The Hook (7 page)

Maisie glared at him and Christy laughed, pleased he had come charging in to find her like a knight in shining armour.

‘Why would she be?'

‘Well, when your dad said she was doing some kind of experiments on you I wasn't sure what he was meaning, so I thought I'd get myself here and find out.' He grinned at Maisie who raised her chin and scowled disdain.

‘I've got a different victim tonight, actually,' she said. ‘But he's not very open-minded.'

Danny came out of the bathroom with his hands concealed inside a nest of slithering green and his hair one jagged inch long.

Maisie screamed and stamped her foot.

‘You little bastard. That took hours to do. That hair cost a fortune and you've just cut it all off because you didn't think you looked cool enough.' She slapped the wet hanks into the sink and burst into tears. Danny reached out a hand to her to say sorry but she pulled away, saliva a reptilian gleam on her lips. ‘Fuck off. I'll never forgive you, so don't even try to say sorry.'

Another door slammed, this time Maisie's bedroom. Mick whistled.

‘Well, she's got a temper in her to stop rivers, hasn't she?'

Danny was by the sink, mute and defenceless as a shadow, looking down at Maisie's hair extensions beached above the waterline on dirty pans and plates. He was almost crying. Christy put her arms round him.

‘Come on, Danny, you know she doesn't mean it. Let's go to the pub for a bit. When we come back she'll have forgotten about it.'

Mick didn't want to let it go.

‘You shouldn't be having her do that to you, Danny. Tell her to say sorry now, tell her to act up or she'll be in a load of big trouble.'

Christy noticed for the first time in a while how strong Mick's accent was. Maybe he sounded more Irish because someone else was there. On her own with him Christy was not conscious of his voice at all. It was as if they communicated without talking much, but that couldn't be right
because Mick had to talk all the time; if he didn't he would explode.

They went to the pub at the bottom of Maisie's road and Mick left them at a table and went to the bar. Danny rolled a cigarette thin as a pipe cleaner and lit it perched on a windowsill. Smoking with his chin tucked into the collar of his shirt and his hair dripping down his neck, he shivered and clenched his teeth. Christy squeezed his hand across the table.

Mick returned with the drinks wedged in a lopsided triangle between his hands, and sat down next to Danny.

‘Do you want to come with me to meet some bikers on Thursday? I'm doing a kind of story on them and I heard there was a meeting going on near Wisenton. We could go and see what they're all about.'

Danny shed his gloom and sat up, his spirits lifting as confidence bolstered him and his gestures became emphatic.

‘Tell me more about what you do. Chris hasn't said anything and it must be really interesting.'

‘I don't know anything, he hasn't told me.' Christy glared at Mick.

He took her hand and kissed it.

‘I got into the whole thing because I like taking pictures and I used to go all over to do it. You meet people, you get talking in bars and sometimes something comes of it, you know.'

Christy went to get the next round of drinks, weaving though groups of people to the bar, taking her
time so Mick and Danny could talk. It was easier to ask Mick questions with Danny asking too. Alone his intensity bore down on her, crushing her own thoughts until she had nothing to say.

Mick wanted Danny to come back to the cottage with them. Christy felt guilty about Maisie.

‘I'll go back and stay with her,' she said when they reached Mick's car, but Mick handed Danny the keys and opened the back door.

‘Come on, sweetheart, I need you to hold my hand now while this speed freak takes us home.'

Danny pulled a yellow note from the windscreen.

‘You've got a ticket. Bad luck.' He stretched to pass it to Mick then pulled it back frowning. ‘Hang on, there aren't any restrictions here after six, so how come they've given you this? Hey, it says four o'clock; you weren't here then, were you?' Danny slid into the driver's seat muttering about traffic wardens.

Mick shoved the ticket in his pocket.

‘Calm you down, Danny boy. I parked here earlier and left the car while I went around town a bit, that's all.'

In the back seat Christy lolled her head on Mick's shoulder, warm and happy with his arm around her. She looked up at him.

‘Well, how did you see Dad then?' Her voice was lazy as she twisted herself until she was comfortable resting against his side.

Mick's arm tensed and his frame was as unyielding as metal beside her. He sighed, pressing his fingers knuckle white on the back of the driver's seat.

‘I never said I saw your dad, girl, I called him up. Is that OK with you? Now stop policing me. Turn right here, Danny.
Right
, I said. Jesus, will we be living after this journey is the question now.' He hugged both arms around Christy, and the car spat dust on to the twilight road.

Christy did not enhance her mother's beauty like Maisie and Danny. Their colouring, their tall grace set off Jessica's moon cool to perfection. Christy tagged along behind her mother, anxious to please her. It was like chasing a shadow: no matter how hard Christy tried, she could not make her mother turn to her with the easy affection of childhood.

Christy was fifteen when she began to understand how her mother hated getting old and blamed her for it. There was a shopping trip Christy remembered. It began badly. Danny was away camping with a friend, so everything he needed for school had to be selected by his sisters. Maisie headed with unerring eye for the most expensive version of school trainers, sweatshirts and tracksuits, sneering and mocking her mother as she searched through the sale racks. Christy darted back and forth between them, trying to divert Maisie's lashing scorn, glancing anxiously at her mother whose brow creased
deep and then deeper when she saw Christy watching her.

Jessica's mood changed when they left the department store, Danny's uniform parcelled and awaiting collection later. She linked arms with her daughters, and smiled, pulling them forward to giggle at a window where a youth blushed in his struggle to pull tights over the stiff legs of a naked mannequin. Their heads together laughing, embracing in the street, the reflection in the shop window was of three girls. Jessica saw this when she threw back her head and her veins raced with triumph. Her daughters hovered on the brink of womanhood and she was forty and still as slight and graceful as they were.

She hugged them both closer and said, ‘I'm going to do it. I want to buy you each a grown-up party dress. It's my own money, left by my aunt, and it's time you each had something special.'

Maisie hardly waited for her to finish speaking.

‘God, thanks, Mum. I know what I want. Come in here, quick.' She dragged her mother and sister into a small shop where music throbbed from the open door.

Jessica was disconcerted. She had imagined they would go and drink coffee first, and talk about where they might go, what they might buy. A cloud of femininity and fashion talk would roll over them and the occasion would be marked with celebration. But that was not Maisie's way. She smiled as her elder daughter came out of the changing room pirouetting, a skin
of gold hardly covering her. It wasn't possible for Maisie to wait and talk, she was too impulsive.

‘What do you think, Mum?' Maisie snaked her spine high and tiptoed in front of the mirror, holding her hair up with both hands, twisting so she could see her back. The colour flowed down from her hair into her dress, shifting like scales in the light.

Jessica blinked.

‘You look lovely, darling, but isn't it a bit short?'

Christy nudged her.

‘Don't say that, Mum, she'll just try and find a shorter one.'

Maisie stalked back into the changing room, her voice shrill above the music.

‘This is the one I want. I don't like anything else. I'm not forcing you to buy me a dress, you offered.'

Christy and Jessica looked at one another. Jessica winked.

‘You know her better than I do,' she whispered, and they giggled.

The dress was folded in tissue paper, turned over and over like pastry until a square, white and neat as a pie, lay on the counter. Christy fidgeted, anticipation surging for her turn, her mouth dry when Jessica wrote the cheque for Maisie's dress.

‘It doesn't matter, I don't need anything if we can't afford it.'

But Jessica snapped shut her bag and squeezed Christy's arm.

‘Nonsense, darling, of course you are having a dress too. Now come on, where shall we go?'

Maisie skipped ahead, shouting ideas back at Jessica and Christy strolling, talking in low voices behind her. In the next shop Jessica searched through the rails for garments she imagined were appropriate for a fifteen year old. Christy was thrilled at her mother's interest and took armfuls into the changing room, emerging sporadically, hunched and embarrassed, in a succession of sequins and frills.

‘Mum doesn't know what I want,' she whispered to Maisie.

‘Try this.' Maisie passed her a handful of gauze.

In the cubicle Christy slipped the dress over her head and came out to show her mother and Maisie before she looked at it herself. Jessica turned towards her and gasped. Christy saw her mother's face crumble, eyes staring from pinched tight skin, sallow and old as if a wax had spilt across her features. She moved in front of the mirror, trying to keep her shoulders straight and her head up.

‘Don't you like it, Mum?'

Tears dazzled Jessica's vision. Christy's soft shoulders rose clear in her mind, and Christy's face framed by white blonde hair, the dress in shades of grey like the dawn. She saw a reflection of herself except that the self she saw had not existed for twenty years. Her earlier triumph of sisterhood with her daughters was confounded now; she moved and stood beside Christy, forcing herself to mark the contrast further. Christy's skin was mapped with veins so fine it looked as though she had been burnished to the point of transparency. Beside her Jessica sagged
from her spine, shrouded by years of dust and dullness, heavy, sucking light in instead of giving it out. She was old and she resented Christy for reminding her of it.

Christy watched her mother's face in silence. She had done something dreadful. The dress was wrong.

‘I don't really like this one,' she whispered.

‘Rubbish, you look great.' Maisie swung her round. ‘This is the one. Come on, Mum, let's buy it and go and have some lunch.'

The shop assistant bustled over.

‘You must be proud of her,' she said as she chivvied Christy into the changing room. ‘You must have looked just like her in your heyday.'

Jessica nodded and tried to smile.

Christy never wore the dress while her mother was alive.

Through the summer Christy worked long hours on the fish farm and Mick was often away. She borrowed Frank's van and drove to the cottage at dusk when the last angler had left the lake, his rods and nets bundled in the boot of his car, his fish slithering and drying on the seat beside him. When Mick was away, Christy went to his cottage to look after his dog. Hotspur stayed with her the first time Mick went away, but he pined, scratching and whining, never able to be still. Frank did not like dogs and had replaced Jessica's pair of black pugs with a sigh of relief and a pale hall carpet when they followed her to the grave. He
grunted and didn't look up from his paper when Christy told him that Mick's dog was coming to stay. But once Hotspur was installed his reed-thin voice rose through the house like dust reaching every corner when he was parted from Christy, and Frank stopped grunting and shouted instead.

‘Get that damned thing out of here. I caught it eating the bonemeal around the roses this morning. It dug one up. You are not keeping it under control, Christy. I won't put up with it any longer.' Frank glared at Hotspur as he spoke; Hotspur licked his lips and curved himself in apology, scraping across the lawn towards the crinoline shade of a rose bush.

Christy caught him and shut him in the garden shed, but he climbed up to the window and stood craning his neck, following Christy everywhere with his pleading eyes. It was better to keep him at Mick's cottage.

Mick was never gone for more than three or four days, and when Christy was busy at the lake, Danny was there, on holiday from college, and he liked to take the van and speed off to feed the dog, freedom a plume of exhaust smoke behind him.

Frank was making money now from the fish farm. His overdraft no longer ballooned each month and he forgot that he was lonely and bereaved when he looked out at the land through which his business flowed as strong as the narrow stream that fed his lakes. The wounds which had ridged the earth around the lakes were healed now and small trees
shivered a path up to the office. Frank's island with its top-knot of reeds and grasses tangling with bramble hoops rustled with purpose as beasts and birds threaded their way through the scrub. From the porch Frank trailed them with his binoculars before dusk. His ritual coincided with the heron's slow circuit of the lake, and Frank watched the bird land on the shore, long legs crumpling in slow motion, wings beating up air for balance, before it could stand, still and upright as a sentry, except for the bone beak thrusting from the rushes. The heron was a menace on the lakes, dilettante in his clean dive to pierce a fish he didn't want to eat. Flapping back to the shore, his trophy impaled and struggling on his beak, he paused and the slick black marking on his head was an eyebrow raised in challenge to Frank, impotent by the house.

Christy felt that at last after almost three years the house was beginning to become a place where people were happy. At first it had been too new and too soon; the rooms were sharp with pain and there were not enough cushions or pictures and no happy memories to soften them. Frank had begged Maisie to come home, even for a short time, but she had said no. She hadn't understood how much they needed her to be there for a while so that this house could fill with images and sounds and life. Christy knew that deep down her father missed Maisie and her jangling energy, as he missed Jessica. With Danny away half
the year Christy couldn't fill the spaces left around her father. And meeting Mick made it worse. Christy hated leaving Frank when she went out with Mick. Most of all she hated it when Frank waved them off and she could still see him smaller and smaller, sitting with the newspaper alone on the porch.