The Broken (27 page)

Now Kelly Kavanagh was in his head, he couldn’t get her out. She was a heavy-set girl of fifteen. One of those – and there were a few in every year group – who’d developed months, even years ahead of her peers, and had spent the first few years of secondary school sitting in assembly looking like a freakish adult in a sea of children, her back rounded, her arms permanently wrapped around her well-developed chest. There’d been older siblings before her – three or four as far as he could remember – all with that same slack-jawed stare. It was ludicrous, what she was suggesting he had done in a thirty-second gap between the end of one class and the beginning of the next, while he kept her behind to explain that she would have to stay in one lunch hour to retake the test she’d cheated on. That he would put his hand . . . there . . . with people passing the classroom and the door ajar . . . A kind of nauseous excitement stirred inside him as he allowed his mind to play out the malicious fantasy Kelly Kavanagh had invented to try to ruin his life. He knew even thinking about it was wrong. It was disgusting. She was a child. He wasn’t remotely attracted to her. But it had been so long since he’d had any kind of sexual activity. He blurred her face in his mind so she could be anyone, put his hand to his groin and let out a groan.

Afterwards he felt grubby and sticky with shame. As he mopped himself up in the bathroom, he couldn’t meet his own eyes in the mirror. A dull dread cramped inside him. Who on earth was he? A father who couldn’t protect his child. A teacher who fantasized about his own pupils. He rested his head against the cool bathroom tiles and, with the tap running full blast, he cried for the first time in years.

22

‘I’m not being funny, but there’s no way one of us put that there.’

Nikki, one of the nursery helpers, flicked her straggly platinum-blonde hair extensions out of her eyes and glared at Hannah as if she was being accused of something. Hannah tried not to look at the metal stud in her nose that seemed to have gone septic, the flesh around it puckered and purple.

‘No, I’m not saying that it came from anyone who worked here.’

Hannah wished she didn’t always feel as if she had to be so over-friendly, even obsequious to the nursery staff, some of whom looked hardly more than children themselves. It was as if their role as guardians of her daughter put her helplessly in their debt, as if any bad feeling between them and her might somehow affect their treatment of Lily.

‘I’m just wondering who else might have been in the nursery during the week, who might have been able to slip something into one of the kids’ bags.’

As soon as she said it, she realized the futility of it. The cloakroom area was in almost constant use. Hadn’t she been there just a couple of days ago herself, talking to Mrs Mackenzie?

Nikki gave her a blank stare. ‘No disrespect, but if we was to keep tabs on everyone who goes in and out of the cloakroom, we wouldn’t be able to do our job. Practically everyone who works here or has a child here is there at some time in the day.’

‘Yes, I see that,’ Hannah said, feeling hopeless. She sent her daughter, the most precious person in her world, to nursery believing her to be safe, but it seemed anyone could gain access to her.

‘Anyway, how is Lily after that little ding-dong with September?’

Hannah felt herself prickling.
Little ding-dong
?

‘She was a bit shaken, as you’d expect.’ Her tone was cold and hard. ‘It’s always a bit of a shock when something like that happens out of the blue.’

‘Yes, I can imagine. Though I wouldn’t exactly say
out of the blue
.’

‘Really? What do you mean?’

Nikki caught the ends of her hair extensions between the second and third fingers of her right hand and started absently combing her fingers through them, her long, electric-blue nails shimmering like beetle shells in the sun.

‘Well, you know how kids are. She was laying it on a bit thick about having a new baby sister. In’t it funny how she’s already decided it’s a girl? I’m not defending September or nothing, but it can’t have been easy to hear all that, not with things as they are at home.’

Here Nikki shot Hannah a glance that was half complicit, half hopeful, as if Hannah might take this opportunity to discuss the salacious details of September’s home life.

‘I’m sure Lily didn’t mean to be unkind,’ said Hannah. ‘She’s not that sort of girl. She was just excited. It’s only natural.’

Hannah was expecting Nikki to jump straight in to reinforce her defence of her daughter, but to her surprise, she hesitated.

‘It’s not unkind though, is it, at that age?’ she said eventually. ‘They don’t know any better.’

‘But I know my daughter.’ Hannah didn’t even try to disguise her outrage. ‘She’s the last person to ever want to hurt anyone’s feelings.’

Nikki went back to examining her hair extensions and her ham-fisted efforts at tact enraged Hannah even further.

‘Isn’t she?’ she prompted, determined to get some kind of confirmation.

Nikki sighed. ‘Lily’s just a normal little girl,’ she said, and all of a sudden Hannah found herself loathing the way she pronounced girl as
gel
. ‘And unfortunately little girls can be quite mean sometimes. It doesn’t mean they’re not lovely on the whole. And of course they’re different here to at home – they’re learning to be their own little people. You know, some parents would be quite shocked at the way their kids act when they’re not around.’

After Nikki had gone, Hannah stood by the door waiting for the session to be over, churning with rage. She was realistic about Lily, it was just that she knew her daughter wouldn’t have taunted September like that. She
knew
it.

While she waited, trying to calm down, she watched the kids playing. Lily was at one of the nearby tables, her head bent over some colouring, concentrating intently to make sure she stayed within the lines. A shout from the Wendy house in the far corner was followed by a squeal of laughter and September’s head poked out, making a funny face, with her eyes crossed and her tongue out. Mrs Mackenzie had called Hannah yesterday to tell her they’d talked to September and she recognized that what she’d done was wrong, and they were happy to take her back into the nursery if Hannah was OK with that. Well, what could she say apart from ‘Fine’? September caught Hannah’s eye and smiled. Hannah tried not to stare at her teeth, imagining them pressed into Lily’s skin like tiny stones set into a pebbledashed wall.

‘How are you holding up?’

Marcia had appeared at her elbow. Hannah felt her face grow hotter. She hadn’t really spoken to Marcia since the mix-up on the day when Sasha had picked Lily up when she was supposed to be having lunch with Marcia’s daughter, Sarah.

‘Oh, you know.’ Hannah rolled her eyes and made the kind of face you make when you want to imply that unpleasant things have been happening, without actually spelling them out.

‘I still feel awful about the other day, Marcia. I had no idea Sasha was planning to pick Lily up.’

‘Don’t worry about it. These things happen.’

Marcia was so solid, so calming. Hannah almost told her what Nikki had just said about Lily, so that they could laugh about it together, but something held her back. What if Marcia didn’t jump in to defend Lily? What if she shifted about and looked uncomfortable? Anyway, Marcia had moved on to talking about the snowflakes the children had been making which had just been stuck up on the windows, even though Christmas was still weeks away, and the moment had passed.

Hannah was hoping that as she was so early, she could collect Lily before Sasha got there. Sasha was always late, arriving in a whirr of motion and excuses. With any luck, Hannah wouldn’t have to see her at all. Josh was right. She needed to start putting her family first, particularly now there was a new baby to think of.

The thought of the new baby was like a punch to the stomach. She ought to be excited about it, but all she could think of was the tiredness and not having room to think and that sour-milk smell permanently wafting off her clothes.

All the way home from school, Hannah fought off a creeping feeling of despondency. She fretted about the baby and what it would mean. Doubt had been building up inside her like plaque. During the daytime she’d drag her body around like an oversized bag, hardly able to lift her head, but at night she’d be awake, lying in the dark counting worries instead of sheep. Money, work, Josh, Lily, Sasha and Dan – all churning around in her brain, adding to the low-level nausea that now permeated everything she did. And when she did eventually drop off, her sleep was patchy and restless, punctuated by stumbling trips to the toilet or dreams so vivid that when she awoke she had the disquieting sense of being unable to tell which was the dream world and which the real.

Too often, she dreamed of that night when she was a teenager. She saw her mother’s face once again, purple and ugly with rage, and Gemma’s swollen, bashed-in head, felt fear ripping through her body. And always, mingling with the fear, there was the guilt. She should have stopped it. Why didn’t she stop it?

Later, of course, her mum had dissolved in a puddle of self-loathing. ‘What have I done?’ she’d sobbed, hitting her own head again and again. ‘I’ll never forgive myself.’ And her distress had been harder to bear than her anger.

For years after it had happened, Hannah had dreamed of it regularly. But after Lily was born, it had stopped for a while. She was always so exhausted, so burned out with childcare and work, she hadn’t time to get caught up in the nightmares of her past. She’d even started to think that Lily had somehow wiped the slate clean. Her daughter was so pure, so utterly blameless, perhaps that had mitigated against what had gone before?

But now she was waking up drenched in sweat and panic once again, with her mother’s twisted face etched on her eyelids and the horrible, leaden, guilt-soaked reality of it all lodged in her gut.

‘It’s just a dream,’ Josh would tell her, his eyes still half shut, his body clinging to sleep even while his hand absently stroked her back. ‘Be better in the morning.’

But Josh didn’t understand how some dreams come from the inside, not the outside, how they hunker down in the darkness and wait.

‘Can we go to the park, Mummy?’

Usually Hannah was in such a hurry to get home, back to whatever deadline she was racing against, counting the seconds until she could stick Lily in front of a DVD and get back to work, that she’d have dismissed Lily’s habitual request to go to the playground out of hand, but today something stopped her. Though she didn’t like to admit it, the conversation with Nikki had got to her. She didn’t believe for a minute that Lily had been deliberately mean to September, but still she felt a nagging worry that she’d let her daughter somehow slip out of her grasp. When was the last time she had spent proper quality one-on-one time with Lily, without secretly calculating how much longer before she could break away and get on with whatever was more pressing instead?

What was more pressing than her own child?

‘Why not?’ she said, and her daughter’s wide beam of surprise brought a lump to her throat.

In the playground, Lily wanted to play ‘cafés’. She climbed the ladder up to the little wooden house attached to the climbing frame, her eyes doggedly fixed on the top, her hands clutching tight to the sides as if she were scaling a great height, rather than just six or seven feet above the ground.

At the top, she peered through the bars of the fence. ‘What would you like, Madam?’

Hannah pretended to consider an invisible menu. ‘Do you have any hot chocolate?’

Lily smiled. ‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’ll have one hot chocolate, please.’

Lily pretended to write the order down. It tugged at Hannah’s heart to see how she held her invisible pencil so carefully. ‘With swirly cream?’ she asked shyly.

Hannah thought for a moment, as if deliberating. ‘Yes. And I’d like chocolate sprinkles on it, please.’

‘Of course, Madam.’

‘And a banana.’

Lily exploded into giggles. ‘You can’t have a banana in your hot chocolate, silly!’

Hannah looked mock-stern. ‘Yes, I can, because I’m the customer, and the customer is always right.’

While Lily disappeared into the wooden house to make the hot chocolate, Hannah looked around the playground. There were a couple of other younger mothers sitting on a bench by the sandpit, their heads bent together, oblivious to their two boys, who were having a sand fight in the corner that was bound to end in tears. From nowhere, Hannah was seized by a wrenching sense of loss. How many times had she and Sasha sat on that very bench over the years? Winter mornings when their breath came out in clouds of white steam and they warmed their hands on take-out cappuccinos from the organic café next to the now empty paddling pool; summer evenings when it was too nice to go home, and they’d buy the girls mini portions of pasta and pesto and let them play out until their shadows were long ribbons of darkness against the grass, and one or other of them fell over and lay slumped on the ground, crying with exhaustion.

They’d been so close then, she and Sasha, swapping complaints about broken nights and temper tantrums, about Dan’s antisocial work hours and Josh’s lack of direction. Or had they? Had they really been close? Maybe it was just convenience that threw them together, a shared need for company during those lonely baby-and-toddler years, for someone with whom to navigate the perplexing new world of routines and naps and a life suddenly lived in miniature, within the stunted and claustrophobic triangle of home, park and school?

One of the women threw back her head and roared with laughter, her hand on her friend’s arm as if to stop her rolling clean off the bench with mirth. Hannah watched. It
was
real, her friendship with Sasha. They had sat like that too. She remembered now, how Sasha could laugh at herself, making a joke of her own need to be in control. ‘Have you disinfected in there?’ she’d call up to September and Lily, ensconced in the little house. ‘Have you brought the Marigolds? Are you wearing hair nets? I’ll be up to inspect.’