Free The Hook by Raffaella Barker

house like dust reaching every corner when he was parted from Christy, and Frank stopped grunting and shouted instead.
    â€˜Get that damned thing out of here. I caught it eating the bonemeal around the roses this morning. It dug one up. You are not keeping it under control, Christy. I won’t put up with it any longer.’ Frank glared at Hotspur as he spoke; Hotspur licked his lips and curved himself in apology, scraping across the lawn towards the crinoline shade of a rose bush.
    Christy caught him and shut him in the garden shed, but he climbed up to the window and stood craning his neck, following Christy everywhere with his pleading eyes. It was better to keep him at Mick’s cottage.
    Mick was never gone for more than three or four days, and when Christy was busy at the lake, Danny was there, on holiday from college, and he liked to take the van and speed off to feed the dog, freedom a plume of exhaust smoke behind him.
    Frank was making money now from the fish farm. His overdraft no longer ballooned each month and he forgot that he was lonely and bereaved when he looked out at the land through which his business flowed as strong as the narrow stream that fed his lakes. The wounds which had ridged the earth around the lakes were healed now and small treesshivered a path up to the office. Frank’s island with its top-knot of reeds and grasses tangling with bramble hoops rustled with purpose as beasts and birds threaded their way through the scrub. From the porch Frank trailed them with his binoculars before dusk. His ritual coincided with the heron’s slow circuit of the lake, and Frank watched the bird land on the shore, long legs crumpling in slow motion, wings beating up air for balance, before it could stand, still and upright as a sentry, except for the bone beak thrusting from the rushes. The heron was a menace on the lakes, dilettante in his clean dive to pierce a fish he didn’t want to eat. Flapping back to the shore, his trophy impaled and struggling on his beak, he paused and the slick black marking on his head was an eyebrow raised in challenge to Frank, impotent by the house.
    Christy felt that at last after almost three years the house was beginning to become a place where people were happy. At first it had been too new and too soon; the rooms were sharp with pain and there were not enough cushions or pictures and no happy memories to soften them. Frank had begged Maisie to come home, even for a short time, but she had said no. She hadn’t understood how much they needed her to be there for a while so that this house could fill with images and sounds and life. Christy knew that deep down her father missed Maisie and her jangling energy, as he missed Jessica. With Danny away halfthe year Christy couldn’t fill the spaces left around her father. And meeting Mick made it worse. Christy hated leaving Frank when she went out with Mick. Most of all she hated it when Frank waved them off and she could still see him smaller and smaller, sitting with the newspaper alone on the porch.
    It was Christy’s idea to build the porch. It was a proper American one, the kind they had in westerns where mothers sat in rocking chairs and sewed and fathers kicked off their boots after a hot day on the ranch.
    Frank didn’t want it at first.
    â€˜It’s going to cost a lot of money just to give you a place to sit three times a year when it’s warm enough,’ he complained to Christy, but she wouldn’t give up.
    â€˜It’s for you, not me. You can sit and look over the lakes. You must do it, Dad. You can’t live here properly unless you have a place you can look out from.’
    In the end Frank capitulated, and although he pretended he still thought it a waste of money, Christy found him with the plans, adding steps and widening posts until it stopped being Christy’s porch and became part of Frank’s house.
    Red and low like a barn, the house stood on a bulge