The Hook Read Online Free PDF Page B

father plead with her mother and her mother ignore him. Frank marched back and forth in the hall, his face turning pink then purple with rage. From a safe position behind the coat stand Christy watched him step purposefully into the kitchen and she hid her face for an explosion. None came.
    Peering out again she could see Jessica over Frank’s shoulder turn her wavering smile on him and reach out her hand to his cheek.
    â€˜Frank, please don’t go on. You know I have enough to deal with without looking after a rabbit.’
    Frank’s arms stretched forward to her and Jessica walked into his embrace; Christy saw Jessica’s fingers twining in her husband’s hair and she knew Felt would not be back.
    Mick and Christy visited the cemetery that Sunday and Christy was more nervous than she had been when Mick met her father. Jessica’s anger at her illness caught Christy as if her mother was beside her talking in the rasping whisper she died with. She shivered. Jessica was in her head, hissing and venomous: ‘Youneedn’t think you can parade your handsome boyfriend here. This is my place, take him away.’ Christy clutched Mick’s hand, but she couldn’t turn back, she had her flowers and the grave needed tending.
    The cemetery lay between Lynton Hospital and the shoe factory, hemmed in and shaded so the grass was glass green all year. Railings twisted and bowed around the perimeter, unravelling between brick pillars and tangling with nettles and brambles in forgotten corners. Jessica’s grave was near the hospital, too near when the sun shone and the tall shadow of the chimney swung across it like a pendulum. The chimney spewed smoke and Christy imagined hospital porters stoking an evil-smelling fire with spare limbs and organs.
    Jessica was halfway down a row in a plot used so long ago that it was deemed empty again. On both sides headstones were spaced like neat teeth and for the first six months Jessica’s grave was a gap in the perfect jaw, a hump of soil banked beneath turf squares until the ground settled and her milk-marble slab could be set. Christy wondered who the previous tenant had been, if Jessica would have liked them enough to spend eternity mingling with their remains. It had to be a woman: Jessica could not be buried with a man she didn’t know, however much time separated them. Somewhere someone probably knew who had lain in this spot until they rotted to nothing more than the air tunnels of worms and the sandy soil around them, but Christy did not want to find out.
    Today Jessica’s spirit was malevolent, and Christy wouldn’t have cared if there had been a murderer in the grave. Even as she had the thought, she could imagine her mother’s mocking face, brows curving up at the ends in surprise: ‘But you must know, love, they don’t put murderers in Christian graveyards, do they?’
    Mick waited at a distance from Jessica’s plot, ignorant of Christy’s internal battle, her desperate yearning for a sign from the grave, a sign that Jessica accepted her boyfriend, was happy for her. She stooped to lay her flowers on the ground; it was better to leave them strewn than to put them in a vase which the wind could empty in her absence.
    Arranging them, crumbling last week’s rose petals around them, she ran her hands across the turf and knocked her fingers on a stone. Pulling it up, she stared, astonished. A whole walnut lay on her palm, wrinkled and darker than the ones in supermarkets.
    â€˜Mick, look what I’ve found.’
    He bent over her, his hand on her shoulder.
    â€˜Well now, you can take that as a sign from God, or if you are not so inclined, as a message from a devoted squirrel.’
    She rose, laughing, and put the walnut in her pocket. The voice of Jessica’s illness vanished leaving a blessing. She had never laughed by her mother’s grave before.
    Christy had vowed at Jessica’s funeral that she