The Broken (22 page)

Josh gazed around pointedly at their surroundings – the flat in one of the best parts of town, the oil paintings, the rugs, the smell of old money wafting up from the cracked leather chair.

Dan followed his gaze. ‘I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. This is Sienna’s place.’

‘Anyway,’ Sienna cut in, ‘I’m pretty much broke myself since I went back to college.’

‘You’re not modelling any more?’ Hannah asked.

‘Just the odd thing. But to be honest, I was never going to make a career of modelling. I haven’t got the look they’re after. I get the odd advert or fashion spread, but no more. And I need to do something with my brain now. It’s been too long in the wilderness.’

‘What are you studying?’

‘History of Art, at Goldsmiths.’

Josh couldn’t help being impressed. She was obviously no slouch intellectually.

‘But the thing is,’ said Dan, ‘I need to be able to support myself. And I need to be able to offer September a stable home. She doesn’t seem to have that at the moment. I thought we could sort the money thing out through mediation, but Sasha refuses. If it carries on like this we’ll end up in court and the fucking lawyers will take everything. Tell me how that makes any sense?’

‘Well, maybe if you hadn’t taken your money out of the joint account she would have been more amenable to mediation.’ Hannah’s voice was measured, but the sharp undertone gave her away.

Dan’s face flushed deep wine-red. ‘What choice did I have? I have to get her to be reasonable. She can’t expect to stay in that house and not even think about getting a job.’

‘She can if she’s the main caregiver.’

‘Well, she’s not going to be. She’s proved she’s not up to it. Fuck it, you two, I’m seriously worried about September. I’m going for fifty-fifty custody.’

Hannah could hardly hide her shock. ‘You’ve never done the childcare, Dan! Who’s going to look after her when you’re off shooting in Morocco or South Africa? Who’s going to pick her up from school when you’re working a fourteen-hour day?’

‘I’ve thought about all that. I’ll get an au pair.’

Josh snorted with laughter. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you? You’re going to hire a complete stranger, even though Sasha is right there with nothing to do?’

‘I don’t trust her any more.’

‘Let’s not talk about this.’ Hannah sounded dangerously close to tears. ‘Josh and I are in an impossible situation. I didn’t come hear to listen to you badmouthing Sasha. She’s my friend, remember?’

For a moment it looked as if Dan would continue, but Sienna squeezed his knee and he sat back, resigned.

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ said Sienna brightly. ‘Let’s talk about . . . I don’t know . . . bagels. What’s your favourite type of bagel?’

‘Cinnamon and raisin, without a doubt,’ Dan countered instantly. ‘Josh? Where do you stand on the bagel issue?’

‘The fruit-flavoured bagel is an abomination, in my opinion. I put it to you that a bagel with fruit bits in it is nothing more than a jumped-up teacake.’

They were all trying so hard to make this work, to keep things bright and breezy and reassuringly superficial, painting a hard shell over the things that weren’t being said. And for a while it worked. They chatted about work, about the latest viral dance craze, about whether Toby the dachshund had Munchausen’s Syndrome because he kept limping for no reason. They sat around the long dark-wood Gothic dinner table and ate the gingerless stir fry and declared it a triumph nevertheless. They drank the mid-price white wine Josh had brought, and Hannah made them all laugh with a story about doing a phone interview with a television personality while Lily was at home ill – the rising hysteria as she fed biscuit after biscuit into the surprised child’s mouth to keep her from making a sound. Sienna countered with an amusing anecdote about arriving to shoot a skincare commercial sporting ‘a spot the size of Brazil’ on her forehead, stylists squealing in horror and attacking the monster with paints and potions.

Josh concentrated on the food and the chatter, and tried not to look at Sienna’s hand resting in Dan’s lap or notice the way his eyes followed her greedily when she got up and left the room.

They were drinking coffee from the most enormous cafetière Josh had ever seen when the crash came. One minute he was sitting with both hands around a chipped mug that read ‘I love New York’, feeling absurdly rebellious to be drinking coffee so late in the evening, and the next there came a noise so violent he thought someone had been shot. When he turned his head, one of the panes in the enormous sash window in the living room had been smashed, a jagged crack running from the bottom left-hand corner up to a hole in the middle, framed by the still-open wooden shutters. Josh was too stunned to move, but Dan jumped up and ran for the front door, wrenching it open. They heard the creaking of the heavy communal door just as an engine started up outside and a car pulled away.

‘Can you see anyone?’ Sienna sounded like a small, frightened child and Josh fought back an insane urge to pull her on to his lap and hold her and stroke her hair.

Dan, reappearing in the living room, shook his head. His face was noticeably paler than when they had arrived, and Josh realized just how much of a shock they had all had. He glanced over at Hannah. She was sitting stiffly upright, not saying anything. One of her long fingers worried away at the eczema patch which stood out raw and red on her forehead.

‘She’s gone too far this time.’ Dan was staring down at the large pebble that he’d picked up from among the shards of glass on the wooden floor.

‘Who?’ Hannah’s voice was sharp.

Dan looked up, frowning. A dark groove ran from his forehead down between his eyes. ‘Sasha, of course. Who else would throw a fucking great rock through the window? How many other psychos do we know?’

‘That psycho is still your wife.’ Hannah was half standing, as if unsure whether to walk out. ‘There is nothing at all to say that was Sasha. It could easily have been local kids.’

‘Local kids? In Notting Hill?’ Josh wasn’t sure if he was trying to make a joke, but it was obvious it didn’t go down well.

Hannah turned on him. ‘Don’t
you
start. I can’t believe you’re jumping to conclusions about Sasha. She had no idea we were coming here tonight. There’d be no reason for her to turn up.’

‘Oh don’t be naive, Hannah.’ Dan sounded angry. ‘You know she’s been spying on us. What about that text she sent?’

‘That text didn’t prove anything – except that you’re totally paranoid!’

‘Hannah’s right.’ Sienna had crossed the room and looped her brown, toned arm around Dan’s waist. ‘We don’t know it’s Sasha. It could be anyone.’

Dan shook his head. ‘Too much of a coincidence,’ he muttered.

Sienna put up a gentle hand to his cheek to hold his head still. Eventually he shrugged and held up his hands. ‘OK, OK. We’ll chalk it up to coincidence, if you insist.’

For a second or two they stayed like that, eyes closed, gently swaying. Josh knew he should look at Hannah, maybe share a complicit
What are they like?
raising of the eyebrows, but he couldn’t, for fear of what she would see written on his face.

‘I feel sick,’ Hannah announced on the way home. They’d left soon after the window incident. Even though they’d bolted the wooden shutters, the awareness of that terrible jagged hole in the pane stifled their attempts at conversation. But now Hannah wanted to talk, to tell him how awful she felt. What if it
had
been Sasha? She knew it wasn’t, of course. Yet what if it was? Should she say something to her? Admit they’d been to Sienna’s flat, just in case?

Josh didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to think about the possibility of Sasha outside in the dark square, looking in on the four of them cosying up together in that comfortable, fire-warmed living room. He could just imagine how she might have felt. But then again, if it was her, shouldn’t they be more worried about her state of mind than about her feelings? If she’d come out in the night, perhaps even bringing September with her, to spy through the windows, and then picked up a rock and hurled it at the glass, wasn’t that dangerously unhinged?

‘I think we should back off from both of them for a while,’ he said finally, as they waited at a traffic light by Tufnell Park tube. ‘This whole situation is getting too intense. I think we should leave them to it for a bit.’

‘Oh, that’s right. The tried-and-tested Josh formula for when things get tough – walk away.’

‘Hey, that’s not fair. Whose idea was it to go tonight and show some solidarity?’

‘Yeah, and look where that got us!’

The lights changed and Josh pulled away, gears grating. How had this suddenly become his fault, he’d like to know.

‘Oh God, I hate this,’ said Hannah. ‘I hate that we’ve ended up in this position. I’d be mortified if Sasha found out where we’ve been. But you know the worst thing?’

Josh shook his head.

‘I actually quite liked Sienna! I wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t. What did you think?’

Josh batted away the image of Sienna leaning forward into the fireplace.

‘She was OK,’ he shrugged.

18

Hannah held her breath, waiting for Sasha’s response. She’d hardly slept, worrying about whether to say anything about their dinner at Sienna’s the night before, and having decided that she would, she’d blurted it out as soon as they were alone together.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really want to, but you know, Dan is still Josh’s best friend. His
only
friend, in many ways.’

She’d expected Sasha to explode, and would even have half welcomed a scene, if only to offload some of the guilt she’d been feeling ever since they accepted Dan’s invitation. But in the event, Sasha seemed curiously unconcerned.

‘I’m not exactly thrilled, but there’s nothing I can do about it, is there? Just don’t tell me about it. The less I know about that woman, the better.’

Hannah studied her face. They were in the café on the high street. Well, one of the hundreds of cafés, to be accurate. Sometimes it seemed Crouch End was just one big café full of women with buggies and baby-carriers and expensive tote bags stuffed with crayons and rice crackers. Women in many respects just like the two of them.

Hannah hadn’t really wanted to come. She was all too aware of the unfinished feature on her laptop, but the scene last night with the smashed window kept coming back to her – the sickening crack, the glass, that awful jagged hole.

‘Something weird happened while we were there.’

‘I told you.’ Sasha was drinking her cappuccino from a bowl, as all the customers were, and it had given her a ring of froth around her mouth like a clown. ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘Yes, but this was odd. Someone threw a rock at the window. Smashed the whole thing.’

Sasha’s clown mouth turned up at the corners. ‘Ha! That’s brilliant. Serves you all right.’

Hannah smiled tightly, but in her head she heard that cracking sound, and something cold shifted inside her.

‘We even wondered for a moment if it could have been you!’

Now Sasha’s face set hard, the smile fading to a fissure. ‘What do you mean, you thought it was me?’

‘Oh, don’t take it like that, we didn’t really think—’

‘No. I don’t believe this. Not only do you go behind my back to cosy up with the woman who has destroyed my life, but then when some yob lobs a brick through the window, you try to blame it on me.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. Sit down, Sash. Please?’

Sasha had half risen, propelled by her fury.

‘I was joking. Please sit down.’

Hannah’s voice wobbled as she reached out to detain her friend, and after a brief pause, Sasha slumped back down in her seat. Seemingly unable or unwilling to look at Hannah, she sat forward with her elbow on the table, one hand up to her head. The nub of her wrist bone jutted through her paper-thin skin and Hannah found herself thinking how easily it would snap clean in two.

‘Sorry,’ Sasha mumbled. ‘I know I’m over-sensitive, it’s just that this is so hard. Parents shouldn’t split up. Parents should stay together. Terrible things happen when parents separate. It’s not right.’

‘I know.’

Sasha now raised the other hand to her temple, so that her head was resting in her hands. As she did so, the sleeve of her mushroom-coloured cashmere jumper rode up, and Hannah was horrified to see a long, deep, red scratch scored widthways into her flesh. Another similar scratch intersected it halfway up, but disappeared under the jumper’s cuff. The dried blood had beaded in places, thick and dark. She tried to think of an innocent explanation, but there was none.

Hannah knew she ought to say something. Yet the words lodged in her mouth like boiled eggs, impossible to get out.

Sasha put her hands down, and instantly the scratches were gone – and with them the opportunity to raise concerns, to be a good friend. Hannah sipped her coffee and tried to forget. Perhaps she hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen. She was prone to exaggerate things in her head – wasn’t Josh always telling her that? – liable to leap to wrong conclusions.

‘It’s Dan’s night to see September, isn’t it?’ She was deliberately changing the subject, trying to get things back to normal.

‘Yeah. We’re meeting at the pizza place at seven.’

‘Why won’t you let him see her on their own?’

Sasha put down her coffee so heavily that some of it sloshed over the side of the bowl and on to the weathered wooden table. ‘I’ve told you before. He’s violent. And he’s a thief. He’s not to be trusted.’

All the way home, Hannah kept thinking about the coincidence that both Dan and Sasha should use the same phrase – that the other was not to be trusted. Impossible to believe that just weeks ago they were living together, sleeping in the same bed.

Back in her flat, she struggled to concentrate. The conversation with Sasha had unnerved her, not to mention the ugly red cut in Sasha’s childlike arm. She tried to focus on her article, on what pay-off she could use to end it, but nothing came. Instead her head was full of Sasha and Dan and Sienna – and the thing hidden away in the back of her wardrobe.