The Hook

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘She loves it now, of course.’ Frank poured more wine. ‘Because she knows that if my income is better she can twist my arm and my heartstrings until hers is better too.’ He laughed and wiped his face with his handkerchief, changing the subject completely. ‘So come on, Mick, tell me how you got that scar, and don’t fob me off.’

  Mick said nothing. He sipped his water, swallowing audibly, and still said nothing.

  Christy gabbled, desperate for there to be no silence.

  ‘I think it’s got something to do with you not drinking. I bet you had a fight when you were young and used to get drunk.’ She leaned towards him, putting her hand on his arm to pull him closer, wanting to kiss him, even though her father was opposite.

  But she was pushed away, steered upright in her place again.

  ‘Lay off, Christy, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Mick turned to Frank, making his shoulder a barrier Christy couldn’t pass. ‘I don’t talk about it, Frank, but I know I can tell you and it will go no further.’

  Christy heard him like the hurtling of an unstoppable lorry and shut her eyes, hoping to avoid catastrophe. Mick had misread Frank. Frank didn’t like lawless stories; you couldn’t tell them to him. Mick was going to say something awful and Frank would ban him from the house and from seeing her. Her eyes were creased tight shut so green shapes swam in her head and her ears rang.

  Through the ringing came Mick’s voice soft and so beguiling you would die for him.

  ‘I was in Romania and I was involved in some of the action for a bit. A lot of people were killed, and I was lucky to get away so lightly. That’s all.’

  Frank was enthralled, demanding more information, more details. Mick sounded like a soldier now, with his talk of rebels and raids and strikes. Christy opened her eyes and the black-blue sky spun with stars. She shut them again. Rage turned the green shapes into black shoals behind her eyelids. How could Mick lie like this to her father? How could she stop him? Slowly, staggering and bumping, she felt her way to the porch railings. Beyond them the ground folded down to the lake, soft black meeting the water without a seam in the dark.

  Frank and Mick weren’t interested in her; they were two little boys playing fantasy war games. She hated Mick for duping her father, she hated her father for falling for Mick’s wiles. She heard their voices sinking lower into the table as they talked. Leaning on the railings she tried to breathe in the summer night and calm down. Nothing happened. Christy thought it must be the drink playing games and she tried again, but her breath went straight out as if she had a puncture. Panic crept up on her. She didn’t know what was happening. Why couldn’t she breathe? Dizzy and gasping she crashed on to a chair, her hands pushing at her throat, trying to make a space for air to squeeze through.

  Mick was beside her almost before she’d sat down.

  ‘Calm down, baby, calm down, you’ll be OK. You need to concentrate all your thoughts on breathing. Come on, try and breathe in slowly, slowly.’

  Left alone at the table with smeared plates and his glass, Frank became bored.

  ‘Stop that romantic stuff, you two, it’s not polite to your poor father. Christy, come and sit here with me again.’

  Christy could hear Mick and see him, but she couldn’t do what he told her to. When she tried to breathe the puncture was still there and the more she tried the more she couldn’t. Her eyes warped with tears from heaving non-breaths.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Frank peered over Mick’s shoulder.

  ‘She’s hyperventilating. It’s OK. She needs a glass of water and a paper bag.’

  Frank pulled himself together, shaking off the wine slur and reminiscences, and sprang into the house muttering, ‘Paper bag, paper bag, what’s she going to do with a paper bag?’ The item was found in the larder; he emptied the bag and brought it back to Mick. ‘Is this right?’

  Mick nodded and held it up to Christy’s mouth. It smelt of onions and was soft and crumpled.

  ‘Blow into this, Christy. Blow into this and see if you can inflate it for me.’

  Eyes bulging, cheeks like snooker balls, Christy blew and blew. Frank crouched behind Mick, hands on his knees, glasses on his forehead, observing. Christy knew she couldn’t be dying because she wanted to laugh: Frank looked so solemn and so absurd, like a wicketkeeper preparing to field. She inflated the bag and her breathing became deeper and slow. It was over.

  ‘Well done.’ Mick held her hand. ‘She needs some sleep now.’

  Frank kissed her forehead.

  ‘Good-night, Chris, mind you don’t do that again, we’ve run out of paper bags.’

  Christy nearly smiled and followed Mick up to her room.

  ‘Get into bed now, sweetheart. You’ll be fine now again. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  She shivered, Mick wrapped her bedspread around her and kissed her. Mummified in pink candlewick, she struggled to sit upright.

  ‘You didn’t get your scar from being a soldier, did you? I wonder if you’ll ever tell me what really happened.’ She was warm now and too tired to be angry. Her eyelids sloped down and she flopped against Mick.

  Hugging her, he whispered, ‘I wonder if I will. Maybe I have, but for sure it doesn’t matter a lot, does it? I’m going home now, sweetheart. Good-night.’

  He got up then and left. The room, which had been cramped with Mick there, was empty and cold without him.

  Mick was public property in court. Everyone had come to see him win or lose, they didn’t mind which, they were there for the spectacle. The jury sat in two rows opposite the public gallery and their eyes and heads switched from Mick to the Judge like spectators at a tennis match. I tried to imagine the lives each one of them led. The man in tweeds at the front was the foreman. His pointed nose jutted beneath a green plastic visor which he sometimes pushed up on to his forehead so it became a septic halo around his baldness. He never smiled at Mick, only at the Judge; he never looked at me. The two women on his left could have been sisters, but I don’t suppose they were. Both permed, both sucking mints behind pearlised pursed lips and nudging one another when I came into court. Ther eyes snapped malice at first, but Mick worked on them, glancing up to look straight at them when he said something that anywhere else would have been funny. They thawed, and through the endless stifled days they began to like Mick. I could tell by the way their jaws softened and their arms and perhaps their prejudices unbent until it was the Judge they glared at, not Mick. Behind them a young man, black-haired and sallow, smirked and flirted with the girl next to him. She wore pink-rimmed glasses and her nose was stippled like lemon rind. They thought they were really cool and I thought they were sleeping together. The young man didn’t like Mick, he didn’t like the way Mick could hold his audience when he talked, he didn’t like Mick’s accent or his scar. I could tell because although he listened without fidgeting to the prosecution, and even to Mick’s barrister, when Mick said something he began to fiddle with his pen or loosen his tie. The girl wanted to like Mick, she simpered when he made jokes, but the creep’s mouth was never far from her ear, whispering something to make her lip curl in a sneer as she unconsciously moved on her chair so she was nearer him; further from Mick.

  Every day for four weeks I sat opposite these people whose names I did not know, watching them decide Mick’s future. I stared so hard I sometimes wept, tears from the strain of not blinking stinging my eyes red. Another young man looked like a student: he had acne and greasy hair and I felt sorry for him. He needed to be out in the May sunshine healing his skin and laughing. He frowned through the trial, but not at anyone in particular. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. The man I liked best had silver hair down to his collar and a nose like a Roman. I thought he was an art-school lecturer or a philosopher or something exotic and sympathetic. He sat with his arms folded and his glasses well down his nose and he seemed to be saying, ‘Enough of this nonsense, let’s talk about life.’

  When Mr Sindall described Mick’s work, how he learnt to take
photographs by lurking on popular beaches with a camera, snapping tourists and then selling them the pictures, the silver-haired man smiled and rubbed his eyes as if he was straightening out a memory. All the time Sindall was building up an image of Mick’s struggle to break into reporting, the man was leaning forward on his elbows, dangling his glasses from his finger and thumb, searching Mick’s frozen face. I wondered if he could see him at all without his glasses on.

  Tobin, the prosecuting counsel, fat and blotched by frustration and too much good living, bounced up and down with objections.

  ‘The defendant’s attempts to get work in his teens can hardly be of relevance, Your Honour.’

  But the Judge swept him away.

  ‘Mr Fleet is presenting his life. We need to know him, Mr Tobin, before we can judge him.’

  The silver-haired man liked that and so did I.

  Sometimes it was so boring in court that I wanted to stand up and scream. One old lady in the jury nodded off every afternoon about half an hour after we all returned from the lunchtime break, another doodled in her notebook, her fingers twitching to be at her knitting or digging her garden. An old man with the unravelled face of a drinker let his mouth drop open and saliva spill out on a thread. Tobin read out lists of road numbers and map references, car number-plates and witness accounts which hardly varied from, ‘The car I saw was dark in colour, I could not say if it was black or not. I could not see the driver. I don’t know if there was anyone else in the car. I never saw that car again.’

  After court every day I was allowed to go downstairs and see Mick. We talked through the glass screen in the visit cell with two policemen sentinel behind each of us. Mick never cried, neither did I. There wasn’t time. We only had half an hour a day, sometimes less when his counsel marched in on a gust of expensive aftershave and politely held the door for me.

  ‘Sorry, Christy, something has come up. Can you see Mick tomorrow?’

  Then I waited outside the court for Mick’s van to leave to take him back to the prison. I never waited alone. People walking by paused, seeing the police ranked with guns by the gates. They clustered, the way onlookers always do, in a huddle on the corner of the court car-park. I wondered if they had any idea what they were waiting to see. When the gates opened and two motor bikes roared out, followed by a car and then the black-windowed van with Mick somewhere inside it, I felt like a wife at the pit head watching the procession of tragedy. The crowd had the set faces and staring eyes you see in photographs of those disasters as people struggle to comprehend something they cannot imagine.

  Chapter 6

  Christy began to think of herself and Mick as one person. What had happened to either of them before was distant and unimportant. When she remembered her life before Mick, she saw drifting images silent and shrunken by the lens of her memory. She was happy now, and it was as if she had never been before. She knew Mick’s mannerisms so well that sometimes she thought she had made him up and he could only do what she had imagined him doing. She knew how he whistled to himself almost under his breath when he was concentrating, how he leaned back when he had finished a piece of work and stretched so his spine arched and his hands brushed the swell of the walls. She wished she didn’t know how he scratched, and how he bit the skin round his fingernails, so badly they bled and he had to wear plasters. Mick’s raw fingertips were ugly. Gloves might help, but she couldn’t bring herself to offer them. She didn’t like gloves.

  One of her earliest memories was of Aunt Vaughan when Danny was a baby, smiling in lipstick as she forced the child’s tiny hands into fists, wedging them inside mittens and binding them tight with white ribbon until they waved like clubs above his blanket.

  ‘It stops him clawing his face,’ Aunt Vaughan explained as three-year-old Christy stared aghast. ‘Babies will claw, you know.’ Her lips were a brick slash in her powdered face.

  Christy gazed at her brother’s flawless cheeks, his feathering lashes. He was asleep, his head and arms thrown back, his mouth open in a small silent gasp. He was round and soft, incapable of such violence. Aunt Vaughan was the one with claws, long pointed nails dipped in blood which she tapped on the table when Danny woke and cried.

  ‘Babies need to cry, it develops their lungs.’

  Aunt Vaughan had been there too much when Danny was a new baby. Jessica had needed her best friend to rally her through a difficult birth. Aunt Vaughan had been an actress. She wasn’t really their aunt, but Jessica loved her ‘like a sister but better’. When they were small, Christy and Maisie were troubled by this phrase. How could you love someone better than a sister? They were sisters. What did Mummy mean? It was never explained. Vaughan was still attached to her stage voice and her vowels swooped and quivered when she drank gin. She drank gin a lot, on her own in the kitchen. Maisie and Christy were too young for school still; Vaughan chivvied them around the house in the mornings and put them to bed in the afternoons. They were afraid of her painted face which smudged and slurred over the cooker as she prepared inedible meals; they were afraid of her tight stiff clothes and her spiked heels which pierced the floor leaving a trail of bullet holes in her wake. Frank stayed later and later at work, Jessica never got out of bed except to snatch Danny from his crib when he cried and wedge a bottle into his screaming mouth. The girls were left with Vaughan. She sliced raw onion into sandwiches for them and dusted her cigarette ash across their beds when she made them in the morning. They longed to see Jessica, but for three weeks after the baby came they were kept from her room.

  ‘Your mother is tired,’ Vaughan explained, one long red-laced finger under each of their chins. ‘She will see you soon, but not yet.’

  Small wonder that they clung to Frank when he left for work each morning and longed for his return in the evening. He read their bed-time stories and mended their dolls. He was kind and dependable. He was their favourite. When Jessica recovered, she came down in her dressing gown and drank with Vaughan in the kitchen. Frank and his small daughters crept round the wall of secret talking which the two women built up, day after day, night after night, glass after glass.

  Finally Vaughan left. Jessica thawed and regained colour in her face and her voice. She still spent hours in bed, her hair drifting across her shoulders, her legs a perfect fishtail beneath the grey silk bedspread. Christy would burrow beneath the covers, her small hand seeking the reassurance of her mother’s skin; Maisie had told her, ‘Mummy turns into a mermaid when she goes to bed,’ and Christy needed daily proof that this was not true. They hoped Vaughan would never be back. But once or twice a year Jessica sank again to be rallied each time by a visit or a phone call from Vaughan. The girls were no longer afraid of her. The fear had turned to pity.

  One winter afternoon when Christy was ten, Jessica dropped the three children at the garden gate and drove away down the street to deposit the neighbours’ children. They filed into the house, banging bags down in the hall. Maisie, aloof now she was at secondary school, ran upstairs to change her clothes, but Christy and Danny barged into the living room to turn on the television. There, unconscious on the floor, they found Vaughan, her skirt rucked, her limbs folded uncomfortably. She had fallen off the sofa, so bolstered by alcohol she had not woken. Like a dead bird she sprawled on the carpet, her mouth half open, her skin tight yellow when they turned on the light.

  ‘She’s drunk,’ said Danny, prodding her with his toe, ‘and it smells in here.’

  Christy opened the window to rid the room of the metallic breath emitted by Vaughan’s every pore. Vaughan groaned and sat up, blinking, her face sagging and confused, in it a premature glimpse of an old woman. Christy helped her up.

  ‘Dear me, I can’t think what happened. Nothing to worry about, children, I was just dozing. Now, I think a sharpener will set me up for the evening.’ She swayed out of the room.

  Christy watched her go, brittle with cracked dignity, and suddenly she knew she was fond of her.

  Since Jessica’s death Vaughan had stayed away
.

  ‘It’s too sad, I can’t come back to find Jessica eclipsed,’ she sighed on the telephone when Christy rang to thank her for a present.

  Christy tried to point out that this was a new house, a new life now, but Vaughan paid no heed.

  ‘Dear Jessica, how I miss her. Do keep in touch, Christy; come and stay with me soon. Remember, as your godmother, it is my duty to protect you.’

  Christy didn’t think Vaughan would be much use in an emergency. She always wore high-heels and satin-boned dresses as closely related to underwear as dresses could be, but she meant well.

  When she was at work and the day crawled, Christy stared out of the office window at the fishermen squatting like stones beside the lake and thought about Mick. At lunchtime he would be writing. He didn’t have lunch, he said it slowed him down. He wrote at the table in the main room of his cottage, clearing a small space in the chaos of books and maps and yesterday’s newspaper. She could see what he saw when he looked up from his work and turned to gaze out of the window. She could hear his breathing and his footsteps when he got up and went to the door or to answer the telephone; she tried not to ring him up during the day; he sounded further away if she talked to him. If she imagined him instead, the conversation would go her way.

  He told her more about his work now, in sentences like banners, floating above their time together. There were two newspapers in Ireland he worked for. Christy wanted to see his pieces on the printed page. He showed her one, a stain of yellow paper with a faded photograph of children tightrope-walking along an army blockade in Belfast. The story was brief reportage and the writer was not named, but along the edge of the photograph in small capitals Christy read Mick’s name and pride caught in her throat.

  ‘Show me more, please, Mick,’ she begged, expecting a fat book of cuttings to appear.