The Hook by Raffaella Barker Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜â€œBlanch 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