs. This prospect delighted him. The sitting room had windows on three sides, casting slabs of sunlight and dust on to the wooden floor. Upstairs the bedrooms were tucked neatly above the study and the kitchen to give the sitting room all the height of the house and a ceiling of pitched beams like a barn. When furniture came in the great space swallowed it and gaped for more, but there was no more. Christy suggested a minstrels' gallery, but Frank laughed.

‘Come on, girl, what would we do with a gallery? This is great.'

And in the end she agreed. The chimney breast crawled up one wall, a red-brick spine from which plastered walls planed out and away sending light and tranquillity down through the beams. Frank left Christy to decorate the bedrooms and took his fantasies outside.

His best moment was the day he ordered his island. Christy brought him coffee in the timber office perched on the edge of the field. They stared at paper edged by a shoelace outline of the second lake. Frank's pen darted at random to place a cross in the centre as if he were playing Where's the Ball. He gave the picture to the chief digger-driver and the next day his island began to bulge from the throat of the lake.

It made Christy laugh.

‘God, it couldn't be less like Excalibur, could it, Dad?'

Frank scratched his head beneath the yellow building-site hat he had adopted.

‘What are you talking about? This is a trout farm not a myth.'

She followed him as he began his daily walk round both the lakes and over to the new ten acres where digging was just beginning.

‘You know, the silver sword rising from the glittering lake. We've just got a bump of mud sticking out of a few puddles.'

Frank never lost hope, even when the earth froze in January and Maisie came to the farm in her fluffy pink coat and freaked out. She said he had buried their mother's memory in ice and he was destroying the family; he sighed and patted her on the back and went into his hut to draw up more plans and forecasts.

A year later in the spring a tarpaulined lorry drove up, stacked with tanks of trout. Christy came out from the house and watched, expecting the fish to pour out in a gush of scales and water, but it wasn't like that. A man with a net raked through the tank and heaved a bundle of gasping bodies out and into the lake. They shone like stones in the shallows, tails fanning anger in ripples then gliding deep away. The breathless netting took all morning as two hundred ten-inch trout moved their thrashing mass into the
lake. The lorry departed at lunchtime with casualties bobbing on the surface of each tank, their silver stomachs curving new moons in the blood-warm water.

The grass was a morass of mud; Frank sat in it, hunched and solid beside the shifting water. He gazed through his reflection.

‘You put them all in, they swim around for a while and then you fish them out. I must be crazy.'

Christy crouched beside him and they peered at the surface, squinting at a mirror of sunlight glancing back at them, searching for shadows or the lone pout of a mouth rising for a fly. But the trout were invisible: shock waves had plunged them to the depths of the lake to flicker among mud worms and weed.

Danny was away at college now, Maisie had nearly finished her apprenticeship as a hairdresser and Christy had no proper job and no plans. College was impossible now she had spent eighteen months building this world with her father. Frank employed her officially, first as the money collector when people came to fish, then as delivery driver supplying local restaurants, and then as shopkeeper and stock controller. Each time his business grew another shoot, Christy tended it, and a year after the farm opened she did everything he did except catch fish and pay bills. She was second-in-command over two hundred fish, eight thousand babies (which she tried to call fry as in small fry, like the professionals), a
tackle shop and smoke house. She was not quite twenty.

Mick loved telling people Christy was a fish farmer.

‘I know what you'll be thinking of because it was my reaction as well.' He would lean forward to share a well-worn joke. ‘She's not the fishwife type, is she?'

Maisie overheard him laughing with some friends at a club one night while Christy was at the bar.

‘He's a bastard, Christy. What sort of creep laughs at his girlfriend's job?' Her hand in her hair stirred static. ‘I bet he'd like to have you ironing his socks and cooking his dinner and not having a life, wouldn't he? You know what Mum thought of that kind of existence; if she had had more freedom she might not have got ill. All that pent-up frustration, Chris, and a man as slippery as your precious sardines. Be careful.'

Christy sipped the foam rucking on top of her beer glass.

‘You know, they aren't sardines, they're trout. He doesn't mean it like that, Maisie; he's really quite impressed, I think. I'm taking him to see the lake tomorrow; he's been going on about it for days now.' She thought of her mother; she would have liked Mick, Christy was sure. Frank liked him, Maisie was jealous because Ben was unsatisfactory.

Maisie stretched haughty in her chair.

‘You should watch out, Christy. There's something odd about him; you're getting in too deep too soon.'

Christy banged her glass down.

‘Lay off, can't you. You just want to spoil it for me like you always do. You fancy him yourself. You admitted it when you met him.'

Beer draped a velvet pool on the table between them, sliding slow from an invisible fault line in the glass.

‘Give me a break, Chris, I'm just trying to be sensible. You haven't got anyone else to talk to, you haven't got Mum now, you must listen.'

Christy swivelled her legs out and turned away. Maisie could clear it up, or it could stay there, she didn't care.

It was wet when Mick first came to the fish farm and Christy's boots slipped and creaked through the closeness of rain on warm grass.

‘Trout love the rain. I don't know if they think it's the thud of something to eat, or if they just like the sensation, but they jump more when it rains.'

She led Mick to the edge and the surface shrank back from a rim of ink-soft mud before the next breath of water came in.

‘It's not tide, it's more like an over-full bath. And the lake over there is for coarse fishing, bream and perch and pike and all that sort of thing.' She pulled Mick round. ‘Come and look at the kinky clothes the fishermen wear. We only sell a few in the shop, but we've got loads of catalogues.'

Christy liked this sensation of being in charge with Mick. Usually he did all the talking and decided
where they would go and when; he even ordered for her when they went to restaurants, and bought her drinks without asking what she wanted. The fish farm was her domain, Mick was less significant here than a maggot. She flicked her hair back and walked tall, proud of her efforts and her father's achievement.

Mick followed her into the office.

‘This is a grand set-up, Christy, living off the fat of the land and all. You're one of the privileged, you know. D'you ever think about that?' He put down the filleting knife he'd been looking at and ran his hands through her hair, tilting her head back. Blue, nearly black, streaks of tiredness lay beneath his eyes; Christy saw her warped reflection stare back from his pupils. ‘Privileged,' he murmured again, and his teeth were a fence in his mouth.