Authors: Raffaella Barker
The Hook
For Hugh
Also Available by Raffaella Barker
I gave up smoking when they read out the verdict. Well, not at the very moment that they read it out, because I was in the courtroom and you can't smoke in there anyway; but afterwards, when I went out of the door and knelt by the entrance to the cells. I cried and my hair swept the floor, drawing a tide of cigarette ash and a yellowed stub back and forth. That was what made me give up.
Everyone else thought I was giving up smoking as a gesture for Mick because he was giving up his liberty. Eighteen years. Longer than some people are married. Longer than the years you are at school. Longer than I knew my mother. Numbers pounded in my mind as I crouched hugging my knees on the dirty tiled floor.
I'll be thirty-nine when he comes out. No, that's wrong, they never serve the full sentence. He'll be out in twelve years. I'll be thirty-three, he'll be forty. I wonder if he will be bald.
Christy was in a night-club when she first saw Mick. Her sister Maisie took her there to celebrate her birthday. Spangles was loud and hot and the ultraviolet light made everyone look brown and healthy until they smiled. Then their teeth gleamed yellow. Christy was very conscious of this and kept her mouth shut, her lips folded like a seam across her teeth.
Mick had a long coat on and he was tall even though he was sitting on a stool. She noticed him when the strobing lights flashed across the dust and dog hairs on his coat. There were so many hairs that he was luminous. His back was turned, he leant forwards on the bar, the bright flow of his coat seeping up and stopping sharp where it met his hair. He had good hair, thick and nearly black, the kind that Christy's mother used to say was wasted on boys. It wasn't wasted on Mick. He turned round; maybe he felt her staring, wondering what sort of dog he had and if he knew how filthy his coat was.
âChristy Naylor, it's your birthday. You're twenty today.'
She didn't know who he was.
âHow do you know my name?' She was flattered and dismayed, rushing with nerves in the noisy bar.
âI found it out.' He smiled and his teeth didn't gleam yellow. He came closer, his eyes never leaving her face.
She liked his eyes. She had drunk a whole bottle of champagne with Maisie before they came out and she was spiked with bravado.
âDo you want to come and dance?' Of course he would follow her; she moved towards the dance floor.
Glancing back to ask his name she saw he wasn't behind her. He had stopped to talk to a man in a suit; he beckoned her over.
âFollow me, there's somewhere better I want to show you.' His voice was low and he spoke slowly. He had an Irish accent and a scar like a frown on his forehead.
Christy followed him through a mirrored door beside the bar. They entered a small room with a carpet and dark walls. He closed the door and the silence was intense. In this room he loomed; the champagne bubbles inside her popped and she hesitated. She edged towards the door and felt for the handle through the gloom but as she turned it he spoke.
âLook, watch this, Christy.'
One of the walls slid back to reveal the dance floor. Maisie and her friends were bobbing in the crowd, their heads swinging like balls in time to music she could not hear.
âThis is where the bouncers sit. They can see out, but no one can see in. They say they are looking out for trouble, but I think they're getting off on watching those girls dancing about.'
He stretched out his hand to her and he was so big in this room with his coat on that he seemed to be everywhere.
âWhat's your name?' Christy flattened herself against the farthest wall, afraid to be alone with this man and not know him.
He crouched by the invisible partition, his face white and carved from shadows, still among the
frenzied dancers, out of place in his coat which folded like the wings of a sleeping bat under his arms.
âMick Fleet is my name, and don't worry, Christy, I won't hurt you. I thought you might like to find yourself in here for a change, so come on and dance with me.' He got up and pulled a switch on the wall then led her to the middle of the room.
Loud music, the same as the muffled pulsing from the real dance floor, swelled in her head and they danced.
Christy was the second of Frank and Jessica Naylor's three children. Maisie was Frank's favourite because she was the eldest. Danny was Jessica's favourite because he was the youngest. This was how Christy saw it from the middle. She looked so like her mother that even Frank, who saw her every day, felt a shiver of loss if he glimpsed her unexpectedly.
Jessica hadn't had much hair left when she died; the treatment had thinned it to down as light as dandelions. Before her illness it had been a sweep of silver blonde like Christy's but not as long. Christy wore her hair loose and it flowed down to her waist. Her dark eyes, her light bones, her air of faint sorrow had all been inherited from Jessica. Even the way she stood at the kitchen sink, hands raw red, steaming, forgotten in the washing-up water as she gazed unseeing out of the kitchen window.
Christy felt she had been grown-up for ages when her mother died at dusk on her seventeenth birthday.
The illness seemed to last for ever but in fact it only took six months for cancer to hound fragile Jessica to her grave. She wore a pink turban in the last weeks of her life, and Christy made them bury her in it. It gave her poor sucked-out face dignity.
Christy had a hangover the morning after her birthday. Mick telephoned her early. She was half asleep when Frank shouted at her bedroom door that she had a phone call, so when the voice down the humming line said, âIt's Mick,' she thought it was part of a dream. Her head thudded with the thickness of too many cigarettes and she was still dizzy and slow with sleep. Mick sounded buoyant and clean. He didn't smoke or drink, not even the champagne he had bought her at the bar. She groaned remembering she'd drunk the whole bottle herself.
âWhy do you sound so far away?' Christy stood on one leg in the hall where the phone was, wondering if love or a hangover was slithering through her veins.
âI'm in London, well, nearly in London. I'll be back on Saturday. Can I take you out on Saturday night?'
A date. He wanted to take her on a proper date. She thought of eating marshmallows and chestnuts by a fire with him, even though it was May and the summer was almost here.
âYes, I'd love that. Where shall we meet?'
âI'll pick you up at eight o'clock, if you like. See you then.'
The humming stopped and he was gone; Christy went on holding the phone, smiling and sweating in the hall with her nightdress on. Last night's make-up was sliding down her face and in the bathroom she decided it was as well that he couldn't see her.
Mick's car was black and new. When Frank led him into the house and offered him a drink Christy knew he was pleased. Normally he kept himself and his disapproval at a distance from her boyfriends. He didn't want to interfere but his eyes always said, âThis is wrong.' She hung around in her room fiddling with her hair, the door open so she could listen to Mick and Frank talking. The pleasure in Frank's voice rose like a speedometer's needle, gathering momentum as Mick explained that he didn't drink, had a job, liked fishing. Perhaps Mick did it deliberately, Christy couldn't tell if he was just humouring her father, but when she went in Frank was leaning by the fireplace rubbing the lenses in his spectacles, his face relaxed and benign.
Christy had forgotten what Mick looked like. Her memory blurred a face with film-star bland bones. But in the sitting room sat a stranger with a scar and a coat at whom her father gazed and smiled. He was more raw than she remembered, filling the floral armchair, his feet in the hearth. She kissed her father goodbye. Her limbs seemed strangely disconnected; she imagined them flailing out of control.
âLet's go.' She hardly looked at Mick.
Frank followed them out to the car, opening Christy's door for her and waving them off, still smiling.
Mick took her to a restaurant without asking her what she wanted to do. She liked that. They knew him there and they left him alone. Dark beams framed him opposite Christy, the candles made him glow and she was hypnotised by his voice. She floated above their dinner on a cloud of pink romance; Mick ate steak and onions, shovelling singed hunks into his mouth and talking at the same time. He was twenty-seven, he came from Dublin. He poured mustard from a plastic bottle over his plate and forked up three onion rings at once; Christy poked at her fish without eating it. It lay on her plate whole and unskinned, silver dancing in the candlelight. Looking down at it she thought it had as much chance of moving as she did held tight in the gaze of this stranger.
Mick was so hungry he was eating for her as well, and when he had finished every mouthful she felt full enough to burst. He was a freelance news reporter, the dog whose hairs still covered his coat was a lurcher named Hotspur and his car was a fuel-injection Ford escort. He talked right through three courses leaning across now and then to help himself to Christy's food as well. Christy ate nothing. His coat spread along the chair behind him and its black mass was part of him as he leaned forward over the table wiping up gravy with bread until his plate gleamed. Christy could hardly blink she was watching him so hard, impressed by the way he ordered wine without looking at the list
even though he didn't drink and couldn't know what she would like. She felt tiny and iridescent, fluttering in front of this animal being. She hardly spoke until a moment when he was savouring the cheesecake and she was ignoring her sorbet.
âHow did you get that scar?'
He traced his finger along the white vein and made his eyes cross.
âI had a lobotomy,' he whispered.
She believed him for a millionth of a second then he winked and they both laughed. Her drink slid off the table; icecubes bled into her lap but she hardly noticed.
Mick paid the bill to a sleepy waitress and he drove Christy home. She wondered if he would kiss her goodbye, and if her mouth would taste of fish and sorbet. His would taste of onions, but she thought she wouldn't mind. She wondered if he would stroke her hair and ask to see her again; she wondered so hard that she didn't speak until they reached the house. Then she rushed her words.
âYou still haven't told me how you knew my name or where I lived or anything.'
He turned the engine off and took her hand.
âThere's plenty of time, Christy. I'm not planning to go away, are you?' He said good-night and he didn't kiss her.
Christy was bitterly angry with her mother for dying on her birthday. Funny way to let go, she thought,
when she took down the row of birthday cards propped among notes of condolence and ribbons from wreaths.
