The Broken (17 page)

It wasn’t fair
.

‘Right.’ He didn’t care how huffy he sounded. ‘Never mind, then. Wouldn’t want you to miss out on a shagfest just to see your daughter.’

Dan looked shocked. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just it’s already booked. Sienna has taken time off.’

‘Oh well, then that definitely takes priority over your four-year-old.’

‘Why are you being so judgemental all of a sudden?’

Josh couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t tell Dan about the image that was now seared across his brain of the naked couple in the messed-up sheets. Couldn’t let on how Hannah hadn’t let him go near her in weeks, how dirty it made him feel to even try to initiate something. Couldn’t confess that jealousy was burning a path through his gut.

He looked at Dan and forced himself to smile. ‘Your round,’ he said.

14

‘Told you this would be fun, didn’t I? Well? Didn’t I?’

Sasha was standing so close that every time she spoke, Hannah felt a fine spray of spittle on her cheek that she had to refrain from wiping off. Sasha was swaying while she talked, and her hazel eyes were hard and bright and glinted under the overhead lights. At first, Hannah had wondered if Sasha could be on something. That is, something more than the four or five vodka tonics she’d already downed. Then she’d remembered the antidepressants. Weren’t you supposed to avoid alcohol when you were taking those?

The evening hadn’t started well when Sasha had turned up at the flat, dressed for their night out in a black, skin-tight bodycon dress with soaring heels and more make-up than Hannah had ever seen her wear. Josh had been noticeably taken aback when she arrived. He’d started talking really loudly and fast, which he always did when he was nervous. Normally, Hannah found it endearing, but this evening it just irritated her. ‘No need to shout,’ she’d said. ‘We’re not deaf.’

Sasha looked incredible. She made Hannah, in jeans and boots and a newish, loose white top with no egg stains down it – which had seemed charmingly boho chic when she’d put it on, standing with her back to the full-length mirror in their bedroom, craning her neck over her shoulder to check how it looked from the back – feel frumpy and middle-aged by comparison. ‘You look nice,’ Josh had told her when she came out of the bedroom, and she’d instantly deflated.
Nice?
Really?

Hannah hadn’t been able to stop staring at Sasha. Yes, she was wearing more make-up than usual, but there was something else as well. She seemed luminous.

‘Have you done something to your hair?’ she asked, head cocked to the side. ‘Eyebrows?’

In the end Sasha cracked. ‘Botox,’ she squealed delightedly. ‘I wasn’t going to tell anyone, but isn’t it fab?’

Hannah felt a sharp pang then, which she’d put down to concern for Sasha and for the heartbreaking insecurity that would make a beautiful thirty-four-year-old woman pay to have bacteria injected into her own face. Only much later would she admit to herself that the concern was tinged with resentment. Not that she’d ever put herself through that kind of invasive cosmetic procedure, but it seemed so unfair that she’d been working ever since she left uni and still couldn’t afford to get her legs waxed. Yet Sasha, who’d earned no money of her own for years, could splash out hundreds on making herself look better without even thinking about it. Hannah felt like Sasha’s frumpier older sister, even though Sasha would turn thirty-five six months before she did. It was not a comfortable feeling. She was going to be left behind, she suddenly realized. She would be the drab, tired-looking woman wearing yesterday’s fashions, while women like Sasha with their fortnightly hairdresser appointments and weekly facials would stay just the same.

Sasha had insisted on a drink before they set off, and the change in her behaviour had been marked. Her voice had become loud and strident, her laugh piercing and false. She had put on the dance playlist Hannah had made for a party the year before, and immediately started undulating suggestively in front of Josh.

‘Come on, big guy, let’s see you throw some shapes,’ she said, attempting to haul him to his feet.

Josh looked so appalled, Hannah couldn’t help laughing. Even his ears were blushing.

When they eventually called a cab, he didn’t even bother to hide his relief.

‘Have fun,’ he said gamely as they left, and she wished suddenly, desperately, that she wasn’t going out at all, but was settling down with him on the sofa with a glass of wine and the
Breaking Bad
box set. At the very same time, the thought of yet another Saturday night in, watching Josh marking his interminable pile of exercise books, and listening to other people, people with lives, walking past the window on their way out to wherever it was people with lives went on a Saturday, made her want to scream.

Sasha had been in a bizarre mood in the taxi, flirting with the Somalian cab driver, then nearly causing him to crash by leaning through the gap in the front seats to crank up the volume on the tinny car radio when a song came on that she liked. And ever since they’d arrived at the club, her behaviour had become increasingly erratic. She and Hannah had found themselves a table near the bar, but Sasha couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes before she was up, throwing herself around the dance floor, or just standing next to the table, drumming her fingers and swaying, while her eyes darted around the room looking for available men.

And it seemed there were
plenty
of available men.

Practically from the second they arrived, they’d been attracting male attention. By
they
, of course, Hannah actually meant Sasha. Flicking back her silky black hair and rubbing one brown foot in her unfeasibly high shoes up the calf of the other brown leg, Sasha was like a man magnet.

‘God, I’m on fire tonight. What’s going on?’ she laughed, after a man with hair cropped close to his head to disguise his premature baldness had come over expressly to inform her that she was the most beautiful woman in the room.

But Hannah had seen how she did it, holding a man’s gaze across the room just that fraction longer than was strictly acceptable, drawing him in with a playful half-smile, then looking away after he’d committed himself to coming over, glancing up as he arrived as if surprised to find him there.

‘I told you this would be fun, didn’t I? Well? Didn’t I?’

They moved from the table to the bar, and Sasha was swaying and standing too near, and Hannah was feeling cross and out of place. Most people in here were five or ten years younger than they were, cool, confident types who didn’t need to keep glancing at their phones in case of child-related emergencies, women whose cropped tops and cut-away dresses revealed taut abdominals that had never seen a pregnancy.

‘You look like you’re in the waiting room at the dentist, not out enjoying yourself.’

The man had appeared from nowhere, materializing by her shoulder and speaking from the side of his mouth. She glanced up sharply and was surprised to find herself looking into a pair of shockingly blue, clearly amused eyes set into a ruggedly chiselled face.

‘It’s not really my scene,’ she said.

‘Mine neither. I was dragged along by a group of mates. We’re on a stag night. You can’t imagine the hell.’

Hannah smiled, the grumpiness of just a few moments ago miraculously melting away.

‘Who’s this?’

Hannah had been vaguely aware of Sasha’s intense gaze flicking between her and the unknown stranger during the course of this brief exchange.

‘I’m Ed.’ The man whose name was Ed nodded at Sasha, without making any attempt to move closer to her. Sasha’s lip-glossed smile spread like a stain over her face.

‘And you came all the way over here because you thought Hannah was about to top herself! That’s so sweet. But don’t worry, that’s just her regular default expression, although she can also do bored and indifferent. Don’t be alarmed, she can’t help it. Inside, she’s positively beaming!’

Hannah felt a wave of anger, sudden and ferocious. How dare Sasha try to score points by putting her down? She hadn’t wanted to come in the first place. Was it any wonder she wasn’t exactly dancing a happy jig in this overloud, overheated place?

Ed smiled at her, and she was conscious of his arm brushing hers and a burning sensation where their skin touched.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I rather like Hannah’s default expression.’

Sasha’s features seem to freeze. Through her flattered embarrassment, Hannah had a flash of insight. Sasha was jealous.

Of her.

Meanwhile, she’d moved her arm so that it was no longer quite touching Ed’s, but in a way this was even worse because now the hairs on both their arms seemed to be reaching out to make contact, creating an unsettling tingling effect.

‘Do you want to dance?’

For a moment, Hannah allowed herself the fantasy. It had been so long since she’d felt anything like this, what harm could it do? She would step forward with this charismatic stranger with his pale-blue T-shirt that set off his tan, and his eagle tattoo, and his jeans loosely hanging off his narrow hips, and the faint whiff of nicotine that hugged him close, reminding her of boys she had lusted after in her youth. And he would take her hand as they pushed through the sea of bodies to find a space and she would feel once again that particular thrill of closing your fingers around an unknown hand, the shocking vulnerability of another person’s soft palm in yours. And when they arrived on the dance floor the force of the crowd would push them together until they had no choice but to—

‘Oi-oi!’

Sasha thrust herself between Hannah and her fantasy suitor, shattering the daydream.

‘Hands off my mate. She’s a happily married woman, I’ll have you know.’ Sasha was speaking in a loud, faux-jolly voice Hannah had never heard before. ‘If you’re after a dance, I’m afraid you’re going to have to make do with me – the sad, single friend.’ She pouted, tilting her head down and gazing up at him through her lashes. Then, with a final flick of her hair, she grabbed his hand, the very one Hannah had just been fantasizing about, thrust her bag at Sasha to look after, and pulled him off in the direction of the dance floor. He turned his head to Hannah as he was led away and gave her a helpless
What can you do?
look. She smiled and shrugged, hoping her face didn’t betray the ugly feeling that gushed, acidic and corrosive, through her gut.

She didn’t have a leg to stand on, she knew. She
was
married. And she couldn’t blame Sasha for wanting to snaffle the first attractive man they’d seen all night. This evening was supposed to be about her, after all. But all the rationalizing in the world couldn’t stop the rage that swept through her as she stood on the edge of the dance floor watching Sasha and Ed weaving their way through the crowd until they disappeared from sight. Her fingers gripped her glass of rum and Coke tightly until her knuckles were four pale splodges under the dimmed lights. She set her face into a ‘good-sport’ expression, ignoring the ache where her half-smile felt heavy and started to sag. A red mist swirled around her brain, but she forced herself to stay very still, concentrating her anger into the pressure of her hand around the glass. The music changed, and then changed again, a relentless bass beat that rattled her insides. Where
were
they?

‘You on your own?’

A cloud of beery breath engulfed her, almost making her gag. The man who stood swaying next to her was shorter than she was, with hard gelled black hair and fleshy red cheeks.

‘You on your own?’ he repeated more loudly, as if she might turn out to be foreign.

‘No, I’m with a friend.’

‘And she’s left you? That’s not very nice.’

‘It’s fine. I’m fine.’

Hannah kept her eyes fixed on the dance floor, willing Sasha and Ed to reappear.

‘Lemme buy you a drink.’

The man was leaning in close towards her, so the brittle spikes of his hair prickled her cheek.

‘No, thanks.’

She scoured the room again, standing on tiptoe, hoping for a glimpse of Sasha’s black silky head. But nothing.

‘Come on. Let’s go somewhere quieter. Have a chat.’

He put a meaty, clammy hand on her arm, and she jumped back as if burned.

‘No! Look, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go to the loo. I’ll see you later.’

She hurried off without a backward glance, lugging Sasha’s bag as well as her own. In the ladies’ toilets there was the usual queue for the cubicles. Women stood in a straggly line, peering into the mirrors as they waited, touching up their make-up and brushing their hair in the over-bright, greenish light.

‘Could take a while,’ the woman in front of Hannah muttered to her. ‘There’s three of ’em in there.’ She indicated the middle cubicle, from which was coming a variety of shrieks and giggles. The woman in front of Hannah put her finger to the side of her nose and inhaled deeply to indicate what might be taking place. ‘And in
that
one,’ she pointed to the cubicle at the far end, ‘there’s a couple. A bloke and a bird. No prizes for what
they
’re doing.’

If the woman’s thin tattooed eyebrows had arched any higher they’d have come clean off her forehead. Just then there came the noise of a bolt being unlocked. The women waiting wearily in the queue suddenly shot to attention as the door to the far cubicle was flung open. Hannah’s idle curiosity about the occupants turned to shock as a figure in a tight black dress came lurching out. Sasha’s lipstick was smudged across her mouth and she was missing an earring. Behind her followed a sheepish-looking Ed, whose expression turned to horror when he caught sight of Hannah.

Sasha, on the other hand, looked triumphant.

‘Hannah! Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you all over,’ she giggled.

‘Slag,’ Hannah heard someone hiss behind her.

‘Er, I think I’d better be off,’ said Ed, sidling towards the door.

‘Good idea,’ snapped Hannah.

A woman in the queue behind them called out, ‘Typical man – gets what he wants then buggers off.’

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Hannah turned on Sasha, not caring that the entire queue was listening. ‘You have no idea who that man is or who he’s been with.’