The Hook

by Raffaella Barker

  Danny grinned, liking him already. ‘Lay it on with a trowel, it’ll spread thicker that way.’

  Mick laughed.

  ‘What the hell, it’s not often you get to pay a compliment to a worthy cause, is it now?’

  Christy cringed at his corny smile, but Maisie played up. Mick took another picture and she posed, eyes wide in a face hard as porcelain, cheeks so hollow her beauty almost collapsed. Christy felt as if she had been tilted until all the tears inside her were poised to pour out and she backed away to the kitchen. How could she be loved when Maisie was there to be loved? Mick couldn’t want her. The sink was full. Automatically she began to wash up, soothed by routine.

  ‘You lucky thing. He’s gorgeous. I wouldn’t trust him an inch but I think he’s dead sexy.’ Maisie came in and opened the fridge for more beer.

  Christy pretended to sneeze, lowering her head to peer into a greying saucepan, recoiling at the stench but not turning round. Looking into Maisie’s washing up she began to shake with anger.

  ‘God, you’re a slag, Maisie. Sort your kitchen out before you start on other people’s boyfriends.’

  Maisie didn’t listen.

  ‘He’s crazy about you. He’s been banging on about you. I wish I’d seen him first.’ She sighed, enjoying the thought.

  Christy scrubbed her saucepan, teeth clenched, hating Maisie who she could hear laughing back in the sitting room.

  Mick appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Christy, are you ready? We need to get going.’ He saw her smarting eyes and put his arm round her. He lifted her hair and whispered, ‘I was scared of meeting your family. That’s what I brought the camera for. It’s my protection, you know.’

  Chapter 2

  Frank was a contract manager in the frozen-food factory on the edge of Lynton when Jessica died. He had worked there for fifteen years and the ritual of his obligations shielded him from Jessica’s ebbing life. He didn’t believe his boss when he was called in a month after his wife had died.

  ‘You can’t make me redundant, I’m important here.’ He heard himself from a long way off, the way Jessica told him she heard her thoughts when he sat with her in the evenings holding her leaf-light hands.

  His boss’s stomach dimpled behind a thin shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry, Frank, I wish it was within my powers to prevent this.’ The boss stood up, the stomach took a moment to go with him then sprang up his torso and wedged like set jelly above his belt. ‘You will be missed, Frank, you will be missed.’

  Frank started playing poker with a farmer outside Lynton. He didn’t lose very much money, and anyway he had plenty now. The redundancy cheque was morphine to his grief and his wounded pride. He came back one night quite early. Christy was in her room sticking photographs of Jessica into an album she’d not had time to use. Frank walked in. His tie was slack, his wavy hair a blur about his head, and his eyes shone.

  ‘I’ve won a field,’ he said. ‘Come and see.’

  They drove in the dark to a waterlogged meadow and squelched across to look at the stream which ran like a vein down the side. Frank talked all the time, striding ahead through long grass. Christy floundered, her feet caught deep in the swamp. Her boot half came off and she toppled for a second before her toes found the warm tunnel of rubber again. Frank was shouting something up ahead and Christy pushed her fingers into her ears and stood still, feeling her life disappearing into a mire deeper than this field. After a moment she ran to catch up, desperate to stop Frank saying too much. She felt that every word he uttered as he paced over the meadow rooted his mad plan more firmly. He wanted to build a lake and a house and live in this field as a fish farmer. That was what Turndell his poker partner had intended, and the planning permission was already granted.

  ‘It’s a gift from God, Christy.’

  ‘Dad, please stop it, you don’t know anything about fish. I hate trout anyway, it always tastes of mud.’ Christy grabbed his arm as he plunged into a ditch.

  He was shouting now.

  ‘Nonsense, we’d be mad to ignore this. It’s a new start in nine acres of prime gravel. I’m going to negotiate with Turndell to buy another ten acres across there.’ He gestured wildly into gloom.

  Christy steered him back to the car and home. She couldn’t make sense of his whirling ideas, but the mud-dank smell of the river lingered in her room as she fell asleep, pulling her down into dreams where she tangled with weeds and chains. The next morning Frank told Maisie and Danny and he put their neat little house on the market.

  Time spiralled like the wind then. They lived out of suitcases. Frank flourished, his energy recharged by every meeting where a builder scratched his head and said ‘It’ll be difficult to get that done’ or ‘There’s no way round it’. Christy became a ghost, her voice sank to a whisper, the glow left her skin, now paper white with fine veins tracing lines across her brow and down her neck. Her hair lost its sheen and became a blob of yellowing cotton wool immobilised in a high ponytail on top of her head. She cried herself to sleep each night and woke with eyes puffed pink and glassy as the fish she loathed.

  She wept all week, day as well as night, when they moved out of the patchwork suburb where she had lived all her life. Danny and Maisie stayed away as much as they could, hissing like affronted cats when they were forced to come and help, crackling the sad air of the little house. All its character was packed away in boxes leaving dusty rooms stripped of their dignity and forlorn, with smudges on the walls by light switches and worn paths across the carpets. In the end Christy did it all herself. She wrapped the pictures her mother had hung and the vases she had filled with flowers from her garden. She dug up Jessica’s favourite roses and planted them in the mud-tracked field Frank called the new garden. There they sprawled, battered by wilder weather conditions than they had known in Lynton. She covered her childhood in layers of newspaper and packed it into cases. It would never come out again. Nothing was the same, not even the memory of her mother now the world she had built for her family was stacked in storage on the Lynton industrial estate.

  They moved to a rented bungalow until the new house was built and the funnel-shaped field became a crater as the diggers excavated. The hole in the ground at the top of the field would be the main lake and out of it lorry-loads of gravel were pumped as fast as the newly exposed springs pulsed in. The gravel funded the lakes; mining it reminded Christy of the gold rush. Men everywhere, digging, rinsing tools, heaping yellow mounds of stone worth enough money to pay for the lake to be filled and even stocked a little. The money from their semi-detached house in Lynton was enough to start straight away on plans and materials for the new house on the lake. Everything was changing, there was no old life to hold on to now and Frank was so happy Christy couldn’t look at him.

  By autumn the first lake glimmered across the thin high end of Frank’s field, a spine of turf separating it from the river. Lake Two was eating into feathered grass at the other end and next to it bricks heaped up into a house. Christy made Danny and Frank’s breakfast in the bungalow a mile away each morning and sent them off to school and the fish farm with Tupperware boxes of sandwiches. She was meant to be starting at the sixth-form college in Lynton, but she was terrified. She knew she should go; Danny was managing his school, in fact he said he was glad to get away from the bungalow and the gathering threat of the fish farm.

  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 h
is 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 f
luffy 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.