Read Online The Hook by Raffaella Barker - Free Book Online Page B

changing room, her voice shrill above the music.
    â€˜This is the one I want. I don’t like anything else. I’m not forcing you to buy me a dress, you offered.’
    Christy and Jessica looked at one another. Jessica winked.
    â€˜You know her better than I do,’ she whispered, and they giggled.
    The dress was folded in tissue paper, turned over and over like pastry until a square, white and neat as a pie, lay on the counter. Christy fidgeted, anticipation surging for her turn, her mouth dry when Jessica wrote the cheque for Maisie’s dress.
    â€˜It doesn’t matter, I don’t need anything if we can’t afford it.’
    But Jessica snapped shut her bag and squeezed Christy’s arm.
    â€˜Nonsense, darling, of course you are having a dress too. Now come on, where shall we go?’
    Maisie skipped ahead, shouting ideas back at Jessica and Christy strolling, talking in low voices behind her. In the next shop Jessica searched through the rails for garments she imagined were appropriate for a fifteen year old. Christy was thrilled at her mother’s interest and took armfuls into the changing room, emerging sporadically, hunched and embarrassed, in a succession of sequins and frills.
    â€˜Mum doesn’t know what I want,’ she whispered to Maisie.
    â€˜Try this.’ Maisie passed her a handful of gauze.
    In the cubicle Christy slipped the dress over her head and came out to show her mother and Maisie before she looked at it herself. Jessica turned towards her and gasped. Christy saw her mother’s face crumble, eyes staring from pinched tight skin, sallow and old as if a wax had spilt across her features. She moved in front of the mirror, trying to keep her shoulders straight and her head up.
    â€˜Don’t you like it, Mum?’
    Tears dazzled Jessica’s vision. Christy’s soft shoulders rose clear in her mind, and Christy’s face framed by white blonde hair, the dress in shades of grey like the dawn. She saw a reflection of herself except that the self she saw had not existed for twenty years. Her earlier triumph of sisterhood with her daughters was confounded now; she moved and stood beside Christy, forcing herself to mark the contrast further. Christy’s skin was mapped with veins so fine it looked as though she had been burnished to the point of transparency. Beside her Jessica saggedfrom her spine, shrouded by years of dust and dullness, heavy, sucking light in instead of giving it out. She was old and she resented Christy for reminding her of it.
    Christy watched her mother’s face in silence. She had done something dreadful. The dress was wrong.
    â€˜I don’t really like this one,’ she whispered.
    â€˜Rubbish, you look great.’ Maisie swung her round. ‘This is the one. Come on, Mum, let’s buy it and go and have some lunch.’
    The shop assistant bustled over.
    â€˜You must be proud of her,’ she said as she chivvied Christy into the changing room. ‘You must have looked just like her in your heyday.’
    Jessica nodded and tried to smile.
    Christy never wore the dress while her mother was alive.
    Through the summer Christy worked long hours on the fish farm and Mick was often away. She borrowed Frank’s van and drove to the cottage at dusk when the last angler had left the lake, his rods and nets bundled in the boot of his car, his fish slithering and drying on the seat beside him. When Mick was away, Christy went to his cottage to look after his dog. Hotspur stayed with her the first time Mick went away, but he pined, scratching and whining, never able to be still. Frank did not like dogs and had replaced Jessica’s pair of black pugs with a sigh of relief and a pale hall carpet when they followed her to the grave. Hegrunted and didn’t look up from his paper when Christy told him that Mick’s dog was coming to stay. But once Hotspur was installed his reed-thin voice rose through the