The Hook

by Raffaella Barker

  Christy had reared these fish from tiny fry, watched them grow with as much affection as anyone could have for creatures never seen but for the churn of mouths and tails until they were hooked on a fisherman’s line. Now they were dead, floating in blood-boultered water. She paced along the jetty, fists clenched, searching for explanations in the fenced square of lake. Then she saw the heron. Dead too. Caught in the netting of the pen, mud-coated where its wings had tried to beat freedom. On its beak just beneath the water, skewered and shivering spectral energy, hung a once perfect rainbow trout. Christy leaned over the edge of the jetty, stretching out her arms, but was too far away to reach the bird. Pulling herself back she caught sight of a second heron enmeshed beneath her. This one was alive, blue-silver feathers floating like little tug boats around its bulk, torn out in the struggle to escape the netting web. Beneath a curve brow its eye was a disc of watchful unblinking yellow awaiting death or deliverance.

  Christy ran back to the house shouting for Frank. Maisie met her in the hall. It was her day off and she had come early to talk to Frank about dates next year for her wedding. As Christy had feared, Anna’s nuptials had affected her. Worn down by her bullying letters, Ben had finally agreed that spring would be appropriate, particularly apple-blossom time which Maisie felt suited her well.

  Frank was out. Maisie lurched on high snakeskin heels across to the lake with Christy. Armed with nets and sticks, Christy ran ahead, her unfastened waders quacking and flapping around her legs.

  ‘Oh God, how disgusting.’ Maisie covered her face with her hands, shuddering as Christy took off her coat and opened the nets over the surface of the pen to lower herself into the water.

  The waders were not a good idea. Bubbles oozed around her and water spilled over in a trickle then a torrent.

  ‘It’s much deeper than I thought.’ Christy heaved herself out again leaving the boots crumpling beneath the weight of water and took off her jeans. ‘Here, you get those boots out and I’ll get the heron.’

  She slid down, suppressing panic as her feet sank deep into cold velvet mud. Backed against netting at eye-level, the heron was nearer and bigger than Christy anticipated. Its beak was an arrow pointing at her face; she could see in her mind the dead bird at the other side of the pen and its impaled prey; she imagined her eyeball pierced, or her arm as she reached to free the bird.

  ‘Catch it in this.’ Maisie crouched on the jetty waving Christy’s coat. ‘Otherwise it’ll stab you.’

  Christy caught the coat, the heron opened its beak in a silent snarl, two compass points pivoting inches away, between them a tongue curled in disdain. She lurched forwards trailing the coat into the water and threw it over the heron; heavy fabric bore the hidden head of the bird down, wet staining the coat creeping black across sandy oilskin. The heron struggled and its beak began to protrude; the coat was slipping off as the bird fought its way free. There was no time to be afraid; Christy stepped closer and grasped its beak. It felt at once fragile and dangerous, as if she had put her hand around a folded cut-throat razor. With her free hand she tore at the netting, urgency overriding any possibility of untangling the bird with gentleness. The head had emerged from beneath the coat and the lidless eye reflected her flailing movements with no shadow of fear clouding its glass yellow. Suddenly the netting sagged; the heron was free. Christy heaved it towards herself, straining beneath the weight and the awkward mass of sharp bones, and staggered back into open water.

  ‘Here, Maisie, take it,’ she panted, finding a last burst of strength to pass the struggling creature up to her sister.

  Cream silk smeared grey and tore as Maisie gathered the heron in her arms, its reed legs flailing pond weed across her skirt. In Maisie’s no longer immaculate embrace the bird looked damaged and dangerous, stretched as tall as Maisie when it raised its beak, pulling her clamped hand up and around, stronger than she was although its neck was more slender than her arm.

  ‘Quick, help me, I don’t think I can hold on much longer.’

  Christy scrambled out of the lake and they carried it together up to the house, Maisie supporting the neck and head, Christy bent over the body. They set it down in the wood-shed and waited by the door, watching in silence. Fluffing its feathers until they puffed like dough, the heron shook itself and began preening, the beak folding deep into down as it worked.

  ‘I think it’s all right,’ Christy whispered to Maisie. ‘Let’s leave it in here for a while to make sure and go and get clean.’

  In the house Frank had made a pot of tea, his morning ritual of the newspaper and ten o’clock toast and marmalade spread over the kitchen table.

  Christy opened the door.

  ‘Dad, something horrible has happened. The herons have slaughtered half the fish.’

  Frank’s tea slopped across the gingham tablecloth; he slammed out of the room and went out to survey the damage in the pen. Maisie and Christy had changed by the time he returned, and they led him out to the wood-shed to show him the surviving heron.

  ‘They’ve done a hell of a lot of damage. We’ve lost quite a bit of money this morning.’ Frank walked between his daughters, scarcely taller than Maisie who was dressed in too short trousers and a pink jersey that had belonged to Jessica.

  The dispersal of Jessica’s possessions was haphazard, and Frank was glad to see Maisie in her mother’s sweater. She would keep it, wear it, wash it, until the scent of Jessica lingering in the wool distilled into the scent of Maisie. He had done no formal distribution of his wife’s clothes and jewels; it was too final and painful to make a decision to be rid of the outer layers that made her real now that she wasn’t. Easier and more appropriate to have them borrowed or asked for and to know that they would be used instead of remaining for ever in mothballs.

  He and Christy had unpacked Jessica’s belongings when they moved to the farm, folding the clothes into her chest of drawers, the jewellery placed in her dressing table, her favourite chair and her mirror all grouped in the spare bedroom which he had painted pale blue like her bedroom in Lynton. He was aware that he was making a shrine of sorts but none of the children objected; Christy had even washed and ironed the lace curtains Jessica had loved and hung them at the window, tied back with yellow ribbons as they had always been. His own room was bare, under-furnished because there was nothing to put in it; all the bedroom furniture had been so feminine, so much Jessica’s that he had hardly belonged in their room in Lynton. Christy made him some tartan curtains, Maisie gave him a bedspread for Christmas the first year they were at the farm, and Danny supplied his old lamp decorated with a trio of footballers in the Arsenal strip. The room was colourful and it held no poignant memories. It was fine.

  He could see the tartan curtains dancing through the open window as he and the girls walked around the house to the wood-shed. They opened the door and stood a moment, their eyes adjusting to brown shadows within.

  Christy saw the bird first.

  ‘Oh no.’ Her voice sharp, shocked.

  In front of timber stacked neat to the roof, lay the heron, beak open, limbs still, yellow eyes closed.

  Maisie put her arm around Christy.

  ‘Never mind, at least it’s not in pain. It would have been terrible to have released it and for it to starve to death.’

  ‘But if we had left it alone it might have been all right.’ Two tears rolled down Christy’s face, then two more. She was surprised by how much she minded.

  Frank carried the bird out and laid it in the yard.

  ‘Probably shock,’ he said. ‘I can’t say I’m not glad, even though you did a great job getting it out of the lake. If it had lived it would have done the same again some time. Now we’ve got no herons living here, or not until the word spreads and some more come to prey on the fish.’ He took Christy’s hand. ‘It’s best this way. I would have had to shoot it if it was damaged, you know. And even though they’re a menace, I love them.’

  She forced herself to smile.

  ‘I know,
I know, and it killed my fish, so I shouldn’t feel sorry for it, but I do.’

  Maisie had wandered off and returned with two spades.

  ‘Come on, let’s bury it. I want to get on with my wedding plans.’

  Frank’s face froze in horror, and Christy laughed.

  ‘You two can dig the grave then. I’m going to clear the pen.’

  October sun, late to rise and slow to penetrate the earth after the bone-cold night, had dispersed the early mist from over the lake and shone a spill of copper across the unbroken surface. On the bank ducks and moorhens dozed, neat as curling stones on ice with their heads lost among their feathers. Christy fancied she could taste the smell of wet grass warming and yellowed leaves sinking closer to the earth as they rotted. She sat down on the jetty raising her face to the sun, putting off for as long as possible the moment when she had to collect the dead. Above her leaves whispered a roof of sound beyond which there was nothing. Her world ended with the lake now; Mick had ceased to be in her every thought when he dropped her off from London a week ago with a smile that flickered no further than his jaw. She hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since. Nothing was resolved, but the balance had shifted and she had lost her faith in him. Maisie and Ben were getting married. Mick and Christy were splitting up. She could leave him now. She was independent and powerful. The fountain pen, tucked away in her underwear drawer, had a new significance. It could be her parting gift.

  She pulled herself up and stood on the jetty, tall when no one was next to her, tall and braver than she had ever thought she could be. Braver than her mother had been. She had never faced the mess she made of Charlie’s life, let alone Frank’s life. Christy felt that by leaving Mick she was laying the ghost of her mother’s restless soul. She had loved Mick, but she knew it was over. Jessica had died because she couldn’t face her love affair being over. Christy was confident that she was not making that mistake. She would tell Mick on his birthday.

  She rubbed her eyes, pushed back her hair and grasped the handle of the landing net, bracing her legs as she scooped under the surface and up around a cluster of bleeding trout. The plastic dustbin at her side was three-quarters full when she raked in the dead heron and laid it on top of the fish. Its neck twisted like silver rope, slack and useless but menacing, the final victim still hooked on its beak. Christy gripped both ends of the limp fish and slid it off the beak, shuddering at the tiny sucking noise of the wound as it closed around air. She held it up, opened its mouth and put her finger in to feel pink sandpaper teeth. She stroked the scales down smooth towards the tail then rasping as she ran her hand back up against the grain. It weighed less than a pound, not much more than a mug of tea, and its whole existence had been futile. Christy kissed the fish, more out of curiosity at the sensation than as a dramatic gesture, and dropped it into the bin. She had finished. More than seventy fish lay dead beneath the heron, and there were probably others that would die and float to the surface over the next few days. Frank would enjoy an evening wielding his calculator and would predict a lean Christmas as a result of this massacre.

  Christy wiped her hands on the grass and walked back up to the house. She found her father with his head in his hands at the kitchen table amidst a chaos of lists and instructions in Maisie’s firm handwriting.

  ‘She says she’s going to do it in May and I have to pay for it.’ He sighed deeply and leant back in his chair. ‘Her mother would be able to stop her. It isn’t right, it simply isn’t right. Why can’t they carry on as they are?’ He piled the papers up and pushed them into a drawer in the kitchen table.

  Christy leant down over him, draping her arms around his shoulders.

  ‘She might change her mind, Dad. May is a long way off and Ben’s never here. Maybe she’ll meet someone else.’

  ‘You’re right. I suppose there are decent people around in Lynton; after all, you found Mick. Perhaps she’ll meet one of his friends. I don’t care who she meets or what she does as long as she doesn’t get married for a while. She’s too young, she’s got to live a bit.’

  Christy turned away from him, her mouth dry and aching with the effort of keeping her expression bland. She put a bowl of cold cauliflower cheese into the microwave, laying the table for the two of them as the dish inside the oven rolled slowly to its climax and was stopped with a ping.

  Frank glared at the squat oven.

  ‘She can have that damn thing as a wedding present. I can’t think why I ever bought it, it makes everything taste of Tupperware.’

  Christy rolled her eyes and didn’t answer.

  Frank was only deflected from his dolour by the crisis of the dead fish. Heavy sighs accompanied the drum of his fingers on the keys of the calculator and at half-past two he announced that things were not as bad as he had expected.

  ‘But don’t tell Maisie or she’ll add another fifty people on to her reception list.’

  Christy looked at the lists Maisie had made. There was one headed ‘Outfits’ with subtitles of ‘Bride’, ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘Father’. Her name was in the bridesmaid section; it was typical of Maisie not to have asked her if she wanted to be a bridesmaid nor to have mentioned anything about it before arriving with her plans laid. She noticed she was to wear a short silver dress and white tights. The whole notion of Maisie getting married was absurd to Christy. Her sister had never discussed it with her, nor indeed displayed anything but disdain and irritation in her dealings with Ben. Christy perused the lists for a few minutes, laughing out loud at the food one where Maisie had allowed her fantasy free rein and wished to have an ice sculpture carved of herself hand in hand with Ben, and stuffed them back in the drawer. She walked down to the office to meet the bookkeeper, a sense of empty loneliness nudging through the mental list of her afternoon duties. At least Maisie knew what she wanted and she had plans. Christy only knew what she didn’t want.

  Chapter 10

  Hallowe’en and Mick’s birthday arrived, the fourth Hallowe’en since Jessica had told her family she was dying. Christy liked the neat dovetailing of the dates. Mick had been busy since they returned from London and Christy had not wanted to see him before his birthday. She still half wanted to be with him; she missed him already. But she was resolved. Danny said he would come back for the weekend to see Mick on his birthday. Christy had given up the idea of a party: it wouldn’t be appropriate.

  She drove to the cottage in the early afternoon on Hallowe’en. Mick wasn’t there, but the fire was lit in the sitting room and the kettle had just boiled. He appeared a moment later with Hotspur wet and muddy trotting behind him.

  ‘Have you been gardening?’ Christy smiled, glancing at the spade he was carrying. ‘I didn’t know you had green fingers.’

  He grinned and kissed her.

  ‘I wish I did, I’d love to tend a garden, you know.’

  It was easy seeing him. Christy had spent too much time thinking of him as a cheap second-hand car dealer, a social-security fraudster. He had skulked in her mind, his eyes darting rat-like, glinting at a chance to make a few pounds. But here he was glowing as the warmth of the fire met flesh chilled from his digging, his face open, hugging her, telling her over and over, ‘I’m so pleased to see you, sweetheart.’

  The fountain pen was a parting present, but Christy couldn’t bear to say so. She had spent hours doodling on the envelope of her card, wondering what to write, how to say ‘It’s over’ and make it sound like ‘Happy Birthday’. In the end she wrote ‘Remember Me’. It looked like a tombstone inscription, but once she had fixed on it there was nothing left in her head to say.

  Mick hardly noticed. He tore open the silver paper and opened the box clumsily, like a child in his excitement.

  ‘Hey, girl, this is the best.’ He held the pen up to the light, turning it, opening it, drawing the nib across his palm. ‘And I was thinking you’d be giving me a razor in this little box.’ He threw the box on to the fire. ‘I don’t need that, I’ll be keeping it with me always.’ He tucked the pe
n into the pocket of his shirt. ‘Thank you, sweetheart, I’ve never had such a thing. My handwriting can’t live up to it.’

  He was holding her tight in his arms, pressing her ribs so the breath squeezed out of her and she had to push him away. ‘Careful, Mick, you’re squashing me.’ They could talk later; it was a shame to spoil his birthday.

  They went for a walk, holding hands through the woods, taking the straightest path because the glimpses of sky between the trees were pink and copper as if the sunset had started already. They came out on the other side, blinking at the melting horizon. It was late afternoon now and clouds were pressing down on the sun, forcing deep shadow in patches. Christy looked around very slowly, absorbing the strange selective brightness of the light.

  Mick ran up a bank to photograph a row of poplar trees, their leaves burnished above black trunks.

  ‘This is wild,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve not seen light like this anywhere.’

  A scrawling line of geese bowled past out of formation on the back of the wind, the leaders dipped in gold, those behind fleeting silhouettes. Christy and Mick watched them wheel and turn along invisible air currents, skimming in and out of colour as the sun slewed beams across the fields. They turned back towards the cottage, walking faster as the pink behind them dulled.