Jessica Naylor’s coffin was smaller than Christy expected it to be. Although Jessica was a slight woman with narrow hands and movements as fluid as a Siamese cat’s, Christy could only remember her as huge. The hole her mother left gaped, and from the childhood memories soaring through the first days of loss stared a monumental Jessica. Perhaps because I was little then, Christy thought, unable yet to form another thought: Perhaps I was afraid of her. The memories were dimly lit, but in them Jessica was lambent, her children strung around her like baubles on a bracelet.
When Christy was tiny Jessica bloomed youth; she would hold her daughter by the hand and stand, poised at the front door or outside a shop or in the playground, until someone animated her with a compliment, an admiring smile.
‘How lovely to see such a beautiful mother and child,’ the Vicar beamed, squeezing Christy’s cheek with bone-cold fingers.
Christy hid her face in Jessica’s neck, hugging her, breathing in her familiar scent of China tea and sunshine.
Jessica didn’t push Christy away then. She kept the little house neat and clean. She was happy when Frank came home and the hall smelt of polish, the kitchen of dinner. If the children were in bed and asleep she shone with smooth accomplishment. Frank sat at the kitchen table with his tie undone, clean-cut in his suit among the frills of her frilly kitchen.
She chopped vegetables and told him about her day.
‘We’ve cleaned out the goldfish today. Christy’s one had some fungus on it but the pet shop gave me blue liquid to squirt into the water. The children loved that.’
She could do it, she really could. This small life Frank had brought her to was enough. She didn’t want to run back to her parents and the big house where she grew up. She didn’t need to be called Miss by men on the estate now that she had local shops where she was Mrs Naylor.
‘Naylor. Such a ghastly name. What a pity.’ Her mother’s sole comment when Jessica told her parents she was getting married was still resonant in her mind, but she never told Frank. She loved him too much to hurt him like that.
Frank gave her everything he had promised. The house was small, but they weren’t in debt, and Jessica could enjoy bringing up the children without bothering her head with bills and mortgages. She made picnics and cleaned the house while the girls were at school, laughing at herself when she started tying her hair in a coloured scarf to keep it off her face. Every day that her house and family were in order was a mark of proof that she had made the right choice. And that her parents were wrong. She was sure Frank would become something more than a factory manager and she sat often on the window seat dreaming of their future, of trips to London to the theatre and holidays abroad. In the meantime, Frank encouraged her to go to the hairdresser once a week and to buy a new dress twice a year. She loved the sparkle in his blue eyes when he looked at her and the strength in his narrow face. They were a handsome couple at church on Sundays, the three children playing around their pew, docile and pretty, never screaming or wiping noses on the backs of their hands.
The years rolled by punctuated by the small victories and losses of childhood. For Jessica nothing changed. She cleaned and cooked and welcomed Frank home every night, sending him to work with a clean shirt every morning. He didn’t always ask how her day had been, and he read the paper now instead of listening when she told him. Alone in front of her mirror, she knew why. Her silver beauty was tarnished, her hair was fading. The mother-of-pearl skin had begun to tighten around her nose and sag along her jaw, not much yet, but she saw the traced lines of what was to come and spread her fingers across her face in horror. Looking through them she could see the reflection of the backs of her hands in the mirror, reddened knuckles and rings sliding where her plump flesh had hardened and shrunk.
Now when she looked at Christy her pride was eclipsed by jealousy. Christy’s slender youth mocked her in a way that Maisie’s never could. Maisie was a foil, a vital addition to enhance Jessica, a device to guarantee astonishment in those she met.
‘Surely you don’t have a daughter that age? You look far too young.’
But with Christy comparisons would be made. Even Frank, looking through photographs of a recent holiday, pursed his lips and whistled.
‘Well, I don’t know where the others came from, but Christy, well, this photograph could be of you in your teens, except that Acid House logo wasn’t invented then.’
Christy walked around Mick’s garden and the midges swooped lower than swallows in the dusk. Above her the trees creaked and expanded towards the clearing, casting a veil of deciduum through their branches. There were no trees outside the house in Lynton where she had grown up, and at the lake they were still saplings. Unused to the creaking voices of old trees, she shivered, clasping her arms close to her as she looked up to a canopy of leaves. Mick’s lawn was as wild as the wood beyond and Christy wove a path back and forth to skirt the brambles leaning in from the wall. A damp scent of nettles hung across the gateway, their green a bright blur in the dying light. Arms bare, hair a blunt gleam on her back, Christy was out of place and small in this wilderness. She was not good at being alone, her steps were hesitant, her body tensed against imagined terrors. At home if Frank was out she spent the evening on the telephone to Maisie or a friend because she didn’t really believe she existed if no one was there to see her.
Her dress danced out of the evening when she turned back towards the cottage; in the kitchen steam rolled up to the ceiling from a pan on top of the chipped stove.
Mick was muttering a line of the recipe he was reading, repeating it like a mantra.
‘“Blanch and pour, blanch and pour.” Here, sweetheart, have a drink for me.’ He passed Christy a cloudy glass and went on chanting, “Blanch and pour, blanch and pour.”’
The wine stung her throat and she felt it sliding down, weighty and rotund as if she were swallowing an oyster. Suffocation crept over her again and she kicked off her shoes and lay on the sofa. She knew what was really troubling her. It was Friday, she wasn’t working on Saturday, although she often did, and neither was Mick. She had no way of getting home unless Mick decided to take her. She was stuck and she was going to sleep with him. That was why she was here. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do it, she had come knowing this would happen. She crushed a cushion against herself and longed for it to be over, to have done it so it could never be the first time again.
Mick laid the table with candles while Christy sat like a stone, Hotspur’s head resting on her lap. The scar on Mick’s forehead turned red as the sun lingered on the front window. It was already dark on the other wall and the last rays waned, shrinking the room towards Mick and Christy facing one another in the glowing window. Mick ate her food as well as his own, holding his fork like a shovel as she had been taught never to do, wiping the plate clean with bread and rubbing his hands across his mouth when he had finished; she half expected him to burp and push his plate back but he leant his elbows on the table and picked his teeth instead. Christy pushed some grains of rice around her plate then smoked four cigarettes in a row. She could never eat with Mick. His vast appetite swallowed hers, and his energetic pursuit of every morsel repelled her, making food something too physical for her to bear.
Mick finished cleaning his teeth and left the table to light the fire. He crouched on the hearth breaking kindling, light as a cat on his feet even though he was filling the whole fireplace with his body. Christy tiptoed past Mick’s turned back and tucked herself into the chair by the fire.
‘What do you think of this place, sweetheart? Do you like it out here in the sticks?’ His voice was smooth as glass to steady her now they had moved from the table.
In the half light he loomed and Christy receded sinking back in monochrome shadows, her pink dress the only colour in the room. She didn’t answer.
‘Are you still here, Christy? I can’t see you now, and I can’t hear you. You’re scared as all hell, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not scared, I’m nervous.’
‘Same thing,’ said Mick and he stretched out on the sofa, leaning back to look at her bolt upright on her chair near the fireplace.
She wished he would turn the lights on. The heap of him merged with the heap of sofa, spreading across the whole room. Neither of them spoke. And then Mick was holding her hands and his hands were so warm she realised hers were frozen. And he was putting his arms around her, unbending her clamped elbows and wrapping her arms around him. And he was kissing her, making her feel so wanted that she did not notice that she wasn’t nervous any more.
Christy woke up stretching in warm morning light. She was in Mick’s bedroom and the telephone was ringing downstairs. She heard him answer it, his voice clear at first then rumbling indistinct but constant like a train passing. She couldn’t help smiling, thinking that even at seven-thirty he couldn’t stop talking.
He appeared in the bedroom, dressed and wide awake.
‘You get up early.’ Christy pulled the sheets up to her face, self-conscious at being naked in daylight when Mick had clothes on. He smelt of coffee when he kissed her. ‘I thought you’d be asleep. I have to collect something now, so I’ll be seeing you later, sweetheart.’ He stroked her hair and was gone.
Christy rolled over and closed her eyes, listening to the car roar away until the sound was so distant it mingled with the moving trees.
From the beginning of the trial everyone knew I was Mick’s girlfriend. The policemen with macho guns who guarded every entrance, the court clerks, even the traffic warden, who had stopped giving me tickets when a constable told him who I was. They smiled at me with sad sympathy in their eyes and whispered ‘Poor love’ when I passed.
Mick was delighted.
‘It’ll really help the atmosphere with the jury and their mood and all that if everyone feels sorry for you, sweetheart,’ he told me during one of our visits.
‘But I don’t know if they’re sorry for me because of what might happen to you or because I’m involved with you.’
Mick stretched his fingers under the glass screen and touched my hand.
‘It doesn’t matter what they’re thinking. Just look tragic and wronged as often as you can and be drop-dead sexy the rest of the time. They’ll love you, Christy, they’ll love you.’
He pressed his palm flat against the glass and I did the same, my hand fitting into his so it looked as though I’d drawn round it. This was how we held hands now.
Mick liked being in court. Right from the first day he had power even though he was handcuffed. The security around his case was crazy. Even the barristers were searched with metal detectors, once at the front door and once outside the courtroom.
Mick applied to the Judge to have the handcuffs removed a week after the case was opened. His arm was sore from the days spent tethered to a shifting rota of police officers.
‘It’s not as though I’m going to do anything, Your Honour,’ he said to the Judge with a grin. I thought he shouldn’t be smiling, he should be pleading, but Mick wasn’t like that and anyway the Judge almost smiled back. ‘I’d have to be crazy, wouldn’t I, to think about escaping with two dozen men with guns crawling around this building?’ He lifted his right arm, dragging the policeman beside him to reluctant attention. ‘I’ll be ending up deformed, Your Honour. I’m already blistered and bruised enough – you can see the bandage right here.’ He pointed with his unyoked hand at the greying fabric on his captive wrist.
The Judge considered him, head on one side, wig awry, heaped up like suet.
‘No, I don’t think we’ll uncuff you, Mr Fleet.’
Mick scratched his scalp and ran his fingers through his hair slowly; the policeman’s hand hovered useless above his own.
‘I suppose it might be prejudicial to the prosecution,’ said Mick. ‘For sure it’s prejudicial to the defence that I am handcuffed.’
The Judge straightened up in his chair shaking his head and shuffled small hands among his papers.
‘No, Mr Fleet. I cannot allow that. You cannot talk like that in the courtroom.’
I didn’t see why it mattered. The jury were always sent out when the Judge and Mick, interrupting his barrister, had this sort of conversation, and they had it often. Mick couldn’t help treating the Judge like someone he knew. He was always demanding reasons and explanations for the way things worked. The Judge allowed far more than I expected. He seemed to like Mick, even though Mick was fired up and emotional sometimes.
‘This is the rest of my life being debated, Your Honour. I need to know what you all think you’re doing with it in here.’
The Judge was like a slap of water in his responses.
‘Yes, yes, but you cannot go against the legal structure,’ he explained time after time.
Mick had a talent for making other people feel important. He gave me a role when all I really needed was to be there. But maybe he was right to. He sucked me into his trial so deep that I could not have got out if I had wanted to. I didn’t want to. I was his route to the outside world, and I was vital. Mr Sindall, Mick’s barrister, had a team of solicitors who darted around me nipping information from me before returning to their notes and files. Members of the public who came to watch the trial smiled at me; one or two spoke, just making conversation: ‘It’s a lovely day,’ ‘Traffic’s bad on the ring road, I hear,’ ‘Do you know when the canteen opens?’ I knew what they were doing. Each sentence came with a searching gaze, their ears flared when I responded and they tucked my words into their gloating minds and hoarded them to tell their friends later. ‘I spoke to his girlfriend. She was friendly, not like you’d expect one of them to be.’ I could hear them marvelling as if I was with them, back in their safe worlds where court was a source of excitement and glamour. I was a part of that glamour and it would have been a lie to say I didn’t love it.
Maisie kept Tuesday evenings free for experimenting on Christy. It was a ritual that had evolved long before Maisie decided that hairdressing was her vocation and before Christy was old enough to understand the repercussions of acquiescence.
Christy was three when Maisie first realised she was better than a doll.
‘Christy, of course, can walk and talk and wee very nicely. The only thing she can’t do is grow her hair fast,’ Maisie explained to their mother in a moment of pride.
Christy basked in a sense of unity with her sister but was anxious. Her hair must grow faster. She tugged at it, she wove nests of wool in its split-ends and filled them with pebbles and buttons as ballast, and she screamed herself breathless blue if Jessica tried to trim it. The hair was a perfect tool for Maisie, a rope to knot, a sheet to drape, a mop to curl. Christy never minded how much Maisie pulled or pinched at her scalp; the habit of pleasing her was unassailable. By the time Christy was seventeen, the habit of pleasing Maisie had lost most of its charm, but she still found herself melting before her sister’s jaw-tight determination. She managed to strike a deal for Tuesday nights only and on the whole they had stuck to it.
This Tuesday Maisie was doing hair extensions. Christy found the bottle of wine she had bought rolling like a nine-pin in the back of the fish van and rang Maisie’s door bell. Squinting up for the key, Christy stepped back to the edge of the pavement. Her reflection warped in the plate glass of the magic shop on the ground floor of Maisie’s building, and again in the distorting mirrors at the back of the shop. Christy bloated, Christy wide-hipped and fish-tailed, Christy long and narrow as a snake, stared back at Christy hot on the pavement.
Danny appeared behind her, his shirt flapping open in the breathless still of the evening. He was back from college for the summer, quiet and etiolated from the months spent bending over his computer. Christy had tried to make him join a circus school she had seen a poster for, but Danny was only interested in computers and making money.
Maisie’s key landed in the gutter behind them extravagantly wrapped in a knot of silver satin. She was in a good mood. When she was angry the key hurtled from her third-floor window bound to a lump of coal. She didn’t care if she hit anyone, didn’t care if she hurt anyone; when Maisie was angry everyone had to know and preferably suffer as well. Much thought accompanied her key in its arc to the pavement; on days of depression there was a damp sponge, on sad days just the key, naked and alone, and on tempestuous days the contents of her handbag showered down, papers and receipts twirling like woodshavings and landing out of reach on the ledge above the magic shop.
‘Why does Maisie have to be so affected? I wish she’d lay off.’
Danny tried to throw the slither of ribbon into a dustbin but Christy took it from him.
‘She’s just like this. You know there’s no point in arguing. Anyway, at least she’s in a good mood this evening.’
Maisie had laid the kitchen table for supper and pulled the coloured blinds so the room flickered pink and orange like the inside of a Chinese lantern. Her collection of car accessories and bumper stickers crowded the shelves by the cooker and stirring a pan she paused to run a wooden spoon across a row of plastic dogs, setting them nodding manically in time to the tune on the radio.
Christy dropped her scarf on the back of a chair and opened the wine.
‘This is really nice, Maisie, what a treat, I didn’t expect supper.’
Maisie giggled.
‘Look again at the table, Chris.’ Her eyes danced and she winked at Danny.
Christy lit the candles and looked. Salad, bread, pots of mustard and relish dotted the table and the plates were prettily decorated with sauces.
‘I don’t understand.’ Christy squinted nearer and squealed. The salad wasn’t lettuce, it was green hair, the very hair that Christy was supposed to be wearing later, viscous and apparently doused in dressing. The bread was a hairbrush wrapped in a napkin and the sauces were shampoos and conditioners drifting a sweet synthetic smell across the room. Christy suddenly felt very hungry.
‘God, this must have taken you ages.’ Walking around the table eyeing the feast, she was annoyed that she could ever have mistaken it for food. Maisie’s joke was revolting; Christy couldn’t laugh as Maisie and Danny were.
Maisie was almost hysterical, clutching her stomach, knees together, back hunched, so she was a string of knots and curved corners enjoying her own joke with childlike abandon. She hadn’t meant it to be creepy. That was the trouble with Maisie: she was always upsetting people without meaning to, especially people close to her. Ben was lucky to live in the middle of the North Sea; on days when Maisie really lost control Christy liked to imagine her sailing off to join him, never coming back, but wreaking red-hot havoc on the oil rigs.
Maisie didn’t give Christy hair extensions in the end.
‘Your hair is long enough and anyway, I don’t think green would really suit you.’
She did it to Danny instead and Christy was her assistant. He looked like a fairground troll when his sisters had finished soldering seaweed strands on to his dark hair. He posed on the motor bike while Maisie darted round with her comb, flicking wisps of hair into ever more absurd peaks. Christy ached with laughter, wandering through the flat looking for the camera. She was halfway through Maisie’s wardrobe, throwing clothes out in a jigsaw swirl of colours, when the door bell rang.
Maisie leaned out of the window dangling the key from a lock of green hair.
‘It’s Mick.’
‘What’s he doing here? I didn’t even say what I was doing this evening.’
Christy crawled out from the scented folds of Maisie’s clothes and ran to look out of the window. The pavement was empty. Mick was already in the building.
Danny scuttled in from the living room, his neck pushed down into his shoulders, trying to hide his head like a tortoise.
‘Get this crap off me. I’m not your doll, you know.’ Grabbing Maisie’s scissors he slammed himself inside the bathroom.
Christy stared in astonishment at both the doors, the front one through which Mick was about to appear and the bathroom one echoing with Danny’s anger.
‘I don’t think he wants cool Mick to see him dressed up as My Little Troll,’ whispered Maisie.
Mick was breathless and had running clothes on when he opened the door. Sweat glistened on his forehead and his eyes gazed blank and tired. Christy was disappointed: Mick should be equal to anything. And he shouldn’t wear tracksuits. No one should wear tracksuits.
She stepped back from him.
‘How did you know I was here?’
Mick ignored her and tried to open the bathroom door.
‘Danny’s in there, you’ll have to wait.’
Christy followed him into the kitchen and gave him a tea towel to wipe his face on. His skin was pasty white and looked as if it would crumble like cheese if he rubbed it. She averted her eyes. He drank a pint glass of water in one slide and revived, wetting his hair under the kitchen tap so he looked like a boxer with the tea towel slung around his neck. It was better than looking like a jogger.
‘Your dad told me you were coming round here. I thought I’d drop by and make sure your sister wasn’t pulling out your teeth.’
Maisie glared at him and Christy laughed, pleased he had come charging in to find her like a knight in shining armour.
‘Why would she be?’
‘Well, when your dad said she was doing some kind of experiments on you I wasn’t sure what he was meaning, so I thought I’d get myself here and find out.’ He grinned at Maisie who raised her chin and scowled disdain.
‘I’ve got a different victim tonight, actually,’ she said. ‘But he’s not very open-minded.’
Danny came out of the bathroom with his hands concealed inside a nest of slithering green and his hair one jagged inch long.
Maisie screamed and stamped her foot.
‘You little bastard. That took hours to do. That hair cost a fortune and you’ve just cut it all off because you didn’t think you looked cool enough.’ She slapped the wet hanks into the sink and burst into tears. Danny reached out a hand to her to say sorry but she pulled away, saliva a reptilian gleam on her lips. ‘Fuck off. I’ll never forgive you, so don’t even try to say sorry.’
Another door slammed, this time Maisie’s bedroom. Mick whistled.
‘Well, she’s got a temper in her to stop rivers, hasn’t she?’
Danny was by the sink, mute and defenceless as a shadow, looking down at Maisie’s hair extensions beached above the waterline on dirty pans and plates. He was almost crying. Christy put her arms round him.
‘Come on, Danny, you know she doesn’t mean it. Let’s go to the pub for a bit. When we come back she’ll have forgotten about it.’
Mick didn’t want to let it go.
‘You shouldn’t be having her do that to you, Danny. Tell her to say sorry now, tell her to act up or she’ll be in a load of big trouble.’
Christy noticed for the first time in a while how strong Mick’s accent was. Maybe he sounded more Irish because someone else was there. On her own with him Christy was not conscious of his voice at all. It was as if they communicated without talking much, but that couldn’t be right because Mick had to talk all the time; if he didn’t he would explode.
They went to the pub at the bottom of Maisie’s road and Mick left them at a table and went to the bar. Danny rolled a cigarette thin as a pipe cleaner and lit it perched on a windowsill. Smoking with his chin tucked into the collar of his shirt and his hair dripping down his neck, he shivered and clenched his teeth. Christy squeezed his hand across the table.
Mick returned with the drinks wedged in a lopsided triangle between his hands, and sat down next to Danny.
‘Do you want to come with me to meet some bikers on Thursday? I’m doing a kind of story on them and I heard there was a meeting going on near Wisenton. We could go and see what they’re all about.’
Danny shed his gloom and sat up, his spirits lifting as confidence bolstered him and his gestures became emphatic.
‘Tell me more about what you do. Chris hasn’t said anything and it must be really interesting.’
‘I don’t know anything, he hasn’t told me.’ Christy glared at Mick.
He took her hand and kissed it.
‘I got into the whole thing because I like taking pictures and I used to go all over to do it. You meet people, you get talking in bars and sometimes something comes of it, you know.’
Christy went to get the next round of drinks, weaving though groups of people to the bar, taking her time so Mick and Danny could talk. It was easier to ask Mick questions with Danny asking too. Alone his intensity bore down on her, crushing her own thoughts until she had nothing to say.
Mick wanted Danny to come back to the cottage with them. Christy felt guilty about Maisie.
‘I’ll go back and stay with her,’ she said when they reached Mick’s car, but Mick handed Danny the keys and opened the back door.
‘Come on, sweetheart, I need you to hold my hand now while this speed freak takes us home.’
Danny pulled a yellow note from the windscreen.
‘You’ve got a ticket. Bad luck.’ He stretched to pass it to Mick then pulled it back frowning. ‘Hang on, there aren’t any restrictions here after six, so how come they’ve given you this? Hey, it says four o’clock; you weren’t here then, were you?’ Danny slid into the driver’s seat muttering about traffic wardens.
Mick shoved the ticket in his pocket.
‘Calm you down, Danny boy. I parked here earlier and left the car while I went around town a bit, that’s all.’
In the back seat Christy lolled her head on Mick’s shoulder, warm and happy with his arm around her. She looked up at him.
‘Well, how did you see Dad then?’ Her voice was lazy as she twisted herself until she was comfortable resting against his side.
Mick’s arm tensed and his frame was as unyielding as metal beside her. He sighed, pressing his fingers knuckle white on the back of the driver’s seat.
‘I never said I saw your dad, girl, I called him up. Is that OK with you? Now stop policing me. Turn right here, Danny. Right, I said. Jesus, will we be living after this journey is the question now.’ He hugged both arms around Christy, and the car spat dust on to the twilight road.