The Hook

by Raffaella Barker

  Christy pressed her palms against her eyes, heaving breaths, not crying, please God, not crying.

  The party was upstairs in a pub. Anna was an old friend of Maisie’s from school; Christy had met her often before and liked her. Her round face was framed by candyfloss hair and her voice fluted like a child’s. Christy thought it was a shame she was getting married, it would encourage Maisie. Christy had never been to a hen night before. She didn’t know anyone who was married, apart from proper adults. Maisie was engaged, of course, but that was different. Christy didn’t believe that Maisie and Ben would ever get married. Maisie liked being engaged for the same reasons that she liked the motor bike in her flat: it gave her a reputation, it made her different.

  Anna, though, was serious about her forthcoming nuptials, and kissing Maisie when she arrived, announced that she was determined to enjoy the hen night to the death. Not a detail had been forgotten. The girls giggled and squealed with faked pleasure when the phallic-shaped menus were brought. The green drinks they sipped were called Screaming Orgasms, and the food was served by three muscle-bound boys wearing shorts and vests. Christy’s nerves jangled. She could not look at the other girls; she was trapped in her own thoughts, scrabbling round and round after Mick. She resented their noise, their laughter, their intrusions on her separateness. The longer she sat there, the more separate she became. She felt an icy disgust when Maisie, drunk, started stroking the waiters’ arms when they leant over to serve her. The girl next to Christy was small and dark. She didn’t drink and she pushed her food around her plate, eating only the salad when it arrived limp and wan after its voyage from the kitchens.

  Christy caught her eye and smiled; the girl stared back at her.

  ‘How do you know Anna?’ Time would pass more quickly if she talked.

  ‘I massage her, I’m learning aromatherapy. You’re Mick Fleet’s girlfriend, aren’t you? I’ve done him as well.’

  Christy looked at the girl’s hands. They were small; long nails yellow and repulsive flicked crumbs across the tablecloth. Christy shivered imagining those hands on Mick’s back. She pretended she knew.

  ‘Oh yes, I remember Mick saying he liked aromatherapy, I’ve never had it . . .’ Her voice trailed off, she was stuck, she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She wished she had never started talking to this girl. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Linda. You’re Christy, aren’t you? Mick talks about you sometimes.’

  Talks not talked. Christy lit a cigarette, letting her hair fall over her face to give herself time. Another waiter came in and whispered to Anna at the top of the table; she nodded and music poured into the room. Everyone looked up, their mouths open. Anna giggled, straightening in her seat and pushing her hair back. The waiter began swaying and as he swayed he fumbled with the buttons of his shirt. His face was in shadow, a tear of sweat wobbled on his cheek. He brushed it off, keeping his eyes on Anna as he dragged off his shirt. A stripper. Christy felt sorry for him. She wondered if he was drunk, or if he did this night after night for hot-skinned half-cut girls, protected from them by his own glass bowl of stony sobriety. He wasn’t even good-looking. His clothes drooped and fell to the floor; he couldn’t muster the panache to fling them across the room in the traditional manner. Inch by inch his body emerged, stodgy and much too hairy. Linda suddenly pushed her plate into the centre of the table, knocking her glass over and Christy’s next to it. Red wine swelled then sank into the pink cloth. Christy thought about mopping it up but couldn’t be bothered.

  Linda was leaning forwards across the table towards Anna, her hands spreading in the spongy cloth, yellow nails flexing.

  ‘How could you do this, Anna? It’s grotesque. Who’s enjoying it? Anyone?’ She looked round at the over-made-up girls, each one looked away, not wanting to meet her eyes.

  Maisie rose and glared down at Linda. The stripper carried on undressing, slowly, halfheartedly. Maisie drank her wine before she spoke, a good gesture as it gave everyone time to focus on her.

  ‘I think you should go, Linda. You’re upsetting Anna.’

  Christy had been tensed for Maisie to shout and rant, to start tearing her own clothes off to prove her point. But she was quiet and in control; Linda seemed the fool, not the stripper, not even the gawping girls. Not Maisie. Christy relaxed and inhaled pride at her sister diffusing awkwardness instead of intensifying it. Linda picked up her bag and rushed out of the room, her long scarf trailing with pathetic flamboyance behind her. Christy hoped she was crying. Her drunkenness vanished, Maisie knelt next to Anna, making her laugh, and the girls next to her, until the whole table had unfrozen again.

  Walking home to the flat with Maisie, Christy’s step was jaunty with admiration for her sister and satisfaction at the downfall of Linda.

  ‘You were brilliant, Maisie, you saved Anna from a miserable night. I don’t know what made Linda do that. She wasn’t even drinking.’ They were passing Maisie’s salon now. Christy looked in and stopped dead. A huge photograph filled the window. ‘My God, Maisie. Look at this.’ Maisie laughing looked out at Maisie laughing looking in and Christy next to her, dwarfed by her giant black-and-white sister.

  ‘They put it up this afternoon; it only arrived from the enlargement place yesterday. What do you think?’

  Christy didn’t know what she thought. It was the picture Mick had taken the first time he met Maisie and Danny. The handle bars of the motor bike curved gleaming chrome; Christy remembered Maisie leaning forwards between them led on by Mick’s flow of sweet talk. She turned away, cold suddenly; Maisie had moved on.

  ‘I didn’t know you were using that picture for the shop.’ She hurried after Maisie along the street. ‘I didn’t know you even had that picture.’

  ‘Mick sent it the other day and they needed something big so they enlarged it.’ Maisie was unconcerned, feeling in her bag for keys as they turned down towards her building. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’

  Christy nodded.

  ‘It’s very good. I wish you’d told me.’

  Maisie sighed.

  ‘It’s no big deal, Chris. You should stop getting so wound up about things.’

  In the flat Maisie went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Christy leaned in the doorway of the sitting room. Orange light flooded in from the street and danced on the motor bike, sending warped shadows across the floorboards. The air was warm and smelt of stale scent; Christy’s face sagged with exhaustion. There were questions knocking somewhere in her mind but sleep shrouded them and she couldn’t think. Something wrong was happening and her body could not face it. She got into Maisie’s scrambled bed and shut her eyes. Maisie came through moments later: Christy was already asleep, fully dressed with her heels prodding the blankets. She looked like a small child in dressing-up clothes. Maisie took the shoes off and got in beside her. She wished Jessica could tell her how to help Christy.

  Maisie was late. I heard her rattle in through the main doors of the court house even though I was halfway up the second flight of stairs. Her bracelets clanked as she heaped them on the table beside the metal detector and her voice carried up through the hall. ‘Do you have to empty my bag? Those are nail scissors. Are they really offensive? Oh, I see, you think I might stab someone with them. Well, I’ll collect them from you later, shall I?’ Then her heels sharp across the floor and there she was in a cloud of scent and clean hair, wearing her pink fake-fur coat and hardly any skirt. ‘Sorry I’m late. Have we missed it?’ She followed me through to the next checkpoint, giggling. ‘It’s just like the Great Escape, isn’t it?’

  We entered the courtroom. Tobin was standing, one elbow on his little folding table, the other draped in his black gown. He lost where he was in one of those endless sentences as his eyes bulged over Maisie, forcing silence into the room while we shuffled along to a pair of free seats in the public gallery. Mick hardly looked up, but the black-haired boy in the jury pushed his fingers through his hair and straightened his shoulders; next to him Lemon Fac
e pursed her lips. Even the Judge gazed at Maisie, his eyebrows peaking to graze his wig.

  Tobin took off his spectacles and wiped them on an ostentatious handkerchief. He shook it out and starched folds made a pattern of criss-cross shadow on white linen. He really strung this sort of thing out. To him the courtroom was a stadium. I’d seen him during lunch breaks talking to Mick’s barrister, sucking on a cigar at the pub they all went to, and there he merged into his chair and his surroundings, a pompous figure always, but not posturing the way he did in court. He knew the value of body language as well as a rock star. He put his spectacles back on and began to rev his speech up again. He had a policeman in the witness box and he was on his way to a major revelation. I could tell now when Tobin felt on top of things. He stood tall, swaying back and forth in the tiny space he filled between his desk and the one behind; if he’d been at home he would be pacing around his drawing room swilling brandy in a big glass.

  ‘Exhibit 85, please.’ He looked over his spectacles at the clerk who shuffled out, allowing Tobin several seconds to gaze at Maisie. His side-kick nudged him and he leant down to receive instructions, his eyes never leaving Maisie’s face.

  The clerk reappeared in front of two policemen. They were carrying a bulky polythene parcel sealed with yellow tape.

  ‘What’s that?’ Maisie whispered, but I shook my head.

  ‘Don’t know. It looks like a set of drainrods to me.’

  Tobin’s voice was plum deep in pleasure.

  ‘Constable Rayne, do you recognise this exhibit?’ The clerk was unwrapping the parcel on the table beneath the Judge’s platform; the Judge slid forward on his throne to see. ‘Your Honour, members of the jury, this exhibit was found in the grounds of Mr Fleet’s house. Buried there, as Constable Rayne will tell us.’

  Then he was off on those interminable questions, sifting every grain of nuance out of the policeman’s responses until a dust of possibility lay over even the most insignificant yes or no.

  ‘Would you tell the jury how you came to find the exhibit?’

  ‘Can you show us on the plan of the property, which the jury will find on page seventeen of the third bundle, where precisely the exhibit was located?’

  ‘Were you alone when you unearthed the exhibit?’

  All the time he was asking, the policeman and the rest of us in the courtroom had our eyes fixed on the exhibit as the clerk unwrapped whatever it was. It was like pass the parcel. A question, another layer, an answer, another layer. Even the Crown Jewels couldn’t need that much padding. Tobin knew it would take ages. That was why he had asked if the policeman recognised it without waiting for an answer and before it was opened. He wanted everyone to be on tenterhooks.

  Maisie was like a spaniel on a scent at my side; she didn’t move, but her hair shivered down her cheek. The final yellow tape crunched through the silent room and there they were. Three guns. One sleek and black, slender as the drainrod I wished it had been, the other two maimed, cut short where the barrels were meant to be. I bit my tongue to stop my teeth shaking. Dad had a shotgun for rabbits and the occasional duck, but it was small, cartoon-like in its simplicity. These guns had big straps and sights and a menace which exploded in the courtroom like a shot.

  This was one of Tobin’s finest moments. No one moved but the air became stultifying, as if everyone had inhaled all the oxygen at once.

  ‘Did these guns bear fingerprints, Constable Rayne?’

  ‘Yes, sir, they did, sir.’

  ‘And did these fingerprints tally with those given by the defendant to the police at the time of his arrest?’

  I could only see the policeman’s square back, flesh in a roll above his collar and then his hair.

  ‘Yes, sir, they did.’

  Triumph sleeked around Tobin like ermine.

  ‘I have no further questions for this witness, Your Honour.’

  I couldn’t look at Mick. I didn’t want to see his expression; whatever it was it would be the wrong one for being accused of hiding guns.

  Maisie squeezed my arm.

  ‘Are you OK, Chris?’ she whispered.

  I nodded.

  ‘Yes, I wish we could go out, though, but it would look bad, we’ll have to hang on until the lunch break.’

  Having peaked, Tobin threw himself into his chair and crossed his legs, ready to enjoy the defence cross examination. The headlines in the local paper the next day were robbed of absolute sensation by the fact that the Judge had ordered that Mick should not be named.

  Chapter 8

  For a long time knowing there could be more was enough for Jessica. She created a world she could visit in her head without danger. Her made-up man was taciturn and tall. He wore a black coat and wrapped her in it with him. He cupped his hands around her head and looked into her eyes. She called him up when she was alone in the house, making beds or dusting. A housewife’s fantasy. Part of her was ashamed, but she needed it. Daily routine was well worn now, with all three children at secondary school. She had always had Thursdays to herself: Frank had insisted she had one day of freedom. She had never done much with those Thursdays except walk. Along the beach with her pugs.

  There had been a man, David, long ago, whom she had met one winter on the blank coastline. Her fantasies were based on him. They had walked and talked, never arranging to meet, but he was always there on Thursdays at ten in the morning. A small café hung over the cliffs at Oldsands, the windows clouded with salt spray on the outside and condensation on the inside. Jessica and David faced one another at a yellow formica table and drank dark tea; outside the pugs whined, glum patience setting their squashed faces. Jessica never felt she was doing anything wrong by meeting David. They were chaperoned by the po-faced presence of the three sisters who ran the café. The youngest one never smiled and had gypsy earrings and a shock of tobacco-yellow hair frizzed to wire by the sea wind. The other two were even less friendly, less colourful and less active. They sat knitting at a table near the gas heater, beneath a model lifeboat. Slowly, from their brief conversations as they passed her milk and took her money, Jessica learnt that they were fishermen’s widows, all three of them, and they ran their café and knitted oil-wool jerseys for those who had survived their husbands on the treacherous North Sea.

  David was a painter, and although neither of them mentioned their families, Jessica guessed that like her he was married and had children. They talked about art, they talked about the sea and the places they had grown up in. They never touched one another, not even an accidental brush of hands across the teacups, and they never discussed the future. One Thursday David didn’t turn up, and Jessica never saw him again. Except in her imagination.

  It was much later that she embarked upon a real affair. She blamed Frank. He forced her into it, she told Vaughan, who leaned her chin into her glass and nodded, breathless in her need to hear more. Frank thought she should get a job, something to take her away from the house. He suggested it to staunch the flow of discontent she had begun to wallow in. He meant well. Jessica found a job in an antique shop in Lynton, and at first all went according to plan. The owner was an acquaintance of Frank’s and had sold an antique dinner service for Jessica. It was the perfect place for her to work, surrounded by relics of a past similar to her own. The smell of beeswax and lavender reminded her of childhood, and she loved the three mornings she spent each week in the shop. Charlie Clement, the owner, was so civilised, so open to her suggestions of displays and repainting. Home began to look cheap and suburban.

  ‘Well, it is suburban,’ Frank pointed out. ‘We live in a suburb. What do you expect?’

  Jessica’s discontent welled again.

  Charlie lived alone in Lynton’s New Town in a square Georgian house. He was tall and broad, his face and his too-long hair fitted her fantasy and he drove around in a gun-dark Jaguar with leather seats, a box of cigars within arm’s reach. He was in love with Jessica before she came to work for him. He had been since the day he bought her aunt’s dinn
er service from her at a price he could never sell it on for.

  Jessica’s mornings in the shop spilled into afternoons when Charlie began taking her out to lunch. This time she knew she was doing something wrong, but she didn’t care. He was interested in her, he offered luxury and calm. At home the girls and Danny had become teenagers and she railed and screamed at them for their door-slamming, secret-smoking, bathroom-based existence. Frank was never there. He didn’t buy her flowers. Charlie gave her long-stemmed roses to go on her desk, a watch because she didn’t have one. A succession of trinkets from him crept into her handbag. She couldn’t take them out; Frank would know where they came from.

  He knew she was having an affair. He said nothing, but his eyes following her around the kitchen as she made supper pleaded with her. She pretended not to notice. Charlie wanted her to leave Frank and come away with him. She began to feel suffocated. Both of them were importuning her, their methods as diverse as their personalities, and, she thought wryly, their motives. Frank continued silent supplication, fear of her leaving gagging him until he scarcely spoke at all. Charlie talked ceaselessly, his intention to wear her defences down until she was swept away with him. It was like the Chinese water torture. She was confused and claustrophobic, unhappy with either of them, unable to imagine life without both. How could she make such a choice? Why could things not continue as they were? She thought she would go insane. Instead she got cancer.

  They were back. Danny returned home late one night, dropped off by Mick who didn’t come in.

  Danny threw his bag down in the hall and headed for the fridge.

  ‘God, I’m starving. I haven’t had a decent meal for days.’

  He was unkempt and high with excitement; Christy in her dressing gown couldn’t get any sense out of him.