‘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.
It was Christy’s idea to build the porch. It was a proper American one, the kind they had in westerns where mothers sat in rocking chairs and sewed and fathers kicked off their boots after a hot day on the ranch.
Frank didn’t want it at first.
‘It’s going to cost a lot of money just to give you a place to sit three times a year when it’s warm enough,’ he complained to Christy, but she wouldn’t give up.
‘It’s for you, not me. You can sit and look over the lakes. You must do it, Dad. You can’t live here properly unless you have a place you can look out from.’
In the end Frank capitulated, and although he pretended he still thought it a waste of money, Christy found him with the plans, adding steps and widening posts until it stopped being Christy’s porch and became part of Frank’s house.
Red and low like a barn, the house stood on a bulge in the ground above the main lake. The porch broke up the long side wall and its weather-bleached timber made everything new and just finished look old and permanent. In the roof, bedrooms with pointed ceilings faced out above the porch, window frames curved like plough yokes over glass which time would twist and warp. The house was Frank’s surrogate wife and he treated it with the clichéd romance that he had long ago stopped offering Jessica. Every week, he came home from Lynton with flowers. Sometimes he gave them to Christy saying, ‘These are to go on the kitchen windowsill and those are for the sitting room,’ so she knew they were not meant for her.
That summer there was no rain for six weeks. The lakes sank as the sun scorched rays across the baked earth and the trout hid themselves in cool deep hollows. Christy helped a small boy dig for worms while his father was fishing, but there were none; they too had forced their way deeper down, to a subterranean layer where soil was damp. The first fishermen arrived at dawn, and Christy woke every morning to the purr of an engine, the clunk of a car door closing.
She asked Frank to restrict the hours.
‘I had to get up at five today, Dad. Can’t we stop them coming so early?’
But Frank laughed.
‘It’s good for you, and we’ll lose business if we don’t let them come early. It’s too hot to fish during the day. The trout won’t rise.’
He was right. Walking out as the sun rose, rubbing her eyes, Christy was glad she had to be up. White mist lay over the water and low across the fields, rising to drape tree trunks, thinning in patches warmed by the sun. Her feet left a dark trail through dew-powdered grass as she walked around the lake to a solitary fisherman. A clatter of beating wings broke the silence and three ducks skidded on to the water shouting a warning to one another as they landed. She recognised the fisherman as a regular, and passed him with a professional blinkered smile and muttered greeting. Frank insisted that all members were greeted, and if no one was in the office when they arrived, Christy had to walk around both lakes making sure they had seen her.
‘It means they know we know they are fishing; there are always some who want to poach, and this stops them.’
This technique seemed to work. The last time Christy had had to stop a fisherman and ask to look in his bag was three months ago. She remembered it with a shudder. Usually when she thought someone was poaching she called Frank to deal with them, but on this occasion he was away. The man had not been to the lake before; he arrived early, paid a day’s membership fee and settled himself on the far side of the big lake. Christy hadn’t taken much notice of him. Her paperwork preoccupied her, and the book-keeper had come. But at five o’clock he appeared outside the office to pay for his catch. Christy smiled and went out to greet him. His pale round eyes gazed from a face sprouting hairs, some on the chin, more on his upper lip and a fringe on each cheekbone like low-slung false eyelashes.
‘I’ve just had the two,’ he said, pulling a pair of rainbow trout from his fishing bag.
As he held them out to her the bag slipped from his shoulder and landed open at her feet. Inside, fishtails and eyes and pink open mouths heaved, bodies flapped, dry-scaled and dull with exhaustion. He had not even killed them.
‘What about those then?’ Christy’s voice spat anger. She would have let him go; she hadn’t noticed the bulge of his fishing bag tucked behind him. Her rage was at her own inefficiency more than his deception. She grabbed the bag and counted. ‘One, two, three, four, five . . . you know we only allow three. The rest should have been thrown back.’ She spoke to a space.
The man had gone, his plump hips wiggling as he trotted away to his car, throwing the two trout he had declared over his shoulder as he went. Christy gazed after him, her arms full of thrashing fish, astonished by his cowardice.
‘You should at least have the guts to stand up for yourself,’ she yelled as the car plunged up the track and away.
Christy was confused by Frank’s quick fondness for Mick. It made her feel as if they were married already. Already. How could she think ‘already’ when it was August and she had only known him since May? Mick was often early to collect her. Frank would let him in and lead him through to the porch for a drink. The third time Mick was early Frank didn’t even bother to call Christy. Usually he shouted up the stairs, ‘Christy, your young man is here.’ Mortifying; in the mirror Christy’s face flared crimson hot, imagining what Mick must be thinking. The day Frank didn’t call up to her she was even more irritated. Did he think Mick had come to see him? Had Mick come to see him? She might as well stay upstairs. No one would notice. She hadn’t dressed after her bath yet, but was lounging on her bed, the warm air drying her skin. In the blue light of her room with curtains drawn, her draped limbs gleamed and her stomach and hips curved across the bedspread, taut like the underbelly of a salmon. She looked down at her body, half closing her eyes, trying to make herself sink and vanish into the deep-water folds of fabric on the bed.
Finally she dressed and went downstairs, moving quietly through the house to surprise Mick and Frank. She saw them and her urge to disturb them slid away. They were so comfortable talking, leaning side by side on the rails of the porch, looking out through the heat-hazed evening. She and Mick didn’t go out that night. Frank poured her a drink and took one of her cigarettes even though he never smoked; Christy perched on a basket chair, smooth and grown-up in her father’s house. Everything was a little different that evening, like a familiar face subtly altered after a long absence. The shadows and the smells suggested a mood she hadn’t known in this house. Cosy domesticity had been Jessica’s creation, and it had died with her. When they were alone together, Christy cooked her father instant food in the microwave and they ate it on their knees in front of the television or standing up in the kitchen between forays out to the lake to deal with late fishermen. Frank didn’t seem aware of any change, though, leaning back in his chair on the porch, one hand shading his eyes, the other tipping whisky around his glass. Maybe the difference was that she was seeing it all through Mick’s eyes. She felt suddenly as if she was looking down at herself, except it wasn’t Christy, it was Jessica, and her clothes hung in the way that they used to hang on Jessica, sliding over her frame, never crumpled, never tight.
Frank coughed.
‘Are you sure you won’t have a drink, Mick? You won’t be driving, after all.’
Mick shook his head, staring at Christy, and she came back to life with a shock. She thought she had heard Frank ask Mick to stay the night, but it must have been a mistake. Mick winked at her, his face lit triumphant at Frank’s words, but he shook his head.
‘I’ve got the dog to be thinking of, I can’t leave him. I’ll keep off the alcohol, thanks.’
Christy wondered if Frank had forgotten Mick didn’t drink.
They had supper cooked by Frank and it was trout from the lake. Christy gutted it fast and clean, proud of her skill. Mick almost gagged when she drew a line along the belly with her knife and it sprang red teeth like a zip. The flesh parted easily and the fish lay open: a pink feather, the spine a gleam dotted crimson until Christy washed the blood away.
‘Don’t you like fish, Mick?’ she teased. ‘You’ll have to get used to it if you don’t want to starve around here.’
Frank didn’t usually talk much in the evenings. Christy worried that he never went anywhere and saw no one except her and the fishermen from week to week, but when she asked him if he was lonely he smiled.
‘Not everyone needs to go out to a pub, you know. I like to be here at home, and if you’re here too I like it even better. Sometimes.’ He paused, Christy went on anxiously twiddling her ha
ir. ‘But I can live without seeing you. In fact it wouldn’t suit me at all to have you or Danny and Maisie hanging over me every night. I’m used to my own company now.’
But this evening Frank was different. He had his sleeves rolled up to the elbow for rinsing the fish and he didn’t fasten them again but kept his arms bare. His arms were wide and freckled under soft hairs. He seemed young and untroubled, the same age as Mick, not another generation. Christy laid the table on the porch and the anti-mosquito light came on, its whip-crack as much a part of summer now as the throb of crickets or the sharp scent of lemon juice which Maisie gave her for her hair. She heard Mick and Frank coming through the house, trays clinking behind their voices.
‘Saunders. ’77.’
‘Arsenal. Crane, Blackburn.’
‘’78. Mac Rae, Rangers.’
‘’82 and ’83. He scored that goal against Man United in the quarter finals. D’you remember?’
The football litany, that was what Jessica used to call it. Ever since Danny went to his first football match aged six, Christy had heard this conversation. Even when she was small and she knew her father was infallible, she had found it moronic. Jessica loathed it, and banned them from speaking at the table if they so much as mentioned football. But often after supper, when Maisie and Christy were doing their homework and Jessica lay on the sofa trying to read, beneath her fat pugs, they would start again, whispering at first but forgetting when Danny got to his favourites, shouting, ‘Wright. Chelsea. ’89.’ You couldn’t even win the game, it was just a list which could be added to until you got bored. Christy was contemptuous.
Mick laughed at her clenched face.
‘Sorry, sweetheart. We were just keeping ourselves going in the kitchen. We won’t inflict you with it any more.’
Frank put down the knives and forks.
‘He’s good, you know, Chris, and he can beat me hands down at the rugby version.’
Mick drank water, Frank and Christy consumed two bottles of wine and were buoyant, setting Mick thumping the table with laughter as they described Maisie’s initial reaction to the fish farm and her subsequent conversion to its favour.
The Hook Page 6